Page 17 of When it Sizzles

When I open the door for Mel just after nine, her eyes go wide and a huge smile splits her face. “Well, well, don’t you look like a happy little sex kitten?”

I shrug, copping to the fact with a guilty grin, and Mel laughs.

“Oh man, I’m so happy for you,” she says, leaning in for a quick hug before pressing a bag of pastries into my hand and a coffee into the other. “I have to run before Aaron starves to death, but call me anytime, if you need to talk, okay? Have so much fun tonight.”

“I will,” I say, hesitating when she pauses at the top of the stairs leading down to the ground floor of the building, shooting me a worried glance. “What?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing. Just…keep your head in the right place. When you click with someone like this, things can get really complicated really quickly.”

I force a smile, assuring her, “I know. But don’t worry. My head is fine. So is my heart.”

Mel studies me for a beat, before nodding, apparently satisfied that I’m not going to be emotionally destroyed by my weekend fling. “Good. Love you, talk soon.”

“Love you,” I echo, shutting the door.

Once it’s closed, I lean back against it with a sigh. I may have lied to my sister a teeny tiny bit, but that’s okay. No one needs to know that I’m already having more-than-boink-buddy feelings for Connor, or that I’m looking forward to talking to him again as much as I am staring into his gorgeous green eyes or feeling his hands on my body.

That will be my little secret, one I’ll keep today and for the rest of my life.

I’m good at keeping secrets. After all, neither of my sisters knows I’m still a virgin. I’ve kept that close to the vest, along with my secret love for playing Dungeons & Dragons online and my collection of vintage test tubes. Yes, all of those are nerdy things, not sexy, emotional things, but surely secret-keeping is a skill that transfers from one type of secret to another. And the person I’m most concerned with deceiving is only going to be in town until Monday morning, so I won’t have to keep the secret for long.

Or so I think…

I’m still pondering secrets and connections and the probability of such a thing as love at first chess game when there’s a knock on my apartment door.

Almond croissant still in hand, I cross the living room and flip the lock, not bothering to look through the peephole first. Strangers never show up at my door. It’s always a family member or my local UPS lady, usually with another vintage test tube for my rapidly expanding collection.

I’m expecting to open the door to Mel with a spare croissant, or perhaps my mother, coming to ask where I ran off to last night after the wedding. My mother is a driven woman. She’s determined to have all her babies married off before she turns sixty-five and she only has a year left to get me headed down the aisle. She won’t be happy that I ducked her re-introduction to Petey Sinclair.

But when I open the door, it isn’t my mother on the other side.

It’s Connor, looking even more delicious than he did last night in an olive t-shirt that brings out the green in his eyes and a pair of wire-framed glasses almost identical to my own.

“Glasses,” I murmur, blinking in shock as I take in his rumpled hair and slightly puffy face. He looks like he woke up and ran here straight from his bed, a fact that sends butterflies fluttering between my hips.

He swallows and nods, pushing them up his nose as he says, “Yeah. I had my contacts in last night, but I didn’t want to waste the time this morning. I…I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“Me, either,” I say, suddenly very aware that I’m in my star-print pajamas with the ruffled shorts that make me look approximately twelve-years-old and am holding a croissant in the air like a torch between us. But as awkward as I am, he’s still looking at me the way he did last night, like I’m an almond croissant from a fancy French bakery and he’s a pastry aficionado. “You want to come in?” I step aside, nodding toward the kitchen. “I have an extra croissant.”

“Thank you, but no,” he says. “Well, at least, not yet. I have a crazy idea, but you’re probably going to think I’ve lost my damned mind. If you do, you probably won’t want me in your apartment, but I…” He exhales a ragged laugh and drags a hand through his hair. “But I can’t stop myself. I tried, I really did, but as I was lying awake last night, I kept thinking about how cautious I always am. How I wait and wait and overthink and second guess myself and then, by the time I’m ready to pull the trigger on something, it’s too late. I’ve missed the moment or squandered the opportunity or…” His gaze locks on mine, making my chest tighten and the butterflies low in my body triple in number. “Or lost the girl. And I really don’t want to lose the girl this time, Wendy Ann. I’ve never felt this way about someone before. Especially not in just a few hours. My ex and I were really close, but she never made me smile half as much as I did last night. Your sense of humor, your mind, your laugh, the way you lick your lips when you’re thinking…”

I swallow, letting my croissant fall to my side as I nod. “It was a piece of croissant that time, but I do lick my lips when I’m thinking. No one’s ever noticed that before.”

“I notice everything about you,” he says, hope burning in his eyes. “And everything I haven’t noticed I want to notice. I don’t want this to be a one or two-night thing, and I don’t want to risk losing you by trying to do long-distance.” He steps closer, bracing his hand on the doorframe. “It wouldn’t work, anyway. I couldn’t handle being away from you.”

Butterflies reaching stadium-seating-only capacity, I step closer. The spicy scent of his cologne swirls through my head, reminding me of the way it clung to my skin last night, making me loathe to shower. “Me, too. I was up until almost four in the morning thinking about you. I told my sisters it was three, but I lied. I just…couldn’t get you out of my head. I kept wishing I hadn’t left.”

“Me, too,” he says, his tongue slipping out to dampen his lips as he takes my croissant-free hand in his, sending sparks dancing across my skin. “There’s been little to no formal scientific research into the phenomenon of love at first sight, but over sixty percent of people polled by a vast university-backed study said they’ve experienced it. Of those, thirty percent were still married to the person they fell for, so?—”

“Those odds aren’t bad,” I cut in, every molecule in my body humming at a frequency I’ve never experienced before. It’s intoxicating, euphoric, but strangely peaceful at the same time. I feel like I’m at the edge of a cliff, about to jump off into the great unknown, but I’m not afraid because I have my parachute strapped firmly on my back.

Connor is my parachute, and I’m his, a fact we prove when we say at the same time, “Especially when you consider the divorce rate in the population at large.”

We finish the sentence, trailing off within seconds of each other. A beat later, we laugh, the sound bubbling into the air between us, so happy and light and free that when Connor asks, “So, you want to fly to Las Vegas with me and…roll the dice?” I only hesitate for a moment.

This is crazy, wild—two things I pride myself on not being—but when I look into his eyes, I don’t see anything to be afraid of. I just see a kind, clever, gorgeous man who already feels like a dear friend.

So, I pull in a breath and whisper, “Yes.”

---