Long Shot

Chapter 14

Leith had been back in Connecticut for two days, since Friday. He hadn’t exactly told Chris the truth when he’d fled Gleann last Thursday. Before Connecticut, he’d meandered through Vermont, checking out the location he’d been considering before Rory Carriage’s call had come through. It didn’t feel like he belonged in Vermont, maybe because it was too similar to Gleann, or because it didn’t have the energy and potential that Stamford had. Or maybe because Vermont was simply too far away from New York City.

Here, in Connecticut, the city—Jen’s home—was a bridge away. A highway drive. A train ride.

He leaned against the driver’s side door of his truck in the motel parking lot, holding his phone and staring to the southeast.

Duncan called then, gloating about how much he’d bench-pressed earlier that day. He sounded slightly drunk.

“You working okay with Jen?” Leith asked him.

There might have been a little laugh in Duncan’s voice; it was hard to tell over the mobile line. “Jen. How did I know you’d bring her up? Yeah, she’s all right. A bit intense, but really smart. Really organized. Not bad to look at, either. I think everyone in the valley is breathing a little easier this weekend, though.”

Leith’s stomach did a little flip. “Why?”

“I guess she went back to the city for a few days to take care of some things. Supposed to be back on Monday. You still driving around New England looking for new roots?”

He pushed away from his truck. “The city. As in New York?”

“No. Phoenix. Of course New York.”

Jen had texted him once Thursday afternoon, after she’d likely heard he’d taken off. Just wanted to make sure you’re OK, it had said. What a shit he was, to not have at least told her himself that he’d gone.

M OK, he’d texted back. Sorry I left. Promise I’ll call later.

“Dougall?”

“What? Sorry, man. I gotta run. I’ll give you a ring when I get back.”

The second Duncan disconnected, Leith called Jen. His leg bounced as he waited for her to pick up—because she never let that thing go to voice mail—the thick sole of his work boots thump thump thumping on the pavement.

“Hey there.” She sounded a little out of breath, like she’d scrambled to pick up. It made his heart jump. In a good way. “Are you back in Gleann?”

“Wouldn’t you know that, if you were there, too?”

“I’m not. I’m in New York for the weekend to take care of a few things.”

“I know. That’s why I called. I’m still in Connecticut. I want to see you. If I hopped on a train, would you go out with me tonight?”

All this was happening incredibly fast. He hadn’t known this was what he wanted to do when he’d called, just that the thought of her being so close to him, away from Gleann, was alluring beyond words, and a chance he didn’t want to miss.

“You mean like a date?”

He was bounding up the outdoor steps to the crappy motel room, tugging his dingy T-shirt out of his jeans to get ready for a shower. “Exactly like a date.”

“What do you have in mind?”

He unlocked the motel room door and toed off his boots. “Don’t care. You pick. I don’t know the city that well.”

“All right. You trust me?”

Going still, he caught his reflection in the generic mirror and noticed he was smiling. “Implicitly,” he said, and meant it.

“Good.” He glanced at a schedule and told her which train he’d arrive on, then she gave him instructions where to take a cab to meet her. Even though he was going to see her shortly, he didn’t want to get off the phone, and he wasn’t a big phone talker at all. She said good-bye and he hated it.

“Wait. Jen?”

“Yeah?”

“I just want you to know, that if it wasn’t highly illegal, I would have killed Olsen for interrupting us the other night.”

She exhaled in a way that had him picturing her lips in a beautiful O. “See you in a few hours.”

Leith grabbed a cab outside of Grand Central and had a harrowing ride south to the corner in SoHo where Jen had told him to meet her. Even if he hadn’t recognized her dark hair or the way her black-and-white dress wrapped itself around that body, he’d know her by her posture—by the way she paced back and forth on a small section of sidewalk outside the little bistro with the wicker outdoor furniture, her phone plastered to her ear. He slid the driver money and unfolded himself from the cab. Just then, Jen pivoted and saw him.

He liked the way she met his eyes and smiled. And he really liked how his appearance caused her to stutter midsentence. She didn’t seem to like that so much, however, and turned her back on him to keep talking.

She wasn’t yelling at whoever was on the other line, but her shoulders hunched with tension and she made curt gestures with her free hand. That’s when he realized she wasn’t carrying her gigantic purse. He had no idea what she was discussing in such strained terms—something to do with minimum guarantees and hard-balled negotiations with regard to tables and chairs—but when she hung up, he was a little scared of her.

It turned him on in a crazy, weird way.

“Ouch,” he said as she came up to him. “Hate to be that person. Everything okay?”

She blinked and then looked in confusion down at her phone. “Oh, that? That was nothing.” She flashed him a smile that was pure sunlight. “Hi. You’re here. In my city.”

Her city. Of course that’s how she’d see it. The odd part was, just a week ago he might have felt uncomfortable hearing that and might have assumed she was deliberately putting space between them. But now that he was, indeed, standing here on a SoHo street with her consuming his vision, there was nothing uncomfortable about her words. It was her city, and he’d wanted to see her here, in her element. He wanted to know what her life had become after she’d left him. And before he’d found her again.

“I am,” he said, then asked, only half jokingly, “So is this a pretty typical Sunday for you?”

She pursed her lips and nodded. “Yeah, a little quieter than during the week.”

Wow, all right. “Well, I’m really glad you—”

Her phone went off again. She gave him an apologetic glance and looked at the screen. “Sorry, I have to take this.”

Of course she did. She turned away, finger pressed against the ear without the phone.

“Hi! Yes, thanks so much for calling me back on a weekend. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” She listened for a long time, then spun back with a whirl and locked excited eyes with him. Looking the complete opposite of the business tiger he’d just witnessed, she bounced up and down on the balls of her high-heeled feet. “Okay, great. Thank you. That’s such wonderful news. Email me the paperwork, I’ll discuss it with my client, and then I’ll see if we have a deal.”

When she tapped off the phone she looked ready to burst.

“What was that all about?” he asked.

“I”—she took a deep breath and looked incredibly pleased with herself—“am setting up a craft convention for Bobbie, to bring her fans and followers together. That was the real estate company that owns the Hemmertex building. They are willing to rent it to Bobbie next winter.”

“So . . . did Bobbie ask you to do this?” He knew her answer before she gave it.

“Not exactly. But! The option will be there if she wants it—and she will once I sell it to her. She wants to do more with her business since her store failed, and I know she wants to support Gleann. So I had this idea about turning Gleann into a destination convention area for small groups. You know, opening the valley up to a new kind of tourism. We could start with Bobbie’s craft convention, really give it a fantastic kickoff.”

He blinked slowly, shocked at himself for being so shocked by her initiative. “We?”

“Yeah. Maybe we could convince the Hemmertex landowners to convert the building into something that could host events all year-round. It would bring businesses back to the downtown. Open up more B&Bs and inns, maybe some motels out on Route 6. Increase usage of the lake. That kind of thing.”

There was an odd sensation in his heart, pride and frustration duking it out. “You’re talking like you’d handle it all. You called Bobbie your client before she even knows what you’re doing.” He opened his arms. “You live here. In New York. You have a job that can’t even leave you alone on a Sunday. Remember?”

The shine of her excitement faded, but just a tinge. “Of course I do. But this is the sort of push that Gleann needs, only they didn’t know they needed it. Bobbie will be ecstatic. Hell, I bet even Sue might crack a smile over the potential.”

Of course, Leith thought. Set off a bomb and then walk away while the shrapnel rained down. Jen was really, really good at that.

Except that he felt in his heart that she was right. This could be a wonderful thing for Gleann, perhaps exactly the spark it needed. Maybe not to set off a bomb, but brilliant fireworks that would umbrella the whole valley and make it come back to life. And that had come from Jen Haverhurst, who didn’t even live there.

Still, he was a realist. He had Da to thank for that. “But what if all that doesn’t work? What if Bobbie goes through with her thing and it fails, or no other events come? What if—”

She looked honestly perplexed as she laid her hand on his bare forearm, just below where he’d rolled up the sleeve of his button-down shirt. No green plaid this time.

“I never thought you to be the kind of person to worry,” she said in a quiet, calm voice that didn’t seem like her at all. Then she stepped closer, so deep inside his space she had to lift her chin to look him in the eye. She searched his face for a long moment, and he wondered what she was looking for. She reached up and placed her hand on his cheek, and said something cryptic. “I never thought you to be the kind of person to think about failure.”

There was an intuitiveness to her words that crawled down his spine with cold, sticky feet, and he pushed deeper into her touch to try to ignore it. It worked, because it only made him even more aware of her, of where they’d left off last time they’d seen each other, the last time they’d touched.

“I’m not thinking about failure.” He bent down as close to her face as possible without taking her mouth. “I’m thinking about getting our date started.”

A slow, rewarding smile. “Good. Is this place okay?”

“Perfect.” He looked nowhere but in her eyes. “I have one condition, though. A challenge, actually.”

“Oh?”

With a long look down at the unusually small purse she had draped over her shoulder, he said, “I see you’re not shackled to your laptop today, which is good, but I want no phone. For two hours. No phone; just me.”

That little wrinkle appeared alongside her nose and her eyes danced. He could practically see her thoughts driving back and forth across her brain, and he was pretty sure she’d deny him.

“All right,” she said. “Deal. But I want to change our date venue, then.”

He grew suspicious. “Why?”

She pressed a hand to her fine chest in mock indignation. “You make an ultimatum and then question my agreement? I’m agreeing to the no phone thing, remember?”

No wonder she usually got whatever she wanted. She could be demanding when she needed to be, charming when she had to be, and utterly personable and magnetic . . . well, pretty much all the time.

“Good point.” He shrugged. “Like I said, I don’t care where we go. As long as it’s with you.”

She turned to the side and offered him her arm. “So come on then. Let me show you one of my favorite places in New York.”

“You know, a shot and a beer at a corner pub would’ve been just fine,” Leith joked as he held open the hefty wood door to the Amber Lounge and let Jen go in ahead of him.

The door closed behind them, shutting out the warm summer evening and throwing them into the dim, air-conditioned lounge decorated in cream leather, substantial bookcases filled with backlit glassware, and plush carpets done in modern swirls of color.

Jen squinted up at him. “Is that where you would’ve taken me if the choice had been yours?”

He recognized the question as curiosity, not judgment. “No. But I called you on a whim, so I hadn’t really given it much thought.” He would now, though.

The gorgeous hostess came up to them from where she’d been straightening chairs by the low tables nearest the shuttered windows. She wore a not-so-gorgeous expression. “Two?” she asked in a bored voice, heaving out an encyclopedia-sized menu from the side of the hostess stand.

“Yes,” Jen replied. “And could you tell Shea that Jen Haverhurst is here?”

The hostess nodded, then led them to a pair of deep, cream-colored leather chairs set facing a short table with a stone top. Leith sank into the chair that seemed to have been made for his size. Jen perched on the edge of hers, legs crossed at the ankle, perfect posture.

He let his eyes drift around the intimate lounge. Though he was an outdoor guy by inclination, he was trained in a visual art and could appreciate the fine design that straddled the line between modern and masculine, posh and welcoming. The elegantly painted sign out front had said the place had just opened ten minutes ago, so there were only two other patrons: guys in suits, one still wearing his plastic convention badge. They sat on the tall, cushioned chairs at the back bar, talking loudly.

“Is this place okay?” Jen asked.

Leith looked back at her and adopted an exaggerated Southern accent. “Yep. I think the country boy will do just fine in this here fancy place.” As she laughed, he opened the tome of a menu and glanced at the side tabs dividing the pages. “Whiskey, eh?”

“You like?”

There must have been a thousand drinks listed, all liquids in various shades of brown or gold, and his mouth salivated as he ran his eyes over the exuberant descriptions.

“How are you, Jen?”

Leith looked up from the menu to see a tall, whisper-thin woman with white-blond hair pulled back in a severe ponytail extending her hand toward Jen. Jen came to her feet and firmly shook the woman’s hand.

“Shea, great to see you. I want you to meet a friend of mine. Leith MacDougall, this is Shea Montgomery, whiskey expert and owner of the Amber.”

Impressed, Leith rose and took Shea’s hand, her grip strong, her eye contact no-nonsense. “Never met an expert before.”

Shea gave him a deep, professional nod then turned to Jen. “Great launch at the Juniper Imports event last spring. I was very impressed with what you did for them. What can I do for you tonight?”

Jen kept her smile restrained, but Leith noticed by the gleam of her eyes how deeply the compliment had affected her. “Wellllll,” Jen said, “the first thing you can do is help my Scottish friend here find a whiskey or two to his liking, and then I’m here to call in a favor.”

One corner of Shea’s mouth stretched for her ear. “Of course. Single malt?” She leaned over to flip through the menu to a specific page he guessed she could find in her sleep. Shea dragged her finger down listings labeled Speyside, spouting a few facts and brief tasting notes about certain ones. They all sounded fantastic, but they were all jumbling in his head.

At last he held up a gentle hand. “I think you’re mistaking me for a half Scot who knows what the hell he likes to drink. My old man drank Famous Grouse every evening. I’m pretty sure anything you want to give me will be better than I’m used to.”

Shea straightened, and he was having the hardest time reading her expression. One moment it looked like relief, another it looked like skepticism. Odd.

“Get him something excellent,” Jen told Shea. “Something special. And bring me one of the same.”

“Carte blanche. I like it,” Shea said. “Do you have time to talk now? I have a private tasting for some conventioneers and I still need to get the back room set up.”

Jen steered Shea toward the hostess stand. Someone turned on music, and a slow, sexy beat drifted from unseen speakers. Leith sat back and watched the two women speak, their words swallowed by the music. After only a few minutes, Shea headed behind the bar to bend over and reach into hidden cupboards. The obnoxious jerks at the bar blatantly checked out her ass and nudged each other, making not-so-quiet comments about what they saw.

Jen returned to his little table in their isolated corner. Only this time, she didn’t sit professionally on the cushion edge. She collapsed into the chair, arms draped over the sides, a giant grin lighting her face.

“What was that about?” he asked.

“You’ve never heard of this place?” When he shook his head, she went on. “Shea’s one of the most well-known experts on Scotch whiskey in the world. Turn on any TV special about whiskey, and she’ll have been interviewed. She’s on a first-name basis with pretty much every distiller in Scotland. She probably has the big liquor conglomerates on speed-dial.”

“Or the other way around.” Leith watched Shea open a bottle with very little of the good stuff left. “Wow. And she owed you a favor?”

“She wasn’t my client at the Juniper Imports showcase, but I pretty much saved her ass that night when none of her booth arrived. Now she’s going to do my whiskey tent at the Highland Games.”

“The . . . Gleann’s Highland Games?”

Jen leaned back, looking wonderfully sure of herself. As well she should be.

“Fuck, Jen. That’s incredible. What a draw.”

“I know. I’m starting heavy promo tomorrow all over the valley. Gleann isn’t going to compete with the bigger, more commercial games across New Hampshire. So I’m going smaller and more intimate, but with elevated experiences. I thought of it when I saw your dad’s scrapbooks, how whiskey was so prevalent in the old games. Big, local tents. Huge bottles as prizes to the competitors.”

He loved how she glowed just then, knowing she’d done well. But even as he grinned in pride, he shook his head because he wasn’t sure where anything else in her life fit in. Now or ever. “Even on a date, you can’t not work.”

“Hey, you’re the one who said no phone. I wanted to bring you here, and I wanted to talk to Shea. Two birds, one stone.”

“I did say that.” The wonderful woman would always be working, always aiming for something. Leith gripped the armrests, fingers digging into the soft leather. “I wish I could be there,” he said to himself, but of course she heard.

She leaned her elbows on her knees, her focus switched solely to him. Her tone turned soft and serious. “Why won’t you be there, Leith? For real. Don’t give me the work excuse. That might work on the rest of Gleann, but not me. Not anymore.”

Shea, bless her, returned holding two spectacularly heavy-footed tumblers with a finger of shimmering brown whiskey in each. She set them down on the stone table with a musical chink. He reached for his without pause, lifted it to his nose.

“Thanks,” Leith told Shea. “I hear you’ll be in Gleann next week. It’s my hometown. But I should warn you that no one there knows anything about whiskey.”

Shea smiled in a way he could now classify as genuine, and he wondered what test of hers he’d passed. “Great to know there’ll be a familiar face. Doesn’t matter if no one knows whiskey. Nine times out of ten those people are more fun to talk to than the people who think they know a lot. I love teaching. And I do love to talk.” Someone out of sight caught her eye and she acknowledged them. “I’ll see you next week then. Enjoy the whiskey.”

“Nice deflection,” Jen said to him after Shea had gone. He’d known she’d been watching him the whole time. “You didn’t answer my question.”

He took his first sip, passing the lovely liquid over his tongue to bite on it with his back teeth. Heaven in a glass.

“Why are you helping Gleann?” he gently fired back. “For real? I asked you once before, in the barn. You want to talk about deflection?”

As she lifted her glass to her lips, she never removed her eyes from his.

“I mean,” he said, because he knew she was buying time and he wanted to get in all that he could, “I’ve only seen how you live here in the city for about an hour now, and I can tell you get energy from it. You carry that to Gleann, yeah, but a little, nonpaying gig like our games shouldn’t mean anything to you. Not after you left.”

Glass still in front of her mouth, she lifted one finger from its curved surface and pointed at him. “But they mean something to you.”

She knew him. Only one other person knew him better, and he was gone. Leith stared into his swirl of whiskey. “Of course they do. They’re some of my best memories.” He lifted his eyes to trap her gaze. “Along with you.”

She didn’t respond with words—and he didn’t expect her to. There it was, that hot, intense shock widening her eyes and making her mouth go soft. Then she looked toward the bar where the two suits had now become five and the noise had increased exponentially. Setting her glass on the armrest of her chair, she said, “It’s my best memory, too.”

“The games? Didn’t you used to think they were a little hokey—”

“No.” Her finger made a slow circle around the rim of the glass. “Not the games. I meant Gleann. I’m doing this for Gleann because that place means everything to me. I’m not sure if I realized the depth of that until I went back.”

She started to play with her hair, plucking at the back pieces and rearranging it around her face and ear. Her glance at him—holy shit—was fleeting and wet, like she was holding back tears. Never had he seen her that way.

“Did you ever wonder why I was in Gleann every summer?”

That confused him. “No. Should I have? Bev just always said her nieces were coming and left it at that.” He leaned forward, placing his glass on the table. “You never let on there was any reason more.”

Her voice drifted distant. “I was really good at that, wasn’t I?”

She had been. She really had been . . . up until the day she’d come back and he’d finally been grown-up enough to notice there was something more. “Jen, whatever you want to tell me, whatever you feel like you have to say, I’ll listen. You know that.”

The impending tears disappeared, just like that. She sat up, her posture rigid. She took a deep breath. “Going to New Hampshire every year wasn’t my choice. At least, not at first. Aunt Bev brought us there, insisted on it and paid for it. Anything to get us out of Iowa. She couldn’t stand the thought of us growing up in her sister’s home with my mom’s asshole boyfriend any more than we could stand to be there.”

Leith’s stomach dropped. The whiskey in his hand was easily the most expensive he’d ever had, and the thought of tipping it down his throat made him nauseous.

“Did he . . .” Oh God, he couldn’t get it out. “Did he . . . do something to you? To Aimee?”

She laughed, loud and short and harsh. “No. He didn’t do anything to us. Neither did my mom. And that was the thing. They didn’t do anything, period. They sat on their asses, with a bottle in one hand and the other held out for a government check. They’d follow me around the house, drunk, calling me names and screaming that I thought I was God’s gift. They called me ugly and nerdy and so many other names I’ve blocked out.” Jen took a pretty big gulp of her drink and didn’t even wince. “But no, there wasn’t any sort of physical abuse, nothing Bev ever reported to the police or called social services about. I think she was scared we’d be put somewhere where she really couldn’t help us.”

He sat perfectly still, only partly aware that more people had started filing into the lounge, scared that if he moved a muscle Jen would realize she was telling him her secrets.

She finished her whiskey and frowned into the empty glass. “I’ve always believed in helping others out if I had the means to do it. I don’t know, that part has always been in me, even when I was really young. But my mom . . . my mom made every excuse in the book. She sat around, waiting for handouts and hating the fact that I wanted to do more with my life. Hating that I wasn’t like her. There was no pride, only jealousy, and the fact I was making her look bad, calling out her own faults. So she tried to call out mine even louder.”

So it wasn’t the boyfriend so much as the mom. No wonder Jen had never spoken of her.

“Or she just made them up,” he offered.

“The sad part was, I didn’t understand how bad it was until Bev brought us here that first summer. From that year on—I was, what, eight?—I realized the toxic world my mom had created in that house. And I vowed to do everything in my power to get the hell away from her. To not be her in any way. To be her complete opposite. Aunt Bev helped me. She saw what I was doing and felt responsible for me. Then I felt responsible for Aimee.”

“That’s why you took all those jobs every year,” he said, piecing it together. “But not Aimee. She was pretty crazy when she was here.”

Jen nodded sadly. “She didn’t want to come. While I was saving every penny for college, I knew Aimee was going to end up like Mom. I tried to change that, but she never listened.”

“Bullshit.”

That got a big response, a nice emotional glare. Good.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“Aimee would’ve stayed in Iowa if it weren’t for you, for your example.”

“But she ran away and got pregnant.”

“And now she has Ainsley. Who is amazing.”

Jen blinked at him. Once. Twice. “She really is, isn’t she?”

He let all that soak in. Jen was the kind of person who needed tangible proof for everything, but she was missing the biggest evidence right in front of her. That Aimee had an incredible daughter and had inherited a business that might go under through absolutely no fault of her own.

“Do you see,” Jen asked, “why I’m such a control freak about her? It’s killing me she won’t talk to me about Owen.”

“Because she and Owen have it under control. And she wouldn’t have that kind of control if it weren’t for all that crap you and she went through. Didn’t we go through this in the park?”

At great length Jen nodded, but he wasn’t convinced it was in agreement. She let out a long breath, like she’d heaved something invisible off her back and now had full range of and control over her diaphragm again. “So,” she said in a hollow tone. “Yeah. Now you know that Gleann was pretty much the only good thing in my life for a really long time. And you . . . you were a huge part of that.”

The old anger and frustration he’d once felt toward her seemed like it had happened to someone else. Those particular emotions were no longer hammering against his heart and mind, but her words, combined with the recollection of their last incredible summer, sliced open an old wound.

He had to ask. “If it was so wonderful, if Gleann changed you and healed you, and then we found something really powerful together, why did you leave? Why didn’t you consider going to school here?”

She closed her eyes, and he couldn’t recall a time she’d ever done that.

“We have to talk about it,” he said, when she still didn’t say anything. “We’ve been dancing around it for days now. I mean, I know we never made any promises to each other, but can you finally tell me why you left?”

When she opened her eyes, they were dry but sad. “It was only ever about college. About creating my own future. Somewhere else. But then you came along and, you’re right, we found something together. It scared me so much, that I was even considering staying. But the thought of picking my place in the world before I ever got to see the whole thing, before I ever knew what I could become . . . The thought of staying in—”

“A small town.”

She swallowed. “Yes. I suppose that was part of it. Gleann’s so different from where I came from in Iowa, but it was still sheltered. The whole idea was to not become my mom, and to do that I had to go bigger. I had to move up and away.”

He stretched his arms over the back of the chair, pressed his head into the cushion, and stared up at the ceiling beams. “I wish you’d told me that back then. I wish you would’ve just said, ‘Leith, I have a shitty mom and a shitty home and I have to get as far away from that as possible.’”

“But it was still too close to me then. I didn’t want anyone in Gleann to find out. The whole point was to pretend I was someone else and then literally become another person. Someone stronger.”

He pulled his head off the cushion. “You are stronger. I can see it. So can everyone else.”

And he hated himself for being selfish, for wanting her to stay with him all those years ago when she otherwise would have missed the opportunity to become this incredible, giving, talented person. To evolve.

I really did love you, he wanted to tell her. And I can see myself doing it all over again.

“I really did love you.”

The words cut through the growing noise in the lounge. It took several shakes of his head for him to realize that it was Jen who’d said them. It was Jen who had somehow heard his thoughts and repeated them back, simply because he’d wanted her to.

She was smiling and moving to the very edge of her chair cushion. Knees pressed together, legs angled to the side, she leaned over the table, closer to him. There was such aching beauty to her. It made every place she was in feel smaller, with her perpetually in the center.

“In my young, inexperienced way,” she said, extremely matter-of-factly, “I loved you. You probably don’t want to hear that now, do you? You didn’t want to hear it back then, and I didn’t blame you.”

His turn to scoot to the edge of the chair, only his legs bracketed the small table as he pressed his elbows to his thighs and leaned in. Their whiskey glasses now stared up at them from where they touched on the table. Hers was empty; his was not.

“I do want to hear it,” he said. “Thank you.” He was very glad she didn’t say you’re welcome. That politeness might have undone him. There was a sharp-edged need for her corkscrewing its way through his body. Hearing those two courteous words, on top of knowing what she’d gone through and that her feelings for him had once been real, and layered over what had nearly happened the other night . . . he was like a grenade, all primed and ready to go and just waiting for someone to pull out his pin. Waiting for her.

It was more than desire, more than sex. He had to make that clear to her, because he didn’t think he could be with her naked if there wasn’t going to be more when they were clothed. She needed to know how he felt and what he wanted. And what he wanted exactly, he just now realized.

“After you left,” he said, touching his fingertips together, “I had a string of really awful relationships, most never longer than a few months.” Carefully he watched her face, the way her jaw tightened and her eyelashes twitched in a barely discernible blink. “At the time I didn’t realize what I was doing, but I’m pretty sure I was purposely choosing the wrong girls. Deep down I knew that those things would never last, because none of them would ever compare to you.”

The last time he’d said something similar, Jen had sprinted in the opposite direction. But that corkscrew was turning tighter and tighter, and the pressure inside him was ready to burst. He had to get this all out, had to ease the weight bearing down on him.

Her shoulders dropped, the deep V-neck of her dress tightening across her chest, making him hard. He ignored it. He needed more than that. He needed her.

“Now that I’ve seen you again, now that I know our chemistry wasn’t faked, I know we can be good together again, Jen. Hell, we could be fucking fantastic. I’m pretty sure, all those years ago when I was picking the wrong women, my mind was holding out hope that you’d come back. It knew something I didn’t. Go figure.”

“Leith—”

He didn’t want to hear any protests, didn’t want her going through any of those lists she loved so much in her mind. Not yet. “Just hear me out, okay?” She nodded, and he began to tick off reasons on his fingers. “We can laugh about anything without embarrassment. We respect each other. We know each other’s past. We talk incredibly easily. I want to tell you things, Jen. So, so many things. We are both smart and business-minded, and we each have drive and dreams.” Honesty ran through his blood and bones and muscles, the most powerful of which was his tongue and lips. He couldn’t stop. He didn’t want to.

“And look at you”—he waved a hand at her—“you drive me goddamn insane, you’re so beautiful. Ah, fuck it, Jen; I’m just going to say it. I want to be with you. I want to try to make it work again. You’re in New York. I’ll be in Connecticut. I want to try, Jen. I have to try. I have to have you.”

And there it was. He’d done it again. He may as well have slit open his chest, carved out his heart, and slapped it on the table between the whiskey glasses.

The longest pause in the world followed, and he had no idea how to fill it. When she slowly rose to her feet, the smooth fabric of her dress pulling snugly around her legs, he had an awful, sickly vision of her leaving again.

Then her eyes turned to green flame, like something magical, and the corners of her delicious mouth ticked up, and he did a mental fist pump.

“I know that look,” he murmured, catching her infectious smile and finally allowing himself to feel the pound of blood in his erection. Let himself ride the desire without reins.

“Oh, you do, do you?” The lounge had gotten loud, but somehow he still heard her.

He slid all the way back in the chair and lifted his face to hers. “I do. You’re going to kiss me.” He glanced down at his lap. “And you’re going to come over here to do it.”