“I’m surprised to see you here,” he said, his gaze leaving hers to glance around the bar. What the hell was he looking for?
“Well, here I am,” Meg said, and his resulting deep laugh reverberated around her. She planted her hand on her hip and glared at him. “Something funny?”
“Not funny at all, and believe me, I know exactly where you are. Every man in the room does, Meg. I was just wondering where your boyfriend was and if he was going to pound on his chest and growl some more to warn me away from you?”
A ribbon of anger prowled a drunken path through her veins. “I don’t have a boyfriend,” she countered quickly, ignoring the hollowed-out sensation the words carved in her chest, right around the vicinity of her stupid heart.
Aaron took a step closer, his body crowding her, the soapy scent of his skin reaching her nostrils. Had it only been a few nights since she’d thought about going home with him?
It would be far better for her sanity if she could relight some kind of spark between her and Aaron, but she hadn’t been kidding when she’d said John was going to ruin her for other men.
Dammit. She couldn’t let that happen. He was going to leave. Life was going to go on without him, and she wasn’t going to be left behind in a crumbling mess of need.
She wasn’t that girl. She wouldn’t be.
“Yeah?” Aaron asked, displaying a cute dimple in his right cheek when he smiled.
“That’s right.”
He gave a humorless laugh. “Then someone ought to tell that to the stuck-up suit.”
She ignored the flicker of warmth that the words conjured—some primal part of her liked the way that John had gone all caveman. The rest of her, however, knew that she shouldn’t like it. Should she?
Meg let loose an exaggerated sigh and folded her arms in front of her chest. “I’m sorry about that. He overstepped and had no right to tell you to stay away from me. I’m my own person. I do what I want.” She tilted her chin up and ignored the part of her that finished that sentence with but what I want to do is John.
“I bet you do.” When Aaron’s gaze meandered the length of her body, it was appreciative. “Since I’m not stepping on anyone’s toes, how about a coffee sometime?”
Speaking of sharing... I don’t. Not with this.
As John’s words flashed a neon warning inside her brain, her heart pounded just a little bit harder. In a few days he’d be gone, their arrangement over. If she accepted a date with Aaron, she wasn’t breaking their agreement, and maybe having something lined up would help soothe the sting that John’s absence would undoubtedly bring.
“Ah, yeah, sure.” She mentally ran through her work schedule. “How about next week sometime? Thursday?”
Aaron’s face lit with a smile, showcasing perfect white teeth. “It’s a date,” he said. He pulled his phone from his pocket and handed it to her. “Can you put your number in here? I’m not missing my chance to get it again.”
“Sure.” She ran a finger over the screen. Why did she feel like she was going to vomit all of a sudden? She was making a date, for God’s sake. Something she’d done before John and planned to do after.
Then why did it feel so wrong, and more important, why did she feel so goddamn empty inside?
As she handed the phone back, a quick movement flashed in the corner of her eye. Wait, was that...? She spun around, and her gaze darted to the door, latching onto the collar of a black polo shirt before the door closed with a heavy thud.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HE HAD NO right to be this angry. No right at all. Especially after almost twenty-four hours. And especially when he couldn’t bring up the fact that he’d seen her with Aaron without sounding like a stalker who’d lost touch with reality.
He wasn’t. He hadn’t even known she was going to be there.
That didn’t erase his feelings.
Still, he didn’t own Meg. They had an agreement, a mutually beneficial one. One he had no doubt she’d follow through with until he left, but beyond that...
He was gone in a couple of days. If she wanted to go out with that guy after he’d disappeared from her life, he couldn’t do anything about it. So yeah, he had no right to be angry.
Then why did he want to punch something...or someone? He could throw a mean punch—a survival skill left over from years ago. But he’d trained himself over the years to navigate his feelings with words, not fists. He rarely felt the need for something physical to release his aggression.
Right now, though, he was struggling to contain his upset.
Squeezing the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white, he took the next corner a little faster than necessary. The building that housed Meg’s commercial kitchen rose up in the distance, and he sucked a big rejuvenating breath to pull himself together.
Get your shit together, dude.
With anger irrationally morphing into excitement—Jesus, he couldn’t wait to see her again—he parked his rental car on the curb of the downtown street and slammed it into Park.
The warmth from the late-day sun fell over him. He smoothed a damp hand down his custom-made dress shirt, knowing that Meg would appreciate the effort—she had an eye for quality clothing, one he appreciated, because he had it, too. Also...well, he wanted to impress her. Her and her family.
He’d known them all for the last couple of months—Meg, her sisters, Beth, Jo, and Amy. Beth’s fiancé, Ford. Jo’s partner, Theo, who was also his friend. And running herd on them all, their matriarch, Mamesie.
He shouldn’t have been so nervous. Shouldn’t have felt like he was about to pick up his high school sweetheart for prom.
Prom. Ha. At that age, he’d skipped more classes than he’d attended. Even if he’d been more involved in student life, his sporadic attendance had been at an inner-city school that could barely afford books for its students. Even if he’d wanted to attend, there was no prom.
Back then, his attention was fully consumed with survival. With scavenging enough cash to eat, with surfing from couch to couch to find a place to sleep. With staying under the radar of social services during his mom’s binges, since landing in a good foster home was, to his knowledge, a one-in-a-million chance.
He’d known too many kids who were sent to homes that hosted five, six kids at a time just to get those government checks. To his way of thinking, he’d still have to fight for food and a place to sleep, but it wouldn’t be on his terms.
A car drove the opposite way down the street he was parked on, and the headlights shining in his eyes in the darkening evening sky pulled him out of his reverie. He shook his head to clear it—he didn’t need to be thinking about that crap right now. It was in the past, a long, long way in the past. He wanted to focus on the present.
Meg was the present.
Sliding out of the car, he glanced around, searching for Theo’s vehicle or Amy’s scooter. He saw Meg’s lumbering catering van, but besides it and his rental, there was only one other car on the street—a Porsche Boxster tinted a fire-engine red that screamed look at me. John snorted when he noticed that the vehicle, which had intentionally been angle parked across two spaces, boasted a license plate that read EARNDIT.
Holy obnoxious. It made him thankful that, even with his love of nice things, he’d never felt the need to pump up his ego or have an identity crisis with a hunk of steel and chrome.
Locking the doors to his perfectly acceptable and not at all obnoxious rental, he wondered if the lack of other cars meant that he was the first to arrive. Adrenaline surged with excitement at the thought that he might get a few minutes alone with his girl.
His girl?
Well, his girl for now.
He walked up to the commercial building and tried the heavy steel door. He had to yank to open it, and when he stepped inside, he was greeted with warm, humid air redolent with garlic, onions and spices. His
leather Salvatore Ferragamo dress shoes tapped a rhythm on the dark tiled floor as he followed the low but upbeat bubblegum sound of Britney Spears circa 2000.
He’d wondered what kind of music Meg liked. He rounded the corner, ready to gently tease her about it, but found himself stopping short when he saw that Meg wasn’t alone.
Meg was in profile, hands resting on a giant, stainless steel island as she spoke earnestly to a man with hair that should have been gray but had instead been tinted a fake blue black. Meg looked luscious, as always—she’d dressed to impress in a short froth of scarlet floral that had clearly not been purchased at a mall. Gauzy fabric flirted with the tops of her thighs and the cap sleeves showed the graceful curves of her shoulders. The neckline wasn’t low and might have been modest on anyone else, but Meg had been blessed in the breast department, and her cleavage rose from the bright fabric like scoops of vanilla ice cream, tasty and tantalizing.
John would have heartily approved of all of this, if not for the man facing Meg. The one who was not listening to a word she said, attention focused on the cleft between those breasts. And John was the first to admit that those breasts were fantastic, but the ogling of them was not a professional way to behave in what John was pretty sure was a business meeting.
“Gavin Aronson,” he muttered to himself when he dragged his attention back to the tool with the dyed hair. The man, who was in his late forties, was wearing jeans that had been sandblasted and artfully torn within an inch of their lives, a studded leather belt and a T-shirt so tight it accentuated the small paunch of his stomach.
John knew Gavin, though not well—thankfully. He’d met him at a handful of events over the years, ones that Gavin’s company had staged for start-ups that John had mentored through a launch. Every time they met, Gavin pitched John some wacky new business idea and hinted that he’d like John’s expertise...without, of course, paying for it.
John would have bet his sizable fortune that the insufferable Boxster outside belonged to the man in front of him—the misogynistic pig who was eyeing Meg.
John was a breath away from placing the man’s eyes back in his head, one sharp, pointed poke at a time.
“You look lost, sugar.” A tall, rail-thin blonde slunk into his line of vision, blocking his view of Gavin and Meg.
“Not lost.” He tried to look around the woman without seeming rude. “I’m a friend of Meg’s. Here for dinner.”
* * *
“I’m Meg’s assistant, Jada.” The blonde bombshell arched her spine, toying with a lock of perfectly waved gold hair as she looked John up and down. He was pretty sure she meant the look to be flirtatious, but all he could think was that it was stupid to put that much time and effort into hair and makeup when they would be ruined in the humidity of a commercial kitchen.
When he didn’t respond, the girl, who couldn’t have been a day over twenty-four, jutted her chest out a little more. He kept his eyes up, afraid that if he followed her invitation to look down, her nipples would poke his eyes out. And it wasn’t remotely cold in here.
“Is that Gavin Aronson?” It was—he knew it was—but he needed to say something, to do something, anything to distract him from the urge to insinuate himself into Meg’s conversation. He fully believed that a woman had a right to wear whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, without inviting unwanted attention, but Gavin was clearly of the opinion that her cleavage was there for his viewing pleasure. And even if he wasn’t staring like a total lech, John could see from across the room that he was just paying lip service to what Meg was saying.
Why was he there in the first place?
He had to intervene. How could he not? He shifted, attempting to move around... What was her name again? Jenna? Jada. The other woman shifted with him.
“How come Meg’s never mentioned she had a hot friend?” Jada grinned, obviously of the opinion that she was cute.
John sighed internally. He didn’t know when or why he’d stopped enjoying the attention from random women, and even some men, but right that second, it was more annoying than anything.
He focused on that annoyance to distract himself from the fact that Meg had never mentioned him. Why would she tell her assistant about him when they were hiding their affair from even her family?
“I don’t know what to tell you,” he replied absently, shifting again. He lifted a hand to help define a little thing called personal space, caught off guard when the barely legal woman grabbed him by the fingers.
“Wha—” he grunted when she flipped his hand over, grabbed a marker from her apron and wrote her name right on his palm.
“That’s my personal number,” she added, and John struggled to keep a polite smile on his face as he finally got a glimpse around Jada’s willowy frame. “Meg will tell you that I have an amazing palate. I have a very talented tongue.”
John managed to snag Meg’s attention for a single moment. Her stare flickered over where he stood, Jada all but pressed against him. Her face was inscrutable as she quickly turned her attention back to Gavin.
“Hello?” Jada waved a hand in front of his face, and he fought back the urge to snap at her. Sometimes being a gentleman was difficult. “I said, I have a very talented tongue.”
“I’m sure Meg appreciates that,” he replied absently. “Nice to meet you. I have to go.”
Pushing gently past the other woman this time, he stepped into the kitchen from the corridor. Meg was wrapping a white cotton apron around her little red dress, and a filthy image of her wearing nothing but that apron flooded his mind.
You are in so much trouble, dude.
His pulse jumped in his throat, and his hands grew sweaty again. As if sensing his eyes on her, Meg turned her head again, and the warning look on her face spoke volumes. She didn’t want him to approach. Didn’t want him to interfere, to stick his nose where it didn’t belong.
Okay, this was business. He respected that. With two measured steps, he approached a long table, pulled out a chair and sat. With his eyes still glued on Meg—her hands, specifically, as she used them while talking to Gavin—his breathing grew a little quicker, and it wasn’t from the strange things he was feeling.
No, it was temper, because Gavin Douchebag Aronson wasn’t listening to a damn word coming from her mouth, and Meg deserved a hell of a lot more respect than that.
Don’t interfere.
Turning, Meg retrieved a small white plate with an ornately presented something that John was certain tasted amazing because Meg’s hands had created it. She held it out to Gavin, and the asshole accidentally on purpose overreached, brushing against her full breast.
Oh hell no. Like a spark to dry tinder, a fire erupted in John’s stomach. No one touched his woman unless she wanted to be touched, and the flush he could see on her cheeks right now told him that that touch had been very unwelcome.
Pushing back from the table noisily, John slowly, deliberately approached the island, where Meg and Gavin stood. Meg sent him those warning signals with her eyes again, but this time he ignored them. Meg and Gavin stood across the island from one another, and John chose to make his point by moving to Meg’s side. He placed a hand on her shoulder, and though she glared at him again, she didn’t shrug him off, which spoke volumes about her current discomfort.
Peevish, Gavin opened his mouth, likely to complain about the intrusion, but stopped when he recognized John.
“John Brooke!” He held out a hand for a very manly, backslapping kind of handshake, accompanied by a dude nod, and John barely refrained from rolling his eyes. “What are you doing here?”
“Here in Boston?” John squeezed Meg’s shoulder, a fake smile pasted on his face. “Or here in this kitchen?”
“I guess I should say, how do you know the lovely Meg Marchande?” The other man smiled, and there was a glint of malicious enjoyment in his eyes. With his next words, John understood why. �
�Of course, you make a point of finding the prettiest ladies no matter what city you’re in, don’t you?”
Don’t punch him. Don’t punch him.
“I do have a taste for quality.” Without thinking it through, he moved just a slight bit closer to Meg. “And Meg makes the best food in the city.”
He chose his words deliberately, to keep the focus off her appearance. He held his breath as Gavin nodded slowly, glancing at Meg, considering.
“That’s quite the compliment.” Gavin turned to John, effectively shutting Meg out of the conversation, which made the fire in John’s gut roar.
“It’s not flattery. It’s the truth.” Unable to help himself, John leaned into Meg again, sliding his hand from her shoulder to the small of her back, holding her up as this idiot man tried to shoot her down.
“You’re early, John.” Her voice was resigned. John hated hearing it, knowing that she recognized that this idiot was never going to take her seriously.
“Are you two...together?” Gavin rocked back on his heels, eyeing where John touched Meg. Wishing it was him, not understanding that he wasn’t even close to being worthy.
“We’re friends,” Meg blurted out before John could answer.
“She’s killing me.” John smirked at Gavin, and it wasn’t a lie—a primal part of him wanted Meg to shout to the world that she was his. “I’m not good enough for her.”
That was true, too.
Gavin studied them for another moment before reaching into his pocket. He pulled out a business card in the same shade of red as his car outside and slid it across the island. “With that kind of recommendation, I’d be an idiot to keep looking. Work up a menu for the mayor’s awards galas and email it to me.”
Meg smiled brightly, but John could see clearly that it was false. She’d wanted this, but not like this.
“Thank you for the opportunity,” she replied tightly, stiff under John’s touch.
“Let me know if you want to switch out this deadbeat for a real man.” Gavin tossed a lascivious wink at Meg before strolling away, humming. Both Meg and John stood frozen until they heard the heavy front door of the building close.
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