Page 9 of The Heartbreaker

So, whatever drove her, it made her one unique woman.

She leaned forward, resting her arms on her thighs. “You really want to know me, don’t you?”

“You could say I’m interested.”

“In what?”

“You.” I cleared my throat. “All of you.”

She released a small noise that didn’t sound like a sigh or a moan. “Ridge …”

“You’re not asking me why I’m interested. Or how I’m interested. Or when I became interested.”

“I don’t have to—because we’re in a private room of a strip club and you saw my moves on the stage, courtesy of high school and college cheerleading, and thought to yourself,She’d be a good lay.” She chewed her lip. “Am I right?”

“Addy, you’re not giving yourself nearly enough credit.” I paused. “Were your moves noticed? Sure, they were. Was your body appreciated? Fuck yes. But I would have appreciated your body if we’d been in a bar, and you were in jeans and a T-shirt, and my imagination was filling in the blanks. Being in here and what you’re wearing”—I nodded toward her—“have nothing to do with my opinion. I would have reacted the same way regardless of where we’d met.” I crossed my legs. “I could have paid you for a dance in the VIP room. I could have let you dancetopless on top of me when we came in here. I told you, that’s not what I want or what I’m looking for.”

“Tell me, then, Ridge, why are you interested?”

TWO

Addison

Iwanted a cardigan. No, I wanted an oversize hoodie and a pair of sweats and my hair in a messy knot on the top of my head while digging into a bowl of steaming hot ramen because the salad I’d scarfed down a few hours ago wasn’t nearly enough to hold me over. And while I slurped up the piping hot soup, I wanted to listen to Ridge talk. I wanted to feel his gaze on my face.

I wanted to smile and have him tell me there was a green onion dangling on my lip and have the two of us laugh about it.

In a perfect world, all of that would be coming true.

What I didn’t want was to be practically naked while I sat in front of him, the air-conditioning making my nipples hard, the room so dark and uncomfortable that it felt like I was in a straitjacket and there were bars between us.

The only thing that made it better was his eyes.

My God, Ridge had kind eyes. They were the first thing I’d noticed when he met me at the bottom of the stage. They were a cobalt blue with navy flecks around the outer edge.

A combo of shades that was so rare together.

I wished I could see the color of them now while he shifted in his seat, getting ready to answer the question I’d just asked.

A question I was dying to hear the answer to.

“Why am I interested?” he said. “Telling you you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen is easy. That’s the obvious answer, but it’s not my answer even though it’s true.”

His charm went beyond his appearance despite him being the handsomest man I’d ever seen. It went deeper than his words.

It was his gentleness I could feel.

A tenderness that I wouldn’t have expected in a man like him.

“Keep going,” I encouraged.

“You know, it’s one thing to find you attractive, it’s a whole other thing to want to know your story. To look at you and wonder how you take your coffee and what you order for breakfast. To want to know what type of outfit makes you feel the sexiest—not what I find the sexiest on you. To want to know what you do when you crawl into bed at night, whether you read from a tablet, or scroll your phone, or shut it all off and cover your eyes with a mask.” He moved his arms to his chest. “It took only a second of looking at you, and that’s what I was thinking. To know there was something far deeper in those light-brown eyes than what I was seeing on the surface.” He paused. “That’s the how. That’s the why. And that’s the when.”

A response that completely took me off guard.

Most guys my age would have stopped at the beautiful part and would have usedhotinstead. But I had a feeling Ridge was older, somewhere in his thirties, not his mid-twenties, like me.

“If you learned all of that about me,” I said, “what would it tell you?”