For Seven Nights Only - Sarah Ballance Page 0,28
step foot on a boat again.”
Disappointment flittered through her. She’d thought about asking Sawyer to go with her to the wedding—there’d be no awkward first date moments, at least—but the wedding was on a yacht. In the harbor. And he had promised she’d have a date, so there was no real need to ask him. By then, he’d be out of her life, at least until the next time she saw him stumble out of the elevator with some skank on his arm.
She sighed. “All right. No bridge. No boat, no water. But I’m not going to find the kind of guy I want to spend my life with hanging off a wall when he should be at work, so the next date is my call.”
The tension in his shoulders visibly eased. “Okay, I’ll give you that just for laying off the water thing. You pick the next date, and we’ll see if we can find your kind of man in your natural habitat.”
“Deal.” She turned and started walking toward home, but he stopped her with a hand on her arm.
“Don’t leave me hanging. What’s it going to be? Wine tasting? Museum browsing? Library?” His tone and expression suggested he was quite literally ticking off the most boring, torturous things in the world.
And he’d missed one.
“Good to know you find me so fascinating,” she said, “but I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. It’s none of those.”
His brow quirked. “Well, then, do tell.”
She grinned. “We’re going to the opera.”
Chapter Eight
Taking Monday off had gotten Sawyer’s ass handed to him Tuesday morning. Subsequently, he’d worked late two nights in a row, until his brothers stopped glaring at him. Thursday left him staring at his water-stained ceiling, wondering if he should call Kelsie. Or text. Then he wondered when he’d ever done that and sat back instead, dreading the damned opera. The only thing that made the idea of it remotely tolerable was knowing he’d be there with her. The problem was they would be there to find her a man, and he was increasingly pissed off over the whole idea of finding someone else for her when he wanted her in the worst way.
Not to mention that he felt like a fraud. He knew nothing about men who actually wanted to go to the opera, and it stood to reason that the rest had been dragged there unwillingly, which meant they weren’t available to begin with.
His phone vibrated. He looked down to see a text from a stewardess he’d met months ago, who had apparently just made her way back to JFK. He deleted it without responding and went back to staring at his ceiling.
He wanted to see Kelsie. Or at least let her know he was thinking of her. Which went against everything he stood for and had nothing to do with that hand job she’d given him. Or maybe it did. Yeah, that was a much better theory than him missing her.
He had to get her out of his system. He had to sleep with her. But he couldn’t sleep with her, because she wanted weddings and white picket fences, and he only did one-night stands with women who were most definitely on the same page.
Dammit.
He kicked the recliner closed and powered off the television he hadn’t even glanced at since turning it on. He pocketed his keys and cell phone, and, checking for his wallet, he left the apartment. There was only one way he was going to get through the night, and that was with a damned good excuse for a distraction.
When the elevator arrived, he headed downstairs.
Alone.
…
Kelsie poked at the remains of her pork fried rice, despite not having taken a bite in at least thirty minutes. Nearly three days of trying to reroute her thoughts away from all things Sawyer had culminated in utter failure. While there hadn’t been a single reason he needed to contact her—they had a date the following day, and as far as she knew, it stood—she couldn’t help feeling a little…lost.
No more so than when her sister called, gushing over wedding plans. Kelsie just leaned her head back against the sofa and listened while Marmaduke took up his favorite pastime, which was trying to pull the elastic band out of her hair.
If her sister heard the pseudo-fierce growls through the connection, she didn’t mention them. “Have you seen the weather forecast?” Jana squealed. “The harbor could have been dicey this time of the year, but it’s utterly perfect.”
“I’m really happy for you