Don't Let Go(28)

“Let it rest, please?” I said softly. “Are you here by yourself?”
He looked at me one more moment, then shook his head. “With some buddies from work.”
I patted his arm. “Well, go hook back up with them. Trash your ex-wife for thinking she could still dance.”
When he finally left after ordering a beer, I sat down heavily. “Shit.”
“So, where is he?” Ruthie asked.
“Fucking everywhere,” I said, lifting my hair and fanning my neck. I pointed across the dance floor. “He’s on the other side.” I shut my eyes tight against the memory of his heated expression. What the hell was that about?
“I assume he has his woman with him?” she asked.
I gave her a look and gazed off in their general direction. I couldn’t see them through the wall of bodies between us, but knowing he was there made my skin tingle.
“Yes, and if I had to guess, I’d say she’s probably pretty ticked off right now,” I said, scooping up a loaded chip.
“Why?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, he just looked so—” What? Lost? Pissed? “She caught him watching us.”
Ruthie’s eyebrows raised a little over her glass. “Watching you—dance?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. “It sort of got a little cozy for one little second there.”
She set her glass down with a thunk. “With Hayden?”
“Don’t judge,” I said, grimacing. “It wasn’t anything like that, just—there for about two seconds, things probably looked a little blurry. It was stupid and we both laughed it off.”
“And Noah saw the blurry?”
“I’m assuming so,” I said, rubbing my temples. “By the murderous look on his face, I’d assume something—” I stopped and blew out a frustrated breath. “Why would he be bothered with that?”
“Maybe he wasn’t?” Ruthie offered, holding up a chip. “Maybe he and Preppy Girl Barbie had a fight and he’s pissed at her.”
I pointed at her. “They most likely did have an altercation earlier today.” I gave the quickie version of the gas station debacle earlier.
“Well, there you go,” she said. “If he was having murderous thoughts about you, that was probably why. So since he’s actually trained to do that, you might want to steer clear,” she said, giving me a cute smile and a head tilt.
I scrunched my nose at her in response and grabbed a jalape?o popper. “I can’t believe I’m eating this crap.”
“Neither can I,” she said. “You’ve been binging all week. Are you pregnant?”
I stopped mid-bite. “Do you even know how not funny that is?”
She giggled. “Sorry.”
I excused myself to go get some water at the bar. Everything from my shoulders up felt like it might ignite if I rubbed two hairs together. I wasn’t sure if it was stress, anxiety, or just an unfortunate hot flash, but I was pretty sure I could conjure up fire if I really put some thought into it. Plus, the margarita was getting too sweet for me, and our waitress seemed to only remember alcohol.
“In a glass or a bottle?” the bartender asked.
I glanced down at the giant bin of ice and fantasized about plunging my head into it.
“Glass with extra ice, please,” I said.
I felt him before anything else. Before sight or smell or words could come into play. I felt the pull of Noah Ryan at my right before he ever even spoke.
“Quite the little dancer you’ve become,” he said, the deep familiar voice unsettling me as it did every single time I’d heard it. He caught the bartender’s eye and held up his empty beer bottle and one finger. “And a Sprite with ice, please.” She smiled like her life depended on it, completely ditching my glass of ice to get his needs taken care of.
I smiled into the mirror behind the bar, finding it safer to look at him that way than the five inches between us.
“Not really,” I said. “Haven’t done that in years.”
“Where’d you learn that?”
I thumbed behind me as if that would clear things up. “Hayden, actually.”
Noah glanced behind us and looked at me, making me look him in the eye. “Hayden,” he echoed. My stomach went to war as a tiny flicker of humor passed through his blue eyes. “Is he another not-a-someone?”
I couldn’t help the smirk that tugged at my lips at his memory of my description of Patrick. I chuckled.
“No, he’s more like a used-to-be-someone.” The woman behind the bar came back with his beer and filled a glass with ice that wasn’t for me. “Hayden’s my ex-husband.”
Noah’s left cheek twitched. “Ex-husband?”
“Yes.” I drummed my fingers on the bar, wishing she’d hurry up with my glass of ice water.
“You dance like that with your ex?” Noah asked.
Like that. I grimaced as I cursed the fact that he kept catching me with my pants down. Someone squeezed in at the bar on the other side of him, nudging him sideways into me. I felt the heat of his arm through his shirt and my gauzy one, and my mouth went even drier.
“It—wasn’t what you think,” I said, pointing to my glass emphatically as the woman came back with the sparkly Sprite. Hearing my words, I realized I’d said something very similar about Patrick. Wanting to change the subject, I said, “I’m sorry, by the way, about today at the pump. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to know.”
He shook his head. “It’s okay, it was my fault.”