“You want to see the upstairs?”
Was that part of the code? Well, either way, the answer was yes. “I’d love to.”
The tour made stops in an office, a guest room, and a ridiculously well-appointed bathroom. The tub was about three times as big as Dax’s and—
“This is the master bedroom.”
Right. Master bedroom.
He gestured for her to precede him. She turned in a slow circle, taking in the gray walls, dark wood dresser, and the enormous, masculine-looking bed made up in tones of taupe, gray, and dark green. When she completed her rotation, he was at her side, gently tugging the wineglass out of her hand. She relinquished it and watched him set both glasses on the bedside table. Was this really happening?
His palm on her cheek answered that yes, yes it was. A shiver shot through her, but it was more fear than lust, and to be honest, she felt a little like she might throw up. She’d anticipated being nervous, but not this much. She’d feared that maybe, as with Dax, she’d get to a certain point and have a repeat of that little freak-out in the hotel room. She hadn’t banked on it being so hard to…get started.
Well, if she wanted this, the only thing to do was just do it. So she lifted herself onto her tiptoes. He seemed to know what was coming because he ducked his head to meet her halfway and their lips touched, tentatively at first, and then with more pressure. He was a good kisser, very gradually deepening the kiss and gently stroking her face and neck. When his tongue tested the seam of her lips, it seemed very gentlemanly, like he was formally requesting permission to enter. She smiled against his lips and granted it. It was funny how everything felt very orderly. The opposite of her encounters with Dax, where she’d wanted to climb on top of him, and, frankly, shove her tongue down his throat from the first moment.
Anyway, it wasn’t fair to compare Greg and Dax. Dax had been there immediately post-jilting, when she’d been all raw and emotional, and he’d somehow tripped some switch inside her. In real life, things weren’t so…urgent.
Kissing Greg was not unpleasant. Not at all. But as he let his hands fall to her waist, resting them inside her loose blouse and against her skin above the waistband of her jeans, she started to feel a more than a little nervous. His hands paused, as if he was seeking permission to go further. Who knew this was going to be so logistically complicated?
The hands inched up a little bit more. Right. He was waiting for the go-ahead. Well, here it went. Swallowing the lump that was growing in her throat, she let her own hands float up to the top button of her blouse, gauging his reaction as she began unbuttoning. He stepped back and watched her, concentrating intensely. When she was done, she straightened her arms and let the blouse fall to the floor.
What now? Were they supposed to make out some more with her bra on, or should she take that off, too?
“You’re gorgeous.” He seemed to mean it. “Tell me what you want,” he whispered. “I want you to feel comfortable.”
What did she want? It was a good question. To be brutally honest, mostly she just wanted the notch in her belt that this encounter represented. She wanted to get on with life post-Mason. She wanted to have fun, right? This was supposed to be fun. And if she didn’t stop microanalyzing everything, it wasn’t going to be.
“Is this okay?” he said, as one of his hands floated up.
It was as if she were watching their encounter from above, from outside her body, watching herself nod. His hovered for a moment above her breast. But then the instant he made contact with the fabric of her bra, she was shoved back into her body, the sensation of his hand overwhelming her. “Oh!” She lunged away. Of course, she regretted the outburst immediately.
But it was too late. He stepped back and regarded her quizzically. “It pains me more than you know to say this, but I think this might be a mistake.”
“No! It’s not a mistake! I’m sorry, I just need a little—”
Oh, crap, he was stooping to pick her discarded blouse. “I have to say, I’m getting a weird vibe. I’m not sure you’re ready.”
That had been exactly the phrase Dax used, that night they’d nearly set their room at the Ritz on fire.
“…maybe you’re not over him.” She tuned in to what Greg was saying midsentence.
Not over Dax? There was nothing to get over. A couple of make-out sessions, some banter-turned-kissing.
“Didn’t you say you’d been together seven years? That’s a long time.”
Oh, right. He was talking about Mason. Her ex-fiancé. All right, time to take a cue from the fact that he was now making for the bedroom door. The situation wasn’t salvageable. “I’m sorry,” she said once again, buttoning her blouse. And suddenly, she really, really was. She’d blown it again.
When they got downstairs, he offered her another drink. Apparently, he was even going to be sweet while she extricated herself. She politely declined. As he kissed her good-bye at the door, after she’d declined his offer to drive her home and apologized once again, he said, “Don’t worry about it. Maybe you’re just not the hookup type.” Then he planted a chaste peck on her cheek. “But regardless, the guy who does get to be with you—in whatever form—is gonna be one lucky bastard.”
Walking down the sidewalk, she felt like she was doing a walk of shame. Not the traditional kind, but the journey was still infused with regret. Was she ever going to get it together? Was she doomed to spend her life alone, rattling around in her big house with only her vibrator for company?
Maybe you’re just not the hookup type. Greg’s words echoed in her mind. If she wasn’t the hookup type, and she wasn’t the relationship type—at least not for a good long while—what did that leave her?
Chapter Eleven
Dax was strolling along College Street after the second Godfather movie, wanting to stretch his legs before settling in for the final installment. In truth, he was considering bailing. The first two were rightly classics, the third more uneven, in his opinion. And it was late. He was going to have to stay at the condo as he would miss the last ferry. But he was a completist. The same part of his brain that saw patterns in data and had propelled him to success in the software industry didn’t like the idea of leaving before the trilogy was over. Still, he wished he had time to grab a drink before the last movie started. A beer would be just the thing to make the last movie more interesting.
“Dax! Hi!”
Or, there was always Amy.
Amy, strolling down College in tight jeans, red heels, and a flowing, sleeveless white blouse, looking like a siren moonlighting as a Calvin Klein model. He squinted past her, looking for evidence of Mr. Crest Whitestrips. He glanced at his watch. It was only ten thirty. Was it possible the date was already over? Or maybe she really was serious about keeping things casual, and she’d already…gotten what she’d been looking for. Judging by the big grin on her face as she ambled to a stop in front of him, he feared she had. “What happened to the Tinder guy?”
“Oh, he lives just up Grace Street,” she said, gesturing over her shoulder. He refrained from pointing out that that didn’t answer his question at all. She tilted her head back to look at the marquee above them. “Oh—it’s Godfather night! How was it?”
“The third one is just about to start.”
“I never saw that one. Only the first two.”
“The first two are by far superior. Francis Ford Coppola reportedly said that the first two were part of a series and this one was meant to be a semi-stand-alone epilogue, but the studio made him label it the third. It’s not really my favorite, but I have this weird compulsion to finish what I start, so I have to stay.” He was going to regret this, but… “You want to join me?”
She grinned. “Are there any horse heads in this one?”
“Nope. You’re safe on the horse head front.”
“Well, that’s a bummer. I actually loved the horse head. In a horror movie sort of way, I mean. I don’t think I’ve ever been so startled by something. Somehow, even though I w
as watching it almost twenty years after it came out and it’s a pop-culture touchstone, I didn’t know it was coming. Anyway, I think it was the best part of the movie.”
“You surprise me, Amy Morrison.”
She looked genuinely perplexed. “Why?”
“I don’t know many women who would get so excited about the prospect of a bloody horse’s head plopped onto someone’s bed.”
She shrugged. “Okay, well, I’m in. Date ended early anyway.”
“But you went to his house.” He didn’t want to ask. But he couldn’t not ask.
She sighed theatrically as she followed him into the theater. “Don’t ask.”
Can’t not ask—already established that. But maybe he’d weasel it out of her later. “I’m going to get some popcorn. Want some?”
She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not really a popcorn person.”
“How can you not be a popcorn person? Everyone likes popcorn. Especially movie popcorn.”
“It’s not that I dislike it.” She sidled up to the glass display cabinet. “I just like candy more.”
Once they were settled into their seats in the almost-empty theater, she ripped into her candy.
“You don’t even want a bite?” he asked, holding his popcorn bag in front of her.
“Not even a bite,” she said, taking a big chomp of a peanut butter cup. “Oh my God, I’m so hungry, though.”
“Didn’t Mr. Tinder feed you?” Or did you just skip right to the main event?
“Oh, he did. I ate a huge plate of pasta at one of the spots on this strip. We had tiramisu, too. I don’t know why I’m so hungry.”
Because you worked up an appetite after dinner? Christ, he had to stop it. Torturing himself like this was not productive. “Did you sleep with him?”
She turned pink. Good. Let her feel a little discomfort. “I’m not sure that’s any business of yours.”
“It isn’t. But I still want to know.” He hoped she didn’t ask why, because he wasn’t sure he had an answer.
She buried her head in her hands, and it was a moment before a muffled, slightly tortured sounding “no” emerged. Then her stomach growled.
He refrained from fist-pumping. “Change of plans,” he said, standing up. “Let’s go eat.”
She blinked. “But what about your thing where you have to see all three movies?”
“I’m over it.”
…
Half an hour later, Amy found herself seated at the kitchen island in Dax’s condo in the Saint Lawrence Market area while he whipped up a cheese sauce on the stove. When he’d asked her what she wanted to eat and she’d said, “nachos,” this wasn’t at all what she expected. And it was kind of funny to be eating something so lowbrow as nachos in this palatial condo. She’d known his company was successful, but taking in the views from the impeccably decorated, cavernous penthouse made her wonder if she’d underestimated the extent of that success.
“My dad was really big on everything from scratch,” he said while he whisked. “It was his signature thing at the restaurant. So I can do a homemade version of pretty much every category of late-night junk food.”
“My version of homemade nachos would involve dumping grated cheese over a plate of chips and sticking it in the microwave,” she said, craning her neck to try to see into his living room. It was weird to be with him, acting like everything was normal, when their last encounter had been that intense, almost-angry kiss in the elevator at work.
“You’ll like this. It’s made from aged cheddar. Anyway, this is easy. Whenever I go out with Kat, she ends up wanting eggs Benedict afterward. Drunken hollandaise making—now that’s a skill.”
“Oh! Speaking of Kat.” She grabbed her phone and opened her messages. “I forgot to tell you. She texted me yesterday asking me to come to dinner at your parents’ house tomorrow. Apparently she has a bunch of house listings she wants me to look at.”
He shot her a look over his shoulder that she couldn’t decode. “And what did you say?”
“I said yes.” She hadn’t wanted to renege on her offer to help Kat. And honestly, she’d had so much fun with his family last Sunday. This whole functional family thing was a little addictive. “But I don’t want you to think I’m trying to elbow my way into your family.” Was she trying to elbow her way into his family? She wasn’t sure.
“S’okay. I appreciate any help you can give Kat. And hey, maybe my parents will listen to you. Kat and I have been trying to get them to move out of their house for years. They’d be so much better off in a place with less maintenance. My dad won’t even let me buy him a snowblower—he still insists on shoveling himself. And they won’t let me put in central air. But the minute I broach the subject of moving, my mother acts like I’m trying to lock her away in a nursing home.”
He tipped the pot, scraped the liquid cheese into a bowl, and plunked it in front of her, where he’d already dumped the bag of tortilla chips they’d bought into another bowl. She whipped her attention back—she’d been listening to him but also leaning back to try to see around the corner into his dining room.
He grinned. “You’re welcome to snoop around.”
“This is definitely your ‘public-facing’ house. It looks like something out of Architectural Digest.” She dipped a chip. “Oh my God, this is amazing.” The sharp cheddar had been spiked with brandy and deepened with caramelized onions. She’d seen him do everything as she’d been sitting there, but somehow she hadn’t been prepared for results that were so off-the-charts delicious.
“Well, I grant that this place isn’t home in the same way that the island is.”
“I didn’t mean it as an insult.” She tried to immerse her next chip in as much cheese as she could without looking like an animal. She had to pause to chew and moan her delight before continuing. “This is more what I would have expected Casa Dax to be like—luxurious, big. But it still feels like you, which is funny because so does the cottage, and the two places are so different.”
He shrugged. “I guess I’m a man of contradictions.”
That was true. One minute he was kissing her possessively, like he had the right to just grab her on an elevator. Or on a ferry. The next, he was making her late-night platonic nachos as if she were his frat brother after a night of bar-hopping.
“So what about Mr. Tinder? Turn out to be not your type?”
He wasn’t going to let it go, was he? Well, if they really were friends, why not? She had planned on doing the postmortem with Cassie next week, so how different could this be? She cleared her throat. “He was really nice. Polite, into real estate—lawyer by day, house flipper by night. And he was into me—at least initially.” God, this was so embarrassing.
“Then you turned into a werewolf, and he changed his mind?”
She laughed, grateful to him for putting her at ease. “No. In the end, I just couldn’t do it.” She searched his face. Eyes narrowed, he didn’t look happy. “He said I wasn’t the hookup type.”
“Maybe you aren’t.”
“But I want to be. I’m trying to be.”
“Because you’re out to prove something to yourself about Mason.”
“I don’t know.” She blew out a frustrated breath. Wasn’t a hookup supposed to be simple? Why did it all have to be so complicated? “I guess I’m just defective when it comes to…” She waved her hand back and forth, still unable to say the damned word, hoping he would get the point.
“Fucking?”
Alrighty then. She nodded, a little bit miserable and a little bit ashamed.
“That’s just not true.” His voice had gone all low and raspy and it went straight to her core. “I guarantee that’s not true.”
“How do you know?” Why was she arguing with him? Still, she couldn’t help herself. “I couldn’t…deliver the goods with you, either.”
He was seated perpendicular to her at the island, and when she looked down at her hands, mortified, he tipped her chin up with his finger. God, she want
ed to grab the hand that was attached to it and…do something with it. Paste it onto her body. Stuff it into her mouth. Maybe there was something to be said for chemistry. Maybe she wasn’t inherently bad at hookups, just that she and Greg hadn’t had the right spark.
After looking into her eyes for a long moment, he let go of her, and a wicked grin spread across his face. “It doesn’t matter. I know enough to know you would have been spectacular. You were spectacular.”
She shook her head. “How do you do it?”
“Do what?”
She hadn’t really meant to get into a discussion about this, but what the hell? If anyone could give her advice on the topic, it was him. “Hook up with women like it’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing! I love women.”
She held up her hands. She hadn’t been trying to insult him. “That’s not what I mean. It’s something I aspire to! I want to find a guy and keep things causal, but I just…” Gah, she sounded like a total idiot.
He rested his chin on his hands, looking thoughtful. “I don’t think it’s something you can just do or not do. I think it comes from your whole attitude about love and relationships.”
“You always say you don’t do them.”
“I don’t. Which you shouldn’t mistake for a disrespect for women.”
“I don’t—anymore.” It was true. She’d always called Dax a womanizer, but spending so much time with him recently had shown her that it wasn’t so black and white with him. He was an honest womanizer, which should be a contradiction but somehow wasn’t.
“I just have no interest in getting emotionally entangled with a woman. So since I operate from that underlying principle, it’s actually easy to have casual relationships as long as everyone is clear about the terms. I don’t think you operate from that assumption.”
“I want to, though.”
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