“Is it?” She looked at me with a sexy smile.
We slowed without realizing it, our movements becoming more languid, less focused on skating and more focused on just being near each other.
“I bet you’re one of those guys that likes the temp a hair above freezing,” she teased.
“And you’re one of those women that likes it hot enough to peel the top layer of skin.”
She giggled. “I do love a good hot shower. Unfortunately, our building is old and only leaves me a little pink—all skin intact.”
Thinking about Ina naked in the shower was a bad idea. My body was reacting and that was very, very bad. I could not let her know I was getting a semi just thinking about her standing under water, droplets sliding between her breasts.
Fuck.
“Do you miss it?” Ina asked suddenly. “Ireland. Home.”
No one ever asked me about Ireland. No one asked about the place I’d come from or the accent I’d worked so hard to hide. In New York, I was Dane Kavanagh, the billionaire CEO. My past was something I referenced in carefully crafted sound bites during interviews, not something I actually talked about.
But I felt I could trust Ina with my past. She wasn’t going to run to the tabloids and reveal all my secrets. Not that my heritage was a secret. I just didn’t care to have my life story exploited.
“I did when I was young,” I said. “When we first moved here and everything felt foreign and hostile. I missed Dublin, missed my cousins and my grandmother and the way everything smelled different. But that was a long time ago. It’s an old memory now.”
“You trained the accent out.”
“I had to. Kids at school made fun of it. Teachers couldn’t understand me half the time. And when I got to Columbia, I realized no one took you seriously in business if you soundedlike you’d just stepped off a plane from Dublin.” I felt the familiar bitterness rise up. “So I let New York chew me up and spit me out, and I came out on top. American accent, American success story. The immigrant dream.”
“Is it lonely at the top?”
The question made me stop skating entirely. Ina glided to a stop beside me, and we stood there in the center of the rink, facing each other, alone in our little bubble of falling snow.
“Sometimes,” I admitted. “Very lonely.”
“Then why do you do it?” She was looking at me with those eyes that always seemed to see too much, understand too much. “Why make Cupid’s Arrow if you don’t believe in it for yourself? Why build an empire around helping other people find connection if you’re not willing to let yourself have it?”
I should have had an answer ready. I’d been asked versions of this question in interviews before, and I always had a smooth response about separating business from personal life. My canned response was always about how my job was to make the product work for others.
“The data is sound,” I said finally, and even I could hear how weak it sounded.
“Love isn’t data, Dane.” She took off her gloves and reached out, and before I realized what she was doing, her warm hand was against my cold cheek. “It’s magic.”
“Magic isn’t real.”
“Isn’t it?” She moved closer. So close I could count the individual snowflakes on her eyelashes if I wanted to. “You built an entire company on the premise that two people can find each other against impossible odds. That’s magic. The algorithm is just the method. The magic is in the connection itself.”
“That’s just probability and compatibility metrics.”
I got it. I understood it in a way I never got it before.
Because whatever this was between us, it didn’t fit into any of my carefully constructed frameworks. It wasn’t a transaction.
It was just feeling.
And I had no idea what to do with that.
“I’m not good at this,” I said quietly. “At being open. At letting people in. I’ve spent so long building walls that I’m not sure I remember how to take them down.”
“I’m not asking you to take them all down.” Her hand was still on my cheek. I realized I’d leaned into the touch without meaning to. “Just maybe let me peek over the top sometimes. Let me see the real you, not just the CEO version.”
“What if the real me is disappointing?”
