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James swirled it around and sniffed it, then took a sip. After a second one, he glanced at me and smiled with approval. “Not bad.”
“I like to experiment.” Shrugging, I added, “Not all of us can afford the 25-year single malts you love, but I’ve found a few decent small-batch bourbons and whiskeys out of Tennessee and Kentucky that are pretty good.”
He sent a smile in my direction and took another sip. Putting the glass down, he let out a heavy sigh and closed his eyes.
I braced myself for bad news, even as a dull headache throbbed at the base of my skull. What the hell could be wrong now? More pictures? Shit. What if there were more pictures? And what could we do if there were? My parents weren’t big on social media—a fact I was now so thankful for, but some of their friends were.
“The pictures and the blog post will be down by the end of the day if they aren’t already.”
The words were a splash of cold water in the face of my panic, and my spiral of thought stalled.
Blinking at him, I tried to process what he’d said.
“What?”
He repeated himself.
“How?”
He managed a half-smile and tipped his glass in my direction. “My sister Gianni found the evidence needed to sue the person responsible for damages.” He paused, then added softly, “If that’s what you’d prefer to do. The damages would be…considerable. You could ruin her life.”
“Her?” My heart lurched into my throat, and I thought of that flash of instinct I’d received, how very…personal it had all felt.
“Yes. You met her. Briefly.” His gaze darkened, becoming unreadable. “That morning at the hotel after we first slept together. Simone.”
With the breath knocked out of me, I shoved upright and stumbled away from the table. On instinct, more than anything else, I made my way over to the sink and turned on the tap, making the water as cold as it would go. Then I shoved my hands under it and bent over so I could splash my face.
The swirling, spinning sensation inside my head didn’t retreat.
“She did it on purpose,” I said. “All to hurt me, didn’t she?”
I hadn’t heard him move, but I knew he was behind me.
“Yes.” He rested a hand on the small of my back, close enough that I could feel his heat.
I resented every inch of the distance between us, but I didn’t close it, my head still reeling from the shock.
“Were you and Simone ever serious?”
“No. I’ve already told you, Tina. I haven’t been serious about any woman. Not in my life. Until I met you.”
Looking up at him, I shook my head. “Yet, it isn’t the same from her viewpoint, is it?”
He turned the sink off and pulled me against him, ignoring my weak attempts to turn away. “My hands are wet,” I told him.
“Shortly, I plan to get other parts of you wet, so I’m not worried about your hands,” he said.
Cheeks heating, I lapsed into silence because how could I object to that?
“Simone and I have never been serious,” he said bluntly. “Maybe she thought otherwise. But she was wrong. As I look back, I can see that Simone had become...possessive. But I never gave her reason to think we were anything more than causal lovers.”
Heart beating in my throat, I whispered, “Like us?”
He laid a hand on my cheek.
“No. You matter. In ways, Simone never had or could.”
My heart did a slow, lazy flip in my chest. Turning my face into James’s hand, I kissed his palm. “You matter too. Far more than my ex or any other guy ever has.”