Page 50 of A Shot at Love
Gemma pushed back from the table and lifted her plate. She needed to stop thinking about him as if he were a potential bed-mate. He wasn’t. He was her protector and nothing more. Lusting over his body would get her nowhere, fast.
“I’m making another one?” she asked. “You want?”
He nodded and took a sip from his bottle.
While she fixed the sandwiches, she gave into more of her curiosity. “Tell me about Theo.”
“What do you want to know?”
She set his plate before him and shrugged. “He’s been your friend forever?”
“Since we were little kids. His family lived next door to mine. His parents still do.”
“He seems a little…eccentric.”
Ky nodded. “As good a word as any, I guess.” He took a bite of his sandwich, chewed, then swallowed.
Across from him Gemma pressed her thighs together and squirmed in her seat as she watched his throat work. The overwhelming desire to stretch across the table and lick his neck barreled through her again like a speeding bullet.
“Theo’s a genius,” Ky said. “A real one. His IQ’s been tested as off the charts. He went to MIT at fifteen, had three doctorates—math, physics, and computer science—before he hit twenty-five.”
Gemma’s eyes widened and her mouth fell open. “Wow.”
“I know. Genius doesn’t even really do him justice. His mind works like a computer.”
“He must have been fun at sleepovers.”
Ky’s lips quirked before he took a draught from his water bottle.
“So smart, yet he seemed a little, I don’t know, lost?”
Ky held the bottle suspended in his hand while he gaped at her.
“What?” she asked.
“Why do you think he’s…lost?”
She shrugged.
“He was wearing clothes that were clean about six days ago, his hair’s a few months from a pair of scissors and he looked a little like a kid whose puppy died.”
Ky lowered the bottle to the table with such exquisite precision and controlled timing, Gemma worried she’d said something wrong.
“I imagine being such an astute observer is what makes you such a fabulous photographer,” he said after a moment.
She was too stunned to respond.
“You’re not too far off the mark. Theo lost…someone. Someone very special to him. Violently. He’s never recovered from it.”
Gemma stayed silent.
“He’s pretty much a recluse now,” Ky continued. “Rarely leaves his place. Won’t see people.”
“He welcomed you in pretty fast.”
Ky lifted a shoulder. “I’ve known him for most of his life. We’re like brothers. I’m one of a very small number of people he trusts.”
And she knew how important trust was to Ky.
“What’s up with all the computers?”
With a sigh, he picked up the last bit of his sandwich. “He’s trying to locate something. He’s devoted his life to finding it, in fact.”
“I’m no expert by any sense of the word, but it looked like he had financial stuff on those monitors. Like you see scrolling along at the stock exchange.”
“Some of it probably was.”
“What he’s looking for involves stocks?”
Ky shook his head and then said, “Not the stocks themselves, but the person buying them.”
“That tells me something and absolutely nothing.”
Gemma realized what a good friend Ky truly was, by his silence.
With a deep breath, he sat back in his chair, his hands crossed over his chest.
His naked chest.
Her thighs vibrated again.
Bad thighs.
“Theo met a woman a few years ago when he’d been asked to speak at an international banking conference in London. She was a financial analyst, also speaking at the conference. They…hit it off right away.” A small, sad smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. “She was everything Theo ever dreamed of in a woman, including the fact she was first-generation Greek, something his parents were thrilled about. He proposed within a month of meeting her.”
“Yowza. That’s fast, but not unheard of. Josh asked Kandy to marry him a week after they met.”
“That’s fast. But we all knew Theo and Calista were made for one another.”
