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Luke’s square jaw went into granite mode and Sephy decided that what would help is if she quit saying she wanted him like that. It would definitely help her, because maybe deep, deep, deepest-down she could acknowledge wanting Luke, but she was never going to bring that up to a level where Luke gained first-hand knowledge of how rubbish she was at romantic entanglements. She valued the relationship they had too much.
‘All you’d need to do,’ she said, aiming for a no-big-deal tone as she steered determinedly away from a suggestion of ‘them’, ‘is stand behind the model and maybe put your hands on her hips, or something.’
‘You really think me simply standing shirtless with my hands on her body is going to sex up your lingerie shoot?’
Sephy swallowed. ‘Yes.’
Luke looked at her like she had lost it. Was it possible he spent so much time on his computer as creative director of his Zombie Freedom Fighter games that he had forgotten what he looked like?
‘Please don’t be insulted or freaked out,’ she begged. ‘Please, just think about it. I really don’t have time to source a professional model and Nora has a photographer lined up who will do the work ASAP at cost, to add to their portfolio of work.’
Sephy could feel herself coming very close to batting her eyelashes or laying a hand on his and letting it linger, but she would absolutely not use her femininity to get this from him.
‘I can give you the money you need to sort this problem,’ Luke said slowly. ‘I can loan you the money if it makes you feel better, but get my kit off, put my hands on these models and sell a sexier image of your lingerie? No.’
‘Why not?’
‘And the fact that you even have to ask,’ Luke said, running a hand through his hair in frustration.
Wait. Luke was now staring at her mouth. Had she just pouted? Oh God. She had. Pouting and Luke were verboten. Gentle flirting she could cope with, but she was always so careful not to let it become overt with him. His friendship was too important to her.
‘I’m a game designer, not a model,’ he reminded her.
‘If it’s your work you’re worried about, we could crop your head out of the shots.’
‘Sephy. Stop. You’re starting to sound desperate.’
‘I am desperate.’ Sephy mentally gave herself a slow hand-clap because that statement was hardly going to make Luke feel special.
‘You’re not desperate. You only think you are because you’ve got a quick fix in mind and you’re too tired to look at it with your business head on.
‘I am totally looking at this with my business head on. I admit it, okay? I got it wrong with this advertising campaign. Played it too safe. I should never have signed off on it.’ She shook her head slightly, as if to reject how overwhelmed, how under pressure, she felt to get this all right. ‘I can’t afford not to correct this mistake.’
‘Everyone who launches a business makes mistakes.’
‘Absolutely, but the ones who survive do so because they fix their mistakes. Come on, a couple of hours in the company of beautiful women. What’s not to like?’
‘No.’
Sephy stared at him as the simple word dropped from his lips to land between them like a boulder.
‘Wow,’ she whispered. He wasn’t even wavering? ‘I thought that last bit would tempt you, at least.’
‘Don’t make me feel bad about this,’ Luke said, standing up.
‘No. Absolutely not. Sorry.’
Luke stared down at her for a moment before turning to walk towards the ballroom’s double doors.
All of Nora’s ‘just ask hims’ must have sunk in deeper than she suspected. She had really thought, after explaining it all properly to him, he would agree.
His emphatic refusal had her reacting childishly. So childishly that as he reached the doors she heard herself emit a clucking sound.
Luke turned around, his expression a mixture of thunder and incredulity. ‘Oh, you did not just make the sound of a chicken.’
CHAPTER TWO (#ubb881ea2-9388-550c-aac5-b8e62c800f99)
Seraphina King had put sex and nakedness and ‘I Want You’ into spoken-out-loud sentences and quite frankly, even days later and watching Daisy for her in an effort to feel less bad about turning her down, Luke was still a little pissed off.
What the hell had she been thinking? Did she really not have any idea how long it took a guy to scour those kinds of words from his mind so that he got to enjoy a platonic friendship with someone like her?
He didn’t care how stressed she was over the launch of her business.
Okay.
He did.
He knew she had been finding it tough ever since her father died. Jeremy King’s reputation in business had to have her stressing over every decision, wondering what he would have thought. Or wondering what her brother, who ran a large property-acquisition company in New York and what her sister, who ran the family King Property Corporation, did think.
Plus, Luke knew her mother going to New York meant Sephy not only had to keep an eye on the estate, she also lost out on guaranteed childcare help, which meant fewer hours to sew and work on the launch.
Even so…
How did she not see that asking him to sex up her ad campaign was crossing a line?
And when he’d said no, like any sane non-professional-model friend would have, she had clucked at him like a chicken.
As if basically calling him a coward was going to help.
‘I now pronounce you husband and wife.’
Luke looked over the top of his laptop screen to where a half-pint Darth Vader was busy playing marriage celebrant to Princess Belle and a slightly dazed-looking Woody from Toy Story.
His smile reflex kicked in as Darth Vader, aka five-year-old Daisy King, decided the only obvious way to mark the end of the ceremony was to knight her newly married toys with her lightsaber.
Not quite what it had been designed for, but she definitely got points for imagination.
Bringing his gaze back to his laptop screen, Luke settled back against the sofa cushions and stared at his new computer-game project brief he’d helpfully titled: What Happens After All The Zombies Are Slain???
Two seconds into staring at it and his concentration wandered.
Helping out with Daisy was the kind of thing friends did for friends.
Helping out with that other thing? Insanity.
Thanks to Lily and Steve Jackson, Luke might not be the same shadow of a kid he had been under his biological mother’s roof, or all the other foster homes he had been placed in, but that didn’t mean he was happy being put on display.
He really had nothing to feel guilty about.
Daisy picked up Woody and Princess Belle and started walking them down the makeshift aisle she had created out of flowers pulled from the garden behind the row of garages that formed the ground floor of the apartment she and Sephy lived in on the King estate.
What he wouldn’t give right now for a dose of Daisy’s unfiltered imagination so that he could crack on with some work.
Actually, scratch that.
He had enough unfiltered, left-field, downright distracting imagination coming from her mother.
Luke stared at his screen and re-doubled his efforts to think about what types of challenges he wanted the users of his new world-building game to have to overcome, because his latest zombie evolution wasn’t cutting it for him any more. Lately, he’d get so far on development before hitting a brick wall, but he had to keep faith that the online multi-platform role-playing gaming community would love his new game as much as the Zombie Freedom Fighter series he had created.
He didn’t get why he was finding it so hard to create this new game. It wasn’t as if he was in the ‘second album’ slump of despair. He had managed to navigate that scary time by gritting his teeth and being so determined to succeed – to better the success of his first game even, that nothing could have stopped him.
So why the problem? This getting to the edge of a precipice and staring into the void beyond had started even before Sephy had thrown him a curve ball.
He tracked the mouse pad with his finger and clicked on his email inbox. If he couldn’t get into the design groove while Daisy was happy playing with her toys, he could at least deal with a few emails.
‘Traitor,’ he muttered under his breath when the arrow cursor on his screen bypassed the fresh batch of business emails and went straight to the middle of his inbox list.
Luke stared hard at the screen.
So, yeah, he thought he might know what had him so distracted from his work, and it all started and finished with the subject line: Get the cleaner in lad…Lily and I are coming for a visit!
It had to be the first time Steve and Lily Jackson had taken a break from fostering, and how had they chosen to celebrate that break? By visiting each of the brood that had flown the coop over the years, so that they could see them in their own habitats and check for themselves that they were all right.
Luke had taken great care over the years to assure them he was absolutely fine. Right up to the inclusion earlier this year of a little white lie that had put paid to the ever-increasing fretting that he was focusing way too much on work and not nearly enough on a personal life.
His fingers rubbed over his chest to ease the stab of guilt.
Yeah. Totally shouldn’t have lied like that.
Because now, if he didn’t come up with a plan and his lie was exposed, he was going to have to endure the unspoken lecture about how they had taught him differently. But worse than that, he would witness their disappointment morph into worry that they’d somehow failed him, and they deserved so much better than that.
‘Mummy!’ Daisy suddenly observed, at the sound of the front door opening, and Luke was saved from thinking about what he was going to do about the email and white-lie situation.
A couple of seconds later and Sephy King walked into her lounge.
Damn, but it was hard to stay mad at her, Luke thought, aware of his eyelids performing the slow-blink thing that they always did when he saw her.
He let the gesture slide because you couldn’t look at Sephy, register all the siren-like qualities – the oval-shaped face, almond-shaped eyes, bow-shaped lips, long jet-black silky hair, and a body that could, and probably had, made more than one man beg, and not react a little.
He was just lucky he had got it down to that small betraying tick.
Especially after what she’d so recently placed front and centre in his imagination.
‘Hey you,’ he greeted, as she came to a stop behind the sofa.
Swinging from her shoulder was the same huge soft brown leather tote exploding with vibrant-coloured interesting froufrou that had got him into trouble the other day. One of her hands clutched a tablet and large sketchbook and the other was wrapped around a travel mug. From the way she was white-knuckling the coffee receptacle, Luke guessed she was on at least her fifth refill of the day.
Dumping the tablet and sketchbook onto the sofa next to him, she let her shoulder slump so that the heavy bag could slip down to the cushions as well. With a hand now free she took the keys that she’d been gripping in her mouth, tossed them into the bowl on the coffee table and moved to flick her long hair over her shoulder with a grace that had absolutely no business beguiling him.
‘Hey you,’ she said on a long sigh, raising her ever-present drink to her lips to sip, before hesitating and obviously thinking better of it.
Definitely for the best, he thought. The snap and sizzle of energy barely kept in check was tangible from this proximity. Or was that the uneasy undercurrent running between them?
‘Did you find a model?’ he asked, really, really, hoping that she had.
‘That would be a negative,’ she said, glancing over at her daughter and taking in the Darth Vader helmet and cape with a slight shake of her head, before sliding her gaze back to Luke. ‘Was she all right for you?’
‘Yep,’ he replied, thinking they obviously weren’t at the laughing about him saying ‘no’ stage yet, then. ‘We went out for the Sunday papers and then she insisted on watching a DVD with me, before getting out every single one of her toys to perform multiple marriage ceremonies.’
‘God, don’t tell me,’ Sephy moaned, ‘Woody has committed bigamy again?’ There was an accompanying and exasperated shudder that had Luke grinning in spite of the new wariness between them.
‘You’d think Buzz would help a buddy out, but he’s obviously seeking out infinity and beyond,’ he said.
‘Actually he’s in my bag,’ Sephy confessed in a whisper. A smile chased out some of the stress as she looked again at her daughter. ‘I found him earlier when I was looking for my tape measure.
Luke wanted to ask her what the hell she had been measuring, given that she was supposed to be looking for a male model to re-shoot her ad campaign.
‘So,’ Sephy made a circling motion with her hand, as if to encompass Daisy’s Weddings R Us setup. ‘Is it only Woody who’s off to jail as soon as the honeymoon’s over, or did my daughter rope you in for a little bigamy too?’
‘Nope. No bigamy here.’
‘Phew,’ she said, blowing out an oversized breath of relief. ‘Not that I’m looking to get married.’
‘And not that I’m asking,’ he countered.
Sephy looked as if she was going to say something, but in a majestic show of self control, she walked around to the squashy armchair and plonked herself down instead.
‘Mummy,’ Daisy announced, ‘I think Luke will come back tomorrow and then you and he can get married like Belle and Woody.’
An interesting sensation spread under Luke’s chest wall as his gaze whipped to Sephy.
Her expression said it all. Comical horror that said in equal measures: ‘What the hell?’ and ‘We so need to remember my daughter has the hearing of a bat.’
Luke wondered if Sephy even realised her hand was rubbing unconsciously over her sternum, as if to chase away her instinctive recoil at the mere mention of a make-believe marriage.
Disappointment ditched its cloak and streaked naked through his head and Luke needed a couple of seconds to work out that Sephy’s reaction should mean nothing to him personally.
He was no longer a young boy facing rejection after rejection and she wasn’t rejecting him for real or otherwise.
The whole world knew Sephy King was marriage-phobic.
He didn’t know why, and probably never would. They weren’t the kind of friends to focus on their pasts and make that about who they were now. They were the kind of friends who bantered, supported and championed each other – but only with the lightest of touches.
All of which was fine by him.
At least it had been, until Sephy had had to go and break the rule she had put in place the first time they had met.
Luke cast his mind back to seeing Sephy for the first time. She had been sitting alone in their local college canteen one summer evening and instantly caught up in the pull of her, he had ended up performing a move so completely uncool, it was only sheer dumb luck no one had whipped out their phone, filmed it and stuck it up on YouTube.
