Fifty Ways To Say I'm Pregnant. Christine Rimmer

something started—”’

      “Call it whatever you damn well please.” She flinched and he realized he’d spoken too harshly. He gentled his tone. “I just want you to give it some thought before we start up with anything.”

      “But…” She looked enchantingly bewildered. “Do you want to spend more time with me?”

      Do bears like honey? He confessed, “Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that. I’d like it a lot.”

      “Well, then…” A few strands of hair had got caught across her mouth. He kept his hands shoved hard in his pockets to keep from reaching out and smoothing those strands back over her soft cheek, behind the graceful curve of her ear. After a few seconds that seemed like a year, she brushed them away herself.

      “Think about it,” he said, his heart pounding deep and hard, every beat seeming to call out her name. “Give it week. By next Friday, if you still think you want to go out with me, you give me a call.”

      Those lashes swept down. “I know my own mind, Beau.”

      “We’ll see.”

      She looked straight at him then, violet eyes flashing with irritation. “I’m not asking for a lifetime. Just the summer. Just a chance to be together, now and then, for a little while…”

      “And all I’m asking is that you give it some thought first.”

      Her eyes went wide and she fell back a step. “Do you remember? You said almost the exact same words before you kissed me the first time?”

      He did remember. They were in the tack room, off the barn at the Rising Sun. They’d been talking—about the wild stuff she’d done down in San Diego, about how he’d never been much farther than Cheyenne himself, except for that one trip to Arkansas with his mom all those years and years ago. He was leaning on a saddle horn. She slid right up close to him and lifted her mouth.

      “Give it some thought,” he’d said. “Before you go offering up those sweet lips of yours…”