“You came.” He stepped aside, the door hanging open.
“Yeah.” Her brows knit together in an adorable frown. The fact that he noticed and thought it was adorable said a lot. There was a distinct possibility his balls were in serious danger. “Oh, I get it,” Noemi said as she swept into the house and he backed up a step, his floury hands at his sides. “You thought I wasn’t going to show.”
“I had some doubts,” he admitted, because damn it, he did. Of course, he did. She had every reason to ditch on him and then he’d have to come up with plan fucking B when plan A had already taken a considerable amount of effort.
Noemi actually slipped out of her shoes and lined them up on the mat. He was treated to the sight of her bare feet and somehow, those delicate toes with the painted red nails were like taking a fist straight to the kidneys.
He glanced over at her shoes and just as he thought, of course they were from her father’s line. She probably had an overflowing closet full back home in New York.
“Come on, Cason, you didn’t really think I’d stand you up. I mean, I wanted to. I thought about it.” She threw him a loaded glare. “You’re a good-looking guy though, and you’re probably used to getting what you want, so you don’t have to act surprised.”
“No, I am surprised.” He rubbed his hands on his jeans, leaving white streaks on his thighs. Cason, right. Have to fucking remember to actually respond to that. “Thanks for the backhanded compliment. My ego appreciates it, but I wouldn’t say I’ve done it justice.”
“Oh, come on. Women must fall all over you.”
Yes. And I am used to getting what I want, in every way. “Not as a rule.” When her brow arched, he amended that statement. “I’m busy. I don’t have time to- dating isn’t…” he ran a hand through his hair, half an act, half a little discomfited by Noemi’s direct black-eyed stare.
She ducked her head. “Sorry. I guess it’s pretty rude to judge a book by the cover, even if that cover is quite pretty.”
He let out a husky laugh that was completely genuine and totally shocked. Noemi seemed the quiet, shy type, but so far, she was smashing those assumptions to the ground. “You think I’m pretty?”
She blushed, the red cutting all the way through her darker, olive toned complexion. God, looking at her, the living room and hallway light shining down on her raven black hair, that pale pink illuminating flawless cheeks right below the arc of her cheekbones, he was reminded why Italian women were some of the most beautiful on the planet.
“I- I might have had a few glasses of wine back at the hotel room before I came.”
Byron glanced out the front window and sure enough, her car was nowhere to be found. “You took a cab.”
“Yeah.”
“How many glasses did you have?”
The flush on her cheekbones deepened. “Enough that I normally wouldn’t say things like this, but I can’t stop myself at the moment.”
He just couldn’t help himself. She was too adorable not to tease. He was slightly out of practice with flirting. He didn’t do that shit. He usually just sat there and let whatever woman was trying to get him wherever for whatever fuck she wanted, do the romancing before he just agreed, paid the tab, fucked her senseless, and moved on.
A hopeless fucking romantic, right to the heart, he was not.
“So, if I was a book, what kind of book would I be?”
She didn’t even have to think about it. Her response was immediate. “You’d be one of those old books, the crazy kind, from the middle ages, that were kept in like old churches or something. You know those ones with all the gold leaf illustrations? The kind with the gold spines and the extremely fancy covers that look like they’re probably worth half a million dollars?”
“I’m not exactly sure…”
“That’s the kind you would be.” She twisted her hands in front of her dress after, like she was just a little embarrassed at how certain that statement sounded.
“I- well- thanks.” He remembered that he’d purposely been growing his hair out lately, and that he hadn’t shaved since days before he left New York. On him, it might as well have been a month. His facial hair had always been thick and dark. It used to piss him off that if he shaved at six in the morning, before he even got to work he had a shadow forming. “I’d personally go with one of those ancient books, the ones falling apart a little at the bindings, plain black cover with the embossing, that typical old book smell when you lift it up to inhale it.”
“Jesus. Have you thought about this before?”