Right Number, Wrong Girl

“Do I have a say in it?”

“If I bring food, does that work in my favour? Surely pizza and sex is the best offer on the table for you tomorrow.”

Pizza and sex?

Wow.

The man needed to calm down.

I swallowed. “I think you need to leave before you turn me on again talking like that.”

He laughed again before pressing one last kiss to my lips. “Goodnight, munchkin.”

“And I am no longer feeling any of sexual excitement whatsoever.”

He grabbed his phone and keys from the entry table where he’d left them, glancing at his phone. “Yep. I’m being harassed to see where I am.”

“Do your family know that you are, in fact, an adult man?”

He grinned, shoving his phone in his pocket. “They do. My mother wants to know if I’ve left you and am now with the woman she tried setting me up with this morning.”

There was a really annoying little twist of my stomach at his words—one I didn’t like the feel of.

I wasn’t a jealous person by nature. Not romantically speaking.

So why didn’t I like the idea of his mum setting him up with someone else?

I wasn’t sure I wanted to delve too deeply into the answer to that question. There was a very good chance I wouldn’t like what I found there.

“Fun,” I finally replied, thinking that was probably the best answer to go with.

One of Hugo’s eyebrows quirked up, but if he thought my answer was weird, he didn’t mention it. Instead, he left with a quick smile. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I walked to the door and watched as he wove through the darkness of the front garden. By the time he reached the gate, he’d already disappeared from my view thanks to the complete blackness of the countryside night-time.

I hesitated there for a moment with my arms wrapped around myself.

I liked Hugo.

More than I’d ever thought I would, but I wasn’t prepared for the clinching of my chest when he’d said his mother was trying to set him up with someone.

I knew that. I knew she was doing that. Half the guests on the list for the party were women under the age of thirty that she deemed acceptable wife material for him. I thought it was old-fashioned and ridiculous, but her reasoning did make sense when you considered it’d worked for her thirty-something years ago.

And I knew that nothing would ever come of this. Hugo and I were nothing more than a very-short term fling that was based purely on mutual attraction that I wasn’t sure either of us were particularly happy about, given the situation we were in.

None of that explained this hint of a hollow feeling.

I didn’t want to think that I was even considering that I might have real, true feelings for Hugo. Ones that were greater than just a bit of attraction. I hadn’t known him long, but we had spent a lot of that time together.

We did, weirdly, have a lot in common, too.

But it didn’t change the fact that I was not the kind of person he could or would marry.

Not that it mattered. I wasn’t even thinking about something like that.

Not as I closed the front door and turned the key to lock it, not as I trotted back into the living room with a dull heaviness in the pit of my stomach, and not as I sat and stared at my computer screen, still on the last article we’d read.

Most definitely not if I wondered if sleeping with Hugo was only going to make that aching, weird feeling worse.