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“Thank you.” My chest didn’t ache anymore when I told someone about her. That was the weird thing about being so young when I lost her. It was such a foundational piece to how our family ended up, that it felt a little bit like telling someone else’s story. “My dad, with his three sons, remarried Sheila, with her boy and two girls, a couple of years later. And because that wasn’t enough chaos, they added Poppy into the mix just after they got married, and I’m not sure she’ll ever cease to remind us that she’s the cherry on top of the whole pile of kids.”
“My goodness,” Ivy sighed. “I’d ask their names, but you’re right, it takes a PhD to keep all that straight.”
“You don’t have one of those? What kind of woman did I get stuck with?”
When she laughed—a delicate, affronted little sound—I felt my whole stomach tense, a pleasing contraction of my muscles directly from the low, throaty sound.
At least she did laugh because I had to resist the urge to bang my head against the elevator wall.
Was that my best attempt at flirting? Good Lord. I didn’t know how to do this anymore. It had been too damn long since I wanted to. My cheeks felt suspiciously hot, and for the first time, I was thankful for the low lighting.
Ivy shifted, tucking her legs to the side, and it brought more of her face into the light.
The sharp edge of her jaw, the high cheekbones and the line of her nose.
She wasn’t a soft beauty.
Something was intimidating about it—the angles of her features were almost severe, but that was why I wanted nothing more than to keep studying them.
Maybe it was the nature of my job—to figure out how something came together in a way that worked, that was built to last—but I wanted nothing more than to see her clearly enough to piece together why I found her so damn attractive.
This was not me. And stuck in the dark elevator with a beautiful woman, I didn’t want to fight that anymore. It was a break from my reality—wearing blinders to anything like this—and it felt good to want to take it.
“No PhD,” she said lightly, folding her hands demurely into her lap. “Just some boring old master’s degrees.”
I whistled. “Some?”
“Two.”
“Slacker,” I muttered. She laughed again, and damn if it didn’t feel like I won the lottery when she did that.
“I don’t think anyone’s ever called me that,” Ivy said lightly. Just as I was about to apologize, she spoke again. “Congratulations on being my first.”
The subtext had me huffing out an incredulous laugh.
I wasn’t much of a believer in fate, but this—being stuck in there with her, after noticing her outside—felt an awful lot like it was meant to be. And I didn’t know what to make of that.
All I knew, the only thing I was certain about, was that I wanted to take in everything I could while she was there.
“You’re telling me no one teases you?”
She paused, tilting her head as she considered the question. “No.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Most men are too intimidated to tease me,” she said easily. Her eyes never wavered from mine. “And it’s a rarity when they have the balls to flirt with me.”
A sharp spike of interest crawled hot up my throat.
Who was this woman?
“Is that what you’re doing?” she asked. Like she was asking about the weather. Or what I was eating. Or some other mundane question that didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Honesty couldn’t hurt, though.
“Trying to decide whether it’s a good idea or not,” I answered.
She hummed but didn’t answer, and I found myself grinning.
