The sixtyish couple sitting next to me at the bar paid their tab, got up, and left. A man slid into the open seat beside me. And just like that, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Because I knew that scent. I knew that man.
“Bourbon,” he said to the bartender, his voice in that one word going down my spine.
My heart did a little spin of triumph, but I tamped it down and tried to get into character. I could do this. I was almost completely in control when I let myself glance at him, just once, the way I would glance at a stranger. I had to look away in shock.
Aidan wasn’t wearing black. He was wearing a dark blue four-button suit with a white shirt and a tie of lighter blue. The top button of his shirt was undone and his tie was loosened an inch, as if he were unwinding from work. He was clean-shaven and his dark hair was mussed. A gold watch I had never seen before glinted on his wrist. I had never seen my boss wear anything but black, and the effect was startling, as if he were a different man.
That was the idea. I had to think of him as a stranger. The blue suit made it easy, just as I hoped my dress and makeup made it easier for him. I smiled privately to myself as I sipped my martini. For once, I was wearing black and he wasn’t. The switch was delicious.
Then I stopped thinking of him as Aidan at all.
In the corner of my vision, a beautiful masculine hand reached out and lay casually on the bar. “Magazine editor,” the voice next to me said.
I gave him another brief glance. “I’m sorry?”
He was looking at me, his dark eyes speculative. With his other hand, he touched his fingertips to his crystal bourbon glass. “I’m trying to guess what you do,” he said. “Hotelier. No, that’s not right. Head of marketing. Director of a fashion line.”
I couldn’t help it; I was a little amused. “Is this a pickup line?”
“I don’t use lines,” he said. “I just talk. What’s your name?”
“You don’t use lines because you don’t pick up women, or because you don’t need lines to pick up women?”
“That’s too complicated a question. Here’s a simple one. What’s your name?”
Oh, he’s good. The thought gave me a thrill, like I was going over the first hill in a roller coaster ride. I was in the hands of a master. “Sarah,” I said.
His eyelid didn’t even twitch. Not a ghost of an admission of the lie crossed his expression. “Nice to meet you, Sarah,” he said. “I’m John.”
There was the briefest pause between us, an acknowledgment that we were going downhill on the roller coaster together. The momentum was starting. We weren’t Samantha and Aidan, we were Sarah and John. We were both in this. We were doing it.
I was more turned on than I could remember being in years.
I held out my hand, partly because that was something Sarah would do, and partly because I felt the overwhelming need to touch him. He raised a brow and shook my hand in greeting. His touch was as warm and strong as I remembered. I recalled that touch against the back of my neck, and I felt the shiver of it all the way down to my lower back. Between my legs. He could do that to me with just a handshake.
Still, I turned back to my martini and took a sip. “I’m not any of those things you guessed,” I said. “Sorry.”
“Okay, then. Tell me what you do.”
I licked a drop of alcohol off my glossed lip, still looking ahead. “I run a finance company.”
“You’re the president?”
“The CEO.”
I’d thought of that in advance. I didn’t know everything about who Sarah was—I’d improvise—but that much I knew. After so many years of working for them, tonight I was a CEO.
“That’s interesting,” Aidan—John—said. “By the laws of the jungle, you and I should be oil and water.”
“Why?”
“Because I deal in art for a living, while you deal in cold-blooded money.”
That made my thoughts turn. Aidan had chosen to be an art dealer tonight. I wondered why. “If you mean that you buy and sell art, then you definitely deal in cold-blooded money,” I said.
He smiled at me. I felt that smile deep in my belly, felt it thrum between my legs and in my nipples. “I deal in beauty,” he said. “I deal in passion and raw emotion.” He lifted his bourbon glass and looked at it in the golden light of the bar. “The money just appears. Though I’m not complaining.”
My throat was dry, watching him. “You make enough of it to have a drink here.”