Damn it. “I just need to step out for a moment.” Her own voice was less familiar. It was too high. It sounded like it belonged to someone playing her in a movie. It felt like that, too, like she was reciting a line. I just need to step out for a moment. It was a line. It was a lie. What she needed to step away from was him. And she’d almost made it.

“You looked at me first.”

“What?” What was he— Oh. Oh. She gasped as goosebumps rose on her skin.

He remembered.

She was frozen in place, shivering with his hand on her bare shoulder, his skin on her skin. She was his prey, and she could no sooner move than if he’d literally caught her in a trap.

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

He sounded angry, which was such an uncharacteristic emotion from Max, at least when it came to her.

She needed to turn around and face him. She’d pulled up her big-girl pants and gotten through that toast, and she could do this, too.

She pivoted in place. He didn’t take his hand off her shoulder, just let it rest lightly against her skin as she turned and settled it more heavily on the ball of her shoulder when she finished her rotation.

She had compared Max’s eyes before to the cool blue center of a flame, but now, despite the fact that his body was calm, that his palm on her shoulder was still and dry, his eyes were a wildfire raging out of control. She had always thought of Max as funny and breezy and easygoing with a hidden center of deeply felt emotion. But now he looked like he’d been turned inside out, like all the tender, emotional stuff was on the outside, plainly visible for anyone to see.

“I did look at you,” she said slowly, relieved that her voice came out sounding like her again. “But then you stopped looking at me.” And for some reason she couldn’t articulate, that loss of his attention had hurt.

“Because I couldn’t look at you anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because then you would see everything.” He moved his hand from her shoulder across her suddenly tender skin until the heel of his palm rested lightly over the notch in her collarbone and his fingers radiated up her throat. She had the sudden, absurd notion that maybe he was on fire, inside. His hand, though it was barely touching her, hovering almost, brought heat as it traced a path through her cold-pebbled skin.

“Which isn’t, in itself, a bad thing,” he added, “but we had a wedding to get through.” He smiled, a little half smile, and he looked more like his usual self, even if it was a sad half smile. “That’s done now.”