Page 26 of Love Walked In

I was pretty sure last night on the train hadn’t been an extremely sexy hallucination, but Leo’s body language in the kitchen said I must have been imagining things.

Or that he wanted me to think I’d been imagining things.

A rock of disappointment had sunk in my belly when he’d held himself away, eyes down.

The whole dance that Leo and I seemed to be moving through was new to me. Two steps forward, one and a half steps back, moving forward but never getting there. A Zeno’s paradox of yearning.

A life of flings didn’t leave room for yearning, and I’d been fine with that. I didn’t love feeling on edge like this.

It really didn’t help that my sex brain was writing a long to-do list in multiple senses of doing .

I was in general pretty vanilla, but something about the combination of Leo’s quiet reserve and his proper accent and that one stupid top button made me want to break his composure in the filthiest possible way, so that all he’d want to do was take me to bed and do filthy things to me back.

The kind of things that had me waking up wet and gasping.

I paused in the middle of writing my action list for the day and smacked myself gently on the forehead with my pen. I couldn’t fantasize in the middle of the store. Even I had limits.

The morning went by in a blur of logistics emails to all the different vendors we needed for the festival.

The chair guy, the sound guy, the printer for programs and schedules.

I sipped canned tomato soup from a mug as I wrote, and at lunchtime I slipped out for a quick walk to soak in the frosty blue sky and white light.

But I couldn’t stop checking my watch, urging the winter shadows to move faster across the bookstore floor.

When two o’clock rolled around, I tapped on Leo’s office door, then opened it. He shot out of his chair like I’d electrocuted him.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to surprise you,” I said, surprised myself.

“You didn’t,” he said as he sat back down. “It’s fine. Just away with the fairies, that’s all.” He shuffled some papers, cleared space. “Ticket sales.”

I shook my head and sat on the wooden chair beside his desk.

“Yeah, ticket sales. There’s a little bit of movement after hanging flyers in the student union and in the cafés around here, but it’s not enough.

I was thinking we might want to involve some Bookstagrammers and BookTokkers based here.

Offer a free ticket in return for some promotion on their accounts. ”

“What would that look like?” he asked, sounding curious and not dismissive like he would have done when I first arrived. “And wouldn’t we need an account of our own? We’ve never done social media, and I wouldn’t know where to begin.”

I resisted the urge to ask him what century he’d been born in. “Ross and Co. has an Instagram account,” I confessed instead.

He blinked at me. “We do? But I haven’t…”

“No, I set one up on my own.” His mouth opened, and I put my hand up. “I swear on Louisa May Alcott’s grave that I haven’t done anything with it. It’s set to private, I’m not following anyone, and there are no posts. But I wanted to claim the right handle before anyone else could.”

Six weeks ago he would have been outraged, and part of me was holding my breath that I hadn’t moved us back in time, that I hadn’t lost his trust, so hard-won. But now he sighed. “All right, fine, show me.”

I told him the login details and introduced him to the wild world of Bookstagram. “People really are keen on this, aren’t they?” he said thoughtfully as he flicked through reels of people raving about books. “They love the stories and they love books as objects, too. It’s all very emotional.”

I nodded eagerly. “People have a lot of feelings tied up in reading. I definitely have some books I read for comfort.”

“Like Paddington ?”

I smiled. “Like Paddington .”

He flipped over another Instagram reel and I leaned over to watch it with him. Bay leaves, spices, his watchful quiet, they drew my attention even more than the cheerful woman holding up the latest Sarah J. Maas on the screen.

My bun collapsed and the long braid fell down onto my shoulder, close to his face. “Shit, sorry, one second,” I stuttered. “I need to buy more pins. I keep losing them, it’s stupid.” I looked down at him. “I call them bobby pins, but maybe they have some other name here?”

“No,” he growled.

My fingers froze at the sound, his voice deeper than I’d ever heard it. “No? They’re called bobby pins here?”

Which was a ridiculous question to ask, because Leo’s facial expression said he wasn’t interested in the correct words for anything.

His whiskey eyes were dark, focused, predatory.

But then his face fell and he looked down at the desk.

“Kirby grips,” he said in his normal voice. “That’s what they’re called.”

For a second, disappointment surged in my chest, then I straightened my spine. I couldn’t let him avoid this, not when he kept giving me hot looks and then getting upset about it. “We should talk about last night.”

“I don’t see why that’s necessary.” But his face was turned away from me, his usual composure showing cracks. Like it wouldn’t take much to reveal the man underneath.

“I thought about kissing you,” I said softly. “And I’m pretty sure you thought about kissing me.”

I took the risk, touched his shoulder, and he buried his face in his hands. “You’re not wrong,” he said, muffled. “But I don’t have any right to that.”

The feminist inside me snapped awake. “What do you mean, right ? I kiss who I want.”

He sat up and pinched the bridge of his nose. “No, I am not a caveman. But you…”

I sensed where this was going, but not talking to each other had landed us in the shit already. “I don’t do this whole British leaving-words-unspoken thing.”

“You don’t fancy me the way I fancy you!” he almost yelled. “That’s why I don’t have the right,” he said more quietly. “You’re going to end up with Graham, anyway. You two are more right for each other.”

I snorted involuntarily, and Leo glared at me. “No fucking way,” I said, half laughing.

“But he makes you laugh all the time,” he said stubbornly. “You call him Blondie.”

“I do. Friends make fun of each other and give each other stupid nicknames. But you know he and Catriona are meant to be, which they’d figure out if they stopped sniping for long enough.

” I could see that Leo still didn’t really believe me.

I needed to be honest here. I sat down on the edge of his desk, facing him.

“Look. I do have something special with Graham. We’ve talked about it.

But it’s not sexy. It’s more like… I look at him and he looks at me and we just understand each other. No pretense or trying to be cool.”

“That sounds like it could be something sexy.”

“I know, but it isn’t. I just… feel like I’ve known him forever.” I reached up and tugged on my braid, a little nervous. “I don’t know what else to say to make you believe that our relationship is platonic.”

Leo let out a long exhale. “So you don’t want to…” He hesitated, and I stared at him. “Shag him,” he finally said, two pink flags appearing on his cheeks.

I couldn’t help my smile. “I thought ‘shagging’ was a word Austin Powers made up, but I guess not.” I leaned forward and said softly, “I would not shag Graham Beckett ever.” Because apparently, deep down, my type was this man, whose black hair was threaded with gray from carrying the worries of the world.

But underneath all the anxiety and the shyness was dry wit and warmth and…

tenderness, and for the first time in years, I thought I could trust that sweet feeling. That he wouldn’t snatch it away.

A wild kind of bravery rose up inside me. “Now, what do you want to do with me?”

I saw Leo’s face change when he understood I was serious.

Uncertainty gave way to something new. He reached out and tugged gently on my braid.

“This drives me mad,” he said, his voice an octave deeper.

He pulled again, and I shivered at the fire in his eyes and the tease on my scalp.

“I want to see it down,” he said. “You never wear it down.”

“You want to muss me,” I said, wonder in my voice. His bossiness shone in a new light. Did it grow out of desire, not just responsibility?

Leo’s eyes fluttered. “Fuck, yes,” he sighed.

I cracked up a little with the tension. “Well, look at you, Mr. Secret Alpha.”

“I don’t know what that means,” he said, his voice teasing.

I groaned. “Because you still haven’t read any romance novels.”

“I think it’s fairly obvious I don’t want to read right now.” He stared at me, his whiskey eyes luminous behind his glasses, and I found myself holding out my braid to him. Wishing for more from him.

“Undo it, please,” I asked, a tiny earthquake somewhere making my voice shake.

He bit his lip, tugged off the rubber band that tied the end, pulled the three strands of the braid apart. It flowed down past my shoulders, covered my breasts. His fingers combed through it, and I hummed with the tug on my scalp.

“You have princess hair,” he said, pressing his lips against the strands.

The word “reverent” popped into my head, but I pushed it away. “I’m no princess.” If I was anything, I was the scrappy orphan, making my way in the world with only my wits.

He gave me a slow, wicked smile. “Then why do I want to kneel for you?”

I felt us racing toward an edge, about to jump in the air, and I wanted more than anything to fly with him. I felt a rush of joy as I pushed him until he was leaning back in his desk chair. “Leo Ross, I want to sit in your lap and kiss you senseless. Any objections?”

He squeaked out a laugh. “By all means.”