He shifted in his seat. “As long as we’re confessing…”
“Wait.” She gulped down her remaining whiskey and held out her mug for more. He obliged in silence, though he was far less generous this time. Her eyes had already taken on a glassy sheen. “Now, I’m ready.”
“It only took a few hours for me to regret what I’d done. It took almost two years for me to go looking for you.”
“What? But we never…”
“I saw you on the university campus. You were surrounded by classmates, and you looked so damned happy.”
“I wasn’t.”
He shrugged. “I watched you for a while, and as much as I wanted to speak to you, I knew I’d made the right choice. You were succeeding in ways I never would. You had friends. There was even a man hovering over you. So, I walked away.”
She jolted upright, her whiskey sloshing over one side of her mug. “Was he medium height with brown hair?”
“I don’t quite recall. What stood out to me was his enormous gold fob watch.”
She groaned. “If you hadn’t fled, you might have saved me from the man who would eventually jilt me in front of half of Seattle.”
“Perhaps I should have,” he replied. “I would have savored stuffing his timepiece down his throat.”
“I hated that watch. He loved it more than me.” She scooted closer to tap her mug to his. “Want to know the worst part?”
“What?”
“He kissed like a toad.”
“Genie, I do not want to hear about you kissing him.”
“Maybe all men kiss like toads,” she mused, a slight slur to her words.
Tommy squeezed his eyes shut and groaned. She’d never been properly kissed?
“Do you kiss like a toad?”
His poor mug was in danger of being crushed between his hands, so he set it carefully aside. “Genie, that’s enough…”
“Think you could do better?”
“I know I could.” He cracked an eye open. “But we’ve had a lot to drink—oomph.”
He caught Imogen against his chest. She encircled his neck with her arms, leaned back, and gifted him a smile so adorably eager that his toes curled. His hands slid down to her slender waist, at last discernible through the layers of heavy clothing. She was so warm, so pliant, and a hiss of wanting escaped his lips.
“Genie,” he said in a strangled voice. “We’re friends, remember?”
“Friends kiss.”
“They most certainly do not.”
“Fine. We’re not friends.”
“Hmm, I see.” He shifted her fully onto his lap, his arms closing around her so naturally it was if they’d done it a hundred times before. “And that means I can kiss you?”
“Exactly. A loophole.”
“I’m starting to think you’re the scoundrel.”
“Perhaps so. And perhaps…” She leaned forward to nip lightly at the end of his nose. “You like it.”
