And just when she’d convinced herself she was both socially adept and attractive enough to handle being on Dr. River Peña’s arm all night, he stepped out of his car looking like solid muscle and sexual energy poured by a fancy German-engineered machine into that suit.

Jess took a flying leap off a mental bridge. She was so completely screwed. She’d lowered the drawbridge to sex thoughts and now they were stampeding across. Frankly, if she and River ever managed to get it on, he was going to have a lot to live up to. Fictional River was a wonder in bed.

He bent and kissed her cheek again—this time she was at least prepared for it, but she was not prepared for the assault of sensation. He smelled… different.

He did a similar deep inhale near her ear.

They spoke in unison:

“Are you wearing perfume?” “Are you wearing cologne?”

Her question echoed last, and louder. Is he blushing?

“A little. My sisters—” He cleared his throat. “They told me to go to Neiman Marcus, get some recommendations.”

Jess pulled out a mental bag of arrows and took aim at the imagined saleswoman who’d dabbed his skin with various colognes and gotten close enough to smell him. “Your sisters told you to get… cologne?”

“They’re invested. In this.” He sighed, but she knew he was only pretending to be exasperated.

His sisters were invested in them? Was that adorable or terrifying? “That’s very sweet,” Jess managed.

River laughed dryly. “That’s one word for it.”

“Well, the cologne is nice.” Understatement of the ages. Jess wanted to eat him up and wash him down with the rest of the bottle.

He leaned in again. “What is it I’m smelling?”

Jess was thrown for a moment when she registered that they were smelling each other. And recognizing a difference. Was this normal? Was this weird? She decided to roll with it.

“It’s—okay, it sounds weird, but it’s grapefruit. It’s a grapefruit roll thing—” She didn’t know how to say it. “It’s not perfume, exactly. Like an oil? It’s a little roller—” Jess shut up and just mimed rolling something on her wrist. “Perfume gives me a headache, but this”—she felt the tops of her cheeks flame—“this I can do.”

“I like it.” He seemed to struggle for words. “A lot.”

What was she hearing in his voice? Weird tight restraint. It sounded like he was telling a platter of buttery beef Wellington, I could stand to take a bite, when really he meant, Get in my face.

Did River Peña… want her in his face?

Jess had to take it down a notch. She might have been consistently obsessing since their Shelter Island snuggle, but she could make no assumptions about where he was with all of this.

Also, as they climbed into his car, Jess reminded herself that they would soon be standing inside an investor’s penthouse for a cocktail party. That is, River—and everyone there tonight—had a financial interest in her looking at him with horny eyes. Jess knew already that River chose his words carefully; for all she knew, his sisters might be actually invested, not just sentimental and meddling. Her obvious attraction to him helped boost confidence in his company, which helped his pocketbook, and also helped confirm everything he’d been saying from a scientific standpoint all this time. Jess knew how important it was to River that the world saw the impact of his data.