She drew in a breath and tore her eyes away from them.
Right up into Mac’s hazel gaze.
She’d startled him in the midst of some fascinating indecipherable expression.
He hadn’t been watching Morty and Helen.
He’d been watching her.
“Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to,” she said, finally, conversationally. The nonchalance she delivered that with was a supreme effort.
He tipped his head quizzically. “Up to?”
“I mean, I’veseennaked people before.”
“Yeah?” He dropped his gaze again and feigned abstraction as he leafed through his mail, flyers and periodicals and bills, from the looks of things, and he paused to frown at a manila envelope. “Have you now? In quantity? Good heavens, Avalon Harwood, what kind of company have you been keeping?”
He kept his face lower, but she didn’t miss his little smile.
“Well, you know how San Francisco is.”
He looked up at her then, and something about the shift in his stance told her he was about to deliver a coup de grace. “I happen to know there are no hippies left in San Francisco. They were priced out. They have to import the weirdos and eccentrics and free spirits now, and they go home to other cities during the day. Everyone’s a workaholic and no one thinks about sex. The Summer of Love it ain’t.”
Damn. So he did know how San Francisco was. Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and all those guys wouldn’t recognize the place today.
“Which is why I’m sure your corporate millionaires and other geeks on retreat here in Hellcat Canyon would find an unpredictable parade of middle-aged nudists... refreshing,” he continued.
Mac met her eyes,kapow, the better to savor her reaction. “It might make them nostalgic, even, for that time of free love... and so forth.”
This was so brilliantly played she was arrested by admiration. She had every faith it would give way to anger in a second or two.
Because the moment he said “sex” that’s all she was thinking about, and yet she couldn’t quite remember the last time she’d had any of that, the same way she couldn’t remember the last time, say, she’d had a piece of toast, though surely it wasn’t that long ago.
She honestly couldn’t think of a single tech worker she knew who could say the word “hippies” without snorting. Or who would willingly whip off their hoodies to reveal their skinny bodies, untouched by the sun in eons thanks to San Francisco weather and all that work. Let alone whip off theirundiesin front of their coworkers. It would take an awful lot of alcohol or some truly splendid Burning Man–caliber drugs.
Rachel was pretty cool, but she was a businesswoman after all. She wasn’t going to want a property adjacent to a part-time nudist colony.
Avalon was going to have to keep her from coming out here today. She fidgeted with her phone, clutched in her fist.
Mac’s eyebrows went up, urging her to say something.
“You don’t know what you’re up against, Mac,” she said idly.
“Don’t I?” he said softly, sympathetically.
She didn’t like that. It reminded her of the times she’d been up against him. And how it clearly hadn’t meant much to him.
“How’s your head, Harwood?”
“Harder and cooler than ever,” she said tersely.
“You have a little bruise. Blue’s not a bad color for you, though.”
“Such a relief to hear I’m not an eyesore.”
It was like a thousand new suns were born in her chest when he smiled slowly at that.
She fought the feeling as if she was actually being sucked into an orbit. She realized that at no point had Corbin ever made her feel as though she could lose herself in him and not even notice. Her boundaries had never been compromised.
