Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle(93)

miles is totally not scary. but I havent been in touch with him in years. in the interim he might have become scary? but probably not, dont think he has it in him. really nice guy. college friend of mine. we hung out a lot senior year bc he was dating one of my roomies. youre interested in him?

Yeah.

As Nora wrote it, she had the urge to hedge her bets in some way. Cross her fingers, knock on wood. Typing it made it feel too real. As if she was committed now. To … calling, reaching out to him, whatever.

go for it.

I don’t even know if he’s single.

hes the kind of guy you could just ask. straight ahead, totally. no bs.

I will.

report back?

For sure!

good luck.

Thanks!

She switched back to Twitter. She surveyed the DM conversation she’d had with Owen. Just call him.

What was the worst that could happen? He could hang up on her. And the best that could happen…

Remembering the way they’d kissed still had the power to rev her up—tightness in her chest, heat between her legs. Eleven months later. She activated the phone app, found Miles.

She was pretty sure Owen’s reaching out to her hadn’t been at Miles’s suggestion or even with Miles’s knowledge. Which meant that her call wouldn’t be expected, and it might not be appreciated.

But it also meant that she hadn’t invented what had happened that night between her and Miles. Someone else—Owen—had seen it, too, and believed in it enough to reach out to her.

Regardless, she couldn’t keep going on bad dates without at least giving this a shot. The situation deserved that much. Miles deserved that much.

She deserved that much.

She tapped the number and held the phone to her ear.

It rang three times, and then a voice at the other end of the line, low and clipped and male, said, “Hey.”

“Miles?”

“Yeah.”

“This is … the woman you kissed at midnight at that New Year’s Eve party?”

There was a long silence at the other end of the phone. Much longer than the amount of time she’d spent waiting for Owen to send his next tweet. Much longer than the amount of time it had taken the seconds to fall off the New Year’s Eve clock as she’d waited to find out if Miles’s mouth would deliver on the knots of anticipation in her stomach.

“My name’s Nora,” she said, because he still wasn’t talking. She took her phone away from her ear and looked to see if he’d terminated the call, but the minutes were ticking up. He was still there.

“Hi, Nora,” he said finally. His voice was deeper than she remembered. She wasn’t good at pinning people’s ranges, but she suspected his would be considered a true bass. “This is … unexpected. Do you mind if I ask how you got my number?”

“From Owen. He found me on Twitter and told me to call you.” She felt bad about outing Owen—no good deed goes unpunished—but she didn’t want Miles to think she was a crazy stalker. Even if she kinda was.

“Figures.” There was a hint of a laugh behind it, so she guessed Owen would live another day.

“I didn’t think about why I was calling, exactly. I just called.”

“Okay. I can live with that.”

He said “I can live with that” like it was a good thing. Like he was happy to have her on the phone, for whatever reason. That was the thing about him, she decided. He didn’t talk a lot. He said very little, when it came down to it. But he made things count. He said them as if he meant them. And when you’d been with a guy who meant nothing he’d said for the last nine months, that was worth something.

“Can you talk for a little while?”

A long hesitation, enough time for her to worry about what would happen if he said no. That would be it, right? She’d stalked him, and if he hated the idea, that would be that. No more Miles. No more fantasy of finding him and— She wasn’t sure what happened next in the fantasy, after she found him.

“Yeah.”

Relief, light in her head and chest. And then…

Okay, smarty-pants, you’ve got him on the phone. What are you going to do now?

“It turns out you know my friend Stacey Heany.”

“Yeah?”

It stood to reason that he didn’t have a much more expansive talking style on the phone than in real life. But that last “yeah” had sounded deeply suspicious. She hadn’t wanted to get his back up. She wanted to put him at ease. She wanted to make him grin the way he’d grinned in that photo on his Facebook page.

“She said you were a straight-ahead guy.”

She had time to get nervous before he spoke. “Did she?”

If the sound of his voice was any indication, she wasn’t doing a good job of putting him at ease.

“I just—I thought it would be good to make sure you weren’t a psycho.”

He laughed, and a ripple of relief went through her. “That’s reasonable.”

“So … I don’t know. Where are you? Are you home? What’s home for you?”

He laughed again, a deep rumble that sent a tingle from her ear down her jawline. “I’m standing in my kitchen.”

“A house?”

“Yeah. A bungalow built in 1918, outside of Cleveland.”