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“Ah, and here I let myself believe you’d rethought my offer for CPR.”
She laughed, and his eyes flared, as though the sound had compelled him somehow.
“Maybe.” Her voice softened on that one word. For she was part teasing and part…not. “I don’t even know if you’re single.”
He leaned back in his chair with a casual shrug, and the way he moved was all feline grace. She was by no means blind to the way he stared at her. “Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not. It all depends on the night you ask and the one asking.”
There was a tingling in the pit of her stomach when their gazes held, and her body felt galvanized, from head to toe. “Then to anyone who asks, tonight you aren’t,” she said in a whisper.
Luke tilted his head at an angle. “I’m very single tonight, actually.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Let me assure you I’m absolutely, one hundred percent single tonight.”
“No, you aren’t. You’re with me.”
A long, painstaking silence followed, then his brows slowly lifted upward, and something fiery sparked in the depths of his slate-blue eyes.
Cheeks blazing hot, Peyton dropped her gaze to the table, suddenly wanting to hide. She’d never come on to a guy like this before.
“Don’t.”
Luke’s voice was thick with something she’d never heard in a man’s voice before. She looked up at him, startled. “Don’t what?”
“If you’re going to tease me, then look at me. I like it when you tease me.”
His smile was gone, and the intensity in his eyes did things to her that she’d never felt before. Her insides roiled with carnal hungers, her body hypersensitive and on high alert. Even the little hairs on her arms seemed to rise and respond to his voice.
Thankfully, the server returned to set two cold Corona beers on their table, and Peyton almost sighed in relief as she dove for one.
“All right then, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t order a beer just to stare at it,” she told him, and determinedly grabbed an open bottle and took one long, long swig. Luke chuckled—a low, rumbling sound that caressed her sensitized skin like phantom fingertips—then he lifted his own beer bottle in a mock toast, and drank.
Two hours later they were both a little too…merry.
Luke had seemed hesitant to drink first, but then he’d downed a whole beer within minutes and soon ordered more. They’d flowed into conversation like they’d met years ago, teasing back and forth.
Peyton couldn’t be more dazzled with him if he’d been a live, glowing sun.
Luke Alexander was quick, smart, a total charmer, and genuinely interested in whatever she had to say. “I don’t see it,” he said now.
“What don’t you see? That I’m a partner in the investment firm I work for?”
He took another swig and nodded nonchalantly. “Yep. Don’t see it.”
“Why? What do you know about investment firms? What do you do for a living?”
He shrugged, the move all sexy and aloof and careless. “This and that.” He signaled at her with an emphatic nod. “Nothing as important as that, I assure you.”
Peyton smiled at the compliment, but she couldn’t miss that he was steering clear of mentioning anything about his life back home. But then, wasn’t that better? It wouldn’t do to get too attached to a weekend fling, right?
Luke had such a lazy way about him, a careless, effortless manner in the way he spoke, in the way he leaned back in his chair with an arm draped over the back of it, in the way he absently played with a spoon, lacing it between his fingers and smoothly twisting it around. It was as if he knew he was gorgeous and embraced it.
It appealed to Peyton, the relaxed way he sat, the way his smile was a bit crooked, higher on one side of his face than the other. It appealed to her organized, perfectionist self more than she could ever have anticipated.
Something about him made her want to be so, so bad.
“Do you live alone? Or do you have a special someone?”
