Back To Us (Shore Secrets 3) (9 page)

* * *

Piper clicked her teeth together, hard, just to be sure her mouth wasn’t gaping open any longer.

“There are a lot of ways to describe Ward,” Dawn mused. “There’s the obvious, that he’s handsome as sin. Strong. Loyal to the nth degree to you and the other girls. Hard worker. But I think everyone in town would agree that he’s pretty sparse with his words.”

Joel nodded.

“So maybe, honey,” Dawn put an arm around Piper’s waist, “you should go see what really just made him shoot off at the mouth like that.” Then she gave a little push at the small of Piper’s back.

“Or maybe I should let him cool off.”

“Go,” Joel ordered. “I don’t want the rest of the night to be as weird as the last five minutes.”

Neither did Piper. Even though she didn’t have the faintest idea what to say to her boyfriend-for-a-month. She took a few steps. Looked back over her shoulder to see Joel already holding Dawn’s hand. Sweet. A little hard to wrap her brain around, since she was so used to them just being platonic friends, but sweet. Sometimes life required adjustment. A refocus, a change of angle. Or in Ward’s case, apparently, a sharp shortcut to crazy town.

She didn’t rush. It wouldn’t do for people to see her chasing after him, willy-nilly, and have people start gossiping. Being out with Dawn and Joel would provide them cover for tonight. But at some point—inevitably sooner rather than later—in the next thirty days, the whole town would figure out she and Ward were dating again. That would fuel the gossip flames into a bonfire that would burn long after the month ended.

People talked. People in small towns talked a lot. There was no escaping it. Piper just wanted to put it off as long as possible. At least until she figured out how much Ward truly cared. If they really had a future together. If he was still worth the risk of heartache the likes of which she’d sworn never to open herself up to again. Piper didn’t need a month, or the much more likely few days before this whole thing became public. She needed at least a year.

So she stopped to hug the due-any-second Maddie Rosenbaum. Reassured her that, while definitely blimp-like, she was a glowing and adorable blimp. Stopped again to clap for six-year-old Justin Tate when his ball didn’t even touch the bumpers on its snail-like crawl down the alley. Piper even gave a friendly wave to Pierce the Putz, Casey’s boring ex.

She gave every impression that everything was normal. That she and Ward still needed a buffer zone of two feet or two people between them just to keep from biting each other’s heads off. Until she hit the end of the room and took a hard left.

The hallway held vending machines. A glass door led to the game room filled with air hockey, video games and pinball machines, all beeping in a screechy non-harmony. Bathrooms came next, a supply room, janitor’s closet and then a door marked Mechanical Employees Only. Piper blithely turned the handle and entered a room that opened into the shadows behind each pinsetting machine. It was a surprisingly private spot in one of the town’s busiest buildings.

She and Ward had discovered this haven—if you could call cement walls and racks full of spare pins and metal parts a haven—back in the day. Probably dozens of other teens had found it since. Tonight, though, it was empty, aside from the knocking echoes of pins toppling onto the wood. Just as she’d suspected, Ward paced at the far end. His wide-legged steps ate up the width of the room. He looked fierce. Or maybe furious. But those knitted eyebrows stood between her and nachos, so Piper plunged ahead.

“Are you back here to cause trouble? Mess with the pinsetter so Joel can’t get a full frame? Because I think we should try playing them at least one game before resorting to nefarious tactics to beat them.”

“I don’t cheat,” he spat out.

It was on the tip of her tongue to say
I
know.
Except Piper couldn’t get the words out. Ward was an upstanding businessman. She’d trust him with her life, with her pets if she had any, and with every last cent in her bank account. But he had cheated—
once
. Once was all it took to almost ruin everything between them. He might not cheat anymore. But it wasn’t a topic she wanted to get into on their first date. So she danced around the topic instead.

“Okay. I’ll guess again. Are you back here to get a buzz off the fumes from whatever they use to oil the lanes? It doesn’t smell nearly as bad as when we used to sneak off here in high school, so I don’t think that’ll work anymore.”

“Piper.” Ward ground out her name in a low growl of frustration. He splayed a hand onto the wall and leaned. Leaned into it, and away from her. “Don’t push. Not here.”

She got that. This room had been one of their special places. Of course, they had a lot of them back in the day. If you took all of them off the table, they’d have precious few places left to go for the next month. “Better here than another weird outburst out on our lane for everyone to see.”

Another growl. “Not now.”

“Why not now? Isn’t it a good idea to begin the same way you mean to go on? You said you wanted to date me. Me, Ward. Not some other girl who doesn’t know how to push your buttons, or one who doesn’t care enough to push.” Exasperated already, less than an hour into their attempt at dating, Piper flung her hands in the air. “You said you wanted me. Well, I push. I badger. I tease. This is what you signed up for. For the whole month.”

“Do you have to do a month’s worth of pushing right now?”

She dropped her arms to fist her hands on her hips. “You know? I think I do. Because what just happened out there was weird.”

That squeezed a short, harsh laugh out of him. Almost as if she’d given him the Heimlich to get it out. “Yeah.”

“Do you want to tell me what’s going on with you?”

“No.”

Because of his sideways stance, Piper saw his muscles tense. His ass muscles, most of all. Not that she was looking. Not that she had anywhere better
to
look. “Do it anyway.”

“Not here. Not now.”

Ward was a one-hit wonder tonight, just like the throwback soundtrack blaring over the speakers. “I repeat, what’s wrong with here and now? It’s private. Trust me, Dawn and Joel won’t miss us. They skipped right past awkward and are already holding hands.”

“That’s part of the problem.”

“You mean because they’ve got more than a decade on us?” It’d take some getting used to, thinking about Joel and Dawn as the hot new couple in town, but it was far from icky. “It’s not like they’re our parents or anything. They’re cute together. Sweet. Don’t you want them to be happy?”

“That’s not it. I don’t need the pressure of them getting it right already.”

“What do you mean?”

Ward half rolled until his back met the wall. He swallowed hard enough Piper noticed his Adam’s apple bob up and down. It was big. Jutted way out. Just like...no. She refused to let her imagination run free. Dating for a month didn’t guarantee sex. Didn’t mean they’d have it at all. Definitely didn’t mean it was a smart idea to add that particularly thick layer of complication to whatever their relationship morphed into as the days and dates and nights ticked off.

“I might not have thought this thing through all the way. We might screw it up. Now. Tonight. Or in a week.”

Obviously. Piper had the urge to stick her tongue out at him. Like before. Old habits, old urges, all rushing back so quickly. Yikes. “So?”

“So when it didn’t work out last time, it rained a shit storm down onto all of our friends. That happening in college was one thing. Happening now, as adults, in the small town where we both plan to stay? A hundred times more complicated.”

If she resisted sticking out her tongue, could she at least say
duh
? Seriously. “Come on. You mean to tell me that you didn’t give that some serious thought before right now?”

Ward jerked one shoulder. “I did. A passing thought. Ignored it, mostly. The way you think about the fact a tattoo’s gonna hurt, but you ignore it to get it done. To get the ink on you forever.”

Wait. This was news. This was huge, epic news. Piper wished she had a magic pause button for the conversation so she could text Ella and Casey. Ward already dripped magnetism. Animal attraction at its most primal level. Dangerous heat. Adding a tattoo on top of all that might just make her already twitching hormones overload. What could it be? Where could it be? She’d seen him in swim trunks more times than she could count over the summer. That narrowed the possibilities quite a bit. Piper’s fingers itched to yank his jeans down and start searching.

No. She’d wait. Because they were having a real conversation, like a real couple. Amazing. Very adult of them, too. Piper didn’t intend to sidetrack it with sexiness until it had run its course. “You’re looking at Dawn and Joel as a thematic representation and physical manifestation of how interwoven we and our businesses are into the lifeblood of the town.”

Just his heavy-lidded eyes swung her way. “I can promise you that whatever you just said, I am not.”

“Sorry.” Piper took a second to streamline her hypothesis. “They’re a drop in the bucket of how our relationship may affect everyone.”

“Yeah. Let’s go with that.”

His being this level of thoughtful was a good sign. The timing might not have been perfect, but the introspection boded well for them making this thing work. As opposed to a couple of weeks ago, when Ward automatically shifted down two stools at Cosgrove’s when she plunked down next to him. She’d done the same thing countless times. Yet here they were, in the same room, practically within arm’s reach, and no buffer in sight. He hadn’t paced away to another corner. Hadn’t moved to put the scarred worktable between them. It was progress. So she’d cut him some slack.

“Aren’t you the king of the long shots? Let’s just hope for the best. We’re aware. We’re cautious. And more to the immediate point, we’re on a double date with two of our favorite people. It should be fun.”

One side of Ward’s mouth lifted beneath the dark hair. “Yeah.” He cocked his head, waited for yet another crash of pins before continuing. Then he spread his arms wide to encompass the whole smelly, metal parts—filled room. “This is us having fun.”

“Night’s still young,” Piper countered. Geez, dating had been Ward’s idea. Why was she suddenly the one trying to sell
him
on the concept?

Ward straightened. His focus snapped to her in an almost predatory way. She felt the zing, like a wire stretching taut between them. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

He pushed off the wall. “Toss out a hint.” Took one long-legged stride closer to her. “A tease.” Then another. He stopped close enough that she had to tilt her head up—way up—to keep that brooding scowl in her sights. “Don’t toy with me, Piper.”

Ah. Now she got it. Ward might be all up on his head, but other parts of him were paying attention to her too. “I’m not being a tease. I don’t play those games. But do you really expect me to spend a month dating you and
not
be flirtatious? It’s encoded in my female DNA. When a smoking-hot man turns his gorgeous midnight eyes on me, flirty things come out.”

“I’ve looked at you just about every day for years now. You haven’t come close to flirting.”

“You haven’t looked at me like you are right now. Cause and effect.”

He raised an arm, began to move it as though heading for her waist, and then let it fall by his side again. And took a giant step back. Then Ward white-knuckled his hands around the edge of the worktable. “We should’ve talked more. Established ground rules.”

The full-throated laugh that rolled out of Piper almost bent her double. “Since when have you ever wanted to talk more?”

“Only when it matters.”

A thrill chased up her spine. When Ward said things like that, the part of her that had secretly stayed in love with him for all these years just melted. And the part of her that had stayed in love with him was, oh, about nine-tenths of her. No, ninety-nine-one-hundredths. That last little part of her, the one filled with reason and caution, closed the door and gave her blessing to whatever the rest of Piper wanted to do.

“Let’s try some role reversal for tonight. Because I don’t want to talk right now.” She took a step toward him. But ran straight into his outstretched palm that planted right above the scooped neckline of her tank top, keeping her at arm’s reach.

“We have to. I can’t force you to do this.”

Piper rolled her eyes. “I know. Grown woman, free will, etc.” He’d gone all caveman on her in her office. Literally swept her off her feet and kissed her senseless. This backpedaling was nonsensical and frustrating, and Piper refused to stand for it. “Right now? I’m the one trying to assault you with kisses. So let me get on with it.” She danced out of his reach, then circled back in to sidle up to him.

Ward jerked away like he’d touched a live wire. “Ground rules are important.”

“How about you collect your thoughts, bullet-point the rules and email them to me tomorrow. You know, after we spend all of tonight kissing.” This time Piper tried the rear assault. Glommed her body up against his spine and clasped her hands right at the waistband of his jeans.

“Jesus, Piper,” he exploded. “Twenty minutes ago you jumped when our fingers barely brushed as I handed you your shoes.”

“Time flies when you’re denied kisses. I just needed to settle into the situation. And now I’m all in.” Because she soooo was.

Yes, she’d dithered for the past few days. Second-guessed herself and the decision to put herself in Ward’s hands for a month. Worried about just what sort of bloody, oozing mess he might leave her heart. But then, when they chatted while she changed into her shoes, everything clicked. It felt like a real date. It felt like coming home. Piper would have to be the biggest idiot in the world not to snatch at this chance to be with Ward again with both hands. How many people got a do-over in life?

“Just listen to me, damn it.” Ward took her hands, lifted them over his head and then secured them with one hand behind her back. “Kissing me is not part of the deal. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. No physical strings attached to this thing. We’ll spend time together, but sex is not on the table.”