Page 17 of Beach Cottage Kisses

Harper, Scott’s next-door neighbor, was out with Cassie, the pediatrician who’d just gotten married to a professor from the university. They’d been jogging together lately and were a good half mile away from their places.

Most of the other cottages were still closed up, their owners not yet home from work.

There was no one to save them.

Except themselves…

Scott hadn’t answered.

“It’s not going to do any good to bury it,” she said, irked that he wouldn’t admit that he had the hots for her.

Unless…was it just her, still feeling that way?

“It’s better than talking about it,” he said, his tone unusually somber. Hard to hear above the sound of the waves. Better that way. To be on the edge of the words, rather than drowning in them.

Maybe he was right. Would any attraction between them suffocate if they didn’t give it air to breathe?

Or would their friendship just slowly wither and die from the awkwardness?

She watched as Morgan and Juice raced Angel up to Dale’s back porch in the distance. The writer must have come outside.

The hope that possibility gave her, as though rescue was just ahead, lightened her spirits some. Until she realized just how critically in trouble she and Scott were if they needed someone else around to save them.

“We’re both attractive people,” she said then, as though reason could provide a ladder out of the hole into which they’d fallen. “It’s possible that the feelings were always available, simmering beneath the surface, but with all the distraction, just never had a chance to present themselves.”

Until they’d been at the most romantic wedding of all time, maid of honor and best man, without dates.

Which didn’t explain the nearly debilitating surge of emotion that had hit her right as Sage had been finishing her vows.

Could it be that something was happening within her? Her defenses weakening as she aged? Could she be having a relapse?

She’d been her normal self all day.

Other than the wedding—and the dream following it—she’d been fine for years. No point in making the issue bigger than it was.

She had the hots for her friend.

An ordinary physical irritation.

Period.

* * *

She wanted to talk about it. Fine.

“I’ve never been turned on by you before.” There. In three years’ time she hadn’t done it for him once.

Then she had.

What more was there to say?

Except, “Have you…been attracted to me in the past?”

His body jumped to full alert as he waited for her reply.

“No.”

Oh. Deflation had never been a pleasant experience.