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That would have to be good enough for now. And knowing Casper as well as I was beginning to, I recognized how hard that was for her to admit.
By the time the sixth and final course—pavlova—was served, there wasn’t much vodka left in the bottle.
“Did we drink all that?” Casper asked when I held it up to check.
“I don’t think it was full when he brought it to the table. However, I have no intention of driving.” I checked the time and saw it was almost eleven. If we stuck around another hour, we’d find ourselves in the center of a dance club.
“I can call a car service,” she offered.
“Already taken care of. They’ll be here in about thirty minutes.”
“I meant for me.”
“I picked you up. I’ll see you home.”
“But—”
“And then I’ll have the driver take me to a hotel, where I’ll sleep off our delightful evening before picking up my car sometime tomorrow.”
“You don’t have to go to all that trouble.”
I shook my head. “Please allow me to be the gentleman my mother raised me to be.” I shook it again. “Actually, she had little to do with it.”
“Your dad raised you?”
If I’d taken a drink of vodka, I would’ve spit it out. “Uh, no. They had nannies for that. Or I did.”
Casper reached over and put her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry, Spider.”
“Hey, I survived, right?”
It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes before my cell buzzed with a message saying our driver had arrived. I excused myself, paid the tab, and swung into the men’s room before returning to the table where Casper waited. “Ready?” I asked. When she nodded, I pulled out her chair and offered her my hand.
“Your nannies did a good job,” she said, taking it.
We walked out of the restaurant that way, but as soon as we were outside, where the car waited, she yanked her hand away.
I knew Casper didn’t feel about me the way I did for her. I wondered if she’d ever open up and let another man get close to her. The time she’d thanked me for being such a good friend to her, “almost like a brother,” she’d added, felt like a knife in my heart. Until then, I’d believed we were getting closer. In fact, that night, I’d planned to kiss her when we returned to the camp—as cabins were called in the Adirondacks. Had she sensed it? Was that the reason she’d made it a point to tell me she looked at me the same way she would a sibling?
It hadn’t stopped the way I felt about her, though. Calla Rey wasn’t just pretty; she was hot as fuck. I’d lost count of the times I fell asleep to fantasies of having her in my bed instead of in one in a room down the hall.
She was tall, probably five feet ten or eleven. And while she was bodybuilder-competition toned, she was also curvy. It didn’t matter that the dress she wore covered her from chin to ankles; it hugged her lushness in a way that had me on the edge of desire all night long. Now that I’d allowed myself to think about it, I’d moved to full-on, embarrassingly hard as a rock.
“You really don’t have to do this,” she said when I opened the back passenger door and motioned her inside.
“I really do,” I said, sliding in beside her.
The driveback to Di Lido Isle, one of South Beach’s Venetian Islands, took ten minutes. Five in, Casper’s head was on my shoulder, and she was fast asleep. I hated waking her when we arrived at the gate, but I had to since I didn’t know the code. Before I did, though, I leaned down and pressed my lips to her forehead. It wasn’t the first time I had, either. Casper was one of those people car rides put to sleep if she was tired. I’d taken advantage of it each and every time it happened.
“Hey, sweetheart,” I whispered. “We’re back.”
She jolted upright and surveyed our surroundings. “The code is 2328,” she told the driver. It wasn’t hard to figure out the numbers corresponded to her dead husband’s name if typed into a keypad. It reminded me of how I’d changed my own the day I returned from Canada Lake to a house I rarely occupied.
I shook my head, chastising myself once again for falling for a woman there was no prayer would ever be interested in me. I couldn’t help it, though. I’d missed her and had to see her.
It dawned on me then that we never got back around to the reason I’d invited her to dinner. My proposition. Given how tired she was and how much we’d both had to drink, I wouldn’t bring it up now. If I did, I had little doubt she’d dismiss it out of hand without the slightest consideration. Maybe rather than returning to Palm Beach tomorrow, I’d wake up early, get a ride to Raspoutine to pick up my car, then swing by here and invite her to breakfast.
“I’ll walk her in, then be right back,” I said to the driver when he pulled up in front of her house.
