LuckoftheDraw (2 page)

His eyebrows went up in interest. “So he made it there?”

She blinked in surprise. Michel knew? “What do you mean?”

“We sat together at the March of Dimes benefit. He told me
then he’d been looking into different organizations, deciding who he wanted to
work with.” He made a sympathetic snicking sound with his tongue. “You are not
happy about this.”

She swallowed the lump that had formed in her throat but
couldn’t answer.

Michel didn’t wait for her to answer. His eyes dropped to
her mouth, then lower to her neck and the deep V of skin between her breasts.
“So,
mon petite souris
, you are free to play while your pussy cat is
away?”

She snorted a surprised laugh, which earned her another of
his devastating smiles.

“I’m free,” she told him, smiling even though she felt like
bursting into tears.

He skimmed his hand over the small of her back and one
corner of his mouth curled mischievously. “For now?”

Petra drew in his scent and warmth. The feel of his hand on
her skin, his touch enticingly soft, and the way those dark-blue eyes took her
in hungrily was causing the beginning of a tremor low in her belly.

Maybe she was going to have to give his kiss a second
chance.

“Forever,” she said, swallowing hard. “I am a little mouse
without a pussy cat.”

“Foolish man.” Michel shook his head. “
C’est la vie
.
His loss is our gain, no?”

She forced a seductive smile she did not feel. “We’ll find
out, won’t we?”

He needed to stop staring at her. He needed to stop sulking
like a lovesick teenager. He needed to get his ass in gear and do something,
even if that something was get his keys out of the bowl by the front door and
take the last shred of his dignity home and put it to bed. Alone.

Alex shifted his weight from one foot to the other and
continued to lean against the fireplace, growing more disgusted with himself as
he did.

Morrison men did not sulk. They did not brood or mope, and
they did not stand by and watch while the woman they wanted was offered up to
someone else by her best friends at a sex party. Morrison men were the
descendants of warriors who fearlessly went after what they wanted, especially
when it came to women, probably the last conquest worthy of a good fight.

If his dad had been there he would have cuffed Alex upside
the head on principle.

Alex knew Rachel and Bree had something up their sleeves,
and he knew it wasn’t him. He’d been helping Petra get through her breakup with
Jude because he was her friend and he loved her. He’d been biding his time,
waiting for the right moment to tell her just how much he loved her, and they
were about to cockblock him in a big way.

He’d come to the party because he’d promised he would show
up to support Petra, but he didn’t support what was about to happen. He had to
figure out how to stop them from setting her up with someone who was not him,
and he needed to figure it out fast.

She was no taller than five-eight and couldn’t weigh more
than one-twenty-five tops. It would be too easy to haul her over his shoulder
and carry her off into the night. She was already standing right there by the
front door. All he had to do was grab his keys, scoop her up and walk out. Too
bad she would break his fucking neck if he tried.

“You look angry enough to kick a puppy,” Ben said, handing
him one of the two beers he’d brought over.

Alex clinked the bottom of his bottle to Ben’s and drank
half the contents down.

“Break time?” Alex asked after he caught his breath.

Ben and Cooper had been taking turns tending bar throughout
the night.

Ben leaned a shoulder on the fireplace mantle close to Alex.
“I can hold this up for you if you want to go take a leak. Get some food. Punch
a wall.”

Alex simply looked at him.

“The hors d’oeuvres Bree made are excellent and half the
women in the place aren’t wearing bras. You should check it out,” Ben added
when Alex didn’t say anything. “Seriously, Alex. You’ve been standing in this
same spot looking angry all night. No one is going to want to fuck you later if
you don’t lighten up.”

Alex took another long pull from his beer and went back to
looking at the crowd.

“I think my hookup days are over, man.”

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Ben observing him
carefully for a moment. “Oh yeah? You think you’re finally ready to meet a good
girl and settle down?” He leaned in closer. “I highly recommend it.”

Smug bastard. As far as Alex could tell, falling in love
with Rachel had been easy for Ben. They’d hit a couple of speed bumps early on,
which was typical, but things had been smooth sailing for them once they’d
cleared the initial rough patches.

It was different with Petra, more complicated. She was his
friend, and as far as he could tell she didn’t consider him anything more than
that. Maybe she never would.

Alex shook his head. “I’m going to become a monk.”

Ben snorted as if to say
yeah right
. “Or, and this
might be a completely crazy idea on my part, you could tell her before it’s too
late.”

It was Alex’s turn to snort. That was rich advice coming
from Ben.

“The way you told Rachel how you felt before it was too
late?” he asked, referring to the night Ben and Rachel had been reunited at a
similar party.

Ben shook his head the way he did when he thought Alex was
being stubborn. Alex had seen that headshake a lot through twenty-five years of
friendship.

“Those were completely different circumstances. No, I didn’t
ask her to get out of the game the way I should have that night, but I made it
clear I wanted to see her afterward. And,” he held up one finger as though Alex
couldn’t tell there was more coming, “I got lucky. Petra had been planning to
set us up the whole time. I don’t think Rachel and Bree have you in mind for
her tonight.”

They were going to set her up with Dr. Bonhomme, one of the
pediatric oncologists at the hospital where Alex, Petra and Bree all worked as
nurses—he and Petra on the pediatric floor and Bree in the emergency room.

Bonhomme was admittedly a good guy and a great doctor. He
talked to the kids without talking down to them and he wasn’t above getting
silly to put a nervous child at ease—something he and Alex had in common. They
guy loved what he did and he passed it on by teaching several highly respected
classes in his field.

None of that counted at the moment, because when Alex
thought about him so much as laying a finger on Petra he wanted to crush his
pretty face with his bare hands.

“She looks good tonight,” Ben observed.

Yeah she did. She always took his breath away, even when she
was wearing scrubs and nothing more than mascara, her hair pulled back into a
severe ponytail, but tonight he couldn’t stop staring.

Her sleek black hair had been parted down the middle and was
decorated by a thin silver headband worn like a fallen halo. Her unnervingly
pale-blue eyes were heavily made up but her rich red lips had been painted pale
pink. All night he’d been entertaining fantasies about pushing her up against a
wall, roughly smudging that lipstick off with his thumbs and kissing her lips
back to a deep red again.

And that sexy dress she was wearing was showing a whole lot
of her pure white skin. There were so many places he wanted to bite and lick
and kiss—the shallow valley between her firm little breasts, the ball of her
bare shoulder, that spot on the inside of her thigh he could see just below the
hem of her dress, right above her knee.

“I double dog dare you,” Ben whispered close to Alex’s ear,
wrenching him out of his thoughts and back into the room.

“You’re an asshole,” Alex muttered.

Ben just chuckled.

Petra looked over at them as though she sensed they were
talking about her. She gave Alex an inquisitive tilt of the head, said
something to the little group she’d been talking to and headed his way.

“Well, isn’t that convenient?” Ben asked, still sounding
smug.

Alex gave him a poisonous look that made him grin.

Ben bumped Alex on the shoulder with the side of his fist.
“I think I’m going to find my girlfriend and sneak her off to a dark corner
before I have to get back to the bar.”

“Good idea,” he said, watching Petra navigate the room
toward him.

Even the way she moved as though she was gliding across the
floor drove him out of his mind. There was a graceful control to the easy sway
of her hips and the movement of her long, slender legs. And that cool
Russian-ice-princess expression of hers was maddening.

He was nearly dying for the chance to find out if she could
maintain that cool demeanor when he was pushing her past all the limits of her
self-control with his mouth, his fingers, his cock.

“So what do I have to do to put a smile on your face
tonight, Lexi?” she asked as she reached him.

The list was a very short one.

“Heaven forbid should the life of the party have an off
night,” he grumbled, and then immediately regretted it. His ugly mood was not
her fault.

Her eyebrows went up. “This is worse than I thought.” He
closed his eyes when she reached up and tugged on the collar of his shirt, then
smoothed her hands over the upper part of his chest. “I love this awful shirt.
The whole outfit is amazing.”

It was hideous, and made him dizzy if he looked directly at
it, which he tried not to do if he could help it. The pants were so tight they
were hugging his balls real friendly-like, but he definitely looked as if he’d
stepped right out of the Seventies.

“It’s so Mac,” she added, smiling when he opened his eyes.
“I can absolutely see him wearing this back in the day. I bet the ladies never
knew what hit them.”

“He hypnotized them with godawful shirts, leaving them too
mesmerized to get out of the way, and then just plucked them up like daisies.”
She laughed, and he tried to smile, really he did, but his stomach had gone
sour. He couldn’t go another day without telling her how he felt, and it was
going to ruin their friendship. He just knew it. “I should have sent him in my
place tonight.”

She reached up and tucked his hair behind his ears. He’d
worn it down as part of the retro look.

“Seriously, Alex. What’s gotten into you tonight?” she
asked, fingers still curled over his ears. “I know you’re not just tired, so
don’t give me that bullshit excuse again.”

You
, he wanted to say, but that one word wouldn’t
take the big leap off the end of his tongue. She’d gotten into him, under his
skin and into his heart and turned him from a bold go-getter into the biggest
fucking wimp he knew.

“I have officially been to one too many of these parties,”
was his judicious answer.

“Are you kidding?” She halfway turned to look at the room
full of people mingling behind her. “I think this is the best one yet. They
girls have completely outdone me. This is even better than the Mardi Gras party
I threw two years ago. Don’t you think?”

He drew in a deep breath. “It’s a good party,” he admitted.
If he’d been in any other state of mind he would have been having a great time.
But for maybe the first time in his life, he hadn’t been able to pull himself
out of a funk long enough to enjoy himself.

“Who are you hoping gets your keys later?” she asked as she
turned back to him.

“You.” Oh there it was, brave little word.

“Well, you might be out of luck,” she said, not missing a
beat, and obviously not taking him seriously. “I saw Bree putting something on
Michel’s keys when she took them from him earlier.” She shrugged. “Which is
fine.”

Which is fine?
She’d just spent months mourning the
breakup with someone she thought she was going to spend the rest of her life
with and she was okay with settling for
fine
?

She deserved so much better than fine. Although, he couldn’t
deny that it gave him no small amount of satisfaction that she hadn’t just
stuck a knife in his heart by telling him she couldn’t wait to be alone with
the guy.

“He’s not bad if you like the black-hair-and-blue-eyes
European type,” she added with another indifferent twitch of her smooth
shoulder.

He reached out and touched it, brushing the backs of his
fingers over her silky skin.

“Add Eastern to the front of that European and you’re
speaking my language.” He said it as seriously as he meant it, meeting her eyes
when her head snapped around.

Hallelujah, his balls were back.

Something in her expression changed. And it was something
good.

She stepped forward, wrapped her arms around his waist and
tipped her beautiful heart-shaped face up to his. Her eyes were two
crystal-clear pools of water within the sexy sootiness of her dark makeup. Her
mouth was temptation itself.

“You always know just the right thing to say,” she purred in
her smoky voice.

It was its own kind of delicious torture to have her pressed
against him chest to belly to thigh in a room full of people. He wanted to kiss
her more than anything he’d ever wanted in his life. He wanted to slide one
hand up her skirt, seek out the nirvana of her pussy, tease and torture and
drive her wild right then and there, with the party going on around them. Let
them watch if they wanted to watch.

He’d give them a show they would never forget.

He put one hand in the center of her back and held her
closer.

“Here’s another one you might like,” he said, angling his
face within a couple of inches of hers. “Let’s get out of here. You and me.
Right now.”

Her arms tightened around his waist and her hips shifted so
her belly rubbed deliciously against his crotch, making him groan.

“Where would we go?” she asked in a whisper that shot
straight to his cock.

“Anywhere you want, Pete,” he whispered back, still holding
her gaze. “I’ll take you anywhere you want to go. Say the word.”

Suddenly Bree was there. “Whoa! What the hell is going on
here?” she asked, trying in vain to physically pry them apart.

“Go away, Bree,” Alex said quietly, unable to take his eyes
off Petra, who smirked.

Bree tugged on Petra but Petra held tight.

“Enough, Alex,” Bree hissed up at him, then fixed Petra with
a wicked look. “You know the rules,
Petra
. No showing favoritism to one
player over the others, and this is clearly showing favoritism.” She tugged
again as though she and Alex were playing tug-of-war. “Let go this instant.”

Petra gave Alex an amused look, holding tight another moment
before she let go.

“Yes, I know the rules.” Petra turned to Bree. “I made the
rules, which means I should be the one who gets to break them, right?”

“I’m with her on this one,” Alex said.

Bree—who was a whole five foot nothing and all the feistier
for it—pointed a finger up at him, not at all intimidated by the foot and a
half difference in their height.

“Nothing more from you,” she told him, then turned to Petra
again. “You. Come.”

“The offer still stands,” Alex told her, but she was letting
Bree lead her away.

He would have fought harder to keep her with him, but he
wasn’t in the mood to make a scene. Even if he hadn’t made his feelings
perfectly clear, he could see by the look on Petra’s face that she at least
understood how much he wanted her.