Her expression was about the furthest thing from come-hither that he could ever imagine. And yet he was unbelievably aware of her.
“The view is amazing.”
He thought it was, too, and he didn’t mean the park.
“Thanks,” he said, congratulating himself on his professional tone, “I like it.”
“I had no idea that Central Park was so huge,” she said turning back to the window.
“It’s eight hundred and forty acres. Forty-two million people a year visit it.” He congratulated himself on the utter safety of a tour-guide-to-client conversation.
Forty million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand and ninety-nine of whom, had they seen his apartment, would have just taken it at face value. They would have seen arrival and success. Not a vague emptiness.
But she hadn’t used the word empty. So where had that come from, that indictment of his life?
He glanced at his dining room table. Would he sit next to her? Across from her? Which would be less dangerous?
“It’s a nice night,” he said. “Do you want to eat pizza alfresco?” Side by side, on his deck, an end table in between them, less chance of those naked little toes touching him, or shoulders brushing, or eyes meeting. They could look at the view, instead of each other.
She laughed and he raised an eyebrow at her.
“In Italian,” she explained, “that phrase means ‘in the cool.’ Usually, when an Italian says it, it refers to spending time in jail.”
“You speak Italian?” he asked, incredulous. He had a sudden, totally unwanted vision, of her leaning in to him whispering, Voglio fare l’amore con te.
As if Jessica Winton would ever say something like that! It was wrong to even think it. It was right up there with come-hithering. Thankfully, she did not speak Italian.
“I just seem to collect information,” she told him.
“Dibs on you for my Trivial Pursuit team.” The weird thing was, he could picture playing Trivial Pursuit with her. At the Christmas celebration he had never hosted. Jamie gave his head a shake in an effort to clear any vision of Jessica Winton inhabiting any part of his future.
Not Christmas dinner. Not sexy Italian phrases. Not playing a game at the annual office party. Not come-hithering.
He slid the patio door open and the sounds of the city, along with warm summer air, rushed in. He held the door back, balancing the pizza in his hand, letting her go out first.
As she brushed by him, the lavender smell—the one that invoked visions of her, and possibly him, in a purple field together—was, thankfully, completely gone.
It was, unfortunately, replaced with something even more tantalizing.
Soap. Skin. Squeaky-clean hair. Something so purely feminine, it took his breath away.
He held the pizza box closer to his nose, hoping to banish all else. He pulled out a chair for her with his toe, and then set the pizza box on the table and took a chair on the opposite side of it. The park was growing quiet—it was probably close to midnight.
“Look! There’s still a horse and carriage.”
“I think they book the last rides at eleven thirty.”
She got up from the table, and went to the railing. “It’s a young couple,” she reported. “Oh, my gosh, I think he’s asking her to marry him. Come see.”
Though it was against his better judgment, he joined her at the railing. Sure enough, eleven stories below them, a young man was presenting what looked to be a ring box to a young woman. Her squeal of delight rose over every other sound in the night.
“It’s like something out of a fairy tale,” Jessica said, with a happy sigh. As she turned back to the table, her shoulder—the naked one—brushed his arm.
Cue the music, he thought, to banish any red-hot thoughts that accidental brush, the one he had been hoping to avoid by choosing to dine alfresco, might cause. Someday, my prince will come. That was it exactly. Jessica Winton had the starstuck look on her face of a woman in search of a prince.
Scary.
Even scarier was his curiosity about why she hadn’t found one.
He opened the pizza box, and offered her a slice. She took one, took a delicate bite and closed her eyes.
“Wild enough for you?” he asked.
She opened her eyes and glanced at him. He kept his expression deliberately bland. Professional, he congratulated himself.
“Definitely wild. And delicious. I come from a pepperoni-only family and I always seem to cave to the majority. This is a treat. Some kind of Mediterranean, right? Olives? Onions? Feta cheese?”
“Plus anchovies and hot pickles. Here. I’ll show you how to eat it like a New Yorker.”
“New Yorkers eat pizza a certain way?”
“Of course.” As she watched, he took the crust and rolled it neatly toward the triangular tip of the pizza.
“But now it’s a sausage roll, not pizza!” she protested, watching him.
He took a bite, aware of her eyes on his lips, before they skittered away. “Try it before you knock it.”
And so she did. She closed her eyes with pleasure as she bit into it. Now his eyes were on her lips!
“And so practical, too,” she decided.
Considering how aware they both seemed to be now of each other’s lips, he wasn’t so sure about that.
“So,” he said, after they had both staved off the worst of the hunger and were working on their second slices, “tell me why you think you might like to work for JHA. Because you don’t really seem like the type who ends up in marketing.”
Terrible timing for a job interview.
And yet he could not think of a better way to get his mind off the lusciousness of her lips closing over that roll of pizza. When he dragged his eyes from her lips, he noticed her naked leg sticking out from under his T-shirt. Her toenails were painted the palest shade of pink.
“The type?” she said. “What type do I seem like?”
The type who was targeted by thieves
