At last, he looked at her. “It’s stupid. Kid stuff someone never outgrew.”
“After you tell me what’s behind this grudge match, we’ll mock him mercilessly. Now, go,” she prompted with a nod. He heaved another one of those whole-body sighs, and her hormones kicked into overdrive. Pressing her fingernails into the soft leather of the armrest, she forced a fake smile. “Unless you’re the one who never outgrew it.”
He rolled his eyes at her tactics but gave in with grace. “We played against each other a few times in school. I won. We both declared for the draft. I got picked; he didn’t. I had the chance he thought he should have had, and I couldn’t deliver. Plain and simple.”
“Doesn’t look plain and simple.”
“You’d think at some point he’d let it go.” He shook his head and made a show of studying the blur of lights whizzing past his window. “It’s been twenty years. Why can’t he find another yardstick?”
She had no answer and didn’t feel inclined to make one up. As far as she was concerned, it was better to let these testosterone-fueled flares burn themselves out. No sense in getting scorched when they got their drawers in a twist over the stupidest things. The male ego was a strange, indecipherable mystery, one she had given up trying to sort out years ago. So she changed the subject.
“When do you leave for Reno?”
He twisted his wrist and pulled back his cuff to check the time. She liked the way the chunky wristwatch looked on him. Usually, he wore a utilitarian sports watch, but this was one of those sleek stainless-steel deals that probably cost more than her first car. Hell, maybe even her current car. “Eleven forty. Plenty of time.”
Millie’s jaw dropped as realization sank in. She’d made a general note of the flight time when she scanned the itinerary, but she didn’t think to check which side of the meridian they’d be on when he left. “Tonight?”
He nodded. “Might as well get started on my residency.”
“Oh. Wow.” A nervous laugh escaped her. She ran a hand through her hair, then quickly shook the layers back into place. No sense in scaring the man off for good with the Cruella de Vil look. “Yeah, right. Good plan.”
She gulped down a lump of disappointment. In the back of her mind, she’d been playing out a variety of scenarios for the evening. Drinks. Dinner. An interview postmortem designed to slide right into playful flirtation. A chance to see if he liked her enough, wanted her enough to push past the playful part and try to make a play. She’d have to shut him down, of course. He was a married man, and while she claimed to have few scruples, vows were one of them. But it would be nice if he tried…
“I’m following your advice.”
She looked up, taken aback by the assertion. “Mine?”
“Divorce her as quickly as I can.” He stretched his arm across the back of the seat as he leaned toward her. “Get up, get out, and get on with life. That’s what you said.”
She gave him a wry smile. “Pretty easy to say.”
“Surprisingly easy to do,” he countered. “Once the hangover wore off, I mean.”
Tilting her head, she studied him in the not-so-subtle glow of Manhattan at twilight. “You’re not sad?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m not, but I will say I’m not as sad as I think I ought to be.”
Millie pondered his statement. When David left her, her whole world imploded. For years, she felt fragmented and cast adrift. Then they’d run into each other and…nothing.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I’m not as sad as I should be?”
She wet her own parched lips, then softly cleared her throat. “Uh, no. Your feelings are your own business.”
“You’re not curious?”
Millie pondered his question for a moment, then shook her head. “You know, I didn’t see my ex-husband for over a decade after we signed our divorce papers,” she said quietly. “We met when I was sixteen, divorced when I was twenty-six.” She cast a glance in his direction, trying to gauge his reception as she clarified her stance on the end of her marriage. “He divorced me.”
“The man had to be a fool.”
Millie chuckled. “I thought so too. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t heartbroken for a long, long time.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, so sincerely, her heart gave a dull thud of gratitude. “But you bounced back. I mean, look at you.”
“Took me a while to—as you say it—bounce back.” She smiled as she recalled her metamorphosis. “When I hit my midthirties, I started dating again. With a vengeance,” she added with some relish.
“I’m almost scared for the guys,” he said gruffly. “Or I would be, if I didn’t feel so damn jealous of them.”
“Bought my first vibrator for my fortieth birthday,” she said as if he hadn’t spoken.
“The gift that keeps on giving.”
“Then I ran into David again, and I wondered what the hell I’d been thinking, wasting all that time between him and…anyone else.” She turned to look him directly in the eye. “My point is that I know how you feel, being sad about not feeling more sad.”
“I’m sorry that you do,” he said, enveloping her hand in his much larger one.
The gentleness in his tone almost broke her resolve to keep her distance. Almost, but not quite.
She wasn’t the gullible girl with stars in her eyes, nor was she the desperate parody of the panicked divorcée any longer. Millie knew who she was and what she liked. Cocktails with umbrellas and skewers of fruit she refused to eat, outrageously expensive dark chocolates, and shoes topped the list. A nice, hard fuck came in somewhere in the top five, but depending on the pickings, a hot bath with a good book topped it in the pecking order. She eyed the man sitting beside her, trying to
