The cars behind him honked some more, louder this time. Noah Pearson grinned.
“Nice to meet you, Emma,” he said in my ear. “Get in.”
Two
Noah
* * *
Well, well, well. Emma Riley.
She was small—much smaller than me. Slender. Red hair that wasn’t natural, but who cared about that anymore? It suited her, made her look passionate, even though the red hair was tied up in a tidy and complicated knot at the back of her head. She was wearing a sheath dress of dark gray, and she’d matched it with black heels and a long silver necklace around her neck. She looked like a businesswoman, but with the red hair and her smart eyebrows drawn down in a scowl, she also looked like a fire-breathing dragon.
Still, she was a classy fire-breathing dragon. Until she opened her mouth.
“God, I’m so hungry I could eat a brontosaurus dick,” she said.
I pulled back into traffic. “It’s nice to meet you, too.”
“I told you, I don’t have any manners.” She put her purse in her lap and rifled through it. “Is it always this sunny here? It’s almost Halloween. I shouldn’t be sweating my lady balls off, trying to find my sunglasses. My sunglasses got put in a drawer sometime in September.”
She looked a little like her sister, Samantha, it was true. My business partner’s former executive assistant and now his wife. Aidan had always been the man women drooled over, but never got, until Samantha. Now he was happily playing the role of devoted husband, just like that. Cute nicknames and side-by-side toothbrushes and weekends in the Hamptons together. No fucking thank you.
Samantha was nice and all, but still. No way.
Emma’s features were a little like her sister’s but everything else was different. Her eyes, the set of her chin, her body, the way she carried herself. And she was very different from Samantha when she opened her mouth and said the swear words I had never heard Samantha say. Emma wasn’t cool and controlled—or at least not right now.
I turned back to the road, feeling a prick of interest I didn’t feel very often. There were a lot of gorgeous women in L.A. There were very, very few interesting ones. I’d been feeling stale lately—the same rounds of meetings, the same kinds of women, the same routines. The last thing I’d wanted to do was pick up Samantha’s sister and play tour guide, but now I was glad I’d said yes.
“Your meeting went badly?” I asked her.
“You have no idea.” She had found her sunglasses, and she put them on. They were the big kind that covered half of her face, dark against her pale skin and her naturally red lips. “All I wanted was to go back to my hotel room alone and drink, or cry, or scream. Maybe all three. But here we are.” She took a deep breath. “Sorry. I don’t even know you, and you’re trying to be nice. I’m being a cunt, aren’t I?”
“Let’s get something out up front,” I said. “If you’re being a cunt, I’ll call you one.”
She paused for a second—and then she laughed. It was a reluctant laugh, but a real one. The sound rippled down my spine and straight into my balls, which definitely hadn’t been feeling very tingly lately. I liked it. I also liked the line of her throat when she lifted her chin, taking another deep breath, as if trying to stifle the laughter down. “Okay,” she said, her voice a little throaty. “You have a deal.”
She exuded sex. There was no other way to put it. Even in the buttoned-up business outfit, it came off her in waves, an invisible dog-whistle that said she was a woman comfortable in her body, a woman who liked sex and didn’t try to hide it. But there was none of the desperation you sometimes felt with women like that, the feeling you got that they used sex to make someone, anyone, pay attention to them.
No, Emma Riley was confident. I let my gaze travel briefly down to the slim line of her hips in that dress, the toned shape of her thighs, and then I looked at the road again. “What do you like to eat? Besides brontosaurus dick, that is.”
“Very witty,” she said. “I hate anything with olives in it, but otherwise I’m easy.”
I doubted that. Hot, yes. Easy, not necessarily. “I know the place. I promise you’ll like it.”
“Thank God.” She looked out the window at the traffic passing by as I left downtown. “How long have you lived in L.A.?”
“Full time? Ten years.”
“And you actually like it better than New York?” Her voice had a New Yorker’s disbelief that this could be possible.
“I like New York, but yes, I actually love it here.”
“I never hear anyone say they love L.A.”
“It’s an easy place to hate,” I admitted. “Traffic jams, crime, smog, people who are complete fakes. That’s all true. But there are also a lot of great places in this city, and a lot of ways to have fun. You just have to know where to look. And, of course, it’s heaven for anyone who likes movies.”
She winced at that, the motion graceful behind her sunglasses. “I guess now isn’t a good time to tell you I’m not a movie fan.”
I felt my eyebrows rise. “You don’t like any of them? Not a single one?”
“It isn’t that I dislike them. I just haven’t seen very many. I never have any time.”
That sounded good to me, because I was dreading the questions: Have you met such-and-such actor? Do you know so-and-so? But I said, “Well, you’re in L.A. for the first time. You should see Chinatown at least.” I pointed. “The place we’re going to eat is just up here.”
The restaurant was called Sausalito’s, though we were six hours’ drive from the actual Sausalito, which was in San Francisco. I had no idea why the restaurant had the name it did, but I knew the owner and I knew it had some of the best seafood I’d ever eaten. It also had a beautiful back deck that had a view of the Hollywood hills. It was hard to get a table on Sausalito’s deck, but I was confident I would have no problem.
I found a parking spot—one of the main preoccupations of anyone in L.A.—and we got out. Emma smoothed her dress over her hips and as I rounded the car, she gave me a once-over from behind her sunglasses. I paused, and we faced each other in the parking lot.
Her once-over was a thorough one, taking in my jeans, my worn boots, my white shirt unbuttoned at the throat, my dark brown leather jacket. I wasn’t the biggest guy in the world—I’m six-three, but Dane Scotland is taller than me, plus he works out like an obsessed motherfucker—but next to her I was huge. She had a dancer’s body, all lithe and naturally graceful. Lightly rounded hips, a flat stomach, small tits, elegant bare arms in her sleeveless dress. Her pale skin was flawless, contrasting with the tied-back dark red of her hair.
I really, really wanted to see that hair down. Wrapped around my hands. I wanted to see a lot of things.
I hadn’t wanted to see those things in a long time.
The moment drew out, our stares intense. Emma looked away uneasily, then back at me again. Checking me out, but not wanting to. I let her do it. I watched the thoughts cross her mind, then settle in, watched her realize that we were somehow turning each other on just by standing here.