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“I’m in a hurry.”
“To get home?”
I don’t turn to face him. I can’t. “Yes.”
The elevator chooses that moment to whoosh smoothly open and to my horror and perverse delight, Hudson ushers me inside.
“You know,” he says, “if you keep this up, running away, hiding your face, then it’s not going to work.”
I snap around to face him. “What isn’t?”
He’s like a sucker punch.
How do I keep forgetting how beautiful the man is?
“Pulling this whole thing off.” He smiles, and it’s small and genuine. Hudson leans against the other side of the elevator, facing me, his hands behind his back as he does so. “I’ve been thinking.”
“It could be dangerous.”
There’s a spark of laughter in his gaze, and right there is why I have trouble with remembering the whole he can destroy me and my brother thing. The good guy part of him, the decent man. But just because he’s that doesn’t mean he’ll unleash his wrath if you do him wrong.
I don’t intend to. I just don’t intend to tell him the small details.
“Look, I don’t know a thing about your family. I know your cousin, but it’s not a best friends thing. You get it.”
“Our kind stick together against the great unwashed masses of the world.” I don’t even know why I say that. It just seems like something someone very rich would say. And though Sarah never said it, she’s definitely looked down on the poor. Probably looked down on me at one point. And we’re not besties, either, just friends.
An eyebrow quirks up. “That’s one very snotty way to put it, I suppose. I just mean…”
“I know what you mean. Our world.”
I don’t know at all.
Now he frowns at me and he’s looking at me in a way that makes me uncomfortable, like he can somehow see the truth inside. “No. I meant he’s someone I knew a long time ago and kept in touch with over the years on a basic level. That’s all.”
He stops.
I can’t breathe because he straightens up and comes to me and every atom in me wants him.
He slides his fingers through my hair and says softly, “Sometimes you’re like two different people in there.”
“I go to therapy.” Against all commonsense, I bring my hand up and place it against the hard muscles that lurk beneath his suit. And I have the sudden urge to see him in jeans and a T.
“Why did you run, Scarlett?” His voice is pure, soft, decadent velvet and I’m melting into total pliability. “What deep, dark secrets are you hiding?”
Those words send such a bolt of fear through me that I stop melting immediately and get the gaffa tape to hold it together. “Nothing. Just…usual family crap.”
“Well, I think we should talk.”
The elevator swishes open and we’re out in the beautiful, vast foyer of marble and steel and glass. The security guard nods to Hudson and then we’re outside in the cooling night air, the sounds of New York and its never-ending traffic rising up around us.
I’m about to say goodnight when he slips his hand under my elbow.
“Hudson, I only had the one drink. I’m not drunk.”
“I didn’t think you were,” he says, hailing a cab and scooting me over the pavement and onto it. “We need to talk.”
Those words put the fear of fate worse than death into me, followed by a desire deeper than the Grand C because he meant a chat over a drink in a small little bar nestled in Greenwich Village.
