Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(86)

“You don’t mind? I feel like I should stay with you. You’re …”

Rachel hadn’t finished the sentence, but there were a variety of ways it could have been finished. Dumped. On the rebound like nobody’s business. Vulnerable. A danger to society.

Nora’s sister’s condo was downstairs in the same building—no height, no view, hundreds of thousands of dollars less expensive—and Nora had arranged to stay over there, so it wasn’t as if she had to find her way home alone. In the morning she’d take the T back to her own Davis Square apartment. Unless—unless she took it back there tonight with the hot, sad-eyed guy in tow.

“I’m fine,” Nora had told Rachel, thinking, I wish someone would booty-call me. Which probably meant she wasn’t fine at all, but there was a sure thing at the other end of Rachel’s phone, and Nora didn’t want to stand in the way of that.

I’m jealous of a booty call, Nora had thought as she watched Rachel’s back weave among partygoers on her way out. That’s pathetic.

But when you thought about it, maybe it wasn’t really that pathetic. Nora had been dumped by her boyfriend of three years and had simultaneously found out he’d been sleeping with another woman for the last nine months. And that was only six weeks ago. The fact that she was at a New Year’s Eve party, on her feet, dancing—that made her a minor miracle. Not pathetic at all. Tough.

She liked the idea of being tough. So much better than letting people—herself included—think that Henry had been able to lay her on her ass. All those hours she’d spent crying her eyes out, not quite sure if it was the embarrassment of having been such a fool or the loss of the guy she’d thought might someday be her husband…

Man, that felt like a narrow miss. She could have been a forty-eight-year-old mother of four whose husband walked out on her for the woman he’d been sleeping with on and off for, oh, nearly twenty years. Did that happen? It must. After Henry had revealed the extent of his cheating, all kinds of women had opened up to Nora with their own horror stories. Being cheated on was so humiliating that people didn’t usually talk about it, but once the floodgates opened, whoa. Stories that had made her eyes fill with tears, stories about mega-scale epic-level *s. My husband … my boyfriend … slept with my best friend … my sister … my mother … for six months … for six years … in my bed on a daily basis…

Okay, no, to be fair, she hadn’t heard that story. Yet. But she’d be willing to bet it had happened.

But the point was, even if there were way worse stories out there, getting cheated on for nine months while you obliviously whistled Dixie, washed your boyfriend’s dirty socks, and sucked his cock entitled you to a little rebound fun.

This guy watching the countdown with her, the one with the Christian Bale mouth and the dark, sad eyes, had terrific broad shoulders and narrow hips and a great ass. You could choose a way worse specimen for a New Year’s Eve rebound hookup. He also smelled really good, like the expensive wool in the fine-gauge sweater he was wearing over dark-gray slacks, and like some sporty deodorant that was probably supposed to evoke hiking through canyons but, warmed by his body, pretty much shouted sex. They probably put some crazy pheromones in that stuff, grizzly-bear sex-gland extract or something.

Nora shifted, too, toward him. Now their arms almost touched and, holy crap, it was crazy how good that felt. As intense as being thigh to hip on the dance floor. How was that possible? Zero contact, but a mad tingle that went straight to her core. She wondered if pheromones worked across a crowded room and if somehow she’d been able to smell, standing on the other side of the room, intercepting his intense scrutiny, that it would feel this good to stand next to him. Maybe that was what had made her cross the room to him after he’d broken eye contact the second time.

She’d moved through the crowd toward him without thinking about it too hard, because if she’d given it too much more thought she might not have done it. And then she was standing next to him, inhaling his scent, discovering that he was considerably taller than she’d suspected. Bantering with him about cheese, feeding him cheese—she wasn’t sure what muddled corner of her brain that stroke of genius had come from. Asking him to dance. She’d had a brief moment of paralyzing doubt when she’d seen the look on his face following her invitation. A look that was all fear and claustrophobia: Get me out of here!

“Hey, I get it,” she’d said. “I’m not your type.”

But he shook his head, and there’d been something in his eyes. Whatever he was afraid of, it wasn’t her. She thought, What the hell? Because, really, the good thing about getting humiliatingly dumped was that all other rejection paled in comparison. Suppose he turned her down? If she’d lived through these last six weeks, she was hardly going to shrivel up and die because a stranger didn’t want to have anonymous December 31 sex. So she asked him, “Is that a ‘No, you’re not my type’ or a ‘No, you’ve got it all wrong’?”

His dark gaze held hers, the way it had when she’d been dancing and he’d been watching. “You’ve got that part dead wrong.” The way he said it had made her heart pound, and that was when the heat he’d started by staring at her across the room had taken on bigger, buzzier dimensions. Something she wasn’t in control of, and she didn’t want to be.