Chapter 3
Emma
My mouth dropped open.I felt it, felt the air in my mouth as I stared at him. I’d never considered myself a person who was easy to shock. No, it was usually me doing the shocking. But I was shocked now.
Shocked, and turned on.
I was a grown woman, with a grown woman’s needs and no time for a relationship—Tinder was my best friend. A Tinder date was usually a pretty straightforward negotiation, with one or both parties looking for sex and not much pretense otherwise. So in a way, I was used to this kind of bluntness about what a man wanted.
But this wasn’t some random guy off the internet with an ex-wife, a gym membership, and a backwards baseball cap. This was one of the Tower VC partners, the lifelong friend of my sister’s husband. He was Noah Pearson, he didn’t even want to be here, and we were supposed to just be having dinner.
I recovered myself before I could swallow too many bugs. “I never agreed to have sex with you.”
Noah shrugged. “True, because I never asked. But it’s going to happen anyway.”
“You seem pretty sure of yourself.”
“I just read the room, Emma. This—” he motioned to the air between us— “is a thing. It’s easy enough to figure out. Why waste time denying it?”
I pushed my sunglasses up into my hair. “You know we’re a thing five minutes after meeting me?”
“Are you saying it isn’t true?”
Damn it. I was trying to force myself to stop staring at him, but I couldn’t quite do it.
He was good-looking—of course he was. Gorgeous, even. And sexy, any woman would be able to see that. What had caught me off-guard was that my breath was short and I could feel my pulse in my neck. Just by looking at him, I could suddenly feel how my dress fit against my skin, could feel the warm breeze on the damp back of my neck.
He had nice hands—wide and strong, the knuckles prominent, the fingers deft and masculine. Why the hell was I looking at his hands? Why was I looking at the shape of his mouth against his trim, dark blond beard? Why was I looking at his short, dark blond hair and wondering what it felt like? Why did I have a shaky feeling in the pit of my stomach at the thought of having dinner with him?
That shaky feeling? I’d never had it. Not when I was a teenager, not when I was a horny single girl in my early twenties. Not for any Tinder date. And Noah had picked up on it, damn him.
But I’d only just met the man. And he was a man, just like any other. He needed to get over himself.
I shifted my weight onto one hip and crossed my arms. “Look,” I said. “If you want to fuck, I’ll consider it. But I make no promises. And do you know what I want right now? Right this minute? Dinner. And a tall drink, cold and preferably loaded with alcohol. I want to get off these heels and get out of this fucking sunshine. Do you think you can manage that?”
He grinned. He took off his sunglasses, and now I was looking at his eyes, which I realized were hazel and had fine, sexy lines at the corners. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Right this way.”
He was right:I liked the restaurant. It was a cool neighborhood place, with green palms and blond oak tables and chairs. Whatever was cooking smelled delicious.
Noah seemed to know the owner, who came out of the back as soon as we came into the restaurant, greeting us effusively. “Mr. Pearson!” he said, pumping Noah’s hand as if they were long-lost relatives. “It’s so good to see you! So good!”
“Thanks, Thomas,” Noah said, shaking his hand and giving his shoulder a manly slap. “Glad to see you’re so busy. Sorry for the short notice, but can we get a table on the deck?”
“Of course, of course!” Staff bustled around and a minute later we were led through the restaurant and out the back, where there were tables under generous umbrellas to keep off the setting sun. The view from here was breathtaking, a vista of the brown Hollywood hills dressed in scrub, the city rolling away. We took a seat and the warm breeze soothed my skin, cooling me as I sat back. Before I could open my mouth, a waiter brought a large, icy, brimming margarita and placed it in front of me.
“My god,” I said, staring at it. I had never loved anything as much as I loved that drink in that moment. “I didn’t even see you order this.”
“I told you you’d like this place,” Noah said as the server put a cold pint of beer in front of him.
“You knew I’d like a margarita?”
“I guessed. Accurately, it looks like.”
Indeed, I had pulled the drink affectionately toward me and had taken a generous sip. “Amazing,” I said as the cold alcohol slid down my throat. Beneath the table, I quietly slipped off my heels. “I could get used to it.”
Noah gestured politely and the server came back with menus. He went over the daily specials, then offered to come back in a few minutes and take our order. I told him not to bother leaving, and then I ordered the ahi tuna. Noah ordered too, and the waiter left.
“So, Emma Riley,” Noah said, easing back in his chair and looking at me across the table. “We could do the get-acquainted thing, I guess.”
I took another deep sip of my drink. “We could.”
“Let’s do it differently. Tell me what you already know about me.”
I liked that. I licked margarita off my lip—he watched—and said, “Not much. You’re the Tower VC partner in L.A., doing entertainment deals. You’ve known Aidan and the others since you were teenagers. Since you’re a Tower VC partner, you’re very rich. You don’t come east very often. Aidan thinks you’re not very serious and you sleep around a lot.”
Noah rubbed a finger over his bearded jaw, waiting for me to say more. When I didn’t, his eyebrows rose. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. I don’t pay much attention to gossip.”
“What do you pay attention to?”
“My business. How much money I’m making. My staff, my clients, my bank balance. That’s about it.” My business was my entire life, taking up all of my time and concentration. I should have known every detail of everything that was happening with my recruits, but as the meeting with Catharine had proven, I hadn’t known what I was supposed to know. What the hell had I been paying attention to all this time?
It was an uncomfortable thought, so I turned the focus of the conversation back to him. “Your turn. What do you know about me?”
He rubbed the finger on his jaw again. Those nice hands. His jaw was perfect under the short, neatly trimmed beard, framing his mouth, drawing my eye to it. “Let’s see,” he said. “You’re Samantha’s sister, CEO of Executive Ranks. You’re thirty-one and you’ve run your company for ten years. You and Samantha were abandoned on the steps of a hospital when you were babies and were raised by adoptive parents in Chicago. You’re one year older than she is. You’ve never been married and have no children. You live in a brownstone in Greenwich Village, which you rent and don’t own. You just met with Catharine Knowles, the president of Lodestar Productions, presumably to try and recruit her an executive assistant. The meeting went badly. You have a sailor mouth. Oh, and much like me, you sleep around a lot.”
I put my drink down. “How the fuck do you know all of that?” The sailor mouth thing was accurate, definitely.
Noah shrugged. “Some of it Samantha told me, some of it I picked up on, and some of it I guessed.”
“Samantha told you about how we were adopted?” It wasn’t a deep secret, but it also wasn’t something that either of us talked about with strangers. Or near-strangers, like Noah was. I’d never talked to anyone except my therapist about it.
“Sure she did,” Noah said. “She’s a lovely woman. Not my type, but lovely. We talk more than even Aidan realizes, I think. Does it bother you that I brought it up?”
I shrugged. It didn’t bother me, exactly, but my parents—my biological ones, the ones who left me and Sam at a hospital and walked away forever—were not my favorite topic. “It’s fine, I guess. It isn’t a state secret. But it’s weird, not knowing where you really come from. I think Sam handles it better than I do.”
Noah took a swig of his beer. “Nothing that a little therapy can’t fix, right?”
“I’m way ahead of you there. I’ve been going for six years. It turns out I’m still a fuckup.”
He was easy to talk to. Easy to look at, certainly. And that voice—it was smooth and rich, hot as hell. The thought of that voice in my ear, saying filthy things, made me take another sip of my drink.
“Welcome to the fuckup club,” Noah said. “I’m the president of the west coast chapter.”
I smiled. “You’re not a fuckup. You’re rich and successful.”
“So are you. Besides, you said it yourself: I’m not serious and I screw a lot of women. Even my own friends think I’m a mess.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. My drink was going pleasantly to my head, and sitting on this patio with this beautiful view, I was starting to think California wasn’t so bad. “How many is a lot?” I asked, curious.
Noah shook his head. “Not as many as my friends think. Aidan is uptight, Dane has been hung up on Aidan’s sister Ava for a decade, and Alex is a survivor of the divorce from hell. Compared to the three of them, I suppose I screw a lot of women.” His hazel gaze moved over me, down the front of my dress and back up again. “Just like you, Emma, screw a lot of men.”
He wasn’t trying to shame me. Even if he was, it wouldn’t have worked. I looked back at him, feeling a pulse of awareness, of pleasure, low in my belly and between my legs. Yes, I had sex when I wanted. But this kind of attraction, the kind that made me feel more drunk than the margarita did—I never felt that.
Never.
It was definitely dangerous. But I was all the way across the country from my home, my everyday problems. I could control this. I knew what would happen in the end—disappointment, deception on my part, the deep fear that there was something irretrievably wrong with me. But maybe, this time, I could enjoy myself until that happened.
I pushed my drink aside and leaned forward, like I was going to tell him a secret. “I have a motto,” I said. “Words I live my life by. Do you want to hear what it is?”
Noah leaned forward too, his gaze on mine. He was close enough that I could smell sun-warmed male skin and beer. I wanted to know what he tasted like. “Tell me,” he said.
“’Deep feelings mess up your life,’” I said.
There was a second when his face went carefully blank, his handsome features a mask. I was close enough to watch every line. Whatever he was thinking of, he pushed it down, pushed it away, made it into nothing. I knew how that felt. I did it every minute of every day.
Then the blankness broke and the sexy lines at the corners of his eyes crinkled as he smiled. It was the smile of one soul that recognizes another. “You’re a lone wolf,” he said.
“Exactly.”
“No attachments.”
“No.”
“No relationships.”
“God, no.”
“No morning afters.”
“Never.”
We were so close that for a second I thought he might kiss me. And I wanted it. Before everything crashed the way it always did, I wanted to know what that felt like.
But Noah didn’t kiss me. Instead he picked up his beer glass and clicked it very gently against my margarita glass before taking a sip.
“Like I said, Emma,” he said. “Welcome to the fuckup club.”