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It should have been perfect, but I looked away, dropping my gaze to the top of the bar. I was still thinking about the woman in Miami, about my day, about the Egertons, about Samantha. I couldn’t get out of my own head.
I glanced at the woman again. She was paying for her drink, but she noticed me looking at her and met my eye. She smiled a little, in a nice way. She was probably like me: someone who didn’t do this all the time, but often enough. Maybe she was getting over a bad relationship or she’d been burned repeatedly by the Manhattan dating scene. Because pretty much everyone had been burned by the Manhattan dating scene.
Did Samantha date? Or did she have a boyfriend? She’d stood in the doorway of her office, watching me as I left today. I knew I’d left her hanging, wondering what had happened with the Egerton brothers. It had happened so quickly after she showed them into the meeting room—she had to at least be curious whether it had anything to do with her. She hadn’t contacted me afterward, as if she knew something was wrong. And since I hadn’t contacted her, she must be wondering if she was in some kind of trouble.
Where was she right now? Pouring out her troubles on a boyfriend’s shoulder? Or was she even thinking about me at all?
The thought came into my mind: If it had been Samantha I’d met at the airport lounge that day, it would have been very, very pleasurable.
Illogical, because I hadn’t met Samantha when it happened.
If it was Samantha at the other end of the bar, we’d already be on our way out of here to fuck.
Egotistical, because it assumed she wanted to have sex with me at all. But the sex-starved mind doesn’t always make sense.
The woman at the other end of the bar was looking at me again, unsure. I was still distracted by my own thoughts, and I wasn’t giving her a strong enough message one way or another. She had finished paying her bill, and as I watched, the couple sitting beside her got up and left, leaving an empty seat.
An invitation if ever there was one. All I had to do was walk over and take it.
It wouldn’t take much—just hello, some small talk, introductions. We’d tell each other things that were possibly true, possibly not. I rarely used my real name in these encounters, because I didn’t want the women Googling me after we parted. If the women I met used fake names or real ones, I never knew, because I never Googled them either. It was better that way—cleaner, both of us a blank slate for a few hours, which made the sex hotter.
Except when it didn’t. If I didn’t like anonymous sex anymore, then what kind of sex did I like?
Samantha. In a first-class airport lounge. Suggesting I come back to her hotel with her.
In real life, she was my employee, and I wasn’t even supposed to think about her like this. I tried to stop, and instead I pictured her in a blue dress—she’d look incredible in blue—and those shoes with the goddamned ankle strap. In another lifetime—one in which we hadn’t met—I’d sit next to her and she’d give me a smile, her gaze going up and down me in that quick, unmistakable way women sometimes had. A once-over. And then I’d—
I blinked and realized I was standing here fantasizing about Samantha while the brunette waited, the empty seat next to her. As I hesitated, another man—brown sweater, shaggy dark-blond hair, affable smile—sat next to her and introduced himself.
She looked at me. I shook my head.
She turned to the other guy, smiled, and said hello.
Good move, Winters. What the hell was that?
I had just turned down sex. Anonymous, no-strings-attached sex—the only kind of sex I ever indulged in. I was going home alone.
All because of Samantha Riley.
I paid for my drink and left the bar. I stood on the Manhattan street, feeling the cool spring night air, scented with the unique New York fragrance of sweat, gasoline fumes, and something deep-fried. I turned in the direction of Central Park, many blocks away, and started walking.
After all, it looked like I had nothing else to do.
Eight
Samantha
* * *
He said his name was Ethan. He was tall, with muscles he was obviously proud of because he wore a T-shirt in the cool May air. He had tattoos on his arms. He wore artfully ripped jeans and a belt with metal studs in it, and I was supposed to sleep with him.
Emma had placed herself at the bar, where she pretended not to know me. This was in case Ethan was a creep and I needed an escape. If I gave her a nod, she’d move in and extract me. If I left with Ethan, she’d leave me be.
“Hey,” he said in greeting as he sat down across the table from me. I was still in my work clothes, so we looked… incompatible. Though of course that could be a turn-on sometimes. Ethan had dark blond hair in a short cut and scruff on his jaw. He was good-looking, I supposed, or at least good-looking enough to get a lot of dates on Tinder.
Damn Emma and her need to fix everything, including my sex life. I hadn’t asked her to get me a date—I’d only wanted to drink some wine and bend a sympathetic ear. But my big sister, who spent her entire career training people to make things happen, had just jumped in and taken over without asking me. Now I had a strange man sitting across from me, and I didn’t know what to do.
No, that was a lie. I knew what I was supposed to do.
