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Mute, Natalie turned around with her face frozen in impolite shock.
He’s a dreamboat. I nodded at him.
He lookedbemused by our muteness. “Um, I’ll just get your bags.” He stepped in and grabbed one of the suitcases. He turned around to reveal a perfectly carved ass.
“God,” I moaned as I watched him load the suitcase in the car.
“You weren’t kidding,” she commented in a breathless, dreamy sigh.
The driver took my luggage from my hands and hurried down the steps to help Luke.
“I guess this is it,” I said as Natalie’s eyes misted over, and a lump formed in my throat in response. “If you cry, I’ll cry.”
She seized my neck painfully and pulled me into a fierce hug. “I’m not crying,” she said in a thick voice. “Call me when you get thereand be safe for God’s sake.”
Luke climbed up the steps with the same grin. “Don't worry. It was nice meeting you, Natalie.”
I gently disengaged myself from Natalie’s death grip and shouldered my backpack. “I hope you have a good holiday. I’ll be back soon.”
I took Luke’s outstretched hand and descended the steps, turningto smile and wave at Natalie’s panicked face. Once inside, I moved over the smooth leather interior for Luke.
Instead of the town car, Luke had arrived in a limousine. It looked wildly out of place in this shitty neighborhood. Across the street, a woman smoking in her plastic lawn chair stared, the cigarette burning in her fingertips. I shook my head and gazed at the interior. A dark glass partition separated the driver from us. There was a champagne bottle on ice in the limo, TV screens, and blinking yellow lights on the ceiling.
This is so cool.
The ugly streets of Concord rolled by the long window. Was I reallyleaving it all behind? I looked around at Luke, whose arm was stretched over the leather. He was studying me quietly, perhaps regretting the whole thing.
“We should come up witha back-story for ourselves. People are bound to ask.”
“Before we do that, I want to make something clear.” Any hint of humor dropped from his face. “This will never be anything more than a business relationship.”
“I know that.” I raised my eyebrow. Where was this coming from? Was my attraction to him that obvious? “What makes you think I want to be with you?”
Now he looked like he had been punched in the gut.
Yeah, serves you right, you pompous jerk.
He quickly recovered and a smug grin flashed on his face. “Don’t you?”
Electricity shot up my spine; I was in dangerous territory. “Maybe I wouldn’t want to be talked down to all the time by your old boy network, boarding school buddies. Or your family.”
He looked stung. I was joking, but perhaps there was a little too much truth to what I said.
“No one would do that while you were with me.”
“Of course not.”
Silence stretched between us as I cringed, waiting for him to reprimand me or do whatever it was billionaires did to their inferiors.
You shouldn’t talk to him like this. He’s not your buddy.
“You’re very blunt.”
An apology was already falling from my lips, but Luke silenced me with a reassuring nod.
“I like it, even though it might be a little hurtful. I’m usually surrounded by sycophants. I expected you to be one of them.”
“Do you want me to be a sycophant in front of other people?”
