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“Weird,” she said, lowering herself into the chair across from the cat. “I have yet to s
ee that part of you.”
He scooped up Luna and took her chair, only to have the cat jump into his lap a half second later and resume her bird-watching.
“True or false,” he said looking across the table at Jordan. “You’re sitting there in my T-shirt, in my home, before dawn.”
“True,” she said with narrowed eyes.
He lifted his coffee mug in a toast. “Like I said. I’m charming.”
Jordan snorted, her eyes watching his hand as he petted the damn cat out of habit. “That’s not what last night was about.”
His body stirred at the memory of last night. “No? Enlighten me.”
“It was merely weird chemistry and lots of mad. Like…an anger bang.”
Luke choked on his coffee. “A what?”
“Is that a New York term?” she mused. “Anger bang? It means—”
“Yeah, I can figure out what it means,” he muttered, shaking hot coffee off the back of his hand, the gesture earning him a scornful look from Luna before she hopped down to go watch the birds from the living room.
Jordan pursed her lips, cupping the mug in both hands and staring down at the steam. “Okay, so…” She blew out a breath. “I feel like I should say sorry. No, I know that I should say I’m sorry.”
Luke was careful to hide his surprise, but he was surprised. He’d had his fair share of serious relationships and knew that a woman apologizing out of the blue wasn’t especially common.
“For?” he asked warily.
“I was wrong to get pissed last night,” she said. “I mean, yes, you could have cleared up a lot of things if you’d have told me that the women were the ones who called it off, but—”
“Not all of them,” he said, before he could think better of it. “Just the first two.”
She studied him. “You left the third one? On your wedding day?”
The memory tore at him. All the memories centered on Eva did. “Yes.”
His tone left no room for discussion on that matter—something she apparently picked up on, because she shifted the conversation back to his previous…brides.
God, he hated thinking of it like that. He knew that the situations were complicated—all three of them. But he wasn’t an idiot. He knew exactly how this all looked from the outside perspective.
He’d tried damn hard not to let it bother him—what he did with his life was his business. His motivations for doing what he had didn’t require justification to anyone.
So why the hell was he tempted to tell it all to the one person he shouldn’t?
It was because when she sat there wearing his oldest shirt, at his beat-up kitchen table, after a night of epic sex, looking as though she belonged there, it was damn hard to think of Jordan Carpenter as anything other than what she was at this moment….
A beautiful woman he wanted to know.
Whom he wanted to get to know him.
“Did you know?” she asked, studying him. “About Stacey?”
Luke’s knee-jerk reaction was to get up and leave the table. Nothing he hated more than memory lane.
But his damn dog must have sensed this and disapproved, because Winston ambled over and rested his head on Luke’s knee, forcing him to stay put. To face the past.
“I didn’t know, but I wasn’t shocked,” he finally answered quietly. “That’s the best answer I’ve got.”
