Party of Three

by Sandy Lowe

  It hit her like a wave hitting rocks, smashing against her brain at full force, then sliding down her body in a rush. It was because Ryan didn’t know Sarah that she wanted her. Of course, this crazy hot woman didn’t want her. She couldn’t possibly. Ryan didn’t even know her. Melinda hadn’t wanted her either. It’s why she was scraping the bottom of the singles barrel. Sleeping with a stranger was the only option she had. She had to get it done, and get gone, before they got to know her. Her personality was that repulsive.

  A boulder had lodged in her stomach, but she pushed around it. She’d dealt with bigger challenges than this. “I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Joe sniggered behind her, making Sarah realize she’d just turned down the boss in front of her entire staff. Fuck. She hadn’t meant to do that. The last thing she wanted was to embarrass her. But Ryan didn’t look embarrassed. She looked concerned.

  “I owe you some food at least. You missed dinner.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I—”

  “Sarah.” All too quickly, Ryan was in front of her, two fingers under her chin, tilting her head so their eyes met. “I was hoping to sit with you for a few minutes, enjoy a meal, maybe some conversation. That’s all. Just a break from the work.”

  “Oh.” It was wrong of her. She was the one who’d said no. She was the one who’d promised herself it wouldn’t happen. But she was so freaking disappointed. Ryan just wanted to talk. She’d misinterpreted the whole thing. Whoop-de-do.

  “Say yes.” Ryan gave her a lopsided smile. “At least right here, right now, to save my dignity. If you want to bail, you can do it in a minute.”

  “Something tells me your ego would recover if I turned you down in front of your friends,” Sarah said.

  “Never. I’m a delicate flower.” Ryan made a face that was half wounded, half pleading. “You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?”

  She didn’t buy it for a second, but she did need to eat, especially since she planned on hanging by the bar and downing some liquid courage before being forced to mingle later. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  Ryan nodded as if she’d expected nothing less. They shed their gear, Sarah changed her shoes, and they snagged a couple of plates of food left for the staff. “Follow me.”

  Ryan turned down a hall that ended in an exit that opened into the back gardens. Flowers were still weeks from blooming, but hopeful shoots of green foliage announced spring was coming. Seeming to know her way, Ryan led her to a solid picnic table tucked into an alcove.

  While the house was only twenty feet away, the alcove was recessed in such a way no one looking out would see them.

  Alone.

  A thread of excitement sparked in her belly, then shot downward to simmer between her legs. Stop it. She doesn’t want you like that, Sarah. No one does.

  Ryan slid onto a long bench, set her plate down, and gestured for Sarah to sit beside her. “God, it’s nice to be off my feet.”

  “How long have you been working?” Sarah picked up her fork to dig in.

  “About six hours. Most of the actual work is over now that all the food’s out.”

  Sarah knew the routine. She’d spent enough time at catering jobs, paying for her living expenses in college, to know even after all the food was prepared and served, the clean and pack up could take hours. “It’s a sweet gig, though. You must be good.”

  “I am.” Ryan’s smile was slow and hot. “Very good.”

  Was this flirting? Or was Sarah just reading into it what she hoped to see? History told her the latter was more likely, so she pretended to ignore the way her pussy clenched in response to that sexy smile. “I believe it. McGregor’s a stickler. How many interviews and test runs did he force you to endure?”

  Ryan speared a cherry tomato from her side salad and popped it into her mouth, then swallowed before answering. “My dad’s the groundskeeper here, so he had some pull.”

  “Your family isn’t wealthy, then?” The words left her mouth before they registered in her brain, and she realized the question had been rude. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just, usually you need to be an insider to land a job like this.”

  “It’s okay. You’re right. I got really lucky. A few years back, I was fresh out of college and struggling to launch my business. I had trouble finding customers and was truly afraid the whole thing might sink before it had started. Mr. McGregor was planning a Fourth of July cookout, and Dad recommended me. Mr. McGregor gave me a chance. More, he went out of his way to recommend me to others afterward. It saved my business. It is my business.”

  “Wow. That was nice of him,” Sarah said.

  “He’s a great guy, bets on the underdog.”

  Sarah scoffed.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, you said he’s an investor in your bakery. You must know what I’m talking about. He helped you too,” Ryan said.

  She twirled pasta in a light cream sauce on her fork and considered her answer. “He loaned me money, with about a thousand conditions.”

  Ryan raised her eyebrows. “Such as?”

  “He made me outline my plans for Cakewalk, the space, the tone, the inventory, the product. That’s fine, I would’ve had to do that for a bank. But then he trashed seventy percent of what I’d outlined and told me if I wanted the money, I needed to focus on what actually mattered. Apparently, that wasn’t baking, you know, that pesky little thing I’d spent four years learning how to do better than almost anyone else.”

  “What did he suggest was more important?” Ryan asked.

  “Business school. He’s got me taking night classes. He shredded my product list, limited my creative freedom, and every second week he’s asking me to attend some annoying social function that’s way out of my league. The man would rather see me in a party dress making small talk with strangers than in front of an oven.”

  Ryan looked at her in silence, her head titled just slightly to one side, her brow creased as if trying to figure out a particularly tricky equation. “I don’t really know you, and this is none of my business, but you’re dead wrong.”

  “Excuse me?” Sarah put down her fork. “I think I know a little more about it than you do.”

  “Do you?” Ryan shifted and put a hand over the fist Sarah had made without even realizing it. Squeezed. It shouldn’t have made her wet. “I’ve seen you work. You’re fastidious, but you’re also creative. You have flair. You’re an artist. That’s a rare combination.”

  “So?” This woman didn’t know a damn thing. And why the hell was she so attractive? That wasn’t remotely fair.

  “So, Mr. McGregor’s not stupid. Your talent is obvious. You can bake like nobody’s business. But that doesn’t mean you can run a successful business. A bakery is more than flour and butter. It’s dollars and cents. It’s cost projections and P&Ls. He’s trying to help you.”

  “He’s trying to control me.” Sarah could feel the smoke coming out of her ears. “He loaned me the money, but he sure as hell let me know his fingerprints would be all over my dream.”

  Ryan pried open Sarah’s fingers one by one, smoothing them out, stroking, soothing. God, if Ryan’s touch felt this good on her hand, what would it feel like on her breasts? Her stomach? Those fingers pushing into her pussy? She pressed her thighs together and bit her lip to hold in a whimper. Perhaps it was time to reconsider her stance on sex with a stranger. Sex with Ryan.

  “You’d never be successful without fabulous desserts and pastries. You spent four years mastering those pesky little things.” Ryan smiled. “Mr. McGregor reined you in, yeah, okay, he trashed a bunch of your ideas, but you can’t sit there and tell me the ones he kept, the ones he suggested himself, haven’t panned out for you.”

  That…was a point.

  How annoying.

  “I’m guessing you didn’t really want to come tonight,” Ryan said.

  Sarah stiffened. Was she that obvious? “What makes you say that?”

&n
bsp; “You’ve spent an hour and a half avoiding the ballroom.”

  Damn her and her accurate observations. “It’s not my kind of thing. Not my kind of people.”

  Ryan nodded. “I get that. Mr. McGregor gets that. That’s why he asked you, why he keeps asking you.”

  “He asked me to a party because he knew I’d have a terrible time?”

  Ryan laughed. “No, he asked you because he knew you’d meet new people, business people, money people, people with power who could help you.”

  “No, he—”

  Ryan turned her hand over and made small circles in her palm. “Yes.”

  Yes. Those three simple letters confirmed a truth she hadn’t seen. She’d believed McGregor enjoyed making her jump through hoops. That he saw her as just another obedient show pony he controlled with his deep pockets. But he’d been trying to help her. “Why? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “What do you mean?” Ryan asked.

  “Why would he help me like that? Why should he care? I’m nobody. Just the scrappy scholarship kid at his daughter’s school,” Sarah said.

  “I don’t know. Maybe you should ask him.”

  Sarah sat for a moment, trying to absorb this new perspective. “I’ve had it all wrong, haven’t I? I’m usually not so quick to think the worst of people. I owe him a huge apology.”

  “Why did you?”

  Ryan traced slow, tender circles in her palm, up over her wrist; the barely-there touch was so distracting she could hardly think. Luckily, it was an easy question. “His daughter is Satan incarnate.”

  “Eleanor?”

  The shock in Ryan’s voice made Sarah want to punch something. Why was it so hard for everyone to believe that beautiful perfect Eleanor had a heart of snake venom? “Yup. She hates me. She tried to ruin my chances of going to college.”

  “Shit, Sarah, are you serious? I’m so sorry.”

  Ryan’s instant outrage, her unquestioning acceptance, warmed Sarah. “Yeah. It sucked.”

  “I can’t believe it. I haven’t been close to Eleanor in a long time, but we basically grew up together. I would’ve sworn she was a good person.”

  “She’s a good actor.”

  Ryan shook her head. “What happened between you?”

  Avery had happened.

  Sarah sighed. “It’s a long story.”

  Ryan glanced up at the setting sun. “I’ve got time. It’s this, or go help wash dishes.”

  “Good to know talking to me is so alluring,” Sarah said.

  Ryan’s hand stilled. “You’re so fucking alluring, you have no idea.”

  All the blood rushed between Sarah’s legs. Oh. “I am?”

  “Yeah. But we’ll get to that in a minute. Tell me why Eleanor hates you.”

  Right. In a minute. Melinda had always put her off too. Later, maybe tomorrow. I just don’t feel like it right now. Or ever. Not with her. Ryan was just being casually flirty. God. Why did she always want more?

  “I have two best friends. Kaitlyn and Avery. We went to school together. We’re tight. We were all attracted to girls, so we bonded.”

  Ryan nodded.

  “Kaitlyn ended up falling for this stoic butch type at about sixteen. They were together all through school, but Avery and I stayed single. Avery volunteered for one of those after-school looks-good-on-your-college-application extracurricular committees and got to know Eleanor. They became friends. Kaitlyn and I tried to include Eleanor in our group, we went out of our way to be nice, but she wasn’t interested in hanging out with us. Only Avery. Like we weren’t good enough for the hedge fund princess.”

  Ryan kept silent, giving Sarah her full attention even as she stroked up and down Sarah’s arm in a maddening rhythm.

  “But after about three months, Avery started hanging with Eleanor less, downright avoiding her honestly, and she wouldn’t tell us why. She got all moody. The woman can get a brood on better than Bronte’s Rochester. There’s no snapping her out of it. Then, one afternoon Avery asked me to let Eleanor know her hockey practice had switched to a different day and she couldn’t make the committee that afternoon. I thought nothing of it. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  “But it was to Eleanor.” Ryan was already connecting the dots.

  “Yup. I passed on the message, and she flipped out. She started crying, yelling at me, saying all kinds of ridiculous things that didn’t make sense. Not then. I tried to hug her, figure out why Avery bailing on some school thing had her crying like her dog had just died.”

  “She was in love.”

  Sarah sighed. “Yeah. But she didn’t tell me that. She just shoved me away and ran off. It was Avery who told me. Eleanor had been sending her signals. Clumsy, obvious ones, the way you do when you’re seventeen and don’t have any experience.”

  Ryan smiled.

  “Avery’s a good person. She didn’t intentionally hurt her, but when you’ve never turned a girl down before, you fumble it. It’s awkward, and embarrassing, and it didn’t go smoothly.”

  “Where do you fit in?” Ryan asked.

  Sarah shrugged. “I’m the one who passed on the message. The one who saw her break. Eleanor somehow got it into her head that Avery and I were dating and that’s why Avery wasn’t interested in her. I guess it made sense looking at it from the outside. We were close, single, and spent a lot of time together.”

  “Were you? Together, I mean.”

  “No. We’ve only ever been friends,” Sarah said.

  “So why didn’t Avery just tell her that?”

  And that’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. “She asked me to cover for her. She wanted someone else, someone she couldn’t have, and she didn’t want Eleanor to know,” Sarah said.

  Ryan frowned. “That’s very Days of Our Lives, isn’t it?”

  “Totally. Her reasons made sense at the time. Seventeen-year-old logic is faulty logic.”

  “So, you let Eleanor believe you two were together,” Ryan said.

  “Yup. Honestly, it didn’t seem like a sacrifice. I didn’t like Eleanor much anyway. It didn’t change anything for me. Not at first.”

  “But then she tried ruining your chances of college?”

  “She hated me. She tried to get other girls to hate me too, but Kaitlyn, Avery, and some luck in the genetics department shielded me from most of that. Teenage girls are shallow,” Sarah said.

  “I don’t think it’s a teenage affliction. I felt pretty shallow when I turned around and saw you tonight. Looking like a runway model in those fuck me heels.”

  “My heels do not say fuck me.”

  “Baby, those heels say all kinds of things, the least of which is fuck me,” Ryan said.

  Sarah swallowed hard. Baby. The endearment settled on her skin, made her tingle. “Anyway, her great act of revenge was to go to the principal and claim I had cheated off her on our history final senior year. She got two other girls to back her up. Eleanor and I received exactly the same grade. It was her word against mine, and she was the daughter of the school’s most generous donor. I was a nobody from Brooklyn there on scholarship.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Ryan said.

  “Thanks. The principal didn’t want to piss off the golden girl. I was this close to receiving an F for that exam, at the very least. It would have dropped my GPA, and culinary school is competitive.”

  Ryan nodded. “What happened?”

  “I went a round with Avery. I blamed her. It wasn’t her fault, not really. But this little favor I’d done was about to ruin my life. I stormed off, had a sleepless night, and Avery used the time to convince Eleanor to come clean. I don’t know how she did it, but two days later, Eleanor confesses, McGregor makes an extra-large donation, and the whole thing goes away.”

  Ryan whistled. “Wow.”

  “Yeah. I’m grateful that Avery backed me. If she hadn’t, who knows what would’ve happened. But she’s still friends with Eleanor. She thinks it’s all a storm in a teacup. Girl drama,” Sarah said.

/>   “She’s never felt powerless.”

  Sarah’s whole body sagged, her righteous indignation slowly deflating. She hadn’t realized how much her resentment had become a part of her until Ryan hit the nail on the head and she could let it go. Ryan got it. Got her.

  “Yes. It wasn’t so much what she did. We were kids. She had her heart broken, and she thought I was to blame. I let her think it. I’m not so cold I don’t get how much that must have hurt. What pisses me off is that no one would have taken her as seriously if her family didn’t have mountains of money. If she hadn’t used that as leverage to get what she wanted, and used it again to clean up the mess she made. She never apologized for lying; she never had to pay. All because she was born rich, and I wasn’t.”

  “And then Mr. McGregor approaches you to invest in your bakery,” Ryan said.

  Sarah laughed. “Yeah. He was so the last person I wanted to see. But banks don’t loan large sums of money to twenty-somethings with no assets and no experience.”

  Ryan looked thoughtful.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been talking your ear off. You must think I’m nuts dragging up all this teenage angst,” Sarah said.

  “I don’t think you’re nuts. I think you’re beautiful, smart, and determined.” And with that, Ryan leaned into her personal space and kissed her. Not a friendly, thanks for the chat kiss. Not a sweet and soft first date kiss, but a full-on, knock your socks off, melt into a puddle on the floor, hot and sexy, I-want-you-naked-all-over-me kiss.

  Even as Ryan’s lips moved over hers, all Sarah could think was more.