Free A Hot Winter (New Adult Romance) (The Attraction Series Book 2) by C.J. Lake

date?”
    Startled, she looked over.  She found Matt eying her, perhaps waiting for her answer.  “What--no.  He’s a dad at Jake’s school,” she explained unnecessarily and opened the cabinet. 
    “He likes you,” Matt remarked casually.
    “I barely know him.  We ran into each other on Parents’ Night.  I completely forgot about it.  He started talking to me about how the kids have too much homework and mentioned maybe getting a cup of coffee.”
    “Huh, that’s a new one,” Matt said, seeming amused.
    “What do you mean?  Asking someone for coffee?”  She almost blurted out that Matt, too, had asked her out for coffee when they’d first met at the hardware store. 
    “No, I don’t mean the destination.  I mean the cover story.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    Half-grinning, Matt rolled his eyes.  “Emma, c’mon.  Granted I don’t have kids, but it seems to me that if you have a problem with the homework, you call the school.  Not invite a good-looking single mother out for ‘coffee.’”
    Emma burst out a laugh.  “Okay, first of all, do we need the air quotes around ‘coffee’?”
    Matt chuckled as he dipped the roller in the paint tin by his foot.  “It’s an obvious line; that’s all I’m saying.” 
    “But you’ve just made a big assumption.”
    “What’s that?”
    “That he finds me good-looking.”  She shrugged as she pulled out the coffee canister.  “Maybe he doesn’t.”
    Matt snorted at that.  “Yeah, right.”
    She willfully had to suppress a smile, because in those two short words, Matt had given her an immense compliment.  Of course the only thing to do was to play it off.  “And speaking of coffee …do you want a cup?”
    “Sure, okay.” 
    As the coffee brewed, Emma leaned against the counter and tried not to watch Matt work.  Several moments passed before Matt said, “So are you gonna go?”  When Emma looked questioningly at him, he jerked his head toward the answering machine. 
    “No,” she said, shaking her head.  “There’s no point.  Why would I get into some homework battle when Jake will be changing schools anyway?”  She didn’t acknowledge the implicit idea that the homework topic was a smokescreen for a date.  Because even if that was the case, she still didn’t see the point to going. 
    “What if your house doesn’t sell right away?” Matt asked.  “Are you still leaving?”  His eyes were focused on the wall he was painting, and his question seemed casual…but she honestly couldn’t tell.  Something made her think that he cared about the answer.
    “We’re definitely going,” she said.  Maybe a little too emphatically, but she wanted to be honest. “I’ll leave the house on the market and we’ll stay with my in-laws till I can get a place for us up there.  My late husband’s parents still live in New York,” she explained.
    “Makes sense,” was all he said.
    Soon, when the coffee was brewed, she poured him a cup and took her own mug to her office. 
    Matt couldn’t help checking her out as she left the kitchen, watching the sway of her hips and that shapely ass that he just wanted to grab.  God, she made him hot.  But he had to forget it, at least for now.  While he was working at her house, nothing could happen.  She’d set that tone pretty clearly with her just-friends vibe.  But honestly, he was beginning to wonder if anything could ever happen between them.  As she’d said in no uncertain terms: she was leaving in a few weeks no matter what.  So why even contemplating starting something up with her? 
    Later, on his drive home, he let the diagonal drift of snow against his windshield blur his thoughts.  When he had gotten into his truck, he’d discovered a voicemail from Pellican, asking to crash at Matt’s place for a couple days.  Apparently some pipes had frozen and burst in Pellican’s building and now he had no heat or hot water.  Before he started driving, Matt had