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Up until that moment, I’d been fine being on my own. My divorce six months earlier taught me I didn’t need any complications. I could come and go as I pleased without worrying about leaving anyone behind. No promises. No commitments.
But not with Claudia. With her, I wanted to lose myself in her eyes, her mouth, her body forever. I wanted to give her everything I could give even if, in two days, my team was deploying for seven months. I’d have asked for her number if I hadn’t been such a dick about it.
But I was a different man then.
I wasn’t broken.
Chapter Two
Claudia
“Ma, let me call you right back. My hands are full,” I say as I shut the door behind me. My mother’s phone call couldn’t have come at the worst time, my mind drawing a blank the moment I saw her name on the phone screen. I didn’t have to take the call but I’d run out of things to say to Trevor then.
What do you say to someone you spent one wild night with a year and a half earlier thinking you’d never run into them again?
“Everything all right?” my best friend Leigh Elliot asks from the kitchen as she pops open a bottle of wine.
I set my tote bag on the floor. “Quick question: what are the odds of running into someone you had a one-night stand with more than a year ago in the same building?”
Leigh’s eyes widen. “Bennett lives here?”
“No, not Bennett,” I reply, laughing. “Trevor.”
She stares at me in disbelief. “No way. Are you sure it was him?”
“I rode the elevator with him. We talked. We said hi. We said each other’s names. It was him,” I reply. “And he lives in 4G.”
“That’s two doors down from me.” She sets the wine on the counter. “What are you going to do?”
“Nothing,” I reply, shrugging. “So he lives in the same building.”
“What if he asks you out?”
I sigh. Do I really want to worry about that? But I’d be lying if I pretended the thought didn’t cross my mind. “I don’t know.”
“You guys hit it off really well that night,” Leigh says.
“But that was a year and a half ago. A lifetime for some people.”
She laughs. “Seriously, Claudia, you two got along so well that I freaked out when you didn’t come home the next morning.”
“He dropped me off at two—”
“—in the afternoon, complete with love bites,” Leigh says, giggling. “I thought you both ran off to get married or something.”
I chuckle. “You’re exaggerating. We had brunch and hung out.” More like we ordered room service and never left the hotel room, but Leigh doesn’t need to know the specifics.
“Yeah, right. Claudia, the guy was smitten.Smitten!” she exclaims. “What else did he say today?”
I shrug. “Nothing. The elevator goes fast.”
“Are you sure he didn’t say anything else? Ask you out maybe?”
“I think we were both too shocked to see each other again,” I say. “We actually had nothing to say the rest of the way.”
“What did you have to go back down to your car for anyway? I thought we got everything.”
“Not everything.” From the tote bag, I pull out an arrangement of sun-dried chile pepper pods in one hand and a jar of Hatch green chile in another. “These are for you, straight from Hatch, New Mexico.”
