3
“SURE, WE COULD HANG OUT tomorrow. That sounds like fun,” Yasmine said, and Alex heaved a silent sigh of relief.
One hurdle crossed, countless more to go.
Fifteen harrowing minutes later, they’d arrived miraculously unscathed at the downtown hotel where the party was being held. Alex loosened his death grip on the door handle and tossed Yasmine a look as the valet parking attendants came to open their doors.
“What?” she said as she checked her hair in the rearview mirror, Miss Innocent all of a sudden.
“I’m driving us home.”
She shrugged. “Okay, if you know how to drive a stick.”
“I know how to do all kinds of things,” he heard himself say. It was unplanned, stupid and tacky, but instead of slapping him, she looked him up and down.
“I’m looking forward to a demonstration,” she said, a smile playing on her lips, a note of flirtation in her tone, right before she got out of the car.
He walked with her through the lobby to the event room where the party was already well under way. Yasmine turned to him and smiled as they stood inside the entrance. “Looks like we’ll be the main topic for office gossip tonight.”
People he recognized and others he didn’t turned to stare at them.
Alex shrugged. “Glad to add a little interest to the evening.”
Christmas Eve was tomorrow and they had Monday off, so no one was scheduled to return to work until Tuesday. Not a chance anyone would forget in that short time, but whatever. He didn’t exactly give a damn.
Not giving a damn meant he could endure the winks and nudges of his male office mates, most of whom considered Yasmine to be the catch of all catches.
Being a programming genius and having a reputation as a former hacker only added to her mystique. In their eyes, bagging her would make him a god among programmers.
Yasmine slipped her hand into his and led him across the room to an empty table. “Hope you don’t mind if we sit alone,” she said.
“Want a drink?”
She nodded. “Champagne would be great.”
Alex made his way through the crowd to the bar, then returned to the table with the drinks and sat down next to her.
Yasmine took a sip of champagne, then said, “Tell me about yourself. How long have you been programming?”
“Too long. Probably since before you were out of diapers.”
She rolled her eyes. “Please. We’re the same age, aren’t we? How old are you?”
At thirty-five, he was nine years older than her, but he didn’t see any reason to point that out. “Thirty-one.”
That’s how old Kyle Kramer was, anyway.
“Oh. You are an older man then,” she said, grinning.
He raised his eyebrows. “Do I have to ask how old you are?”
But he knew. She was twenty-six as of July 15.
“I’m old enough,” she said, leaving the unspoken question “For what?” hanging in the air.
“I’ll bet.” Old enough to know better, but that had never stopped her from breaking the rules before. Alex found himself hoping she’d continue to be wild for at least one more night.
“Mind if we sit here?”
Alex looked up to see Drew Everton, sans Santa hat, and a woman who must have been his date standing on the other side of the table.
Much as Alex wanted to be alone with Yasmine, he couldn’t think of any polite reason to say no. “Sure, have a seat,” he said instead.
“Kyle, Yasmine, this is my friend Hannah Filarski,” Drew said as he pulled out a chair for her.
She sat down and beamed across the table at them. “Hi!” she said a little too loudly.
“Hi,” Alex said. “Where did you and Drew meet?”
He caught the wince Drew gave at that question as he sat down next to Hannah.
“We met through an online dating service. Drew’s my twentieth match so far.”
“Wow, that’s a lot of dating,” Yasmine said.
“I’m on a mission to find Mr. Right before the end of the year.” She glanced at her watch. “And I have exactly eight days, four hours and twenty-two minutes to find him.”
“She’s joking,” Drew said, then forced a laugh.
“No, I’m not.” Her wide smile took on a brittle quality. “I had my cards read at the beginning of the year, and they said I’d definitely find my one true love this year.”
Yasmine glanced at Alex, then quickly looked away, amusement twinkling in her eyes. “Maybe that just meant you’d meet him this year. But you might not realize he’s the one until months or years later.”
This apparently was not the answer Hannah was looking for. “No, I definitely have to know it’s him right away. Biological clock and all,” she said, as if Yasmine, at twenty-six, understood such things.
Alex, oddly enough, was beginning to understand the ticking of the clock. Not that he felt as if his time would run out at midnight on the thirty-first, but he did find himself wondering when and if he’d ever have the chance to test that all the equipment was working properly.
And Yasmine’s words kept echoing in his head. You might not realize he’s the one until months or years later. A nagging voice in his head wanted to know why Yasmine had lingered in his mind all these years. Why, of all the cases he’d worked on, of all the women he’d known, was she the one he couldn’t forget?
Was it possible that only now, nine years after she’d first laid eyes on him from across the witness stand, Yasmine might realize he was The One?
And where the hell had that idea come from? He knew whatever he started with her would be doomed, so there was no point in imagining a future. Women generally didn’t fall for the men who’d sent them to prison.
He’d managed to tune out the conversation that had been happening at the table. He started paying attention and found Drew still looking uncomfortable, and Hannah discussing how she’d eliminated all her former matches through a careful and insane process of critiquing their shoes.
“So, let me get this straight,” Yasmine said. “You can sum up a guy by the shoes he chooses to wear on a first date?”
“Absolutely,” Hannah said.
“But what if your dream guy is on his way to the car to pick you up for your first date, wearing the right shoes, and he steps in a pile of dog crap, then goes back in and changes into the wrong pair of shoes?” Drew asked.
Hannah seemed caught off guard by the question, but after a few awkward moments she recovered and answered, “If he’s Mr. Right, then the second pair of shoes he chooses will also be the right shoes.”
Alex was beginning to wish Hannah would go off in search of a pile of dog crap instead of staying here to inflict any more of this conversation on him.
“So you must have already sized Drew up based on his footwear,” Yasmine said. “How does he fare by your shoe standards?”
“I never do the analysis while on the date,” Hannah said.
Of course not. That would be crazy.
“So when do you do it?”
“I simply take detailed mental notes during the date, and then afterward I write it all out and decide what his shoe choices mean for my destiny.”
“I personally think it’s what’s in the shoe that counts. I could never love a guy with bad feet,” Yasmine said, her tone teasing as she cast a glance down at Alex’s Bruno Magli’s.
“Ew, I hate feet! They’re just so gross.” This, from Hannah of the shoe-analysis method of dating.
“I think they’re sexy,” Yasmine said, then sipped her champagne. “Our company recently designed an interactive software program for foot fetishists.”
Hannah didn’t seem to know what to say to that. “So…you guys make sex software? What, exactly, does that mean?”
“Have you ever heard of the game Virtual Bimbo? It’s our bestselling product.”
“Virtual Bimbo?” Hannah looked horrified. “As a woman, don’t you find that offensive?”
“I actually think it’s hilarious. The game allows you to design your own bimbo, and then you take her out on the club scene and try to get her laid.”
The look of horror grew.
“It’s supposed to be funny,” Drew added.
“You win the game if she scores with the hottest guy in the club,” Yasmine said, seeming to enjoy Hannah’s discomfort, “and you lose if she has to go home with the weenie guy. The final video sequence shows her having sweaty, multiple-orgasm sex if it’s the hot guy, or boring rabbit sex with the weenie guy.”
“Oh my God, that’s awful.”
Drew made a throat-clearing sound and said, “So, Kyle, what did you do before you came to Virtual Active?”
Alex had rehearsed his answer a hundred times in his head, until he could spout it as if it were the truth. And it really wasn’t that far from the truth. “I worked as a programmer in Virginia for a while, then got burned out on that, came to California and started a survival training business.”
“Survival training,” Yasmine said. “You mean like living in the wild and killing your own food?”
“Those are a few of the skills I taught.” In truth, he’d spent summers in college teaching survival training in the mountains of Virginia, so it was a natural choice for his fake previous career.
“So that’s where you got the big muscles and the tan,” she said. “Certainly not from sitting at a computer all day.”
“Please don’t tell me you killed actual animals,” Hannah said, the color gone from her cheeks.
“We tried hunting teddy bears, but no one could bring themselves to eat the polyester stuffing.”
He didn’t see any point in getting into the whole issue of killing one’s food to eat. It wasn’t something he’d ever enjoyed doing—matter of fact, he’d hated it—but it was an essential element of survival in the wild.
Under the table, Yasmine’s foot nudged his, and she was trying hard not to smile.
Hannah pushed herself away from the table and stood. “I can’t sit here with someone who kills animals for sport.”
Drew looked at her without making a move to stand as well. “Um…would you like a ride home?”
“I’ll take a cab!” she said and walked away.
Drew sighed as he looked from Alex to Yasmine. “And that is the official end of my adventures in online dating.”
“So I guess her dream guy’s shoes would be made of cruelty-free materials,” Yasmine said.
“Sorry, man, I didn’t mean to open a can of worms,” Alex said.
“I’m sorry, too, but she had to go,” Yasmine said. “You can do a hundred times better than her.”
Drew made a face and shrugged, then downed his drink. “I knew it was a doomed date when she made a big fuss over my driving a car with a gas-powered engine. Apparently, she prefers guys who use electric.”
“I told you, I’ve already got the perfect woman for you. I just need to figure out a way to hook you up,” Yasmine said.
“Well, whatever. I think I’m going to grab some chow over there at the buffet,” Drew said as he stood up from the table.
Across the room, the band transitioned from playing holiday music Alex had been ignoring, to an up-tempo dance number, and people began to fill the dance floor. He craned his head to watch, unable to resist the spectacle of a bunch of techno-geeks dancing without rhythm.
“Want to dance?” Yasmine said.
“Um…” He didn’t especially, but he loved the idea of watching her dance. “Sure.”
A few seconds later that’s exactly what he was doing, and Yasmine’s moves were even hotter than he’d imagined. Mesmerized by the sway of her hips, he forgot about everyone else in the room.
They danced through one song, then another and another. Finally a slow song came on, and they moved close together.
Her hands slid up his chest, around his neck. Their first real physical contact. Her body pressed against him, moving to the slow beat of the music, coaxing him into an intimate dance with a promise of something more.
Where their bodies met, he burned.
He wanted her, no getting around it, no ignoring it for a second; his body wouldn’t let him. And as he grew hard against her, she couldn’t help but know it too.
Then she did something unexpected. She pressed her abdomen more firmly against him, against his erection, stoking his desire. Her gaze sparked with daring.
“I’ve got a thing for you, you know,” she said into his ear.
“You do?”
“And it has nothing to do with your feet.”
“I’ve got good feet, just so you know.”
She smiled. “I’ve been having trouble concentrating at work.”
“Because of me?”
She nodded, her eyes locked on his.
“I’d hate to affect your job performance.”
“Then I think we need to come up with a fix for this.”
The last shred of Alex’s will to resist disappeared. Whatever fix she proposed, he was all over it.
What the hell. Didn’t he deserve one night without self-control? He wanted Yasmine, she wanted him—what was the harm in giving in to their urges? If anything, it would help him get closer to her, right?
Right.
The music changed to an Elvis rendition of “White Christmas.” Alex took Yasmine’s hand and led her off the dance floor.
Who needed mistletoe and chestnuts roasting on an open fire? They’d started a fire of their own, and it was time to put it out.
As they passed a huge, twinkling Christmas tree at the edge of the dance floor, she tugged him behind it and pinned him against the wall, where they were concealed from the crowd. Her hand grazed his thigh, then traveled across his pelvis, barely missing his cock. A smile played on her lips, and he knew she was teasing him.
“Am I being too forward?” she asked.
“I like a woman who knows what she wants.”
“So you’re getting my message loud and clear?”
“I think so,” he whispered as he traced his finger along the neckline of her dress, brushing the soft flesh of her breast as he did so.
“Let me spell it out for you,” she whispered. “I want you to take me home and have hot, nasty sex with me all night long.”
He went from half-mast to full in an instant. This didn’t feel like an investigation. It just felt right. He couldn’t think of anything he wanted more than Yasmine naked in his bed.
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
“What about dinner? Aren’t you hungry?”
“Not for food, but we can pick up carryout on the way home.”
Alex didn’t need any further invitation.
He took her by the waist and guided her out from behind the Christmas tree. Through the crowd, out the door, across the hotel lobby, to the parking lot—he didn’t stop until they were at the valet parking stand.
“You think everyone will forget about our having shown up here together by Tuesday?” she asked as they waited for her car.
“Not a chance.”
“You think we’ll inspire a new sex game idea? Maybe a holiday-themed one—Christmas Party Hookup?”
Alex laughed. “If that’s the title of our next software release, we’ll know where the idea came from.”
“I guess a little gossip’s not so bad. They’ll have something more interesting to talk about than the latest gadgets they got for Christmas.”
“You don’t care what people think?”
“It doesn’t make any difference if I care. People will think what they want to think.”
That was probably the attitude that helped her remain a criminal without remorse.
For a moment Alex came to his senses and felt the urge to stop this speeding train while he still had the chance. But he glanced over at Yasmine, her face lit by the glow of the hotel lights, and the doubt disappeared. He’d wanted her for years, now he could get rid of all that wanting.
Yasmine had exposed to him his biggest weakness, and it was her.