by Julie Kriss
“I’m not getting a fucking haircut,” he said.
I lifted my chin. “Do you understand why I’m here? My brother—your business partner—sent me. Because you need to get ready for the meeting with this Okato person.”
“Okada,” he corrected me. “Kaito Okada.”
I shrugged. I’d said it wrong just to bait him. Now he looked annoyed, so it had worked.
“I don’t need a haircut to meet Kaito Okada,” Dane said. “I don’t need whatever Aidan told you I need. Okada and I can talk just fine.”
“Are you going to meet him in basketball shorts?” I said.
He scowled. “I can buy clothes.”
“Uh huh. And how often do you buy clothes, Dane?”
He shrugged.
“How many suits do you own?”
“I am not wearing a fucking suit.”
“I think, for a deal this big, that you probably are.”
He scowled some more. Even his scowl was handsome. He used to scowl from behind his glasses, but now, with his man bun and his bulk, the effect was much more dangerous.
“You’re outvoted,” I told him. “This isn’t just about you—it’s about the other partners as well. And they want me here to dress you, so there’s nothing you can do.”
I nearly crossed my fingers behind my back. I had no idea if the other two partners were on board with my brother’s plan. The odds were good, because Alex and Noah would want this meeting to go well, just like Aidan did. They’d back me up if it came down to it, I was sure.
“How did Aidan convince you to come here, anyway?” Dane asked. “It can’t be because you missed me so much.”
I felt a stab of pain at that. I hadn’t missed Dane because I hadn’t let myself miss him. I’d buried everything and kept marching forward, determined not to look back. “I have a full life in New York, thank you very much,” I lied. “Lots of work, lots of friends, and lots of boyfriends.”
Did he wince? It was hard to tell. If he did, he buried it quickly. “That’s nice,” he grumbled. “I’m glad.”
“This is a paid assignment,” I said, because we had to be clear. I was not here because I had the urge to see Dane Scotland, smell his skin again, see if he could make me laugh. Or come. “Tower VC is paying me a fee. If you want to be an asshole, then the company is paying me for nothing. Because I’m cashing the check regardless.”
Dane’s face went calm, his dark eyes reflecting on something. “Okay, a paid assignment. I get it. I guess I could use some new clothes. And I hate shopping.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re giving in?”
“Sure,” he said. “The sooner we start, the sooner you’ve done your job and it’s over with. Am I right?”
I shook my head. “You aren’t getting rid of me. Aidan has me at the Langham for the next week.”
That surprised him. “A week?”
“Until Okada gets here. Aidan wants to be sure you’re ready. He wants me to take you to some fancy restaurants, that kind of thing.”
He snorted. “He thinks my table manners are that bad? Like I don’t know which fork to use or something?”
I crossed my arms. “Do you know which fork to use?”
His gaze lit on mine. “Do you?”
We stared each other down for a second, and I felt that stare—deep in my belly, tingling in my breasts. That stare was very familiar.
“Of course I know,” I said, lying again. “I go to some fancy fashion events in New York. I get invited all the time.”
“With your boyfriends,” he said.
“Sometimes I bring them, yes. Other times, I go solo. By choice.”
Lying, lying, lying. But he didn’t need to know.
Dane looked at me like maybe he could see through me. But then again, maybe he couldn’t, because he didn’t say anything.
“Okay, fine,” he said finally.
I felt my eyebrows rise in shock. “You’re actually giving in? To the whole week?”
“Like you say, I have no choice. When do we start?”
“Right now,” I said, to test him. Because I still couldn’t believe he was agreeing to this. “We’re going shopping.”
He groaned, but he bit it off. “Fine. Do I get to take a shower first?”
Dane in the shower. That body. In. The. Shower.
I wasn’t going there. At all.
“I hope so, because you stink like sweat,” I said. “Pick me up at the Langham in half an hour.”
Five
Dane
* * *
Ava was surprised. Hell, I surprised myself. But as much as I hated this entire fucking idea, I didn’t want to tell her to get on a plane and go home. I’m an asshole, I know that, but I draw a line at being disrespectful to Ava. And telling her to get lost when she’d come all this way was disrespectful.
Aidan, my best friend, didn’t know our history, but he knew that Ava was the only person I wouldn’t tell to fuck off. Which was why he’d sent her. He really was the devil.
I showered and dressed in jeans and a white tee. I tied my hair back from my face. Then I stood in the bathroom, my hands braced on the counter, and got up the courage to see her again.
If I wanted to see Ava anytime in the past seven years, I could have done it. I could have gone to New York. I could have called her up or sent a text like a normal human. But we weren’t normal, Ava and me. We’d left normal behind a long time ago.
Because she could have called me, too.
I’d never expected her to. I knew she didn’t want to see me again. I knew she didn’t want to talk to me.
It didn’t stop me from asking Aidan how she was every chance I got. Or reading her blog—more than once, to be honest, though I barely understood what I was reading. That, I could do. But calling her, seeing her, crossed the line.
Until today.
“You’re thirty-four years old, Scotland,” I said, still gripping the bathroom counter. “Get a grip and get this done. It’s just Ava.”
Right. Just Ava. Just the woman I’d lost my virginity to, the woman who had trusted me with hers. The woman who had turned my world from gray into color for one cold winter eleven years ago. Right now she was blonde and curvy, sexy, a successful fashion stylist with friends and—I gritted my jaw—boyfriends. But I could still see that girl—brunette, beautiful, serious, smart—who had come into my room late one night and said the words that stayed with me even now: I’m tired of being a virgin.
There was no man on earth who could have resisted Ava in that moment. Including me.
Seeing her now was strange, like the last few years had lasted decades—and like they hadn’t happened at all. But she was waiting for me, and coward or not, there was no way I wasn’t going to go. Even if we were going—Jesus, what a nightmare—shopping.
I left the bathroom and walked back through my apartment. Used the voice commands to moderate the temperature and lighting while I was gone, to activate the security system, to power off my computers. I shoved my wallet and phone in my back pockets and left my penthouse, arming the security pad and getting in the private elevator.
I’d been rich for a long time now, but I never once got in this elevator without remembering the elevator in the building I grew up in, which was old and unreliable and not very clean. I’d lived in with my parents in a high rise near the South Side that had seen better days, a building we lived in because my grandmother lived just down the hall. My parents both worked shift work and were hardly ever home, even more rarely at the same time. The apartment was usually empty, so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. Until I was thirteen, she’d pretty much raised me.
Then my grandmother got sick with cancer. It happened fast—seven months after she first complained of chronic pain, it was over. She was gone. After she died, my parents worked even longer shifts than they had before, and when I wasn’t at school I was home alone all the time. I got an under-the-table job with a landscaping company, hauling gravel and pulling wee
Coding made sense in my brain. It came to me as easily as breathing. When I coded, I didn’t have to deal with the real world—I made the real world. I didn’t care about school anymore, though I still went sometimes and managed a passing grade. I didn’t care about how I looked or what I wore. I didn’t even care about girls—at least, not much. If I had my computer, I could do whatever the hell I wanted. I was free.
At fifteen, Aidan, Noah, Alex, and I all left home and got an apartment. It was cheap, and of course we had to lie to the landlord to get it—we got the janitor to swear he was Noah’s father when he signed the papers. And it worked. I left that rundown high rise and its bad memories without looking back. I moved in with my friends, and not long after, Ava started camping out with us. She was eleven, just a kid who didn’t want to be home with her uncaring mother, and I barely noticed her as I worked on my code day and night.
Years later, I noticed her. But Aidan was my best friend, so I never let on. Not until that night.
Now, instead of living in that shitty old South Side apartment, I walked through the posh lobby of my building, nodding politely to the security guy. I went down to the parking garage and got in my top-of-the-line Lexus, which I drove maybe once a week, and made my way through traffic to the Langham hotel.
Ava was standing out front. She had changed—now she was wearing a leopard-print dress that barely skimmed her knees and black high heels. For a woman who worked in an industry full of stick-thin women, she had Marilyn Monroe curves. One of the posh, gray-haired guys walking out of the hotel practically tripped over his feet when he saw her.
I opened the door and called to her before George Clooney Lite could make a move. “Ava.”
Her eyes widened and she came toward me, completely oblivious to the daddy figure walking off dejected to get a cab. “I like a man with a nice car,” she said, making her voice a feminine purr.
She was playing with me, I knew that, but the sound still traveled over my skin like an electric charge. “Get in,” I said.
She did, settling into the cream leather seats and wafting me with her sweet vanilla scent. She told me where we were going, but the words tumbled out like a foreign language. Definitely French, but I didn’t recognize anything she said, even though I’d spent the past three weeks learning French from my teaching algorithm.
“I have no idea what that is,” I said.
Ava rolled her eyes. “Of course not. It’s only the poshest menswear company in the city. I made you a measuring appointment.”
I started the car, punching the coordinates she told me into my GPS. “What is a measuring appointment?”
“An appointment where you get measured, Dane. For custom clothes.”
“I already know what size I am.”
“Are we doing this or not?”
Right.
We were doing this.
Ava and me.
Six
Ava
* * *
I sat in a stylish chair, sipping a glass of champagne as Dane stood in the middle of the room, getting measured by a tailor at one of the most expensive menswear stores in Chicago. All around us were racks of custom suits, ties, and shirts, as well as books of fabric samples. In order to get the most accurate measurements, the tailor had asked Dane strip to his boxer briefs. Dane had grumbled, but eventually he’d done it. So now I toed off my heels and flexed my sore toes as Dane stood in the middle of the room, nearly naked, his back to me.
“Are you having fun?” he asked, as if he had eyes on the back of his head and could see me lick my lips.
“I’m working,” I said, enjoying the view. I let my gaze crawl over his shoulders, the sleek muscles of his back, watching the mysterious ways they moved under his skin. I stared at the way his ribcage tapered to his waist, and then I fixed on the perfect shape of his butt beneath the black underwear. The tailor needed an arm measurement, and Dane lifted an arm, making everything ripple all over again. I took another sip of champagne.
“Are we almost done?” Dane griped.
“No, sir,” the tailor said, earning my gratitude. “We still need to do the waist and the legs. If you could please turn around.”
I quickly raised my phone so Dane wouldn’t catch me ogling him as he turned. “You’ve been working out, I see,” I said casually, scrolling through my phone numbers and acting as if the sight of him was almost boring.
“A little,” Dane said. I wasn’t looking at him, so I couldn’t tell if that was humor in his voice.
“And what else?” I said, as if I was making idle conversation and I wasn’t burning to know. “Contact lenses?”
“Laser eye surgery.”
“Um,” I said. If I looked just above the top of my phone, I’d get a direct view of his package in those boxer briefs, but he’d catch me looking. Damn it. “You went to a lot of trouble.”
“I got tired of being a nerd.”
“Took you long enough. I suppose you wanted a date for once.”
“Something like that.”
I kept scrolling, looking for a particular number. I had so many numbers in my phone, and most of them were for people I barely knew. “Aidan says you finally got a girlfriend or something,” I said.
“I’ve had a couple of girlfriends, though I don’t have one now.”
“I see. Were they serious?”
God, I was so obviously fishing. Well, screw it—I wanted to know.
Dane took a second to answer—a second that lasted way too long—and then he said, “No.”
I looked at him at last, making my gaze go straight to his face instead of all the other places I wanted to stare at so badly. “You don’t sound very sure.”
Dane shrugged, which made the tailor make a tutting noise, since he was taking a measurement under Dane’s armpit. “The women thought it was serious,” he said, ignoring the tailor. “I didn’t.”
I snorted. “I’ve dated a few guys like that.” Too many. That was my problem—I always thought it was serious, and the guys never did.
“Really? I hope you dumped them.”
I said nothing, unwilling to admit I never dumped anyone. I was always the one who got dumped. “When it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”
“I get it,” Dane said. “That means the sex was shit.”
I opened my mouth to argue, to lie again—the sex was usually very much shit—and then my gaze dropped. Damn it. I looked at Dane’s chest, the muscles of his pecs, the dusting of brown hair on his taut skin. His flat stomach. Even his belly button was hot. The tailor put his measuring tape around Dane’s waist, moving into my line of vision, and I looked away before my gaze could drop lower.
I had a sudden memory of one afternoon that magical winter when I was nineteen. The other three left the apartment, and Dane and I jumped each other. The apartment was empty for barely forty-five minutes, so Dane fucked me on the kitchen table, consequences be damned, both of us crazy high with pleasure. It was pure insanity, and when we both came we nearly broke the table. It was only afterward that I realized we’d torn my panties, and I had to stuff them in my pocket and go bare under my jeans until I could go home and change.
Despite everything that came afterward, it was a happy memory, one of the best. For a breathless second I could still feel him inside me, the distinctive feel of him, the way he moved. No one since had ever moved quite like Dane.
This was my problem: I always cared too much about these things. Dane had probably forgotten.
“You have a boyfriend now?” Dane asked. Fine, it was his turn to fish. I’d take it.
“Not right now,” I said.
“What happened to the last one?”
“He broke up with me, then stopped taking my calls.” I’d called a lot of times, left a lot of messages. Too many, maybe. I was that girl.
“You’re better off,” Dane said. “Hey. Is it necessary that this guy grabs my balls?”
I looked back to see the tailor attempting to measure Dane’s inseam. “Just relax and you’ll be fine,” I said, lifting my phone and dialing a number. I didn’t want to have this conversation anymore.
Jewel answered on the first ring. “Honey, come have drinks in SoHo with me.”
“Can’t,” I said to her. “I’m in Chicago.”
“Chicago?” She nearly shrieked the word. “No one goes to Chicago. It’s nowhere.”
“A girl’s gotta work,” I said, watching the tailor measure the other inseam because it gave me an excuse to look between Dane’s legs. “Listen, I need a men’s hairstylist in Chicago, stat. Who do you recommend?”
“I’m not getting a haircut,” Dane mumbled.
I gave him a closed-fingers shut up sign and said into the phone, “I’m not working with much here. I need the best.”
“Well, there’s no scene in Chicago,” Jewel said, “but if you have to have someone, try Tyrell. He’s the only one I’d trust. Do you have a budget?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then I’ll call him and get him to call you. He won’t make time otherwise.”
“I’m not getting a haircut,” Dane said again.
I gave him the shut up sign again. “You’re a lifesaver, honey, thanks,” I said to Jewel, and hung up. “You’re getting a haircut,” I said to Dane. “Maybe your boring, clingy girlfriends like the man-bun, but it’s going.”
The tailor squawked as Dane pushed him aside, striding toward me in his underwear. He put his hands on the arms of my chair and leaned over me, his eyes on mine. I could see every inch of his naked skin. He glared at me.
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