AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“With your boyfriends,” he said.
“Sometimes I bring them, yes. Other times, I go solo. By choice.”
Lying, lying, lying. But he didn’t need to know.
Dane looked at me like maybe he could see through me. But then again, maybe he couldn’t, because he didn’t say anything.
“Okay, fine,” he said finally.
I felt my eyebrows rise in shock. “You’re actually giving in? To the whole week?”
“Like you say, I have no choice. When do we start?”
“Right now,” I said, to test him. Because I still couldn’t believe he was agreeing to this. “We’re going shopping.”
He groaned, but he bit it off. “Fine. Do I get to take a shower first?”
Dane in the shower. That body. In. The. Shower.
I wasn’t going there. At all.
“I hope so, because you stink like sweat,” I said. “Pick me up at the Langham in half an hour.”
Five
Dane
* * *
Ava was surprised. Hell, I surprised myself. But as much as I hated this entire fucking idea, I didn’t want to tell her to get on a plane and go home. I’m an asshole, I know that, but I draw a line at being disrespectful to Ava. And telling her to get lost when she’d come all this way was disrespectful.
Aidan, my best friend, didn’t know our history, but he knew that Ava was the only person I wouldn’t tell to fuck off. Which was why he’d sent her. He really was the devil.
I showered and dressed in jeans and a white tee. I tied my hair back from my face. Then I stood in the bathroom, my hands braced on the counter, and got up the courage to see her again.
If I wanted to see Ava anytime in the past seven years, I could have done it. I could have gone to New York. I could have called her up or sent a text like a normal human. But we weren’t normal, Ava and me. We’d left normal behind a long time ago.
Because she could have called me, too.
I’d never expected her to. I knew she didn’t want to see me again. I knew she didn’t want to talk to me.
It didn’t stop me from asking Aidan how she was every chance I got. Or reading her blog—more than once, to be honest, though I barely understood what I was reading. That, I could do. But calling her, seeing her, crossed the line.
Until today.
“You’re thirty-four years old, Scotland,” I said, still gripping the bathroom counter. “Get a grip and get this done. It’s just Ava.”
Right. Just Ava. Just the woman I’d lost my virginity to, the woman who had trusted me with hers. The woman who had turned my world from gray into color for one cold winter eleven years ago. Right now she was blonde and curvy, sexy, a successful fashion stylist with friends and—I gritted my jaw—boyfriends. But I could still see that girl—brunette, beautiful, serious, smart—who had come into my room late one night and said the words that stayed with me even now: I’m tired of being a virgin.
There was no man on earth who could have resisted Ava in that moment. Including me.
Seeing her now was strange, like the last few years had lasted decades—and like they hadn’t happened at all. But she was waiting for me, and coward or not, there was no way I wasn’t going to go. Even if we were going—Jesus, what a nightmare—shopping.
I left the bathroom and walked back through my apartment. Used the voice commands to moderate the temperature and lighting while I was gone, to activate the security system, to power off my computers. I shoved my wallet and phone in my back pockets and left my penthouse, arming the security pad and getting in the private elevator.
I’d been rich for a long time now, but I never once got in this elevator without remembering the elevator in the building I grew up in, which was old and unreliable and not very clean. I’d lived in with my parents in a high rise near the South Side that had seen better days, a building we lived in because my grandmother lived just down the hall. My parents both worked shift work and were hardly ever home, even more rarely at the same time. The apartment was usually empty, so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. Until I was thirteen, she’d pretty much raised me.
Then my grandmother got sick with cancer. It happened fast—seven months after she first complained of chronic pain, it was over. She was gone. After she died, my parents worked even longer shifts than they had before, and when I wasn’t at school I was home alone all the time. I got an under-the-table job with a landscaping company, hauling gravel and pulling weeds after school. With the money I saved, I bought my first computer and taught myself how to code.
