Triple Play

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“Fine. Married.”

He looked surprised. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“Anybody I’d know?”

“His old high school sweetheart. They’d lost touch, but met up again at their ten-year reunion a couple of summers ago.”

His brow furrowed. “Hmm...Laura? Lauren? He talked about her once.”

Her turn to look—and feel—surprised. Not only that Seth would have told Rand about Lauren Desantos, but that Rand would remember her name so many years later.

“We were tight once, me and your brother, even before I became his client,” he said by way of explanation.

He didn’t continue, didn’t say the next logical sentence: Until you came between us.

She had, which was her biggest regret of all. And, possibly, one reason she was being so nasty to Rand. Her own sense of guilt and responsibility still weighed on her.

Rand and Seth had been friends in college, Seth being only three years ahead of the star athlete. And when their business partnership broke up, their friendship had, too. All because Seth’s horny, pushy little sister hadn’t been able to keep her hands to herself. And because Rand hadn’t seemed to mind all that much.

“So you haven’t spoken to him since—”

“No. I see him once in a while, at banquets and events, but we don’t speak.”

Her heart clenched in her chest and she sucked her bottom lip between her teeth. Regret choked her, and she acknowledged again just how selfish she’d been.

“I’m really sorry about that, Rand,” she murmured, aware that the words were long overdue. She’d said them in the letters and messages she’d sent him after their last encounter, but they deserved to be spoken out loud. “I never meant to come between you two. I wouldn’t have...”

“It’s okay. Besides, it wasn’t all your fault. It takes two to tango.”

“Yeah. And you danced that night, too.”

He didn’t smile, that sexy grin didn’t flash, he simply stared at her, his eyes intense, as if he, too, recalled their last night with utter clarity.

“My turn to say I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I shouldn’t have let things go so far.”

She stiffened. “Don’t try to claim you weren’t interested.”

“Oh, I was interested,” he insisted. “Way too interested than I was supposed to be in my friend’s baby sister.”

“I wasn’t a baby!”

Well, she’d been kind of a baby.

They had met a month before Emily’s eighteenth birthday. She’d just graduated from high school and was primed to have a fun visit in SoCal with her big brother. She’d been thrilled to get away from her overprotective grandfather, who hadn’t let her even talk to a guy on the phone, much less actually go out with one. Having been a good girl for so long, she’d dreamed about getting a little wild even before she’d met Rand McConnell.

Once she’d met him and gotten to know him as an amazingly smart, funny, nice guy who was also über-hot, she’d been a goner.

“I was too old for you,” he said.

“Three years...”

“Is nothing now. But then? There’s a big difference between just-turned-eighteen and twenty-one, and I should have known better.”

Rand had graduated early from UCLA—he was gorgeous, talented and smart, talk about a triple threat—and had been expected to land in the big leagues. Everyone predicted he’d be a big star. Seth had signed him, worked with him, helping plan his career, which was supposed to be brilliant.

Well, his career had been brilliant, but Seth hadn’t taken him there. Because her brother had caught Rand and Emily in bed together and not only sent Emily back to their grandfather for the rest of the summer, but had dumped Rand as a client.