I rubbed the back of my neck. My leather gloves were cold. “Me too.”
She giggled. “Oops.”
“We have to stop drinking so much.”
“It’s the holidays,” she said.
“Since when have you ever partaken in anything you could chalk up to the holidays?”
Kathryn tugged her scarf down so I could see her lips. Her red lipstick had long since disappeared. She’d left remnants of it on each and every martini glass. “Since Jon sent us to pick out a Christmas tree, I suppose.”
I liked the idea that I’d been the only person there with her that day. Even though I’d wanted to bite her head off at the time and I couldn’t stand her bad attitude, I looked back at it with fondness.
“I’ve never been more afraid of you than I was that day,” I said.
“Afraid?” She laughed and shook her head. “You’re many things, Ethan Collinder, but afraid is not one of them. I was so intimidated by you when Jon hired me. I never thought I’d be able to stand on my own two feet and hold my ground when you were in a room. I always figured I’d sort of just melt into the background because you were always so, so—”
“Cocky?”
“No.”
“Annoying?”
“No.”
“Greedy for clients?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Shut up and let me finish.”
“Sorry.”
“You were always so on,” she said. “Everyone wanted to be around you. Our colleagues gravitated to you like bees to honey and they still do. At the time, I didn’t understand it and I was jealous that things seemed to come so easily to you. But now it all adds up. You make the people around you feel good, Ethan.”
“Even you?”
Kathryn pursed her lips and nodded. “Even me.”
“I wish I’d recorded that.”
She rolled her eyes but I could tell she was amused. “You do have a tendency to ruin the moment though.”
“It’s part of my charm.”
“Uh huh. Sure it is.” She turned back toward the street and nodded in that direction. “We should probably head back. We have a long week ahead of us, and if we’re smart, we’ll take our last day off tomorrow to regroup and rest up. I plan on spending most of my day on the sofa with a book and copious amounts of tea.”
We made for the street so we could each hail a cab. As we walked, I found that we inched closer and closer together until our shoulders bumped on every second step and our fingertips grazed the other’s hand every so often. Neither of us said a word but I wondered if she was as disappointed to have to say goodnight as I was.
Even though it was near freezing temperatures, I could have stood on that lookout point with her all night.
At the curb, I leaned into the street and hailed the first cab that came by. We were lucky. It was empty and the driver pulled over with his blinker on. I opened the back door for Kathryn and she stepped off the curb and paused beside me. She put her hand on my chest just below my right shoulder and gazed up at me.
“Thank you for tonight,” she said softly. And much to my surprise, she leaned in, stretched to the tips of her toes, and pressed a feather-light kiss to my lips.
When she pulled back, her cheeks were rosy and her eyes glittered like they were made of magic. “Thank you for the company and the good advice. I’ll see you on Monday morning.”
With that, she slid into the backseat of the cab and pulled the door closed behind her. I stepped up onto the sidewalk and out of the way as the cab pulled away. They took a right turn and disappeared out of sight, leaving me to hail another cab when all I wanted was to be in the backseat of Kathryn’s car with my hand on her thigh and her cheek on my shoulder.
I gave my head a shake. No. You’re not supposed to feel this way.
Determined to push her from my thoughts for the rest of the night, I turned back to the road to hail a cab. I saw one coming and was about to flag it down when my phone started to ring. Thinking—perhaps a little too optimistically—that it was Kathryn calling, I scrambled to get my phone out of my pocket.
The name on the call display was Eli’s.
I frowned and my stomach rolled over. What was my brother doing calling me at one thirty