He blinked away the vision of Kimber’s long legs wrapped around his waist, those retro shoes crossed at his back. “No worries. I don’t.” He cleared his throat, hoping the rasp in his voice conveyed disbelief rather than lust.
“Just… be nice to her instead of being your rigid, cardboard self.”
He opened his mouth to say he wasn’t rigid and ask what she’d meant by “cardboard.” Was she insisting he was bland? Dry? Stiff? Whatever she’d meant by it, it was unflattering.
She didn’t give him a chance to argue further, forcing him into business mode with a question about a redesigned logo for a senior care facility due tomorrow.
He tried to tune out her previous comments and focus on work. He absolutely wouldn’t consider Angel’s claim that the gorgeous redhead currently occupying his penthouse—and his thoughts—liked him and had liked him for years.
Nope. He’d shut that out completely.
* * *
Kimber closed the door to Lyon’s bedroom and stifled a yawn. It was after nine, but he’d finally gone down. Tomorrow, she needed to take them both out to do something. They’d been cooped up in the house for two solid days. She hadn’t imagined an enormous penthouse with an entire wall of windows overlooking Lake Michigan was capable of causing cabin fever, but she’d been wrong.
Of course, that may not be the only cause of her anxiety. Ever since Angel had planted the seeds that Kimber should flirt with Landon, they’d grown into Jack’s beanstalk. As much as she would like to lay blame at Angel’s feet, she couldn’t.
Kimber didn’t need so much as a nudge to turn even a casual “hello” into picking out China patterns prematurely. Mick wasn’t the only date she’d turned into a boyfriend too soon. She’d done that with those who’d come before him. Her secret superpower was the ability to morph a perfectly okay short-term relationship into a doomed one that zombie-dragged its decaying self to inevitable demise.
What she needed to learn was how to take things a moment at a time and stop worrying about the future so much.
In her bedroom, she toed off her shoes, smoothed her patterned pants over her legs, and straightened the billowy jade-green top. You could practice on Landon.
She could.
She bit her lip and tightened the loose ponytail at the back of her head, winding the tendrils framing her face as she considered. Landon wasn’t in the market for a relationship. And if he was, Kimber would be the last woman on the planet to garner his attention. She thought of Lissa Francine with a twist of her lips. Kimber was not a petite honey-blonde strutting her stuff and her bare midriff in magazines and runways.
But.
She was living in his house. Landon might even feel obligated to have a drink with her to be polite if she insisted. She could practice her small talk, her flirting techniques. It wouldn’t be hard to flirt with him. Nowhere near a hardship.
After a few days of afterhours drinks and flirting, she could leave his penthouse, check in hand, and have proven to herself that she could walk away from a relationship. Yes. This plan was lame and had a loophole the size of Denver. But in a way… it was brilliant. Satisfied with her newborn idea, she padded through the hallway and paused next to Landon’s home office. The room was dark save for a strip of lights glowing over a small, barely stocked bar. She stepped into the room, past the wooden floor of the hallway to the deep brown rug. She followed with her other foot and stretched her toes over the piled carpet.
A few liquor bottles stood on the countertop, along with a row of gleaming crystal glasses. She imagined Landon in here, papers spread on the thick mahogany desk, brows lowered over his glasses in deep concentration. He’d lift a glass of amber liquid to his lips and sip, then rub that cleft in his chin with one hand…
“Sexy,” she whispered.
The clearing of a throat had her spinning around. Landon stood in the doorway, briefcase in hand, one eyebrow cocked over the rim of his glasses. Unlike the man in her mind’s eye, this Landon was infinitely hotter. And real.
“Kimber.”
She could listen to him say her name on a loop. The way his tongue kicked out the “K” sound, the way his lips pursed for the “b,” the way his mouth held the “r” for a beat.
“Hi.” She licked her lips, fervently trying to recall if she’d spoken her thoughts aloud while encroaching on his private space. Geez. What might she have said? “Sorry, I was just…” She gestured nervously at nothing in particular, unable to fill in the blank at the end of her incomplete sentence.