Peyton smiled and took the seat across from his because her knees had been knocking and her nerves were eating her raw. Then, for long seconds, they just surveyed each other across the table, smiling like a pair of besotted teenagers out on their first date.
His smile vanished first, and he made a mock somber face. “Toad will be very unhappy you took that chair from him—without even doing as I asked. To sit there I make him do cartwheels. Do you think that’s fair?”
She winked in conspiracy. “I just saw him walking with his parents to the tower suites, so he’ll never know.”
The waiter came over, and Luke raised one sleek blond eyebrow, still smiling that unnerving male smile at her.
“I’d be happy to order for you—but I don’t know what it is you like other than that chair.”
Peyton signaled in his direction. “I’ll…have what he’s having.”
A Corona beer sat untouched on the table before him, and as soon as the waiter left, Luke jerked his chin in its direction. “I never drink beer. I was trying to amuse myself.”
Peyton nodded. “Which is exactly what I’m trying to do, too.”
“Ah, and here I let myself believe you’d rethought my offer for CPR.”
She laughed, and his eyes flared, as though the sound had compelled him somehow.
“Maybe.” Her voice softened on that one word. For she was part teasing and part…not. “I don’t even know if you’re single.”
He leaned back in his chair with a casual shrug, and the way he moved was all feline grace. She was by no means blind to the way he stared at her. “Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not. It all depends on the night you ask and the one asking.”
There was a tingling in the pit of her stomach when their gazes held, and her body felt galvanized, from head to toe. “Then to anyone who asks, tonight you aren’t,” she said in a whisper.
Luke tilted his head at an angle. “I’m very single tonight, actually.”
“No, you’re not.”
“Let me assure you I’m absolutely, one hundred percent single tonight.”
“No, you aren’t. You’re with me.”
A long, painstaking silence followed, then his brows slowly lifted upward, and something fiery sparked in the depths of his slate-blue eyes.
Cheeks blazing hot, Peyton dropped her gaze to the table, suddenly wanting to hide. She’d never come on to a guy like this before.
“Don’t.”
Luke’s voice was thick with something she’d never heard in a man’s voice before. She looked up at him, startled. “Don’t what?”
“If you’re going to tease me, then look at me. I like it when you tease me.”
His smile was gone, and the intensity in his eyes did things to her that she’d never felt before. Her insides roiled with carnal hungers, her body hypersensitive and on high alert. Even the little hairs on her arms seemed to rise and respond to his voice.
Thankfully, the server returned to set two cold Corona beers on their table, and Peyton almost sighed in relief as she dove for one.
“All right then, I don’t know about you, but I didn’t order a beer just to stare at it,” she told him, and determinedly grabbed an open bottle and took one long, long swig. Luke chuckled—a low, rumbling sound that caressed her sensitized skin like phantom fingertips—then he lifted his own beer bottle in a mock toast, and drank.
Two hours later they were both a little too…merry.
Luke had seemed hesitant to drink first, but then he’d downed a whole beer within minutes and soon ordered more. They’d flowed into conversation like they’d met years ago, teasing back and forth.
Peyton couldn’t be more dazzled with him if he’d been a live, glowing sun.
Luke Alexander was quick, smart, a total charmer, and genuinely interested in whatever she had to say. “I don’t see it,” he said now.
“What don’t you see? That I’m a partner in the investment firm I work for?”
He took another swig and nodded nonchalantly. “Yep. Don’t see it.”
“Why? What do you know about investment firms? What do you do for a living?”
He shrugged, the move all sexy and aloof and careless. “This and that.” He signaled at her with an emphatic nod. “Nothing as important as that, I assure you.”
Peyton smiled at the compliment, but she couldn’t miss that he was steering clear of mentioning anything about his life back home. But then, wasn’t that better? It wouldn’t do to get too attached to a weekend fling, right?
Luke had such a lazy way about him, a careless, effortless manner in the way he spoke, in the way he leaned back in his chair with an arm draped over the back of it, in the way he absently played with a spoon, lacing it between his fingers and smoothly twisting it around. It was as if he knew he was gorgeous and embraced it.
It appealed to Peyton, the relaxed way he sat, the way his smile was a bit crooked, higher on one side of his face than the other. It appealed to her organized, perfectionist self more than she could ever have anticipated.
Something about him made her want to be so, so bad.
“Do you live alone? Or do you have a special someone?”
He laughed and raised his beer to her in another toast. “Alone, thank God. And it’s staying that way. And you, Peyton Lane? What are you doing here all by your lonesome?”
“Meeting you,” she said saucily.
He chuckled at that, taking another long swig, all the while watching her with those sparkling slate-blue eyes that made her pussy cream.
It was quite interesting, how both of them had been talking for hours and yet neither was even really saying anything. But those stares of his spoke volumes—she couldn’t miss the heated male interest in those eyes.
Or how it warmed her to her very bones.
An image of them entangled in bed made her palms sweat and her inner muscles grip.
Tonight they might have hot, reckless, wild sex and if they did, Peyton would conveniently forget about him as soon as she boarded the plane back home on Sunday.
Her insides heated at the thought of being intimate with him, and by the time they headed for their rooms at well past midnight, her stomach felt like a butterfly war zone.
Instead of taking the gravel path, they walked along the beach, and Peyton removed her sandals and allowed her little feet to sink into the sand. The night sky was clear, dotted with flickering stars and a faint white quarter-moon.