Miles stared at me for a moment, his eyes widening, and then…
He laughed.
He actually laughed.
A full-blown laugh. Complete with wrinkled eyes, a hand pressed against his stomach, and… a smile.
A wide, bright, glorious flipping smile that made my stomach do somersaults.
I stared at him, lips parted, unable to move.
“What?” His laughter petered out into a small chuckle, but his smile stayed fixed on his face. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You’ve never laughed at me before.” I licked my lips. “And you’ve never smiled at me, either.”
He frowned. “I’ve smiled at you.”
I shook my head emphatically. “No, you haven’t. Never. Even when you have been nice to me, you’ve never smiled. You’ve stopped yourself at least twice since we got out of the car!”
“I smile!”
“Not at me!” I stepped forward and jabbed my finger into his chest, then froze.
What was I doing?
Oh, my gosh.
That was a silly, silly thing to do.
Darn it, Gabriella!
Miles looked down at me and reached up at the same time, wrapping his hand around mine. His fingertips brushed against my palm, and I drew in a sharp breath as the tickle sent goosebumps erupting up my arm.
My mouth was dry. Why was it dry? Where was my saliva? Oh, gosh. What was happening here?
I moved my tongue across my teeth in a desperate attempt to alleviate the dryness, but it was no good. Instead, I bit down on my lower lip and dragged it between my teeth—something that worked surprisingly well.
For me.
What it also did was draw Miles’ attention to my mouth.
His gaze dropped to my lips, and I immediately pressed them together. I had to resist the urge to lick them, but thankfully the rapid beating of my heart drew my attention away from the fact he was still staring at my lips.
Maybe.
Kind of.
Not at all, actually.
It was the whole reason my heart was doing a stupid little skippy-skip-skip against my ribs.
“I smile at you, Gabriella.” Miles slowly lifted his gaze back up to meet mine. “Just because you’ve never seen it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.”
What did that mean?
“What do—”
“Gabriella!” The sound of Aunt Cat’s voice interrupted me, and just like that, whatever the moment was, it was gone.
We jerked apart as if we were doing something wrong.
Just in time, too, since the mudroom door swung open, and Aunt Cat appeared. She looked us both over like we were intruders.
“What are you doing out here?” Her eyes flicked between us again. “Am I interrupting something?”
“No!” I shouted, a little too loudly.
She raised her eyebrows.
“No,” I repeated after a moment. “I was stuck in the village, and Miles gave me a lift home, that’s all. He wanted to check the greenhouse for damage.”
“I’m sure,” she said dryly. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Has he checked it or were you too busy canoodling?”
Miles cleared his throat. “We weren’t canoodling.”
“Right. I suppose she had something on her mouth you couldn’t stop looking at.” Aunt Cat grinned.
My cheeks were red hot. Oh, God.
“Don’t you have a greenhouse to check over, boy? Chop, chop!” She clapped her hands together, making him jump.
Still, he jolted into action and disappeared through the gate, peering over his shoulder at us until the hedge blocked his view.
Slowly, Aunt Cat turned to face me. “Well, well, well. It looks like you have some explaining to do.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Contrary to Aunt Cat’s belief, I did not have any explaining to do.
There was nothing going on between me and Miles. We’d only just made friends, for goodness sake.
I mean, sure, there was that weird moment before she came out. Where he’d been looking at my mouth and had said he smiled at me but I just hadn’t seen it. Where my heart had moonlighted as a rocker and staged an attempted escape from my chest.
But that didn’t mean anything.
There was nothing going on.
It wasn’t like I wasn’t aware of the fact I was attracted to Miles. I knew I had a crush on him, but that’s all it was. A schoolgirl crush.
At least it had been. Until last night.
When he’d been nice to me.
Apologised.
Admitted he’d been wrong.
And smiled at me.
Mmph.
I didn’t care what he said—he hadn’t smiled at me. Ever. Not as long as I’d known him. In fact, he’d always made a conscious effort not to smile or laugh at me. Of course, it all rather made sense now that he’d shared with me how he’d judged me, but that didn’t make his insistence that he did smile at me make any sense.
Where was an agony aunt when you needed one?
Oh.
Wait.
I was one.
With a sigh, I carried my laptop into the kitchen and set up on the island. It was one of the few rooms we’d made serious modern changes to, and one of those was power outlets on the island.
I opened it up and loaded the internet browser. I was the only person awake right now, but I opened a second browser window and opened the webpage of the nearest garden centre, just in case anyone else woke up and came down.