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They could have been on a date, from outward appearances, because Bayart’s candlelit interior invited intimacy. In keeping with the restaurant’s formality, Cole was still in the navy suit that he’d worn to the office. And Marisa was probably expecting tonight to be all business...
“Wow, you’re direct.” Marisa blew out a breath. “Isn’t it obvious? We’re destined for close encounters in small spaces.”
He smiled at her attempt at humor and deflection. “Try again.” When she still said nothing, he continued, “I’ll go first. I wonder what you saw in me while we were in high school. I was a jock and a jerk.”
She joined him in smiling, and it was like the sun coming out. “That’s an easy one. I admired you. You were willing to take risks. On the ice, you took chances in order to win. And off the ice, you skated on the edge with your pranks. I was meek, and you were confident. I was quiet, and you were popular.”
“I was a jerk, and you weren’t.”
She blinked, and the curve of her lips wobbled.
“Fat lot of good it did me, too. I ultimately wound up crashing and burning, on the ice and off.” It was his offer of a mea culpa—accepting guilt and responsibility. Fifteen years ago she’d called a halt to his pranks. And if he’d been a jerk in the aftermath, it had been for nothing. He’d still gotten a professional career on the ice, and when it had ended, it had had nothing to do with Marisa.
“You know what they say. Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all...”
“You’ve never taken risks?” he probed.
“Well, I did recruit you for the Pershing benefit. I guess you bring out the daredevil in me.”
“Yeah,” he drawled. “The same way I tempted you to test out the theater department’s prop during senior year.”
Marisa looked embarrassed.
Before he could say more, the waiter came up to take their order. Marisa waffled on what to have, but settled on the Cobb salad.
“You can’t choose a salad,” Cole said with dry humor. “It’s a sin in a place like this.”
“It’s not,” she responded lightly. “I’m sure everything is delicious here.”
Including her. He could tell she’d contemplated ordering a richer entrée, and he wanted to say he appreciated every inch of her lush curves, but he let it go. Maybe a salad was Marisa’s go-to choice on a date—not that she thought of this as a date, but certainly dinner with a man. Him.
When the waiter had departed, the conversation turned to casual topics, but Cole was determined to shift gears back to what they had been discussing.
At a lull, he said, “It must have given you some satisfaction to see me taken down a peg or two in high school. After all, we did have sex, and then I avoided you.”
“It hurt.”
“I wasn’t prepared to deal with what had happened between us. You were a virgin, and you caught me off guard. I might not have hurt you when we fumbled our way through sex, but I did in other ways.”
She lowered her lashes. “We were both young and stupid.”
“Teenagers make mistakes,” he concurred.
She toyed some more with the wineglass, making him crazy. “It must have been an unwelcome surprise when we were first paired up to make a PowerPoint presentation in economics class.”
“Not unwelcome,” he replied, shifting. “You were an unknown quantity.”
“A nonentity at school, especially among the jocks.”
He shook his head. “Sweet pea, you may be a teacher, but you still have no idea how most teenage boys think. The only reason the jocks didn’t know how big your breasts were is because you were always hiding them behind a bunch of books.”
She stared at him. “You were looking at my chest?”
He smiled wolfishly. “On the sly. And I wasn’t just looking. Do you think that whenever I brushed by you during our study sessions it was an accident?”
Her eyes widened, and her hand fell away from the wineglass.
“Definitely a C cup.”
