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Wes tamped down the memories, glad his frigid feet were available to cool the heated blood in his veins. Any hotter and he could melt a path between here and the hotel.
“What did you say to Dan when you talked to him?” she said.
“That I’d run into you on the plane,” he said. The worried look on her face was entertaining, an
d he couldn’t resist letting a slight smile slip. “I didn’t share your attempt to seduce me.”
She stopped on the sidewalk and narrowed her gaze at him. “Did I really mention kitchen utensils?”
Wes halted beside her. The skeptical look on her face bunched her brow in a way that was too charming for comfort. No, the culinary tools had been the result of his own overly imaginative libido. But since she’d subjected him to the torture of offering him something he couldn’t have, it had only seemed fair to pay her back.
And he wasn’t ready to let her off the hook so easily, not when he was still revved up from her intoxicated seduction attempts.
He continued up the sidewalk. “Are you really wearing Hello Kitty underwear?” He brushed off the crackling sizzle the question created in his body.
She huffed out a breath and trudged on beside him, clearly declaring the topic an impasse. After a few more moments filled with the sound of whipping wind, the sting of pelting snowflakes, and a pregnant silence, she said, “What else did you tell Dan?”
His heart pinched a touch, and he gave up the teasing tone. “I didn’t mention the part where you passed out.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then she winced. “He would have told Mom and Dad. And my return home is going to be difficult enough.”
He tried for an encouraging tone. “They’ll simply be happy to see you.”
But Wes knew her father well enough to know there would be rough times ahead. Through the years, Wes had witnessed enough of the man’s tendency to fire disapproving words at his daughter. In truth, Wes had always admired the way she’d stood up for herself, refusing to change in the face of overwhelming pressure on all fronts. At home. At the exclusive private school. By the very town she’d been raised in. If she’d lived somewhere else, with a different family, he doubted she would have been quite so obstinate.
He glanced at her set face and let out a silent scoff. Or maybe she would have.
“Happy to see me?” Evie’s brow furrowed with pure skepticism. “I doubt that.”
“They love you,” he said.
“Not as much as they love you.”
An annoying flare of guilt made his words harder than he’d intended. “That’s not true.”
“Oh please, my parents love me because they’re supposed to, but they adore you,” she said with a wry crinkle of her brow. “You’re so…so…” She looked him up and down and sent him a faint frown of disgust that held no heart. “Perfect.”
Perfect? How could a man whose life had been reduced to spending New Year’s Eve with a client be considered perfect? “How do you figure that?”
“With your fabulously successful investment firm”—she rolled her eyes—“your perfect looks, and your perkily perfect, Stepford-esque girlfriends.” She glanced at him curiously. “Whatever happened to that girl you dated in college?”
“We got married.”
Evie’s gasp was loud enough to be heard over the whipping wind, and she came to a halt, closing her eyes. “Oh, God,” she croaked, sounding miserable and looking entirely too cute. “I threw myself at a married man?”
Technically, she’d thrown herself at a man who was rapidly approaching the definition of a pathetic workaholic.
“Don’t worry,” he finally said. A muscle in his cheek twitched as he went on. “Sara and I got divorced two years ago.”
Her eyes flew open, her warm gaze meeting his. “Oh.”
She looked as if she didn’t know whether to be happily relieved or appropriately sad.
He relaxed a fraction. “But, cheer up,” he said with a slight shrug, pushing aside the unhappy memories. “You’ll be glad to learn the divorce went perfectly, too.”
Her smile was infectious—her eyes lit, and he fought the answering smile. Until the shared amusement, the need to connect won out. A tiny grin crept up his face, kicking Evie’s up a notch as well.
Which only made her more beautiful.
