“You’ve really outdone yourself,” Alex decided when Charlotte emerged from the house carrying their plates.
She’d already set the table with linen placemats, silverware, and a bucket of ice for the wine.
Charlotte smiled but didn’t say anything. She never seemed to know how to respond to compliments.
The meal was absolute perfection. It tasted almost like Maximiliano’s version but without the same fresh-caught ingredients from the Valencian coast, it would be impossible to make an exact replica.
“What did you do for your birthday last year?” Charlotte asked when they’d finished half a bottle of wine and most of their dinner.
“Not much,” Alex answered honestly. “Dinner with a few friends,” she added but didn’t explain that she would have happily spent it alone if Stephanie hadn’t forced an outing on her. She didn’t have a problem doing something on her own, but most people reacted as if it were the most pathetic thing in the world. “How about you?”
Charlotte fussed absentmindedly with the tip of her ponytail where it spilled over her shoulder as she sat back and considered the question. It had been eight months ago, but Alex was surprised that she didn’t immediately remember.
“I went out to a bar with someone,” she replied after a beat.
Alex sipped her wine. The words seemed deliberately selected to o er as little as possible. “Are you going to introduce me?”
Charlotte’s cheeks were flushed pink. Was it the combination of the wine and the warm night or something else?
“To who?”
“To whoever you spent your last birthday with,” Alex countered.
Pink turned to red too quickly to be attributable to any external factors. “No way,” she replied with a chuckle.
Alex’s stomach tensed. Was she supposed to be a secret?
The notion made her skin crawl. “Why not?”
“Because I don’t think you want to meet the girl I used to hook up with,” she explained before taking a long drink from her wine glass as if she could conceal herself behind it.
Alex relaxed her shoulders and laughed. “Just a hook up?
Why not a girlfriend?”
Charlotte drained her glass. “Because not everyone is girlfriend material,” she decided.
She couldn’t argue with that but was instantly curious about what Charlotte thought made for girlfriend material .
As if reading her mind, Charlotte o ered an explanation.
“She was a little all over the place. Not really sure what she wanted in life. She was twenty-two, so I couldn’t blame her, but I couldn’t really take her seriously either, so we just kept it casual,” she explained with a shrug.
Jesus . Twenty-two . Alex suddenly felt every year of forty-six. The last naked body Charlotte had seen had been twenty-four years younger than hers. Her tits were probably up to her neck .
“Does that bother you?” Charlotte knitted her blonde eyebrows together.
“No,” she replied immediately, although she wasn’t sure she was telling the truth. Too much wine made her hazy.
With a barely contained grin, Charlotte stood. “You know what doesn’t matter? Any of what I did before I met you.”
She extended her hand in invitation.
Alex looked at Charlotte’s open palm, then at her face.
“Where are we going?”
“You didn’t think dinner was the only thing on the menu for your birthday, did you?”