“Oh. Yeah.” She sighed, looking from the fender to her friend, then to Cade. Her gaze shifted again to the cat, then his car. Finally she shrugged. “Thanks. We appreciate the ride.”
As soon as both women—and the feline—were settled in his borrowed BMW—the quiet redhead in the back and Eden and her rescue cat in the front—he started the car.
“So, you still seeing Kenny Phillips?” he asked, hoping like hell she’d say yes.
“Not anymore.” She did that cute little nose-wrinkling thing then shook her head. “He never quite forgave me for breaking his foot.”
It’d been Kenny’s screams that’d caught Cade’s attention a couple years back, leading him to rescue a stunning, naked Eden. Cade was still baffled by that situation, since Kenny was nothing if not a missionary kind of guy. How the hell did a guy break his foot having standard, missionary sex? You’d think it’d take a swing, a tube of body lube and a few leather straps to reach that level of risk.
“I don’t think you lost out on much. Dating is a full-contact sport,” he told her with a laugh.
Unlike a lot of women, Eden didn’t get that speculative, how interested are you in playing the game with me look in her eyes. Instead she just shrugged.
“I guess Kenny decided to sign up for a lower-risk league, then,” she informed him as she rolled her ankle first one way, then the other. “And he took most of his teammates in town with him.”
“Wimps,” Cade muttered. What kind of jerks blamed the girl for their own incompetence? Sure, Eden was a little accident prone. But she was sweet and sexy in that girl-next-door way. She was fun and easy to talk to, and unlike so many others around town, she didn’t play the user game. A guy would be lucky to date her. If he was interested in dating, that is.
“So you’re saying you wouldn’t be scared?” Eden challenged. Her chin was high and her tone light, but he could see the vulnerability in those gold-flecked brown eyes.
“Sweetie, unless a woman straps an explosive device around her waist and insists we go dancing, there’s not much that will scare me.” Cade laughed.
“So you’d date a girl who had a reputation for being a little clumsy?” she asked quietly.
Well, how the hell had he missed that trap? Cade frowned, even as a gurgle of horrified laughter came from the backseat.
“I don’t base my dating choices on things like that,” he sidestepped. Then, to further cement the keep out message, he added, “Really, I don’t see myself dating at all in the next little while. Between the old man in ICU and my grandmother needing me, I figure I’ll be pretty tied up until I return to base. Gramma said something about some deals my father was trying to wind up when he had the heart attack, something with important timing. I’m probably going to have to take care of that, too.”
Ah, silence.
He had no idea what’d caused it, but he’d take the stilted quiet over tap dancing around a verbal trap any day. Other than the uncomfortable shifting her friend did in the backseat, nobody made a sound. Even the cat quit purring.
Still, by the time they reached Eden’s place, less than a mile up the road, tension tight enough to bounce coins off rippled across the back of Cade’s neck. He drove down the long, circular driveway, his discomfort slowly fading as he noted how rundown the Gillespie place had become. The immediate yard around the huge house was still tidy, but beyond the fence, weeds were brushing the trees. Even the once vivid white paint on the shutters was graying, chipped and curling.
One of the outbuildings looked like the roof had collapsed and someone—probably Eden—had built a crude wire fence to pen up a goat and what looked like a horse-size dog.
“Thanks for the rescue. And the ride,” Eden said when he stopped in front of wide bank of steps leading to her front door.
“Anytime,” he told her. “Just try to keep your accidents scheduled for my visits home. I hate to think of you hanging from a tree and only wimps here to save you.”
She laughed, the pained discomfort chased away by amusement. “Would you believe that I usually manage to rescue myself when you’re not around?”
Cade considered that for a second.
Then he shook his head. “Nope.”
Her cheeks warm with a pretty pink wash, Eden gave him a sweet look from under her lashes. The kind of look that should make him feel protective. Or manly, like a superhero.
Not horny like a sailor on leave.
Time to go, he decided.
Leaning one elbow on the seat, he angled himself around.
“It was nice to meet you,” he told the quiet redhead in the backseat. She gave him a wide-eyed, about-to-hyper-ventilate look.
Because he was a SEAL, trained in multiple ways to kill men and defend his country? Or because of his high school rep and near rock-star dating status?
Then the redhead blushed.
Yep. Rock star.
“Cade?”
He looked at Eden with a friendly smile, ready to politely brush off her thanks.
She was staring at the cat on her lap, as if one glance away would send it leaping out the window.
“Did you maybe want to get drinks with me? Sort of a welcome-home and thank-you combination?”
Drinks? Unless that meant standing in line together to each buy their own bottle of water at the corner market, drinks were a really bad idea. Drinks were code word for tiptoeing into dating territory. A precursor to, part of or windup from something more intimate.
A huge mistake.
It wasn’t that Cade didn’t date. And he was nowhere near being a monk. But here in his hometown, the rules were different. Here, the women tended to see him as Robert Sullivan’s son. The guy who’d get the key to the Sullivan coffers. A great catch.
Not that women didn’t have an agenda outside of Ocean Point, as well, but usually that had more to do with being able to say they’d been with a SEAL. Being a notch on a woman’s lipstick case, he was okay with. Being the target of her engagement ring search, he wasn’t.
Still, this was Eden. He’d need to let her down easy.
“Sure,” he heard himself say instead. “A drink sounds good.”
His momentary chagrin at giving in to the urge fled quickly at the look of surprise on Eden’s face and the delighted shock on her friend’s.
She’d expected him to say no. To be a wimp.
Her friend had figured the same, hopefully without the wimp part. He knew his rep, and the status-obsessed focus of a lot of the country club set that Eden ran with. The Sullivans were big shit around town. The Gillespies barely danced around the fringe. From the time he was fourteen, he’d heard hundreds of lectures on dating, all focused on the girl’s last name, never her first. God, he hated that. That, and the way everyone always gossiped, judging each other’s worth by who they dated or the limit on their credit card. Hell, before he hit the end of the driveway, he’d bet her friend would have texted twenty of her best friends to tell them the news.
Within ten minutes, forty more people would probably have texted her back with varying degrees of shock, denial and outright horror at the idea of a Sullivan lowering himself to date a woman like Eden. One who lived in a rundown house, whose sexual encounters resulted in broken bones and who wrecked cars to rescue cats.
Who didn’t date for status.
Who liked him for him, not because of his last name.
Who made him feel like the hero she always teased him about