Page 5 of The Temptation
“Well, if I think of anything, you’ll be the first person I call.”
Liam tilted his empty glass toward mine, and we clinked them together. “I’m more than happy to stir up trouble.”
Rome located his “missing” boyfriend a minute later, and we chatted for a while before we were all summoned to the dining room, where an elegant five-tiered cake with black-and-red frosting was unveiled.
“Hey, Parker. That looks more like a wedding cake than a birthday cake!” Sebastian called out, and everyone laughed.
“Shut up,” Parker snapped, pointing a knife at him. “Picking wedding cakes is hard work. Sometimes, a guy needs to go through a few test cakes to figure out the right one.”
I stood at the rear of the room, lost in the crowd as I watched Chef Donovan and Declan’s assistant, Franks, lighting tall, slender candles. As soon as the last one was lit, Parker started us all singing “Happy Birthday” to Declan.
As if by magic, my eyes lifted from the cake and Declan’s warm grin to lock with Pierce’s gloomy gaze. In a heartbeat, my brain flashed back fourteen years to when he’d been seated opposite me in my childhood home while singing the same song for my thirteenth birthday.
My heart jumped into my throat and lodged there. My lungs felt as if they were in a vise. I couldn’t draw a breath. Could barely even think as goose bumps broke out across my arms. He was gorgeous. Too perfect, almost. Tall and lean, with dark hair and a tan face with sharp cheekbones. His eyebrows were thick, giving his face an even more menacing appearance. As an undergrad, he’d laughed and smiled so often, destroying my ability to think.
But since my thirteenth birthday—no, since Sawyer’s death—I felt like I could count all the times Pierce had smiled in my presence on one hand. And not one of them had been directed at me. I’d just happened to be in the vicinity.
Standing here tonight, seeing Sebastian, Declan, and even Rome cuddled with boyfriends they adored more than anything in this world, I had to wonder if maybe Pierce was a lost cause.
If Sawyer had been alive, he would have had a wife at his side and a pair of kids at home. He’d made it clear early on that he’d planned to marry not long after college and have two kids before he turned thirty. He’d wanted the American dream of a house, marriage, kids, a dog, and a mortgage.
I was the one determined to be…difficult.
This time, I glanced away first, ripping my eyes back to Declan as he leaned forward and blew out his candles to the applause of all his gathered friends and family. I drifted away as they cut the cake, giving Pierce the space he wanted so he could enjoy his evening with his oldest friends. He didn’t need his stalker hounding him.
The night wore on, and I stupidly continued to drink. It wasn’t all a shit mood and grumpiness. Listening to Sebastian tell stories always made me laugh, and Parker always had a witty quip perched on the tip of his tongue.
It was well after midnight when it became obvious that I was far too buzzed to drive home. Most of the other party guests hadleft. The core group remained, along with a few other old friends. Pierce was somewhere in the house, but I’d lost track of him in my wanderings and drinks.
Right now, what I needed was fresh air. If I could clear my head a bit more, I’d call for a ride to whisk me to my place. But if that was too much work, I’d locate a comfortable couch to crash on. While my bed sounded nice, waking up at Declan’s the next morning meant getting served breakfast made by Chef Donovan. That was not a terrible option either.
Feeling overheated and too mellow, I shuffled through the house to a set of French doors that led out onto a patio. A cold January wind slapped me in the face as soon as I slipped outside, and I questioned my sanity, which was a good sign.
Instead of retreating inside, I took another step into the frigid darkness and closed the door behind me. Heavy shadows blanketed the patio area. In the grass beyond the paving stones, tiny yellow garden lights glowed, but they offered little illumination where I was. Here and there, long yellow rectangles stretched across the pavement from the interior, but I avoided them.
All the patio furniture had been packed away for the season, leaving me with nowhere to sit. That was fine. It was too fucking cold to remain out here for long. I just wanted to disperse the fog from my head and shake off the last of this shitty mood. Pierce rarely got me dejected like this, but the combination of the birthday party and seeing all my friends so happily paired off had left me feeling bitter. It was an impulse pity party, and it was well past time to shut it down.
I leaned on the wall and dropped my head against the cool stone, letting out a long, deep sigh.
“What are you doing out here?”
I almost jumped out of my skin at that sharp question. Surprise had me so rattled that it took an extra two seconds for me to recognize the voice.
Pierce!
“What? What do you mean? I’m getting a breath of fresh air,” I stated, wishing that I could at least sound cool and collected, but I didn’t. I sounded panicked and defensive. It didn’t help that I wasn’t sure where the hell in the darkness he was. Right now, he was a disembodied voice floating out of the shadows.
“It’s too cold to be without a coat.”
I squinted in the direction of his voice, still not seeing him. A scrape of his foot on stone drew my eyes to the right, and Pierce stepped out of his hiding spot, passing through the edge of light cast by one window as he strolled closer. He must have been out here for a while; otherwise, his eyes wouldn’t have been so perfectly adjusted to the lack of light to see me in the shadows. Unless he’d watched me step outside and shuffle to my hiding spot.
That brief pass through the light revealed that he was also without a coat. He drew closer to me—closer than he’d been in a long time—and stopped. His head turned toward the door as if he were weighing whether to continue inside the house or linger outside with me.
“What are you doing out here?Withouta coat?” I asked, a playful lilt entering my voice because I had zero self-control or self-preservation.
His lips twisted into a smirk, and I could’ve sworn his eyes sparkled in the faint light with what looked like humor. “I came out here to clear my head. You’re driving home, right?”
My teeth clenched, and I struggled to hold in an angry snarl. It was as if he still thought I was a stupid teenager without an ounce of common sense. But then, I had very little if I was still chasing him.
