He’d come to the party because he’d promised he would show up to support Petra, but he didn’t support what was about to happen. He had to figure out how to stop them from setting her up with someone who was not him, and he needed to figure it out fast.
She was no taller than five-eight and couldn’t weigh more than one-twenty-five tops. It would be too easy to haul her over his shoulder and carry her off into the night. She was already standing right there by the front door. All he had to do was grab his keys, scoop her up and walk out. Too bad she would break his fucking neck if he tried.
“You look angry enough to kick a puppy,” Ben said, handing him one of the two beers he’d brought over.
Alex clinked the bottom of his bottle to Ben’s and drank half the contents down.
“Break time?” Alex asked after he caught his breath.
Ben and Cooper had been taking turns tending bar throughout the night.
Ben leaned a shoulder on the fireplace mantle close to Alex. “I can hold this up for you if you want to go take a leak. Get some food. Punch a wall.”
Alex simply looked at him.
“The hors d’oeuvres Bree made are excellent and half the women in the place aren’t wearing bras. You should check it out,” Ben added when Alex didn’t say anything. “Seriously, Alex. You’ve been standing in this same spot looking angry all night. No one is going to want to fuck you later if you don’t lighten up.”
Alex took another long pull from his beer and went back to looking at the crowd.
“I think my hookup days are over, man.”
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Ben observing him carefully for a moment. “Oh yeah? You think you’re finally ready to meet a good girl and settle down?” He leaned in closer. “I highly recommend it.”
Smug bastard. As far as Alex could tell, falling in love with Rachel had been easy for Ben. They’d hit a couple of speed bumps early on, which was typical, but things had been smooth sailing for them once they’d cleared the initial rough patches.
It was different with Petra, more complicated. She was his friend, and as far as he could tell she didn’t consider him anything more than that. Maybe she never would.
Alex shook his head. “I’m going to become a monk.”
Ben snorted as if to say yeah right. “Or, and this might be a completely crazy idea on my part, you could tell her before it’s too late.”
It was Alex’s turn to snort. That was rich advice coming from Ben.
“The way you told Rachel how you felt before it was too late?” he asked, referring to the night Ben and Rachel had been reunited at a similar party.
Ben shook his head the way he did when he thought Alex was being stubborn. Alex had seen that headshake a lot through twenty-five years of friendship.
“Those were completely different circumstances. No, I didn’t ask her to get out of the game the way I should have that night, but I made it clear I wanted to see her afterward. And,” he held up one finger as though Alex couldn’t tell there was more coming, “I got lucky. Petra had been planning to set us up the whole time. I don’t think Rachel and Bree have you in mind for her tonight.”
They were going to set her up with Dr. Bonhomme, one of the pediatric oncologists at the hospital where Alex, Petra and Bree all worked as nurses—he and Petra on the pediatric floor and Bree in the emergency room.
Bonhomme was admittedly a good guy and a great doctor. He talked to the kids without talking down to them and he wasn’t above getting silly to put a nervous child at ease—something he and Alex had in common. They guy loved what he did and he passed it on by teaching several highly respected classes in his field.
None of that counted at the moment, because when Alex thought about him so much as laying a finger on Petra he wanted to crush his pretty face with his bare hands.
“She looks good tonight,” Ben observed.
Yeah she did. She always took his breath away, even when she was wearing scrubs and nothing more than mascara, her hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, but tonight he couldn’t stop staring.
Her sleek black hair had been parted down the middle and was decorated by a thin silver headband worn like a fallen halo. Her unnervingly pale-blue eyes were heavily made up but her rich red lips had been painted pale pink. All night he’d been entertaining fantasies about pushing her up against a wall, roughly smudging that lipstick off with his thumbs and kissing her lips back to a deep red again.
And that sexy dress she was wearing was showing a whole lot of her pure white skin. There were so many places he wanted to bite and lick and kiss—the shallow valley between her firm little breasts, the ball of her bare shoulder, that spot on the inside of her thigh he could see just below the hem of her dress, right above her knee.
“I double dog dare you,” Ben whispered close to Alex’s ear, wrenching him out of his thoughts and back into the room.
“You’re an asshole,” Alex muttered.
Ben just chuckled.
Petra looked over at them as though she sensed they were talking about her. She gave Alex an inquisitive tilt of the head, said something to the little group she’d been talking to and headed his way.
“Well, isn’t that convenient?” Ben asked, still sounding smug.
Alex gave him a poisonous look that made him grin.
Ben bumped Alex on the shoulder with the side of his fist. “I think I’m going to find my girlfriend and sneak her off to a dark corner before I have to get back to the bar.”
“Good idea,” he said, watching Petra navigate the room toward him.
Even the way she moved as though she was gliding across the floor drove him out of his mind. There was a graceful control to the easy sway of her hips and the movement of her long, slender legs. And that cool Russian-ice-princess expression of hers was maddening.
He was nearly dying for the chance to find out if she could maintain that cool demeanor when he was pushing her past all the limits of her self-control with his mouth, his fingers, his cock.
“So what do I have to do to put a smile on your face tonight, Lexi?” she asked as she reached him.
The list was a very short one.
“Heaven forbid should the life of the party have an off night,” he grumbled, and then immediately regretted it. His ugly mood was not her fault.
Her eyebrows went up. “This is worse than I thought.” He closed his eyes when she reached up and tugged on the collar of his shirt, then smoothed her hands over the upper part of his chest. “I love this awful shirt. The whole outfit is amazing.”
It was hideous, and made him dizzy if he looked directly at it, which he tried not to do if he could help it. The pants were so tight they were hugging his balls real friendly-like, but he definitely looked as if he’d stepped right out of the Seventies.
“It’s so Mac,” she added, smiling when he opened his eyes. “I can absolutely see him wearing this back in the day. I bet the ladies never knew what hit them.”
“He hypnotized them with godawful shirts, leaving them too mesmerized to get out of the way, and then just plucked them up like daisies.” She laughed, and he tried to smile, really he did, but his stomach had gone sour. He couldn’t go another day without telling her how he felt, and it was going to ruin their friendship. He just knew it. “I should have sent him in my place tonight.”
She reached up and tucked his hair behind his ears. He’d worn it down as part of the retro look.
“Seriously, Alex. What’s gotten into you tonight?” she asked, fingers still curled over his ears. “I know you’re not just tired, so don’t give me that bullshit excuse again.”
You, he wanted to say, but that one word wouldn’t take the big leap off the end of his tongue. She’d gotten into him, under his skin and into his heart and turned him from a bold go-getter into the biggest fucking wimp he knew.
“I have officially been to one too many of these parties,” was his judicious answer.
“Are you kidding?” She halfw
ay turned to look at the room full of people mingling behind her. “I think this is the best one yet. They girls have completely outdone me. This is even better than the Mardi Gras party I threw two years ago. Don’t you think?”
He drew in a deep breath. “It’s a good party,” he admitted. If he’d been in any other state of mind he would have been having a great time. But for maybe the first time in his life, he hadn’t been able to pull himself out of a funk long enough to enjoy himself.
“Who are you hoping gets your keys later?” she asked as she turned back to him.
“You.” Oh there it was, brave little word.
“Well, you might be out of luck,” she said, not missing a beat, and obviously not taking him seriously. “I saw Bree putting something on Michel’s keys when she took them from him earlier.” She shrugged. “Which is fine.”
Which is fine? She’d just spent months mourning the breakup with someone she thought she was going to spend the rest of her life with and she was okay with settling for fine?
She deserved so much better than fine. Although, he couldn’t deny that it gave him no small amount of satisfaction that she hadn’t just stuck a knife in his heart by telling him she couldn’t wait to be alone with the guy.
“He’s not bad if you like the black-hair-and-blue-eyes European type,” she added with another indifferent twitch of her smooth shoulder.
He reached out and touched it, brushing the backs of his fingers over her silky skin.
“Add Eastern to the front of that European and you’re speaking my language.” He said it as seriously as he meant it, meeting her eyes when her head snapped around.
Hallelujah, his balls were back.
Something in her expression changed. And it was something good.
She stepped forward, wrapped her arms around his waist and tipped her beautiful heart-shaped face up to his. Her eyes were two crystal-clear pools of water within the sexy sootiness of her dark makeup. Her mouth was temptation itself.
“You always know just the right thing to say,” she purred in her smoky voice.
It was its own kind of delicious torture to have her pressed against him chest to belly to thigh in a room full of people. He wanted to kiss her more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life. He wanted to slide one hand up her skirt, seek out the nirvana of her pussy, tease and torture and drive her wild right then and there, with the party going on around them. Let them watch if they wanted to watch.
He’d give them a show they would never forget.
He put one hand in the center of her back and held her closer.
“Here’s another one you might like,” he said, angling his face within a couple of inches of hers. “Let’s get out of here. You and me. Right now.”
Her arms tightened around his waist and her hips shifted so her belly rubbed deliciously against his crotch, making him groan.
“Where would we go?” she asked in a whisper that shot straight to his cock.
“Anywhere you want, Pete,” he whispered back, still holding her gaze. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Say the word.”
Suddenly Bree was there. “Whoa! What the hell is going on here?” she asked, trying in vain to physically pry them apart.
“Go away, Bree,” Alex said quietly, unable to take his eyes off Petra, who smirked.
Bree tugged on Petra but Petra held tight.
“Enough, Alex,” Bree hissed up at him, then fixed Petra with a wicked look. “You know the rules, Petra. No showing favoritism to one player over the others, and this is clearly showing favoritism.” She tugged again as though she and Alex were playing tug-of-war. “Let go this instant.”
Petra gave Alex an amused look, holding tight another moment before she let go.
“Yes, I know the rules.” Petra turned to Bree. “I made the rules, which means I should be the one who gets to break them, right?”
“I’m with her on this one,” Alex said.
Bree—who was a whole five foot nothing and all the feistier for it—pointed a finger up at him, not at all intimidated by the foot and a half difference in their height.
“Nothing more from you,” she told him, then turned to Petra again. “You. Come.”
“The offer still stands,” Alex told her, but she was letting Bree lead her away.
He would have fought harder to keep her with him, but he wasn’t in the mood to make a scene. Even if he hadn’t made his feelings perfectly clear, he could see by the look on Petra’s face that she at least understood how much he wanted her.
Feeling significantly better, he made his way over to Ben and Cooper’s assigned station at the bar. Ben saw him heading their way and got a beer out of the tub of ice. He gave it to Alex with one hand and held out the other for a low-five. Alex obliged.
“That wasn’t so hard, now was it?” Ben chided.
It had just about killed him. His heart was still racing and his hands were shaking, although he would never admit it.
“What did I miss?” Cooper asked.
“Alex sacking up,” Ben answered.
“I should apologize,” Alex said to Cooper. “I angered your girlfriend just now.”
Cooper’s eyebrows went up. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, I tried to ruin her plans and she didn’t take it well.”
Cooper grinned. “I’ll probably be thanking you tomorrow. She gets feisty when she’s angry, and as long as she’s not angry with me, it works out in my favor.”
Alex raised his beer and they all drank to that.
“So what’s next?” Ben asked.
“I don’t know, man.” His eyes locked with Petra’s across the room. Yeah, he’d definitely gotten to her. “I made my point,” he said. “The next move has to be hers.”
Chapter Three
What on earth had just happened?
How many times had she had her arms around Alex that way over the past couple of months? Over their entire friendship, for that matter. How many times had he held her while she’d cried, or just plain needed to be held since Jude left? How many times had they fallen asleep in her bed on nights when she hadn’t wanted to be alone, him spooning her with his big body, his arms wrapped around her? Had he been looking at her that way the whole time and she hadn’t been paying attention?
Petra glanced over her shoulder at Alex as Bree continued to lead her away from him. Nope. She hadn’t been imagining that look on his face. And she wasn’t imagining the way that look made her pussy hot and achy and unbelievably wet.
Alex, she thought. How strange.
“You’re not paying attention,” Bree said, giving Petra a little shake.
Petra dragged her eyes away from Alex. “Sorry. What were you saying?”
Bree narrowed her eyes. “What the hell is going on between you two?”
“That’s what I want to know,” she stage-whispered, as though he could hear them from across the room, above the loud music and boisterous conversation.
“Seriously, Pete, is there something happening between you and Alex that you’re not telling me about?”
Petra rolled her eyes. “When have I ever kept anything from you and Rachel?”
Bree gave her a droll look. “Would you like a list?”
Okay, she was admittedly the least forthcoming of the three of them. By a lot.
“If something was going on between Alex and me you would have heard about it.”
Bree crossed her arms and continued to look skeptical. “You sure about that?”
Petra mimicked her pose and gave her the same look in return.
“I don’t know what’s going on over here, but the two of you need to knock it off,” Rachel said, looking between them as she joined them in the dining room. “What do you say we get this show on the road? People are getting antsy.”
That was fine with Petra. She was getting pretty antsy herself. Maybe a night with Michel was what she needed. She could blow off some steam and get her longstanding curiosity about him out of her syste
m in the process. Only…
Alex had just messed that up for her, hadn’t he?
She’d convinced herself she was willing to do whatever it took if it turned out she and Michel didn’t have the kind of chemistry she’d hoped for. She’d done it before.
Back when she and Jude had been participating in the early key parties they’d thrown, she’d been paired up a few times with lovers who hadn’t made her toes curl. She knew how to take her own pleasure if her partner wasn’t exactly the kind of lover she was hoping for, and she knew how to make it fun for everyone in the process.
But in that moment she’d spent in Alex’s arms she’d seen the things he wanted to do to her in his bright-blue eyes, and damn if it didn’t look as if he wanted to ravish her.
“Pete?” Rachel snapped her fingers in front of Petra’s face. “You still with us?”
Petra couldn’t help the impatient look she gave Rachel, then Bree.
Immune to even the most stern of Petra’s expressions, Rachel pressed a small, folded piece of paper into Petra’s palm. Petra opened it and found the number three written in elaborate script. Three was her lucky number and Rachel knew it.
“Every player will get matched in the order of the numbers they draw. To prevent possible cheating, the lovely Miss Bree will draw a set of keys for each participant as they turn in said number to me,” Rachel said as if she were a rule announcer on a game show, only speaking so candidly because no one else was standing close enough to hear. “Good luck,” she added, giving Petra a knowing wink. She offered the small bowl containing the rest of the numbers to Bree. “Feel like playing?”
Bree held up a hand. “Thanks, but I already know how lucky I’m going to get tonight,” she told them with a dreamy smile.
I had a hand in that, Petra thought with no small amount of pride.
She’d set her friends up with the men who made them smile that way, who made their cheeks get rosy whenever they were near each other. She loved them both dearly for throwing her a key party to return the favor, but she hoped they weren’t thinking hers was going to have the same end result. She was still raw from Jude leaving and she wasn’t ready to try being in love again.
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