“If you want the kind of attention that I’m giving to Crystal, I suppose we could work something out, but you have to be prepared for what that means.”

He took a step toward her, and this time, when those blue eyes burned into hers, she felt something different in that heat.

She didn’t know if it was different, or if she was.

“I don’t want that,” she said, taking a step away from him.

“How else is a man supposed to interpret the way you’re behaving?”

“I don’t know,” Jamie snapped. “Maybe you could quit trying to interpret me and go back to your date.”

“Is that what you want? You want me to go back in there and close the deal?”

She didn’t. She felt strangely and unaccountably like whatever link she had to him, whatever thing was keeping her grounded right now, would vanish if he went off with that woman.

It was something strange and mysterious that she couldn’t get a handle on.

It was sex.

That was what it was.

The strange sense of isolation that she had around her family, around her friends, and even in this interaction with Gabe and that woman, came down to the fact that she didn’t understand that kind of relationship. That she’d never had one before.

And the not knowing made her feel so small and lost and vulnerable and weird. And she hated it.

“Don’t,” she said.

She felt like she’d been cracked open, and she didn’t like it. Like that admission was revealing something about herself. But it shouldn’t. Gabe was being open about the fact that he wanted sex. That he wanted sex with that woman. She knew it. He wasn’t hiding it. Why should she? Why should she hide the fact that she...?

Did she want to have sex with Gabe?

It was a strange thing to consider. Especially since she never even kissed him.

She wasn’t ready to answer a definitive yes to that question. The only thing she knew was that she didn’t want him to be with that other woman.

“Don’t what?”

Jamie scrunched her face up. “Don’t leave with her.”

The silence was sickening. Horrible. Jamie didn’t like being embarrassed. She supposed nobody did. But she...she just didn’t have a lot of experience with it. Which maybe said more about her and her self-confidence than it did about the situations she’d been in before.

But right now her need—it really felt like a need—for Gabe to not leave with that woman, to not get naked with her or touch her or kiss her, overrode everything.

“Why not?” Gabe asked, crossing his arms.

“I...” The words teetered on the edge of her tongue, words she’d never spoken before in her life, about an emotion she didn’t think she’d ever felt. At least, not one that she ever indulged in. “I’m jealous,” she said.

“Jealous?”

She clamped her teeth together, doing her best to speak around them. “I don’t know. Whatever the thing is when you don’t want someone to touch someone else. That thing.”