Three Little Words

by Jenny Holiday

  “I’m okay,” she said, suddenly seized with the desire to reassure him.

  “Let’s get you inside and warmed up.”

  She couldn’t argue with that plan. Couldn’t even work herself up to retaliating. Though she bore him no grudge as it related to the snow, she was suddenly freezing. Like, wet and miserable and cold-inside-her-bone-marrow freezing.

  “Come on.” He slung an arm around her shoulder and angled his body against the wind, which was a chivalrous but futile gesture given the relentlessness of the storm.

  They turned a corner, and he pointed. “It’s just up there.”

  Wow. “Up there” was a giant, Tudor-style building that looked like a castle.

  But the castle was an apartment building, and Bennett’s unit was…not the palace Gia had expected.

  Well, okay, not that she expected anyone in Manhattan to live in a palace. But according to her observations—and her taste buds—Bennett was an exceedingly talented chef. And those pay-what-you-can nights would suggest that he did well enough with his restaurant that he could afford to literally give food away at least some of the time.

  But he lived in a studio. A big studio, but it was still only one room.

  But then again, her impression of how top chefs lived was based on Food Network shows, so who knew?

  As she shrugged out of her wet coat and toed off her boots, she scanned the space, which grew more interesting upon further inspection. It was small, but it was far from your standard bare-bones bachelor pad. It was exquisitely decorated. The walls were paneled with whitewashed wood, and the furniture was light, too—a pale beige sofa, a fluffy armchair, and an artfully distressed trunk repurposed as a coffee table made up the living portion. A narrow marble island separated the main room from the kitchen. In the far corner, a queen-size bed was piled with white bedding, and there was a big window seat at the end of the room flanked by flowing white curtains. Ornate mirrors that contrasted with all the white simplicity of the rest of the space hung in various spots and made the apartment feel much bigger than it actually was.

  “This place is gorgeous,” she said, and she meant it. And so not what she would expect from a thirtyish single man, much less one who quoted the Bible at her with one breath and made suggestive banter with the next. What was this guy’s deal?

  “Can’t take much of the credit, I’m afraid.” He took her coat—which was actually his coat—and hung it in a small antique wardrobe next to the door. “When I bought this place, I hired a designer and told her to make it look like home.”

  “And where’s home?”

  “Charleston.”

  That made sense. The room looked like it belonged in the pages of Southern Living.

  “Yeah,” he went on. “I showed her some pictures of the house I grew up in, which was pretty big, and said, ‘Make me that in miniature.’”

  “Well, it’s amazing.”

  “She did a good job.” He smiled, taking in the small space with obvious affection.

  She’d thought, when she’d first met him, that his smile was smug, and maybe that first one had been. But this one, the first real, full-size one she’d seen, was not smug. It was big and guileless—she didn’t see a lot of that in her line of work—and charmingly lopsided. The right side turned up more than the left.

  “If I squint my eyes, I can almost smell the magnolia trees,” he said.

  “You’re homesick.” Gia wanted to be homesick, suddenly. She imagined it as a kind of dull emptiness that was always with you, like a toothache that never got better, one you couldn’t stop prodding with your tongue, paradoxically comforting in its persistence. What must it be like to feel so attached to a place that you hired a decorator to recreate it?

  “Homesick? No.”

  He’d spoken so sharply, his vehement answer so out of proportion to the benign statement, that she turned to him. His brow was deeply furrowed, but when he noticed her looking, his features rearranged themselves into a smile that was clearly false. She’d seen the real one a moment ago, and this was not that.

  “Not really. Just not a fan of the cold in New York.”

  She had no idea what had just happened there. Clearly the guy had some baggage, which, fair enough, considering her own little Ibiza flashback.

  But they didn’t know each other well enough for baggage, nor were they ever going to, even if she slept with him. So, in an attempt to get them back on more comfortable ground, she opted for teasing. “Not one for snowball fights?”

  He looked at her for a long time, like he was trying to figure something out. “Not historically,” he finally said, opening the armoire again and producing a towel. “I’ll try to get through to the airline. Leave me your info, and I’ll rebook both of us. You go take a shower and warm up.”

  A shower.

  Normally the suggestion that she take a shower would have been a loaded one. It would have been delivered with a wink or an intense look. Not a vow to perform air-travel-related logistics. She wasn’t sure how to proceed here, and that was not a spot she found herself in very often.

  He’d grabbed a second towel from the armoire and was using it to dry his hair. Why was his hair so pretty? She would stop dyeing hers forever if she could have that deep, rich, so-brown-it’s-almost-black hair.

  Well. All right. Usually she didn’t have to initiate these things, but it wasn’t like she wasn’t capable of nudging this situation along a little.

  “I can call a friend and find somewhere else to crash…” She let the sentence trail off in order to test the waters.

  She waited for the knowing look. For the come-on.

  “Are you kidding me?” He shook his head like a dog, his hair falling perfectly back into place, walked over to the window, and pulled back the curtains. It was as white outside as it was inside. “You are not going anywhere, my friend.”

  There it was. Maybe not the come-on she’d hoped for, but he didn’t want her to leave.

  She smiled and took the towel.

  “I’ll take the sofa. Bed’s all yours.”

  The smile slid off her face.

  * * *

  Gia disappeared into his bathroom, and Bennett enjoyed a whole ten seconds of peace, a respite from the unrelenting beauty of the model he’d inherited for the night, before she called out, “Holy crap!”

  “What?” He ran to the bathroom door, afraid she’d fallen or something. He still felt like an asshole for that last assault on her during the snowball fight. If her feet were as wet as his—neither of them had been wearing footwear appropriate for this epic a storm—she might have slipped on the tile in the bathroom.

  But then he stopped at the door. He couldn’t barge in unless she truly needed help. “You okay in there?”

  The door opened a crack. It was a large enough crack to make evident that she was wearing only a towel.

  And that she hadn’t fallen or otherwise been the victim of a bathroom tragedy, so he took a deep breath and a step back.

  “I just pulled back your shower curtain to reveal the most amazing bathtub. Can I take a bath instead of a shower?”

  “Of course,” he said, because that was the correct answer. He did have a pretty amazing bathtub—it was a giant claw-foot soaker—but Jesus Christ, Gia stretched out inside it naked? That was not a visual he needed right now. “Take your time. I’m sure I’ll be on hold with the airline for a while—if I can even get through.”

  And I’ll need some time to get the image of you in my bathtub out of my mind.

  “Thanks.”

  Was it his imagination, or did she open the door a bit wider before she closed it? Hold it open for a beat too long and sort of…smolder at him?

  No. No. That had to be a trick of his slow-moving, cold-addled brain.

  Thirty minutes later, he was stretched out on the sofa listening over and over again to a recording assuring him the airline cared about his call, when she emerged.

  There was a billow of steam from the bathroom,
and it was almost like when you were at a play and they used that liquid nitrogen to signify that Something Serious was happening. Like Gia was actually the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come or something.

  But that was ridiculous. Bennett had been haunted by a lot of shit, but he’d done his time with his ghosts, had already undergone his own personal Ebenezer Scrooge–esque reckoning. Hell, he was already feeding the Tiny Tims of this godforsaken city.

  Gia was wearing what probably passed for pajamas in her universe: baby blue shorts with white lace trim and a fitted spaghetti-strapped tank top made of the same soft-looking material.

  And the shorts were short. They didn’t extend much beyond the tops of her thighs. Or maybe it was just that her legs were long. Ridiculously long. Long, perfect expanses of flawless skin.

  Her hair was damp; little tendrils curled around her face, which was bare of makeup. Seeing her like this made him realize how much she must have been wearing before. It was like a mask had come off. And holy shit, did she have freckles?

  She did. Just a smattering, but he never would have known. Those secret freckles…damn. They got to him.

  He sat up, moving his legs from where they’d been stretched out on the sofa. It wasn’t an invitation, more that her appearance had moved him to sit up straight, to come to attention. But she seemed to take it as one, sitting on the sofa rather than the armchair angled next to it.

  He set the phone to speaker mode and laid it on the coffee table. “I’m losing hope here. We might need to give up until tomorrow.” He started to rise, intending to make up the sofa for himself, but she stopped him with a foot. She’d swung her legs onto the sofa, and now she pressed the ball of one foot down on the top of the center of his thigh, as if she wanted to prevent him from getting up. Her toes, like her ears, were small and perfectly shaped. They were painted with bright orange polish the exact color of the middle stripe on a piece of candy corn. He had the strange, startling urge to put one of those toes in his mouth, almost as if it were a piece of candy.

  “Thank you,” she said, her tone urgent enough that it drew his gaze from her foot. “I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t run into you tonight.”

  That was an outright lie. She’d told him on the train in from Jersey, after her calls to hotels hadn’t yielded a room—and again just now—that she had colleagues she could stay with. And anyway, Gia was about as far from the damsel-in-distress type as it was possible to be.

  “I’m pretty sure you would have landed on your feet.” The phrase brought his attention back to her literal foot, still resting on his leg.

  The foot that started moving upward toward his rapidly hardening dick.

  The overture felt half-surprising, half-inevitable.

  And oh God, it had been such a long time. He swallowed a groan.

  The foot inched up a little bit more. Shit. He was wearing flannel pajama bottoms—he hadn’t been kidding about hating the cold—so she’d be able to see the effect she was having on him. He sneaked a glance at her face, and yep, she was riveted by the tenting in his pants. A little smile played at the corner of her lips as she stared at his lap with unbroken concentration, like she was a Jedi master with the power to make men pop woodies with her mind.

  But whatever. It wasn’t a crime to get turned on. It was, in fact, the logical response to what was happening. He was a mortal man, and Gia was unnaturally beautiful.

  It was what he did with that attraction that mattered. That dictated the kind of man he was.

  He let his hand fall and wrapped his fingers around her ankle. She must have initially thought that he meant it as a sexy gesture, because she pointed her foot and curled her toes and let loose a breathy sigh.

  Fuck. That sound.

  Worse, he was even beginning to like her, with her quirky jokes and her old-school camera.

  Bennett reminded himself that he was, above all things, disciplined. Discipline was what you needed in a kitchen, and it was what you needed in life. Everything he had today, the life that he’d created for himself out of nothing, was the result of it.

  So, even as every nerve ending in his body screamed bloody murder at him, he gently lifted her foot and moved it aside. Off his body. Stood and angled himself away from her as he opened the coffee table trunk that housed the extra bedding. Tried to be casual. Better that than to make a big “it’s not you; it’s me” speech.

  “I changed the sheets on the bed while you were in the bath, so it’s all ready for you.” He waited a beat, preparing to tear down her argument if she tried to insist that she could sleep on the couch. Or, worse, if she tried to push things further. He didn’t want to embarrass her, but he would if he had to.

  But all she said was, “You’re going to sleep on the sofa?” and it wasn’t a suggestive question. She’d gotten his message.

  “I do half the time anyway. I usually fall asleep watching TV.”

  After a beat she said, “Okay.”

  Her voice was small and sounded almost defeated, but he had to make that not his problem.

  All right then. He forced himself to move like a normal person and not a sex-starved robot as he tucked a sheet over the sofa cushions. Forced himself not to watch her pulling back the covers on his bed and sliding under them.

  “I’m going to hit the shower,” he said when he was done making up the sofa. He’d changed into dry pj bottoms and a T-shirt while she was in the bath, but his hair was still wet from the snowball fight, he was freezing, and, frankly, he was going to have to beat off if he was going to survive this night.

  * * *

  Gia was going to be an insufferable bitch tomorrow. She’d held herself back from lashing out at Bennett earlier, but as she slid under the covers of his bed, a cocktail of shame and lust whished through her veins, making her body practically vibrate. By tomorrow the lust would have faded, leaving only the stinging humiliation of rejection, and that could not be tolerated. She would have to cover it with something else, something less weak.

  God. He hadn’t even said anything to cushion the blow. No You’re really pretty but I actually have a girlfriend/am a devout Catholic/am secretly gay.

  No, he had just calmly removed her foot from his leg. The worst part was, she’d thought at first that his touch heralded a different sort of intent. That initial contact as he’d banded his hand around her ankle had seemed so possessive, so heated.

  She wanted there to be a reason for the rejection, was the thing. She wanted to know why he didn’t want to sleep with her.

  Maybe he didn’t find her attractive.

  If that was the case, she had nothing else to offer him.

  Which stung like hell.

  But sometimes the truth hurt.

  I surrender.

  Bennett’s line from earlier popped back into her head, reminding her of memories she’d rather forget.

  It had just been a line, probably one Lukas had used a dozen times before her—and after her.

  But she had fallen for it without reservation. She knew his type now. Model collector. A certain kind of guy who frequented spots where models hung out. Often, as had been the case with Lukas, they were part of a posse attached to an actual famous dude.

  The worst part of it all, the shame attached to the memory, was how quickly and enthusiastically she had remade herself for him. She had changed her hair for him—dyeing it a yellow blond because “Blondes have more fun, right, Gia?” She had turned down a job, too, at a critical point in her career, in order to stay on for a month and party with him and his friends. He’d badgered her about it so much, and she’d mistaken that manipulation for love. She’d thought they were on the verge of something real. How stupid she’d been. She could only console herself that she hadn’t told him she’d fallen in love with him.

  The heartbreak had faded relatively quickly, but the shame stuck with her.

  She usually tried not to think about it—she’d gotten quite good at not thinking about it, actually.

&nbs
p; But her defenses were down today. The shitty shoot, the battle with the gate agents, Bennett’s rejection. This accumulation of little cuts was the only reason she could think of that her mind kept hamster-wheeling itself back to that day on the beach.

  They’d had a water fight—not unlike the snowball fight from earlier. Fun and sun and happiness and surrender.

  And then, when she’d come back from the bathroom much later in the day, tiptoeing up behind him with a bucket of water, intending to get him, what she heard him saying to another of his B-list posse-mates was like a bucket of cold water dousing her.

  Gia is a hot piece of ass, isn’t she? But you know who’s hotter? Sheena Shelly. We’ve been messaging, and I think I can get with her. She’s going to be one of the Victoria’s Secret models this year.

  Sheena Shelly was another model on the shoot. A seventeen-year-old who’d already walked in two Paris Fashion Weeks. The comment hurt, and not just because it broke her heart. It was the first time she’d felt genuinely self-conscious about her body, the first time she’d been upstaged by a younger model.

  Frozen, Gia stood there and watched Lukas get his phone out and show his friend a string of sexts between him and Sheena.

  The only good thing about that day was that she had dumped her bucket of water on him—and his phone—before walking away forever.

  Actually, that wasn’t the only good thing. That had also been the day she’d vowed never to let herself get collected again.

  She’d stuck to that vow, and it had served her well. If anyone did any collecting these days, it was Gia.

  The shower stopped, the squeak of the pipes as the water turned off suddenly yanking her out of memory lane. She listened to the sounds of Bennett moving around in the bathroom and reminded herself that the world was full of men. Florida would be full of men. There was going to be one at this wedding who wasn’t already part of their tangled web of friends. And what was Gia’s motto, forged that very day in the Ibiza sunshine? One man is as good as another.

  She was already facing away from the main room when Bennett came out of the bathroom, but she closed her eyes just in case.