Exactly the way she wanted them to.
SIX
With his afternoon cleared, there was nothing Jeff would have rather done than call Connor. Tell his best friend he wasn’t the only one to pick up a souvenir in Vegas. Talk out the changes ahead of him and have the guy—the only guy on the planet who knew him as well as he knew himself—tell him he had his back.
But Connor had just reconciled with his wife—a woman he’d married within hours of meeting that same night Jeff met Darcy—and even if Jeff thought he could live with himself for interrupting them...he was fairly certain the two lovebirds were still off the grid.
Just as well.
There was someone else who deserved to know what was happening first.
Olivia. The woman he’d started a relationship with five weeks ago. The something Jeff had found to fill the empty spot in his life he’d only become aware of after Vegas.
Jogging across the marble-and-glass atrium, Jeff caught the elevator to Olivia’s top floor office.
How the hell was he going to explain this? And how would she take it?
Things had been going well with them. They’d been a smart fit from the start. Comfortable together, compatible.
She was open and pleasant. Harvard educated. Business savvy. Connected.
Two hours ago, he would have given it six months at the outside before he popped the question. And only because it seemed like an appropriate time to wait. In Olivia he’d found a woman who was all the things he’d known he wanted for a partner in life from as far back as he could remember—from the first time he looked across the table at his parents and thought to himself, someday, I want that.
The business journal over morning coffee. The dinners at the club. The shared interests for their shared lifestyle. The sparkling hostess championing the charities and foundations they supported.
It sounded shallow as he itemized it in his head, but it wasn’t.
He wanted the kind of good match that meant a lifetime of companionable, easy happiness. What his parents had up until the day five years ago when a heart attack took his father. The best man he’d ever know. The example Jeff had always hoped to live up to. Hell, he wished he was around to talk to about this.
Riding up to Olivia’s, he couldn’t help question what she would think when she looked at the woman he’d been with before her. The one who’d been his wake-up call about putting an end to the screwing around with women who weren’t right for him and thinking about getting serious with one who was. Settling down. Starting a family.
Olivia would see everything she wasn’t when she looked at Darcy.
And it would make her wonder.
Darcy had been a good time he hadn’t seen coming. And the only reason she’d gotten under his skin the way she had was because of the way she’d left.
So the chemistry between them had been hot enough that even months later, he could feel the lingering burn of it, so what? That was sex. Not exactly a foundation to build a solid forever on. But neither was it something he could, in good conscience, ignore when it came to a relationship with another woman.
“Hey, Mel. She in?” he asked, when he got to her office.