“Is that what they tell you in sorority rush?” Alex asked. “They just told us it was a great way to meet chicks.”
“Chicks?” Kiara echoed, as disapproving as she could manage.
“Babes,” Alex said, and when the corner of her mouth twitched he tried, “Honeys? Hotties?”
She held up her hands in surrender, laughing in spite of herself. “Stop. Just stop. That’s disgraceful.”
“What?” he asked. “That college boys want to meet girls?”
“That you would ever call a woman a ‘honey.’”
“Well, I wouldn’t now.”
“So you didn’t open a bar just to meet chicks?” she asked, arching a brow. She didn’t know him now, really, but she knew him then.
And now, as it had then, a flash of hand-in-the-cookie-jar guilt gave him away, and he cleared his throat. “Ahem. Well, I wasn’t that long out of school when I decided to open this place.”
“Uh huh,” she said.
He gave a sulky scowl of exaggerated proportions. “And it’s a pub, not a bar.”
“Uh huh,” she said again, as their eyes caught and held, just like they had the night they met, his dancing with laughter, daring her to share the joke.
Someone called him from down the bar. A flattering degree of annoyance flashed on his face. “I’m not really working,” he said. “But I’m always working. Don’t go anywhere.” He stood up, putting his hands on her knees as he did, half pressing his point, half flirting with the hem of her skirt. It was almost brief enough to be an accident.
“Okay,” she said. Like her knees would hold her up after that.
He put on an all business face, and that was sort of knee-weakening, too. Alex Drake, Guy in Charge was every bit as sexy… no, sexier…than Alex Drake, Guy Your Mother Warned You About.
This is really happening. She watched the crowd part for him as he went to deal with the distraction. I am on a date with Alex Drake.
It can’t possibly be that simple. Outside of his influence, the inconsistencies nagged at her, but wouldn’t quite link up. Before she’d been distracted, she’d been about to go back to the beginning, to the emails they’d exchanged, and she grabbed her phone to do that now.
His email address was
[email protected], and he didn’t sign his name. So she wasn’t crazy, and he hadn’t lied. Not outright. She had addressed him as Elliott, and he hadn’t corrected her. She might overlook that, except…
Except her email was
[email protected].
Their first date—no, their first meeting, at that beer-soaked, frat house party—she’d told him that she was attending Port Calypso University on a music scholarship, and he’d asked her what she played. So he knew.
He knew.
That. Rat. Bastard.
Chapter Two
Alex was in trouble for a bunch of reasons.
First, he was in trouble because Kiara Fredericks was sexier than he remembered.
No, she was prettier than he remembered. She was just sexier now, full stop. College freshman Kiara had a wholesome prettiness and a total lack of awareness of how hot she was in a PCU tank top. Kiara version 2.0 was a rough-cut emerald polished up to a facetted jewel. Her dark brown hair was swept off her delicate neck. She wore a burgundy silk blouse that skimmed curves and slid over skin, and a charcoal skirt, hemmed right at the border of sexy and classy. And she was wearing makeup, but not so much he couldn’t see the freckles that had always charmed him.
The second reason he was in trouble was that he hadn’t really thought all the way through his impulse to see her again, and the little lie by omission he’d committed to make it happen.
And the third reason? Well, it was waiting for him when he came back to her after dealing with a total non-crisis that the manager could have handled. Kiara had figured it out. And she was pissed.
God, he knew better than to say it just then, but she was irresistible when she was angry. Her cheeks flushed and her hazel eyes sparked and a lock of hair slid from her bun or updo or whatever it was called to curl against her neck and tremble with the intensity of her emotion. Kiara 2.0 was sophisticated and sexy. But this was his Kiara. Version 1.0—or maybe 1.5—was so very hot when she got hot under the collar.
His. That was an unexpected and uncomfortable word. But it was the one he thought as he reached her, and she jumped off the barstool, not tottering at all in those high heels. They put her almost at eye level, but not quite.
“I hope you’re happy,” she growled.
He was. Happy to see her again, happy to have gotten to see her sparkling with passion again, happy she’d recognized him at all. He also had enough self-preservation to keep from saying that. “I can explain,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure how, other than, I was kind of an asshole, but I wanted to see you.
“Was it fun?” she demanded, and even though they stood inches apart, even though her hitched voice was low between them, people around them were getting curious. Body language was louder than words.
“Was what fun?” he asked, stalling. For what, he didn’t know. To think of something to say.
“Making a fool out of me.”
“Whoa… no.” Her voice was tight, as much with tears as anger. But he knew better than to reach for her, though that was his instinct. “That’s not at all— Okay, I know it looks bad. But I swear. Ted Benwick really did want to set me up with you, and his wife calls you…”
“Katya,” she supplied, when he fumbled.
“Right. I didn’t know who you were until he gave me your email address.”
“Then you lied to me.”
“Only my name. Everything else is true.”
“Only your name?” she repeated, her voice rising. They were definitely drawing an audience now. “You mean the small detail of your identity?”
“Well, would you have met me if you knew?”
There was a small, telling hesitation before she said, “Of course not!”
Alex lifted his hands in a well-there-you-go gesture that he thought would help, but didn’t. She got madder, despite the fact that she’d been enjoying herself two minutes ago, despite her admitting she wouldn’t have given him a chance if he hadn’t deceived her.
Deceived her.
Well, he hadn’t thought about it that way, but there it was, written in the flags of furious color in her cheeks. “Look, Kansas,” he started. “I’m—”
“Don’t!” she snapped. “Don’t call me that.”
“Kiara,” he amended, and now he held out his hands in a placating gesture. “I thought we’d laugh about it. Together, I mean,” he added hastily, seeing the spark of lit fuse in her eyes.
“Maybe if you’d told me when you first sat down.” She grabbed her phone from the bar and fumbled it into her ridiculously small handbag.
“I’m trying to apologize—”
“Don’t,” she said again, snapping closed her purse. She put a wad of bills on the bar for her drink. “For someone who, the last time I saw him, was cutting a romantic swath through sorority row, you don’t know much about women.”
Swath. His fraternity brothers had teased him about his farm girl freshman, but he’d always loved that she used words like swath and farce and even condescending chauvinist. That she’d won some Kansas Corn Queen beauty pageant when she was sixteen. That her mother had named her after a character in a romance novel and she knew how to drive a tractor and play the freaking cello.
All those things were a precursor to this beautiful, polished woman in front of him. All those things had come rushing back when Ted Benwick gave him her card with her email address.
All those things turned him into a complete idiot at the thought of seeing her again.
“I know you’re not going to believe this,” he said, stepping in front of her so she couldn’t leave the bar, “but I’m usually not so stupid.”
“Oh, I totally believe you could run the gamut of stupid,” she said.
“Are you seri
ously still angry about something that happened eight years ago?”
For a moment she just stared at him in disbelief. “I’m angry about something that you did eight minutes ago, you moron.”
“Come on, Kan—Kiara,” he said, trying to hide his desperation. He didn’t want her to leave angry. He didn’t want her to leave, period. He wanted to fix this—he was good at fixing things, damn it—but he hadn’t gotten as far as figuring out why. “It was a little lie of omission because I wanted to see you.”
“So I’m supposed to be flattered?”
Shit.
“Here’s a clue, Alex Drake,” she said, in a voice like the sharp sting of a snapping rubber band. “You don’t play games with a girl’s heart after you’ve dumped her. Not back then, not right now, not ever.”
She was right, he knew she was right, but that didn’t make her holier than thou tone any easier to take.
“Look, if you’ll just get off your high horse for a second—”
“My high horse?”
“You always take a fortified position on the moral high ground and don’t give it up—”
“How do you know what I always do? You haven’t talked to me in eight years.”
“Which I’m trying to fix right now.”
“By being the same callous reprobate you were back then?”
“Well, if you’re going to act like the same prissy, self-righteous—”
“You know, Alex, maybe it only seemed I had the moral high ground because you were always so deep in the valley of fuck up.”
For a second all he could do was stare at her. He should be defending himself—or not, since she was right. But Kiara Fredericks, virgin Corn Pone Queen from Podunk, Kansas, had just dropped the F-bomb in the middle of a crowded pub. So instead of arguing, he did the worst possible thing.
He laughed.
Not at her. God, he wasn’t that much an asshole. But he did laugh in surprised shock and a surreal sort of feet-knocked-out-from-under-him delight.
Whatever else she’d been doing in the last eight years, Kiara had developed some lightning reflexes. He never saw her hand move to her glass on the bar until the watered down remains of her drink hit his face.
He sputtered and choked, but it was hard to tell who was more shocked—him or her. She stood, frozen, her eyes huge, one hand covering her mouth, the other barely holding onto the highball glass. It tipped out of her nerveless fingers, and somehow, Alex was able to catch it before it fell.
“I—Oh my gawd,” she wheezed.
He blinked through the vodka dripping from his hair, tempted to laugh at the look on her face, tempted to lean down and kiss her—because what was his shirt and his dignity compared to getting to see the old Kiara come out of the cool, composed, sexy woman he’d hardly recognized at the bar.
She fumbled open her purse and pulled out a few more bills, tossing them on the bar without looking at them. “For the mess. The waiter, I mean… I… I have to go.”
“No, you don’t—” he started, but she was already darting around him and through the crowd, which backed off to give her a wide path—a swath, even—to the door.
Alex had hoped to get into the office and change his shirt before running into his business partner, but he was out of luck.
“What the hell happened to you?” Greg asked from behind his scrupulously tidy desk.
“Don’t ask,” warned Alex, going to the closet where he kept a change of clothes. Running a restaurant and bar meant long hours.
“You know when you say that,” said Greg, swinging his chair around, “it only makes me more curious.”
Alex peeled off his shirt on his way to the office’s small washroom. “I’m sure you can get the story from the staff later.”
He and Greg had been best friends since college. They might as well be brothers, with all the good and bad that entailed. Like how, by the time Alex had cleaned the sticky drink out of his hair and buttoned up a new shirt, he could already hear maniacal laughter coming through the open door.
“Holy crap!” said Greg through his laughter. Alex found him peering at the computer screen, and the cc TV footage from the bar where Kiara was throwing the drink in his face on a soundless five second loop. “I should post this on Facebook.”
“You do and you’re dead.” Not for his sake. That was not the first drink he’d had thrown in his face—though to his credit, or at least he thought so, it had been years since he’d deserved it and maybe never as much as he deserved it tonight.
But he felt a hot rush of protectiveness toward Kiara. He shouldn’t have laughed at her for cursing—God knew he really had fucked up—but she’d taken him by surprise, in her adorable, spitting-kitten fury. And yes, he’d found the drink-flinging thing funny, too, until he saw how embarrassed she was.
It had been a long time since his last pub-brawl, too. But anyone who gave her grief about this would answer to him. Including his best friend.
He let Greg off the hook, however, because his glee was entirely at Alex’s expense, which was as it should be, and how it usually was. Alex calmly walked to his own desk and sat like he had pressing work to do.
“That girl looks familiar,” said Greg, pausing the video and peering closer.
“I dated her in college.” He watched him out of the side of his eye, to see if he would let it drop.
Greg enlarged the image. “No shit! That’s Miss Iowa State Fair!”
“Kansas,” corrected Alex, aloud, and crap, to no one but himself.
“You dated her for a while.”
“A couple of months.”
“I remember now. You broke up with her right before the winter formal.” Greg left a significant pause. Or maybe Alex’s memory gave it extra weight. “I always thought that was kind of a dickish thing to do.”
“Well, you would know,” said Alex calmly, not liking the pot/kettle thing going on. Not liking the reminder that he’d been a dick.
Finally he gave in to temptation and opened a browser window, typing her name into the search field—something he’d resisted doing since he’d first gotten her email address and realized who she was, who Mrs. Benwick considered his perfect match. He hadn’t wanted his decision to be based on how she looked now.
There were several pages of Google hits. Kiara Fredericks didn’t just play the cello. She played the cello. There were actual articles about her, using words like “rising star” and “virtuoso.” In the images section, there were thumbnails from performances and events, but Alexander clicked on one with the glossy look of official publicity photo. The image filled his screen—Kiara wearing a scarlet dress, her dark hair pinned up with sparkly clips, her neck and shoulder arched gracefully as she pulled the bow across the strings of the cello she held almost sensually in front of her.
No, not almost. Definitely sensually.
Kiara 2.0 was beautiful, sexy, and talented. She was cosmopolitan and polished, and exactly the type of woman he went for every time. Every time except once, for two months in the fall of his senior year in college, when he’d met a freckled farm girl with a laugh and a temper and bank of twenty-dollar words and a talent for getting under his skin. It made him a little crazy now, in a juvenile, I want all the candy sort of way, to think that Kiara 1.0 was still inside that cool composed woman in the photo.
Alex hadn’t heard Greg approaching until he heard his appreciative “Whoa” from over his shoulder. “Why did you break up with her again?”
Because a lot of reasons, but he summed it all up with, “Because I was an idiot, obviously.”
His friend’s hand came down on his shoulder in a comforting, fraternal slap. “Well, that’s no news to me. What are you going to do now?”
That was a good question.
He couldn’t pursue her after this. It would be dickish, even for him. He’d send an apology in email, and she’d read it or she wouldn’t. He could only hope that when she did run into him again—Port Calypso wasn’t so big that he could be sure
that would never happen—it wasn’t with a sharp object.
“I guess it’s her next move,” Alex said, still staring at the computer screen.
“Dude,” said Greg. “You’d better hope her next move isn’t to cut off your balls.”
Chapter Three
“I can castrate a bull, you know.”
Sophie Russell, Kiara’s best friend since forever, put a well manicured hand on hers. “Ki, sweetie, we’ve talked about how you shouldn’t say things like that outside of Christmas dinners around your family table or what have you.” The press of fingers became a condescending pat. “Now have a martini and you’ll feel better.”
Kiara didn’t want a martini. She wanted a bourbon. She wanted a lot of bourbon, but they were at a reception celebrating the announcement of the new arts season—symphony, theater, and gallery exhibits—and that meant it was a working night for her, even if Magdalena, her cello, was at home.
“White wine,” she told the young man behind the cash bar. He reminded her of the bartender at Alex’s pub, which made her stomach drop in embarrassment—would she ever not feel six years old when she remembered her awful behavior?
“I can’t believe I threw a drink,” she said, for about the hundredth time. And that was just the times she’d said it aloud.
“Honey, he deserved it.” Sophie pulled enough cash for her drink out of her evening bag. “He broke your heart.”
“Eight years ago, and that’s not the point.” She laid her elbows on the bar and sagged onto them. “I’m so over him.”
“Yes,” said Sophie. “I can tell that by the way he was able to make you so mad.”
Kiara caught herself slumping and heard her sixth-grade cello teacher’s voice in her head, telling her to stand up straight. So she did. “It’s just the way he broke up with me. No explanation. No closure.”
“Hmmm,” said Sophie, checking her texts. “Maybe he was just a womanizing jerk who didn’t deserve you?”
“Isn’t college when you’re supposed to be a womanizer?” Kiara asked, rhetorically, then gestured to Sophie. “Or a man-izer, as the case may be? It’s just so weird, because he treated me really well while we were dating. Then… pfft. We should just be friends.”