Some people would probably find reason to object to the fact that he’d helped her, also the fact that he held the door for her as she walked out of his apartment, but she thought there was nothing wrong with good old-fashioned manners.
They’d been sadly lacking in the last three men she’d dated.
As had interesting conversation.
As they stepped into the elevator she was suddenly aware of the claustrophobic nature of their surroundings. Her arm brushed against his and she felt a shock of sexual awareness. It caught her off guard and she stepped back with a murmur of apology. Their earlier misunderstanding had flavored the air with something sharp and a little dangerous. He’d put thoughts in her head that hadn’t been there before. Or maybe they’d been there but she hadn’t recognized them. All she knew was that if he could turn the simple act of making a meal for someone into something more complicated, what was preventing him from thinking she was brushing against him on purpose? It was a good thing he couldn’t read her mind, because her mind was going to all sorts of places he certainly wasn’t invited.
That brief physical encounter left her with an impression of hard muscle under the wool of his coat. Her nerve endings tingled and she kept her gaze fixed on the seam of the elevator doors, wondering what it was about elevator rides that was so excruciatingly awkward. It was the air of false intimacy, she decided. People who barely knew each other—in this case two people—forced into close proximity by limited space. Where were you supposed to look? To stare at the floor felt apologetic and she had nothing to apologize for. To maintain eye contact felt awkward, and eye contact could be as easily misread as a meal cooked for two.
Harriet continued to stare at the doors, even though there was nothing about them that deserved such close attention.
To intensify the discomfort of the moment the elevator stopped on the next floor and a woman stepped in holding hands with a man. They were laughing together, clearly enjoying a shared joke. Harriet felt a stab of envy. You only had to look at them, the eye contact, the pleasure they took in each other’s company, to know they hadn’t “settled.”
To make room for them Harriet was forced to step back and in doing so she tripped over Madi’s leash, which had somehow wound itself round her ankles.
She fell against Ethan with a thud and a gasp of apology.
His arms came up and he steadied her, his hands closing around her upper arms, holding her firm until she regained her balance and untangled her legs from the offending leash.
Keeping her hand on Ethan’s broad chest for balance, she bent to free herself and saw Madi looking at her.
She could have sworn the dog had done it on purpose.
Madi the matchmaker.
It was only moments until she was back on her feet, but in those few moments she learned two things. Firstly, that Ethan’s strength wasn’t only restricted to his character. And secondly, that she was capable of all manner of feelings she hadn’t previously encountered. Apparently her heart was capable of beating harder and faster than she’d ever thought possible, and her stomach was able to perform a strange, fluttery maneuver that she couldn’t begin to describe let alone put a name to.
She wondered what Ethan was thinking.
Probably that she was clumsy, and that for an expert who supposedly did this every day, she was surprisingly slow at dodging the potential obstacle of a dog’s leash.
Or maybe he wasn’t thinking of her at all.
He was simply taking his sister’s dog for a walk.
She was the one who was unpicking each element of the situation and analyzing it until her brain hurt.
She was the one with the problem.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ETHAN FOLLOWED HARRIET out into the street, for once glad of the cold air.
The elevator had felt stifling, or maybe the heat had come from inside him. He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that his height had given him a perfect view of Harriet’s hair. It spilled over her shoulders in a subtle blend of pale gold and buttermilk, reminding him of long, lazy summers growing up when his priority had been to do nothing.
Right now he would have been happy to do nothing with Harriet.
The thought startled him. Not just the doing nothing part, which would in itself have been enough to make those who knew him raise an eyebrow, but that she would have been his choice of companion.
She chose that moment to look at him. “What? Why the frown?”
“It’s colder than I thought it would be.” He said the first thing that came into his head, although in fact it was the second thing. Because she’d been the first thing. He’d been thinking about how her cheeks dimpled when she smiled, and how shiny her hair was under the lights of the elevator. He’d been thinking about how her eyes had blazed when she’d confronted him, how patient she was with Madi, and how the food she’d made had been the best thing he’d ever eaten. “Really cold.”
He turned up the collar of his coat in support of his statement about the cold. And it was cold. There was no way he’d be caught in a lie.
“Wasn’t it cold a few hours ago?”
She obviously thought his behavior was strange.