Five
Samuel Kane could count on one hand the times he’d been truly surprised.
He made it his business to anticipate every possible person and event with the power to affect his life and spent a great deal of time developing contingency plans for just such occasions.
He hadn’t planned for this moment.
And now here he was, his mouth hanging open, blinking like twelve years of his life had evaporated and his seventeen-year-old self stood facing Arlie Banks.
Arlie plucked the glass from his hand without invitation and took a swallow. Samuel tried—and failed—not to imagine the channel of heat spreading on her tongue and sliding like silk down her throat.
“After our meeting this morning, I went to see Kassidy Nichols. My best friend from high school?”
Sifting through his memory, Samuel uncovered only the shallowest recollection of her image.
“When I told her that I was coming to work at Kane Foods, she mentioned that once upon a time you had asked her advice about taking me to prom.” She paused, awaiting confirmation.
“I did,” he admitted, steeling himself for the inevitable follow-up question.
“Why didn’t you?”
The part of him dedicated to deflecting pain at all costs supplied a ready defense.
I knew you hadn’t been asked and I felt sorry for you.
He could say this right now. He could end this conversation and send her scurrying away from him tonight and forever.
He might have, if not for what he’d seen earlier.
The look on Arlie’s face the second she’d heard Taegan Lynch’s voice. Her entire body had tensed and before she’d had a chance to rearrange her features, he’d seen genuine fear in the depths of her eyes.
So thick, he could almost taste it.
It had taken every ounce of his considerable restraint not to scoop Arlie off her feet, throw her caveman-style over his shoulder, and carry her away from general vicinity.
Not that such overblown displays of romanticism had ever been within his purview.
He’d only read about them.
“I chickened out,” he said. A huge understatement of the roughly seventy-eight times he’d hovered in her vicinity, rehearsing what he’d say only to have the words evaporate when he took a step in her direction. They were quiet as a sloop sailed past, the cozy family aboard gathered around a table on the deck.
“I would have said yes.” Arlie took another sip from his glass before handing it back to him.
The rim was still warm and wet from her mouth. A smoky communion between them. “Why is that?”
She leaned forward on the railing, her cascade of blond waves almost silver in the moonlight. “I liked you.”
This was why he never drank around other people. In his current state, he was altogether unequipped to deal with this revelation.
Everything he couldn’t say burned at the base of his throat. I liked you too. You were warm, and kind, and the first person who wasn’t charmed by my brother.
His brother.
The whole reason Arlie Banks was on this boat in the first place. Would she be making such admissions if she knew Samuel’s real secret?
What remained of his logical mind warned him that he was in imminent danger of derailing his plan, but he found himself physically incapable of saying words that would wound her further. Words that would send her flying into his brother’s arms for comfort.
The simple, logical explanation he’d been battling since the moment she’d walked into his office had crystalized when he’d watched from the darkness, her narrow shoulders slumped, her body shaking.
Hewanted to comfort her.
He wanted her in his arms.
He wanted her in his bed.
What terrible irony it was, discovering the glaringly unexpected flaw in his own plan. By hiring Arlie Banks, he hadn’t just made her forbidden for Mason.
He’d made her forbidden for himself.
Such exquisite torture, to stand next to her in the wake of her admission. To drink in her sexy smirk and to know she could never be his.
“The way I see it, I owe you a dance,” she said as she gazed at the upper deck, where music had begun playing and the crowd had sorted itself into pairs hitting the makeshift dance floor.
Arlie stole his glass once again, setting it on a nearby table, then shrugged off the suit coat he had draped over her shoulders and slung it across the back of an adjacent chair. He experienced a sympathetic twitch, exposed as he was, desperately wanting the familiar weight of it back on his shoulders.
Sliding her small, cold hands into his large warm ones, she tugged him toward a patch of deck beneath a crisscrossing ideogram of twinkling string lights.
Arlie nodded approvingly. “It’s no I Left My Heart in San Francisco, but it will do.”
Samuel blinked at her, hoping he reflected an appropriate approximation of puzzlement. “Was that the prom theme?” he asked, knowing full well that it was.
She smiled wide enough to reveal the tiny dimple at the left corner of her mouth. “Décor-wise, yes. Which you would have known if you’d come.”
“And watch you dance with someone else?” he teased.
“Speaking of dances,” she said, her eyebrows gathering at the center of her forehead in an adorably serious manner. “You have a very important decision to make.”
“And that would be?”
“First or last?” she asked.
“Pardon?”
“If we’re going to recreate a dance from the prom we never went to together, we need to decide which part of the night we’re recreating.”
Personally, Samuel preferred the part where they would have fled the Lennox Finch event hall to have sex in the old Packard limo his father would have insisted they take.
Not so his children could enjoy the luxury of riding in it, but so the other guests could see them arriving in it.