Heart Stealers by McLinn Patricia & Arnold Judith & Ortolon Julie & Shay Kathryn

Author:McLinn, Patricia & Arnold, Judith & Ortolon, Julie & Shay, Kathryn [McLinn, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary Romance, Anthology
Published: 2013-01-30T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

“I don’t know what went wrong,” Sharon said, then sighed and leaned back against the wood-slat bench on the edge of the Village Green playground. Max and Olivia were a shout’s distance from the bench, conquering a complex climbing apparatus that incorporated ladders, slides, passageways and crossbars. They scampered from platform to platform, raced along a wobbly suspension bridge and slid down a curving plastic chute, giggling and bellowing. Sharon sat with Deborah, her vision fixed on the children while her mind wandered back to last night.

“Why do you think something went wrong?” Deborah asked.

“He was going to kiss me,” Sharon said, genuinely bewildered. She and Brett had stood beside his car, surrounded by the night’s stillness, and he’d stroked her face with his fingertips—and she’d been certain he would kiss her. It might have been her first date in years, and Brett Stockton might have been a man unlike any she’d ever spent time with before, but she wasn’t an idiot. She knew that when a man touched a woman a certain way, when he looked at her a certain way, when he danced with her a certain way, and words became extraneous because so much was said with their movements, their eyes, their smiles... It meant he desired her.

But Brett had backed off. He’d driven her home, stood with her on the front porch so they could watch Tracy cross the street and let herself safely into her townhouse, and then he’d said good night and left. As if that moment by his car outside the restaurant, his gentle caress and his longing gaze had never occurred.

“Maybe he was being a gentleman,” Deborah suggested. “I know that’s a rare breed, but maybe he thought kissing you on your first date would be pushing things.”

Maybe it would have been, but last night Sharon wouldn’t have cared if he’d pushed. She’d wanted his kiss.

“I don’t think it was that,” she argued. “Nothing about him indicated that he was a gentleman.” She laughed sadly, then slapped a mosquito off her thigh and shifted on the bench, edging into the patch of shade cast by a leafy oak tree. “I mean, he was certainly very polite and all” —he knew which fork to use with the salad, didn’t he?— “but he didn’t seem prudish.” He’d enjoyed her flirting at his office, even if her ulterior motive then hadn’t been romantic. And he’d touched her last night, more than once, deliberately. He’d patted her shoulder whenever he’d had to leave the table. He’d held her hand on the dance floor, and wrapped his arm around her, not forcefully but with a definite purpose. “I was so sure... There was this one moment when I was positive he was going to kiss me. I must have misread the whole thing. It’s been such a long time, I don’t even know how to interpret a man’s signals anymore.”

“You interpret signals all the time,” Deborah reminded her. “Body language is practically your profession.”

“I hardly think taking photos of high school seniors qualifies me as an expert on body language.

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