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Did they?
No, she would have remembered.
“I don’t think so.”
“Huh,” he mused as he moved to the next pot.
Liam McDonnell was probably accomplished in many things, but acting was not one of them.
He reached for her hand and drew her to stand next to him.
“Well, I apologize for not clarifying that yesterday. Please let me rectify my faux pas. Would you like to have dinner with me?” When she didn’t respond right away, he stroked her knuckles and added, “It’s the least I can do after you brought Phoebe all the way here.”
It was awfully presumptuous of him to assume she was free for dinner on such short notice. So, while her pride wanted her to decline the offer, the part of her brain that was being run by her hormones—particularly the sex ones—demanded she accept his invitation. Especially when he kept caressing her hand.
“What did you have in mind?”
There was a glint in his eye as he studied her.
“My vote is to go to the pet store first. After we’re done there, we can call in our to-go order at La Trattoria, and on our way to pick it up, we’ll stop by the Wine Warehouse for a bottle of wine. Then we’ll come back here, and once Phoebe is fed and comfortable, we can have a nice, relaxing dinner together.”
Utah couldn’t find a thing wrong with that plan, so she replied, “Should we take Phoebe with us?”
“Of course. She needs to pick out her bed and toys.”
She caught a whiff of his woodsy scent when they walked toward the door and was overwhelmed with a desire to wrap her arms around his neck and kiss him right there on the patio while Phoebe looked on. The way he’d been looking at her since she arrived made her believe he’d be agreeable.
Plus, him wanting to have dinner and wine with her was a good sign, right?
The odds of her breaking her sex drought seemed to be favorable.
She’d see how she felt after a few glasses of Pinot.
Oh, who am I kidding? After a few glasses of wine, I’ll be dropping to my knees to worship his cock and begging him to fuck me.
Again, it’d been a long time since she’d had a worthy candidate to have sex with.
****
Liam
They talked all the way to the pet store while Phoebe went back and forth between leaning over the console to kiss him and sitting happily in Utah’s lap.
The woman next to him was charming, utterly gorgeous with legs that went on for miles, and from what he’d gleaned from their conversations, witty and smart.
“Where do you work?”
She picked at invisible lint on her shorts. “I’m, um, an IT consultant.”
That got his attention.
Boston General, where Liam was the CEO, had just had a data breach that zeroed out dozens of patient accounts with large outstanding balances. The perpetrator or perpetrators had done it in such a way that the hospital couldn’t prove they hadn’t actually been paid, and it’d taken more than a week before it was even noticed.
To top it off, “paid in full” notices were automatically sent when the account balances hit zero. Going after people when they had that in hand would have been an uphill battle in court, not to mention the disastrous PR nightmare that would have resulted if they’d pursued collection.
Instead, Liam and the board decided to take the financial hit but got the feds involved to try and track the culprits down, with no luck so far.
And Liam was on thin ice with the board.
