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“Follow me home,” he suggested. His place, a luxurious high-rise condo, was only a few blocks away.
When she looked ready to argue, he said, “I’ll order dinner delivered and you can be home making your calls within the hour.”
He was pushing too hard. But they were building their future here—futures apart from each other, while still offering friendship and support. He needed every detail laid out.
He needed this to work.
He’d been living in limbo too long and was beginning to feel like he was wasting his life.
If it was just a feeling, he’d move on. Braden tried never to build plans on something as unreliable as feelings. But when it was feeling and fact combined, he knew to push.
In her jeans and polo shirt, with her dark hair swirling around her face and shoulders, Mallory looked tired as she preceded him through his front door. And hot as hell, too. Braden liked women and got turned on as easily as the next guy. But Mallory pushed a button in him no other woman seemed to know how to push.
Probably because he had to get her out of the way before another woman could find her way in.
You’d think her continued physical rejections during the last year of their marriage, including a show of out-and-out aversion to him touching her, would have done it.
You’d think. But it hadn’t.
He’d called in an order of lasagna and salad from the wine bar on the bottom floor of his building and it arrived right behind them. Mallory was looking around the condo as though something might have changed since she’d last been there three years ago, shortly after he’d moved in. She should know him better than that. She was the one into aesthetics. He liked his surroundings nice and clean, and then he just lived in them—used them for their purpose, took them for granted.
With Mallory, her surroundings were almost like a living entity, a partner in her life. She tended to them on a regular basis, changing things up, adding stuff.
He used to look around when he got home from a trip, testing himself to see if he could figure out what she’d changed while he’d been gone.
She’d challenge him and if he could work out whatever it was, he’d get sex before dinner rather than afterward.
He’d almost always had the appetizer sex.
“You want a glass of wine?” he asked, pulling the bottle he’d ordered out of the bag. He had to get his head in the game.
And get her out of his head.
“Tea’s good, if you have some.”
Of course he had tea. It had always been a staple for both of them. He poured a glass for her, added ice, then opened the wine for himself.
She found plates and silverware, took them to the table in the dining room, in front of French doors that led out to a balcony facing the ocean in the distance.
She’d loved the view the moment she’d seen the place. He’d known she would.
“We could have just gone to a restaurant,” she said as they sat down. She hadn’t looked at him since they’d been inside.
“It would have taken twice as long and you’re in a hurry. Besides, we can get through more business if we aren’t constantly being interrupted by wait staff.”
He’d wanted their talk to be private. What they were doing, her having a baby with his sperm, that was about as private as it could get. And now, they were about to enter into
a second business agreement.
“I thought maybe you wanted to show me things,” she said. “You know, where things were in case you needed me to tend to them in your absence.”
That was logical, he thought, since he’d given her the key.
“Like maybe how the thermostat works or where the water shut-off valve is,” she continued.
Good points, both of them. “I’ll do both before you leave,” he said, digging into his lasagna. She’d served herself a big bowl of salad with a small slice of the lasagna, forgoing the garlic bread.
“We should have been doing this all along,” he told her, at ease with her in a way he hadn’t been sitting across from her at their various restaurant haunts.
