Lily, though…she was someone he wanted to gamble on. To spend more time with. The thought jarred him momentarily.
But why? He had been in the world for long enough to know that he was tired of avoiding commitment. Lily had been a surprise, but already she was proving to be a refreshing change from the demands of his life, which he hadn’t really realized until today were pretty intense.
He wondered where she lived, if it was anywhere close to Napa Valley.
Probably not, though. She didn’t seem Californian. It was hard to explain, but there was something a bit more edgy about her. Probably East Coast. Which meant she may as well be living in Santiago. He actually visited here more than he did the other side of the United States.
He scoffed at the empty room. What was he doing, anyway, making up a fictional relationship with her? They were together for a few hours, nothing more. And he was going to behave himself.
He shoved his legs into his sweats—thick, fleece-lined, and baggy, nothing like those ones that Lily had been wearing—and pulled on a T-shirt before sliding his laptop from his bag and logging on to the hotel Wi-Fi.
Once online, he immediately typed “Lily Stanton” into the Google search box. Maybe it was an invasion of her privacy, but he figured if it was on the Internet, it wasn’t private, anyway.
The first search result was for Four Tethers Consulting. When he clicked on it, a full-length picture of her in a conservative skirt suit, shaking the hand of the president of a major IT service corporation, popped up. Holy damn. She was very successful, based on the client list on her website. She was the president and employed thirty consultants in her firm, apparently.
No wonder she hadn’t batted an eyelash at the nearly thousand-dollar price tag on this suite for the night.
And it explained her small suitcase. Every consultant he had ever met was able to pack two weeks’ worth of life into a suitcase smaller than his laptop bag. Considering that Lily had been toting a rollerboard, she had probably managed to stuff everything she needed for a ski trip into it and still left room for souvenirs to bring back home.
Even on vacation, she packed like she was going on a work trip.
Consultants were a weird breed.
He had been momentarily shocked when she had computed what had to have been thirty calculations in her head, down in the lobby. And each dollar amount that she had assigned to something that either of them would need to use during their stay was logically justified.
It had floored him, turned him on, and turned him inside out with the force of attraction he’d felt, not just to her body, but to her clever mind.
He poked around a bit more on the firm’s website. It was based out of Manhattan and listed a satellite office in North Carolina, but apart from that there wasn’t any specific information about its president.
He clicked back to the search results page and saw her name attached to several consulting projects at big technology firms. Interesting. She seemed to know the clean tech fields well, was an investor through an angel group, and served on the board of directors of a nonprofit company focused on bringing technology to public schools along the Eastern seaboard.
After a few more minutes, he hadn’t found anything more interesting, so he closed the page and started checking his e-mail.
Lily had been in the shower for nearly twenty minutes when he finally heard the water shut off, and he had to reread the e-mail he had opened several times to push past the image of her emerging from the shower, naked, streaming water, with peaked nipples from the sudden cold after so long in the wet warmth.
He groaned and fought for control by forcing the words from one of his e-mails into his brain. Sales projections. Market share. Growth potential. The dry terms brought him back to reality. He heard shuffling in the other room and the door swung open. Lily emerged, dressed in flannel pajamas, her long hair wrapped in a towel.
She looked amazing.
She gave him an embarrassed smile. “I didn’t have anything but dirty clothes and these pajamas.”
He pushed back from the desk. “You look great. Besides, it’s not like we’re heading to a fashion show.” He grinned and gestured to his worn sweats with the big Stanford logo on them.
She looked at him in surprise. “Did you go there for college?”
“Business school. I was at Berkeley for undergrad.”
“Oh.” Understanding dawned in her eyes. “Do you still live in California, then?”
He nodded, trying to ignore how disappointed she looked. She must feel it, too, he thought. This connection between them.
He wasn’t just thinking of their attraction then, though that was certainly a big connection, too.
They stared at each other for a moment too long, and he searched for something to say.
“Oh, I connected to the hotel network, if you want to use my laptop.” He gestured to the desk.