Who in the hell did he think he was? He might have been the hottest guy I’d ever seen in my life—one who’d messed with my head enough to make my self-imposed break from men last ridiculously long, even though my career was flourishing—but that didn’t mean he had the right to tell me what to do.

“Why the fuck wouldn’t I? I’m not your girlfriend. I’m just some woman you talked to for a few hours nine months ago. I’m surprised you even remember my name.”

“I remember a fuck of a lot more than your name, Cecily,” he rumbled.

“Cee-Cee,” I snapped. “Nobody but my family calls me Cecily.”

“If you didn’t want me to think of you that way, you shouldn’t have introduced yourself to me as Cecily.”

He made an excellent point, one I’d wondered about myself quite a few times. I never gave my full name when I met new people, not even in a professional setting. Yet, that’s exactly what I’d done with him. I’d been surprised when my name had slipped out of my mouth back then, and I still wasn’t sure why I’d done it, except that it had felt right at the moment.

Maybe it was because I’d wanted him to see me as a Cecily, a woman who was more mysterious and sophisticated than fun-loving Cee-Cee. Or it could have just been because Cecily sounded sexier than Cee-Cee. Either way, it apparently hadn’t mattered because he’d easily forgotten about my existence in the few minutes I was in the bathroom.

“Fine,” I huffed. “You can call me whatever you want, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m nobody important to you.”

“Only because you pulled a disappearing act on me!”

His deep blue eyes flared, in what looked like barely suppressed rage mixed with a hint of hurt. But that didn’t make any sense considering what I’d seen with my own two eyes that night. “I didn’t think you’d care. You seemed happy enough with that brunette at the bar when I came out of the bathroom.”

“The brunette at the bar,” he echoed softly, the anger in his expression oddly replaced by a flash of humor as he chuckled wryly. “All that time, wasted over a simple misunderstanding. It fucking figures.”