My breathing stalled at the gentle touch.
It was almost more intoxicating than the kiss. Almost.
“You don’t know what I’ve done,” I murmured, unable to believe the words were coming out of my mouth. “You don’t know what I’ve seen. What—”
Sympathy in her blue-green eyes.
Then she rose on tiptoe, and her lips were on mine.
Heat.
Sweet as sugar.
Then the sugar disappeared.
“Dinner’s at seven p.m.,” she murmured, dropping back down to her feet. “72 Star Ridge. It’s the yellow house on the corner with white trim.”
She strode away, leaving me with my jaw dropped open, no doubt a shell-shocked expression on my face. But I managed to recover enough to ask her, just before she moved around the corner, “What’s your name?”
Her feet stopped moving, those blue-green eyes drifted over her shoulder. “Iris.”
I was still staring after her, thinking that was the absolute perfect name for her when I heard the front door open and shut.
The click of it closing made me jump.
Then realize I’d better figure out what I was going to bring to Iris’s house for dinner.
Because I knew that I might be a lot of things—a failure, a shitty friend, a man who possessed an exceptionally powerful RBF—but my mom had at least raised me to be a good guest.
So, I didn’t show up at someone’s house emptyhanded.
And while I knew that I probably shouldn’t be going down this minefield, that it was stupid to inflict myself on a woman I’d known two seconds after meeting her was way too good for me, I also wasn’t going to miss out on a chance to show up at Iris’s with flowers or a bottle of wine.
Because maybe I’d find exactly the right thing and she would smile at me like I’d hung the moon again, like she had when I’d pointed out her purse.
And maybe that meant she’d let me kiss her again.
Four
Iris
The knock at the door came precisely as the clock over my microwave turned from 6:59 P.M. to 7:00 P.M.
He was punctual.
He . . . was nameless.
My nerves threatened to swell up and overwhelm me for the hundredth time in the last twenty-four hours—well, the last eighteen hours because, yes, I’d been counting down the minutes, alternating between horror that I’d both kissed and invited a stranger to my house and excitement that I’d both kissed and invited a stranger to my house.
I didn’t take risks.
Ever.
Well, that wasn’t precisely true.
I hadn’t taken risks up until the last month, until thirty-two days ago when I’d surprised Frank at our house for our anniversary, bringing dinner and booze and his favorite homemade cherry pie . . . and he’d clearly forgotten about the significance of the date.
Seven years I had spent with him. From junior year of high school through college through starting a career. He’d given me a ring. We’d set a date.
And he was fucking a string of women on the side.
And he’d given me gonorrhea.
Fun times.
But I’d had the antibiotics, had been given the all clear, and I’d decided that I couldn’t live in my small town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas any longer. I couldn’t deal with the fact that everyone I knew and had grown up with, people who’d claimed they were my friends, people who’d interacted and talked with me on a regular basis, that not one of them had thought I should know that the man I was going to marry was sleeping with women who weren’t me.
Well, that was probably because the women he was fucking were the same ones I’d once considered my friends.
Another knock had me blinking away the past and wiping my hands on a towel.
I hurried to the door, glancing through the window at the side and seeing that it was indeed the unnamed bartender from Bobby’s.
He saw me through the glass, gaze drifting from my face to my toes then back up, and I watched as his eyes warmed, his expression relaxed, and he smiled. That smile had me freezing in place because it was huge and unapologetic . . . or maybe that wasn’t quite the right word, because it was more like that grin lit up his face, removed any walls and barriers, and gave me a peek at something soft and vulnerable underneath.
And clearly, I was delusional if I thought I could read that much from a quirk of the lips.
Either way, I stood staring at him for far too long because he, still smiling, pointed to the door.
“Oh,” I murmured, shaking my head slightly and reaching for the knob.
Doh. It would help to actually let the man whom I invited for dinner into my house. I flipped the lock and tugged open the door.
“Hi.”
As far as greetings went, it wasn’t the most original, but it tended to get the job done.
“Hi,” he murmured.
Good. We were on the same level.
Inwardly snorting, I invited him in, taking the little potted Christmas tree he extended.
“I thought that since you’d just moved into the area, you might not have had time to decorate . . .” His words trailed off as he spun to take in my living room, which had been absolutely plastered with Christmas décor.
I like Christmas, okay?
Well, scratch that. I love Christmas, and when I’d moved out of the house Frank and I had bought—thankfully also the reason we’d put off our wedding for a year since our entire wedding fund had turned into house fund—I’d taken all of our Christmas stuff.
And because I loved the holiday, I had a lot.
Three artificial trees.
Twelve nutcrackers in various sizes.
Glittery wreaths and ribbons and festive tea towels. Pine-scented candles, strands of cranberries and popcorn, and—
Oh crap. It looked like my house had vomited up St. Nick. Which might be fine for someone I knew, someone who understood that my crazy extended to strictly this holiday and that I did not, in fact, have a
