Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(88)

The crowd was close, and the shove bowled over several bystanders. Suddenly the room was dead still and dead quiet, all the celebration brought to an abrupt halt. All eyes were on the man who’d kissed her so spectacularly less than two minutes earlier. His scruffy blond friend—he’d told her his name was Owen—scrambled to his side. Several huge friends hauled Beer Gut up, asking after his health and well-being, a rising mutter of deep discontent coming from their ranks. Nora’s heart beat in a different way. Fear.

“Hey, man, we’d better get out of here,” Owen said. “He’s got friends. Lots of very big, very drunk friends. Boston College football. You can choose ’em.”

“But I need to—”

Beer Gut attained standing, and his crew advanced as Owen and Sad-Eyed Guy backed away.

“No, man, we’re outta here.” Owen tugged his friend’s arm.

“I—”

“Don’t be an idiot, dude. They’re going to kick our asses.” Owen yanked him, hard, and the two of them turned and ran.

“Wait!” Nora called. “Wait, I don’t know your—”

They were not waiting. They were running, pushing through the crowd, heading for the door as fast as they could go, and by the time her legs started to work, they’d already disappeared from her sight.





Chapter 3


“What the hell happened back there?”

Miles and Owen had taken the elevator down twenty-two floors and run full tilt toward the Kendall Square stop for several blocks, ducking through parking garages and hotel lobbies to stay off the street, before they were able to convince themselves they weren’t being pursued.

“That * kissed her. Twice.”

Owen regarded him levelly. “It is New Year’s Eve.”

“She was with me.”

As he said it, Miles recognized the total absurdity of it. But she had felt like she was with him. She had been hot and vibrant and his while he kissed her, and funny and adorable when he’d let her go, and he’d been two seconds from asking her to leave the party with him and become more his. All his.

Probably it was a good thing fate had intervened in the way it had. Fifteen minutes and he had gone Neanderthal-possessive. The events of the last month had apparently unhinged him.

“You work fast, man,” Owen said mildly. “Also, you’ve got confetti in your hair.”

Miles shook it out, a slight rain of silver, and ran his hands through his hair to get the rest.

The train car they were riding in had been packed to the gills when they boarded it. An earthy scent blend of beer and hard alcohol and vomit and sweat permeated the air but was starting to fade as the car emptied out. They’d managed to snare two seats side by side. There were still people in the aisles, though, loud and jovial, as the car made its lurching way over the tracks, screeching and squealing as it cornered.

“Are you going to see her again?” Owen asked.

“I don’t know her name,” Miles confessed. All he knew was the precise way her smile bloomed, starting with the lift of her upper lip, finding her eyes last. He knew the shape of her fingers on another woman’s arm, telling her it was okay, she belonged. And he knew the thoroughness with which she inhabited a room.

Not much. A name would be more practical.

The look on Owen’s face would have made Miles laugh, if he’d been in a laughing mood. “You’re kidding me.”

“Nope.”

“You didn’t get her number.”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you when you were dragging me out of there. I don’t know her name or her number.”

“You danced with her, you kissed her, you beat some guy up over her, she was ‘with’ you”—Owen inserted air quotes—“and you never asked her what her name was?” With his loony yellow hair and outraged expression, Owen looked like Doc Brown from Back to the Future.

“It didn’t come up.”

“How does that not come up?”

Miles stayed silent, and Owen narrowed his eyes. “Oh. You didn’t tell her your name because of the investigation.”

Miles sighed and used his shoulder to fend off a drunk T rider who had almost fallen in his lap. “I might not have felt particularly inclined to share that piece of information, no.”

“Well, now you’re screwed. How are you going to find her?”

“I’m not. She lives in Boston. I live in Cleveland. I’m not going to see her again.” Except in my dirty fantasies. Because he was already having intense flashbacks, to the way she’d looked on the dance floor, to the swift show of her smile as they’d talked, to the feel of her mouth and the exact curve of her ass under his palms.

“What about tomorrow night?”

Miles’s flight back was on the third. If he kept his ticket. It was tempting not to return to Cleveland at all. Maybe if he stayed away, all that had happened there would recede slowly in importance until it didn’t hurt anymore.

Miles shook his head. “It’s too complicated.”

“What’s complicated? I saw you kissing her. It didn’t look complicated at all.”

No, it hadn’t been complicated. It had been the simplest thing in the world, totally primal. A straight hit of sex to the brain, a hard-on so hard it still hurt. A craving he’d have to shut down as soon as he could get on top of it.