Page 47 of Seductive Swimmer
21
Savannah
When Alex first told me that we’d been invited to dinner at Brayden’s house, I thought he meant a work dinner. Then he mentioned Brayden’s wife, Lorelai, was looking forward to meeting me, and I started to think otherwise.
Which is why I am now buried in piles of clothes in my closet, with Bianca on speakerphone, panicking over what to wear.
“Mossy green sweater with black skinny jeans?”
“Too low-cut. Don’t show boobs at your boss’s house.”
“Maroon tank with black blazer over regular skinny jeans?”
“Ohhh yes, with those charcoal booties!” Bianca cheers.
I sit down in the piles of clothes and groan. “What am I doing. Dinner with his best friend, who happens to be my boss. This is weird. It’s totally weird. Right? Tell me it’s weird.”
“It’s not weird, Van. You’re just stressing because you like Alex.” Her words are meant to be reassuring, I suspect, but instead they make me more antsy.
“Of course I like him, I’m fucking him, aren’t I?” I huff.
“Sure, but you alsolikelike him.”
I do. It’s true. Somewhere along the way I’ve fallen for Alex Devlin. Which makes him all the more dangerous because now he has the power to hurt me, even if he doesn’t realize that yet.
“That’s the problem. I do like him. A lot,” I admit.
“And that scares you,” Bianca replies softly.
My phone buzzes with a message that Bianca wants to connect via video. I click accept, and seconds later her face fills my screen. Her eyebrows are raised, waiting for me to respond, but there’s also compassion in her eyes. She gets where I’m coming from.
“It fucking terrifies me. How did you find the courage to give Dex a chance after finding out he lied to you?”
“Well, he took it slow. He didn’t push me about anything, just spent all his time and energy on making me feel good about me, about him, and about us. He made sure I knew that he regretted pretending to be Jay, and he showed me just how much better it was being with Dex.” She’s smirking at the end of it, and I roll my eyes. Of course it’s better being with a millionaire business mogul instead of the bicycle messenger he pretended to be when they first met. “Let him woo you, Van. You deserve a good wooing.”
“Is that even a word? Wooing? You’re meant to be the writer here,” I tease. But her words are landing on their mark. My mind flits back to the coffee maker, and the locks. The ride to the pool when it was raining. He’s been showing me his affection in ways that I’ve been resisting.
I don’t like it when anyone tries to ‘take care of me’. It makes me feel smothered, the way I was by my parents growing up. They took the titlehelicopter parentto a whole new level. Moving to New York, making it on my own, it’s important to me. And letting anyone, especially a man, into my life and accepting his support is hard.
Besides. I don’t want coffee makers and door locks. I want intimacy, respect, and eventually love. The problem is, I’m really not so sure Alex can give me that.
So far, dinner with Brayden and his wife Lorelai hasn’t been as awkward as I thought it might be. Lorelai is hilarious, teasing Brayden and Alex nonstop. It’s actually really cool to see Alex in a social setting. He seems so comfortable in his own skin. Lo, as she insists I call her, has told all kinds of stories about Brayden and Alex from college, and we haven’t stopped laughing. I could all too easily see this happening again the future, and Lo and I becoming friends.
It doesn’t hurt that Brayden is apparently a really good cook. He prepared a Moroccan peanut stew that was full of flavor with just the right amount of spice. We ate with our hands, as per Moroccan tradition, and the flat bread that accompanied the stew was incredible. I’ve never been to a dinner party, or a double date, or whatever you’d call an evening like this, but even I can tell this has been a success.
After dinner is finished, Lo stands up to clear the dishes and I immediately go to join her.
“Let me help.”
“Thanks, we’ll let these two hooligans talk about how amazing we are as we clean up.” Lorelai tosses an impish grin to her husband.
Brayden also seems more relaxed at home. It’s a relief to see that being around me in a social setting, on the arm of his best friend at that, isn’t that big of a deal after all.
Lorelai and I clear the table and head to the kitchen. She and Brayden have an incredible penthouse apartment, with big open living spaces and a rooftop patio. The guys move over to the couches that face a wall of windows as we clean up.
“You’re good for him, you know,” Lo says casually.
My heart thumps in my chest. “What do you mean?”
