Page 10 of The Professor's Wife

Rowe would have liked this.

“Penny for your thoughts?” Tristan asked.

“I like this town,” I mused. “It’s small, and the nature is wild.”

“I like it, too.”

“Also a bit of a tourist trap.”

“What place on the West Coast isn’t?”

I nodded. “That’s fair.”

A lot of people looked our way. Most of them were women, and they were ogling Tristan like he was a piece of meat. When I glanced up at him, he didn’t appear to notice.

Or maybe he was simply used to it.

The ice cream shop was tiny, framed in red, with a line stretching out the door. We stopped behind at least a dozen people. I tightened my grip on my purse strap and studied the menu written across a chalkboard propped against the wall.

I gaped at the price of a single-scoop cone.

“Sixteen dollars?” I asked. “How much is one scoop back home?”

“Eight. Maybe. If it’s fancy.”

I laughed. “We could have bought an entire tub.”

“Relax, Daze.” His voice was low and warm. “Sometimes it’s about the experience.”

Daze.

He made it sound as though he had been calling me that for years.

I looked up at him, and he was already watching me. He wasn’t smiling. He only held me beneath that focused gaze until my skin felt too tight.

“I suppose you’re right,” I murmured.

“What are you getting?”

“Brownie crunch. You?”

“Strawberry.”

I stilled for a fraction of a second, unable to resist the heat that moved through me. It was the way he said it—low and slow, as though the word itself were something to savor.

I blinked, suddenly conscious of how warm my neck felt.

When we reached the counter, I began to open my purse, but Tristan beat me to it. He ordered for both of us and slid cash across the counter.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, my cheeks heating.

He shrugged. “It’s only ice cream.”

But to me, it wasn’t. It was something else. Something he wouldn’t understand.

I let the tremor pass through me without showing it and whispered, “Thank you.”

He smiled, and I felt it in my chest.