Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 73699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 368(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 368(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
“It’s vodka and gin. Plus, Bond drank one in Casino Royale.”
“Ah ha! So you’re a Bond fan too. What do you know, we do have something in common!”
He doesn’t smile, but his gaze seems slightly friendlier than usual.
“All right,” he says finally. “Let me make one quick phone call, and then I’ll make us one.”
I wait until he’s out of sight, listening for the click of his bedroom door before I hop out of my chair and do a victory dance. What it lacks in coordination, it makes up for in enthusiasm.
I’ve just figured out what my project will be while my real life in San Francisco is on hiatus: I will figure out what makes this guy tick, and I will make him like me.
Kurt wasn’t entirely wrong about me. I do like people to like me. They don’t have to love me. Just … adore me, a little bit. Not because I’m vain, but, well …
I suspect it probably has something to do with the deep-seated guilt of just how awful I was in my early twenties. Self-centered, reckless, and a little ungrateful.
I’ve been making up for it ever since.
I have no idea how long Colin’s phone call will take, and quite honestly, I don’t really need him to make the cocktails. I love to entertain, and added at-home bartending to my cocktail party and dinner party skills a long time ago. And though this particular cocktail is new to me, it’s nothing a little Google can’t help with.
A quick search later, and I see that this mysterious Vesper is pretty close to a martini. I pull the vodka and gin off the sleek bar cart Colin keeps in the corner of the living room and find a bottle of the third ingredient, something called Lillet Blanc, in the refrigerator.
I contemplate shaking it. It’s very Bond after all. But the picture of the drink I found on the Internet is perfectly clear, and shaking the cocktail will make it cloudy.
I put two cocktail glasses in the freezer to chill and then snoop around Colin’s kitchen until I come up with a crystal mixing glass and a bar spoon.
The mixing glass is small, so I have to make the drinks one at a time, measuring carefully, pouring over ice, and stirring for a good minute or so to get the liquor ice cold before straining into the glasses.
I’m digging around in the refrigerator for a lemon to garnish the drinks when Colin emerges from the bedroom.
He pauses, looking at the two finished cocktails in surprise. “I said I’d make them.”
“I heard you.” I hold up the lemon. “Do you have a little—?”
I mime the motion of making a lemon twist to garnish the drinks.
Colin shrugs out of his suit jacket and drapes it over the back of the barstool, rolling up the sleeves of his dress shirt as he walks toward me.
He opens a drawer and pulls out a channel knife, but instead of handing it over, he reaches out for the lemon. My fingers close around the fruit reflexively, so accustomed to living alone, to doing things my way, that I immediately resist giving up control.
Colin’s apparently used to being in control too, because he continues to reach for the lemon. Only, I’m holding it so tightly he can’t grab the lemon without also grabbing my hand.
Things that are not sexy: lemons.
Things that are sexy: Colin Walsh holding my hand holding a lemon.
It shouldn’t be. I know that. But the second his fingers make contact with mine, I feel it in places I have no business feeling anything as it relates to this man.
Still, my hand doesn’t pull back, and, I realize belatedly … neither does his.
I lift my gaze to his and see something that looks like a flash of heat—if a bit angry heat—before he tugs the lemon out of my hand.
Clearing his throat, he adds a lemon twist to the cocktails with an adeptness that tells me I’m not the only one who knows his way around the home bar.
He hands me one of the glasses before lifting his own in a silent toast and taking a drink. “Not bad.”
“You sound surprised.”
He studies his drink for a moment. “No. Well. A little. I’ve never had a woman besides female bartenders make me a beverage.”
“And you thought we were incapable?”
“Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“Well, what else am I supposed to—”
Colin reaches out and sets a single finger along the base of my cocktail glass, managing to tip it toward my face without spilling a single drop. “Shut up and drink your damn drink.”
I take a sip, not quite sure what to expect. “Oh! It’s good.”
“You sound surprised,” he says, mimicking my earlier statement.
I make a ha ha face then take another sip of the drink. “I didn’t know quite what to expect with the vodka and gin together, but it’s … pleasant, isn’t it?”