He gave me a slow once-over, and his mouth dropped open as his gaze snagged on all my curves, of which I had more than a few. My Puerto Rican mom passed down a certain plumpness to various parts of my body, parts Riley had never seen before, let alone seen squeezed into a little black dress. Under his heated stare, I suddenly had the urge to cover up, even with the scorching sun outside the window that hadn’t yet ended its plunge into twilight. Why couldn’t it be like we were kids again, so easy and carefree?
“You look incredible.” He walked toward me and then trailed his fingertips down my bare arms, tracking the movement with his eyes. “But I have to go to my office. My assistant can’t find the report she needs for Dad, and he’s flying out to Dallas first thing tomorrow.”
“We’ll just eat after, then,” I said. “No problem.”
Riley sighed and took his suit jacket from the back of the couch. “I mean we’ll have to stay there and redo the report. My assistant said her computer crashed, so if she can’t find the report, we’ll have to redo the entire thing.”
“That’s terrible,” I said, and failed to keep the note of disappointment from my voice.
“We’ll catch up another time, okay?” he said. “There’s plenty of food in the fridge. Help yourself to anything you need. I’ll be back later.” He shrugged into his jacket then dropped a kiss on my head. “I’m really sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s your work,” I said.
“I’m really sorry,” he said again. Frowning, he walked out.
I sagged against the closed door to fight with the straps on my sandals so I could take them off. All dressed up with no place to go. I allowed myself a full thirty seconds of a pity party complete with anguished violin music screeching through my head before I trudged back upstairs to change.
Do I know how to empty a house or what?
3
Sam
“IHAD TO FIRE MY COUSINtoday because he’s going places,” my friend Tony said, squinting at the road ahead. “Not to college, but other would-you-like-fries-with-that places.”
“Sucks.” I swallowed my sigh along with a fiery dose of tequila and rolled my gaze out the open passenger window. On any other day, I would be more sympathetic, but today had turned into an avalanche of shit. And I wasn’t even counting Hill and his sudden obsession with my fingers.
My mind, the prickly bastard that it was, kept flashing to my brother’s hands creeping down Paige’s back to just above her ass when they’d hugged. It probably had felt innocent enough to her, but she hadn’t seen the look in his eyes—a hunger that promised he would use her, then cast her off harshly for therapy bait like the dozens of others.
But to do that to Paige? I guess I should’ve known Riley could stoop so low. I hoped she was smart enough to see it coming if he tried.
Still, I couldn’t shake that image of them, what they could be doingright now, if for whatever reason Paige didn’t see that he was looking at her like a sexual object. But Paige was so much more than that. Funny, since I was the guy who had wanted to strip her naked in a public library when she didn’t even know who I was. This wasn’t a case of like brother, like brother, though.
Tony narrowed his eyes through an exhale of cigarette smoke. “Dude, relax. Zen it out.”
Easier said than done. I didn’t have time anyway. We were almost at the house where Hill had so politely requested my presence.
