“Is that a metaphor?” Dylan muttered, typing something in the chat window.
“What are you writing?” Mike split his attention between the milk mess and Dylan’s mess.
“I’m asking her to meet me for coffee.”
“No chianti and fava beans?”
“Shut up.” Dylan’s glare turned from simple annoyance to a simmering fury. OK. Mike knew when to let up. Half a minute later and the milk was cleaned up; time to get out of the house and let Dylan find his way through his heartache. He had a date tonight.
One that required some serious planning to pull off. What was Laura thinking right now, facing her own screen as Dylan tried again and again to talk to her? Was she scared? Intrigued? Pissed? She kept turning him down, and that didn’t bode well for a future triad.
All Mike could do now was “wow” her with tonight’s date. He left Dylan half-naked and brooding, to find his way through her roadblocks, the man grousing about all the ways he might have screwed up on their date.
Same mountain, new date. Or, it seemed like the same mountain. They all seemed the same to her as her vision blurred, her veins unaccustomed to blood pumping this hard through her body for any reason other than sheer arousal.
Arousal was an issue here, though, too.
The view from the top of the mountain was breathtaking and Laura probably would’ve appreciated it more if her attention weren’t completely focused on Mike. He was all she wanted to watch as he surprised her. He’d carried a back pack at his side through much of the walk. Not wearing— just carrying it. And now like some sort of a magician’s hat, he pulled out a blanket, two bottles of red wine, a couple of glasses, a container filled with five or six different kinds of cheese, most of them with names she couldn’t pronounce, and a container of grapes and strawberries, a couple of them chocolate covered.
“What’s this?” she said.
“I thought I’d surprise us with a light dinner.” He smiled shyly. “I’m too much of a gentleman to take a woman out and not feed her at least something. I may have dragged you along for another crazy hike and ruin my chances at the third date, but at least you can’t say we didn’t have dinner.”
She surveyed the layout before her. Some sort of a camping blanket; thin, but well-worn. Actual stemware, wine glasses that he kept in a special case. And as he inserted the cork screw into the first bottle of wine, and very deftly opened it, she sampled one of the cheeses.
“Mmm, sheep’s cheese?” she asked.
His eyes lit up. “Yes! You can tell from the taste?”
“Yeah,” she said, “it’s one of my favorites.”
“Well, hot damn! Who knew I’d find someone who knows their fromage?” he said, biting his lower lip, and smiling and nodding at the same time, as if he quietly celebrated a minor success.
“Yeah,” she said quietly, “who knew?” Her face shifted in an expression of wistfulness, of serenity, of being very much in the moment.
She felt she could breathe around him, that she could appreciate each breath. And as he handed her the glass of red wine, she sniffed it, then took a sip. “This is good.”
“Guess?”
“Guess what?” she asked.
“Guess what kind of wine this is.”
She surveyed the bouquet, sniffing a couple of times, lapped at the red wine very ostentatiously, took a sip, and looked at him grandly, with as much pretension as she could muster, and declared, “It’s red.”
He burst into laughter. “How sophisticated.”
She shrugged. “Sorry. I may know something about cheese, but I know nothing, absolutely nothing, about wine. But I like this.” She reached for his hand as they stood and stared out at the valley. “I like this a lot.”
His warm palm closed over her shoulder and he looked down at her, standing a full foot above her frame, his neck leaning toward her, his face an inch away. “Yeah. I like it a lot too.”
Making love outside, in the fresh air, had never been part of her bucket list. In fact, it was more a part of her anti-bucket list; bright light, no covers, on the hard ground? Who would find that appealing?
Uh, her. Right here. Right now.
As Mike stared at her, eyes burning with an intensity she fell into, an abyss of wanting, she found herself startlingly interested in trying this new experience. Was this why he had gone to so much trouble—the wine, the special blanket, the fromagerie of cheeses and such? It dawned on her that he wasn’t just being a sweetheart, giving her a lovely, gourmet picnic for their second date.
As a matter of fact, what they had eaten was just an appetizer.