“Where did you learn this?” I asked, breathless. The wine still singing in my veins, the closeness of his body equally intoxicating.
“I took up ballroom dancing at the same time as bodybuilding,” he murmured in my ear. “All part of my master plan. What do you think?”
About you? Hell if I know.
About the dance, well…
“Not bad,” I said. “Could use a few hip thrusts, some extra grinding.”
Asher choked and snorted simultaneously, his expression halfway between amused and scandalized. “Kate, this is a dance of grace and precision!”
“What, you can’t grind precisely?”
We sniped back and forth as he whirled me across the floor, but it was somehow more gentle, less pointed, than all of our arguments before, all of our insults softened by the smiles tugging at our lips, by the way neither of us could seem to look away from each other’s eyes.
Before I knew it, the music slowed to a stop, the dance over. I looked up at Asher. If you were literally any other super hot guy, I’d kiss you right now, I thought.
But somehow that didn’t make me want any other super hot guy to be there instead.
Asher opened his mouth, probably to say something to ruin the moment and demonstrate his trademark sense of timing, but I spotted a clock over his shoulder and beat him to the punch. “Shit!”
“Kate, I need to tell you s—wait, what?”
I pointed at the clock. “I never meant to stay this late. Oh shit, I have so much work to do tomorrow. I need to head back right now if I’m going to get even three hours of sleep tonight. Dammit!”
Asher looked disappointed but nodded, accepting. He reached into his pocket. “I’ll call you a cab.”
“Don’t even worry about it,” I said, swatting his hand away from his cell. “I asked Lacey specifically to make this one close to my place, it’s less than a mile. I could walk there blindfolded.”
Asher frowned. “You’re tipsy and in heels. At least let me walk you home.”
Maybe I’ve mentioned this before, but I do have a strict policy of always accepting favors from attractive men. “Well, if you insist.”
“I do.”
I’ve never suffered the horrors of a truly crappy neighborhood, preferring to experience all those hilarious stories about dead bodies in communal laundry rooms from Lacey, at least before she moved into Grant’s place, which looks like what you’d get if you cryogenically froze Frank Lloyd Wright for three hundred years and then shoved a pencil in his hand and told him to get back to work.
Still, it was definitely less upscale than Asher was probably used to, and I found myself suddenly seeing small defects as we walked through the crisp night air: the peeling paint on an old house, the smell of rotting fruit in the parking lot where the farmer’s market hadn’t quite swept up, the empty McDonald’s that hadn’t been open for years and was currently serving as a graffiti artist’s canvas.
I was leaning on Asher for support as we walked, and I could feel myself tensing, slightly, even as part of me longed to sink further into his supporting arms. What if he was judging my neighborhood, and by extension, me? What if he made a snide comment? What if I committed justifiable homicide?
“This reminds me of my old neighborhood,” Asher said softly.
I glanced at him, surprised. “Seriously?”
“Not all of Grant’s friends were born into money,” Asher said, looking upward as we strolled to watch the smoke rise from the chimney of the local Vietnamese bakery, getting an early start on the day. “I made my fortune in college, remember?”
“Right, that imaging system thing with the nerd girl from your gaming club.”
“That nerd girl gave me a flying leap right into Warren Buffet’s social circle,” he reminded me teasingly. “I made my first billion with her work. Plus, I happen to know that the latest Sherlock Holmes movie you love so much uses six of her patents in the special effects, so who’s the nerd now?”
“You,” I said. “Always you.” I softened it by squeezing his hand slightly, and I was rewarded with one of his real smiles, the kind that almost seemed to hide at the corners of his mouth, that made my heart do a little flip like a pancake in a skillet.
“I felt so isolated in college,” Asher continued to muse. “My parents worked so hard all their lives, and they always imagined that my siblings and I would pursue some sort of noble calling, but there I was, studying business down in the muck and grubbing after more money. They wanted me to go to seminary like my big brother, or at least politics like my sister.”