Almost Like Love (11 page)

I suppose I might be persuaded to tell you someday . . . for the right price.

She read it over several times, her heart still racing and warmth creeping into her cheeks. After a moment she realized she was grinning like an idiot.

Was he flirting? It sounded like he was flirting. But maybe he was just teasing. Teasing wasn’t the same thing as flirting.

Not that she wanted him to flirt with her. Hadn’t she made a huge point of explaining that they shouldn’t cross that line?

But flirting wouldn’t really cross the line, would it? Kissing would cross the line. There was a big difference between kissing and flirting.

If he even was flirting. The more she read his email, the less certain she felt.

What kind of price are we talking?

Send.

A simple question. Not overtly flirtatious but not closing the door, either.

What are you offering?

Oh, great—the ball was back in her court.

She chewed on her lip for a moment.

Do you have a sweet tooth? I’m a pretty good baker.

Definitely a less flirtatious tone. It was the safer course, but she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of regret as she hit send.

That seems like a fair trade. We can discuss terms when I get home tonight.

He’d followed her lead in backing away from the flirting precipice—and, without being rude, had clearly indicated that they shouldn’t do any more emailing while he was at work.

Well done, Ian.

Well done, both of them, really.

So there was no reason to feel disappointed as she put her phone away and went to the bookshelves to pick out something to read.

There was a fairly wide selection. The fiction choices ranged from spy novels and thrillers to Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and the nonfiction included business books, military history, historical biographies, and sports biographies. All pretty typical stuff for a—

Kate froze. Tucked away on the bottom shelf and partly hidden by a floor lamp was something she recognized.

She moved the lamp out of the way and crouched down to look more closely.

It couldn’t be—but it was.

An original Dungeons & Dragons set.

Her older brother had been a player, and he’d used this identical set. How well she remembered the Dungeon Master’s Guide, not to mention the many-sided dice used to determine the events of the game, from character creation to battle outcomes.

This was one of the original bastions of geek culture. Could it be that cynical, practical, money-minded Ian Hart had once let his imagination roam in the world of swords and sorcery?

Of course, the set might not even belong to him. It could be Jacob’s—although she doubted it. This was a vintage collectible. But a friend or relative of Ian’s might have left it here. Or maybe it did belong to him but wasn’t something he’d ever used much. Kate knew how relics of youth could follow people through the years for no particular reason.

Kate sat down cross-legged on the floor, lifted the lid from the box, and pulled out one of the well-worn manuals.

property of ian hart
had been written on the inside front cover in large block letters.

A slow smile spread across her face.

There was additional evidence of usage throughout. A young Ian had scribbled notes in the margins, and there were several character sheets stuck in between the pages. The one he’d played most often was a human warrior he’d named Galahad.

Kate closed the book and ran her fingers over the cover.

She ought to put it all back. Even though she hadn’t technically been snooping—the box was on a bookshelf in the living room, after all—she was quite sure that Ian would prefer to keep this part of his past private. The decent thing to do would be to replace the set where she’d found it.

A few minutes later, she’d carried the box over to the sofa and displayed the contents on the coffee table: rule books, dice, miniatures, and a faded map drawn on an enormous sheet of graph paper.

Then she curled up with a Robert Ludlum novel she’d taken from the bookshelf and waited for Ian to come home.

Ian’s pulse kicked up a notch as he rode the elevator to his apartment. Since Kate had emailed him earlier that day, he’d pulled his phone out several times to reread their exchange, a smile tugging at his mouth every time he did.

He’d come up with step two in his plot to woo her into his bed. He’d invite her to stay for dinner with him and Jacob, and at some point during the evening he’d casually mention that it might be fun to do something while Jacob was away that weekend with his grandparents.

He wasn’t used to putting this much work into the planning stages of a seduction. For most of his adult life he’d relied on “Can I buy you a drink?” and “How about we get out of here?” to achieve a pretty impressive closing percentage.

Of course, living with Jacob had put a crimp in his social life. He had to either plan ahead for a babysitter—something he didn’t like to do too often, since he spent so much time away from Jacob because of work—or limit his dates to the one weekend a month Jacob went to Philadelphia to see his grandparents.

The truth was, he hadn’t really minded the change. He tended to avoid serious relationships, and casual dating had begun to pall even before Jacob had moved in with him. In the past year he’d been out only a handful of times.

But his attraction to Kate felt different. He was never sure what she would do or say next, and her determination to resist him brought out some primitive male instinct to conquer that felt like a shot of whiskey in his veins.

It had been a long time since he’d felt this alive around a woman.

Part of that feeling came from the times he’d gone to her rescue. Even though Spike wasn’t real, Ian had found himself at home in his skin. There was something cathartic about being able to say exactly what he felt, not to mention showing his tattoos to the world.

He’d been an executive for almost ten years, but the truth was, wearing a $2,000 suit to a board meeting could feel more like playing a part than taking Kate home on a Harley did.

And it didn’t feel nearly as good.

Bridezilla had had it all wrong when she’d told Kate that a man felt better standing next to a petite woman. Standing next to Kate—especially when there was that spark of challenge in her eyes—made him feel more vital and powerful and masculine than he ever had in his life.

As he turned the key in his lock, his anticipation rose, and he felt a surge of electricity the moment he saw Kate in the living room. She was curled up on the couch with a book, and when she met his eyes and smiled slowly, he felt it in his groin.

“Well, hello there,” she purred, and for one heady moment he thought he might not need a seduction plan after all.

Then he saw the coffee table.

So much for feeling powerful and masculine. In a flash he was reduced to the gawky thirteen-year-old he’d once been, playing Dungeons & Dragons for hours with like-minded eighth-graders.

Doing his best to ignore Kate’s grin, he dropped his briefcase on the floor and went to look over the display. Then he sat down in an armchair across from her.

“I might have known you’d find this stuff. Did you use some kind of geek radar?”

“It just goes to show you should never make assumptions about someone,” Kate said. “In a million years I would never have guessed you had this in your past. And in case you were wondering, I didn’t snoop. It was on a shelf right out in the open.”

He shook his head. “I should have destroyed the evidence years ago.”

Kate was still smiling at him, and he found himself smiling back. The sun had set, but Kate had turned on only a few lamps. She looked beautiful in the soft light, her skin impossibly smooth, her hair as bright and shiny as a copper penny. Her elbow was resting on the arm of the couch, and her cheek was pillowed on her hand, her head cocked to the side. She looked comfortable, her feet tucked under her in her favorite sitting position.

He liked seeing her look like that—like she belonged in his apartment.

He glanced down at the miniatures she’d arranged on the coffee table. So what if Kate knew he’d once played Dungeons & Dragons? Considering how proud she was of her own geekdom, this could actually work in his favor.

“I want to hear about your days as Galahad,” she said. “And you were a Dungeon Master, too, weren’t you?”

He leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head. “I thought you wanted to hear about my tattoos.”

“I want to hear about that, too. Basically, I want the story of your life.”

“Really.”

“Yep.”

He nodded thoughtfully, letting a beat go by while he pulled off his suit jacket and loosened his tie. “I tell you what. If you stay and have pizza with Jacob and me, I’ll give you the story of my life afterwards. Some of it, anyway.”

Kate raised her eyebrows. “You sure drive a hard bargain. In exchange for giving me what I want, you’re going to force me to eat pizza? You must be brutal at the negotiation table. Are you going to make me have dessert, too?”

“Smart-ass. Is that a yes?”

“You’ve talked me into it.”

If he had his way, this wouldn’t be the only thing he talked Kate Meredith into.

“I’ve still got homework to finish,” Jacob said once they’d polished off two pizzas. “Is it okay if I take my Oreos into my room?”

“Sure,” Ian said. After Jacob left he told Kate, “We can have our cookies out on the terrace, if you like.”

“You have a
terrace
?”

Kate might not be susceptible to his usual moves, but it was a rare New Yorker who could fail to be impressed by an apartment with a balcony.

He grinned at her. “See? My soulless palace of luxury has a few advantages.”

She rolled her eyes and followed him into his study, where French doors led out to a brick-walled terrace.

“Okay, it’s nice,” she acknowledged, looking around at the lush ivy, the potted shrubs, and the rosebushes in wooden planters. As she set her glass of milk on the wrought-iron table and took a seat on one of the cushioned chairs, Ian flipped a switch that turned on fairy lights entwined with the ivy.

“Okay, it’s beautiful.”

“Would you like a glass of wine?” he asked as he lit the votives in the center of the table.

She shook her head. “I think I’ll stick with milk. It’s the perfect pairing with Oreos.”

“Very true.”

As he sat down in the chair beside hers, she dipped a cookie into her milk and took a bite.

“The setting is perfect,” she said after a moment. “A beautiful terrace, candlelight, and Oreos. The time has come for Scheherazade to tell a story.”

“Am I Scheherazade in this scenario?”

“Yep.”

“So that would make you the sultan.”

She crossed her legs and waved a cookie in the air like a royal scepter. “I await my nightly entertainment.”

He finished his last Oreo, cleared his throat dramatically, and began.

“Once upon a time, there was a young man who lived in Brooklyn with his m
other and sister. When he was in eighth grade, he discovered Dungeons & Dragons.”

Kate nodded. “That’s when my brother got into the game, too.”

“Did you ever play?”

“A little . . . but I got sucked into computer and video games pretty early. That’s where I spent my time.”

“I never got into those. It was just Dungeons & Dragons for me until high school.”

“I still have a hard time visualizing that. D&D is hard-core geeky.”

“You have to bear in mind that young Ian Hart was very different from the handsome, sexy, powerful man you see before you now.”

Kate snorted.

“At thirteen, he was as nerdy as they come—tall and skinny, with braces and acne, and so wrapped up in his fantasy role-playing game, he could have been one of those cautionary tales about kids who lose their grip on reality.”

“So what changed?”

“One day at recess, the school’s basketball coach spotted him shooting hoops and recognized some latent talent for the game. Or it might have been the fact that Ian was tall and the JV team needed a center. Whatever the reason, the coach encouraged Ian to try out for the team, and he made it.”