Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(90)

“I wouldn’t be ready for anything, anyway,” he told Owen when “Sweet Caroline” had run its course. “Deena moved out only two weeks ago. We were together for more than five years.”

Owen just looked at him.

“That’s a long time. We lived together, our possessions mingled. Everything I did was all caught up with her.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why are you being such a dick about this? It would obviously be a rebound thing.”

“Maybe I think you need a rebound thing. And you’re punishing yourself by not letting yourself have one.”

“I’m not punishing myself.”

“Are you sure?”

“What would I be punishing myself for?”

“Letting this embezzlement thing happen on your watch.”

Fucking Owen, who knew him too well. “Look. The point is, I don’t have her name and number, and it’s probably for the best.”

“I can get it for you. I can find out.”

“How?”

“I’m sure Erica knows someone who knows someone who knows who she is.”

“No,” Miles said.

“Come on, dude.”

“No.”

Because she was too nice to do that to. Too nice to drag her in, drag her down. Make her a quickie stop on the Miles-deals-with-his-pain train.

You don’t even know her. How do you know she’s nice?

He thought of the way she’d chosen to give her smile, to give her self, to the people in the room who needed her most. To him, too. I just know.

The fact that he was arguing with himself, the fact that he was claiming intimate knowledge of someone he’d exchanged a couple hundred words with, danced with for less than a minute, and kissed once, was more proof that he was totally irrational where this woman was concerned and that staying away from her was the best thing for both of them.

Owen sighed. “I’m worried about you, man.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’ve got a good lawyer. That’s what matters.”

“That’s not all that matters, is it?”

He could take the feel of her, the strawberries-and-salty-arousal scent of her, the quick smile and flippant humor of her, the goodness of her, and pack it into a mental box. Shove it on the highest shelf of some attic, behind the humiliation of having his board tell him they thought he’d steal from the nonprofit he’d founded—from hungry kids, for Christ’s sake. Behind the pain of having his fiancée tell him, if not in so many words, that she didn’t believe in his innocence. He had that kind of mental control. He could do it.

“It’s all that matters right now.”

*

Nora had just received yet another email, the gist of which was that her friend Selena had racked her brain and contacted everyone she knew but couldn’t figure out who the hell Nora was talking about.

Nobody knew who he was.

Nora found it implausible that in this day and age of total connectivity, at a moment in history when she could track down the girl she’d played with on the climber in elementary school with about ten keystrokes, she couldn’t find a guy she’d publicly swapped spit with at a legend-quality New Year’s Eve party.

She’d posted it to Facebook. She’d tweeted it. She’d emailed her sister, her sister’s roommate, her sister’s roommate’s friend.

Nada.

Well, no, not nothing. She’d gotten back a bunch of messages and tweets and emails from horny guys who’d apparently gotten a little too much enjoyment out of her (brief, safe-for-work) description of the interaction she’d had with the Sad-Eyed Guy.

I wasn’t the guy who danced with you at the New Year’s party, but there’s always next year.

Heya, hot stuff, New Year’s Eve isn’t the only night of the year where you can kiss at midnight.

My dick is 9 inches long and I can make you forget him.

So much for the power of social media. Scratch the surface off the Internet, and once again it would prove that it was porn all the way down.

Oh, and she’d also gotten a few Puritanical wrist slaps, because apparently people had waaaay too much time on their hands.

Serves you right for making out with someone you didn’t know.

That’s vile that you didn’t ask his name before you rammed your tongue down his throat.

It was testament to the shape and size of her desperation that she’d been briefly thrilled by that last one, because it had raised her hopes that the critic had seen them kissing and just needed to be persuaded to tell her who the mystery guy was. She’d emailed back and asked, but she hadn’t gotten a response. And then she’d realized the email writer had probably been extemporizing. “Rammed your tongue down his throat” was social commentary, not a description of what he or she had witnessed.

She hadn’t rammed, anyway. Neither of them had. There had, admittedly, been a lot of tongue involved, but he had great technique—rare, she thought, or maybe it was simply another irritating aspect of Henry she’d put up with too long, the way his tongue filled her mouth, all wet and blobby.

Sad-Eyed Guy’s tongue had this way of being in exactly the right place, with the perfect slide and caress, the advance and retreat, at exactly the right time. As if he were anticipating what she needed. As if they were psychically linked. Ah. Psychically linked kissing.