Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(83)

Yeah. Brilliant idea.

He broke the connection, turned away. He headed for the food table, which must have been catered, because this was no half-assed assortment of stuff people had scavenged from their pantries. There was a ham whose smoky flavor was addictive—Miles had eaten way more than his fair share an hour ago—and a cheese assortment that had probably cost several hundred dollars by itself. The dip-and-veggies setup was a work of art, not a grocery-store plastic-tray affair. Between the platters, bouquets of Mylar balloons urged him to have a Happy New Year. He frowned at them.

He spread some Brie on a cracker and leaned against the wall beside the food table. He told himself he wasn’t going to look for her again, but his eyes found her anyway. She danced in a larger group now, her body language open, welcoming, her hands beckoning, her smile inviting. When new dancers approached, she opened the circle wider to include them.

The song ended and she broke away from the crowd. He watched her move through the room, her smile coming and going. She stopped beside a seated elderly woman—all wrong here, curved in on herself, decades displaced. The pixie-haired dancer knelt and shook the other woman’s hand. Leaned to speak in her ear, offered her own ear to the other woman. Rubbed the older woman’s arm. The older woman smiled hesitantly, and then, when the younger woman said something else, more broadly. Miles found himself smiling, too, an unfamiliar sensation that stretched the stuck muscles in his face and made his chest feel oddly, almost disturbingly, light.

His smile shriveled as soon as he noted it.

She caught him staring again, but this time he couldn’t hold her gaze. He pretended he’d been looking for someone else, scanning the crowd purposefully. He spread another cracker with Brie and focused all his attention on it. He’d have to stop with the staring. Not so long ago, he’d been the guy who talked to everyone. The guy who spread smiles, like a wave at a baseball game. Now he’d forgotten how to be normal.

“Amazing, huh?”

She stood next to him. He froze with his hand on a carrot stick, the end still plunged into some sort of hot spinach dip.

She was even prettier this close, her hair damp from sweat at her temples, a smattering of light freckles across her nose, full lips, gorgeous cheekbones. She still breathed heavily from her athletics on the dance floor, making her chest rise and fall, which he knew only peripherally, because he was not allowing himself to look. He was afraid if he did he’d never look up again, and her eyes were not the sort of thing you wanted to miss. Pale blue, rimmed with long, thick lashes, and weirdly penetrating, as if she knew all the things about him that he didn’t want anyone to know.

“Can you believe this spread? Can you believe this party? Can you believe that f*cking view?”

It was a weird thing about Miles that he was a sucker for women with foul mouths. He couldn’t explain it. It was those words in, well, that mouth. It made him want to kiss her like nobody’s business. Plant one on that luscious mouth and slide his tongue across hers. As if he could lick the taste of the word “f*ck” right off her lips.

Instead, he said, “Great view.”

Awesome, Miles. Scintillating.

Of course, he’d been too busy admiring the interior view to give Boston-through-the-enormous-plate-glass-windows its due. The condo was down near the Charles on the Cambridge side—supposedly one of the best views of the Boston skyline in the whole greater-Boston area. He couldn’t contest that—it was spectacular. The buildings cast reflections in the Charles, dots of light and columns of color. He couldn’t see the famous CITGO sign from where they were, although maybe that was the top edge of it there, casting a reddish light over the lower buildings to the right of his field of vision?

But she didn’t seem to mind his vapid response. “Have you had this one?” She pointed to one of the cheeses.

He shook his head.

“Oh, God, you have to.” She cut him a slice. “Here.”

He reached for it, then realized she was intending to feed it to him. Holy shit.

She put it in his mouth, but not in a porn-star, fingers-lingering-so-he-could-suck-them sort of way. Just matter-of-fact. Which possibly made it worse, because he wanted to nip her fingers, and the craving was hotter than anything overt she could have done.

Then he realized that the piece of cheese was the most amazing thing he’d ever tasted, which distracted him enough from his previous train of thought so he could chew and swallow and say, “Mother of God.”

“I know, right?” She smiled at him.

“What is that?”

“I don’t know. I wish they’d left the labels out, but they didn’t. I’ll try to find out, though. The hostess is my older sister’s college roommate’s friend, so I have an in.”

He laughed, the sound unfamiliar in his ears.

“What’s your connection?”

“I’m visiting my friend Owen.” He pointed. “He got the Facebook invitation from a friend of a friend of a friend.”

“I’m surprised there aren’t more of those. Like this place isn’t packed to the gills. Who wouldn’t want to ring in the New Year up here, with this food? I’m going to angle to get invited every year. Find out if they do a Fourth of July party, too.”

“I’m sure they must, right?”

They stared out at the view for a moment.