"Jesus. Are you late for your own wedding or something?" That would beawful, Jo realized. Just awful. She didn't want Mr. Handsome to be on his way to his wedding. She wanted him to marryher. Possibly right here and now in the airport. She wondered if an airline pilot, like ship captains, had the ability to perform marriage ceremonies.
Slow your roll,she told herself firmly. There was no universe in which this city-slicker guy was going to marry her at all, much less on a two-second-long acquaintance.
What a pity, though. He wasgorgeousand she bet he smelled really, really good.
To her horror, Jo found herself taking a step forward, like she'd sniff the guy. Her feet would have taken her right up to him for a sniff, if he hadn't said, "No!"
Jo flinched and stepped back. "Yeah, no, sorry about that, don't know what happened to my boundaries." She knew exactly what had happened to her boundaries. They'd all melted into a wave of toe-curling heat the moment she laid eyes on the most beautiful man she'd ever met. It was perfectly normal. Probably. Probably deciding you wanted to marry somebody as soon as you saw them wastotallynormal.
Mr. Handsome blinked at her. "You didn't cross any boundaries. I mean, no, I'm not late for my own wedding."
"Oh! Oh, good. Because really, you shouldn't be in a position of needing to fly out of a snowstorm close enough to your wedding for it to be an issue. Like, there should definitely be a moratorium on travel at, say, what, at least three days before your own wedding? No Vegas bachelor parties the night beforewhen you're supposed to be getting married in Vermont. That kind of thing." This was awful. She was talking and she couldn't shut up.
Mr. Handsome drew a careful breath, like he was trying to avoid saying all the things he probably really thought about the crazy woman he'd just asked for a lift from. Possibly he was trying to avoid saying "NEVER MIND, I'VE THOUGHT BETTER OF IT"very loudly and with a lot of emphasis,which Jo really couldn't blame him for, if he had.
Instead, though, he said, "I've always been a little concerned about Vegas bachelor parties anyway," like he'd really put some thought into it. "I feel like if you're doing a 'what stays in Vegas' kind of party, maybe getting married isn't quite the thing for you right now?"
"Exactly! You get me!" Maybe the imaginary wedding was back on. Or maybe, Jo thought, maybe she needed to get out of the house more often, so that she wasn't planning weddings to men she'd exchanged fifty words with.
Mr. Handsome's smile absolutely lit up what was otherwise a perfect, flawless, chiseled face. Because of course it did, Jo thought: ofcoursehis smile would make him evenmorebeautiful. That wasn't fair.
"So we're on?" he asked hopefully.
"For thewedding?" Jo's voice cracked. She was almost certain she hadn't said anything about a sudden marriage aloud, but she couldn't think what else Mr. Handsome might mean.
His brown eyes widened slightly. "…for the plane flight?"
If the world would just open up and swallow her whole, that would be great, Jo thought. If she could sink into the magma at the center of the earth, or wherever it was the magma resided, then that would beperfect. She stood there a few horrified seconds, hoping it would happen, and when it didn't, whispered,"Right. The flight. Are you nuts? Have you seen the weather? If it's not a wedding, what is it? Oh no. Not a funeral?"
Mr. Handsome's expression softened into a flickering smile that made Jo feel inexplicably safe and warm. "No. No funeral. I'm supposed to get back East for work, that's all. Something big came up."
"Twenty grand worth of big? I mean, what do you do—areyou a model?"
His eyebrows shot upward. "No? What? Why?"
"Oh." Jo felt herself blushing all the way to her hairline. "Because you look like you could be? TV star, maybe?"
"No." That disarming smile of his was back, teasing at the corners of his mouth and eyes as he offered a hand. "Colton Drew, attorney-at-law."
"Jo. Uh, Jo, uh, is there another kind of attorney?" She pulled a glove off to shake his hand—big, square, incredibly warm—and his eyebrows crinkled again.
"Not as far as I know, Jo Uh."
"Talbott," she said with momentary sour amusement, both at his teasing and her brief inability to remember her own name just because aboywasshaking her hand. "Jo Talbott. I just suddenly wondered. Because why would you—notyou, but attorneys—have to say 'at law' if there wasn't another kind of attorney?"
Colton Drew, attorney-at-law, opened his mouth and shut it again before pursing his lips, staring into the distance, and finally shaking his head. "No idea. It's just an affectation, I guess. It's a case being brought by a group of teens trying to prevent further damage to the climate, and the defendants have manipulated the system to move the court date up by several months. I need to get home so I can finish preparing the best possible case for them."
"Oh." Something else inside Jo melted. "So you're one of the good guys?"
He offered that absolutely devastating little smile again. "I hope so. I practice environmental law on behalf of the children of the future, anyway."
"And that pays enough to spend twenty grand on an emergency flight?"
Colton chuckled, an inviting, quiet sound. "It does when we win suits of this magnitude, yes. These wins also let us take on the equally important but less financially fecund suits."
"Fecund?"
To her surprise, Colton Drew looked a little abashed. "Extremely productive."
