Playing for Keeps (Heartbreaker Bay #7)(34)

Finn came back with their drinks and an order of fries. “To share. Play nice,” he said, looking at Sadie.

“Hey,” she said but Finn was gone. And okay, so she could see why he’d direct that at her. She and Caleb dug into the fries and she realized something else—eating deliciously, perfectly crispy fries with someone, sharing a big blob of ketchup, their fingers occasionally bumping into each other . . . it was an intimacy all on its own.

“So,” she said, watching as he sipped his drink, which made her smile because a big sexy guy ordering anything other than beer or a badass liquor was foreign to her. “I’ll play. A Fuzzy Navel?”

He shrugged. “Maybe I’m trying to get in touch with my feminine side so I can understand what a certain woman is thinking when she looks at me.”

She blinked. “Is it working?”

“No. You’re a closed book.”

She snorted. “You’re making that up. You don’t care about understanding what I’m thinking.”

“I care more than you know,” he said easily. “You’re just not open to it because you’re scared.” He paused while she absorbed the absolute truth of that statement.

“But you’re right,” he said. “I didn’t order the Fuzzy Navel to figure you out. I’ve got the feeling that nothing but time is going to help me figure you out.” He took another sip, his eyes considering her. “I ordered it because it was my grandma’s fave. She drank it whenever she was stressed, which was a lot. So now I do the same. It’s sort of my way of toasting her from whichever cloud she’s sitting on watching over me.”

Damn. That was really sweet. And when a guy like Caleb did something sweet, it was also incredibly sexy. She took another sip of her drink. “Think she was watching when you pushed me up against the brick wall in the alley and kissed the hell out of me?”



Caleb choked on his drink and set the glass down. He’d been coming out of a meeting with Hunt Investigations, the security company on the second floor, when he’d seen Sadie walk into the bar. Completely unable to resist, he’d followed her in and sat next to her. He was breaking down her walls one brick at a time—or so he hoped—but he knew he still had a long way to go.

What he didn’t know was why he insisted on pursuing this, pursuing her , when she clearly would rather pretend there was nothing between them. Maybe it was because of that , he thought with an ironic grimace. The seduction of being with a woman who didn’t want anything from him was too much to resist . . .

In any case, he couldn’t seem to stop himself. “First,” he said, “you kissed me . And second, damn woman, thanks for putting the image of my grandma in my head and ruining the moment.”

She laughed.

And God, he loved her laugh. It was deep and throaty, and she always seemed a little surprised that she could be amused.

“Why was she always stressed?” she asked.

He didn’t like to think about his past, much less discuss it, but this was Sadie, and he took the fact that she was asking as a good sign. “She was a young single mom,” he said, “and then her daughter became a young single mom with a bunch of kids. There were a lot of mouths to feed.”

She just looked at him for a long beat. “And you were one of those mouths?”

He nodded.

“What happened to her?” she asked.

He turned back to his drink. “She died when I was little.” It’d been a whole lot of years, but she’d spent the most time with him while his mom had been gone working night and day, and he still missed her.

He felt Sadie’s hand cover his. He turned his over so that he was palm up and entangled his fingers with hers.

“I’m sorry,” she said, eyes and voice warm. “I’m guessing things were rough after she was gone?”

She hadn’t pulled her hand from his, and he ran his thumb along hers. It’d been a long time since such a simple touch had meant anything to him. “My mom did the best she could. My sisters helped. They all put their heads down and did whatever they had to do to raise me and send me off to college.”

She appeared to be mesmerized by this story, by the fact that he hadn’t been born rich and successful. “And now they work for you,” she said.

“Yes.”

“So you all . . . like each other.”

He laughed. “Yes.”

This seemed to be the biggest surprise of all for her. “And you’re still close.”

He wanted to bring their joined hands up to rub his aching chest, because she clearly couldn’t compute a family unit that was tight and loved each other. “Yes, we’re close, even though they still try to boss me around. Comes with being the baby of the family.”

This got a smile out of her. “Cute.”

“Or annoying and unnecessary,” he said. “Which I tell them as often as I can get anyone to listen to me.”

“So let me get this straight,” she said. “At work you run this huge conglomerate and are a well-known venture capitalist with more responsibility than I could ever manage, but at home you’re the baby?”

“See? Annoying, right?”

She shook her head. “Still cute.”

When he grimaced, she smiled. “So how did you go from barely getting by to . . . ?” She waved her free hand up and down, gesturing to—presumably—his suit.