Avril Tremayne – Getting Even (страница 7)

“Good God! Why hasn’t she ever introduced me?”

“Maybe because he lives in LA,” she said through slightly gritted teeth. Did he want to meet Rafael or stand around talking about him? “But he’s here, and we’re here, so the offer’s...there...?”

He held out his arm. “An offer I can’t refuse.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“WELL, FUCK,” RAFAEL SAID under his breath as a triumphant-looking Veronica headed for him, accompanied by a guy who was a carbon copy of both her trust-fund-lugging husbands.

She stopped to take a glass from a passing waiter, then laughed at something Preppy Boy said as he grabbed his own glass. And in that instant Rafael may as well have been nineteen again, in that first year at college, about to go feral because some random dick of a guy had hit on her.

His hand jerked, champagne sloshing out of the glass and onto his shoe. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have been able to stop himself from cleaning that off, but the thought that Veronica would spot it, and in the process see that his shoes were handmade, stopped him. Not that he wanted to show off—she had a whole closet full of designer shoes—he just wanted to show her that he’d come a long, proud way, and the shoes were a symbol she’d understand.

Felicity gave his arm a warning squeeze. “You’re not going to strangle the poor man, are you?”

His lips twisted—half smile, half grimace. “I’m more likely to wring her neck.”

“You guys must have had fun at college if she can’t even walk beside another man without winding you up! Get it together, will you?”

And then Veronica was there, flashing a smile—what she called her finishing school smile—and he wanted to grab her by the arms and shake her and tell her not to use that smile on him. He wanted to kiss her, rip those uptight pins from her perfectly coiffed silver-blond hair and tear off her perfect dress and rattle her easy grace. He used to be able to do it. Make her as desperate and deranged as he was. Strip the cool off her just by touching her, so that she was hot and disheveled and gasping and throbbing.

And by God, he was going to do it again.

But to get her to lose her cool meant keeping his. So he quirked up an amused eyebrow, inclined his head toward the guy she thought she was waving in his face like a victory flag, and said, “Number three?”

“How’s the hip?” she quipped back, inclining her head toward Felicity.

“Unattached,” he said. “Needing a replacement. Interested?”

“Is it the balls giving you trouble?”

“It’s the socket. I need a new one, but I can use an old one in the meantime.”

At which point Felicity cleared her throat and he became conscious that he and Veronica were exuding enough heat to light a furnace.

Veronica stepped forward, that smile replastered to her face as she held out her hand to Felicity. “I’m Veronica Johnson, an old college friend of Rafael’s.”

Felicity gave her fake smile for fake smile as she took that hand, shook it. “Felicity.”

“Oh, I know who you are—my sister, Scarlett, is your biggest fan!” Veronica laughed—like sweet bells on a clear night—but it was as fake as her smile; he knew because there was no snort to it. “Not, I promise you, in a Stephen King Misery kind of way.” She pulled Preppy Boy fully into the circle. “And this is Phillip Castle.” Back to Rafael, with her eyebrows set to go-fuck-yourself. “You know how we were talking about your next book? Stamp, is it?”

“Close enough,” Rafael said as Phillip choked on his champagne.

“Well, Phillip’s with Smythe & Lowe, and he’s very interested.”

“Oh, he is, is he?”

“Yes—go figure. And since you seemed so keen to tell me about your books when we had that delightful chat earlier, I knew you’d jump at the chance to speak to someone...impartial? Meanwhile, if you can spare Felicity—” turning to Felicity “—I hope she’ll regale me with all the salacious details about what happens next with Beth and Braxton in This Time Forever so I can fill Scarlett in once I’m back home in New York.”

Felicity waved an airy hand. “Oh, Beth’s going to have a wonderfully tragic soapy end I’m afraid,” she said, and narrowed her eyes ever so slightly. “I’m leaving the show to play Julie in Catch, Tag, Release—didn’t Rafa tell you?”

Veronica’s smile slipped, which told Rafael she didn’t like what she’d just heard. The news, or the name, or both? No time to work it out, because the slip was microscopic and transient and Veronica was bouncing right back hard.

“Oh well, I’m dying to hear all about that,” she said and, before he knew it, the women were separated from the men. She’d done it, of course. A society-girl skill of hers he’d never been able to demystify. Correction—he’d never had to demystify, because she’d never used it against him before.

Well, whatever she’d done, it had worked: he was out of earshot.

Phillip—poor, clueless bastard—was paying the price for that, because valiantly though he tried to engage Rafael in conversation, Rafael simply didn’t give enough of a fuck to listen. The guy deserved better than monosyllabic nonresponses but that’s what he got. He had to know something was seriously awry by this point, but Rafael was too busy straining his ears toward Veronica to care.

Rafael finally shot Felicity a look he hoped she’d interpret correctly as Get Veronica back here now.

Felicity double-blinked at him—her way of saying she understood—and not only steered Veronica back into the circle but, like the trouper she was, engaged Phillip in a conversation about Liar, Liar.

He saw that Veronica’s champagne flute was empty and reached out to take it—just one second too late to stop a passing waiter from stopping beside her and proffering his tray. She smiled at the waiter, swapped her empty glass for a full one, then angled her body away to say something to a nearby guest.

Shit!

He kept his lips curved in a slight smile, pretending to listen to Felicity and Phillip while his nerve endings zapped, his blood simmered and his scalp twitched at the proximity of Veronica’s small, slender fingers, which used to twine tightly in his hair when she came. Unbearable to have her so close after all this time and not be able to touch her.

She timed, perfectly, the return of her attention to when there was a lull in the conversation between Felicity and Phillip, casting a sweeping glance around the marquee and saying, “Everyone’s moving in.” She made a graceful hand gesture. “See? The doors are open.” She turned to Phillip. “Shall we, Sir Galahad?”

“We shall indeed, milady,” Phillip responded promptly, and gallantly held out his arm for her to take.

She flashed her Stepford Wives smile somewhere between Rafael and Felicity. “Maybe we’ll run into each other on the dance floor later.”

And that was it. She was gone.

“Run into each other on the dance floor?” Felicity said. “That’ll be interesting!”

“Don’t worry, it won’t happen. She’s already made her point.”

“Which was?”

“That she’s over me.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Prove that she’s not.”

CHAPTER FIVE

THE FOOD WAS FABULOUS. The wine excellent. Teague’s best-man speech was a triumph of gentle wit. Romy and Matt’s jointly delivered response weaving superheroes, damsels in distress and mere-mortal babies into a love story was flat-out adorable. And Veronica prayed for the night to be over so she could go to bed with a bottle of gin.

She’d been feeling so proud of herself out in the marquee. Parading Phillip under his nose, exuding fan-girl charm all over Felicity, resisting the urge to smash a champagne flute and stab Rafael through the heart when Felicity dropped that bombshell about playing Julie—playing her—in Catch, Tag, Release and called him “Rafa” like she owned him.

She’d entered the hall and taken her seat and told herself that elusive thing called closure was almost within her grasp.

And then Rafael had strolled in, arm-in-arm with Felicity, and sent her a look of such smugness she was all the way back to fury again.

Which had obviously made her a diabolically bad companion for Phillip, who kept disappearing whenever he wasn’t required to sit at the table to eat.

Rafael couldn’t have been much of a companion for Felicity, either, because when he wasn’t sitting at his table to eat, he spent his time gloating at Veronica from various vantage points. Yes, gloating! There was no other way to describe his secretive, self-satisfied smile.

If she hadn’t been giving zero fucks, she would have been tempted to go up to him and smack it off his face. As it was, all she could do was not look at him. Which was easier said than done because it required her to keep him in her peripheral vision to make sure she didn’t do it by accident while simultaneously directing her eyes elsewhere wearing an I-am-fascinated expression. And maintaining her eyebrows in a perpetual go-fuck-yourself arch while performing those ocular gymnastics had given her a crick in her neck and a headache.

Worst of all, the joy she felt for Romy and Matt had been tainted by a bone-deep envy she hadn’t been expecting and they didn’t deserve.

It was just that she’d somehow assumed Romy and Matt would be the way they’d been in the old days—together but not especially together; tactile but more like the way you physically interacted with your best friend; joking around but inviting the rest of the gang in for a laugh. She’d been so certain their marriage would be predicated on a position of Hey, why not do it? since they were both single and were going to have the kid Romy needed anyway. That would have meant today was more college reunion than wedding, with Veronica and Rafael tag-teaming the group hugs to avoid any partisanship.