Dancing in the Moonlight - Harlequin.com

RAEANNE THAYNE
237
beat. Words of love welled up in her throat but they
tangled on her tongue, and she couldn’t manage to find
the courage to work them free.
She focused instead on what he had said earlier, those
tantalizing words he hadn’t explained.
“Jake, what did you mean before? When you said
I’ve always been…more than a neighbor to you.”
The hand idly dancing down her back froze in midstroke
and he let out a long, slow breath.
She wasn’t sure he would answer her, but after a
moment he sat up, pulling the sheet along with him as
he leaned against the headboard. His features were
solemn when he faced her, and she felt a little spasm of
nervousness when his silence dragged on.
“Do you remember when you helped me do CPR on
my father?” he finally asked.
Of all the things she might have expected him to
discuss at a time like this, his father’s death wouldn’t
even have made the first cut. Tension tightened her
shoulders at the mention of Hank Dalton but she took
a couple of deep breaths to push it away.
“Of course.”
With an odd premonition that she didn’t want to have
this conversation naked, she reached for her robe
hanging onto the bedpost and shrugged into it, then
moved to sit at the opposite end of her narrow bed, her
back propped against the footboard.
“You hated us all by then, especially Hank,” Jake
went on quietly. “Remember? For a long time all you
ever gave me was a drawn-up kind of look like you just
walked past a nasty-smelling barrow pit. Yet when we