His for the Taking by Julie Cohen Page A

glance. He’d put on the long-sleeved shirt and was buttoning it. Even through the cotton she could picture his naked chest.
    She was probably going to picture it for the rest of her life.
    Nick rolled up his T-shirt and shoved it back in the pack, and then pulled out a pair of dark trousers. Zoe jumped to her feet.
    ‘I’ll just make a phone call,’ she choked, and fled the room before he decided to drop his jeans, too.
     
    ‘How do you deal with all of this?’
    Zoe dragged her attention away from the easy, sexy way Nick walked and glanced around her to see what he was talking about. The taxis beeped, the street vendors shouted, the homeless guy muttered, the sidewalk vents steamed. It was all normal.
    ‘Deal with what?’
    ‘Everything.’ Nick swept his hands out in an all-inclusive gesture. ‘The smell, for a start.’
    Zoe sniffed in a deep breath and let it out. ‘Hot dogs, concrete, gasoline, and somebody’s perfume. What’s wrong with that?’
    ‘It’s not air, it’s fumes. Don’t you feel like every breath is coating your lungs with gunk?’ He grimaced.
    ‘New Yorkers love gunk in their air.’ She grinned at Nick and winked at him. He’d made himself so at home in her great-aunt’s apartment, it was amusing to see him looking uncomfortable here on a NewYork street. ‘Is the city too big for you, Eagle Scout?’
    ‘It feels like another planet.’ He pointed across the street, to the green trees and grass of Central Park. ‘That, I understand. This, on the other hand—’ he pointed right, towards the buildings ‘—is suffocating. All these walls. How do you ever feel like you’re outdoors?’
    ‘You know you’re outside because the traffic gets louder. Come on, the office is up this block.’
    They turned away from Central Park and Nick cast a longing look over his shoulder at the trees they were leaving behind. ‘Were you born here?’ he asked.
    ‘Nope. In Jersey.’
    ‘So you chose to move here.’
    ‘The minute I turned eighteen.’
    ‘Why?’
    Zoe twisted the silver ring she wore on her thumb. She’d found it only a few blocks from here, kicked into a forgotten corner, and she wore it constantly to remind herself of everything else she’d found on the streets of New York.
    ‘Because you can be yourself here,’ she said. ‘Nobody cares what you do.’
    ‘That’s appealing?’ Nick manoeuvred around two men who were having a loud disagreement in a foreign language in the middle of the sidewalk. They carried on yelling at each other without taking any notice.
    ‘Very.’
    ‘But how can you feel as if you matter to other people, if everyone’s so caught up in their own lives?’
    ‘Why would you want to feel as if you mattered to other people?’
    She wasn’t looking at him, but she felt Nick throw a sharp glance her way.
    ‘Here’s the lawyers’ office,’ she said, launching herself up the stone stairs before Nick asked any more questions. She wasn’t sure how a general conversation about New York’s pollution had turned into a big question-and-answer about her philosophy of life, but she had enough things to think about without it.
    And two of those things were standing in the lobby waiting for the elevator up to the offices of Hopper, Stein and Feinberg, Attorneys-at-Law.
    She padded up in her running shoes behind the two slim blondes and said, ‘Yo, sis and sis.’
    Jade and Cindy turned around, both swivelling gracefully on their heels. Like all of the Drake women aside from Zoe, they were delicate and feminine. Jade, her eldest sister, wore the stylish conservative clothes of the young soccer-mom-in-training; Cindy had on a sharp designer suit that fit her job as a PR executive.
    ‘Zoe,’ Jade said and leaned forward to give her a light, perfumed hug. Her younger sister hugged her, too, though more briskly, as befit a successful businesswoman.
    ‘It’s been ages,’ said Jade, as sweetly as she always said everything. ‘When are you going to come out