Unexpectedly His(17)

Head over heels. Honestly, who’d believe a man as flat-out gorgeous as Nick would fall in love with her on any given day, much less head over heels?

“You’re up, Mets fan.”

With the easy comfort she so envied, Nick twisted some spaghetti onto his fork and lifted it to his kissable mouth. She wanted to be that comfortable in her own skin. She wanted another chance to kiss that mouth. Her fork clattered onto her plate. She felt a flush burn across her skin as she picked up the utensil and deliberately forked another piece of her dinner. No, her fingers hadn’t just gone limp. No, she hadn’t been staring longingly at his lips.

“Best childhood memory.” Her words rushed ahead to cover her tracks.

Nick cocked an eyebrow. “That’s a tough one…not many to choose from,” he said, in a way that managed to seem boyish and vulnerable, as if the memories bothered him more than he’d let on. “You know about my father from Jane, the gambling, his taking off, leaving us with more debt than my mom could handle. A helluva mess. She worked a lot, my mom.”

The glow from the television illuminated sadness in his impossibly blue eyes. A kind of loneliness, a feeling she understood completely. What she managed with statistics and computer code, he controlled with distance and swagger. But they each spent a lot of time alone.

“Occasionally, my father still contacts me.”

“Really? I didn’t think…”

“Jane doesn’t know. Neither does Jake.” He swirled more pasta onto his fork. “Mostly he calls when he needs a little money, sometimes just to remind me how much I’m like him.” He raised his eyebrows. “But there were good times. Mostly, I remember Jane and Jake and me, and of course, Charlie, getting into trouble. Boosting lawn chairs, tossing eggs at windows and taking off, running like hell, trying not to get busted.”

Marianne smiled at him over the rim of her glass. “Sounds like fun. Ever get caught?”

“Fun, yes. But did I get snagged?” He shot her a look that was all kinds of doubtful. “What about you? Ever get in trouble when you were growing up in…?”

“Manhattan,” she said, finishing the question. “And, no, I was a rules girl. Never any trouble, always meeting expectations. But summers at the beach were fun. My cousins would come down to the house…”

“In the Hamptons?” Her short nod served as her response, so he continued, “I bet you were cute, all towheaded and tennis-tanned.”

Such a heartbreaker, the man would flirt with a scarecrow if it wore lipstick and a skirt, but the truth was she’d never been all that cute. Too curvy, too young, she’d buttoned up around eleven years old and kept her sunburned nose in a book or computer, preferring the solitude to the teasing of the boys on the beach. Inexplicable curves, glasses, braces—the effect was awkward rather than adorable. “No, never very cute. Or towheaded. I spent a lot of time reading or banging on the PC.”

Nick set his plate back on the coffee table and settled into the corner of the sectional. “That’s right, you’re my sister’s computer girl, the one who designed the app she bet on last year. Nice job, by the way, backing Jane into a corner over Charlie.”

“Well, she caused most of that trouble by herself, but…” She offered a small smile at his backhanded compliment, unsurprised to hear he was only putting the pieces together now. As far as he’d been concerned, she may as well have been invisible. “Before Jane gave me a job, I was hacking out a future as a mid-level broker.”#p#分页标题#e#

“On Wall Street?” he confirmed. “Pretty ambitious stuff. Why’d you leave?”

Anxiety twisted in her chest. No one had asked her that particular question in months, and it was a question too complicated to answer over chicken parm. She needed to tell him before her dad’s homecoming—and she would—just not tonight. Her father’s conviction and the resulting rumors had made her life as a trader too difficult to continue. But that was all over now—in the past where it belonged.

She offered a less complicated answer, one that was partly true considering how her engagement had unraveled after the arrest. “Man trouble?”

“Not of your own making?” Touché on the reminder she’d called him out for his own brand of relationship trouble.

She smiled. “No, not of my own making.”

Nick returned her smile. “This was your last relationship?”

“My only relationship,” she confessed. Well, only intimate relationship anyway, one that made her regret how long she stayed all reserved and buttoned-up. “And you? How many relationships are included in your romantic past?”