He rubbed the finger on his jaw again. Those nice hands. His jaw was perfect under the short, neatly trimmed beard, framing his mouth, drawing my eye to it. “Let’s see,” he said. “You’re Samantha’s sister, CEO of Executive Ranks. You’re thirty-one and you’ve run your company for ten years. You and Samantha were abandoned on the steps of a hospital when you were babies and were raised by adoptive parents in Chicago. You’re one year older than she is. You’ve never been married and have no children. You live in a brownstone in Greenwich Village, which you rent and don’t own. You just met with Catharine Knowles, the president of Lodestar Productions, presumably to try and recruit her an executive assistant. The meeting went badly. You have a sailor mouth. Oh, and much like me, you sleep around a lot.”
I put my drink down. “How the fuck do you know all of that?” The sailor mouth thing was accurate, definitely.
Noah shrugged. “Some of it Samantha told me, some of it I picked up on, and some of it I guessed.”
“Samantha told you about how we were adopted?” It wasn’t a deep secret, but it also wasn’t something that either of us talked about with strangers. Or near-strangers, like Noah was. I’d never talked to anyone except my therapist about it.
“Sure she did,” Noah said. “She’s a lovely woman. Not my type, but lovely. We talk more than even Aidan realizes, I think. Does it bother you that I brought it up?”
I shrugged. It didn’t bother me, exactly, but my parents—my biological ones, the ones who left me and Sam at a hospital and walked away forever—were not my favorite topic. “It’s fine, I guess. It isn’t a state secret. But it’s weird, not knowing where you really come from. I think Sam handles it better than I do.”
Noah took a swig of his beer. “Nothing that a little therapy can’t fix, right?”
“I’m way ahead of you there. I’ve been going for six years. It turns out I’m still a fuckup.”
He was easy to talk to. Easy to look at, certainly. And that voice—it was smooth and rich, hot as hell. The thought of that voice in my ear, saying filthy things, made me take another sip of my drink.
“Welcome to the fuckup club,” Noah said. “I’m the president of the west coast chapter.”
I smiled. “You’re not a fuckup. You’re rich and successful.”
“So are you. Besides, you said it yourself: I’m not serious and I screw a lot of women. Even my own friends think I’m a mess.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. My drink was going pleasantly to my head, and sitting on this patio with this beautiful view, I was starting to think California wasn’t so bad. “How many is a lot?” I asked, curious.
Noah shook his head. “Not as many as my friends think. Aidan is uptight, Dane has been hung up on Aidan’s sister Ava for a decade, and Alex is a survivor of the divorce from hell. Compared to the three of them, I suppose I screw a lot of women.” His hazel gaze moved over me, down the front of my dress and back up again. “Just like you, Emma, screw a lot of men.”
He wasn’t trying to shame me. Even if he was, it wouldn’t have worked. I looked back at him, feeling a pulse of awareness, of pleasure, low in my belly and between my legs. Yes, I had sex when I wanted. But this kind of attraction, the kind that made me feel more drunk than the margarita did—I never felt that.
Never.
It was definitely dangerous. But I was all the way across the country from my home, my everyday problems. I could control this. I knew what would happen in the end—disappointment, deception on my part, the deep fear that there was something irretrievably wrong with me. But maybe, this time, I could enjoy myself until that happened.
I pushed my drink aside and leaned forward, like I was going to tell him a secret. “I have a motto,” I said. “Words I live my life by. Do you want to hear what it is?”
Noah leaned forward too, his gaze on mine. He was close enough that I could smell sun-warmed male skin and beer. I wanted to know what he tasted like. “Tell me,” he said.
“’Deep feelings mess up your life,’” I said.
There was a second when his face went carefully blank, his handsome features a mask. I was close enough to watch every line. Whatever he was thinking of, he pushed it down, pushed it away, made it into nothing. I knew how that felt. I did it every minute of every day.
Then the blankness broke and the sexy lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled. It was the smile of one soul that recognizes another. “You’re a lone wolf,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“No attachments.”
“No.”
“No relationships.”
“God, no.”
“No morning afters.”
“Never.”
We were so close that for a second I thought he might kiss me. And I wanted it. Before everything crashed the way it always did, I wanted to know what that felt like.
But Noah didn’t kiss me. Instead he picked up his beer glass and clicked it very gently against my margarita glass before taking a sip.
“Like I said, Emma,” he said. “Welcome to the fuckup club.”
Four
Noah
* * *
As the sun disappeared below the horizon, I drove her to my place. We’d had one drink each, we’d eaten our fill of great food, and Emma seemed to be unwinding. She had put her big sunglasses away and was leaning back on the expensive leather seat of my very nice car.
The air between us was heavy with expectation, even in the silence, and that was fine with me. I hadn’t anticipated getting a woman into bed in what felt like a million years. I was definitely going to enjoy this one.
“We’re not going to tell anyone, right?” she said, and I knew she was thinking the way I was.
“Hell, no,” I said.
She smiled, an almost-mischievous smile. “I don’t know who everyone would worry about more, you or me.”
“Well, I could definitely crush your tender emotions with my callous, not-serious ways.”
“True. And I, the man-eater, could rip you to pieces.”
I snorted. No, she couldn’t.
Well, maybe. I was game to find out.
I pulled into my driveway and got out of the car. Emma got out, too, looking my house over from top to bottom in a way that was similar to the way she’d looked at me. “This is nice,” she said.
It was. My house wasn’t huge—it was a three-bedroom place in a quiet neighborhood on the west end of Griffith Park—but it was decent. I kept it up, had it painted regularly, had renovated the building and the grounds. It was my place, had been home for the past ten years, and when it came to my house I spared no expense. “It’s the only nice thing I own,” I said.
Emma looked at me, confused. “What?”
“Nothing.” Of course, she’d already said I was rich. I was a Tower VC partner, so I should own a lot of nice things. There were a lot of things people didn’t know about me, and I liked it that way. “Come inside and I’ll show you how nice it is.”
We walked through the main room, the wide-open space with a few sofas, a bookshelf, gleaming wood floors, and a high ceiling with heavy beams. Off the main room was my kitchen, where I poured us a glass of chilled wine. I knew she liked the place, and the wine, because she quickly slid off her heels and wandered the room in her sexy bare feet, her calf muscles slender and tight as she walked.