by Maria Luis
He did not just . . . “Excuse me?”
“Right now,” he repeated slowly, his brown eyes drifting down to her blouse. “Are you wearing any?”
And to think that Luke had set her up with a gentleman.
Snapping her fingers, his gaze jumped back up to hers and he didn’t even have the grace to look sheepish at being caught staring at her breasts. “Is that a no?”
“It’s a no.”
His expression turned hopeful. “No, as in you’re not wearing any lingerie right now?”
“It’s a no, as in your chance of ever finding out just disintegrated and went up in flames.”
“That’s hot.”
“I just said that you have zero chance of getting me into bed, and you think that’s hot?”
Spare me from delusional men.
Her date took a swig of his beer, dragging the back of his hand across his mouth. “I think you’re hot—does that get me brownie points?”
Anna stared at him blankly, internally debating all the different ways she wouldn’t mind schooling him in the art of talking to a woman. Subtly she directed her gaze to Luke’s booth, only to find him watching their table avidly.
It was safe to say that his first attempt at matchmaking was a complete disaster.
His mouth moved, but whatever he’d said was lost on her. She couldn’t make out the words in the bar’s dim lighting, and, really, did it even matter?
While she’d give Luke a B-rating for effort, he’d failed epically on performance.
The thump of Aaron’s beer bottle hitting the tabletop jerked her back to her present situation. In other words, the second coming of the Date from Hell.
Anna opened her mouth to put an end to the suffering. “While I—”
Aaron swiftly cut her off, pointing the beer bottle at her. “Listen, Anna, I’ve got to tell you that this has been nice but I don’t think it’s going to work out.”
“I was going to say the same—”
“You’re hot, I’ll give you that.” He paused for another pull of his beer. “Let’s be honest, though. You’re a cock-tease.”
“Because I won’t tell you if I’m wearing lingerie.” Her eyes narrowed. “You do realize how ridiculous that sounds, don’t you?”
“Not as ridiculous as the fact that you own a panty shop but won’t show the goods.”
Anna considered herself to be a very levelheaded woman.
She worked in customer service, was a single mother to a fourteen-year-old boy, and had driven La Parisienne from kitschy French Quarter shop to a near million-dollar business. And she’d done it all by the age of thirty-two.
But that was it. The gloves were coming off.
She snagged the strap of her purse, and grabbed her half-finished cocktail.
Don’t do anything rash, girl.
It wasn’t acting rashly if it was justified, right?
Anna lifted her cocktail, fingers splayed around the now warm glass, and—
“Aaron, man, it’s fucking great to see you,” said a familiar gravel-pitched voice.
She twisted to stare up at the man who was responsible for the utter ridiculousness of her night. She met his strained green gaze, frowning when he mouthed, “Don’t.”
Don’t, what?
Be insulted by her date’s utter disrespect?
Take action for being sexually objectified?
It wasn’t anything new in Anna’s line of work, unfortunately, but usually people weren’t so openly crass.
Her date lurched to his feet, beer bottle planted on the table as he and Luke shared one of those one-armed man hugs. “When you gave me a call the other day,” Aaron was saying, his hand absently wrapping back around the glass bottle again, “fuck, it was like a blast from the past.”
Luke didn’t smile. In the little time that she’d known him, Anna had quickly realized that Luke O’Connor’s smiles were exceedingly rare. If he hadn’t proved their existence by bestowing two on her, she might have thought them an urban legend.
Shifting his muscular frame around a chair, Luke leaned his weight on the cane and offered his free hand for her to shake. “It’s good to see you again,” he murmured, closing his hand around hers.
It was the first time that they’d touched.
His grip was strong; his palm rough against hers.
Anna had the sudden visual of them together in bed, those rough hands of his skimming her body and tugging off her clothes.
No. No, no, no.
“I was just letting Anna here know how great it’s been to meet her,” Aaron boasted, his brown gaze fixed on her. “We can’t thank you enough for setting us up tonight, Luke.”
Her molars cracked together. So, he wanted to play that game in front of his old friend? Not going to happen.
Turning to Aaron, she murmured sweetly, “Is that so? You were only just getting through telling me how much of a prude I am.” She dropped her hands to the table. “Something about, oh yeah, me refusing to tell you if I’m wearing lingerie or not?”
Behind the square lenses, his brown eyes went wide. “Did I say that?” He looked over to Luke, his expression turning beseeching. “Man, I was just talking about our old football days. Remember that game against Xavier? We were what? 14-13, right before you caught the ball and ran for eighty-seven yards? Jesus.” He slapped his hand against his jean-clad knee. “Best day of my life right there. Best moment.”
“Your best moment?”
The timbre of Luke’s voice sent a note of wariness chasing down Anna’s spine. A quick glance at his posture revealed tense shoulders and an even tenser jaw. His white-knuckled grip on the cane was just another indicator that Luke O’Connor was not pleased.
Not that Capton Dick took notice.
Kicking back in his chair, Aaron drained the rest of his beer and lifted the bottle in salute. “Definitely my best moment. When you got to the end zone . . . it was like the fucking heavens had opened up. I’ll never forget it.”
Luke nodded, seemingly absorbing that bit of information, before he ground his cane into the floor. “You know what’s not going to be your best day, Cap?”
Aaron stared at him blankly.
Anna inched back from the table.
Luke smacked the lifted legs of Aaron’s chair with the tip of his cane. Aaron caught himself on the descent, one hand planted flat on the table. “What the hell was that for, man?”
“For being a sexist prick. Apologize. Now.”
Nostrils flaring, Aaron threw a condescending glance toward Anna. “How am I being a sexist prick? She works at a goddamn panty shop. It’s one step up above a strip joint and you know it.”
Embarrassment and rage flooded her veins. Her periphery turned hazy, and, before she could even recognize that she was acting very un-Anna like, she tossed her cocktail in her date’s face.
She was done for the night.
Chapter Eight
Guilt was a bitch.
Even worse than guilt? Shame.
As Luke stared at the frosted glass doors of La Parisienne, he felt a heavy mixture of both. The guilt was to be expected, considering that his old buddy Aaron Capton had turned into a complete douchebag.
The shame, though, came as a bit of a surprise.
Luke respected women—hell, he’d been outnumbered growing up and had been force-fed feminist ideology since before he’d had his first erection.
But Aaron’s objectification of Anna last night? Luke had overheard the miserable exchange and yet had only stepped in at the end.
That’s where the shame swept in, and the reason why he was standing on her shop’s front stoop right now.
The glass doors and bracketing glass windows provided a glimpse of the inner workings of the boutique. Women and men moved about the aisles, some clearly nervous as they ducked their heads to avoid making eye contact, others more carefree as they held up hangers and perused the racks.
As was becoming habit, he switched the cane over to his left han
d so he could open the front door.
Luke didn’t know what he’d expected when entering La Parisienne. Maybe it was his own ego talking, but he’d fully expected to walk in and have women go shrieking in the other direction. But other than a few swift glances at his cane, no one made a fuss over his arrival. No doves bursting into the air, and definitely no scandalized glares that a man had interrupted a special haven.
Guess you’re a bit more egocentric than you thought, man.
Guess so.
He scanned the shop, searching for familiar blonde hair and high-as-hell heels. The longer he stood there, the twinge in his hip became a stronger pulse of pain. And the longer he stood there, the more unwanted attention he garnered from the boutique’s clientele.
“Can I help you?”
God, yes.
Luke whipped around, dropping his gaze to a short, curvy woman he recognized immediately. “Shaelyn? What the hell are you doing here?”
His best friend’s girlfriend raised a brow. “I own this place. Better question, though, is what in the world are you doing here?” She lifted a hand, palm faced out. “No, wait, don’t answer. You’re out to seduce a new woman.”
Seduction wasn’t really Luke’s M.O. He’d always gone for women who wanted what he did: no strings attached, casual sex. The minute he left for deployment, the relationship was over.
“I’m not seducing any—wait, you own this place?”
Shaelyn gave him a bright smile. “Guess Brady might have forgotten to tell you, since you were deployed and everything. My cousin, Anna—you probably don’t remember her. Anyway, she owns it but named me business partner when she realized I’m awesome.”
A feminine voice entered the fray. “I named you as my business partner because you have a knack for knowing exactly what our clients want.”
Luke steeled himself against the sight of her. He turned his head, just enough to watch her approach. Unlike on the date last night, she was in her element. She radiated strength and power, and the slim red dress she’d donned hugged her in all the right places.
Her blue eyes were cool when they landed on him, distant, with no hint of the sly wit he’d come to recognize and expect. “What can I do for you, Luke?”
Her tone matched the reservation in her gaze.
Luke balled his hand into a fist around the cane’s grip. He’d fucked up. One look at her face told him that she would accept no less than both of his testicles as an apology. When he’d called her a ball crusher, he’d hit the mark.
“Wait, wait!” Shaelyn flung out a hand to clip Luke in the shoulder. “How do you know my cousin?”
She knocked me over and then blackmailed me into becoming her matchmaker.
“We met at my mom’s shop over on Dauphine,” he said instead, going for the answer that wouldn’t require the family jewels served up on a sacrificial platter.
Brow furrowed with curiosity, Shae turned to her cousin. “What were you doing over there? Were you looking for a new perfume?”
Anna’s lips parted.
Luke grinned.
There it was, that hint of embarrassment. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, crossed her arms over her chest, and then let them fall loosely back to her sides. Her awkward silence was gold. He’d spent almost a full week trying to figure out what exactly she’d wanted to buy, and now here was his chance to uncover the mystery. Whatever it was, it had to be good.
Flicking her tongue out to wet her lips, she shot a hesitant look his way. “Ah, yes, I was looking for a new perfume.”
Liar.
He might not know her, but he knew her facial expressions well enough to realize one fact: she hadn’t come to Herbal Heaven for perfume.
But Shaelyn either wasn’t that well-equipped to decipher her cousin’s behavior or didn’t care because all she did was nod understandably. “Your collection of perfumes is pretty lacking.”
“It’s not lack—” Anna drew in such a heavy breath that her delicate shoulders lifted too. “Anyway, I didn’t have the chance to buy anything. I met Luke and then had to run out the door to grab Jules from practice.”
“Your cousin is forgetting something.”
Anna’s gaze zoned in on his face, and he didn’t have to know her at all to read the DANGER warning flashing in her blue eyes. He tromped on anyway. At the end of the day, it had been his ass crash-landing in a pile of tea bags. He’d been the one forced to smell like patchouli for the rest of the day.
He flashed Anna a winsome smile, taking it with a grain of salt when she mouthed, “Don’t you dare.”
Problem was, Luke was the daring kind.
He shrugged his shoulders, then turned to Shaelyn, who was looking up at him expectantly. “Your cousin wrestled me to the ground.”
Anna’s reaction was instantaneous and one-hundred-percent indignant. “I did not. You surprised me. I didn’t mean to break anything.”
Luke lifted a brow. “You took out my cane.”
“Not on purpose,” she snapped, a pretty flush turning her cheeks a warm pink. “It wasn’t like I saw you and thought, ‘He’s the one. Go for the crippled guy with the cane.’”
Even as Shaelyn stared at them both as though they’d each grown a pair of horns, Luke couldn’t help but laugh. This Anna wasn’t at all like the blonde he’d shared a booth with a week earlier. That Anna had been disarmingly charming, despite being two sheets to the wind.
This Anna was way too professional for his liking.
The blush suited her. Her flashing blue eyes, which threatened his imminent dismemberment, suited her.
Fuck it, but Luke wasn’t ready for it at all to end. He nudged Shaelyn in the side, mock whispering, “And after she threw me to the ground, she tried to pay me off. Shoved cash down my pants like I was a common hooker.”
Shaelyn clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes squinting with laughter.
Anna looked ready to skewer him where he stood.
“Luke, may I see you in my office?” she asked, her tone deceptively calm.
“Should I be worrying about you trying to pay me off again?” he asked, his tone deceptively worried.
After thirteen years in the army, there wasn’t much that worried him. He’d served six deployments all over the world—seven if you counted his last stint in Iraq that had culminated in a shattered hip and months’ worth of physical therapy sessions that didn’t seem to be working.
Anna didn’t worry him.
He was coming to realize that, if anything, she was a balm to the monotony of his life.
Luke O’Connor was quickly becoming a pain in her ass.
As Anna opened her office door and waved him inside, it was hard not to contemplate all the different ways she really could wrestle him to the ground and all the ways she’d feel better after doing so.
His big frame paused to absorb the sight of her office. She’d just had it redone not that long ago, and it was with a burst of wry humor that she asked, “Feeling emasculated by all the pink in here?”
His gaze stopped on a portrait of a curvy woman modeling Shaelyn’s latest design at the most recent New Orleans Fashion Week. “The opposite, actually,” he said huskily, “I can’t help but wonder why I never brought a woman here to pick out something for herself.”
When he lifted one hand off the cane to trace blunt-tipped fingers over the mannequin’s lacy garter, Anna was the unfortunate victim of a good case of lust.
Tearing her focus away from his fingers, she circled the desk and seated herself in her plush chair. Stop noticing how good looking he is. Easier said than done. The man oozed testosterone, and . . . Focus, she needed to focus. “I thought you don’t bother with the seduction period. Better to just get them into bed and get it over with.”
His light green eyes found her face. “Who ever said anything about getting it ‘over with’?”
Her heart threatened to leap straight out of her chest it was thudding so hard. “You did, right before you told me th
at you weren’t interested in getting me into bed.”
He didn’t flinch, but there was a small enough pause in his crooked gait to indicate her words had struck a chord. “You were drunk,” he finally said, lowering his body carefully to the cushioned bench on the other side of her desk. “I didn’t want to take advantage.”
“There’s no reason to lie.” Anna crossed one leg over the other, propping her elbows on the desk. The silver bangles on her wrist jangled against the wood. “I’m obviously just not your type.”
In a second that felt a lot like forever, he studied her. She felt that one look as acutely as if he’d physically touched her.
“It’s like I told you at the bar. I’m not interested in anyone right now.”
Maybe, maybe not.
Either way, Anna wanted the upper hand in this situation. “In case you were wondering, you aren’t my type either. I prefer the men I date to be less . . .”
His eyes narrowed. “Manly?”
Yes. No. “Of course not.”
“Crippled?” he uttered the word as though it’d been ripped from deep in his soul. “Broken?”
Was that how he saw himself? A broken version of the man he once was? As much as she suddenly wished to offer him comfort, Anna didn’t think that he’d be game for anything that closely resembled pity.
“I was going to say that I prefer men who have a soft side.” She gestured toward the cane. “Even with the cane, you seem like the type of guy who likes things a bit rough.”
The corners of his mouth lifted in a panty-dropping grin. “Are you saying you don’t?”
I don’t know.
Two sexual partners, the last one of which didn’t really count because it had lasted all of five minutes five years ago, didn’t give her much experience in the bedroom department. But she refused to let Luke notice her hesitancy—or, worse, notice that Anna was on the verge of asking him to show her all the ways he knew how to treat a woman in bed.
She covered her interest with a dismissive scoff. “I prefer when things are orderly.”
He laid the cane across his lap, hands resting on the bench on either side of his hips. His legs spread in that typical guy way that tempted a woman to crawl into the V of his hard thighs and get down on her knees.
