Maggie Moves On(39)
Nirina: Silas Wright, if that’s the Old Campbell Place owner whose throat you’ve got your tongue shoved down and you don’t bring that girl into this shop in the next 24 hours, you are dead to me. Dead. To. Me.
God only knew where his half-sister had found the dancing-skeleton-in-the-cemetery GIF.
“Mags, I know I just kissed the hell out of you on a public street and all, but if you could do a guy a favor and help me find a middle finger on this keyboard thing, I’ll buy you two scoops,” he begged.
She took the phone and unashamedly read through the messages. Then laughed. “I’ve got a better one,” she said, then handed the phone back.
“New phone, who dis?” Silas read out loud.
He hit send, and within seconds, his phone was vibrating. “Now you’ve gotta stay. My whole family just fell in love with you.”
14
Silas talked Maggie into swinging by his place to pick up the dog. It hadn’t been hard to convince her, since her brain was a stew of lust hormones. Besides, Kevin would be mortally offended if he knew Silas went for ice cream without him.
Maggie didn’t like disappointing anyone—humans or dogs—if she could avoid it.
It looked a bit like a storybook. The cabin or cottage, she couldn’t decide which was more fitting, had dark-green clapboard siding, a navy-blue front door, and a gingerbread front porch just big enough for two rocking chairs and a pair of ferns overflowing from orange pots.
He’d tucked solar lights along the stone path and deeper in the yard of shrubs and ornamental grasses.
“Wow, Sy,” she said, not for the first time that night. The kiss had been dangerous. It had been an assault on logic. Biology talking her into something she’d prefer to think on for a while. But the house was a new kind of sneaky charm.
“I’d invite you in,” he said, still holding her hand. “But…”
Thank you, sweet baby Jesus, for the “but.”
“Are you saying you don’t trust me to control myself?” she teased.
“Yes. That is exactly what I’m saying.”
“A wise move.”
“Besides, I purposely left it a mess just in case things looked like they were headed in the direction they’re most definitely headed in.”
Maggie couldn’t help but laugh. “I didn’t shave my legs for exactly the same reason.”
He paused at the gate. “Just so you know, that wouldn’t stop me from enjoying you.”
“Neither would your mess,” she promised.
He gave her one of those soul-jarring, stomach-on-a-roller-coaster looks. “Wait right there.”
She watched him jog up the path, onto the porch, and in through the front door.
The second the door closed, Maggie busted a move on the sidewalk.
That kiss with Silas Freaking Wright had finally dethroned her engagement as the most romantic moment of her life. Which, to be completely honest, only held the top honor by default. Not that there was anything wrong with a drunken, late-night proposal in a Burger King parking lot when both parties were too young to know any better. Or to know if they were both straight. She winced at the memory of her drunk twenty-two-year-old self getting down on one knee next to Dean’s VW Rabbit. She should have known then.
“Maybe we should get married,” she’d slurred, leaning hard to the right.
“Maybe we should,” he had agreed, closing one eye to zero in on which Maggie was doing the proposing.
Looking back, that shiny, sickly expression on his face should have been another neon warning sign. But she’d been caught up in the moment. Not the romance of it. Or her feelings for the cute, nice, dependable Dean. She knew now it was more a by-product of the crushing loneliness she had felt after losing the mother she’d depended on and the father she’d learned not to. It had threatened to swamp her, to pull her under and never let her find her way back to the surface.
She’d put it all on Dean’s barely adult shoulders. Made it his job to save her. To protect her from the loneliness. To give her a place to fit into. And he’d loved her enough to say yes.
Even after he’d found his voice, even after he’d whispered the truth she should have already known, he still loved her. He still protected her.
And she was still using him to keep the loneliness at bay.
“Well, shit,” she muttered to herself. The truth of it hit her like a wheelbarrow handle to the solar plexus. Before she could chicken out, she pulled out her phone, opened her texts, and typed.
Maggie: I really do want you to have the life you want. There’s someone out there who’s been waiting for your surly, snarky ass their entire life. It’s not fair for me to hog your sour disposition all to myself.
His response was quick.
Dean: No one will ever knock you off your shrewish pedestal in my cold, shriveled heart.
Maggie: Love you, shithead.
Dean: Love you back, weirdo.
On a long sigh, she stowed the phone back in her pocket. She felt sad. And turned on. And terrified. Things were changing again, and she had no control over them. Change in her life hadn’t been good. It had been hard. Painful.
She needed to calm the eff down. She didn’t get carried away. No matter how fine Silas’s butt looked in a pair of jeans, she wasn’t about to throw her career away and settle down with the cute landscaper from Idaho.