her past to appear. Well...maybe ghost wasn’t the right word, but she wasn’t sure what to call the person she was supposed to be meeting. They certainly weren’t friends. They never had been. Just two people who happened to be born to parents who ran in the same social circle.
“Miss? Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?” the bartender asked her from behind the bar. “It’s still happy hour for another fifteen minutes. Drinks are half-price. Our special is pineapple margaritas. They come in a pineapple cup. Everyone seems to like them.”
Cricket was tempted. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she must look kind of sad sitting in a bar by herself, twiddling her thumbs. “Oh, I probably shouldn’t. I’m still waiting for my friend.”
“Your friend is late,” a man said. He was sitting at the end of the bar with a domestic beer in his hand. His back had been to her most of the time she was there, his eyes glued to some sporting event on the large television over the bar, but she had definitely noticed him. She didn’t have to see his face to know he was one of those hypermasculine men whose pheromones filled the air and made otherwise sensible women turn into a pool of senseless goopy jelly. His was broad backed, tall, muscular. He sat up very straight, which Cricket’s mother would have appreciated. He wore his inky-black hair in overlong curls, which might have been considered boyish or feminine on another man, but worked on him. He was brown skinned, some beautiful shade that she couldn’t begin to describe. And just when she decided that she had better stop cataloging his features, he turned to face her.
Well...damn.
He might be the most gorgeous man she had ever laid eyes on, and a tiny spark of recognition went off in her brain. She had seen this man before, but she couldn’t immediately place where she would have met such an extraordinary-looking human.
Maybe in her dreams.
“Yes,” she said quietly, hoping he wouldn’t hear her embarrassing breathlessness. “My friend is quite late.”
“Have a drink. They won’t get mad at you. And if they do, they aren’t the kind of friend you need.”
She opened her mouth to speak but then hesitated.
“I’ll buy you the drink. My sister-in-law loves those pineapple things. You should try it.”
Cricket was twenty-nine years old. She spoke four languages fluently and had studied with the best and brightest around the world, but she’d never had a stranger offer to buy her a drink in a bar.
Ever.
But then again, guys never made passes at pudgy girls with two PhDs who were named after bugs.
“Say yes,” the man said to her, the corner of his mouth curling in an appealing way.
She swallowed hard and warned herself not to be the awkward person she was ninety-nine percent of the time. “I need to know who I’m saying yes to.”
“Elias.” He got off his stool and walked over to her, his hand extended.
“Cricket,” she responded absently as she took note of his hand. Normally she introduced herself as Cree, because scientists named after bugs didn’t usually garner respect, but this time she had forgotten and introduced herself by her given name.
He had recently had surgery. There was a barely healed incision running from his wrist all the way up the palm of his hand and one along his thumb.
“Do you inspect everyone’s hand you shake so closely?” he asked. It was then she realized that she hadn’t shaken his hand at all—she was holding it with both of hers as her thumb ran along the still-angry incision line.
“You shouldn’t be shaking my hand. Yours is swollen. You should wave, or do that head-nod thingy that guys do.”
“Would a wink suffice?” He took the chair next to her at the four-top.
“Oh, no. Winks can be kind of creepy, don’t you think?”
He smiled at her, fully this time, showing off a set of perfectly white teeth. He became even more gorgeous, if that were possible. “They could be sexy, too. I guess it depends on who is doing the winking.”
“And on the winkee. No?”
“I wouldn’t find it creepy if you winked at me. Is your name really Cricket?”
“Yes. Like the bug,” she admitted with a small sigh.
“That can’t be true.” He laughed. “Your parents must have thought it was a cute name for a girl.”
“No, they thought I looked like a bug, so they named me Cricket. Cricket Moses Warren.”
He slanted a brow at her. “Moses as in part-the-seas Moses?”
“I suppose, but I think I’m named for my great-great-grandfather, who was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. His name was Moses.”
He winked at her. “It’s nice to meet you, Cricket Moses. I am Elias James Bradley.”
“Oh, how normal of you to be called Elias James. I suppose your parents were too unimaginative to name you after a noisy, beady-eyed bug and an ancestor of the opposite sex.”
He grinned at her. “No, I’m named after a soap actor and my father.” He raised his hand to signal the bartender. “A pineapple margarita for my new friend, and another beer for me.”
“Friends now, are we? I don’t even know one embarrassing thing about you, and you know two about me.”
She wasn’t normally so chatty with strangers, especially deliciously beautiful strange men, but she was feeling kind of nervous. “You know I just had surgery on my hand and I have very limited movement in it.”
“Is that embarrassing?”
“Yes. I work with my hands. I can’t do my job now because of it.”
“You work with your hands, huh? Are you an MMA fighter?”
“No.”
“A football player?”
“No.”
“A boxer? Did you hit someone so hard your hand shattered in tiny little pieces?”
“I didn’t break my hand at work.”
“How did you break it? Freaky sex accident?”
“You’re weird.” He grinned.
“I know.” She nodded, not believing she wasn’t censoring herself like she normally would. “I have been my entire life.”
“I like it.” He looked down at his swollen hand and attempted to bend his fingers without much success. “I broke it doing a mud race. I fell from a twenty-foot landing and then had a 250-pound man land on top of me. My wrist snapped.”
“Ouch.” She gently took his large, swollen hand in hers again and studied it. “Your hand should still be immobilized. Judging from the healing
