Page 9 of The Wrong Brother

The entrée comes. It’s fermented honey-glazed duck with greens and polenta. We eat in companionable silence, occasionally catching one another’s eye.

“And what about work?” I ask casually. “What do you do when you are not wandering into my store looking devastating in red dresses?”

There it is again. That pause.

She sets her wineglass down too carefully this time. “Nothing exciting.”

Not what I asked.

My instinct is to push harder now. Because whatever it is, she does not want me digging.

But tonight is not supposed to be about truth.

Tonight’s focus is pleasure.

I study her for one long second before deliberately leaning back in the chair again, letting the tension dissolve.

“Good.”

Emma blinks. “Good?”

“I spend enough time around ambitious people. They are exhausting.”

Suspicion flickers in her eyes like she knows I noticed the dodge and chose not to challenge it.

Smart girl.

Tomorrow, perhaps, I’ll question why a woman with watchful eyes and careful answers walked into my life looking half-lost and half-running.

Tonight, I want to hear her laugh again instead.

She belongs here more than most people I entertain, though I can’t place why. That realization irritates me strangely. My eyes keep drifting to her mouth.

“You keep staring at me,” she says finally, voice dry as our plates are removed.

“You wore that dress for me to stare at you.”

“I wore this dress because it was the bargain for dinner.”

A laugh escapes me before I can stop it. Genuine amusement feels rusty in my chest these days.

“And yet,” I say softly, letting my gaze drift slowly down the curve of her body again, “you still came home with me.”

Her breath catches slightly.

There it is again, that strange pull toward her.

It should be simple attraction. I know lust well enough to recognize it immediately, and I wanted Emma from the second I saw her flushed and insecure in my fitting room. But this feels sharper somehow. Instinctive. Like some primitive part of me recognized her before my brain did.

“Do you vacation alone often?” I ask, trying to slow myself down. I can feel my pulse beginning to pound through my forearms, heat coiling low in my abdomen. I want her cornered, want to rip that very expensive dress off her.

“Not usually,” she admits. “I think I’m having some kind of quarter-life crisis.”

“You look too young for a quarter-life crisis.”

“That’s rude.” But her lips twitch, shoulders dropping in relief.

I want her closer.