Page 24 of She's Like the Wind
Ezra chuckled. “Maybe next time then.”
Gage glanced at me, his mouth in a tight line. I wanted to believe he looked uncomfortable—but I wasn’t letting myself get sucked in.
Not again.
They didn’t stay long. Gage mumbled something about having an appointment.
Ezra gave me one last smile before they left. Gage nodded toward me and turned away.
He didn’t say goodbye.
When the door swung shut behind them, I reached for an oyster and swallowed it, feeling a strange sense of doom suffusing me.
Later, when Aurelie and I walked back toward Royal Street, weaving through the festival-goers and the booze-drenched streets, she asked, “You okay?”
“I will be,” I assured her.
And I meant it.
But not tonight.
I was going to go home, take a bath in my gorgeous clawfoot bathtub that Madame Marguerite had bought for the apartment because it was so French, and work to forget the look in Gage’s eyes when his friend flirted with me like he knew that Gage had fucked me; and now, since he was done with me, I was somehow available to his friend.
It made me feel dirty and used.
It also hurt. A lot.
CHAPTER 9
Gage
Iwatched her laugh.
She was standing under an iron lace balcony on Jackson Square, head tilted back, hair caught in the breeze, coffee cup in one hand, her other linked with Aurelie’s.
Naomi LeBlanc glowed in a way I couldn’t explain, not even to myself.
Butshe wasn’t glowing for me.
I shouldn’t have come.
Shouldn’t have let Ezra drag me to Fives.
Shouldn’t have told him her name or anything else.
But I had because a part of me wanted to talk about her, wanted someone else to desperately see what I’d seen, even if I was too much of a coward to say it out loud.
But when Ezra opened his Goddamn mouth and flirted with her like she was just another pretty thingI’d discarded, something hot and sour curled in my stomach.
She felt it too—the slimy oiliness of my stupid fucking friend because the son of a bitch had done it on purpose. The next time I saw his wife, I was so going to rat the bastard out.
Naomi hadn’t looked happy…at all.
Not like she had earlier, when I watched her—yeah, I did watch her like an infatuated idiot—laughing as people screamedStella.
She looked soft at that moment. So fucking beautiful.
I’d wanted to go to her, put an arm around her, pull her close, smell her.
