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Of course, it didn’t mean she didn’t have a boyfriend who lived elsewhere. For the time being.
Okay. He sat again and the step was no warmer for his having just left it. He didn’t know about her love life, and he wouldn’t know. She certainly wouldn’t volunteer it, and he wouldn’t ask.
That kiss—why had he kissed her? With his careless spilling of emotion, he’d lost all leverage he’d had to be able to interrogate her, to finally learn the truth.
But that kiss—how could he have not kissed her? He’d tasted a memory of crayons and Play-Doh mixed with the exotic newness of her as an adult who craved a different sort of satisfaction. He couldn’t get her off his skin. Shaking her off had been a challenging, sorrowful, arduous process, and now he was back to square one.
He sat there, at square one, shaking his head, for an hour and a half.
He was still sitting when Cassidy finally emerged. She didn’t see him. She backed out of her front door, fumbling with her keys. A black trench coat was draped over her arm, implying she was in such a rush that it would be thrown on while walking quickly to wherever she was going.
She snapped open a little gold-beaded purse and dropped her keys inside. There couldn’t be room in there for much else. She turned just as Eric got to his feet on the top step. She froze, her expression a blend of nervousness and extreme pissed-off-ness. She put her hand back on the doorknob.
“No, please,” Eric said. “Please, Cassidy. I needed to talk to you. I knew you wouldn’t meet me.”
Cassidy blew out a hard breath, and her eyes narrowed. But Eric’s eyes traveled down from her face, and her warning signs became insignificant. Her body—the body he’d once hugged through a navy Saunders University sweatshirt and denim shorts—was poured into a dress that rendered him speechless. Her freckled shoulders and arms were bare except for two thin straps. Her breasts, only slightly more cream-colored than the satin gown, swelled out from a tight bodice. The dress fell from her waist in gauzy layers, cut on a diagonal so that he had an unobstructed view of one long, toned calf. Bright red toenails peeked out from complicated-looking gold sandals, the kind a Roman goddess might have worn.
He dragged his gaze back to her face, framed with sleek burnished waves. Surprise was all over that flawless face. How could that be? How could she not know that if he’d loved her girlish looks, her womanly beauty could very well strike him dead where he stood?
“Give me a break,” he said, but his words sounded, even to him, more of a desperate plea than a command. He added, “I came all the way here.”
Cassidy spoke. “So I see.”
“I mean, I came all the way to London, not all the way to your apartment. Though I did come here…I’m not stalking you.”
Cassidy hesitated, panic spreading across her features. She shivered and shrugged into her coat. Then she raised her arm and, at a volume Eric had never heard come from her throat, yelled, “Taxi!”
She started down the steps. Eric took light hold of her wrist.
“What are you doing? You can’t spare me a minute of time?”
Cassidy thought it over.
“Yeah, okay. I followed you. But I really have to talk to you and I didn’t know how else to get through to you.”
He squeezed his fingers around her skin a tiny bit, a physical entreaty.
“Hear me out. Just hear me out. You don’t have to—” He cut himself off. She was regarding him warily, but she didn’t yell for a taxi again. He let go of her wrist and dragged his hands through his hair, digging his short nails into his scalp. “You don’t have to say anything. All right? I was wrong. I was wrong to ask you anything about why you—about why you left. I was wrong to kiss you like that. I was wrong to demand anything. It doesn’t matter now. How could it matter now?”
Cassidy didn’t answer, but Eric hadn’t expected her to.
“It doesn’t. That’s not why I’m supposed to be here, it’s not why I’m supposed to talk to you. I’m here for Gilbert Harrison, and Gilbert Harrison only. Can we go somewhere? Twenty minutes, I promise. Then you can go—wherever you’re going. Unless—” shoot “—you have a date picking you up?”
Cassidy shook her head, a tiny motion that made Eric breathe a little bit easier.
“All right, then. Can we go somewhere for a drink, maybe?”
Cassidy pressed her lips together, thinking, then nodded vaguely to the other side of the street.
“After you,” Eric said.
Cassidy nodded like a queen, then took the first step, wobbling the slightest bit on what could have been four-inch heels. Eric took her arm gently, hoping her stubbornness wouldn’t make her shake it off so hard that she went sprawling onto the pavement.
She quietly allowed it.
They walked across the street and down about a half dozen doors to a pub called the Black Horse. He opened the heavy wooden door to a rowdy ruckus of football fans screaming at a TV above the bar. Eric couldn’t tell whether the noise was happiness or disappointment. It occurred to him for the first time that sports fans tended to sound the same no matter who was winning.
When Cassidy, in her open coat, swept through the door that Eric held open, a collective hush fell over the men gathered around the television. The silence was only long enough to be noted, then catcalls and whistles filled the air. Eric tried to glare at each man in turn, but ale and sports had watered down any deference they might have had to a protective escort. Cassidy clicked by them, all but oblivious, leading Eric to a table in the back corner, and as soon as she was out of their eyeballing range, the noise level shot back up.
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