One More Time - Ali Parker Page 0,19

this night ending without me fucking her. That wasn’t happening. Not anymore.

“You ready to call it a night, or do you wanna come back to my place?”

Kelly froze with her napkin dabbed to her lips, lowered it slowly, and seemed to be having a hard time formulating an answer. “You want me to come back to your place?”

“If you want to, why not?”

“Oh, I get it,” she said, her easy smile back in place as she kept her light, joking tone. “This is just another brotherly rivalry of sorts, is it?”

This was sure as fuck not about Jared, but hadn’t I been thinking it would annoy him if I slept with her? Since honesty seemed to have been the theme of the night, I kept to it. “Maybe, but it doesn’t change the facts. I want you. You gonna lie and say you don’t want me too?”

Chapter 8

Kelly

I didn’t lie to him. Instead, I’d cracked a joke and told him that what I wanted was to see where the magic happened. I’d meant his practicing his guitar, but then I’d gone and blushed and given the whole joke away.

To his credit, Caleb didn’t give me a hard time about it. He’d paid the bill, ignoring my protests that I cover my part, gave me his address, and then waited for me to pull up behind him in the parking lot.

He was being different tonight, more approachable. He’d actually talked to me openly before dinner, and though he’d seemed a bit distracted later while we ate, we still had a perfectly pleasant evening.

A perfectly pleasant evening that was ending with me pulling into his driveway at his surprisingly modestly sized Hollywood Hills home. My pulse thundered through my veins, and my heart threw itself against my ribs.

Because holy crap! Caleb freaking Larsen, the world’s current favorite guitar son, invited me to his place after dinner. That kind of shit didn’t happen to girls like me, except it was, and I had no idea how to handle it. This was supposed to have been nothing more than an interview, and now I was on my way home with him.

There was no way I was going to be able to keep my journalistic distance, but I’d decided to throw caution to the wind and play along with whatever it was that was going on here.

Caleb’s jet-black truck was parked outside a garage wide enough to take three cars, and I rolled up behind him in my beat-up Beetle. It seemed impossible that it was really him, subject of my biggest celebrity crush, leaning casually against his truck, waiting for me to park and join him.

He looked so effortlessly cool in his black jeans, black button down, and undone combat boots. Black leather adorned both wrists, and his hair was wild and windswept, like he’d driven all the way home with his windows open.

My engine sputtered to a stop, and in a few long, sure strides, Caleb was pulling on the handle of my door and opening it for me. I didn’t need him to do that. I was perfectly capable of opening my own doors, but it was both surprising and fascinating to me that he kept making these gestures.

I stepped out of the car, cursing myself for probably the twentieth time that I’d chosen to wear the heels that pinched my baby toes when I stood, but in the excitement of getting ready for dinner, the memory of the toe-torture wasn’t nearly as bad as the reality of it was.

Trying not to wince, I teetered along the stone path that led to his front door and followed him inside. He pushed through the inconspicuous looking narrow wooden door and turned toward me once we were inside. “So this is it.”

He tossed his keys into a small ceramic bowl on the table by the door and started flicking on lights. It took me a second to register what I was seeing. Which was… not much.

The house itself was stunning, with large rooms and larger windows that allowed for unobstructed views of the city. It had wooden flooring and modern finishes. The entire living/dining area opened up to a big deck with one of those endless pools that sat right at the very edge.

It was beautiful, but echo-ey. Because for as gorgeous as the house was, it was also very empty.

“It’s beautiful,” I said, knowing better than to bring up his lack of stuff. If I’d learned something about Caleb during dinner, it was