East Rising (Naive Mistakes #2) (2 page)

Who am I kidding? She took
home
guys
, period.
I never took anyone home. I hadn't been with anyone since Conall
had left the states about six months earlier. And before him I'd
never been with anyone either. Not really.

"
Luff?
Thinking about your beau
again?"
Finking
.
Her hand was on mine. My gaze was on the sheets of rain splashing
down on the cars outside.

I shook my head, smiled wanly. "Is it that
obvious?"

"Well, I said a few things to you and you
never heard me."

Her sweet blue eyes quivered with concern.
"Oh, just forget it!" I said, leaning back in my very uncomfortable
wooden chair and crossing my arms. My gaze fell briefly to my
book.

"And, any good?" Dani asked me, catching
what I was looking at.

I shrugged. "It's hot, very steamy."

She snatched it again. "E.L. James hot?"

I shrugged again.

"Oh, right, you've never
read that, have you?" I shook my head, my mind still firmly on what
it was
always
on...

"Talk to me," I said to her, leaning forward
on the table and scrunching my shoulders. "Distract me."

It was lunch-time. Dani and I always met up
at Starbucks — the one inside the Tesco, which is like a UK-version
Wal-Mart or Target — and spoke about shit. If we worked the early
shift, we met at lunch-time. If we worked the late shift, we met at
lunch-time. If we worked no shift, lunch-time we'd meet at
Starbucks. She was like my second Kayla (my bestest friend in the
whole universe who was now so deeply in love with Brad from
Bushwick that it had only enhanced my own loneliness when I'd been
back home.) I was happy for Kayla. I really was. So fucking happy
that it hurt all the way down to the bottom of my stomach.

"Well, a hot guy came over just after you
left work," said Dani. "Blue eyed. A little pudgy around the belly,
but, hell, who am I to complain?"

I waited for it. When it didn't come, I
raised my eyebrow suspiciously.

"And I'm seeing him tonight." She blushed as
she'd said it. That was Dani, loose as a child's laces but shy as a
new kid in kindergarten.

I gave a half-chuckle and shook my head.

"Hey! Beats sitting here
every afternoon losing yourself in book boyfriends you know you're
never going to meet,
luff
." She picked up the book once
more and threw it on the table to emphasize the point.

Only, Dani was wrong.
Conall
was
that
boyfriend. He
was
that man. He was my
Travis
Maddox
, my
Dean
Holder
, my everything...

"He's stopped texting me," I said to her.
This statement shocked her. Dani was light-hearted — as Kayla was —
but this was beyond joking. The one thing Conall had always done
was answer me back, to tell me he was coming back, to tell me that
he would explain it all when we got together. Now there was just
silence.

Fucking
coward
, I thought now.

"When was the last time you got a message
from him?"

I fought the tears back, steadied my chin,
tried to answer, but ended up taking a sip of my coffee
instead.

Damn it. This guy had fucked me up. He'd
fucked me up big time. And I had no idea why. Or why I even hoped
he would still see me one more time, finally settle things, tell me
to my face that he'd lied. I deserved at least that much, didn't
I?

"I still don't understand why you don't just
show up at his work, tell him he's a fucking arsehole in front of
the secretary he's probably doing, and then have it over with?"
said Dani.

I rolled my eyes.

"Yes, yes, I've heard your
'pride' speech. But if someone had screwed me over the way your Mr.
Wrong has done you, I'd have done that. I'd have gone right to his
turf and given him a piece of my mind, and a backhand.
And
a knee to the
cahoonies." Dani sat back, cross-legged, arms folded, looking like
a bouncer who hadn't quite reached full-age yet.

I sat silent. She looked at me from the
corner of her eye. "I'm getting a coffee," she said finally.

She came back with a Frappuccino the size of
my arm, with extra cream, and sauce, and probably an extra shot of
espresso as well.

"Still drinking the good stuff, I see," I
said, my mood lightening at its sight.

"Well, I know I'm supposed to be a
replacement for your Kayla friend, so I'm trying. All I need are
the extra earrings, although I think I'm getting close..." She
turned her ears left and right to me, showing me the two extra
piercings she'd gotten. She was up to four on each side now. Shave
the side of her head and she'd be a tubbier version of Kayla.

I laughed.

"Anyway, all this
decadence" — she licked the cream lasciviously and eyed me like I
was the latest hot guy she was going to jump — "is making me think
of something
much
more interesting..." She licked her lips. "Any news from
Green-Eyes?"

The mention of the grinning guy of a
week-or-so earlier gave me an unsteady feeling at the pit of my
stomach, like lead had dropped in it. But it also made me
smile.

Why did he do that to me? I'd seen my fair
share of hot looking dudes at the pub. Hell knows a bunch of them
tried to flirt with me. None of them even got a featherweight of an
effect on me. And yet, this guy, this smirking guy who'd happened
to be at Starbucks two days in a row and who had somehow gotten me
even to flirt with him, had made me — if only for a nanosecond —
forget the one and only guy I'd ever loved.

Dani noticed my involuntary smile. I took a
long swig of coffee, sat back in the uncomfortable chair and
started reading my paperback, imagining, while the author told me
about lingerie and seduction, that it was my Green-Eyed-Boy. And
me.

My
boy. That's what I called him, because in my mind, they were
all mine.

And they never left me.

"The name's Dorian. Dorian Brant."

The statement, in a
rumbling baritone, spoken to me while I'd been pouring some
friendly old guy a draught beer at
Jolly
Roger
, from behind the counter, came to me
with such precision and strength that, even though I wasn't talking
to anyone else, I knew it had been aimed at me. I turned my head,
my hand pushing down on the draught lever, my other holding the
glass, and then I went blank, everything stopped, and the beer
spilled. I dropped the glass. My black uniform pants were now all
wet and I smelled like the back alley of a pub after a long Friday
night. The glass had smashed. The old guy said, "Oh, goodness,
dear. Are you alright?" I turned my head down to the glass, but my
mind was still on Green-Eyes,
my
Green Eyes, who'd just introduced himself, and I
said, "Uh, um, er..."

And then I ran away, into
the back, practically knocking Dani over as I tried to find
somewhere to hide (a hole? under a bed? the friggin states!?) as
well as wash myself off. I didn't get far. To get to the bathrooms
I'd have to actually walk out into the main pub area. And green
eyes, no,
Dorian Brant
(God, the name gave me dreamy shivers) was out there... And he
was tall. And he had the kind of eyes that...

Right. Then it hit me. Why
I'd been reacting like this. No,
over-reacting
. Dorian Brant had eyes
like Conall Williams: Different color, same effect.

And that was bad. That
was
very
bad.
Because, in their presence, I'd been Jell-O. And the last time that
kind of eyes had hypnotized me, I fell. And I fell fuckin hard,
down the cliff and into the rocks, washed out into the ocean and
still not returned... Until these new eyes had caught me. Not blue,
green. Green as unripe tomatoes, deep as the Grand Canyon, alive as
my skin under Conall's touch.

Fuck. This wasn't bad. This was a potential
catastrophe of titanic proportions...

I gathered my wits and,
with whatever respectable amount of pride one can muster when one
is covered in Guinness, I pulled my shirt straight (it was very
wet), hitched up my pants (
soaking
) and opened the door to the
main pub area, hoping to dart a beeline straight to the women's
bathroom. Only, when I opened the door, you guessed it, I didn't
walk straight into him, but almost.

He was leaning back on a
railing (holy mother this dude was
tall!
), legs crossed (oh so smooth)
and grinning, arms folded over his friggin
huge
chest. Not ripped, huge. Very
huge. "Rub against my cheek while you're screwing me"
huge.

And that grin, that endless, toothy grin...
I knew, right then, right there, that I was going to come to hate
that grin, almost as much as I hated his emerald-beautiful eyes.
Hated the grin. Hated it so much. I despised that grin so utterly
that the damn thing, as I stood there, made me smile, and then
laugh, and then feel like a little girl in the hands of this
strong, clearly older, and exceedingly confident man.

Just like I'd been with Conall.

I was
so
screwed...

Deep Baritone Dorian Brant
chuckled along with me, staring at my beer-sodden pub uniform,
dimples forming on his over-confident face.
Damn!

"I think I should..." I pointed behind me,
then ahead of me. "I think I should go, um, get changed..."

"Or not," he said, and he
stared at me with no change of expression. "I mean, you definitely
need to get
out
of
those clothes. Definitely. That, you certainly have to do." He
raked my body with his eyes, slowly, from the top of my head to my
toes, his eyes lingering just a second by my legs. Why there
specifically? It felt like I was being eaten, and Vampire Dorian
was licking his lips of me now.

A wave of "something" coursed through me and
I was suddenly very weak, and very uncomfortable. My smile
disappeared, his remained — just barely visible.

I ran, not literally, but I
was outta there, to the bathroom. I splashed my face with water,
looked at the drops remaining above my eyebrows and on my golden
skin (at least England hadn't totally ruined my Mediterranean
look,
yet
.)

"What the fuck are you doing, Leora?" I said
to myself. "Not again. Not again. So, he's cute, fine — " A
customer came out of a cubicle (red-bordering-on-pink hair,
excessive eye-shadow, milky skin) and smiled at me. She pulled out
some lipstick from her baby-sized purse, put it on, pursed then
smacked her lips. I stared at my hands on the countertop.

"Guy troubles?" she asked.

I nodded.

"You'll manage." As she walked out, she ran
her fingers across my right shoulder, over my back, to the other
shoulder, slowly, sending shivers down my spine. Was that just a
pat-on-the-shoulder-move, or a seductive caress?

The bathroom fluorescents showed up two or
three blackheads on my brow. I splashed my face again, took a deep
breath, and then wondered what the hell I was doing in this
bathroom without a change of clothes!

Dani slammed through the door, out of
breath, eyes wide open, her mouth agape.

"Him!?" she said, pointing in a direction
where Dorian would be right now, if there hadn't been any walls
between us.

I nodded.

"Fuck,
luff!
Forget this Conall
prick.
This
guy is
a fucking
dream
!"

I could sense the lust dripping from her
lips as she said it.

"You can have him," I said, now leaning back
against the countertop, shaking my fingers dry.

"Fuck. That. Shit!" She ran out. A moment
later she was back with a change of clothes for me. "Here." She
threw them at me and they shocked me awake as they hit my chest, a
stray sleeve slapping my lower lip.

"This isn't mine," I said to her.

"I know, the shirt is
tighter. It's time you show off your cups a little, love."
A li'le
...

I shook my head. I couldn't fucking believe
I was doing this again. And in that moment, crashing waves of
questions and, perhaps, realizations, started slapping me.

What was the purpose of
seeing Conall, really? Was it
really
for closure? And why
hadn't
I visited his
work, or gotten an address for him? Why hadn't I hunted the fucker
down, slapped him once across the face and told him he was the most
chicken of shits to walk the face of the earth, on
both
sides of the
Atlantic!?

The answer, sadly, was too
clear for me to remain level-headed about it. Three
months...
Damn
...
What a waste of time. The answer...was that Conall was still mine,
in my mind, as was Travis Maddox of
Beautiful Disaster
, and Dean Holder
of
Hopeless
. They
were all mine, still, and none of them ever left me.

But Conall
had
left me. He'd left me
good. And he hadn't even bothered to be a man about it and tell
me.