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2
GAVIN
“Holy shit, King. I know you pull hot girls, butthatgirl?” Blake Holliday asked to my left.
Yeah.
Thatgirl.
I watched Whitley Bowen traipse out of Percy Tower in that ridiculous fur coat with lavender hair swishing at the same tempo as her ass. Seeing her had momentarily paralyzed me. I couldn’t even get words out.
Blake wasn’t wrong. I could get with plenty of hot girls. Even by my own standards, I was a notorious playboy. I’d dated celebrities and models and socialites alike. I had a different girl on my arm at every event. None of them made much of an impression on me. In fact, I’d been so bored the last couple months that I showed up stag to events. My friends joked that I’d gone through every eligible woman in Manhattan. But that wasn’t it. I was just over the monotony.
None of them were Whitley Bowen.
A certified wrecking ball, who tumbled through relationships about as destructively as I did. We had been close friends for a few short years before we crossed a line we could never come back from.
“Who was that?” Merritt Locke asked next to me.
I glanced over at the guy who was soon-to-be family. In a month, Locke would be marrying my cousin back home in Midland, Texas. New York royalty officially merging with the King oil dynasty.
A wedding that I still didn’t have a date for.
“Thatwas Whitley Bowen.”
Blake and Locke exchanged a look. They’d been best friends since their Stanford days, when they both were college swimmers. Now, Locke was Olympics bound, the fan favorite. I thought he had a real shot at gold. And Blake was returning to New Mexico were his family ran a ski resort.
“Can’t believe you let a girl like that walk away,” Blake said.
Again.
I didn’t say that out loud, but it was an echo through my mind. I’d let that girl walk away once before and regretted it. I damn well wasn’t doing that again.
I winked at them. “Gentlemen.”
Then, I dashed out of Percy Tower, my lunch plans forgotten as I chased after Whitley. She had a head start. If she wanted to escape me, she could thoroughly disappear into the New York City traffic.
But when I rounded the corner, looking right and left, hoping to catch a glimpse of her lavender hair, I found her with her hand against the building, taking a deep breath. She hadn’t run away at all.
“Whit,” I called, catching up to her.
She jolted. For a split second, we were back in time. Three years ago, when I’d chased after her after the Fashion Week debacle. I wanted to make things right after what happened with Robert. But when I’d slipped outside, looking for the rush of tulle, she’d already sunk into a cab and disappeared from my life forever.
I didn’t regret much in my life, but I regretted everything about that day.
“Hey,” she said, a wide smile hiding any trace of fear from her face. “What are you doing out here?”
“What amIdoing out here? Whit, you’re in New York.”
“I am.” She shrugged. Her petite shoulders barely noticeable under the mound of fur. “But weren’t you in a business meeting or luncheon or something?”
“Oh, that? No, Locke is marrying my cousin.”
She arched an eyebrow. Right. She hadn’t been here when Locke moved back to New York. She hadn’t been here for any of it.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said in a rush. “What are you doing here? And dressed like this?”
“What? Can’t a girl get dressed up?”
