“I care about you, Alexandra. I think I could fall for you very easily, with a little encouragement.”
The words were a bit of a lie, since he was already there, but he decided that was information he should keep to himself for now.
“The thing is, I’ve never been much of a masochist,” he went on. “I’m not going to keep beating my head against a wall when I’m getting nothing out of it but a headache.”
“Then stop. Please, Sam. I thought we could still have a friendship, even with this whole inconvenient pheromone thing between us, but apparently I was wrong. When you touch me, kiss me, I forget all good sense. So now I’m asking you. Please. Leave me alone. Thank you for the chair and...everything, but I don’t...I can’t...” Her voice caught and his heart broke right along with it.
“I don’t want this!”
She jerked the door open and raced out the door before he could move, grabbing her dog and her cooler as she rushed down the stairs.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“RILEY’S WORKING a late shift tonight and the kids are with Jeff and Holly. Want to come over and rent a chick flick?”
Before answering, Alex finished the headpin she was looping to make a charm out of a particularly pretty turquoise bead. “I can’t tonight. Sorry. I’ve got a date.”
Claire raised an eyebrow, the glasses she wore when she beaded making her look smart and sweet at the same time. “Seriously? Again? Isn’t that like your third date this week? Who’s the guy?”
She gripped the small needle-nose pliers more firmly. She was here to bead, not talk about her love life, she wanted to snap. But when her best friend owned the shop, she supposed she had to expect an interrogation.
“A couple different guys. Three, actually,” she answered without looking at Claire.
“Three dates in a week? Impressive. Even for you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” She bristled.
“You don’t need to jump down my throat. I was just asking. It seems a little...frenetic, especially when you only opened the restaurant two weeks ago.”
Okay, she had to agree with that. She probably should have said no when the last guy asked her out, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to do it.
She supposed she had some vague idea that maybe if she threw herself back into a social whirl, returned to her status quo of serial dating, she could start to get her head on straight again. She did best with one or two weeks of dating, where all parties concerned just wanted fun and company, right? Maybe that way she would stop aching for a certain man who wanted more than she could ever give.
She had gone to lunch with one man to check out the competition in Telluride, a matinee of a summer blockbuster action movie with another, and she was meeting a third for drinks and conversation this evening, her one day off this week.
“When do you have time to meet all these men?” Claire asked.
“Oh, here and there. You know.”
“No. I have no idea. It’s still technically the off-season, so I’d like to know how you happen to find every available guy who happens to wander through town.”
“I struck up a conversation with someone while I was mountain biking. Another I helped find the potato chip aisle at the market, and a third was a guy I met several months ago at a trade show who happened to be in town for the weekend.”
“So do you like any of these guys?”
“I like all of them or I wouldn’t have agreed to see them, would I?” Her tone was a little more belligerent than she intended and Claire must have picked up on it.
“You tell me.”
She wanted to give some fast and flippant answer but she couldn’t. The truth was, she wasn’t really being fair, she supposed, especially when the guys wanted at least the possibility of another date and she couldn’t even give them that.
“I like to have fun,” she said. “What’s wrong with that?”
Claire gave her a long, searching look, which Alex studiously tried to ignore while she attached a jump ring to the earring finding. “Nothing at all, if I thought you were really having fun.”
She couldn’t come up with an answer to that, simply because she didn’t have one. She wasn’t having fun. She was miserable. All the frenzied dating was only making her aware how much more she could have.
Damn Sam Delgado, anyway.
“Well, you’ll be happy to know I’ve decided to take a dating break after tonight.” Okay, she had only just reached that momentous resolve as of right this very moment, but she didn’t have to tell Claire that. “Who has the time or the energy?”
Again, those big, magnified eyes scrutinized her. After all these years of being best friends, nobody knew her like Claire, not even her mom or her sisters.