He just shrugged and shot her a wink, neither confirming nor denying. “Hey, you gotta start somewhere. Doesn’t sound like you’re in a position to be choosy.”
Grinning, she dropped the robe and began shimmying back into her dress. He wanted to shake his fist at the heavens at the injustice of it all. He would never see Amy Morrison naked again.
The thought was a lot more disappointing than he would have liked.
Chapter Eight
On the ferry over to Dax’s, Amy tried to reconcile herself to the idea of being friends with him. She had well and truly blown it on the sex front. “Ha!” she laughed as the wind whipped her hair. Maybe she should say that she hadn’t blown it—that was part of the problem. Regardless, two strikes, and she was out. Life wasn’t like baseball. A girl wasn’t automatically entitled to a third swing. Dax had quite reasonably decided that two aborted attempts to get it on were enough, and now he didn’t want her. There was no way to argue with that and retain her dignity. Gah, she couldn’t pull off the whole monogamy-for-life wedding thing, but apparently she also couldn’t pull off no-strings-attached sex, either. You couldn’t make someone want you for a wife, fine, but it seemed she couldn’t even make someone want her for a hookup.
Anyway, he was probably right. Actually having sex would have made things weird in the office. Being friends was better. She nodded, which was stupid because it wasn’t like she was trying to convince anyone besides herself. Anyway, she had the idea that being friends with Dax was going to be fun. It was possible she had misjudged him all these years. A guy who could pull off that crazy fake proposal stunt—she still grinned like an idiot when she thought about it—was a person with a grand sense of adventure. She’d felt like they were a couple of wild kids getting away with the caper of a lifetime, playing an enormous prank on the grown-ups. Like she was on top of the world. Like they were unstoppable.
There was also the part where it had just been really, really sweet. Thoughtful. He couldn’t have intended it, but now when she looked at the ring, sitting on her dresser while she tried to decide what to do with it, it wasn’t such a loaded symbol anymore.
No, she was getting carried away. It had been fun; that was all. She was beginning to realize that she hadn’t had fun—just fun, with no ulterior motive, no grand plan—for a long time.
And it now it was time for another fun day with a friend. A friend who did not want to have sex with her.
Okay, enough. It was time to stop her brain from going there.
After she disembarked the ferry, she retraced the steps they’d taken the night after her wedding. Ward’s Island was just as charming by day—more so, really, since she wasn’t gutted with heartbreak this time. There was a note on Dax’s front door directing her to the backyard of Gary’s house next door, and when she let herself into Gary’s gate, she burst out laughing. Gary sat on a lawn chair sipping a cup of coffee, and Dax’s legs—only his legs—were visible, sticking out from under some kind of giant contraption. It was like he was a mechanic lying underneath a car—if the car looked like a cross between a robotic hot air balloon and a giant vacuum cleaner.
“Hi, Amy,” he called from beneath his metal prison. “I’ll just be a minute.” Ahh, that voice, so low and gravelly and commanding. It did something to her. It did something that was not a “friend” thing.
“You’ve got the idea,” she said to Gary as he motioned her over to a chair. “Sit here and relax while he does all the work.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Amy, by the way.”
“Gary,” he said, shaking. Then he nodded at Dax’s legs. “He’s good at this. It’s that programmer brain, I think.”
She squinted at the contraption. “So I hear you’re trying to get this to crack an egg?”
“Nah.” Gary waved his hand in the air dismissively. “Changed my mind. Now I’m working on getting it to turn the pages of a book.” He jumped up and began showing her various aspects of the machine, including a series of gears, the last of which tipped a little teeter-totter up so a marble ran down its length. It was impossible not to catch his enthusiasm as he waved his hands wildly and hopped around.
The marble was stuck in a cup the teeter-totter had deposited it in. “This is one of the current choke points,” he said, sighing theatrically. “Dax is working on another down there.”
“Dax is no longer working on a choke point.” He popped up beside them. In his bare feet and bright orange board shorts and…nothing else. It was a warm morning, but Amy shivered anyway.