Page 105 of Boyfriend of the Hour

Was the compliment more than a little condescending?

Yes.

Did I still beam?

Absolutely. More because Nathan was still watching me with admiration. And that meant more to me than what any of these people would ever have to say.

On the other side of the table, Charlotte eyed me a second longer than was comfortable before taking a long sip of her wine.

“Giovanna is full of surprises,” Nathan said. “That’s one of my favorite things about her.”

He brushed a hair out of my face, pulling my gaze back to his as his finger lingered around my jaw. To my surprise, I found humor there. And something else I’d only ever seen on the faces of a few men, all of them in my family: my grandfather, my brother, and my two brothers-in-law. And only when they were looking at their wives.

Adoration.

It almost made me drop my glass, so I took another sip of the impossibly smooth vodka instead.

“Lucky bastard,” said Jordan to one of the other doctors, who chuckled in response.

I didn’t know who it was. I couldn’t look away from Nathan’s warm gaze.

Nor, it seemed, could he look away from mine.

NINETEEN

WOMEN WHO PROBABLY WANT NATHAN HUNT

#1 Charlotte the Mule.

As dress rehearsals go, the dinner went more smoothly than most.

See, the point of a dress rehearsal is always to work out any remaining kinks in the production. It’s where you figure out that someone is entering the stage from the wrong mark or that the light blocking doesn’t match the choreography for the second scene’s entrances.

So, in a way, it was a good thing that someone like Charlotte Mueller was sitting across from me at dinner, watching me try not to look lost when someone discussed a difficult surgery Nathan had had last week or pretend that I’d “forgotten” basic things about my boyfriend like his birthday or the fact that his brothers’ names were Spencer and Carrick (rather than not knowing these things at all). Her ladylike snarls and curt questions pointed out the holes in our production in a way Nathan’s other coworkers, who barely seemed to know him at all, could not.

Clearly, there were some things we needed to fine-tune.

Didn’t make it fun, though.

Otherwise, I managed to fake my way through the rest of it, including a meat course served through a cloud of smoke and soup offered in the form of a bubble. In a way, Nathan had done me a favor by bringing me to a restaurant where you didn’t have to order. The silverware was changed out for every course, so I didn’t have to worry about which fork to use. And since everyone was eating the same things, I could just wait to see how other people portioned out their food before I attacked mine. By the end, I was surprisingly full, which was more than I expected from courses consisting of approximately two tablespoons of food each.

“So you’ll be at the gala?” Reagan asked as we waited outside Columbus Circle for cabs.

I smiled at the smaller woman with braided hair. Reagan and I had hit it off fairly well—probably because she’d grown up in a neighborhood not far from mine, near Yonkers.

“Yes, we will,” Nathan confirmed beside me, where he had secured my hand in the crook of his arm. “But we’ll be sitting at the Huntwell table. We’re chairing the event this year.”

For probably the twentieth time that evening, I tried not to look surprised. He hadn’t mentioned the part of the “gala” where I was the date of the head honcho.

On the other side of us, Charlotte eyed Nathan with something that looked a whole lot like lust. Which turned to disdain as her blue-eyed gaze landed on me.

“Great,” Reagan said. “There’s never anyone fun at these things, right, baby?” She squeezed Dwight’s arm.

He just nodded as several cabs pulled to the curb.

“We’ll see you then, Joni,” said Jordan and his wife hummed her approval as she traded air kisses with me. He was a bit older than the rest of the crew—I gathered he was the original doctor at the clinic and had been a bit of a mentor to the restof them. There was something fatherly about the way he looked over Boon, Dwight, and Nathan before turning back to me with a kind smile. “I’m glad you’re bringing this one out of his shell. It’s about time.”

We watched as each couple got into their own cabs, all departing for what I was sure had to be their massive apartments and townhomes scattered all over Manhattan. None of them had that look on their faces, the invisible weight of people who didn’t know where their next rent check was coming from or how they were going to pay their cell phone bill next week.