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Emma rolled her eyes.
Julie could talk about Cassidy until she went blue in the face.
Didn’t mean Emma had to talk back.
She was saved from any further interrogation by the noisy arrival of Riley and Sam, followed by Jake and Grace. Judging from Riley’s mussed hair and Grace’s smeared lip gloss, Emma had been spot-on about the reason for them being late.
As Julie took everyone’s coats and fielded an argument between Riley and Grace about some Bachelor contestant drama, Emma moved up beside Sam Compton.
“Your shirt’s untucked in the back,” she said quietly.
He glanced down and gave her a sheepish smile. “Sorry. The cab ride—”
Emma held up her hand. “I don’t even want to know.”
He grinned and reached around to tuck his blue button-down shirt into his jeans. Not that it mattered. Shirt in, shirt out . . . either way, Sam Compton was a ridiculously good-looking bit of man meat.
Hell, all the men in the room were almost painfully good-looking. Sam was blond and blue-eyed, with this bad-boy-meets-boy-next-door charm. Emma could hardly blame Riley for being obsessed with the guy since high school.
Grace’s guy was equally appealing. Jake Malone was tall, dark, and handsome personified. He had a sort of Hugh Jackman–type confidence and copious amounts of charm with a wicked smile that promised deliciously dark deeds in the bedroom. Or so Grace told her.
And then there was Mitchell Forbes. Sex in a pinstripe suit. Well, no pinstripes tonight. But the dark-haired, blue-eyed Wall Street hotshot had a buttoned-up seriousness that should have clashed with Julie’s carefree-party-girl vibe. Instead they were living proof that the whole opposites attract thing actually worked.
Her friends had hit the relationship jackpot.
If Emma weren’t so determined not to need a man, she’d be jealous.
She was about to ask Sam how things were going with ROON—the distillery he’d established a couple years ago that had started to get national press in the past couple months—but Sam’s attention had drifted away from her.
“Yo, Cassidy. Good to see you, man!”
And so it begins.
Emma turned to look at him, only because not looking at him, would be, well, obvious. And she made damn sure that there was no outward reaction to him. No knees buckling, no knuckles whitening from where she gripped her wine glass, not even a flicker of facial reaction.
But inside?
Inside something fluttered.
Dangerously.
There was no sign of the usual suit today. He was wearing jeans like the rest of the guys, and a black sweater that fit just well enough to emphasize sculpted shoulders and a trim waist. He held a bottle of wine in his left hand and shook Sam’s hand with his right. And his eyes . . .
His eyes met hers over Sam’s shoulder. And held.
And something shifted.
It wasn’t much. Not even a smile. The glance wasn’t even prolonged.
But for two people who had very deliberately tried to live outside of each other’s orbit for the past year, it was definitely something.
Emma pressed her lips together as they both looked away.
The moment had been so fleeting that nobody else seemed to have noticed.
It was as though their spontaneous shared drinks a week earlier had been a turning point. Emma just didn’t know a turning point toward what.
Or if she even wanted it.
