“I know.” He plunged his hands into his pockets and studied the battered floor. “Okay, I’ll go.” She thought he meant he was leaving, but then he spoke. “I like spending time with you. I’d like to take you out again.” A mischievous twinkle sparked in his dark eyes. “I’d like to have you over again.”
“I’d like that, too,” she admitted. She’d like to laugh with him over dinner, to kiss him in the shower, to lie in bed and eat potato chips. But at what cost? “I thought, you know… we shouldn’t press our luck.”
“You mean because of what happened.”
He meant Condompocolypse. She didn’t exactly mean that, but he’d brought up a valid point. “Yes.”
He walked behind the counter and invaded her space, breeching her boundaries like he belonged there. Funny thing was, he sort of felt like he did. She knew Landon on a different level now. A level where no clothes were required and hectic breathing ensued.
“What if we’re extra careful?” he asked.
The in bed was implied. Like with a fortune cookie. But she was determined not to lay waste to another relationship—not to take what they’d had to its inevitable demise. No matter how she thought she felt about him.
“Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead,” she said.
He tipped her chin and watched her. The tingle from his touch shot all the way down to her toes. “Maybe you’re right.” She saw the sadness in his polite smile a second before he dropped a soft kiss on her lips. A good-bye kiss.
Then he turned and walked out of her store, leaving her to wonder if she’d cut her losses or made the biggest mistake of her life.
* * *
Landon digitally signed the approval sheet for the billboard and e-mailed it back to the designer. He smiled at the image, proud of the work. Work he’d pulled off with only Kirk and Janie assisting him.
In the weeks since he’d last seen Kimber, he’d been looking for a way to help her with Hobo Chic whether she’d asked for it or not. And he’d known she wouldn’t. She was probably avoiding him—regretting her unplanned three-word admission… but he’d taken her words with a grain of salt. She’d been sated and happy followed by terrified and worried. That situation could make anyone blurt out something they didn’t mean.
After that night, after he’d covered her body with kisses and they’d made love, she’d left. And she’d left him literally aching to see her again. He missed her. Not just the sex—amazing as it was—he missed talking to her, sharing a drink or a laugh. He missed her presence in his cavern-like penthouse.
Going home had become an exercise in frustration. When he and Lissa had split, he’d felt the opposite. He used to love returning to his empty, quiet home, his only mistress a glass of Macallan. He’d enjoyed his drink and the view on the balcony before turning in for a restful night’s sleep.
But now… now his place was a tomb. Devoid of his nephew’s laughter and clutter. Bare of Kimber’s warm presence. The scotch in his glass each evening only served to remind him of the drinks he’d shared with her; the night on the balcony they’d made love under the stars.
In a word, it sucked.
But it didn’t have to keep sucking. He had a plan to get her attention, to get her to come to him. The billboard he’d just signed off on ought to do it, or at least lure her into calling him.
In the hall, his secretary scuttled by with an armload of large, yellow envelopes.
“Cindy, I’m heading to lunch. Be back in an hour,” he told her.
The owner of Windy City potato chips, Otto Williams, was waiting for him at Grand Pine Café. Landon agreed to meet him, despite the fact that having lunch together was a pointless waste of time. Otto had approved Windy City’s designs a week ago. He’d signed off on the ads and had purchased a marketing package big enough to pad Landon’s retirement. But Otto, well into his eighties, had a way of doing things. When a deal was done, he liked to drink an Old Fashioned and bond over chewy steak at Grand Pine.
So, Landon set out to accompany him in both endeavors.
He paid the cab driver and strode to the door, nodding at a few passersby weaving along the busy walkway. The sun was hot and making him sweat—late August in Chicago—and he slipped his jacket off before he went inside.
A teenager nearly mowed him over as Landon reached for the door. The boy mumbled a rushed sorry and brushed by wordlessly, earbuds in, head down. Landon sent him an irritated glare before moving aside to let the woman following—his mother, he assumed—chase after him.