Salivating became even more of a possibility when Julian closed the distance between them, striding forward in that purposeful way of his. And when his head blocked the light coming from the barn, she saw determination and focus in the set of his jaw, the intensity of his eyes, the deep line of concentration between his eyebrows.
“Hello, Hallie.”
The sheer depth of his voice, like the belly of a submarine scraping the ocean floor, almost had her backing away. Just dropping her purse and running.
Because what was happening here?
Without breaking eye contact, Julian picked up her free hand and wrapped it around the bouquet of wildflowers. “For you.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
He seemed to be expecting that, because his expression didn’t shift at all. He merely seemed torn over which part of her face to study. Nose, mouth, cheeks. “I’ll explain. But first, I want to apologize for my behavior on Sunday. I acted like a jackass.”
Hallie nodded dazedly. Was she accepting that apology?
Hard to say, when she was watching Julian slowly drag his tongue from right to left along his bottom lip, an answering clench taking place between her thighs. Something was different about him. He never failed to be entirely magnetic, but this was on a whole other level. It was almost intentional. Like he’d forgotten his filter at home.
“I’d like the opportunity to spend time with you, Hallie.” His attention traveled downward, stopping at the hemline of her dress, that bump in his throat traveling high, then low, along with the register of his voice. When he reached out a single finger and traced the location where her skin met the hem, the air vanished from her lungs. “I want to . . . date you.”
He packed so much bite into the word “date,” there was no pretending it didn’t have more than one meaning. Especially when his finger was just inside the hem now, teasing side to side to side, setting her legs trembling.
“You want to date me?”
“Yes.”
“I still don’t understand. What changed?”
Julian hooked his finger and dragged her close by the hem of her dress. Breathless, her head fell back so she wouldn’t have to break eye contact. God, he was tall. Did he grow in the moonlight or did he just seem larger now that he’d apparently stopped withholding himself?
“Truthfully?” he asked.
“Yes, truthfully,” she whispered.
Acute distress flickered briefly in his gaze. “I felt you slipping away from me. On Sunday in the yard.” He paused, visibly searching for an explanation. “We’d left things up in the air before, but this was different, Hallie. And I didn’t like it.” He studied her closely. “Was I right? Have you slipped away from me?”
Under such intense scrutiny, there was no point in providing anything but the truth. “Yes. I have.”
His chest rose sharply, shuddering back down. “Let me try and reverse that decision.”
“No.” She ignored how sexy he looked with that single professor’s eyebrow hoisting into the air and let the word hang between them. Maybe the longer she left it there, the better chance she would have of actually keeping her resolve. Panicked by her slim odds, Hallie reminded herself that he’d written back to the other woman. Or what he assumed was another woman. He’d told a stranger deep, important things about himself, and that hurt, because he’d made Hallie feel like his confidant. Then he’d given that confidence to someone else.
Oh, she was the furthest thing from blameless here. Writing those letters had been deceptive and shortsighted. Part of the reason for distancing herself now was to leave her folly behind her, pretend she hadn’t acted so impulsively, and enjoy the clean slate she planned to start writing on tomorrow. She could admit that. However, the sting of him leaving a letter on that stump continued to linger.
And last, but definitely not least, hadn’t she proposed in her last letter that they both do something that scared them? For her, it was walking into the library and taking the landscaping job. For Julian, obviously it was her. She—this—scared him.
Hallie bit back the sudden need to knee him in the jewels.
“No?” he echoed Hallie, his fingertip pausing in its sensual travels beneath her hem, misery etching itself on his features. “I really have behaved poorly, haven’t I?”
In all honesty, they both had.
So she couldn’t answer with a yes. Not without being a hypocrite.
“What happened to us being wrong for each other?” she asked instead. “We decided that pretty early on, didn’t we?”
“Yes,” he said, moving his hand away from her with a visible effort, curling his fingers into a fist, and shoving it into his pants pocket. “It’s come to my attention that I am far more wrong for you than the other way around, Hallie. You’re nothing short of breathtaking. Unique and beautiful and bold. And I’m a goddamn idiot if I ever made you feel otherwise.” She could feel in her bones how badly he wanted to reach for her in that moment. “I’m sorry. Every second we’ve spent together, I’ve been restraining myself. Trying to keep . . . to stay controlled.”