“We have a room on the lower level that faces the back,” said David. “A kind of family room we sometimes use for garden parties in the summer because the back wall is all windows. There’s a big grill outside. Let’s have a winter picnic. We’ll grill steaks. We can eat inside and watch the stars come out.”
“Or we can be hardy,” said Tania, “and bundle up and go outside for a stargazing party. I understand Cassie can show us a few constellations. And I make a wicked Irish coffee.”
“What about the projections you wanted to go through?” Jack asked David. They’d been led to expect a working dinner.
“This sounds like more fun,” said Senior, waving a hand dismissively. “What do you say?”
Jack looked at Cassie. She was beaming, lit up like a big copper sun. “All right,” he agreed.
As they tromped outside in boots, parkas, and hats, he wondered if it could really be this easy. Every time he tried to turn the conversation back to business, Wexler deflected him. “If I have any questions about that, I’ll call you after New Year’s,” he’d say. Or, “Why spoil a gorgeous clear night like this with business?”
What the hell had shifted Wexler’s mood so dramatically? He had an unsettling feeling it had something to do with what had happened between Cassie and Junior. Junior himself gave no clues. He’d eaten dinner with them but had been uncharacteristically subdued. Then he’d begged off, but not before saying a polite good night to everyone. It didn’t escape Jack’s notice that his eyes lingered on Cassie for a long time as she graced him with a wide, genuine smile.
Cassie. While he and Tania sat on lawn chairs near the house sipping booze-laced coffee, Cassie and David stood twenty feet away, heads tilted back to look at what was, he had to admit, a pretty spectacular night sky.
He marveled anew at how Cassie managed to look so beautiful when nearly every inch of her skin was covered by wool and Gore-Tex. Even from this distance, even in the dark, she radiated a kind of energy. There was a luminescence about her that was like a drug. He pushed to his feet. Why resist? Maybe he could drive off Senior and find out what the hell was going on.
They were talking in low tones when he approached.
“Stargazing parties,” said Senior. “You’ll have to make him do them. In fact, I’ll make it a clause in the contract.”
Holy crap. Wexler was going to sell. She’d done it. He didn’t know how, but somehow Cassidy James, bartender-slash-math student, had brokered Winter Enterprises’ biggest deal of the year.
She turned to him then, and she smiled. Just a smile. But it made his chest tighten and his heart thump, because he thought it might be a different smile than the ones she gave everyone else. It seemed like a private smile. One that hinted at possibilities he hadn’t considered. It provided new information, variables that hadn’t ever factored into his planning.
It was a smile that promised love.
He decided right then and there, standing in the snow with Cassie James smiling at him. He’d always avoided women because he thought they distracted him from what was important. But this one, she was going to distract him no matter what, whether she was in his bed or someone else’s. Even if he never saw her again, he’d never be able to get her out of his mind. And the thought of never seeing her again, the image of her in someone else’s bed? He answered that question with another. There would be no Winter Enterprises to protect if he became completely unhinged, would there?
So screw the rules. He was going to take Cassie James back to her room and fuck her all night long. Then they were going back to the city and he was going to take her on a proper date.
Jack’s little revelation scared him. But not enough to make him back down. Cassie deserved to be wooed. And the thought of anyone else doing that made his stomach churn. Still, there was no need to call attention to themselves here, so when she started yawning and announced her intention to call it a night, he said good night calmly and pleasantly, just like David and Tania did, and watched her walk away, pretending that his insides weren’t churning like an overflowing river.
He’d give her maybe a half-hour head start. And then she was his.
The longest thirty minutes of his life, it turned out. Wexler had had a few drinks, and was getting nostalgic about the early years of his career. Jack tried not to keep peeking at his watch. It didn’t do any good anyway. The damn minute hand might as well have been broken for all the progress he saw.
Thirty minutes was kind of arbitrary anyway. There was nothing wrong with giving her a seventeen minute head start. Surely that was enough to dispel any potential suspicions.