“I didn’t know how to feel about it. I still don’t. He wants me to call him.”
I’d introduced Gretchen to her current ex after he and I had become fast friends at Notre Dame. During our first class of Introductory Biology, we were the only people who seemed to notice how crazy the professor was. We’d looked at each other across the room and made the same face. Greg, Lucy, and I would discuss lectures over cold pizza in the dining hall or stay up late drinking Kahlua hot chocolates under the fleeceFighting Irishblanket my dad had sent me.
Thinking Greg was the perfect guy, I’d set him up with Gretchen years later and they’d hit it off immediately—until he’d mercilessly dumped her two days before graduation.
He’d accepted a job in Japan, an offer we’d heard nothing about, and was moving to start a new life. It’d been obvious to everyone but him and Gretchen that he’d been terrified of how intense things had become with her. Regardless, he’d gotten on the plane and none of us had heard from him since. Until now.
“Is Greg in town or did he call from Japan?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t say. But the number was local.”
I widened my eyes. “Aren’t you curious?” I asked. “What if he’s in town?”
She shook her head vigorously, blonde curls bouncing over her shoulders. “Nope,” she said with finality. “That part of my life is done.”
“Wow.” I lifted the wineglass to my mouth. “I can’t believe, after all this time—” I started and promptly spilled wine down my front.
“Oh, Jesus,” Gretchen said, taking my drink from me. “Put club soda on that. Now.”
“But Lucy’s about to make her announcement—”
“That dress is too sexy to get ruined,” she said. “And toowhite.”
I cursed my clumsiness and hurried into Lucy’s kitchen to search her refrigerator, finding only Perrier. I poured some onto a dishtowel and pressed it against the impurity on my breast. At a noise behind me, I turned.
My lips parted. Hooded golden eyes, darkened with hunger, stared back at me. A hot thrill pulsed somewhere deep in me. My body remembered him first with the impulse to arch toward him. I froze, back in the theater, mesmerized by the handsome, mysterious stranger, under his spell again as if no time had passed since that night.
When we’d met eyes across a crowded room.
When he’d suggested ordering me somethingflavorful.
When I’d momentarily lost all sense of my surroundings.
I’d almost convinced myself it’d all been a dream.
He flattened his hands on the surface of the kitchen island, the only thing separating us. “You disappeared on me.”
I hadn’t disappeared so much as run away. Standing in front of him again, I was hit with the same dueling urges as I’d had during our first encounter.
Go to him.
Stay away.
“Tell me your name.” His thick voice was my desire manifested.
My draw to him was so strong, it seemed the only thing to do was back away from it. So I did, retreating one step. “I . . .”
He straightened up. “Don’t run again. What’s your fucking name?” he repeated. It didn’t occur to me to question the intensity of his question or the urgency in his voice—not malicious butpleading.
“Olivia,” I said, hardly recognizing my own voice.
“Olivia,” he said with reverence, momentarily satisfied.
He rounded the island toward me, his eyes never leaving mine as he took the towel I’d been holding—clutching. The hair on my arm rose over me as his skin brushed mine, the look in his eyes growing hungrier.
“Olivia,” he said softly. “I’m desperate to know you.”
My lids fluttered. A man like this wasn’t desperate for anything, but in that moment,Iheld his full attention. And his golden-brown gaze, fringed by long, unblinking lashes that softened strong, carved-from-marble features.
