LITMIR.BIZ

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slowed and angled the car in front of a long aluminum building with a you-could-see-it-from-anywhere neon sign of a roller skate, flashing in bright green and blue. How had Stella missed that blinding splash of color?

      “You’re not supposed to roller-skate?” she asked. Stella could come up with half a dozen medical reasons a young woman of reasonable health shouldn’t skate, but none of them visibly applied to Hayden.

      “Well, it was a long time ago, but my grandparents had some definite ideas of the kind of trouble a girl could get herself into in the darkened corners of a roller rink.”

      Now that made sense. “All my preteen angst just came flooding back,” Stella admitted, awash in fond memories. When makeup was experimental (and forbidden) and her best friend had taught her how to practice kissing on her hand at a slumber party. Everything had seemed so important and boys too complicated.

      Actually, not much had changed. Well, except for tonight. This thing with Owen felt anything but complicated, and the only important plan was to live this night fully.

      “Girls used to whisper and brag how they made out at the roller rink at school,” Hayden confided, her tone a little wistful. She opened the door, and the overhead light popped on, making her blink.

      Tony lifted a brow. “You didn’t?” he asked her.

      She rolled her eyes. “As if my grandparents would ever have permitted that.”

      He rushed around the car and met her at the door, offering his hand to her like a gallant knight. “Allow me to change that.”

      “Absolutely,” she said, and reached her fingers toward his.

      “What about you, Stella? Was kissing at the rink part of your education?” Owen asked as they scrambled out of the car to stand on the sidewalk.

      “Maybe,” she hedged.

      Actually, it hadn’t. At a party, she’d been dared to kiss the guy she’d been crushing on and she’d planted the worst kiss in the history of worst kisses on the guy. She’d missed his lips and managed to swipe the side of his nose instead. He’d rolled away to laugh about her with his friends, and she’d ended up borrowing a stranger’s phone to call her mom to pick her up from the party early. That was Stella’s first official lesson in keeping her emotions to herself, and boys at a distance.

      Beside her, Owen crooked his elbow in a gentlemanly move that she was beginning to recognize as his signature. “Let’s make it not a maybe,” he said.

      But maybe she could forget that lesson. At least for the night. With a nod, she hooked her arm through his and they walked inside together. She kind of enjoyed this linking elbows thing they had going. As if they were a team ready to face danger or fun together. Probably both.

      The familiar scents of perfume and cologne and the oil used on the wooden floor of the roller rink made her stomach clench for a moment. Her most embarrassing experience had happened at a place just like this, and she preferred not to dwell on emotions that brought her down. The roller rink had never figured into any of her plans past the age of fourteen.

      But she also smelled beer and gourmet pretzels. Patrons leaned against the railing surrounding the rink while sipping on martinis and gin and tonics, not sodas and fruit punch. Owen wasn’t some teenage boy interested in looking cool to his friends. And Stella definitely knew how to kiss a man now. Besides, she was all about living life tonight, not avoiding it. Roller-skating it was.

      They joined Tony and Hayden in the lobby of the rink, where the pair was waiting in line.

      Hayden greeted her with a smile. “Stella, it’s adult skate night. It’s like this night was tailor-made for us.”

      Tony pulled out his cell phone and they laughed and posed for selfies.

      “This light is doing weird things to your hair,” Hayden said. “First pink. Then blue.”

      Stella fluffed her curly locks. “Try to catch one when I look blond.”

      Finally it was their turn at the register. The guys paid the admission, and the four of them exchanged shoes for skates.

      The music pumped, a combination of disco from the seventies, new wave from the eighties and bubblegum pop from the nineties. Their skin was awash in silver patterns from the mirrored balls above their heads and the pulsing strobe lights suspended from the ceiling.

      They sat on one of the long carpeted benches that lined the skating area and put on their skates. Hayden and Tony quickly laced up, but Stella’s pace was slower so she could take this night all in. She didn’t allow herself to break out of her self-restraint that often, so she wanted to really live this moment—the sound of the music and the laughing couples around them, the thump of the bass beneath her socked feet and the steady warmth of Owen’s shoulder as he sat beside her.

      Hayden gave her a wink as they skated off, and in moments Stella lost the other couple in the crowd on the hardwood roller floor.

      Owen didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry, either. She snuck a peek at his profile. He looked pensive. “Everything okay?” she asked over the din of the music.

      He angled toward her and flashed her that amazing smile of his. The one she’d first noticed in the PharmaTest waiting room when it had triggered some secret little voice inside her mind that said exactly.

      “I’m thinking that the moment I get out on that floor in my skates, any chance of looking cool and impressing the lady I want is definitely out.”

      Stella couldn’t help but laugh. This sexy hunk of a man wanted to impress her, and that made something inside her go all gooey toward him.

      The prospect of her carefully honed defenses crumbling should have scared the hell out of her. Her parents had insisted she’d need a tough shell in order to have a life as an ER doctor, so she’d guarded herself from emotion for as long as she could remember.

      But tonight she craved more. Her usual choice of guy leaned to the nerdier type—the kind of man who didn’t worry so much about appearing cool because he was so far away from that descriptor anyway.

      With his wide shoulders and strong arms, Owen probably played sports. His easy confidence around her—and, well, everyone—suggested he was the guy who’d always been invited to the popular parties in high school. The kind of guy who saw through girls like her. But not tonight. Owen wanted her, and he wasn’t afraid of saying it or showing it.

      Maybe he deserved some honesty from her. “But if you don’t go out on that floor, how will I ever be able to pretend to fall so that you can catch me?” she asked.

      The smile dropped from his lips, and in a flash of strobe lighting she caught the intensity of his gaze. Just for a moment. Then the light moved and he was concealed once more.

      His thumb stroked the back of her hand and tiny shivers spread through her fingers and down her arm. Imagine what she’d feel if that thumb stroked other needy places on her body? And that naughty little thought brought on a full body quake.

      “What was that fantasy about darkened corners Hayden mentioned?”

      Stella swiveled on the bench, searching for someplace private where she could replace her teenage roller-skating failure with a warm memory of kissing the hunky guy. Finally. The kind of memory she could think about while on those rough twelve-hour shifts that awaited her in the emergency room.

      Another beam of light flashed across his face, and she caught a teasing glint in his eyes. He leaned in to whisper in her ear. “Just to warn you, I’m about to throw down the worst line. Ready?”

      Was she? Absolut— Wait a minute, don’t just sit there and passively let this smooth, gorgeous man lay down the moves. This is your night to live. Live it. She gave him the side eye. “It’s not the one about guessing the material of your shirt and it turns out to be boyfriend material, is it?”

      He scratched at his chin. “That’s pretty good, and by good I mean terrible.

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