Rock Wedding (Rock Kiss #4) - Nalini Singh Page 0,43
the daily business of living their lives. Picking up something at the grocery store, grabbing a burger, taking a simple walk.
Abe knocked, sending Flossie into paroxysms of exited barking. “Hush, Flossie,” she said and pulled open the door. “Hello, Abe.”
He smiled and bent down to pet Flossie as Sarah’s traitorous dog sniffed at Abe’s jean-clad legs and apparently decided he was okay from the way her tail began to wag. When he rose—after Flossie ran off to play in the enclosed yard—it was with a frown. “You got shorter.”
“What?” She glanced down. “Oh. I’m not wearing my heels.”
Abe’s gaze lowered and Sarah couldn’t keep her toes from curling into the carpet; she suddenly felt bare to the skin when she was perfectly well dressed.
“What’re you doing here?” she asked in an effort to wrench back control of a meeting that shouldn’t be happening in the first place.
“Using then discarding me, Sarah? Tut-tut.”
“Abe.” This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. He wasn’t supposed to pursue her. Abe didn’t pursue women. Not even his wife.
“Nice dress,” he commented, hand braced on the doorjamb. “Sexy, but all business. You had a meeting about your company?”
Sarah didn’t quite know how to respond. No man ever asked about her business—Jeremy hadn’t cared, and all her employees were female. It had simply worked out that way, but she was glad for it. She wanted to give women like her a chance. Women who were alone and friendless and struggling in this big city.
“Yes,” she responded when Abe just waited patiently for her answer. “With my accountant.”
“Yeah? Business good?”
Again, Sarah hesitated. Why did he care? Abe had no interest in business, that she knew full well. “You want to go into partnership with me?” she joked in an effort to find her feet. “Doing your due diligence about the company’s finances?”
His smile was sudden and gorgeous and it still made her chest squeeze so hard. No one had a smile like the keyboardist for Schoolboy Choir.
“I suck at business. That’s why I have finance nerds to handle it.”
Sarah rolled her eyes. “You do keep an eye on what they’re doing though, right?” He hadn’t when they’d been together. Back then, she hadn’t been confident enough to offer to take on the task, hadn’t known she had the potential for that kind of skill. The night classes she continued to take regularly had shown her different, shown her that she wasn’t the “stupid, brainless brat” her mother’s boyfriend had so often called her.
“Yeah, I check things now that I’m sober,” Abe said, his deep voice slicing the dark memories in half.
He leaned in a little closer at the same time, his body blocking out the outside world. It should’ve made her want to step back; it didn’t—it made her want to place her hands on his chest, raise her lips to his and taste him as if she had every right to kiss this man when he came to her door.
As if he were hers.
Abe’s physicality had always spoken to her own. That was the one place where they’d never had any problems.
“You eaten?” he asked as she fought with herself to stay in place, to not give in to the tug between them.
“No,” she answered. “I haven’t been home that long.”
“I know a place.”
Sarah’s toes curled deeper into the carpet, her battered heart skipping a beat. “I…” Shaking her head, she reminded herself how this had ended the last time around and knew what she had to say. “I think it’s better if we aren’t seen together.”
That gorgeous smile faded as if a cloud had passed across the sun. “Right.”
“I don’t want to be sucked back into the media storm that surrounds you,” Sarah found herself saying, hating that she’d stolen his smile, regardless of whether that was the only sensible decision she could’ve made. “They’ll start saying we’re getting back together and following me and…”
“Yeah.” Abe pushed off from the doorjamb, dropping his hands to his sides. “You’re right. I’ll go before the bottom-feeders sniff me out here—just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
Sarah fought the part of her that so badly wanted to ask him to stay, to say that they could just hang out at her place. Those words she could never say—because one thing had become clear to her: Abe was her deepest weakness.
He still held the power to hurt her more than any other man on this planet.
ABE MANAGED TO KEEP HIS DISTANCE FROM SARAH for the next seventy-two hours.