With his hand on her face, he turned her toward him. “I’m exactly where I want to be tonight, with the woman who’s worked her way so far under my skin in the last few months that I can no longer imagine a day without her being part of it.”

His gruffly spoken words made her heart leap and her blood race. She could feel the throb of her pulse in her neck and between her legs.

“Let’s get out of the cold,” he said.

In the time it took Erin to gather her belongings, he was around the truck, helping her out and guiding her over a patch of ice that she would’ve missed if he hadn’t been there. They removed their coats in the mudroom and hung them on the hooks one of the previous tenants had installed.

Erin felt his gaze on her as she went up the spiral stairs ahead of him. The enhanced sense of awareness she experienced when he was near made her feel out of sorts and off her game, but not necessarily in a bad way. How had she made it to thirty-eight without having experienced anything that could compare to the way she’d felt when he’d walked into Jenny’s earlier?

Mitch, the man she’d lived with in law school, had been handsome, sexy, intelligent and funny, but he’d never made her blood boil the way Slim did simply by walking into a room. At one time, she’d expected to marry Mitch. That seemed like such a long time ago now, so far in the past as to be part of someone else’s history rather than hers.

Slim poured two vodka cocktails, handed one to her and took a deep drink of his, all without taking his eyes off her. “You’re a million miles away. What’re you thinking about?”

She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I’m thinking about the last man I was seriously involved with. It was a long time ago. During law school. I thought I was going to marry him and have it all—a family and a career and a home.”

He took her by the hand and led her to the living room.

Drink in hand, Erin curled her legs under her and sat on the sofa while he plugged in the tree lights and killed the lamp before settling next to her.

“What happened?”

“9/11 happened. He tried. God knows he tried. He stuck it out for more than a year afterward, but…” She sighed, the weight of the difficult years that followed her brother’s death still heavy on her soul after all this time. “I’ve avoided anything that smacked of entanglement ever since.”

“Whatever became of him?”