Unfinished Business. Inglath Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ breasts he and his friends had been assessing with clinical horniness was Addy Taylor.

      Culley got up from the table as if puppet strings pulled him out of the chair one limb at a time.

      “You’re not going over there, are you?” Paul laughed. “We know you’re probably short on goddesses down there in Podunk, Virginia, but this would be ballsy even for the Culley of old.”

      “I know her,” Culley said.

      “No way,” came back the chorus of three.

      “And we thought things had changed. You still get all the hot chicks,” Paul grumbled.

      Culley tamped his friend down with a look of disapproval. “I’m just going over to say hi to an old friend.”

      “How do you know her?” Tristan piped up, suspicion drawing his brows together.

      “We kind of grew up together. She married a friend of mine from high school.”

      “Oh, yeah, Mark—” Paul searched for a last name.

      “Pierce,” Culley finished for him.

      “So where is he? If she were mine, I sure wouldn’t be turning her loose in the likes of this city.”

      Culley shook his head. “You always did hold the reins way too tight, Evans. Don’t you know that just makes them want to run faster?”

      Paul frowned while Tristan and Wallace laughed, their hoots ripened by the Scotch they’d been drinking like Gatorade.

      Culley headed across the room on the crest of their still rumbling laughter. Six paces into it, an extended family of butterflies had taken up residence beside the campfire still smoldering in his stomach. How long had it been since he’d seen Addy? Years. His brain couldn’t seem to wrap itself around a number, but he knew it had been shortly after Mark and Addy had gotten married, definitely not since Mark had stopped keeping in touch, quit returning Culley’s phone calls.

      Just a few feet from her table now, he was struck again by the differences in her. He remembered her in her wedding dress, how perfect and…virginal she had looked that day.

      He remembered how envy had nearly eaten a hole in him.

      The woman sitting at the table in front of him did not look virginal.

      She looked…hot. Paul’s word, but appropriate here.

      She glanced up then, cutting short his visual assessment.

      “Hello, Addy,” he said, his voice sounding like it needed to go home and come back after it had gotten some more practice.

      The surprise on her face fit every cliché ever used to describe it. “Culley?”

      “Small world, huh?” He tried for a smile, but found it had apparently unionized with his voice, and they were both on strike.

      “What are you doing here?” she asked, one hand fluttering to her throat.

      “Ah, conference, with those guys,” he said, hitching a thumb back toward his table. He didn’t dare look around; his three friends had lost any nuances of subtle behavior several jiggers ago. “How about you?”

      She cleared her throat, looked down, then, “Just here for the night, actually. I’ve been working in the city this week.”

      Culley knew about the divorce. His mother had kept him apprised of the details, sparse as they were, despite his reluctance to hear them.

      There had been plenty of times over the years when he’d thought about picking up the phone and calling Addy. She’d been his friend first, after all. But her marriage to Mark had shifted the balance of their relationship, redefined it. And then there had been that last, awful scene between Mark and him the night of their wedding. Nothing had been the same after that.

      Even after he’d heard about their divorce, it felt as if too much time had passed for him to contact Addy, or maybe he still felt guilty for protecting Mark all those years ago.

      “Is someone joining you?” he asked.

      “No,” she said.

      “Mind if I do?”

      She met his gaze, held it in silence long enough to make him wonder if she might turn him down, then said, “I’d like that.”

      “Let me just go tell these guys,” he said, hit with the inexplicable feeling that he was aimed for the edge of a cliff, and his brakes were about to fail.

      CHAPTER THREE

      HE WAS THE last person in the world Addy had imagined seeing in the Oak Bar of the Plaza Hotel.

      She watched him wind his way through the tables to the corner of the smoke filled bar where he’d said his friends were sitting. He looked different, and yet there was a sameness to him that was familiar and somehow comforting.

      Culley.

      She let the name settle over her, sink into an awareness that had been elbowed out of existence long ago.

      They had grown up together, their mothers best friends, both of whom had once nurtured the idea of their children marrying the way some people cultivate prize-winning gardens.

      But Addy had recognized early on that she and Culley were different. His bedroom walls had been lined with pictures of a half-dozen stars. Hers had a single picture of Tom Cruise, to whom she had remained faithful until her junior year when Mark started school in Harper’s Mill.

      To Addy, Culley had been one of those guys who would never settle down, never be happy with one permanent relationship. Girls left their bras in his locker with their phone number written on a strap. She had teased him mercilessly about it, told herself she didn’t mind. The two of them had been friends since they were toddlers. And she had her own goals. On the day her father had walked out to make another family for himself, she had decided the man she eventually ended up with would be the kind of man who meant it when he said one and only, forever.

      “Hi.”

      He was back. She didn’t miss the interested glances of the two blondes sitting at the table across from them, both of whom looked as though they would have been all for leaving their bra with a room number written inside.

      “Hi,” Addy said. “Sit down.”

      He took the chair across from her, and she stole the unobserved moment to notice a few details about him. Short, dark-blond hair. A slash of jaw that, in her opinion, had always been the defining feature of his good looks. He was lean and fit, and she was glad to see that he had taken care of himself. That his need to push life’s limits had never taken him over the edge.

      He looked up then, caught her staring. Gripped with sudden awkwardness, Addy anchored her hands around the wineglass in front of her and tried for a neutral smile. She didn’t need a mirror to know she’d failed.

      He signaled a waiter who promptly stepped forward to take their drink order.

      “What СКАЧАТЬ