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I swallow my relief. “Oh.” Then I frown at them. “Wait. Who said I made out with him? I didn’t.”
“My brother. He texted about an hour ago and informed me he was marrying a yachtsman and that you’re poised to be the future Lady Tulley.”
I sigh. “Of course he did.”
A harried-looking waiter comes over to take our orders, even though we’ve barely had time to glance at our menus. He stands there tapping his foot impatiently and murdering us in his head while we scramble to pick something. This place is so busy I have a feeling they want their customers in and out like some human assembly line.
Once he’s gone, I fill the girls in about the ball, making it clear I didn’t snog anyone.
“I mean, at one point, I think he was about to kiss me,” I do confess. “But his assistant interrupted.”
“His handler, you mean,” Celeste says dryly. “That poor woman. I reckon a large part of her job description is ensuring the young lord’s trousers remain zipped.”
“Aw, Ben’s not that bad,” I argue, reaching for the cup of coffee another frazzled waiter suddenly drops in front of me. I thank him before continuing. “I think Ben’s caddish reputation has been grossly overexaggerated.”
“Sorry, Abbey, but that reputation is well earned,” Yvonne warns, her expression serious. “He’s an absolute cad. In the tabloids every other day, caught up in some debauchery or another.”
I shrug. “As the daughter of a man who was in the tabloids his entire life, I have it on good authority that half the shit those rags write about people is false.”
“Fair point.” Celeste wraps her fingers around her coffee cup. “But Yvonne’s not wrong—the Tulleys and debauchery go hand in hand. I’m thrilled you had a good time, though.” She gives me a grudging look. “And I suppose it was right of you to take Lee. He’s not stopped gushing about it.”
“I don’t think he even came home last night. At least I didn’t hear him come in.”
Our food arrives in record speed, and I forget my manners as I practically inhale my avocado on toast. The two of them are far morerestrained, Celeste daintily spreading jam on her toast while Yvonne picks at a poached egg.
“What did you end up doing last night?” I ask Celeste between mouthfuls of food.
“Roberto stopped by mine for a quiet dinner. He brought the most exquisite white wine, and we got drunk and shagged on the living room floor.”
Yvonne’s eyebrows fly up. “Are you serious! Our prudish Roberto had a shag somewhere other than a bed?”
“Mental, right?”
I wash down my toast with some coffee, laughing at Celeste. “You never mentioned Roberto was a prude. Is he actually?”
I still haven’t had the pleasure of meeting her forty-three-yearold lover-slash-philanthropist. Lee says Celeste likes to keep her boyfriends to herself. She’s never even brought one home to their parents, according to him.
“He’s…reserved,” she finally answers. “Vanilla, I suppose.”
Yvonne snorts. “You suppose?”
“All right, all right. He’s very set in his ways,” Celeste says, grinning. “He prefers missionary position—always in a bed—and blow jobs only while lying down to receive them. And he doesn’t make a sound during either act. It’s quite unnerving.”
“Nate isn’t very vocal either, particularly during blow jobs,” Yvonne says with a shrug. “It’s not that unusual.”
I feel a stab of jealousy at the thought of her on her knees in front of Nate.
Immediately followed by a sharp prick of guilt at the memory that this woman’s boyfriend was in my room last night asking if there was “something” between us.
The nausea I didn’t experience this morning now makes an appearance. I gulp down some more coffee and hope neither of them comments on my sudden mood shift.
Luckily, we can’t loiter in the café long. We’ve barely taken ourlast bites before the waiter marches over with the bill and practically orders us to leave. We part ways on the sidewalk, and I walk home trying to remind myself that I haven’t crossed any lines with Nate.
I flat out told him I wasn’t interested in playing home-wrecker. I told him to stop texting me. Hopefully he respects that. Like, stop torturing me with your brooding bad-boy-ness, dude. Just keep having silent sex and receiving silent blow jobs from your girlfriend and leave me out of it.
Back at the flat, I run into Jamie in the upstairs hallway.
“Hey. Jamie. Question,” I say. “Do you make noise when you get a blow job?”
