Tom stood. “All right, drunk baby, come on. I’ll walk you home.”
Her languidness vanished in an instant. “I don’t need you to walk me home,” she snapped. “I’ve walked home a hundred times in the dark.”
“I’m sure you have. But this time, there might be an armed fugitive hiding in the woods. And I’m leaving anyway. I can either walk you or I can follow behind you. Your choice.”
“Walk her home,” Jill cut in. “Isabelle, put your prickliness away and be nice. Maybe you’ll like the feeling.”
“I doubt it,” Isabelle answered, but she shrugged. “And he already asked to walk me home. Apparently, he likes his girls mean and feral.”
“All the more reason to walk home with him, then.”
Isabelle huffed out a laugh at that then winked in his direction, completely confusing him. His mental state wasn’t helped when she reached to shrug on her coat and her blouse threatened to split in two and reveal the pink bra peeking out underneath.
He spun and walked toward the entryway where he’d left his own coat, but there was no relief there. Isabelle followed close behind to tug on her tall snow boots, leaning over so that her shirt gaped to show the generous rise of her breasts. Tom just shook his head and made himself look elsewhere until she’d finished her task. He, in fact, didn’t like his girls mean and feral. She was not the girl for him.
Then again, he still wasn’t sure he had a read on Isabelle West yet. He wouldn’t say she was mean, exactly. But as for feral...well, there was something a little wild about her. Something unfiltered. She said what she meant and wasn’t coy about her moods.
Jill, waving away Tom’s praise for her food, sent them out the door with warnings about ice on the steps. The woman was truly an amazing cook, not to mention a damn good pastry chef. He’d have to find one of her cookbooks and have Jill sign it for his sister. Wendy adored cooking. And she was terrible at it. But Tom liked to make her happy, so he went to her place once a month for a pleasant, polite evening with Mom and Dad and Wendy’s husband and kids, and he ate her awful dinners without complaint. Cookbooks hadn’t helped in the past, but maybe Jill’s would be the right fit.
“You’ve got Jill wrapped around your finger,” Isabelle said, the words warm instead of accusing.
“You have that turned around. I’d die for that woman.”
Isabelle’s laugh rang loud and pure into the night as they walked down the driveway to the road. “She’s easy to love.”
“But she likes living alone?”
Isabelle shrugged. “Maybe nobody is worthy of her. Or maybe love isn’t all that great.”
He shot her a look, but she was staring straight ahead, her small smile lit by the snow. “And which one is it for you?” he asked.
“Oh, me? I love living alone. And love definitely isn’t all that great.”
He’d heard that kind of sentiment before, but never with such good cheer. “I’d say that’s cynical, but you sound happy about it.”
She finally looked at him. “You’re not wearing a wedding ring. Do you live alone?”
“Yes.”
“No wife or kids? Are you depressed about it? Are you pining away?”
His lips twitched at the idea of sitting in the window of his apartment, staring yearningly into the night, like a sappy scene from a bad movie. “No. But I travel quite a bit.”
“A woman in every port?”
“Not quite,” he said with a grin. “But you make Mammoth and Casper and Cheyenne sound more promising than they are.”
“Exotic locales. Exciting adventures. Femme fatales.”
“I see you’ve been spying on me.”
She nodded, still more reserved with him than she was with Jill. “Well, I don’t travel, but I’m not lonely. I have my work, my friends and my home. And internet porn. Life is good.”
Tom tripped over a snowdrift and nearly fell flat on his face. Isabelle laughed as he dusted snow off his knee.
So much for her reserve. “If you said that to shock me, it worked,” he said.
“I said it because it’s true.” She grinned over her shoulder as she kept moving. “Try to keep up.”