The Single Dad's Second Chance (4 page)

Though Rachel was puzzled by her friend’s odd behavior, she didn’t ask any questions. It wouldn’t be the first time Holly had chosen to hide out in the back rather than face an ex-boyfriend who had ventured into the shop. With her polite smile in place, she moved out past the counter—and found herself face-to-face with Andrew Garrett.

“Mr. Garrett. Hi.”

He smiled, and her already wildly pounding heart kicked it up another notch.

“I thought we were on a first-name basis now,” he said to her.

Were they? She didn’t know what to think, why he was there. But she couldn’t deny that she was really glad to see him. “Andrew,” she amended. “How can I help you today?”

“What kind of flowers would you recommend to express a heartfelt and sincere apology?”

She felt a smile tug at the corners of her mouth. “How badly did you screw up?”

“You tell me.”

“Sorry?”

“That’s supposed to be my line,” he said. “And I
am
sorry.”

“Why?” she asked cautiously.

“Because I couldn’t decide whether or not I should call, and when I finally admitted to myself that I wanted to call, I realized I didn’t have your number. By then, a whole week had passed so I figured there was no point in tracking you down because you’d probably already written me off. And now it’s two weeks later, but I haven’t stopped thinking about you, so here I am anyway.”

“You’re here to see
me?
”

He nodded. “Obviously you’re working right now, but if you don’t object to giving me your number, maybe I can call you sometime and we could make plans to do something again?”

She took one of the business cards from the holder by the cash register and was scribbling her home number on it when Holly came through from the back with a spring assortment to set in the display case.

“I’m sorry for reneging on our plans this afternoon,” Holly said to Rachel. And then, as if she’d only now realized that Andrew was there, “Oh—I didn’t realize you were with a customer.”

Rachel rolled her eyes in response to the blatant fib. “Holly, this is Andrew Garrett. Andrew, my friend and business partner, Holly Kendrick.”

“I apologize for interrupting,” Holly said to him. “I just got a message that my brother’s coming into town so I have to pick him up from the airport, but I feel terrible about abandoning Rachel with two tickets to a Wolfpack game on a Saturday afternoon.”

“Shouldn’t you be on your way to the airport now?” Rachel suggested.

“You’re right,” Holly agreed. “It was nice meeting you, Andrew. See you tomorrow, Rachel.” Then she disappeared into the back again and—hopefully—out the back door.

“Was that your friend’s not-so-subtle way of letting me know that you don’t have any plans today?” Andrew asked when Holly had gone.

“Actually that was subtle, at least for Holly. And I do have plans.”

“The basketball game.”

She nodded.

“I like basketball,” he said. “If you wanted to sell the extra ticket to me, I’d go with you.”

“I’m not selling the ticket to you,” she told him. “But I will let you buy the popcorn.”

He smiled. “Sounds fair. What time’s the game?”

“Four o’clock.”

“I’ll pick you up at two-thirty.”

* * *

Andrew pressed the code to buzz Rachel’s apartment at precisely two-thirty. After he identified himself over the intercom, she told him “apartment 704” and released the lock.

He stepped into the lobby and took a moment to look around while he waited for the elevator. He’d never lived in an apartment and wasn’t sure he could do so without feeling claustrophobic, but he had to admit that this building had ambience. There were watercolors on the walls, fresh flowers strategically placed around the room and leather seating around a gas fireplace.

A quiet
ding
indicated the elevator’s arrival and, a minute later, he was at Rachel’s door. She responded promptly to his knock.

“I just need to grab my purse,” she said, and stepped back so that he could enter.

He didn’t glance around her apartment because his gaze was riveted on her. She’d changed from her work clothes into a pair of black jeans that molded to her narrow hips and a soft pink sweater that hugged her curves and somehow made her eyes seem even bluer. She’d brushed her hair out, so that it spilled over her shoulders in a silky cloud. On her feet she wore black boots with heels that looked more fashionable than practical.

He felt a distinctive tug low in his groin and couldn’t deny it was attraction. And his body’s instinctive response to Rachel Ellis worried him, because he sensed that there was something more going on here than basic chemistry. Lust was simple enough, but what he felt for Rachel wasn’t simple. There was something more mixed with the desire he felt, and he was concerned that he could—maybe already did—actually like her.

She picked up her purse off the console, double-checked that she had the tickets, then grabbed her coat from the closet. “Okay,” she told him.

When he didn’t shift from his position in front of the door, she looked up at him. He watched her eyes darken as puzzlement changed to awareness, and the pulse at the base of her throat quickened as awareness gave way to desire. It had been a long time since he’d had to read a woman’s signals, but he was confident that the attraction he felt was reciprocated.

She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Are you, uh, ready?”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “There’s just one thing I think we should get out of the way before we go.”

And then he kissed her.

Chapter Four

O
h. My. God.

He was kissing her.

And this wasn’t a casual brush of the lips. It was immediate and full mouth-on-mouth contact. Not in a way that could be considered aggressive or pushy, just direct and sure, and there was something incredibly sexy about his self-confidence.

In the space of a heartbeat, those masterful lips took Rachel from casually intrigued to completely aroused. About three seconds later, she decided that if levels of expertise could be assessed like in the martial arts, he was a black-belt grand master of kissing. Two seconds after that, she was incapable of forming any other coherent thoughts.

Kissing Andrew Garrett was simply...bliss.

He lifted a hand to cup the nape of her neck, his thumb gently brushing over the racing pulse point below her jaw. His other arm curled around her back, drawing her closer. She went willingly, eagerly. Her lips parted beneath the pressure of his, and when his tongue slipped between them, she felt the surge of heat through her veins, igniting flames of desire.

And still he continued to kiss her, savoring the taste and texture of her mouth without pressing for anything more. His lips nibbled, his tongue teased and everything inside of her quivered with want, need. He wanted her, too—there was no mistaking the desire she tasted in his kiss—but it was tempered by patience, balanced by caution.

Because she had her own reasons for being careful, she appreciated his restraint. But she was still disappointed when he finally lifted his mouth from hers.

She was twenty-seven years old. She’d had boyfriends, relationships, heartbreaks. She’d shared her body and her bed with other men, but never had any other man kissed her with the focused intensity Andrew demonstrated. Even now, he kept his arm around her, as if he wasn’t quite ready to let her go.

“I’ve been thinking about that since Valentine’s Day,” he told her.

“Oh. Um.” The power of conversation had completely deserted her along with the ability to form coherent thoughts.

He smiled. “Yeah, I know the feeling.”

“I wasn’t— I’m not—” She blew out a breath. “I’m on a dating hiatus.”

“You mentioned that.”

“And we’re supposed to be going to the basketball game.”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m a really big Wolfpack fan.”

“Okay,” he agreed.

“But now I’m thinking...that I might want to
not
see the game even more.”

The glint of humor in his green eyes faded; the arm around her waist tightened. “Rachel.”

“I’m not usually the impulsive type, and I don’t even really know you. Or maybe it’s just that sixteen months is a really long time to go without having sex. Except that I didn’t even think about it for most of that time, and all you did was kiss me, but I’m definitely thinking about it now.”

“I’m thinking about it, too,” he admitted.

“But we had a deal,” she reminded him.

“We did?”

She nodded. “You’re buying the popcorn.”

“Popcorn. Right.” He finally released her and took a step back. “Then I guess we should be going.”

She felt a little bit steadier as they waited for the elevator. Although there was no one else in the hall, she was confident that she had enough self-restraint to refrain from tearing his clothes off in a public place. And when the doors of the elevator closed behind them, she was sure the moment of insanity had passed.

The blast of cold air that greeted her when they exited the building quickly cooled her heated skin. In fact, she’d only taken a few steps before she was wishing that she’d grabbed a hat and gloves. Instead, she stuffed her hands into the pockets of her jacket and tucked her chin deeper into the collar to combat the unseasonably cold weather. When her heel caught a patch of ice, she would have fallen onto her butt if Andrew hadn’t managed to catch her elbow and hold her up.

“I was right,” he murmured.

“About what?”

“Your boots are more stylish than practical.”

“I wear the practical ones every day,” she told him. “I like to dress up a little when I go out.”

“Did I mention how nice you look?”

“Not in so many words, but I thought the kiss might have been an indicator.”

“I’m usually pretty good with words, but it’s been a long time since I’ve done the dating thing,” he said apologetically, as he walked around to the passenger door of his car.

She had no complaints about his communication skills, but she didn’t dare say so in case he interpreted her response as an invitation to kiss her again. Not that she would object if he did so, she just wasn’t sure she could handle another one of his kisses right now.

“I should have said that you look nice—beautiful, actually.”

It wasn’t the smoothest compliment she’d ever received, but she could tell that he meant it, and despite the fact that her teeth were close to chattering, she felt her cheeks heat.

He opened the door for her.

She lowered herself onto the leather seat and reached for the belt. Andrew slid in behind the steering wheel and started the car, immediately turning up the temperature. Before he had pulled out of the parking lot, she could feel the warm air on her frigid feet.

As the heat permeated the vehicle and thawed her extremities, she became aware of other things: the wide-palmed hands wrapped around the steering wheel, the breadth of his shoulders beneath his leather jacket, the strong line of his jaw darkened with just the slightest hint of stubble and the clean, masculine scent of him that filled her nostrils every time she drew a breath. She definitely wasn’t feeling cold anymore, not with all of the heat churning inside of her.

She unfastened the top two buttons of her coat, and he automatically reached for the button to adjust the climate control. She mentally added
courteous
to his already-impressive list of attributes that included handsome, charming, loyal—and a fabulous kisser.

In fact, her head was still reeling from that kiss. Ordinarily such a bold move would have put her off. But it was hard to be annoyed when every long-dormant nerve ending in her body was standing at attention and begging for more.

“So how did you become a Wolfpack fan?” he asked her.

“My brother played college basketball.”

“At NC State?”

She nodded. “Did you ever play?”

“No, my game was football. At Duke.”

She might have guessed football, because of those shoulders. But he was tall enough that basketball wouldn’t have been out of the question. The school, however, surprised her. “Both Holly and I went to Duke.”

He smiled. “I think we’ve already established that I would have been there a lot of years before you.”

“Unless it took you a long time to graduate,” she teased.

He laughed. “I got the standard four-year degree in four years.”

She had a lot more questions, but he turned the focus back to her. “Did you meet Holly at college?”

“No, we go way back to the second grade when Holly’s parents split up and she and her brother came to Charisma to live with her grandmother. We first decided we would go into business together when we were in fifth grade, but we didn’t know the business was going to be flowers.”

“How did that come about?”

“We both majored in business, but Holly liked to try a lot of different things and occasionally took courses just for fun. One of those was a floral-design class offered on Saturday mornings, and she fell in love with it.”

“So you’re the ‘Buds’ of Buds & Blooms,” he realized. “Clever.”

“We thought so,” she agreed. “Most people assume ‘Buds’ is a reference to undeveloped flowers—and it is. But we liked that it was also an abbreviation of buddies.”

And since she’d already told him far more than she intended, she said, “So tell me about you—what do you do?”

“Nothing very exciting,” he warned.

“You mean you’re not a NASA astronaut or government spy?”

He chuckled. “Unfortunately, no. I’m a carpenter.”

Which explained his strong and confident hands. “What kind of carpentry do you do?

“Mostly finish work and cabinetry.”

“So you’re a detail man,” she surmised.

“I guess that’s a fair assessment.” He turned into the parking lot of PNC Arena.

“Do you like your work?”

“Most days.”

“Then you’re doing the right thing.”

The parking lot was rapidly filling up, so he drove directly to the gate. “Why don’t you get out here and I’ll meet you inside after I’ve parked the car?”

“Okay,” she agreed, and added
chivalrous
to the ever-growing list she was compiling. Obviously his mother had raised him to treat a girl right—and this girl’s heart was already starting to go pitter-patter.

It’s just a basketball game,
she reminded herself. Not a date. He was only there with her because Holly had bailed and Rachel happened to have an extra ticket. And she might almost have believed this was just an impromptu outing between casual acquaintances, except for that kiss.

She had to stop thinking about that kiss.

Because every minute that she spent with him, she found him more attractive and appealing, and she wasn’t looking for any kind of romantic involvement at this point in her life. She wasn’t ready to end her dating hiatus just yet. She didn’t want to feel all the feelings he stirred up inside her. In fact, she almost hoped that he would shove popcorn into his mouth by the handful or slurp on his soda or send text messages throughout the game so that she could focus on some annoying behavior and stop thinking about the feel of his mouth on hers.

* * *

He shouldn’t have kissed her.

Not that Andrew regretted the off-the-charts lip-lock they’d shared, but he knew it would have been smarter to resist the impulse that urged him to sample the taste and texture of her temptingly curved mouth. Because now he couldn’t think about anything but the softness of her lips, the sweet flavor of her and the surprising passion in her response.

And no matter how many times he told himself that what he’d shared with Rachel was just a kiss, he wasn’t reassured. Because now he wanted to kiss her again and again, and he wanted those kisses to lead to more. A lot more.

He spotted her immediately when he walked through the doors. She was standing just inside, waiting for him. He wondered how it was that he’d been into her shop more than half a dozen times over the past few years, had several conversations with her and never noticed how truly beautiful she was.

Sure, he’d felt a subtle buzz, but until their paths had crossed at Valentino’s two weeks ago, he’d never seen her as anything other than the woman who worked at the flower shop. Maybe, prior to that day, he hadn’t been ready to see her as anything more.

Her lips curved when she spotted him, and his gaze automatically dipped to the soft, sweet mouth. There was no doubt he was feeling the attraction now.

“Popcorn?” he asked.

“Absolutely,” she agreed.

He bought a large popcorn and a couple of drinks, then they went to find their seats.

The last time he’d been at the arena was with Maura. A guy at work had a couple of tickets to a Hurricanes game that he couldn’t use, so he gave them to Andrew. And they were great seats, too.

His daughter, unfortunately, had been less than thrilled with the close-up view of players ruthlessly crushed against the glass. And when a little bit of jostling ended with the gloves dropping and fists pumping, she’d started to cry. They’d left before the end of the second period.

Thinking about Maura at that game reminded him that he hadn’t mentioned his daughter to Rachel.

He wasn’t deliberately keeping the existence of his child a secret from her—he just hadn’t yet found a way to bring her name into the conversation. Maybe he hadn’t tried too hard, but, truthfully, he was enjoying talking about other things for a change. The basic getting-to-know-one-another conversations always seemed to take on a different tone whenever he revealed that he was a single father.

Some women weren’t interested in playing mommy to another woman’s child, but in Andrew’s recent and admittedly limited dating experience, most of them tried to use the existence of his motherless child to worm their way into his affections.

He didn’t disagree that a child needed a mother, and he felt fortunate that both his mother and his former mother-in-law were close to Maura. He also had three female cousins who doted on his little girl, so she had plenty of women in her life. And although a couple of his dates had expressed an interest in meeting his daughter, none of them had ever done so.

It was too early to decide whether or not Rachel would be the first, but if he planned to see her again after tonight, he knew that he had to tell her about Maura. Not now—not in the midst of a crowded arena only minutes before the game was scheduled to start, but definitely before their relationship progressed further than a few kisses.

As the players continued their warm-ups, he glanced over at Rachel and discovered that the low V-neckline of her soft pink sweater afforded him a tempting view of pale skin and a hint of shadowy cleavage.

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. The initial attraction to Rachel had been nothing more than a mild curiosity, a subtle stirring in his blood. Then they’d had dinner together on Valentine’s Day, and they’d talked and laughed and he’d realized he actually liked her. That, combined with the attraction, changed everything for him. Or maybe it was the first kiss—the impulsive touch of her lips to his cheek. But somewhere along the line, what had started as a subtle stirring in his blood had escalated to a raging hunger, so that he actually ached with wanting her.

Was it simply a matter of timing? Was he finally ready to move on with his life? Or was it Rachel? Was there something about this specific woman that got to him?

He reached for more popcorn, and his fingers brushed over the back of her hand. The casual touch sent heat coursing through his veins, and the little catch in her breath confirmed that she’d felt something, too. Her gaze lifted to his, her blue eyes wide, aware. Her slightly parted lips glistened with butter, tempting him to lick it away.