He listened without comment to all of this.

When I was done he asked, “Did you get your head together?”

I nodded.

“What’d you decide?” He seemed very interested in my answer.

Yikes.

I sat back and took a sip of wine. This was going to be the hard part.

“I need you to take me back to Luke’s,” I told him in a quiet, don’t freak out on me voice.

His mouth got tight but, to my surprise, without a word or a freak out, he nodded.

That said a lot about him. All of it good.

Hell and damnation.

We did the dishes and he took me back to Luke’s. He walked me into the building and when the elevator doors slid open, his hand came to my neck before I could walk in.

He brought me close, his face dipped to mine and I saw the hungry look in his eyes. This time it was more intense because I could see it was mingled with anger or frustration or both. I figured whatever he was going to say was going to complicate my complicated life significantly.

I was not wrong.

He started talking and I vowed that if I ever got caught in a man pickle again, I would choose a man who was not a straight-talker.

“After he gets done with you, screwin’ with your head while he’s f**kin’ your body when he knows you have serious feelings for him, or you get done with bein’ with a guy who would do that, done with a guy who’s thinkin’ of someone else when he f**ks you, when you decide you wanna be with a guy who is thinkin’ of nothin’ but you when he f**ks you, Ava, you call me.”

Ho-ly shit!

What did I do with that?

I just stared, I couldn’t do anything else.

“Do you understand me?” he asked.

At that, I just nodded.

I understood him. Ee-yikes but I understood him.

“Good,” he said and he sounded pissed off. Even pissed off, he still brushed his lips against mine. I registered that the lip brush felt nice while he walked away.

I shrugged off the lip brush, got in the elevator and used the key to Luke’s floor. I did my now familiar holding-of-the-breath-until-the-doors-slid-open-to-Luke’s-loft and I let it out on a gush when they did.

He was sitting at a stool in front of the bar, the kitchen garbage can a few feet in front of him, sorting through one of the piles I made for him (tossing most of it in the garbage, I might add) and eating one of my Milano cookies. He was still in his Tom Petty mood, I knew this because Tom was singing “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” on the stereo.

His head swung around when I walked in.

I opened my mouth to say “Hey” when he spoke. “Where the f**k have you been?” he bit off.

Hmm.

Someone was in a bad mood.

It was about to get worse. I knew it would because I was going to make it get worse.

And I did it on purpose.

Barlow Bitch Blood was pumping so watch out!

“At Ren’s,” I answered.

The air in the room went scary as I walked in, got close to Luke, put my phone down on the bar and grabbed the bag of Milanos. I shoved my hand in the bag, studiously avoiding the scary air and Luke’s gaze and nabbing a cookie.

“Ava.”

I looked at him. He was in his controlling-fury mode, I knew it with one look.

“Yeah?” I asked, sounding unconcerned and a little surprised at myself that I could pull it off.

“You wanna tell me what you did at Zano’s?”

Not really.

Still, I answered, “I needed space to get my head together. He gave it to me. I spent the afternoon at his place, alone, and took a nap. When he got home from work, he made me dinner and brought me back here.”

I’d gone from lying through my teeth every other second to being honest when it was definitely not good for me. I should have stuck with lying. Even though all this was perfectly innocent, I could tell Luke didn’t like it, not one bit.

“Now that you answered that question, you wanna tell me why you couldn’t get your head together and take a nap here?”

I shrugged, being Queen of Calm. Barlow Bitch Blood was apparently latent. I’d lived twenty-nine years hardly ever being a bitch. Now it was coming out in spades.

“Okay, then you wanna tell me what your drama was about at Fortnum’s?”

I was starting to bite into my cookie, I took it out of my mouth and said (back to lying),“I didn’t have a drama.”

“Then what was that?”

“It wasn’t a drama.”

“Eddie said he saw you crawling on all fours.”

Jeez!

This was so annoying. He had sources everywhere.

“I dropped a contact,” I lied.

Luke glared at me and then said, “Ava,” in a very low, very lethal voice.

“I told you, I had somewhere to go. I had to meet Ren so he could help me out.”

“When did Ren Zano become the one who helped you out?”

“Yesterday, at dinner,” I told him breezily, shaking my cookie in the air for effect.

Not a good answer. I knew this because the scary air started pressing in.

Surprisingly he let it go and asked instead, “Where did you sleep?”

Again I was about to bite into my cookie but stopped and asked, “What?”

“At Zano’s, where did you sleep?”

Uh-oh.

Before I could fight back the Barlow Bitch Pull it popped out of my mouth. “In his bed.”

Eek!

Red alert! Red alert! Scary air hitting danger zone! Evacuate the premises immediately!

Then Luke growled in a voice so low, I barely heard him, “You’ve got to be f**kin’ shittin’ me.”

“Luke, it was no big deal. He wasn’t there,” I decided to go back to breezy.

I was standing a few feet in front of him, between him and the garbage can.

He leaned in but kept his seat. I leaned back. I did this mainly because his intensity was kind of scaring me.

“You wanna call Zano right now? Ask him, shoe’s on the other foot, he f**ked you three times, you fell asleep with his c**k inside you, how he would feel about you takin’ a nap in my bed?”

It was then I saw his point.

Then again, if it was Ren f**king me, he would have been f**king me. Not some fill in until he sorted out his feelings for another woman.

On that thought, I lost interest in my Milano and threw it back in the bag. I put the bag on the counter and sifted my fingers through my hair, leaving my hands on top of my head. Then my eyes moved back to Luke.

He was holding his body perfectly still and I got the impression he was doing that so he wouldn’t strangle me.