It took Dallas a second to figure out Ryan meant him. “What are you talking about now?” he asked, feeling like they’d had this conversation already. “What have I done?”
Ryan, the buzzkill, stroked his chin with his fingers and studied him through eyes brimming with pity. “I don’t understand why I keep having to explain this to you. There are several billion reasons why you can’t be that friendly with the single nurses on staff.”
“I work with them. I was just being polite,” Dallas protested.
“No offense, but you don’t always read women right.”
He was about to argue the point, then remembered Simone. “No one is ever right one hundred percent of the time.”
“I’m not sure you even hit fifty percent.”
“I only have to read Hannah, and so far, I’m doing okay.” Last night was a good indicator of that.
He must have looked a little too smug about it though, because Ryan frowned. “About that… I bumped into Hannah at the Wayside,” he said.
“So?” Dallas dangled his half-finished cup by the rim to illustrate the fact. “Along with most of the town. They make the best coffee. I hear it’s a great way to start the morning off right.”
“She wasn’t alone.”
A tiny bit of his good mood seeped away. He’d left her in bed, planning her day. She hadn’t said a thing to him about meeting up with anyone. He plunked his cup down. Normally, he respected Ryan’s deep-seated need to protect the people closest to him. He had trust issues that years of therapy hadn’t managed to cure. “She’s allowed to hang out with whoever she wants.” Even if she’d said nothing to him about it.
“Sorry, Dallas. It’s just that their conversation looked kind of intense. At one point he was holding her hand.Hewas holdinghers,” Ryan repeated hastily, apparently not having the same problem with reading people as he claimed Dallas did. “All I’m trying to say is that you have to be more careful about the people you let get close to you. Are you sure the old boyfriend is really out of the picture?”
“Positive.” Hannah would have told him if her ex-boyfriend was in town. Unless, of course, she hadn’t found out about it until after he’d left for work. She wouldn’t have met him for coffee, though. No way.
“Forget I said anything,” Ryan said. “You know how paranoid I can be.”
Too late. Dallas’s good mood had been flushed down the toilet and was currently swirling the drain. Ryan hadn’t made any mistake and they both knew it. Whoever she’d met with, she knew him well.
But Dallas wasn’t going to jump to any conclusions. Whatever reason Hannah had for meeting someone at the Wayside, it had definitely come up at the last minute. The man could have been anyone, too. It could have been one of her brothers. Her brother Blaise definitely fit the intense description. And it would be just like him to drop in on her unannounced.
She’d likely tell him all about it when he saw her that evening.