Loverboy (The Company #2) - Sarina Bowen Page 0,14

make a suggestion about the bar, he’d make the opposite one.”

“I’ll bet he’s super attractive.” My sister gives me a smirk. “He is, isn’t he?”

“Maybe. Why does that matter?”

“Honestly, that summer you never stopped talking about how much he drove you crazy. I just assumed you had a thing for him.”

“I didn’t,” I sigh. “Okay, I did. I used to feel a little sweaty every time he even glanced at me. Anyone would. He’s the kind of hot that knows he’s hot. He’s got this irritating smile. I call it the loverboy smile. He uses it as a weapon.”

“The horror,” Ginny says, grinning. “Which flavor of hot are we talking about anyway?”

“Abercrombie model hot,” I grumble. “Tousled blond hair, strong arms, legendary butt.” Just thinking about him makes me agitated.

“Did you ever …” She clears her throat suggestively.

“No way,” I say a little too quickly. “He, uh, propositioned me a couple of times, though.”

My sister blinks. “And you turned him down?”

“Of course I turned him down! I was nineteen. And …” I sigh.

“A virgin,” my sister finishes. “I forgot about that.”

Ginny and I weren’t very close during those years. She was busy getting drunk, getting tattoos, and saying yes to the men who propositioned her. I was busy trying to be her polar opposite. We were both fighting our father’s war, but not as allies. We know better now.

“It was a strange time,” I admit. “Spalding had just shown up in my life. And Daddy liked him a lot. He couldn’t shut up about Spalding.”

“Is that why you chose him?” She winces.

“He seemed safer.” I swivel on the couch, squirming under the weight of this conversation. “He was safer, I guess. He wasn’t always asking me for sex.”

“He was too busy gelling his hair,” Ginny says wryly.

My ex is vain, it’s true. But that wasn’t our real problem as a couple. We were just wrong for each other. I knew it, too. Even when I was nineteen years old, looking across the bar at Spalding’s preppy good looks, I didn’t feel the pull. There was none of the achy heat that I felt whenever Gunnar Scott placed a hand on my elbow to reach past me for the grenadine or the olives.

I was afraid of that feeling—that frisson of danger Gunnar gave me. But Spalding seemed more manageable. Easier to control. Whereas Gunnar made sexy offhand suggestions about how we might spend time together, Spalding took a different tack. He’d sit at the bar, order a martini and then politely ask me out.

“You and I would make a good couple,” he’d said. “We’d be the envy of the Upper East Side.” He’d said it so easily—as if our pairing was something the world needed.

Even at nineteen—and I was a naïve nineteen—I’d understood that Spalding was a spoiled firstborn son. He had a way about him, as if life was one big gourmet menu he could order from. As if the world owed him praise, and also a cookie.

I didn’t mind as much as I should have, though, because I was the cookie he wanted.

Even so, I was a busy girl—too caught up in the day-to-day work at the bar to bother with college boys, no matter how hot or charming. I turned both Gunnar and Spalding down, inadvertently playing coy while I worked my butt off. Who could date when she got off work at two a.m.?

And who would I even choose? The dangerous boy whose dirty insinuations were probably just mocking me? Or the smooth-talking rich kid who wanted to impress me with a three-hundred-dollar dinner at Per Se?

In the end I didn’t have to choose. Gunnar kissed me just once, proving beyond any reasonable doubt that I couldn’t possibly handle myself with him, even if I could summon the courage to try. But then he disappeared and never came back.

And the next time Spalding asked me out, I finally told him yes.

After long moments of silence, I find myself staring into my wine glass while my sister watches me cautiously. “Psst. Posy!” She whispers. “Where did you go?”

“No place good,” I grumble.

“Tell me about Gunnar. Why do you think he won’t last a day in your shop?”

My shrug is listless. “I don’t know how coffee works in California, but he seemed incapable of operating Lola. Maybe he’s so hot the clients didn’t notice that their drinks were wrong.”

“Maybe,” my sister says dreamily. “I think I might have to swing by on Monday before work and test out his