“Para nada,” Lucas said, smiling. “I’ll call you tomorrow, yes? Maybe we can have dinner together.”
“I wish I could but I’m flying back to Minos in the morning.” Damian gripped Lucas’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself, filos mou.”
“You do the same.” Lucas frowned. Damian looked better than he had a few hours ago but there was still a haunted look in his eyes. “I wish you’d change your mind about tonight. Forget what I said about women. We could go to the gym. Lift some weights. Run the track.”
“You really think it would make me feel better to beat you again?”
“You beat me once, a thousand years ago at Yale.”
“A triviality.”
The men chuckled. Damian slung his arm around Lucas’s neck as they walked slowly to the door. “Don’t worry about me, Reyes. I’m going to take a long shower, pour myself another brandy and then, thanks to you, I’m going to have the first real night’s sleep I’ve had in months.”
The friends shook hands. Then Damian closed the door after Lucas, leaned back against it and let his smile slip away.
He’d told Lucas the truth. He did feel better. For three months, ever since Kay’s death, he’d avoided his friends, his acquaintances; he’d dedicated every waking minute to business in hopes he could rid himself of his anger.
What was the point in being angry at a dead woman?
Or in being angry at himself, for having let her scam him?
“No point,” Damian muttered as he climbed the stairs to his bedroom. “No point at all.”
Kay had made a fool of him. So what? Men survived worse. And if, in the deepest recesses of his soul he somehow mourned the loss of a child that had never existed, a child he’d never known he even wanted, well, that could be dealt with, too.
He was thirty-one years old. Maybe it was time to settle down. Marry. Have a family.
Thee mou, was he insane?
You couldn’t marry, have kids without a wife. And there wasn’t a way in hell he was going to take a wife anytime soon. What he needed was just the opposite of settling down.
Lucas had it right.
The best cure for what ailed him would be losing himself in a woman. A soft, willing body. An eager mouth. A woman without a hidden agenda, without any plans beyond pleasure…
There it was. That same image again. The green-eyed woman with the sun-streaked hair. Hell, what a chance he’d missed! She’d looked right at him and even then, trapped in a black mood, he’d known what that look meant.
The lady had been interested.
The flat truth was, women generally were.
He’d been interested, too—or he would have been, if he hadn’t been so damned busy wallowing in self-pity. Because, hell, that’s what this was. Anger, sure, but with a healthy dollop of Poor Me mixed in.
He’d had enough of it to last a lifetime.
He’d call Lucas. Tell him his plans for the night sounded good after all. Dinner, drinks, a couple of beautiful women and so what if they didn’t have green eyes, sun-streaked hair…
The doorbell rang.
Damian’s brows lifted. A private elevator was the sole access to his apartment. Nobody could enter it without the doorman’s approval and that approval had to come straight from Damian himself.
Unless…
He grinned. “Lucas,” he said, as he went quickly down the stairs. His friend had reached the lobby, turned around and come right back.
Damian reached the double doors. “Reyes,” he said happily as he flung them open, “when did you take up mind-reading? I was just going to call you—”
But it wasn’t Lucas in the marble foyer.