Sinful Love (Sinful Nights #4) - Lauren Blakely Page 0,72

impossibly tall silver mannequins on display. The rain on a cobblestoned street corner. She captioned them all.

In French.

He answered them. In French.

That wasn’t all, though. She also gave really good naked Skype strip shows. The best, actually.

Last night, for instance, she’d shown him precisely how a cheektini looked on her succulent ass. She’d modeled no less than a dozen, sliding them on, gliding them off. Yeah, he was okay with how things were. Because at least they had something. He didn’t try to define it, or to pressure her for a declaration. Maybe just voicing his own feelings on the street had been enough. He was no longer carrying that hard knot of tension inside him, that secret knowledge that he was a man wildly in love with a woman. His feelings were out in the open, and somehow that made things better, especially after she threw the line back to him with her note. I want to discover you.

But as he pulled the phone from his pocket, his thoughts of her vanished. Morris’s name flashed across his screen.

“Michael,” the man said in a gruff, gravelly tone befitting a PI. “I got something for you.”

He straightened and glanced over at Ryan and Sophie, who were wrapped up in each other, laughing, whispering. They probably wouldn’t care that he was busy on the phone. He walked away from them and down the aisle that would be covered in peach tulip petals for the wedding.

“Tell me what you’ve got.”

“Meet me in person in thirty minutes. There’s a diner off the highway. It’s busy enough, but far enough away, too.”

Morris gave him the address, and Michael repeated it. When he hung up, he headed to the happy couple and dropped a hand on Sophie’s shoulder. “Hey, I need to take off, but I’m all set on the ring and what I need to do.”

“What’s going on? Client stuff?” Ryan asked. “On a Saturday? Wait. Don’t tell me there’s more trouble at White—”

Michael cut him off. “Nothing work-related. Just something I need to do.”

He didn’t want to say anything in front of Sophie. Not that he was worried it would get back to John, but the fewer people that knew about his own investigation, the better chance he had of gaining information. He’d learned that over the years in business.

“Fine, fine. Just take off,” Sophie said with a pout, shooing him away. “We were going to invite you to get a bite to eat or coffee, but now we won’t.”

Ryan laughed and tugged Sophie closer. “He hates coffee.”

“Well, he could have had soda,” she said. “But now he can’t. So toodle-oo.”

Michael smiled and pressed his palms together as if in prayer. “Rain check?”

She waved a hand as if wiping away his transgression. “You are forgiven. Oh, wait. Are you going to bring Annalise to the wedding?”

Michael stared at her like she was an oddity. That hadn’t even occurred to him. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it.”

“Think about it. It would be so nice.”

Michael shifted his attention to Ryan. “I don’t believe I’ve said much about Annalise, and now you’re telling Sophie to invite her to the wedding?”

Ryan shrugged. “You don’t have to say much. Your constant texting, emailing, and Skyping says it for you. Oh, that and the fact that you were madly in love with her in high school.”

Sophie’s eyes lit up. “Tell me everything. I adore romantic tales of love rekindled.”

He shook his head. “I seriously need to go.”

“Bring her,” Sophie called out as Michael turned on his heel.

“It’s more than a month away,” he shouted back.

“Gives her time to plan.”

Michael laughed once more, pretending he had no interest in asking Annalise. But as he headed to the parking garage, he found himself considering it further. If they were really doing this long-distance thing, and it seemed they were, why not bring her to his brother’s wedding? They’d already been tossing out options for his first trip to see her in a week or so. Maybe they could plan the next one, too.

For now, though, he shifted gears, calling Mindy and picking her up along the way.

“My fingers are crossed for big news,” Michael said as he held open the car door for his friend.

She wrapped her index and middle fingers together. “Me, too.”

At the diner, Morris was working his way through a mug of coffee when Michael slid across from him, shaking his hand in greeting. Mindy said hello, too, and sat next to Michael. Fifties music played on