Lilac Lane (Chesapeake Shores #14)(63)

“What I meant to say was that it’s too hot for you to be walking to work today,” he said. “I’ll be leaving in a half hour, if you’d like a lift.”

She hesitated for a split second, then nodded. “I’d be grateful. Thank you.”

Suddenly he didn’t know which was worse, the shouting that had become routine once again, or this infernal politeness. Did he want to set off an explosion by mentioning it, though? He opted instead, for a nod. “Okay, then. I’ll see you in a half hour.”

And in the meantime he was going to have a very long talk with himself about acting like an idiot. This morning had been a good reminder that women turned men into bumbling fools. It was probably far wiser to avoid going down that path again.

*

For a man who’d issued an invitation for her to ride to work with him, Bryan seemed to have used up all his words for the day. He hadn’t spoken since Kiera had climbed into his environmentally sensible Prius, grateful to have the air-conditioning blasting.

“I haven’t seen much of you recently,” she said to break the silence. At his disbelieving glance in her direction, she added, “I meant away from work.”

“I thought that was how you wanted it,” he said. “I’ve followed my usual routine, but you seem to have come up with a completely different schedule. You’re gone by the time I get back from my run.”

“I like to walk into town while it’s still cool. I enjoy getting together with some of the O’Brien women at Sally’s.”

“And the garden? I thought you enjoyed weeding.”

“I wasn’t sure you wanted me around,” she said. “I’ve done a little when I’ve gotten home. Luke’s let me off earlier in the evening recently, and it’s still light out.”

Bryan stopped at an intersection and gave her a long look. “Did he change your schedule to minimize the amount of time we’d have to start a ruckus at the pub?”

She gave him a rueful grin. “He never said such a thing, but I suspect so. I thought perhaps you’d asked him to set it up that way.”

“I’m not going to tell Luke how to run his business,” Bryan said. “The scheduling is up to him.”

“You know,” Kiera began, not entirely sure she ought to be opening up this particular can of worms. “When I agreed to do the cooking thing for the festival, I didn’t expect things between us to go back to the way they were at the beginning.”

“What did you expect?”

“That we’d have a friendly rivalry that would benefit Nell’s church and the town.”

“And?”

“There is no and,” she insisted, but she couldn’t quite meet his gaze.

Bryan turned his attention back to the road. Silence fell between them again. She sensed that somehow she’d disappointed him. Had he known she wasn’t being entirely honest?

“Okay, there was more to it,” she said eventually.

“Something that couldn’t have been resolved just by talking to me?”

“How, when you were the problem?”

She could tell her candor had startled him by the clenching of his jaw. He didn’t reply, his concentration focused on parallel parking in a tight space in the alley behind the pub.

When he’d turned off the engine, he faced her. “How was I the problem? I thought we’d made peace, that we were getting along, getting to know and respect each other.”

“We were.”

“And that was a bad thing?”

She nodded. “I realize it can’t possibly make much sense to you, but that scared me. I was growing comfortable talking to you, especially on those quiet nights on your deck. It reminded me of another time, another man.”

“Your ex-husband?”

She laughed bitterly at that. “Hardly. Sean wasn’t much for quiet conversation. No, it was Peter.”

“The man who died.”

“After Sean, I’d allowed no one to get close to me. I made it my mission to protect my heart from any more pain. It was easy enough to ignore the occasional drunken pass some man might make or to say no to the few who might have put my heart at risk.”

She allowed herself a smile. “Then there was Peter. He made no demands. He listened. He gave me reasons to laugh. It was insidious, if you know what I mean. The little exchanges that meant nothing in themselves, but added together to become trust and caring and, over time, love.”

There was sympathy in Bryan’s eyes. “And then he died.”

“And then he died,” she agreed simply. “He broke the trust, and my heart.”

“And you panicked because you felt it happening again,” Bryan said. “You were starting to trust me?”

“I know the signs now, you see. And I couldn’t allow it.”

“So you and I are going into this crazy cooking competition just to put some sort of an artificial barrier between us?”

She shrugged at how ridiculous it sounded. “So it seems.”

To her surprise, Bryan laughed. After a startled moment, she found herself laughing with him.

“It might have been easier just to slap me when I kissed you,” he told her. “That would have gotten your message across loud and clear.”