Chapter 4

Chapter Four

JORDAN

Jordan picked a table out of sight from the mess and people outside, and he sat with his back to the room.

They shed coats, gloves, hats, more gloves, and by instinct, Jordan patted his hair down. The damn shortness of it made it stick up at the slightest provocation.

What he was going to ask Ryan was incredibly personal and still a secret to everyone except Micah and Angie.

A woman came to the table. “Morning, Ryan,” she said with a big smile. “Mr. Darby.”

“Call me Jordan, please.”

“What can I get the two of you?”

“The usual,” Ryan said and returned her smile. He really did have a lovely smile, his whole face showed his pleasure. “Jordan, this is Ashley.”

Jordan stood and extended a hand. “Hello, Ashley.”

“I’m Gabe’s wife,” she said. “We haven’t met yet. Not properly, at least.”

“Gabe is the middle Todd brother, right? We talked horses with him and Nate?”

“Yep, that’s him.”

“It’s nice to meet you. Everyone has been very friendly.” Jordan wanted to make sure she knew that he was relaxing here now he felt better.

“We try. What can I get you Mr.—Jordan?”

“Coffee, and do you do pastries or something? Anything is fine.”

She nodded. “No worries, I’ll be over in five.”

Which left him alone with Ryan, who was examining him curiously.

“What’s your usual?” Jordan asked when he couldn’t think of a way of launching into what he really wanted to talk about.

“Here?” Ryan evidently hadn’t been expecting that question, and for a moment he seemed to need to think about what his usual was. “Black coffee and anything that Ashley has baked today. Doesn’t matter what. Chocolate, lemon, pastries, muffins… whatever she does is freaking awesome.” Then he subsided into silence and his cheeks flushed pink.

Yes, that could be due to the warmth in here compared to the cold outside, but more likely it was embarrassment. “You take your cake very seriously, then?” Jordan teased.

Ryan mumbled something and then seemed to shrink a little in the chair.

Jordan immediately apologized; he could see discomfort and knew he’d caused it. “Sorry, my sense of humor is shit. Ask my brother.”

“I like cake,” Ryan blurted and then played with the cutlery on the napkin. “It’s my one weakness.”

He looked at Jordan and something zapped between them, an awareness of sorts. It sure looked like Ryan was exposing some small part of himself that Jordan felt a kinship to. The way Ryan looked at him, stared at him, the way he was licking his bottom lip. Everything had Jordan sitting forward in his seat.

“You sure don’t look like you eat a lot of cake. Do you work out?”

“My brother has a set-up in his garage. I go there.”

“Nothing sexier than a man with muscles,” Jordan said.

Ryan’s mouth parted a little and his eyes widened. Sometimes, Jordan wished there was some kind of gay man’s secret handshake or a code word. Too often he flirted with a man who was in no way interested in him. But that there—the eyes, the focus, the way Ryan swallowed—was a signal of sorts. Add in Ryan’s gaze lowering to Jordan’s lips and back up, and Jordan knew.

He just knew.

“Are you out?” he asked softly.

Ryan nodded and shifted in his seat again, sitting taller. Evidently, he was proud of who he was, and that showed in the way he sat.

Not proud of eating cake, but proud of being out. Got it.

“You?” Ryan asked—no, whispered, in case anyone could overhear if Jordan wasn’t.

Jordan appreciated the discretion, even though part of him wanted to write out a banner and stick it in the window. “No,” he admitted, “Too much… too many people….” He couldn’t find the damn words. Where was a script when he needed one?

“I get that,” Ryan said. “Must be hard.”

They were interrupted by Ashley coming over with a tray, trailed by a young boy who couldn’t have been older than eight, proudly carrying two plates with a selection of cakes on each.

“Hey, Sheriff Ryan,” the young boy said with a wide grin that showed a lot of missing teeth.

“Hey, Josh. No school today?”

“The heating broke,” Josh announced. “So we get a home day, an’ Liam is coming over to see the movie people later. They have cameras and everything.”

With the cakes and coffees on the table, Jordan didn’t waste time. “These look good.” He half turned and looked at Josh, who blinked at him. “Hi, Josh. Come find me when your friend arrives, and I’ll give you a tour.”

“Wow, hi.” The boy wiped his hand on his jeans and held it out, and Jordan shook it very seriously. “My name is Josh,” Josh announced. “My mom is here.” He waved up at Ashley, who was looking at her son fondly. “I have a sister called Kirsten—she’s at college—and my stepdad is Gabe.” He scrunched up his nose as if he needed to qualify all of this so that Jordan understood. “Gabe’s the brother of Uncle Jay’s fiancé, Nate.”

“Awesome,” Jordan offered, because what did you say to all that excitement and information in one sentence? There was a lot of complicated family up here. He’d only really dealt with Jay and Sam. So at least he now knew that Jay had a fiancé and that Gabe was Josh’s stepdad, but he’d lost the thread with the rest.

Didn’t matter what he said, though, because Josh was still smiling. “I’m going to go and text Liam. Bye.”

Josh left a lot quicker than he’d arrived, and Ashley immediately apologized and thanked Jordan at the same time. “If it’s too much, just say so,” she tagged on at the end.

“It will be fine. I would love to do it,” Jordan admitted. To see the work behind a movie was fascinating to him; to get past the chaos and see the technical side of filming was something he loved to share. To share that with a child as excited as Josh would be something that lifted him out of his still-ill slump.

She thanked him again and left him and Ryan alone.

“He’s a good kid,” Ryan said, and for a moment, Jordan thought he detected a warning in his tone.

“Seems so.” He then concentrated on the plates in front of them. There were tiny bite-size pieces of several different offerings, and he picked up the first one, a quarter of a muffin with the softest, warmest milk chocolate chips inside. Jordan groaned at the taste; he was a sucker for chocolate, and looked up to see what Ryan had tried first.

Ryan hadn’t tasted anything; he was just looking at Jordan and seemed to be trying to say something.

Unconsciously, Jordan licked his lips, and fuck, Ryan actually shifted in his seat.

Okay, this was way too intense for him. He needed to rein this in. Then Ryan did something obscenely sexy with his fork and some lemon muffin, and right there and then, Jordan was hard.

All Ryan had done was eat cake.

For a moment, you could hear a pin drop, a frisson of excitement, of expectation.

Then Ryan cleared his throat. “So, you have questions?”

God, yes. Like tell me you’re pushy in bed and your thighs are as strong as they look in those regulation pants, and tell me that you really want casual sex with a man who’ll be stuck in the closet for at least another four years.

Instead what he said was “I’m writing a script, and I wanted to run some scenarios by you. I wouldn’t have to name you, but if you were willing, I could pay you a consultancy fee.”

Ryan sipped his coffee and ate another small bite; this time a coffee-walnut slice, like the one Jordan had just finished, that tasted like heaven. Then he sipped some more coffee. “So, you’re an actor, you own your own production company, and you’re a writer?”

Jordan could laugh that off, say something like “sounds like a lot when you put it that way,” but he was proud of what he did. “Yes.”

“Wow. So, you’re not just a pretty face.”

Whether Ryan meant that as a compliment or not, Jordan didn’t know. Until Ryan flushed scarlet and focused on his plate. Jordan loved that this man wasn’t intending to flirt, to come on to Jordan, but he still managed to have Jordan in the palm of his hands.

A hand reached between them and snagged a cake off of Ryan’s plate.

“Sam, fuck’s sake.” Ryan covered his plate with his hands.

“You snooze you lose,” Sam teased, then sashayed away with an exaggerated wink back at them.

If it was possible, Ryan was even more scarlet and now utterly incapable of looking at anything other than his plate.

“Sam’s a force of nature, isn’t he?”

Ryan muttered something like “stubborn,” “irritating,” and “asshole,” in that order. Then he finally looked up. “Yes. I can talk you through some procedures if you want me to.”

At this point, Jordan wondered whether he should be honest about the kind of script he was writing. Maybe Ryan was gay and out but didn’t like gay movies or romance.

So instead Jordan just summed up how he felt and then changed the conversation. “Great. We start filming tomorrow, so I’ll take your number and we can work out a time. Is that okay, and how tall are you?”

Ryan blinked at the change in conversation. Did the whole “sip, eat cake, sip” thing again.

Jordan realized it wasn’t that Ryan didn’t want to answer or was deliberately slowing the pace of the conversation. He was just giving himself thinking time.

“Six five,” he said. “Why?”

Jordan copied what Ryan had done—coffee, lemon slice, coffee. Then he grinned widely and leaned forward, lowering his voice. “I like my men tall.”

Ryan choked on his mouthful of coffee and patted his chest as he sat back in his chair. “Jesus,” he snapped. “Is this an LA thing, getting up in my face?”

“Nope,” Jordan said gently. “It’s a Jordan thing.”

Then he left with a soft thank you for Ryan’s time. He found himself back in the snow and cold, wishing he’d put his coat and everything else on before stepping outside.

They were going to be here for six weeks. Maybe by the end of that time, he’d be used to the cold.

And possibly he’d have the blushing, sexy sheriff in his bed.

Just for a night.