There was nothing else here—no matter what the squadron of rogue butterflies in her stomach were saying.

“I’m taking the dogs for their morning walk,” she said as she clipped Mary’s leash to her collar.

“I’ll join you.” He sat the pan down on the stovetop and turned off the burner.

Groucho’s leash slipped in her hand at the proposal. Nash? Going on a dog walk? After last night? The idea made her palms sweaty, and she sucked in a calming breath before saying, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. They have a routine.”

“Can I come with you? Please?” he asked, then looked at her, a smile starting to curl the corners of his mouth upward. “Positive reinforcement and all that.”

She opened her mouth to tell him no, but nothing came out because he was looking at her like the puppy she’d teased him about being. He was all pleading eyes and sweet energy. Then he gave her the full double-dimple grin, and her resistance wilted like a bouquet of magical pansies from her books when they got hit with the harsh light of a sorcerer’s wand in mid-spell.

“All right.” Giving in to the inevitable, she held out the handle of Mary’s leash with a weary sigh that there was no way he was going to buy as legit. “Let’s go.”

They made it down the stairs in silence—that was if no one counted the dogs’ happy yaps that echoed just enough in the stairwell that Chelle knew she’d be getting a nastygram from Suzanne about her dogs disturbing the building’s residents (AKA Suzanne). After they cleared the lobby door, they got hit by a blast of feels-like-winter-even-if-it-wasn’t-officially-December-twenty-third wind that blasted the chitchat right out of her.

A few minutes later, they were half a block away from her building, and Nash hadn’t said a single word yet, either. Aside from a few sidelong glances that sent a shiver through her, which had nothing to do with the chill in the air, he was quiet. No unsolicited advice about the correct amount of slack to have in the leash. No out-of-the-blue tidbits about the best route to take to give Mary and Groucho the optimum step-to-sniff ratio. No unasked-for opinions about the type of poop bags she had, the proper length of each break so the dogs could sniff the fire hydrants, or the ideal amount of space to leave between the pugs and any oncoming pooches.

There was no way one observed orgasm was responsible for all that. Nash was holding back. Why?