“You know Theo’s turning twenty-eight this Saturday. I’m throwing him a surprise party at XIII in Chelsea,” Nick murmured, his gaze drawing a straight line up my thighs. “You should come. You’d be the biggest surprise of all.”
“Thank you… but I shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” Nick frowned. “We’re all grown up and you’re both single. It’s time to bury the hatchet.”
“Nick, I know we’re adults now but some things that happened in the past are still hard pills to swallow.”
“Well you can’t just leave it in your throat, right? This is our chance to put all the bad shit behind us. Life’s too short to hold onto grudges. Everyone deserves a second chance, am I wrong?”
My gaze fell as I considered his words. After leaving New York, I’d spent so many sleepless nights telling myself that I didn’t deserve a second chance with Callum. But that was mostly thanks to the hate and vitriol spewed at me on a daily basis. “Trash. That’s what you are,” that awful woman loved to tell me. But as much as my surroundings confirmed it, I refused to let the idea sink into me. I told myself I was worthy. It was a mental battle I mustered the strength to fight every day because while I lived waist-deep in misery, I refused to sink all the way in. I had a life I loved at some point and I was determined to find it again someday.
“What, am I wrong?” Nick read the change of heart drifting onto my face.
“You’re not wrong but – ”
“Then pay it forward, Lake. You left two days before your best friend’s twenty-first birthday – before you guys were gonna go on this big trip together. And she forgave you because you were basically sisters since you were sixteen years old and the fact that you disappeared didn’t erase that. It’s not like you never had any good memories with Theo. It’s not like Theo didn’t spend a decade having Callum’s back and bailing him out of trouble before all that shit went down. There’s good and bad to every relationship. And the ones that have a lot more of the bad to get past only end up being more rewarding. Tell me I’m not right about that.”
He was. Shockingly so. I thrust my hand through my hair, Nick Spencer somehow saying all the right words to rip my heart right open. Of course, Theo wasn’t the one it was bleeding for.
“Okay, I’ll go to the party,” I finally blurted.
“Shit – yeah?” Nick pumped two fists in the air. “Yeah!”
I stared into space as he burst out of his chair and celebrated by gathering everyone and ordering a giant round of shots. I went with the toast and knocked it all back but underneath my smile, I entertained a bad thought. A slightly evil thought. I had agreed to go in earnest because I believed in second chances. I lived on the idea of them. But even if I didn’t, seeing Theo Spencer still might not be the worst idea.
Because all those years ago in the dining hall, Callum hadn’t brought me to his table till I’d lit a fire under his ass by sitting with Nick. A decade later, I wondered if Theo’s party might have him feeling the heat once again. It was a call to his bluff. I needed to know if I was fighting for anything – if second chances did exist. So I clinked my glass to Nick’s.
“Cheers to a new beginning, Lake DePalma,” he grinned.
I did like the sound of that.
Chapter Four
Callum
I knew something was wrong based entirely on the fact that Oz was being quiet for once and there was rarely anything quiet about Osborne Tate. He was a lumbering, six-foot-five giant of a man who shook the floor when he walked. The sound of his footsteps and the boom of his voice announced his arrival before he ever stepped into a room.
I had met him five years ago at a bar in Scotland and with similar interests but opposite demeanors, we got along quickly. Shortly after, we’d renovated the Pike Distillery. A few years later, we’d made the Pike name something every whisky drinker would recognize at a bar. But I still had a constant hard-on for branding, which was why I opened The Pike last year. It was my eighty-seat cigar lounge on Fifty-First and Park, serving only my whisky and a handful of other spirits owned by the conglomerate that acquired our company. The club was members only but we offered Scotch tastings every other month, open to the public by reservation and the purchase of a ticket priced just under three hundred dollars a pop. Oz and I made sure to be present at every one because they used to be full of fat cats in thousand dollar suits, all of them waiting to approach us at the end with some sort of business pitch.
But as we got popular, the trend of our audience changed. We didn’t complain. Now the tastings were half-filled with gorgeous women in short skirts, who crossed and un-crossed their legs while eyeing me and coating their lips with my Scotch. They were perfect – generally coming straight from the office, too busy with their careers to think about anything beyond a quick fuck and a good orgasm. Which I was good for. Oz eventually started calling tasting nights “The Reaping.” They were guaranteed sex. Even our waitresses started taking notice.
“They call him the Viking and you the Greek God. Which I think is fitting,” one of them murmured as she dropped off my third round. I always sat with Oz at the far leather booth while the tastings went on. It wasn’t till the end that we had to speak. Of course, Oz usually shouted across the room to pitch in with random facts and corrections, none of which were true because he’d just made them up. I was fine with it because everyone laughed and hardly understood what he was saying anyway. After five drinks, his accent surfaced and he started rolling his Scottish ‘R’s like twelve pound bowling balls.
But tonight, he wasn’t drinking or speaking. He was preoccupied with his phone and occasionally glancing at me but not saying shit, which definitely meant no good. I tried to ignore it and focus my attention on the new girl, who kept “accidentally” brushing her chest against me while dropping off our drinks. “See one you like?” She peered over her shoulder at the women in attendance.
“A few,” I lied. My eyes were naturally drawn to a certain type and I didn’t realize till tonight that that type was any pretty girl who resembled Lake. Average height, glowing skin and thick, wavy hair – light brown and darker would do the trick. I spotted three of those tonight and they all had their eyes glued to me but my mind wasn’t reacting the way it usually did. At this point, I usually had my choices narrowed down and started picturing the one I wanted in my bed with her hands bound by her panties. But I had none of that in mind tonight because despite having her coloring down, none of these girls were Lake. And I had seen Lake again. Recently. Witnessed her beauty up close in person, so now my own type was ruined. They looked good but they weren’t Lake and I was apparently fucked, cursed to spend my life holding every woman I looked at to her standard of beauty.
It wasn’t happy about it.
“Well, let me know if none of them make the cut. I’m not doing anything after work and I’m too nice a girl to let you go home alone.”
I blinked over at the new girl, wishing I remembered her name. “Is that right?”
“Mm-hm.” She didn’t bother to lower her voice. “And I may or may not have heard about the way you like it, but that works perfect for me. You weren’t the one who did my interview but I did tell them that one of my greatest strengths was taking orders.” She winked. “So keep me posted on tonight.”