He shook his head. The conversation had taken off on this gallop. He didn’t understand where they took a wrong turn or what changed since breakfast. She went to get dressed and he came outside and—bam!—she now thought of him as some sort of . . . he didn’t even know what.

“What’s happening right now? How did we go from showering together to this?” He really didn’t get it.

“We can’t avoid the topic forever.”

“But when did I become the topic?”

She lowered each leg until her feet rested on the grass below. “Because it’s more comfortable when all the focus is on me and protecting me and watching over me, right?”

“I feel like we’re fighting and I’m not sure why.”

She stood up and walked over to him. Stopped a few feet away. Close enough to touch but they didn’t. “I don’t want you to look at me like someone you need to fix.”

“Sweet hell, Maddie. I look at you and my breath stops. I want to drag you home and strip you naked, and none of that has to do with rescuing you.”

Some of the tension left her face. “What is it about?”

She looked as confused as he felt. Nothing about last night prepared him for this topic. They kept flipping around and now they’d landed on something that sounded like what are your intentions? and he couldn’t get his bearings. “I don’t know. I don’t really get why you have me spinning in circles when no woman in a year even piqued my interest enough to ask her out for coffee.”

“Spinning?”

“Confused. Off balance.” Did she really not know the definition? “I haven’t focused on anything but work and my family for almost two years. Then you come along and . . .” He didn’t know how to describe these feelings for her because he didn’t understand them. They hit him out of nowhere and kept knocking him down. “You’re in my head all the time. From the moment we met in Ben’s office.”

She blinked at him a few times. “No one has ever said that to me before.”

No, he didn’t want the soft eyes and lighter tone. She had him revved up and ticked off and maybe he needed to stay that way for a while. “Yeah, well, I didn’t expect it. I sure as hell didn’t plan on you.”

“But then I lured you into my mess.”

Enough about that first meeting. He’d let that go a long time ago. “With or without what happened that first night in the cabin, I would have found you on Whitaker. This—us—was inevitable.”

She frowned at him. “How do you figure that? I’m a recluse, remember?”