Chapter Two

The studio tilted around Tiffany.

“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Blondie glanced at Piers and back at her.

“Luke?” She forced the name past her stiff lips. “You want to talk about Luke?”

Threes, trouble always came in threes. Someone must have proven that. What were the odds? She needed to work out the odds. First the date, then Lola, returning her call today of all days. Now this guy showing up out of nowhere. Her fingers twitched to write this down, try to find the connection. The pink book beckoned from her tote bag.

“Yes.” Blondie smiled down at her. “His stepmother—Lola, is it? She told me where to find you.”

Son of a bitch! She should never have contacted Lola. That was her first mistake. Nothing good ever came of contacting Luke’s family. Only, with the proposal looming and the way things stood, she hadn’t really seen an option. She couldn’t very well accept the proposal of one man while she was still married to another. “I don’t have time to talk about Luke.” Ever. “And ex. He’s my ex-husband.”

Up went Blondie’s eyebrow. “Um, not according to—”

“He’s my ex because I say he is.” Her breath sawed through her mouth. She forced it to slow down. Nobody but Lola knew she and Luke were still married.

“O-kay.” Blondie held up his hands in surrender. “Whatever, but I still need to talk to you about Luke.”

“Well, hello.” Piers slithered up beside her. His gaze fixed over her head. “And who might you be?”

This was all she needed, Piers asking questions.

“Thomas.” He held out his hand to Piers. “Thomas Hunter.” The name suited him, direct and no-nonsense.

Piers slid his fingers into Blondie’s—Thomas’s—and leered over his slow hand squeeze. “Are you a model?”

“No.” Thomas gave a rumble of laughter. “I’m an engineer.”

“A real man, then?” Piers sidled a bit closer. “You should consider modeling. You have fabulous bone structure.”

“My mother will be pleased to hear it.” Thomas slid his hands into the back pockets of his jeans and smiled down easily at Piers. “Actually, I just needed Tiffany.”

The way he said that made her belly tighten. Her phone pinged. And right on time, Lola crashed the party. At least she’d given up calling and was sending texts. Tiffany had a thing or two to say to Lola about sending hot blond men to her place of work. Men who knew Luke and knew he was still her husband.

“We all need Tiffany.” Piers put his arm around her shoulders and tugged her closer. Tiffany almost lost her balance. “I need her now and you can have her later.”

“Um, no.” Tiffany wriggled out from beneath Piers’s arm. God, she could smack him. His little display of affection was only to impress on Thomas that he wasn’t really a screaming bitch. But then, she only had a few more hours to put up with him. “I can’t see him later. I have a date.”

Piers threw her a look that said he didn’t give a shit.

“Why don’t I take your number and I can call you later,” Thomas said.

“Look.” She needed to shake him off before he screwed up everything. “I—”

“Here.” Piers grabbed the phone out of Thomas’s hand. His fingers flew across the touchpad. “This is Tiffany’s cell and I put mine in there as well. Just in case. You can call me anytime for anything.”

“Um, thanks.” Thomas peered down at his phone.

Tiffany twitched to snatch it and start deleting. Piers really shouldn’t be handing out her number to anyone, particularly not Luke’s friends. Luke was out of her life, gone, over, except for the car. And the divorce.

“I’ll call you later,” Thomas said.

“Don’t.” Tiffany stepped away from him. “I have nothing to say about Luke.”

“Yeah.” He pulled a rueful face. “That’s not going to work for me. I can see you’re busy, so I’ll call you later.”

He turned and strolled his very fine ass away from her.

Tiffany smirked at his broad back. Not if I see you first.

* * *

Tiffany barely stopped herself from running as she crossed the parking lot to her car. As it was she did a quick scan to check that no big blonds lurked in the shadows waiting to spill her secrets to the world. That exit line of his had a bit of a threat hanging off the end of it.

Thank God, the shoot was over. Piers had grown steadily more toxic as the afternoon progressed. A last-minute idea change from the client had turned him feral. She hated her job. Correction, she hated working for Piers, but her options weren’t exactly overwhelming with no qualifications and a high school diploma Daddy had fixed for her. Still, her job had paid for the repairs to her girl.

And there she was. Her girl. Sitting in the middle of the nearly empty parking lot, reducing the cars around her to rolling tin cans. The Lamborghini Miura, with its come fuck me lines and parking-lot hustle. Mee-you-ra: even the sound of it made her tingle.

Except the Miura wasn’t really hers. First, she’d belonged to Luke. The three of them had been twined together—her, Luke, and the Miura—in a fast, wild ride that took your breath away. God, they had laughed and laughed as Luke opened the Miura up and let her eat the highways. Young, beautiful, carefree, and in love. A pang shot through her chest. She wasn’t that Tiffany anymore. She was this Tiffany, the one who was going to do the right thing, marry the perfect man, and love the life she should have lived all along.

Tiffany had started the repairs with the idea of giving her back to Luke. She’d broken the Miura, another victim in the wreckage she and Luke left behind. It seemed right to fix it. That had been the plan, anyway. So why, when the car was all fixed and beautiful again, did she still have it? Daddy asked her that all the time. Even Ryan wanted to know.

Sweat broke out over her skin. Lola, Luke, and that Thomas guy all converging on her and threatening to topple her stack of lies. Oh, God, she had to keep this from Daddy and Ryan. She needed to calm down. It was bad, but not quite hopeless. Yet. What she needed was a plan.

The weight of her book in her tote hung reassuringly heavy against her shoulder. If she got home fast enough, she would have ten minutes before she got ready. Some girls did chocolate, others took long bubble baths, but she had her pink book filled with wonderful numbers. From panic to poised in a few neat calculations.

Nothing could get in the way of her marrying Ryan. She’d been ready for this since the day they met. Ready to settle down and help Ryan grow his career. Raise a few children together, throw fabulous parties for beautiful people, and live the life she was born for.

Tiffany slid the key into the lock and turned. The door rose to stand, as designed, like the horns of a bull. She didn’t want to think about that time in her life. Mostly, she didn’t want to think about Luke. Her secret was still safe. She had kept it for seven years. This was just a minor hiccup, a bump in the road. Well, she would flatten it. A quick call to Lola, and her plan was in motion.

Tonight was going to be one of the biggest nights of her life. She was getting engaged, for real this time. Not two kids, crazy in love with each other and not thinking past what they had in their pants. With Ryan, she had the real thing: a mature relationship, based on mutual respect and friendship. And the sex was comfortable, satisfying, and frequent enough for both of them to feel good about it.

Okay, Ryan didn’t turn her hormones inside out, but that was good. She wasn’t twenty anymore, but staring down the barrel of her thirtieth birthday. At this point in her life, sex wasn’t a two-backed beast that gobbled up everything in its path. It was supposed to be an extension of her intimate and caring bond with her partner. That was how Ryan put it.

The Miura crackled and popped into life beneath her. It licked along her nerve endings like the rasp of a cat’s tongue. Almost four hundred pounds of torque in a decadent V-12 engine, and it was all hers. At least for now.

Light traffic saw her home quickly, and it was still early as she let herself into her Gold Coast condo. Her cleaning lady had been there and left the huge shutters open.

Tiffany poured a glass of a crisp Sauvignon Blanc and stepped out onto the enclosed deck. Fold-down glass shutters ran the length of the room, open to admit the evening breeze. A gentle Latin beat floated in from her neighbors’ apartment. She’d never met them, but she liked their music. Not so much the couple on the other side of her. They liked to party and they liked to fight, and they did all of this loudly.

She looked around the airy, sleek lines of her home. It had been a gift from Daddy after she’d split from Luke. Cool hardwood eased the ache of her bare feet as she carried her shoes into her bedroom. The other bedroom stayed empty for the most part. All dressed up and ready for a guest. But she didn’t have guests here much. Most of her friends were married, some of them even on their second and third marriages. Which brought her right back to Luke.

On her deck, she eased onto the daybed and sipped her wine. Her book sat on her lap. Pink so hot it made you blink with tiny rhinestones swirling and dancing across the cover. She cracked it open and found a blank page. The familiar weight of the glittering pen rested in her hands as she wrote. Numbers. Neat, precise, ordered. No guesswork and no room for error. From the first moment she had learned to count, numbers had been her friends. Of course, Daddy didn’t think much of her interest in numbers, so she kept it to herself.

“Everybody has a gift, Princess. Your gift is to be beautiful.”

And she was, on the outside, but inside she hugged her numbers to her until she got the chance to write them down in her book. If you looked for them, every day was full of small calculations and examples of numbers in action. Carefully she recalled all those instances throughout the day when she’d wanted to reach for her book. When the world swirled into chaos, numbers were the way out. Simple calculations, more complex concepts, they all broke down to the basic relationship between one number and the other. Addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication; predictable, constant, reliable.

She let the numbers work their magic. The panic subsided and peace moved in. This was all doable. First, the special dinner Ryan had called and reminded her about that morning. Tomorrow, she would call Lola and find out where Luke was hiding. Lola had to know where he was. Then she would track down Luke and get her divorce.

Tiffany tossed back the last of her wine. She debated pouring another one. What the hell, she deserved it after the shock she’d had. Her phone blinked with a missed call from an out-of-town number. She listened briefly to the message. Then had to listen again because she’d paid more attention to the voice than the words. Thomas had called. He said it was urgent. It all sounded a bit dirty in that killer voice of his. He wanted to set up a time to see her.

Delete.

She got to her feet and padded through to her open-plan kitchen that faced Lake Michigan. Everything in the condo faced that incredible view. She found the wine and topped off her glass. The last she’d heard from Luke, he was working in an ashram in India. Luke in an ashram! She’d pay good money to see Luke getting up with the sun and meditating. Or even better, Luke doing communal chores like cleaning toilets. She could have had the papers served to him there, but decided against it. Actually, she’d been deciding against it for the past seven and a half years.

The Tiffany who married Luke wriggled and squirmed, not ready to be tucked away forever. Tough shit. Wild Tiffany had run out of time. She took a huge gulp of her wine. It went down the wrong way and she came up for air coughing and spluttering. The problem with her divorce—other than she didn’t have one—was that nobody else knew. Daddy, Ryan, and all her friends assumed she was divorced. Most of the time she thought of herself as divorced. They could all go right on thinking she was divorced, because she sure as hell wasn’t going to tell them.

Why hadn’t she filed for divorce? She didn’t really know, or want to know. Maybe it had something to do with that piece of her that questioned if marrying Ryan really was the right thing for her. She didn’t trust that part, though, because that was the part that ended up married to Luke.

But she missed her sometimes. At times it felt like she had two Tiffanys wrestling for space inside her. One Tiffany knew Daddy was right, her future lay with Ryan. The other one craved the speed of the Miura, top down, wind whipping through her hair, and screaming her defiance at the top of her lungs.

The whole thing made her head hurt. Perhaps if she charted it all out on a graph, she would see it more clearly. She almost opened her book again.

Her phone rang. Thomas. She hit Ignore and checked the time.

Time to get beautiful.