It took several seconds to register. “You want to take me to the science center? As in the Pacific Science Center? As in school field trip, nerdy grade school nirvana?”
“Yup.” He was already heading that way.
“But Will,” she said, scampering after him in her high heels. “I’m supposed to be living on the edge. This is even more mundane than my regular life.”
He stopped so suddenly she would have skidded past him had he not grabbed her hand. Brynn assumed he was steadying her, but he kept pulling her closer. Then closer still. Until they were standing chest to chest, hip to hip in the middle of a crowded courtyard.
“Does this feel mundane?” he asked, tilting his hips forward slightly.
“Will!” she hissed at the contact with his erection. “You’re…”
He shifted his hips again to confirm it. “Yup.”
“There are children around.”
“Somehow I don’t think two adults dry-humping is going to outrank cotton candy with the six-year-old set.”
“We are not dry-humping,” Brynn said, her hands going to his chest to push him away. Except she didn’t. Okay, maybe they were kind of dry humping.
He carefully scanned the crowd for gawkers before slowly lowering his head as though to kiss her cheek and then missing, and landing behind her ear, where there were about a thousand nerve endings.
“Is that a yes to the fling?” she asked, hoping he didn’t notice her slightly breathless voice as his tongue flicked across her earlobe.
Will pulled back almost as quickly as he’d moved in. “Mmmm, too soon to tell. I’ll have to see how you perform in the bubble race.”
Brynn stared in exasperation at his back as he strolled toward the admissions gate of the center as though they hadn’t just necked in public.
She chewed her lip.
She hadn’t been lying about it being field trip heaven in there. Every school in the area made an annual trek there. Including hers. And every damn year, her class had been instructed to pick a partner to stick with for the day. But there was always an odd number. And Brynn had always ended up with one of the chaperones.
Which had been fine, really. Because at least the chaperones hadn’t called her names and hidden her lunch box.
“Come on, Princess!”
She took a deep breath. You can do this. You’re an adult.
You’re not that little girl anymore.
“God, I hate you,” she muttered as she set off to follow Will.
It was a sentiment she’d been thinking and saying for years. But for the first time, she wasn’t even remotely sure it was true.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
No sex without love. We’re not savages.
—Brynn Dalton’s Rules for an
Exemplary Life, #24
Admit it, you had fun,” Will said they crossed from his driveway to hers. Over the grass this time. Because rebels did that sort of thing. Still, Brynn might have been just a little careful not to let her heels pierce the lawn.
“The Science Center was fun,” she conceded as she dug her keys out of her purse. “But the Ride the Ducks adventure was a monstrosity.”
“Come on, that’s tourist gold!”
“Perhaps. But it’s local trash.”