Shifting my weight from one foot to the next, I bit down on my lip. “I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a run-­in-­the-­other-­direction kind of thing.”

He took one step closer, his arms loose at his sides—­his right arm brushing against the handle of his duty gun. The star on his chest seemed shinier than possible, and was eye level with me. “It’s . . . yeah, it’s a good thing.”

I sucked in an unsteady breath as a balmy breeze tossed a strand of hair across my face. What in the world was happening here? I glanced around the empty parking lot and to the line of cars beginning to stream out of the strip club across the street. “Are you . . . on lunch?”

“Yeah. I work until seven in the morning,” he replied, and then he moved so quickly, I didn’t register what he was doing until the tips of his fingers grazed my cheek. He caught the wayward hair, and as the breath literally got lost inside me, he tucked the strand behind my ear. His touch, it lingered briefly along the sensitive skin behind my ear, drawing out a sweet shiver.

My pulse was somewhere in cardiac territory. “What . . . what are you doing here, Reece?”

A slight smile graced his poetic lips. “You know, I really didn’t know at first. I was out driving around, knowing I needed to take my lunch, and I found myself pulling into the parking lot. And I thought about how we used to do this.”

My insides got all mushy, because it was dumb, but I was amazed that he actually remembered doing this. Here I was thinking that I was the only person who held on tight to those memories. I looked up at him, feeling dizzy, and it had nothing to do with the heat or his height. “And?”

“You tired?”

That wasn’t an answer to my question, but I shook my head. “Nope.”

His eyes, such a deep blue they appeared black in the low light, fixed on mine. “Well, I got to thinking. Crazy thoughts.”

My brows rose. “Crazy thoughts?”

He nodded as his grin went up a notch. “Crazy insane thoughts, such as why can’t we just start over?”

“Start over?” I was turning into a puppet that repeated everything he said.

“Yeah, you and me.”

I’d figured that much.

“And I think it’s a damn good plan,” he continued, and he was somehow one step closer, which put him as close as Nick and I had been standing earlier, but I’d felt nothing earlier. Now, there was a riot of sensations invading my system, shorting out my nerve endings. “I’m hoping you agree.”

“What plan?”

He reached out again, this time fixing my glasses. “Let’s forget about that night. I know we can’t really pretend it never happened, but you said I . . . that I didn’t do wrong by you and I know you wouldn’t lie about that,” he went on, and my heart dropped to my navel. Lie? Me? Never. “But we can move past it, right?”