She nodded, her face blank and nonjudgmental, just as she’d looked when he tried to explain why he couldn’t quit the family business.
With a sinking feeling that he’d ruined everything between them—if there had been anything to begin with—he said, “I wanted to tell you how sorry I am. It won’t happen again.”
“Daniel,” she said gently. “You weren’t yourself, and I understood that.”
“I want you to feel safe with me.”
“I do feel safe with you. And actually, I didn’t mind.”
He laughed and instantly felt better.
“See, you’re still not yourself, as evidenced by the easy laughter. Come lie down.” She patted the bed beside her. “You have a few minutes for another nap before Sarah gets here.”
He hesitated. He wanted to get close to her again. But every time he did, he messed things up. He’d never wanted a woman so badly, and he’d never been so far away from having her.
“Don’t worry about last night, Daniel. When Sarah and Tom get here, we’ll grab brunch and you’ll feel better. Right now, get some more sleep. Give up.”
With a sigh, he kicked off his shoes, hung his jacket in the closet, and crawled across the bed to her, taking care to lie flat on his stomach so he didn’t wrinkle his shirt.
“Here.” She moved her laptop over onto a pillow and patted her thigh. He wasn’t going to argue with this. Screw his shirt. He rolled toward her, set his head in her lap, and closed his eyes.
“Oh God,” he muttered as her fingernails found their way through his hair and down to his scalp.
She chuckled. “When was the last time somebody stroked your hair?”
“I was probably . . . seven.”
“Yeah, you act like you don’t want your hair stroked. Your entire vibe could be summed up as, ‘Don’t touch my head.’ ”
“Which is why you messed up my hair in the bar that first night,” he pointed out.
“The devil made me do it.” She increased the pressure on his scalp. Other than the kisses and brief bouts of heavy petting he’d snuck from her, this was the best he’d felt in a long time. He made an effort not to push his head against her hand, encouraging, like his cat.
Without pausing in her massage, she asked him, “Do you remember telling me about your brother last night?”
“Yeah,” he grunted. “It’s not a secret. Just . . . ” With her hand doing these things to his head, he had a hard time thinking of what it was. “Sad.”
“What were you like before your brother died?” she asked.
He smiled. “I was in a band.”
“What did you play?”
“Lead guitar. I could practice with my headphones on without my dad hearing.”
“What kind of music did you play?”
“Oh, punk. We were a punk band when punk was out of style. We were very proud.”
She giggled. “Did you dye your hair green and spike it?”
“I wanted to, but I had to be at the breakfast table in the morning and the dinner table at night with my hair looking completely normal, or my father would have grounded me for life. I did what I could. I really know my way around a jar of hair gel.”
“Speaking of which,” she said, “I’m ruining your hairdo.”
“I can fix it,” he said quickly, because he didn’t want anything to interrupt the exquisite march of her fingernails across his scalp. “What were you like at sixteen?”
“I ran away a lot,” she said. “My dad was between jobs then, so he was drunk most of the time. When you played a gig at a club, I would have been the girl hanging around outside, wanting to look cool but too poor to get in, with an inappropriately old boyfriend. Except it was Morgantown instead of New York, so take that girl you would have seen outside your club and make her one fourth as worldly and sophisticated.”
“That girl would have been trouble,” he declared.
“Yep, that was me.”
“That girl would have eaten me for breakfast.”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
He knew so. Back then, he’d given his heart to music, to friends, to girls. He’d gotten shot down a lot, but that didn’t matter. He’d had deeper to dig and more to give. If he’d seen Wendy sitting with her legs crossed outside one of the dives he used to play, blond hair long, makeup heavy, stockings ripped, and then he’d heard her laugh, his resilient heart wouldn’t have stood a chance.
* * *
As Wendy watched, Daniel’s breathing slowed and the planes of his face went slack. He was asleep.
She returned to her laptop, typing press release salvage jobs and checking Lorelei’s posts, as if Daniel weren’t touching her. But he was touching her, and she was very aware of this. The past three days had been three of the worst of her life, and she feared the worst was not over . . . yet here, in a strange hotel room in a strange city, doing her work, she felt like she’d come home. Her face tingled with delicious awareness that Daniel was with her.
It was domestic and strange to host him on her lap. She fully realized how fleeting it was and how wrong she was to have any kind of inkling that her relationship with him would last beyond their launch of Lorelei and Colton’s promo. But she couldn’t deny that she felt better and more at peace in this moment than she had not just in the past three days, but in years. As she examined that thought and her fingers paused over the keyboard, she wondered whether she’d felt so at peace . . . ever.
She lightly traced one fingertip along the smooth, light skin over his cheekbone, then let it dance down through his black stubble to cradle his jaw.
He didn’t stir, his breathing deep and even.
She went back to work.
After several minutes she heard a key card slide through the lock and the door open. Sarah and Tom had made incredibly good time from the airport—too good. Wendy’s first instinct was to dump Daniel off her, but it was too late. The best course of action was to play this cool. After all, there was nothing really going on between her and Daniel. And it wouldn’t have been at all unusual for Sarah to fall asleep with her head on Wendy’s thigh. Daniel and Wendy were friends, just like Sarah and Wendy.
So she held her place and beamed at Sarah as she came around the corner.
With a glance at Daniel, Sarah grinned back. She sat in the upholstered chair beside the bed and pulled out her phone.
Ten seconds later, a text blinked onto Wendy’s phone.