Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(128)

He hadn’t called her or texted her or let her know he was coming. He hadn’t wanted her to tell him no, to turn him away. He’d wanted to use every persuasive power at his disposal when he finally got the chance to talk to her. And if sex was part of that persuasion toolbox—okay, that would be no hardship.

He pulled out his phone and dialed her number, but he got her voice mail. He didn’t leave her a message. Instead, he wrote her a text. View’s nice up here.

He put his phone back in his pocket, but a minute later he pulled it out to make sure a text hadn’t come in and failed to vibrate. Nothing.

He didn’t know her address, and there was little point in trying to go to her on New Year’s Eve, anyway. She was probably at a party somewhere. Smiling at another man across the room. Dancing.

He was torturing himself.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and his heart pounded madly, so hard it hurt. He pulled it out.

Owen. She there?

No.

Oh, man. Sorry.

Dumb to think that because he wanted so badly for her to be here, she somehow would. As if he could conjure her through will alone.

His festive surroundings had begun to oppress. The Mylar balloons with their Happy New Year’s message were mocking him again.

He headed for the elevator, took it down.

He saw her again in his mind’s eye, at another New Year’s Eve party. Smiling. Dancing. Leaning close to whisper. And, later, tilting her face up as the countdown receded toward zero.

The thought of it made his chest hurt so much that he flattened his palm against the wall of the elevator to steady himself.

Because of course anyone who saw her across the room, as he had, would want her. Would want her so much—

Miles’s teeth hurt and his hands clenched into fists, remembering.

He knew there was no one else for him. All the women who’d come before her were ghost versions of what he wanted. Her, naked, in those red lace boy shorts, gesturing and laughing and making him laugh. Down on her knees, draping herself over his shoulder while he knelt at her feet, standing with her legs apart and her hands braced against the shower wall. Telling him about her job, her day, her reasons for things. Smiling, laughing, teasing, remaking the world in her image: Luminous. Glorious.

He stepped into the lobby and headed for the revolving doors.

He’d seen her, a year ago tonight, and there was no way to unsee her. No way to unravel her from his own fibers, no way to forget the whisper of her voice in his ear, the curves of her body under his hands, the feel of her as he moved in her, through her. There was the world, vivid with her presence, and then there was this. One foot in front of the other. While that imaginary other man at that other party watched her across the room and coveted and schemed.

Because Miles had screwed up and needed too much and confided too little and waited too long. And being here was too little, too late.

He was going to make himself sick.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. Owen, he thought, and he almost let it go.

Only he didn’t. He pulled out his phone.

Nora. View’s not bad from down here, either.

He looked up and she stepped out of the revolving door, toward him.

* * *

She wore a loose, short bright-blue dress with chunky blue patent-leather shoes. She had a matching shawl wrapped around her shoulders and draped over her arms. The blue of the dress made her eyes bluer, and the drape of the dress made her breasts higher and rounder, and he—he stuck both his hands in his pockets so he wouldn’t try to slide them under the flippy little hem of that dress, which had a ruffle all the way around it.

“Nora,” he said.

“I was already on my way when I got your text.” She said it so defiantly that it would have made him laugh, except that all he wanted to do was grab her and hold her and brand her in every way he knew how.

“Nora, I—”

“No. Listen.”

She looked fierce. For a moment he was afraid again. She was here, but that didn’t mean she was his.

“I almost didn’t come here tonight,” she said.

He started to say he was glad she had, but she talked right through the half-formed words.

“Because I couldn’t do it. I tried and tried—I practiced in front of the goddamned mirror—but no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t say it. I couldn’t tell you I was a hundred percent sure you were innocent.”

He shook his head and started to speak, but she shook hers, too, hard. Don’t interrupt me.

“I didn’t think you’d want to see me if I couldn’t say that.”

“Oh, God, Nora, I’m so sorry—”

But she was still talking, ferocious and relentless. “I kept thinking about Henry. How Henry told me I was too trusting. I thought that was why I couldn’t trust you. I felt like Henry had taken away the best part of me. The part that sees the best in people. And that was all I could focus on, how I couldn’t see the best in you, and it was Henry’s fault.”