Did he mean here in his house or here alone with him in his bedroom? In his plain-but-very-stylish clothes, he belonged in this room completely, with its clean lines and expensive but understated décor. Annika suddenly had a vision of him, shirtless and dressed only in plaid pajama bottoms, reclining in his bed, his hair damp and his chest and abs covered in droplets of water. And another vision of herself, startlingly similar to a memory she had of Vegas, kneeling beside him and licking each of those droplets off.

Her skin began to pulse with desire. Really, she should leave. Hudson Craft was still Hudson Craft; nothing had changed. They weren’t compatible. Couldn’t be compatible. She should just stride past him, open the door, and be gone.

But she didn’t want to. She wanted to stay here, to get a glimpse behind the curtain, to see who Hudson really was. And that was a problem.

Abruptly choosing to ignore the tiny voice of reason that was getting smaller with every breath she took, Annika turned to look out the glass wall again, then sat on the black leather bench at the foot of his bed, her mind carefully skirting all the reasons she shouldn’t. “Your view is killer.”

Hudson pulled a standing swing chair over and sat, too, facing the glass wall across from them. “I like it. In fact, I think it was this view that sold me on the house.”

Annika gave him a look.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head and ran her fingernail along the stitching on the leather. “My dad said the same thing about his house and my mom. She wanted to buy it just based on the view from the deck.”

“Smart lady,” Hudson said. “I haven’t regretted waking up to this so far. How does your mom like her view?”

Annika paused. There was never a good time to lay this on people; they always got really awkward and strange when she did. “My mom died a long time ago, when I was a newborn. Cancer.”

Hudson turned to look at her. “I’m sorry,” he said simply. “That must’ve been really hard, growing up without a mom—never knowing her, always wondering what could’ve been.”

Huh. No one had ever said that to Annika, apart from the therapist she saw briefly as a teenager, for what her dad called her “unprocessed abandonment issues”—by which he meant he was mad that Annika had started having sex and didn’t know what else to do about it. Everyone else always assumed that just because her mom had died when she was a newborn, she must not have too many feelings about it. “Thanks. It was. But my dad definitely made up for it. I never felt alone.” Shut up, Annika. He doesn’t care. Why was she sharing all of this with him?