“He looks like a happy man to me. I think things are going his way.” And she gave him a sideways smile that was full of flirt. Like, Things could be going your way, too, hon.
Her top was halter style, and she had great shoulders, strong and round. She wore a gray tweedy skirt and smooth black knee-high boots, and his unruly mind served up an image of her, naked except for those slick boots.
Jesus.
It wouldn’t go away, that picture of her. It wasn’t the flotsam and jetsam of his brain. It was a fully formed idea.
He seriously considered the possibility of it.
Maybe the year didn’t have to slink out in shame. Maybe he could put a more emphatic end on it.
“Let me refill your drink,” he said, reaching for the empty martini glass in her hand.
She gave him a big, genuine grin. “I’ve got a better idea.”
“Yeah?”
“Let’s dance. I love dancing. I love this music.”
She didn’t say it in a vampy way, but it shorted out something in his brain. It seemed like sexiness was something that happened to her accidentally while she was having more fun than the average woman could wring out of a New Year’s party. That was what made her so hot, he realized. She wasn’t trying particularly hard. She was just more here than most people were. More present, more vivid. And so she’d penetrated the fog he’d been wearing, like rifle fire through body armor.
Here was the thing. Numb had felt good. Numb had felt safe. Numb was what you were supposed to feel in his situation, when you were falsely suspected of embezzling more than three hundred thousand dollars from the nonprofit organization you’d helped found and when your fiancée told you adios, she didn’t think she was the stand-by-your-man type. You were supposed to lick your wounds and hide out for weeks, months, years. You were supposed to have as much life in you as a glacial boulder. You weren’t supposed to go to a New Year’s Eve party and spot some hot elf–witch chick with joie de vivre busting out all over and get all hot and bothered.
Numb had felt good. This—alive, buzzing, raw, wide open—felt dangerous.
“Hey, I get it,” she said. “I’m not your type.”
He shook his head. So far from the truth, it couldn’t find it with a lie detector.
“Is that a ‘No, you’re not my type’ or a ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong’?”
“You’ve got that part dead wrong,” he said, with some heat.
Her smile began at the corners of her mouth. “You like ’em younger.”
Shake.
“Prettier?”
Shake.
“Less busty?”
They were grinning at each other now, and it felt good, something shaken loose inside. Freed.
“Less bossy. You’re not in the market. You’re married. You’re gay.”
He laughed out loud at that, and he knew he’d dance with her. And probably not stop there. He’d think about the consequences, how they fit with his broke-ass life, later. After midnight. Next year.
“Okay, you’re not gay. Good, then, come on.” And she grabbed his hand and tugged him toward the dance floor.
There was some kind of eighties’ theme going on with the music, and AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long” was playing. Well, that kind of erased all subtlety from the situation, didn’t it? And maybe that was for the best, because his body had also decided to bypass subtlety and go for broke, and by the time she got her arms around his neck and slid against him, he was hard. Like really hard, so the shimmy of her hip against his crotch found him, no problem. She did it again, and he wanted to simultaneously ask her to stop and beg her to keep doing it. Maybe it was something about the lyrics, which had always done it for him, even though he wasn’t quite old enough to have bumped and ground to this song at middle-school dances.
Her breasts pressed to his chest, her thighs moved across his uncomfortably engorged dick, and she tilted her pelvis to grind on him. Okay, that wasn’t accidentally sexy, that was overtly take-what-you-want, go-for-broke sexy, and it notched his own arousal up about six levels. She smelled unbelievably good, her hair strawberry-scented to match the color. He knew because he had his nose in it, and somehow his hands had found her ass and were guiding her movements against him. The friction there was the epicenter of something disturbingly fast-building, and he had to pull away a little from her, take it down a notch, because she was too much energy in his arms, too much pure, raw temptation.
He tried to think whether he’d ever wanted a total stranger like this, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t. He could blame the song, he could blame the speed with which she’d thawed his numbness, he could blame the evening, the anonymity, the unfamiliar city, the beautiful scenery, the holiday with all its “Auld Lang Syne” bonhomie, but at the bottom and the center of all the thinking and explaining there was just the feel of wanting her.