Chapter 4
Ava
Here are the facts of Dane Scotland and me: He’s my brother’s best friend. I’ve known him since I was eleven and he was fifteen. I practically lived with my brother and his friends during my teenage years, when I didn’t want to be home with my mother. I don’t want to talk about my mother.
I didn’t sleep with Dane until much later, when I was nineteen and he was twenty-three. I hadn’t planned to be a virgin at nineteen, but somehow I still was. It drove me nuts. I couldn’t find a likely candidate to fix the problem—someone I trusted, someone I thought was hot, someone who would help me through an experience I knew would probably be a big deal. I didn’t want it to be a big deal, but my brain always trips me up over these things. Everything is a bigger deal than I want it to be, and I never know how to stop it.
Losing my virginity was the biggest possible deal, unfortunately. I needed help with it. I picked Dane.
By that point Dane had created the software that the boys sold for an incredible forty-six million dollars. They were nobodies, and then they were millionaires. We still had the old apartment for a while, but one weekend the other three went away, off to meetings or real estate buying ventures or whatever, and I realized that Dane and I had the apartment to ourselves for two whole days.
So on Friday night, after waffling for hours about what to do, I finally picked the direct route. I got up from the sofa where I was wrapped in a blanket, watching TV, and walked into Dane’s dark bedroom, where he was lying asleep. When he woke up and said, “What is it, Ava?” I said, “I’m tired of being a virgin.”
And then he surprised me by saying, “So am I.”
The whole thing changed when he said those three words. So am I. So simple and so complicated at the same time. I knew Dane—I knew he was a geek, a software programmer with glasses who rarely changed his shirt. But he was twenty-three. And under the glasses, he was cute. Under the old tees, he had nice shoulders and a flat stomach, and he smelled really good. He had a nerdy-hot thing going on big time, and as much as I liked to tease him, deep down I’d never suspected he’d gone all the way to twenty-three without sex.
This was supposed to be an adventure with a nerdy-hot older guy who could teach me things. And then he changed the game by saying So am I.
This, I realized, was a better game. A scarier one. But one that was much more exciting.
So I took off my clothes and got in bed with Dane, and we both fixed our problem.
Oh, my God.
Most women will tell you their first time wasn’t all that good. It was fast, no one knew what they were doing, it was a race to the finish line. Dane and I should have been like that. We sure as hell didn’t know what we were doing. And both of us really, really wanted that finish line.
But somehow, while we were getting there… Oh, my God.
We did it once, and then we did it again, trying different things. Then we slept for a while and did it again, trying even more different things. We spent most of that weekend in bed, with breaks to eat and shower, and except when we were exhausted almost none of that time was spent sleeping.
On Sunday night, when the others started to trickle back in, they found Dane in his room, on his computer, while I was sitting on the sofa, watching Gilmore Girls reruns. Same old, same old. I thought at least one of them would notice that both of us were glowing and Dane’s sheets were freshly laundered, but no one did.
I thought someone might notice when I went on birth control and accidentally left my pills in the bathroom, but no one did.
I thought someone might notice that Dane and I made excuses to stay home when the other three went out. That if we got the chance, we’d take even an hour alone. Hell, half an hour. Twenty minutes could do it.
No one noticed.
That long, cold winter, while everything changed around us, Dane and I…well, we practiced. It wasn’t going to be permanent, or even a relationship. We both knew that. I was only nineteen, and I had plans to go to New York and get into the fashion business. Dane was a genius and a sudden, somewhat reluctant multimillionaire who should not be living in our rundown old apartment anymore. The boys started Tower Venture Capital, and they made their plans for offices in New York, L.A., and Dallas, as well as proper offices in Chicago. It was a crazy time, great and sad and terrifying all at once, none of us knowing where we were going or what the next day would bring.
I was mixed up—not a new thing for me. I didn’t really know what I wanted. I knew that I liked Dane, that I trusted him, that we had the natural ability to give each other orgasms. I knew that the future seemed wide open and impossible at the same time. I knew that I wanted a career in the fashion business, but I didn’t know what that career would look like. Like any nineteen-year-old, I knew everything and nothing all at once.
It wasn’t until later, after all of the bad things had happened, that I realized that all that winter, I was happy for the first time in my life.
Dane hurt to look at.I mean, it actually hurt. The glasses were gone, for one. His brown hair used to be tousled, but now he’d grown it long enough to tie back in a man-bun that was sexy because it was actually careless instead of a studied fashion statement. He matched it with a dark brown beard that was in need of a trim.
And his body… What had happened to Dane’s body? I remembered him as all lean, rangy muscle, taut biceps and warm, flat chest. Now he had bulk. His shoulders were muscled, as were his arms and his chest. He was wearing basketball shorts, which meant I could see the thick, defined muscles of his thighs and his calves. Did Dane have calves like that eleven years ago? I was pretty sure he hadn’t. For someone who’d had pretty frequent interactions with Dane’s body at one time in my life, it was like a crazy double vision. He wasn’t Dane—and yet he was. That was Dane’s face under that beard, those were his handsome cheekbones and his dark eyes. He still moved like Dane, sounded like Dane. And he still pissed me off like Dane.
“I’m not getting a fucking haircut,” he said.
I lifted my chin. “Do you understand why I’m here? My brother—your business partner—sent me. Because you need to get ready for the meeting with this Okato person.”
“Okada,” he corrected me. “Kaito Okada.”
I shrugged. I’d said it wrong just to bait him. Now he looked annoyed, so it had worked.
“I don’t need a haircut to meet Kaito Okada,” Dane said. “I don’t need whatever Aidan told you I need. Okada and I can talk just fine.”
“Are you going to meet him in basketball shorts?” I said.
He scowled. “I can buy clothes.”
“Uh huh. And how often do you buy clothes, Dane?”
He shrugged.
“How many suits do you own?”
“I am not wearing a fucking suit.”
“I think, for a deal this big, that you probably are.”
He scowled some more. Even his scowl was handsome. He used to scowl from behind his glasses, but now, with his man bun and his bulk, the effect was much more dangerous.
“You’re outvoted,” I told him. “This isn’t just about you—it’s about the other partners as well. And they want me here to dress you, so there’s nothing you can do.”
I nearly crossed my fingers behind my back. I had no idea if the other two partners were on board with my brother’s plan. The odds were good, because Alex and Noah would want this meeting to go well, just like Aidan did. They’d back me up if it came down to it, I was sure.
“How did Aidan convince you to come here, anyway?” Dane asked. “It can’t be because you missed me so much.”
I felt a stab of pain at that. I hadn’t missed Dane because I hadn’t let myself miss him. I’d buried everything and kept marching forward, determined not to look back. “I have a full life in New York, thank you very much,” I lied. “Lots of work, lots of friends, and lots of boyfriends.”
Did he wince? It was hard to tell. If he did, he buried it quickly. “That’s nice,” he grumbled. “I’m glad.”
“This is a paid assignment,” I said, because we had to be clear. I was not here because I had the urge to see Dane Scotland, smell his skin again, see if he could make me laugh. Or come. “Tower VC is paying me a fee. If you want to be an asshole, then the company is paying me for nothing. Because I’m cashing the check regardless.”
Dane’s face went calm, his dark eyes reflecting on something. “Okay, a paid assignment. I get it. I guess I could use some new clothes. And I hate shopping.”
I narrowed my eyes. “You’re giving in?”
“Sure,” he said. “The sooner we start, the sooner you’ve done your job and it’s over with. Am I right?”
I shook my head. “You aren’t getting rid of me. Aidan has me at the Langham for the next week.”
That surprised him. “A week?”
“Until Okada gets here. Aidan wants to be sure you’re ready. He wants me to take you to some fancy restaurants, that kind of thing.”
He snorted. “He thinks my table manners are that bad? Like I don’t know which fork to use or something?”
I crossed my arms. “Do you know which fork to use?”
His gaze lit on mine. “Do you?”
We stared each other down for a second, and I felt that stare—deep in my belly, tingling in my breasts. That stare was very familiar.
“Of course I know,” I said, lying again. “I go to some fancy fashion events in New York. I get invited all the time.”
“With your boyfriends,” he said.
“Sometimes I bring them, yes. Other times, I go solo. By choice.”
Lying, lying, lying. But he didn’t need to know.
Dane looked at me like maybe he could see through me. But then again, maybe he couldn’t, because he didn’t say anything.
“Okay, fine,” he said finally.
I felt my eyebrows rise in shock. “You’re actually giving in? To the whole week?”
“Like you say, I have no choice. When do we start?”
“Right now,” I said, to test him. Because I still couldn’t believe he was agreeing to this. “We’re going shopping.”
He groaned, but he bit it off. “Fine. Do I get to take a shower first?”
Dane in the shower. That body. In. The. Shower.
I wasn’t going there. At all.
“I hope so, because you stink like sweat,” I said. “Pick me up at the Langham in half an hour.”