“Like my family?”
“Or a girlfriend…?” She glances sideways, her eyelashes brushing her cheeks before she looks up at me directly. “Before our kisses cross a line?”
I think they already have, but maybe she’s thinking about me kissing the tops of her thighs, too. I brush my knuckles under her chin, keeping her gaze lifted as I hold her eye contact. “I’m single. Completely single. And my family is all on the east coast tonight, so midnight is long gone for them. I’m all yours.”
She lets out a stuttering exhale that feels a lot like surprised relief. “Okay.”
“How about you?” I stroke my thumb along her jaw. “Do you have family you want to call at midnight?”
“No, I’m single, too.”
“And what about family?”
“Oh.” She looks vaguely surprised at the question. “I’m an only child, and my mom is on the east coast, too. Fast asleep. And my father…” She laughs and gestures at the busy city below us. “He’s here, but probably already asleep, too.”
“In Vegas?” I can’t keep the disbelief out of my voice.
“He’s not here for the party. I actually didn’t know he would be here this week. My mom was the one who pointed out that our paths would be crossing, and since this is neutral third space, she thought we might be able to defrost our relationship with dinner.”
“Wishful thinking?”
“She’s not… It’s not that idealistic. We’ve never been super close. My dad was absent for most of my childhood. My mom was too present.”
“Ah. Controlling?”
“Yeah. I, um, was quite the rebel as a teenager?—”
“Dr. Francesca!”
She looks pleased at my reaction. “I know, right?”
“What did rebelling look like for you?”
She kicks her ankle up behind her. “I got my first tattoo when I was fifteen. Drank a lot of their booze.” She looks at me carefully for a moment, as if she’s weighing up if she wants to say whatever she’s going to share next, and then she gets a defiant little look in her eye, and suddenly I canclearlysee the kind of bratty teenager she was. “I discovered how much fun it was to fool around with boys, too.”
I fucking bet she did. “Yeah?”
“Mmm.”
“And that was fun?”
A wicked smile curves at her pretty mouth. “Very.”
I laugh out loud. “We all have a wild stage.”
“Tell that to my parents,” she mutters.
“But—and I know we’ve just met—aren’t you a different person now? That was what, a decade ago? You’re almost finished with medical school!”
“I wish that impressed them.” Her voice goes tight at the end.
“I can’t imagine how being a doctor is wrong to someone.”
“I’m going into emergency medicine.” She hunches her shoulders up to her ears.
I slide my jacket off and wrap it around her. “That’s really cool.”
“Not to my parents. They just see it as more of my rebellious streak. The worst part is that if I were a boy—he wanted a boy—my dad would probably love that I want to be an ER doc. That’s the right kind of reckless for ason. But I was supposed to…” She trails off.
