Just Surrender... by Kathleen O'Reilly Page A

be stabbed between one’s own eyes, Tyler would have done it.



8
    T HERE WAS SOMETHING SWEET about watching Tyler sweat through this conversation. The store’s customers continued to shove past him, shooting him their pushy New Yorker looks.
    Edie knew this wasn’t his natural state, but he didn’t complain, didn’t whine. No, he was plodding through the twelve steps of courtship hell in order to make her happy.
    In order to get laid, an insidious voice corrected her.
    Did that make her a bad person that she was enjoying his torture? Possibly, but in between the twitchy frowns, he would watch her steadily, knowingly, and Edie had the acute feeling that Tyler Hart was aware of what Edie was doing. Such really smart awareness tickled her in sexual places. Mind games, that’s what they called it. If she spent a lot of time analyzing her prior relationships, which Edie didn’t, she might have noted that most of them were with dim bulbs, men who were a few tokens short of a full fare, but Tyler was different. Tyler was smart, and this whole undercurrent of crazy tension kept her senses tingling and alive.
    Mind games could be fun.
    At first.
    While she watched him talk on the phone, he watched her listen, and his conversation grew even more uncomfortable, and not so much fun. After each robotic interchange, his twitchy frowns grew even more twitchy, until at last, she was ready to pull the plug. Needing to look somewhere else, she stared down at the berber carpet.
    “I can’t do this,” Tyler said to someone, and whether it was Passion or Edie, she didn’t know. Her head shot up, meeting his eyes.
    “Of course you can,” Edie whispered urgently, and she could feel a twitchy frown of her own. Seeing the intent look in those undim eyes, she suspected he was about to do something to mess with Edie’s status quo, and Edie was desperately fond of her status quo.
    “I’m talking to my brother. Not Passion,” he told her.
    Edie’s frown grew even twitchier, even as she could hear the shouts emerging from his phone: “No, Tyler, no! ”
    A man with an overpowering cologne and too much hair product brushed past her to peruse the graduation cards. Tyler edged away from Graduation and into Thinking of You.
    Seeing no choice, Edie followed.
    Smartly ignoring the warnings from his brother and stupidly ignoring her growing panic, Tyler stuffed his phone in his pocket and everyone’s twitchy frowns stopped. On his face there was something new and even more dangerous. Resoluteness. Firm resolve, and the little hearts and flower cards beckoned behind them.
    “I didn’t feel right about talking to another woman.”
    “In front of me? I can respect that. I didn’t mean to encroach on your personal space. I do that a lot, jumping into situations that really don’t concern me, and usually people don’t mind, because usually I can fix things—”
    “Edie,” he interrupted.
    “What?”
    “It has nothing to do with privacy.”
    “Oh. Well, you struck me as a very private person, and I thought—”
    “Edie.”
    “Yes?”
    “That’s not it.”
    “What is it?” she asked, not liking his guessing game, not liking the hearts and flowers showcased behind him, not liking the whole dangerous trend of this conversation.
    “Do you have to ask?” he said, raising one supercilious brow at her, which normally would have ticked her off, but now it only scared her. She didn’t need to ask why because Tyler Hart wouldn’t do rascally things like flirt with another woman in front of her, even though she told him to, and she wished he were a little more squeevy so that she didn’t have to…
    Respect him so much.
    Everything would be a lot easier if he were like all the other guys who had to use meaningless lines, or mooch her for a few bucks, or drank too much in order to ditch responsibility at the door. But Tyler didn’t do anything of those things. Not. One.
    No, he had to be honest.
    He wanted her, she reminded herself.