On the roof, Nichole glanced around at what had become a dense crowd. With the way people were pouring into the place now she probably wouldn’t even see him again. Which was good. Because she really wasn’t interested.
Though even as she thought it, she realized she was scanning faces. Her gaze slipping past friends and acquaintances without stopping in an absent-minded search for the stranger who was making a liar out of her even as she stood there.
And then she found him. Nearly a head taller than most everyone around him. That vivid blue gaze locked steadily with hers.
A loud cheer sounded and all attention shifted to the doorway. Jesse had jogged up and was standing with a stunned grin on his face. She’d only met him once before he’d left, two years ago, but she remembered him to be as cool as his brother, who was now pulling him in for a solid hug.
She looked back to where her blue-eyed hero had been a moment before, but within the shifting crowd she’d lost him.
The party was in full swing, the roof packed to capacity, the atmosphere as welcoming as Jesse and Sam’s ever-expanding social network. Garrett had managed to get a couple of minutes with his oldest friend and to secure plans for later in the week before letting the next eager guest at him. He hadn’t been two feet out of the crush before finding her again.
Nichole. That was her name. It had taken him the better part of an hour to pick it out from a nearby conversation, roll it around in his mind and connect it to the woman with the glittering almond eyes and fiery spill of curls, the long legs in dark jeans and the strappy little top with the tiny bow.
Standing within a loose grouping of friends and acquaintances of whom they both seemed to know some, but not all, they’d been talking around each other for hours now. Much as they’d been circling throughout the night. Picking up hints through rapid banter interspersed with old stories and private jokes. Exchanging looks that, within their lifespan of a scant handful of seconds, said more than all the words they’d shared combined … and then moving on.
Only now all those hints, bits and pieces had begun to take shape in his mind, forming the image of a woman he liked. A woman who laughed easily, spoke intelligently and didn’t take herself too seriously. A woman who liked to joke and tease. Who gave as good as she got. And whose unconscious smile did something to him he couldn’t quite put a name to.
He wanted her.
Not the way he usually wanted his dates. Not for some superficial conversation and perfunctory dinner or drinks that were the means to an end he’d been limiting himself to for as long as he could remember. All he’d had time for. All he could afford. Because he’d spent every spare minute he had on making his construction company top in the city, earning his degree and keeping his four sisters from doing all the things he didn’t want them to do.
Nichole made him want more. She made him curious. Made him want to linger. To take his time and find out if maybe they could have something … uncomplicated. Casual, but real. For a while.
He wanted the rest too. The parts where he pushed that pretty blush to see how deep and dark and far it could spread. The parts where he had her beneath him, all that fiery red hair wrapped around his fists and spilling over his pillow as he pushed inside her body. But when those parts were over, and before they even began, he wanted more. And he wanted it soon.
Laughter subsiding, Nichole sighed, her dark gaze finding his beneath the ashy fringe of her lashes. It wasn’t coy or contrived. Nor the blatant invitation he’d lost interest in back in his twenties. It was contemplative. Heated, but questioning. Enticing in its hint of uncertainty.
Damn, if that didn’t make her all the better.
Around them the conversation had somehow found its way to movies filmed in Chicago and who could name the most. Beneath the titles volleying back and forth, Garrett gave a subtle nod of his head toward the quiet corner of the rooftop where they’d watched the sunset.
Nichole’s slender brows drew together, her teeth setting into her lush bottom lip in the ultimate expression of uncertainty.
It shouldn’t have gone straight to his groin, but it did. At least until he saw her fooling with that phone she carried around. One thumb brushed the smooth screen and—was she … texting?
Immediately he thought of his sister, “using a lifeline” to make some inane decision she didn’t trust him enough to help her with. Was that what this was? Indecision over whether to step over to a corner and talk with him?
Sure, he had every intention of taking it further, but for now—
Wait … What the hell …? She was not holding that phone up to take his picture.
Eyes on the screen, only half listening to an escalating debate over whether the outlying suburbs and thus the John Hughes classics counted, Nichole had been trying to frame the shot when her subject was suddenly front and center—closer than he’d been edging past her down in the access stairwell.
Oh, God. She’d been busted taking his picture to send to Maeve. This was an all-time low.
Her gaze crawling up the towering expanse of Oxford cloth and then creeping over the tantalizing stretch of bare masculine skin at the base of his neck, she forced herself to keep going until she reached the now steely blue of his eyes. Her stomach tumbled into free fall.
“What’re you doing, Red?”
Swallowing past the tight knot in her throat, she shook her head.
What was she doing? Trying to snap a picture of some virtual stranger because she couldn’t account for the reaction she was having to him? Because she couldn’t keep her eyes off him for more than three seconds at a stretch and she needed the judgment of a reliable outside source? Someone who knew her just about as well as she knew herself. Maeve.
So, basically, she was acting like a complete nut-job.
And yet a part of her still twitched with the need to get a photo and hit “send.” It must have been obvious too, because seconds later a hand firmed around her wrist—loose, but uncompromising—and pushed the phone down to her side.
The skin beneath his grasp warmed as though a low charge ran from his hand up through hers. It felt good. Too good. And suddenly all she could think about was how long it had been since anyone had touched her for more than the briefest instant. What a simple pleasure that heated, lingering contact was. And how she hadn’t even realized she missed it.
He was bending close to her ear and his breath washed warm across skin that seemed to come alive beneath it. “Red?”
The air went thin around her as the slow tingle behind her ear began to spread, sliding down her neck, shoulder and arm until it came to mingle with the charge emanating from her wrist.
“I don’t know what I’m doing. Men don’t usually—I mean, I don’t—” Trying to find the words, she licked her lips, watched his eyes darken at the sight. “There’s something about you.”
Maybe it was the way he hadn’t hesitated to protect a woman he didn’t know. Or how he was built like he pounded rocks for a living but could argue international economics as easily as the merits of Leia over Uhura. How he savored opportunities to stop and enjoy the simple stuff. Or how his offbeat jokes made her laugh like she’d known him forever.
Or maybe it was just that when his gaze drifted to her hair, she could feel his fingers tightening in it.
Could it be so simple? He made her feel like a woman and made her notice him as a man … when for so long no one else had.
A gravel-rough laugh rumbled from low in his chest and the hand at her wrist loosened, easing into a slow up and down caress over the bare skin of her arm. “There’s something about you too. So what do you say to getting out of here and figuring out just what it is?”
Getting out of here? Her heart slammed to a stop.
That