A senior when she was a freshman, Liam was the boy every girl wanted and every guy wanted to befriend. He had spent more time in the principal’s office than he did in class. With a new girlfriend every week, a permanent gang of hangers-on who followed him around the school, and the legendary pranks he’d played etched on the restroom walls, he was still remembered years after graduation. It would have been perfect. But now, as she took in those sparkling blue eyes and thick dark hair, the chiseled planes and angles of a face that had morphed from good-looking into devastatingly handsome, she couldn’t believe she had fallen so hard for someone who had always been completely out of her league.
“I have changed. No glasses. No frizzy hair. Better clothes. Bigger boobs . . . Not that any of that matters. You made it clear what you thought about me.”
“That was a long time ago.” His voice was rough, strained. “I don’t feel good about what happened.”
“What a coincidence. Neither do I.”
He let out a ragged breath. “Don’t tell me you’re still upset.”
“‘Upset’?” She wanted to scream. Angry. Hurt. Humiliated. Disappointed. Crushed. Bitter. Wrecked. Destroyed. There were so many better words to describe her devastation when the man of her dreams stood her up for her senior prom and then disappeared from her life.
But what had she expected? Her own mother had abandoned her, too.
“No,” she lied, letting the pain and hurt she’d been harboring for the past decade wash away any thoughts of forgiveness. If she clung to it, embraced it, maybe she wouldn’t think about her pathetic teenage fantasies, the embarrassing ways she’d tried to catch his attention, the dreams of kissing him and living happily ever after with the only boy she’d ever loved.
“I’m totally over it,” she continued. “High school prom? What’s that? I never think about it. Or you. I never think about you. When I bumped into you right now, I couldn’t even remember your last name.”
He raised an incredulous eyebrow. “That’s hard to believe since you probably know the details of every meeting that’s going on in every room, the location of every exit, the number of attendees, and how long it takes to walk from one end of the conference center to the other.”
She did know all those things. Her brain had an irritating habit of working even when she wasn’t conscious it was processing information. Over the years she’d found a way to shut it down. Unfortunately, her mental tricks only worked when her life was under control, and right now she was caught in a maelstrom of contradictory emotions that threatened to tear her apart. Why did he have to look so breathtakingly gorgeous? Why couldn’t he have worn a boring suit and tie instead of a badass leather jacket that made him look like a young James Dean?
“I only remember important things.” She bent down to pick up the pads, tearing her gaze away as she tried to control her instinctive reaction to him. Although she desperately wanted to escape, she couldn’t return to Tyler empty-handed.
“You’re angry with me.” A pained expression crossed his face.
“I thought that was obvious.”
“Let me help.” Liam crouched down beside her and picked up one of the boxes.
How irritating. She wanted him to act like the bad guy he was. Saving her from a fall and crouching on the floor of a conference center to help her stuff pads back into boxes were not the actions of a villain.
“That’s a lot of . . .” His faced reddened and he cleared his throat. “Products.”
She snatched the box from his hand. “My boss needed one for a pitch and I accidentally got too many.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Organicare. We’re in the personal care business.” After leaving Madison behind, Daisy had taken some time off from her work as a software engineering consultant to help Layla start up her new recruitment business. Office management involved too much social interaction and hadn’t given her the intellectual challenge she craved, so she’d responded to Tyler’s ad for a senior software engineer who could support his rapidly hemorrhaging engineering department. He’d been up front about the financial state of the company, but Daisy didn’t mind. She’d spent her career hopping from start-up to start-up, moving on before she made attachments that would make it difficult to leave.
“I haven’t heard of them.”
“Why would you?”
“I’m with Evolution Ventures, a venture capital company based in New York. I moved out here a few weeks ago to head up our new West Coast office. We mainly fund start-ups in the food services industry, but we’ve been expanding into tech so I’m here for the pitch sessions.”
Even more irritating. Hopefully Tyler hadn’t put Evolution on the pitch list. Bad enough that he’d dragged her along to answer questions about the software system and pour blue liquid onto pads to demonstrate the superior absorbency of Organicare’s products. But to have to beg Liam Murphy for money to save the company . . . She couldn’t imagine anything worse.
“I’m glad things worked out for you, Liam, but honestly, if we weren’t in public, I’d slap you across the face.”
“That’s very considerate of you.” He held out a hand to help her up, but she waved him off as she stood, cradling the boxes in one arm.
“I’m surprised you even know what that word means.”
His behavior on her prom night had been all the more devastating because Daisy had seen another side of Liam when he had first started coming to her house to hang out with her older brother, Sanjay. He joked with her, teased her, even played video games with her if Sanjay had homework to do. Although he’d become more distant after she turned sixteen, he was more protective of her than her own brother, volunteering to pick her up from late-night study sessions, and showing up to drive her home on the few occasions Layla managed to drag her to a party.
“Let me take you for a drink after the conference.” He handed her the last box. “We can catch up, and you can tell me about your dad and Sanjay . . .”
Her anger finally peaked, crashing through her veins in a tidal wave of emotion. Every moment of her prom night was etched into her mind—from the heartfelt emotion in her father’s eyes when she walked down the stairs in her dress, to the tears on her pillow as she cried herself to sleep. Liam had been a fixture in her life for eight years, and he had disappeared without even saying goodbye.
“Are you serious?” She rounded on him, now grateful for the heels that put her a few inches closer to his eye level. “I don’t want to have a drink with you. I don’t even want to breathe the same air as you. I don’t want to catch up or talk about the fun times we had. And you don’t deserve to know about Sanjay and my dad because you didn’t just leave me; you left them, too.”