“It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Jenna. And it’s Mitch, please.”

It’s the auditory equivalent of being hit by a crosstown bus. His voice is rich and compelling, and pulls at me like an undercurrent. I catch my breath at the depth and timbre of it, the way the resonance lingers after he’s finished speaking. The faintest hint of some kind of accent sneaks into each syllable, rendering every word just the littlest bit alien, and that much more exciting. I’m speechless.

Wow. That’s a hell of a voice. A catastrophic, panty-melting, knee-weakening voice. Did not expect that.

He offers his hand to me; I take it, my soft palm sliding along his callused one like silk over sandpaper, and raise my eyes to his. His steady gaze is warm and questioning. I’m not sure what exactly the question is, but I’m willing to fudge an answer if only he’ll keep looking at me, if only he’ll say my name again in that enveloping baritone.

My mouth opens and I cringe inwardly, unsure of what might spill out, but what I say is: “Thanks. You, too.”

Kari doesn’t seem to notice the way my voice comes out, all strangled and wavering, but I can tell by some subtle shift in the depths of his eyes that Mitch does. He holds onto my hand about fifteen seconds longer than strictly necessary, and then rather than just let it go he places it back in my lap. My breath hitches again. One corner of his mouth tilts up just a little, as though he’s amused by me.

“You guys chat,” Kari says. “I gotta pee.”

She heads off. I watch her go, a little bemused.

Mitch speaks again—Lord have mercy: “Kari says you’re here for an engagement party?”

“What? Oh.” I come back to my senses. “Yeah. It’s my ex getting married, and I’m not exactly celebrating. But good for him. I hope he’s happy.”

“Your ex invited you to his engagement party?” He sounds incredulous. “That’s a pretty insensitive thing to do.”

“Well, he didn’t invite me, exactly,” I tell him. “He invited Kari. I’m her plus-one.”

“Still. Inviting your best friend? Doesn’t sound like a very nice thing to do.”

“Well….” I shrug. “We still can’t figure out what happened exactly. Gertrude—that’s the fiancée. She goes by Trudi. With an i. I call her Gertrude.”

He smiles. It’s easy and natural and his eyes get these crinkles at the corners—I get the feeling he smiles a lot. “So would I.”

“We figure maybe she just kind of went through Drew’s address book and invited everyone who wasn’t an ex-girlfriend?”

“Maybe. Still not a great approach.”

“I don’t know. Maybe she did it on purpose—but whatever the reason, the invitation arrived, and Kari cooked up this plan to doll me up and show Drew what he’s missing.”

His eyes do a not-at-all-subtle sweep of me, head to toe, then return to mine. “Solid plan,” he says.

I feel like squirming in my seat, and I’ll be damned if I will. I sit up straighter, shrug like it’s no big. “Turns out he’s not missing anything.”

“Oh, I disagree,” he says. “So where is this idiot?”

I wave in the general area of behind me without turning around. I don’t need to see any more of that. “He’s over there with his girlfriend—his fiancée—and I totally do not care.”

Mitch looks across the room, narrows his eyes a bit, then looks back at me. It’s disconcerting how he gazes right into my eyes while he speaks to me. Makes me feel a little weird, a little vulnerable. A little like he’s rummaging around inside my head—like he can see what I’m thinking.

Which is funny, because even I can’t figure that out right now.

“Black t-shirt?” he asks.

I nod.

“You want me to punch him for you?”

I can’t help it; I smile a little. “Desperately. But we’d probably get thrown out, and who needs that?”

“No, really,” he says. “I know a guy.” He raises his voice a little and calls: “Hey, Luis.”

But he keeps his eyes on mine.

Luis slides down to our end of the bar. “Yo.”

“If I punch a douchebag for being insensitive to a lady’s feelings, are you gonna throw me out?”

“Dude, I’ll hold your coat,” Luis says.

“If you tried to punch all the douchebags here,” I say, looking around us, “I think we’d be here till closing.”

“Hey,” Luis says. “We have a strict no-douchebag policy here.”

“At a bar in Alphabet City?” I laugh. “Must be awfully slow in here most nights.”

“You insult Loisaida, you insult me,” Luis says, and looks mock-offended. “She’s got a mouth on her, this one.”

Mitch, eyes still trained on me, nods almost imperceptibly. “Yeah,” he says, “I’ve been noticing it.”

Okay, so I know a come-on when I hear one. And I might even object—not my type, no matter what Kari says, or how much she slanders Cary Elwes—except that the voice gets lower. Deeper.

Let’s be honest here. Cowboy boots or no cowboy boots, that voice is ridiculously sexy. I’m starting to think of it as a proper noun: The Voice.

Kari returns and plops back on her stool, coming between Mitch and me. It’s a bit of a relief—those eyes were getting to be a bit much. He turns back to Luis, and Kari leans in close to me.

“You are not even gonna believe this shit,” she whispers—well, shout-whispers really, because it’s a bar. “I’m about to set the online soap opera world on fire.”

“That guy?” I nod discreetly toward Luis, who’s chatting with Mitch as he pours him another beer.

“No!” she exclaims.

“I guess I’m having trouble keeping up,” I say. “Over him already?”

“Well, it’s not like I’ve never met an MC actor before. That’s no big deal. It films here.”

“I know where it films.”

Boy, do I ever know. Midnight Confessions and All the World film right here in New York, and over the course of our friendship I’ve spent a lot of time sitting around Central Park with a book while Kari paces back and forth on 65^th Street, hoping to catch one of the actors leaving the ABC studios. Despite having made brief acquaintance with a couple of minor actors from one or the other of the soaps, she has yet to find her way inside those hallowed halls.

She knows everything about them anyway. Apparently at these fan events there are auctions, and her friends are always winning autographed scripts and phone calls from the stars and, most coveted of all, studio tours.

Kari’s never bid on a tour, which is good because she has a hard enough time making ends meet without dropping a couple grand on something like that. I’d have her committed. But enough of her online friends have been to the studio that she could probably draw an accurate blueprint of the place.

That doesn’t stop her desperate desire to get in, though. Like I said, it’s abnormal.

So even if it’s not a big deal, it’s not like her to be so cavalier about a possible in at the ABC studios. “So, you didn’t try to see if he can get you in, or whatever?”

She shrugs. “He’s not filming any time in the next couple of weeks, so I didn’t want to push.”

This is Kari’s way of saying she got bored. Poor Luis. He outlived his usefulness with record speed.

“So how do you plan to set the internet on fire?” I ask, tired of the whole conversation already.

“That guy you were just talking to,” she says, tilting her head at Mitch. “Do you know who he is?”

“Of course not,” I say. “I never recognize these people. Is he an actor?”

“He used to be on Doctors and Nurses!”

I can’t stop myself from rolling my eyes. Oh, great. Kari’s one regret in life—soap opera regret, anyway—is that she lives in New York instead of Los Angeles. Midnight Confessions and All the World are just the consolation prizes of the ABC lineup; what Kari and her pals are really obsessed with is Doctors and Nurses.

Because it films on the west coast, Kari has only met a few of the actors from “DN”—her shorthand, not mine—and always at organized fan events. This doesn’t compare to the kind of meeting she sometimes scores with the actors from the New York soaps, where she can press them for info—“scoops” or “spoilers,” in the vernacular of her online soap crowd.

“What’s he doing in New York?” I ask.

“He left DN a couple of months ago and moved to New York. He’s been cast on Midnight Confessions.” It’s clear from her tone that this kind of move is a demotion in the soap world. “I can’t figure out why I haven’t heard about it already. They must have buttoned it up tight. That’s why I went to the bathroom—to call Stace.”

What, they have a hotline?

“Call Stace?” I echo.

“Yeah, just to tell her he’s been cast on MC.” Kari is practically vibrating with glee. “I hope I’ll have a ton of stuff to spill when I get online!”

Hopefully the poor guy won’t tell her anything that would get him in trouble. According to Kari, the people that run these shows don’t appreciate it when fans know everything that’s coming up. Kari and her pals, of course, always know everything that’s going to happen weeks before it actually does, in excruciating detail. Somehow, they even find out dialogue and stuff, so they know episodes line-for-line and have already debated and freaked out about them before they air. I don’t know why she even bothers to watch.

“That’s great, honey.” I sigh. “Listen, I think I’m going to head home. You want to get a cab with me?”

She shakes her head and leans in close again. “No way. I’m gonna stick around and … you know. See what happens.”

“Kari!” I scowl at her. “You are not going to pick up some random in a bar just to impress your soap pals?”

She has the audacity to look offended. “He’s not a random, and that would so not be the reason.” She pauses to consider, then says, “Not the only reason, anyway. Probably only like … sixty percent of the reason. Seventy, tops.”

I shake my head and pat her hand where it’s resting on the bar. “Okay, you do what you gotta do, you lunatic.”

She leans over and kisses my cheek, and I stand up. Mitch swivels on his stool and catches my eye again. I give him a little wave, and he does that up-and-down appraisal again, which gives me a little involuntary shiver. Then he nods, and turns back to Kari. He says something I can’t hear and she laughs and puts her hand on his knee as he gestures for another beer.

More power to her; I hope they get married and spend the rest of their lives popping out little soap fans.

And for her sake, I hope he’s a nice guy. I really do. But Kari’s track record—usually pretty good—has been dismal lately. She’s at the tail end of a string of bad relationships—three of them, if I’m counting properly. Each of them turned out to be a bigger creep than the one before.

But right now, Kari’s dating woes are not my problem. I’ve got my own problems.

I take a moment to thank my lucky stars that I didn’t move in with Kari when I broke up with Drew. When we first arrived in New York, Kari and I were great roommates, reveling in being single women, congratulating one another over breakfast when the night before had been particularly successful.

Mr. Right Now was plenty good enough for us in those days.

When I was apartment hunting after the breakup, naturally I stayed at Kari’s till I found a place. She invited me to live with her, to “revisit the good old days,” she said. By which she meant, of course, the good old nights.

I almost took her up on it, out of fear of being alone—but now I’m looking for something different. And honestly, I’m glad I didn’t. This one-night stand is one I definitely do not want to be a party to.

And when my stomach lurches at that thought, I’m quite sure it’s just the happy hour food at Jacks coming back to haunt me.

Someone shut the heavy glass door while I was talking to Drew; I wrestle with it for a few seconds, and then I’m outside. The air is crisp and cold, and I wish I’d brought a jacket.

Hell, while I’m wishing things, I wish I hadn’t come.

Except as soon as I think that, I get a flash of that moment Mitchell Cole opened his mouth and let loose with that astonishing, unexpected bedroom voice.

Whoa, wait a minute. Bedroom voice?

I contemplate this for a moment and, based on the way that my stomach is turning in slow semicircles at the thought of it, conclude that yes, that voice belongs in the bedroom. And then there’s that jaw. And those eyes.

And my reaction to him—what was that all about? I think about it, but no answer is forthcoming.

So I give up and hail a cab, carefully packing my reaction to that voice away in a little mental box as I head for home and what turns out to be a restless night’s sleep.