“I’m sorry, Gary, but I have work to catch up on. But thank you.” She touched his arm gently so he wouldn’t feel hurt by her rejection, but when she pivoted to leave, her legs wouldn’t walk. Because…damn Luke Preston, she could hardly get her mind in order since she’d met him.
She gritted her teeth, thrust her chin up in determination, and turned back to Gary with a cold, calculated smile. “At what time would this be, Gary?”
Gary’s grin was about a mile wide. “Eight thirty?”
Peyton nodded. She had to see him.
The moment Gary offered her the chance, her initial reaction had been No way, but deep down she knew it was inevitable.
She had to see him, one more time, at least to get him out of her system. And to get to see the real Luke, not the role he’d played with her. Just one more time, she inwardly promised herself.
One last time.
“You’ve been in a shitty mood all night, Luke. If you were going to be such a sour tart and be wearing a sweater, you shouldn’t have said it was a ‘pajama party,’ ” Patty, his neighbor from the third floor, said to him from across the living room of his apartment.
“Fine, I’ll put on my damned pajamas,” Luke grumbled, yanking off his orange long-sleeved turtleneck and unzipping his jeans. He slept in his tighty whities and that’s the pajamas he’d always worn to his famed and acclaimed “pajama parties,” where people came in their sleep attire and stayed all night doing whatever the fuck they wanted.
“There. You guys happy now?” he asked both his neighbors, Patty and Natalie, with a harsh glare as he kicked his jeans off.
He’d come up with this party idea while flying back from Cancún. But Luke was a little bit disappointed that he wasn’t really into it. He was in a rotten mood, and he’d been in it constantly during the past weeks.
It was as though he’d been shot in the damned head, because lately he’d been swamped with idiotic thoughts that were disgustingly cliché and extremely unlike him; like what purpose he had in life and how he’d be much happier if he had someone to share it with—that someone being a dark-haired seductress whose name he didn’t even want to remember since just thinking it bugged him to no end.
He kept thinking these imbecilic thoughts and asking himself why, for some reason, the drinks, the parties, and the girls had suddenly lost all of their glitz. It was all her fault.
Every aching bone in his body seemed to cry out for her, and Luke hadn’t realized until now that the dark-haired weekend angel, whom he’d once thought had been sent from Heaven just to please him, had been sent to him as a penance, probably for having broken so many hearts when he hadn’t known better.
Luke couldn’t be more pissed with her, with Heaven, and with his goddamned life as it was.
He rested back against the sofa and glowered at everything within view while people starting filling up his pad, one
by one. Models in their sheer nighties came over and fawned over him, cooed over him, rubbed his muscles, called him all kinds of sexy pet names, kissed him on the mouth.
He used to enjoy this, he really did. But now he couldn’t see why. It seemed so…superfluous. Unnatural and meaningless. He could see the looks in these women’s eyes, and he could almost see money signs pop out of their pupils when they spotted him. He couldn’t even be quiet with them as they asked in their whiny voices, “What’s the matter? Don’t you like me anymore?” They expected him to be fun all the fucking time, and to have a fucking hard-on all the time, and lately he just didn’t feel like having either.
But this was known to be the party of the fucking year, attended even by Playboy Playmates who got naked and got it on as fast as you could say “mate!”. If this party didn’t make him feel better, then Luke didn’t know what would.
So he just sat there on one of the couches with a view of the door, his arms spread to his sides like a king lounging back in the plain white briefs his family made a fortune on, and all the while he tried to tell himself that after just a couple of more drinks, nothing would matter anymore.
The women would start looking real good, all of them, and pretty soon he wouldn’t care who screwed him.
But it was only a martini later that his gay neighbor who looked like a goldfish appeared at the door, and the little man was beaming like he’d just struck gold. And at his side, her beautiful big eyes wide in horror as she took in her surroundings—was Peyton.
Luke stiffened, while every cell in his body reared up and roared for her. He slammed his eyes shut and reopened them, sure he was hallucinating, but his gaze zeroed in on her and she was still there, paralyzed and stupefied by his friends, and Luke’s unfeeling heart just…climaxed.
Surrounded by almost-naked ladies, Peyton appeared almost prim in that plain gray skirt and a matching fitted jacket, with a long pearl necklace and red heels, her beautiful, long hair tumbling down her shoulders.
Prim. And proper. And—
Holy God, he wanted to rip off that skirt, that jacket, and bury himself inside her and forget he’d ever thought it was a good idea to leave Cancún without her.
He wanted to wrap himself in that fucking hair and then take that mouth again until all the gloss covering her lips was all over his face.
His legs shook with red-hot, pulse-pounding, out-of-this-world desire, and for the first time in weeks, he got a fucking erection again, and it was so titanically hard it was going to thrust out of his tighty whities this very second.
With Herculean effort, he rose on unsteady feet, aware that his lady neighbors followed him up and wantonly squished him like the ham between a sandwich. He seized the body of one of them to shield his erection from view, and that same instant, Peyton’s eyes found him across the room. The hurt that flashed in her eyes ripped through him like a thousand knives.
In the space of a heartbeat, the vulnerable, wounded expression on her pretty face made Luke feel face-slapped and dirty and unworthy of her. He had never in his life felt so shitty as at this very moment, when he saw himself through Peyton Lane’s pretty dark eyes.