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“Bodie’s here?” Zac was smiling approval. “It will be good to see him.”
Bodie and Gus. They sounded more like ranch hands than surfers. “So what’s next for you, Gus?”
“Yeah, so listen, Chris.” He glanced uneasily at Zac and stepped up close to the counter. Immediately, Zac took the hint and went back to his table. “I totally owe you dinner.” Gus’s eyes were dark and earnest, and so beautiful it was like having her own personal movie star. Even better, the eyes didn’t make her feel as though her identity was dissolving. They were just really hot. Though this close—he suddenly looked so boyish. She’d placed him around twenty-five, just a couple of years younger, but... “Just you and me. Inside, in a restaurant. Some place romantic. I swear I won’t go near a surfboard the whole evening.”
“Before I answer, one question.” She grinned at him. “How old are you?”
“Aw, come on.” He stepped away from the counter in disgust.
“What?” She giggled. “How old?”
“Younger than you think.”
“Fourteen? Fifteen?”
He snorted dismissively. “Yeah, right. I’m twenty-three. I will be soon, I mean.”
“You’re twenty-two?”
Zac looked up. Smirking.
Good God. She’d practically be a cougar.
“But I’m... I mean, it’s not like we’re going to get married, right?”
“You’re right.” She looked up into those movie-star eyes and smiled, still able to see Zac’s smirk in her peripheral vision. So Gus didn’t mind older women, huh? She wasn’t sure how she felt about the age difference. But she was sure about one thing. It would hurt no one to have dinner with the kid and see what happened.
“I’d love to have dinner with you, Gus.”
“Awesome!” He lifted his hand for a high five. She didn’t move.
“Hey, this is the place.” The deep voice came from the entrance, behind Gus.
“Bodie!” Zac turned, this time with his hand up confidently. Slap.
Coming into the shop was the sexiest man Chris had ever seen—besides Gus. And Zac.
Bodie was powerfully built, in his thirties, with one of those craggy ultramasculine faces that wasn’t necessarily handsome but didn’t need to be. A Daniel Craig or Clive Owen face.
His eyes met hers, and he stopped in the entrance to the shop, hands on his hips, his friend Gus apparently forgotten, and stared at her with as much interest as she was staring at him.
It was suddenly difficult to breathe.
In her peripheral vision she saw Zac standing abruptly, closing his laptop.
Okay. Chris needed to think about this. She’d wanted to have some kind of wild adventure while she was here in California. Right now she was standing in her sister’s coffee shop alone with three of the sexiest men alive, all of whom appeared to find her attractive, which had never, ever happened to her in New York or anywhere else in her whole entire life.
And she was planning to leave?
11
AMES PUSHED BACK the chair in his condo office. He was tired, frustrated by an afternoon of fruitless calling, and he missed Eva. Missed her! It was as if they were in a serious relationship instead of just having a fling.
Yeah, guess what.
He still wasn’t sure how it had happened. He’d just been going along, enjoying her craziness, her color and her spirit. Then somewhere along the way part of her had sneaked inside him. Or maybe part of her had awakened the part of him that remembered how to enjoy itself. Either way, Ames had begun to change. He’d become impatient with the long hours he put into his job, the months of constant travel, the restrictive attitudes about how to look or behave. He’d started thinking about how much he missed playing basketball and baseball, how he’d like to start going to more concerts and plays—after all, he lived in the cultural center of the country, if not the world—speaking from a New Yorker’s perspective, of course. He’d like to read more, and yeah, maybe relax a little.
Preferably with an exuberant, beautiful woman at his side. Naked some of the time. Or a lot of the time.
His past relationships seemed bland and shallow next to this vibrant, exciting woman who’d taken one look and realized what Ames had lost and how he could get it back. Who’d taken on that job with a determination that never veered over the line into an attempt to control him. His infatuation with Chris seemed so middle school now, his determination to win her arrogant and shortsighted, more about his own ego than who she was or what they could bring to each other.
