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I round the hood of my SUV as a man opens the driver’s side door. His foot hits the paved driveway. The first thing I notice are his black polished shoes. The second are the socks covered in a bone and paw print. Dog person? Then the black dress pants. I allow my gaze to climb as he steps out of the car, rising with his lean frame.
His attention is on the phone in his hand, which gives me the opportunity to do a thorough visual assessment. And I embrace that opportunity with enthusiasm.
He’s wearing a pale blue button-down and a tie with what looks like a binary code pattern on it. His jaw is angular, his lips full, his nose straight. He’s wearing black-rimmed glasses, his dark hair is parted at the side and styled with purpose. My mouth goes dry as I put together the individual components and create a whole picture.
Miles Thorn is exceptionally good-looking. The kind of good-looking that makes me think of Hallmark movies, or bumping into someone and accidentally on purpose dropping everything in my hands just to have an excuse to stage an introduction.
“Hi! You must be—”
He doesn’t even spare me a glance as he cuts me off by raising a single finger. Then he turns away so his back is mostly to me and raises his phone to his mouth. “I’m meeting with a cat sitter right now. I’ll message when I’m done. Shouldn’t be long.”
I’m so busy being disappointed that he’s ruined his attractiveness by being horribly rude that I don’t pay attention to where my feet are going. My toe catches on the curb, and I stumble forward.
I lose the battle with gravity and go sprawling across the driveway. My purse flies out of my hand, and because I never zip it up, the contents scatter.
“Shit. Are you okay?” Polished black shoes appear beside me, and then two strong hands slide under my arms, lifting me back to my feet.
And now I’m back to finding him attractive. “I’m fine. Thank you. Embarrassed, but fine.” Heat climbs my neck and settles in my cheeks.
“What the hell happened?” He glances around as if he’s expecting someone to have been responsible for my clumsiness.
“I didn’t see the curb.” I touch my temple and realize my glasses are no longer on my face. Without them my vision isn’t the best. Not so bad that I can’t see someone standing in front of me, but bad enough that I can’t read road signs. “I lost my glasses.”
“I see them.” He sidesteps me and bends to pick them up.
Instead of handing them over, though, he brings them up as though he’s going to place them on my face like my eye doctor used to do when I was a kid. I startle and he ends up poking me in the cheek with one of the arms.
“I don’t know why I did that. Here.” He shakes his head and thrusts them at me.
Our fingertips graze with the handoff. It’s innocent contact, fraught with my embarrassment and his, but even with how mortified I am, warmth, not from mortification this time, spreads through my limbs and settles awkwardly in the pit of my stomach.
Do not get butterflies over a cute guy with questionable manners, Kitty.
I manage to get my glasses back on without poking out my own eyeball or bursting into flames, which I’m considering a win. There are new scratches on the right lens, but a bit of buffing should take care of it.
He checks his phone again, while asking, “You’re not going to sue me or anything, are you?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
He shoves his phone in his pocket. His cheeks, which are high and sharp, are tinged pink. “Nothing. Sorry. It’s been a day. You’re okay?”
“Fairly embarrassed and feeling like this is an introduction I wish I could erase and try again, but otherwise fine.” I extend a hand, wishing my mouth knew when to take a break with the awkward words and hoping we can start fresh with a handshake. “I’m Kitty Hart, owner of the Kitty Whisperer, cat care and training services. You must be Miles Thorn.”
He stares at my hand for a few seconds before he wraps his around mine. He has long fingers with neatly filed nails. There’s a mark of pen on his thumb. “You can just call me Miles.”
But it’s the strange hum that seems to run up my arm and then ping its way through the rest of my body that makes my brain cells turn off for a moment and my hormones fire up like a furnace on full blast. It’s also the reason my voice gets all husky when I say, “Hi, Miles.”
He smirks, like maybe he realizes he’s having this effect on me, and says, in the same husky tone, “Hi, Kitty.”
