Total pages in book: 88
Estimated words: 85608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 428(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 85608 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 428(@200wpm)___ 342(@250wpm)___ 285(@300wpm)
I wasn’t ready for this confrontation. Not by a long shot. If he hadn’t seen me, I would have found a way to avoid this, but he had seen me. We had an audience, and it wasn’t like we could get into it in front of all of his friends. I didn’t want to get into it at all. Three years hadn’t been long enough for me to be ready for this conversation. Maybe I’d never be ready to talk about it. And certainly not in this moment.
Which meant that I needed to let the outrageous, wild Whitley Bowen that he was all too familiar with off her leash.
My hips swayed seductively as I made for the group of businessmen. My eyes were only for Gavin King. One of his friends nudged him and laughed. Gavin didn’t look back at him as I approached. He couldn’t look away from me, as if I’d put a spell on him in my too-short skirt and too-high heels and too-purple hair.
I ripped my sunglasses off when I reached him, standing way too close for total strangers. Which his colleagues clearly thought we were—and we were very much not.
“Hey, you,” I said with a grin.
“Hey,” he said on a breath.
I took his tie in my hand and threaded it between my fingers. His eyes were impossibly green this close. They stared at me with three years of distrust and confusion. I needed to end this or my knees were going to go weak, and we just couldn’t have that.
“You know this isn’t your color,” I said, flipping the blue tie over his shoulder.
A knowing smirk crossed his sullen little mouth. “That so?”
“Green,” I said with a wink. “To match your eyes.”
“I’ll take that into consideration.”
One of his friends elbowed him. “You going to introduce us to your friend, King?”
Gavin and I snapped back to reality at the same moment. And reality was not a plane that I enjoyed existing on.
Gavin looked flummoxed for a whole second as if he had no earthly idea how to introduce us.
“Love to, gentlemen,” I said, stepping back with a flourish. “But I have business to attend to. You understand.”
Gavin’s mouth turned into an O of confusion. I could see every single thing he wanted to ask on those perfect, pouty lips. The what was I doing here and what business could occupy my time and how had he not known that I was in New York. A million things that I didn’t want to discuss and couldn’t bring down my mask enough to acknowledge.
So, I didn’t let him get the questions out.
I wagged my fingers in farewell and shot him a wink. “See you later, King.”
I swallowed back my apprehension and sauntered away from the group. A whistle followed my exit. I kept the smirk on my lips the whole way, tossing the sunglasses back into position before exiting Percy Tower onto the Manhattan streets.
It wasn’t until I cleared the front doors that my shoulders slumped and a frown replaced the ridiculous smirk. My hand dropped to the stone exterior of the building, and I took a steadying breath. Gavin King knew I was back in New York City. I’d survived that interaction. Barely.
It’d get easier the next time and the time after that. Like exposure therapy. The more I saw his beautiful face and that muscular physique and the skilled fingers, the more I’d replace the memory of him using all of that for my pleasure. The more I’d replace the look of betrayal on his face when I’d gotten back together with his best friend. The more I’d replace the horror he must have felt when I’d left New York without so much as a good-bye.
I’d agreed to come back.
I knew what that meant.
I just hadn’t wanted to face the fact that I still had feelings for him on my first day.
2
GAVIN
“Holy shit, King. I know you pull hot girls, but that girl?” Blake Holliday asked to my left.
Yeah.
That girl.
I watched Whitley Bowen traipse out of Percy Tower in that ridiculous fur coat with lavender hair swishing at the same tempo as her ass. Seeing her had momentarily paralyzed me. I couldn’t even get words out.
Blake wasn’t wrong. I could get with plenty of hot girls. Even by my own standards, I was a notorious playboy. I’d dated celebrities and models and socialites alike. I had a different girl on my arm at every event. None of them made much of an impression on me. In fact, I’d been so bored the last couple months that I showed up stag to events. My friends joked that I’d gone through every eligible woman in Manhattan. But that wasn’t it. I was just over the monotony.
None of them were Whitley Bowen.
A certified wrecking ball, who tumbled through relationships about as destructively as I did. We had been close friends for a few short years before we crossed a line we could never come back from.