“I hate running with a passion, but I’ll cheer you on,” she says.
“I’d like that.”
When I say goodbye, it feels like that might happen, and that she’d be there at the finish line, waiting for me.
18
Abby
* * *
The next day, Hayden decides she wants to learn French just like her dad. As we traipse around the city, I teach her the words for swing, and store, and chocolate-chip cookie.
As the evening draws near, we catch the subway to the Village, making our way to the restaurant on Christopher Street where Simon is meeting Nick’s twin brother about an estimate. Simon asked me to hand off Hayden here since he has plans tonight to take her to a movie in nearby Chelsea.
The funny thing is, when he told me, I nearly asked if I could join them. I found myself wanting to go to the movies with the two of them, grab a bag of kettle corn, and accidentally brush fingers with Simon as we reached for a handful at the same time.
My stomach pirouettes at the possibility. I grip Hayden’s little hand tighter, focusing on her, not her father.
It’s not easy.
It’s really hard.
But I award myself another gold medal, this time in the One City Block Walk Without Thinking of Simon.
When we reach the restaurant site, I push open the door, and Hayden flies inside and throws her arms around her dad. “Daddy! My lesson was so fun! Abby is teaching me French too! Bonjour!”
“Bon soir, ma chérie,” he says as he scoops her up in his arms, and my heart soars as he speaks to her in French. “I think that’s great, sweet pea. Will you tell me more the second I’m done?”
Hayden nods and gives him a big kiss on the cheek, then snuggles closer. Skyrocket is the more apropos verb now, because my damn heart launches itself into the stratosphere when he turns and looks at me.
The breath flees my chest.
His eyes sparkle like he has a secret. Like we have a secret. And we do. How we feel about each other. Even with all this space between us, and all the people here, I swear I’m the only one he sees.
“Hey Abby,” he says, and I hear something new in his voice. Something stronger, and softer, too. Like I’m the person—besides his little princess—that he most wants to see at the end of his day.
“Hi,” I say, and in that one word, and how it falls from my lips, he has to know it’s the same way for me.
As I head to the door, I feel his eyes on me the whole time. That’s where I want them. I want him to be looking at me, longing for me, falling for me.
Because I’m in so deep with him.
* * *
Simon
* * *
That night, our language lesson is on the phone as she helps me prep for the dinner this weekend. She teaches me how to ask important questions about wine. I ask her if wine makes her frisky.
“Don’t you already know? I had a few glasses before I jumped you at the zebra movie.”
“Ah, I wasn’t sure if it was me, or the stripes, or the wine.”
“All three,” she says, then instructs me on how to compliment the chef on the food.
I repeat her words, and then I compliment her on how she tastes better than dessert.
“Oh stop,” she says shyly, and I can hear the blush in her voice. “And next time it’s my turn with you.”
Can’t argue with that. Especially since she wants a next time. Maybe we’re not resisting each other. Maybe it’s just semantics when we say phone sex isn’t the same as ripping each other’s clothes off.
But even so, we’ve managed a hands-off week. And more than that, we’re proving something vitally important—how much more there is to us than mere attraction.
As the night rolls to its end, I remind her that it’s my turn to teach her. “Turns out Hayden has a birthday party for two hours tomorrow night. Any chance I can take you out to a pool hall and teach you to play, like I promised?”
“As long as you do that thing where you line up behind me and show me how to make the shot.”
And that’s precisely what I do the next night. She leans forward on the table, lining up her shot, peering at the orange ball as she pulls back the wooden stick.
“Like this?” she asks over her shoulder.
“Just like that.”
I crowd in behind her, pressing my body against her, positioning the cue between her fingers. She murmurs, and I nip her shoulder blade. My mind is awash in dirty images courtesy of this position, and my God, how I want her like this, bent over, her arms braced on the green felt. My dick throbs in my jeans, and I know she can feel my erection against her ass. Her wonderful, lush ass. I push against her, and her breath shudders.
“And then you pull it back like this,” I say, showing her as I move the cue.
She leans her head back into me, and I draw in a deep, intoxicating inhalation of her hair. Her coconut scent floods my nostrils and kicks my arousal into overdrive.
“Is this us not ripping each other’s clothes off?” she asks, her voice full of heat and fire.
“Yes. Because, sadly, you’re still fully dressed. Which seems to be an affront to all my baser instincts.”
“I like those instincts,” she murmurs.
Setting the stick on the table, she spins around. She’s pinned between the pool table and me. Journey plays overhead, and other games continue around us. Right now, I don’t give a crap who’s here. Not as she loops her arms around my neck.
“I do want to tear off your clothes,” she whispers, then drags one hand down the buttons of my white shirt. She plays with the top button, slipping it open.
“Are you actually going to take my clothes off here at a pool hall?” I ask skeptically.
But she ignores the question as she gasps. “Oh my God, I didn’t know you had a tattoo.”
“Only because you’ve never gotten my clothes off before.”
She slides open another button and rubs her fingers over the ink—a large Celtic circular piece on my pec. “What does it mean?”
“Trust. Trust yourself.”
She lifts her face and looks at me. “When did you have it done?”
“When I finished college. It was a reminder to trust my instincts with work and career. But it came to mean other things.”
“Like trust your instincts with Miriam?”
Hearing her name isn’t a punch in the kidney anymore. It doesn’t hurt. That pain is long gone. “I had to rely on my gut. That it was time to go and end the marriage.”
“Do you ever regret it ending?”
I shake my head. “No. We were wrong for each other. And I’m not someone who believes you stay together for the kid. My daughter is better off with us apart. I had to trust myself to know that.”
She nods her understanding, then tilts her head to the side. “And do you trust yourself with me?”
I chuckle lightly. “Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don’t.”
“When don’t you?”
“Right now.” I dip my head to her neck, growling in her ear. “When I want to get the hell out of here and make the most of the thirty minutes we have left, even though we promised to keep our hands to ourselves.”
“What if I don’t use my hands then?” she asks, her tone flirty.
I wrench back to look at her. “Don’t use your hands?”
She runs her finger across her bottom lip. “What if I just use my mouth? Would you trust yourself to enjoy it? Would you trust me to make it good for you? Would you trust us to know it’s what we both want?”
My head spins, and I’m dizzy with lust. “What am I going to do with you?”
Abby
* * *
He doesn’t take long to devise an answer. The man knows how to get stuff done. He’s a dealmaker, a problem solver, and he simply calls a car service he says he knows from his Wall Street days and orders a vehicle, stat. I don’t ask why he doesn’t use Uber, because ten minutes later the answer is obvious when we climb into a long sleek ca
r.
With a partition.
God bless the old school car service solution.
“Just drive,” he tells the man in the black cap.
Simon presses the button for the divider, and in seconds we’re alone on the leather seat. Quickly, I unzip his pants and take his erection in my hand.
“You said no hands,” he says on a moan.
“I lied. Do you care?”
He grins. “No.”
“Good. Then I’m going to the zucchini festival right now.”
He cracks up. But then his laughter is swallowed by his groan as I dip my head between his legs. I swirl my tongue over the tip of his erection, and he moans when I make contact. I do, too. The taste of him is heady—masculine and sexy, a little salty, and all addictive. I flick my tongue across him, then down the shaft, and he thrusts up into me.
He groans my name, and I want to play with him, toy with him, but instead I decide to blow his mind. I wrap my lips around him, and then I take him deep. He’s hard and thick, and so fucking aroused. I swear he’s throbbing in my mouth. He grips my head, tugging me closer.
There’s a roughness to him at times. He never hurts me, but it’s a good roughness, like he knows sex is better if we’re not delicate. He knows it’s okay to grab my hair and yank hard, and my God, I hope he knows he won’t have to go easy on me when he makes love to me just because he’s so much bigger.
When. Not if.
Because I know it’ll happen. We are a fait accompli, and I don’t say that because I’m treating him like the most delicious lollipop. I say it because neither one of us can get enough of the other.
This week was about proving we could pull this off. That we could work without jumping each other. We passed, successfully, keeping it chaste in the home.
We’re not at home now, and we’re free, so I draw him deep, stretching my lips over him. I’m wildly aroused by going down on him. I love how he tastes, how he feels, and how much he wants me.
“Abby,” he groans. His voice is laced with heat and desire. “I want to come in your mouth.”
I let go with a wet pop to arch an eyebrow and say, “Like there’s any place else you’d come?”
I dive back down, and he’s closer, thrusting hard, pushing into me and digging his fingers roughly into my hair and against my skull. Breathing is hard, but I’m up to the task, sucking him deep. As he rocks into my mouth and curls his hands around my head, he issues a guttural moan, then a warning. “Coming. Now.”
I don’t need the warning, and I love how he loses control for me. I savor the taste of his release sliding down my throat.
When I finally break away, the clock mocks me. He needs to get home.
I tell him as much, and that even though I wish the night wasn’t ending, I had the best time with him. He smiles like a happy, woozy man as he pulls me closer and kisses my head. “My sweet, sexy Abby. You know I can’t resist you.”
My smile widens. “I know. And you taste so much better than zucchini.”
19
Simon
* * *
In her white knickers and a fencing jacket a size too big, Hayden adopts the en garde stance and waggles her sword.
I lean forward, my palms on my knees, watching intently. Abby brought Hayden here to the fencing club, and I left work to meet them. She’s no fencing prodigy. But she’s doing her darnedest to keep up in her first lesson.
After Hayden stabs the instructor in the breastbone, he cheers her on. She turns to me, her young eyes lit up and seeking approval.
“Great job,” Abby calls out, then waves to my girl.
“Keep it up,” I second, then Hayden returns her focus to the lesson.
“She’s having a great time,” Abby says, bumping her shoulder against mine.
“She is. Think she’ll want another lesson?”
Abby shrugs lightly. “Who knows? She likes to try new things, and that’s good.”
“I can see her testing every sport once. Every instrument once. She’ll want to do rock climbing, then piano, then ice skating.”
Abby holds up an index finger. “Karate next, and after that it’ll be ballet, then saxophone. She’ll have to try singing too.”
“Let’s not forget gymnastics and origami. She’ll probably start an origami club in kindergarten.”
“That sounds exactly like her.”
I turn to face her completely, and my heart sputters. Abby’s smile is wide and pretty, and we’re sitting together talking about my kid, and we’re both just getting, totally getting, how Hayden ticks. I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather be, or any conversation I’d rather have. This woman has burrowed her way into my heart, simply by being herself. I don’t honestly know if I can let her go.
“She should try everything,” Abby says, her voice softening, quieter now.
“To see what she likes.”
Abby nods. “To see what she falls in love with,” she adds softly, her golden eyes never straying from mine.
“She’ll definitely fall in love with something,” I say, my voice matching hers, my heart beating rapidly.
“Like languages.”
“Or restaurants.”
“Or something else entirely.”
“Or someone, someday,” I say, barely a whisper.
As the sound of metal hitting metal in a bout surrounds us, I bend closer to her and speak softly near her ear. “I can’t stop falling for you.”
She shivers, and her eyes float closed momentarily. When they flutter open, she looks at me once more. “I can’t, either, Simon.”
The way she says my name, sweet and desperate, threads into me. I’m powerless to resist her. I stop fighting it.
No, I don’t kiss her again in the fencing club during my daughter’s lesson. Instead, I ask her a question. “Hayden’s back with her mom this weekend, and I have a dinner with Gabriel and his guys. Would you like to come with me?”
“Because you’re not learning French fast enough?” she asks playfully.
“Oui,” I say with a grin. “But I’d like your company, too.”
“Will you pick me up before dinner?”
I nod. “I will.”
20
Abby
* * *
“The paella was amazing when I was in Spain,” I tell Gabriel from my spot next to him in his gorgeous apartment, where he’s cooked us a feast.
He rolls his eyes in pleasure. “It’s to-die-for. Never better than in Barcelona.”
“But I bet you can make it even tastier,” I say, with a playful challenge.
He laughs, and it matches his personality—big, buoyant, sparkly. I can see why Simon wants to work with him. He’s charming and amazingly talented, and the dinner he made for us is divine, an incredible red snapper and risotto, as well as roasted artichoke, lightly seasoned.
His partners are easygoing, and Simon was right. They vastly prefer to speak in French. That’s what we’ve been doing, though Gabriel speaks Spanish, too, and as I chat with him we slide back and forth into that language.
“So you learned all your Spanish abroad?” he asks.
I shake my head as I slice a piece of the fish, the knife slipping through like butter. “My mother is from Spain, so I knew enough beforehand, but in the year there I became fluent enough to teach it now. What about you?” I ask as I bring the bite to my mouth.
He tells me he grew up bilingual, speaking French and Portuguese, but then he mastered English in school and Spanish in his travels.
“It’s a handy language to know in the food business,” he says as he picks up his glass of wine.
“Yes, I suspect it is,” I say and catch the gaze briefly of Simon, who’s next to me, chatting with Gabriel’s colleagues. There are eight of us here at the table. He’s held his own through most of the meal, though I weigh in from time to time and translate. When I do, he shoots me the sweetest smile, one that just melts me.
But then, everything he does seems to have that effe
ct on me.
Maybe even more so tonight, with two glasses of wine making my world particularly warm and toasty.
When Eduardo asks a question about the structure of the deal, the crinkle in Simon’s forehead tells me he doesn’t understand every word, so I chime in with a translation.
“Thank you,” he says softly to me, then answers the goateed man.
As he talks, I turn my focus back to the chef.
Gabriel gestures to Simon with his eyes. “You’re good for him,” he says in a quiet voice.
“You think so?”
“Yes. The two of you are like a perfect team.”
A faint blush creeps across my cheeks. “Thank you.”
“How long have you worked together? Because he wasn’t speaking like this a few weeks ago. Did you help him?”
I beam and nod. “I did.”
“He is lucky to have such a good teacher. And a lovely one,” he says, then flashes a charming smile.
We chatter on about travel and food, then about the best wines in the world. A few minutes later, I catch my breath when a hand presses against my thigh. Simon’s hand. He doesn’t even slide it up my leg—he simply rests it on me as he talks. I don’t know if it’s one of those things he’s barely aware of, or something he’s intending. But I know this much—I love that he’s touching me.
Gabriel raises a glass of wine. “To good food!”
Eduardo nods. “To good deals!” Then he meets my gaze, waiting for me.
“To good matches!” I turn to Simon.
“To all of you,” he says, and as the rest of the guests join in with their toasts, Simon slides his palm up a few inches, and I nearly swoon right there at the dinner table.
I love how much he needs me. I love how much he wants me. I love the way he talks to me. I love how he looks tonight, in his gray slacks, a light blue button-down, and no tie.
I love everything about tonight, including this wine, including the company, and including how much I want this dinner to end so that whatever happens next has a chance of beginning.
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