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“You’re all focusing on the wrong thing here.” Eloise huffed, expelling a deep breath and wrestling with her own impatience. “Did you hear what I said? The part about his friends showing up and him getting all ‘tough guy’ on me and telling me to mind my own business?”
They frowned at her in unison, and she took another long sip of her drink.
“Hmm.” Kim leaned back and crossed her arms protectively over her chest. “That does sound suspicious.”
“Oh, come on,” Sarah said, shaking her head. Her party hat tipped dangerously to one side and Chloe reached across the table to fix it. “That could be because of anything. Maybe this guy stole his last girlfriend or something and that’s why he wants to keep you far away from him.”
Kim shook her head, always cautious, but Chloe jumped at the chance to agree with Sarah and nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah,” Chloe said. “I mean, sure, it’s a little strange, but he seems like a nice guy when he’s with you, right? A little gruff, but maybe a bit of a tender side under there? Sounds like a dream guy to me.”
Kim frowned. “So, she’s just supposed to pretend that whatever was going on with him that day didn’t happen? It sounds like he could be up to something illegal. What if he’s involved with something really dangerous?” She slipped her cardigan back onto her shoulder and tried not to make eye contact after she was done talking. It was rare for her to argue, especially with Chloe or Sarah, but the margaritas seemed to have given her a boost of liquid courage.
Chloe twisted a lock of her long, brown hair around her finger and cast a sidelong look at Sarah as Eloise’s stomach turned sour. They all got along well enough but Chloe didn’t like being contradicted and they had all been drinking just enough to loosen their usual inhibitions. “Involved with something? Like what?” Chloe asked. “Insurance fraud?”
There was an unpleasant edge of sarcasm in the question but Kim’s eyes narrowed. “I watch a lot of true crime and you’d be surprised what a seemingly normal person can be involved in.”
“I told Jackson and David I thought he might be dealing drugs because he keeps such odd hours and is always looking over his shoulder.” Eloise waved a salsa covered chip at them, anything to draw their attention to her and away from each other, before biting into it.
Kim snorted. “Dealing drugs? That’s the best you could come up with? What if he’s a serial killer or running a human trafficking ring to steal people’s kidneys? Or worse?”
“Worse?” Eloise asked, but no one was paying attention to her again.
“As if something like that would stop me from finding the man of my dreams,” Sarah said. “Sometimes you have to take a chance on love.”
Kim pointed a finger at her. “That kind of reckless attitude is exactly how you ended up dating your last boyfriend and that guy was?—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Sarah said, one hand waving to dismiss the rest of whatever Kim had been planning to say. “But you have to try, don’t you? I have a goal. I’m gonna be one half of a power couple, find somebody with ambition, and I am not about to let something that’s probably not true anyway get in the way of my dreams.”
“Ethan is not the man of my dreams,” Eloise reminded them. “I barely know him. Jackson and David don’t seem to think he’s that bad but?—”
“I agree with Sarah,” Chloe said, and Eloise barely resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “You’re always so …”
“Picky,” Sarah supplied when Chloe struggled to find the right word. “You barely date and when you do, you tear the guy to pieces in your mind. You look for flaws so of course you find them.”
Eloise looked away, running one finger down the condensation on the side of her glass and avoiding their eyes as they watched her. She was terrible at dating but only because she had never really tried. It wasn’t like she was defective. It was just that she knew where her priorities were supposed to be until her career was established.
Career first, that’s what her mother had always told her. Eloise was starting to think she’d really meant career only—she was twenty-seven and still dodging lectures about her career and her dating life during their monthly phone calls, after all—but even if that wasn’t the case … Well, if she ever was successful enough in her career for her mother to stop nagging her about avoiding men, she was going to start her romantic life with someone more respectable than Ethan. Someone with a good job, health insurance, a 401K …
She’d have to go into it sensibly, with someone that checked all the boxes for a long-term life partner. Ethan didn’t check any of them, as far as she could tell.
God, what had she been thinking even going to his house? Maybe she should stop being mad at Ethan for just being, well, Ethan and start being mad at herself for getting distracted by a pretty smile and a pair of dimples.
“You should at least let him explain what happened.” Chloe’s expression was caught somewhere between pity and condescension. She never seemed to have trouble attracting men so Eloise supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that Chloe wasn’t the most empathetic person to her struggles.
“It has been a long time since you were even interested in anybody,” Kim agreed reluctantly. It looked as though it pained her to say it and Eloise thought it probably had. Any hint of possible conflict was more than she would want to be involved in. Kim was so timid she would probably have run from Ethan on sight and never looked back.
“I’m not interested in him,” Eloise insisted. It wasn’t entirely a lie. She had her priorities and that was more important than her skyrocketing blood pressure and odd urge to lean into him and find out what he tasted like. A small shudder ran through her at that mental image and she hoped the others didn’t notice. “I’m just mad that he got me to feel sorry for him and his ridiculously named dog and then he had the absolute nerve to get a bad attitude with me.”
“You wouldn’t be this mad if you didn’t think he was hot.” Sarah smiled, lips curving like a cat that had finally caught the canary. “And maybe you like that he’s a bit unpredictable. You can’t figure him out and it bothers you just enough to keep your interest. Opposites attract and all that,” she said with a nod, twirling the little umbrella in her drink with a knowing wink.
“I’ve never been into bad boys,” Eloise grumbled, unwilling to admit that her friend had made several very accurate points.
“You’ve never found a hot one who looks at you with bedroom eyes. Ten bucks says he’s itching to get under your skin and ruffle those perfect feathers of yours.”
The image that conjured, of Ethan’s hands and his mouth disrupting the tight grip she kept on her life flashed tantalizingly across her mind and she shrugged helplessly. She wanted it—her physical reaction to him was stronger than it had ever been for anyone else—even though she knew very well that she shouldn’t.
She’d never been this at odds with herself before. It was as though, somehow, in the course of a few offhand meetings and one disastrous spaghetti dinner he had cracked her open and all the carefully concealed urges she’d been refusing to acknowledge all her life had come spilling out. She was trying to shove it all back in before anyone noticed but it was sliding through her fingers and making a mess of things.
Maybe this was what her mother had always warned her about. You could build a life and a career for yourself, put all the blocks in place with years of work and consideration, and someone could waltz in and disrupt it all on a whim. One flashing dimple and an attractive body and she was dangerously close to losing her focus.
