Lust

by Melissa Andrea

  Walking over to her table, I had the element of surprise on my side. Her back to me and her attention completely on her book allowed me to pull out the empty chair opposite of her unnoticed until I actually sat down.

  She looked up, her face pulling with confusion, but when she saw me, that spark of anger lurking in her blue eyes whenever I was present appeared. In the past year, it was something I was used to, and despite the fact the flame existed because of her hatred toward me, it turned me on.

  “What’s good here?” I asked, picking up her discarded menu from the table. I opened it and pretended to look through it, but all I focused on was her eyes on me.

  “Excuse me?” She finally managed to get out, and I smiled. Well, I smiled on the inside.

  I had come close to being slapped more than once by Meela this morning, and if she thought I was messing with her now, she was likely to actually follow through. Not that I would mind it too much. A violent Meela would be fucking hot to witness.

  “Do you come here often? What do you recommend?”

  “For starters, another table,” she snapped and closed her book. She set it down on the table with enough force that her water sloshed over the rim of her glass.

  “If you haven’t noticed, it’s packed,” I said, without taking my eyes off my menu.

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “How’s the prime rib?” I asked, ignoring her response.

  Before she could answer, a waitress appeared at the table with Meela’s lunch in hand.

  With one look at me, her smile fell. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were waiting on someone. I would have waited to bring out your plate.”

  “I wasn’t,” Meela bit out. “He was just leaving.”

  “How’s the prime rib here?” I asked the waitress, and for a second, both women just stared at me as if I sat here butt naked asking if they served peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at a three-star restaurant.

  The waitress was the first to recover. “It’s excellent, sir. I definitely recommend it.”

  “Good,” I said, closing my menu. “I’ll take that.”

  “Of course. I’ll bring that out right away,” she said and turned to walk away.

  “Excuse me,” Meela called after her, and the waitress stopped midstride. “My food?” Meela pointed at the plate still in the waitress’s hand.

  She blushed every shade of pink and red as she rushed back to the table. “Oh, my god, I’m so sorry! I was completely—”

  “Distracted.” Meela glared at me. “It’s what he’s famous for.”

  The waitress let out a nervous laugh and set Meela’s food down in front of her. “Can I get you anything else, Ms. Davis?”

  “How about security?”

  The waitress stared at Meela completely confused and then looked at me.

  “She’s joking,” I assured her, but Meela and I both knew that was a lie. “I’ll take a rum and Coke if you get a second.” I winked at her, and she smiled.

  “Of course,” she said, and with one more worried look at Meela, she hurried off.

  Meela leaned forward and narrowed her eyes at me. “Must you do everything at my expense?”

  She had actually managed to shock me. “What does that mean?”

  She waved an angry hand at me. “This! You! What are you doing here?”

  I leaned forward. “I’m getting lunch.”

  “But why here? Why are you sitting at my table?” she demanded.

  Her voice had started to rise, causing others to glance our way. With a deep breath, Meela sat back, tucking her hair behind her ear.

  “My assistant told me I’d like it here.” Meela crossed her legs, and I couldn’t help but let my eyes wander. “She was right.”

  I made a mental note to give her a big fucking raise.

  “Next time, make a reservation. That way, I won’t have to share my table with you.”

  She tugged at the bottom of her skirt, but it wasn’t going to magically grow inches, no matter how much she tugged and pulled. Her only option was to uncross her legs, but then she would have to admit that she was aware of where my eyes were. She picked up her book again, but she wasn’t really reading it. I was making her too nervous.

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Well, I do.” She immediately put her book down again, and I couldn’t help but smirk.

  Uncrossing her legs, she pushed her chair into the table.

  Well played, Meela. Well played, I thought.

  “Any big plans for the weekend?”

  She sighed. “What are you doing, Reed?”

  “What? I can’t be—”

  “No,” she cut me off. “You can’t. Whatever you’re trying to do, whatever you’re thinking is never going to happen. We will never be anything but a closing argument.”

  “I’m just here for lunch, Meela. I’m starving, and I didn’t feel like finding another place. I’m not here to play games.”

  “Then I guess you won’t mind if I go back to reading my book.” She opened her book before I could respond.

  “Are you going to celebrate your win tonight?”

  “No,” she said simply with no further explanation. I watched as her eyes moved furiously back and forth over the page.

  “Why not?”

  She sighed, and her eyes found mine over the top of her book, her brows pulled into a frown. “Let’s make a deal, okay? If I answer your next five questions, then you take your lunch to go, I can go back to reading alone, and we can pretend this never happened.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  She set her book down again and folded her arms over the table, giving me all her attention.

  “Why aren’t you going out tonight?”

  “Because I don’t feel like it.”

  “Don’t you like going out?”

  “No.”

  “Makes sense,” I said and enjoyed what happened next.

  Her eyes cut across the table at me. “What does that mean?”

  “You just don’t seem like the type.” I shrugged.

  “I don’t seem like the type to go out? And you judge this based on your vast knowledge of me?”

  “We could celebrate tonight. Drinks. It could be fun.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Why? Are you scared you might actually have fun with me?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Are we having fun now?”

  “I am,” I answered honestly. “You could be too if you stopped trying to convince yourself I’m the devil.”

  “I don’t have to convince myself of that. You’ve proven yourself quite worthy of the title.”

  “I see we’re not playing very nice today.” Her bark was definitely as sharp as her bite.

  “Don’t put that on me, Reed. You started this war.”

  “I like the way my name sounds when you say it.”

  “Stop it,” she warned, but I wasn’t very good at heeding warnings.

  I held up my hands in surrender. “And for the record, I didn’t start it on purpose. I told you I didn’t intentionally plan to use the information you told me.”

  Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Told you? I’m confident you meant to say you tricked it out of me!”

  I could have argued, but we had been having the same argument for the past year, and I wasn’t getting anywhere. No matter how many times I tried to convince her I hadn’t purposely tricked her, she refused to listen to me.

  “I think you know I didn’t trick you. I think you know it, but you keep telling yourself that so you don’t have to feel guilty about how much you enjoyed kissing me on that elevator.”

  Her eyes went wide, and I knew I had hit my mark.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I look back on that kiss with complete disgust.”

  I shook my head, a grin pulling at my lips. “Whatever you have to tell yourself to sleep better at night, firecracker.”

  “Stop calling me that,” she snapped.

 
“Let me ask you something, Meela, and you have to be completely honest.”

  She leaned back and crossed her arms defensively. “What?”

  “If I was to get up right now, come over to your side of the table, and kiss you, what would you do? Because honestly, I think about kissing you again every time we’re in the same room together.”

  Her cheeks turned pink, and the tightness in her lips loosened. I was working her over, and this time, for the first time since our first meeting, it seemed to put a chink in her armor.

  She opened her mouth to answer, but before the words came out, the waitress appeared at the side of our table with my prime rib in hand.

  Her timing was terrible.

  “I had them rush your order,” she said with a smile

  “Thank you so much, Gina”—Meela smiled—“but could you please bring Mr. Pierce a box? He, unfortunately, got called away and won’t be able to stay and enjoy his meal.”

  “Oh,” Gina, the waitress, mouthed and looked in my direction.

  I stared at Meela, and I loved that she held my gaze, as well. I was far from ready to leave, but I needed to take my time. It wasn’t going to be easy to win Meela over, but I had a definite feeling it would be worth it.

  I held out my hands in mock disappointment. “Unfortunately, work calls.”

  Gina was more upset to see me go than Meela was.

  “Let me take this to the back and have them wrap this up for you.”

  “Thank you.” I gave her my award-winning smile.

  When she was gone, I turned toward Meela. “This was fun.”

  She rewarded me with a genuine laugh. “It was interesting for sure.”

  “There’s a new club, LUST, that just opened downtown. You should go out tonight. Have fun. Prove me wrong, Meela.”

  The waitress appeared with my food boxed up and ready to go. I got up, and without saying goodbye, I walked to the front of the restaurant.

  Prove me wrong, Meela.

  It was the perfect amount of dare to throw down. And if I knew her at all, she would accept it graciously.

  Six

  Meela

  “Another one bites the dust,” I told Carrie as I made a slash through the mark on my cases-against-Reed board. “Bring on the wine.”

  Carrie Daniels was the best wine drinking, Reed hating, clothes sharing best person any girl could ask for. She’d been attached to my hip since seventh grade when I sat alone during lunch period for the first week of middle school.

  I was always the shy one; I lived in the shadows, and I liked it that way, but Carrie shined too brightly to live there with me. So when she designated herself as my ride or die, I suddenly didn’t belong there either.

  She moved with me to Charleston after I got hired on at Jamison, Jones, and Associates so I wouldn’t be alone. Carrie wanted to design clothes; it was always her dream, and the day I told her I was moving, she told me she was coming too.

  “My dream can be accomplished anywhere, Meme. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.”

  We found this tiny two-bedroom apartment with sometimes questionable neighbors and crappy heat during the winter for what we could afford, and we’d been living here ever since. It was far from the extravagance that Charleston could offer, but it was our home, and I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

  Carrie returned with a glass of wine for me and something totally not wine in hers. She held out a glass for me, but instead, I took hers.

  “Oh, no, that’s … mine,” she said when I brought it up to my nose.

  I frowned up at her. “Orange juice?” I questioned and switched our glasses.

  She scrunched up her face. “My stomach is a little upset,” she said dismissively and then proceeded to praise my win. “Congrats, counselor. I knew you could do it. Describe the look on his face when you won.” Carrie’s eyes went wide with mischief.

  I laughed. “It was the face of someone who is no longer in first place on the board.”

  “In your face, Reed Pierce,” she sang.

  My board was completely a hundred percent juvenile, but I really didn’t give a flying eff. It was my only therapeutic relief when it came to my rage for Reed. After leaving the courthouse that day a year ago, I’d come home, cried my eyes out for two days straight, ate an entire gallon of ice cream, and binged watched action movies. Carrie and I would cheer when the villain, who was always played by Reed, got what was coming to him.

  It was my proudest couple of days … or so I had thought. Things took a huge turn for the worse when two dozen roses had shown up with a little card that read: Truce?

  For the next hour, I had debated hiring a hitman, and it took Carrie several hours after that to make me see the light. A month later, we started the board, and it kept Reed alive and me out of prison.

  She was my person.

  I touched my glass to hers before taking a long drink. The bittersweet taste was exactly what I needed to push away the strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. It had been lingering there since this morning after court, but it had gotten stronger after my run-in with Reed at LeBlanc.

  Normally, talking about my wins against Reed was my favorite part of the day. I’d come home, Carrie would pour us some wine, and I’d tell her all about the way I’d wiped that smug smile off his face. Two bottles later, we’d be on the floor laughing and making jokes at his expense. Winning always gave me a high, but winning against Reed gave me a special kind of high.

  Something about today was different. Reed had been different toward me, and I didn’t know how to handle it. I didn’t want to handle it. We had a routine, a system, and it worked because after what Reed had done, there was no going back.

  We could be friends, Meela.

  As much as I tried to ignore them, his words had echoed through my head all afternoon. I knew deep down I couldn’t be friends with Reed. I couldn’t forgive him for taking advantage of me the way he had.

  “What should we order? Our usual?” Carrie asked.

  I opened my mouth to respond, but Reed’s words hung in the back of my mind. He’d been challenging me. I could see right through him, and while I didn’t need to prove anything to Reed Pierce, his words haunted me just the same.

  “Let’s celebrate!” I heard myself saying. I set my glass down on the small coffee table and gave Carrie wide, excited eyes. “We’ll invite Taylor and Kaylee, too.”

  “Really?” she beamed. Her surprise only managed to confirm I wanted to do this.

  “That actually sounds perfect,” she said in a slow way that made me finally become fully alert to how different she’d been acting since I’d gotten home. “I have some news of my own to celebrate.” Her smile was hesitant, but it didn’t take away from her obvious happiness.

  “Oh, yeah? What are we celebrating?” I asked.

  “Well …” She took a deep breath, and before she spoke, I knew exactly what she was going to say. My heart sank like an anchor. “I’m pregnant!”

  And then I saw it.

  The glow I’d ever only heard about in movies because no one we knew had actually experienced the so-called spark. At my age, women were having babies left and right, but it was definitely not for me. Just the thought of having someone or even something in my life that dictated my every move made me feel suffocated.

  The happiness in her eyes over knowing she was going to bring life into the world was beautiful on her, but I didn’t understand it. I’d never understood it, and I probably never would.

  As best as I could, I pretended to be excited for her. “Oh my god, Carrie, that’s great news!”

  She laughed, and happy tears sprang to her eyes, making her glow and glisten even more. “I appreciate the enthusiasm, but I know you better than you think, Meela Davis.”

  “What?” I acted like I was clueless. “I’m happy for you.”

  “It’s okay, Meela. I know babies and family isn’t your thing.”

  I wanted to deny her words, and convince her t
hat maybe one day I would have the all-American dream of a dotting husband, a bundle of joy, and that white picket fence. But she did know me too well.

  “I’m very happy for you, Carrie. I really am.”

  It was enough for her, and she smiled. “Thank you.”

  I really was happy for her. While I might not be the family type, I knew from a very young age Carrie wanted it all—the career, the doting husband, the baby, and the white picket fence. I used to make fun of her, pretending to gag every time she brought up the subject, but now, it was actually happening for her, and understand it or not, I would be happy for her.

  “When did you find out? Does Dillon know?” I asked, quickly changing the subject from me back to her again.

  “I found out the day before last, and I told Dillon last night.” Her larger than life grin told me there was more to her celebratory news.

  “And?”

  “And he proposed!” She couldn’t contain her excitement as she jumped to her knees in front of me. She pulled something from her pocket, and I watched as she slipped the small silver band onto her finger. “I didn’t want you to see it before I had a chance to tell you,” she explained.

  “Holy shit.” I felt like my eyes were no longer a part of my skull. I grabbed her hand and pulled her to me. She laughed as she almost fell into my lap.

  “I know, right! Of course, I told him we didn’t need to get married just because I was pregnant, but he swore up and down he had been planning to ask me.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  She shrugged and lifted her hand so she could stare down at the ring occupying her finger. “I really, really want to.”

  I could see the doubt lingering in her chocolate brown eyes, and it made my heart hurt. Carrie hadn’t exactly had the best luck with men and that made her exceptionally cautious.

  “I do,” I told her, covering her hand with mine and pulling it to my chest.

  “Really?” Her lips pursed to the side.

  “I’ve never seen a man so smitten with anyone in my life. He’d be crazy not to be head over heels in love with you.”

  “You’re the best of the best.”

  “I really am happy for you, Carrie. You’re my best friend, and you deserve whatever is going to make you happy.”