“You didn’t know?” I ask, as Jamie launches herself at me and wraps me up in a tight hug.
“About Jamie, yes,” Damien says as Jamie shifts her hug from me to him. “I couldn’t think of a better way to ease you back into reality than to bring Jamie out here. She’s about as real as it gets.”
I can’t help but laugh in agreement, especially when Jamie sticks her tongue out at him.
“But the decorations? I didn’t have a clue.”
“Oh, please,” Jamie says. “It’s a celebration. Banners, balloons, food, drink.” She turns her focus to me, her eyes as wide as if she’d just stepped into heaven. “This place is so well-stocked you wouldn’t believe.”
I cock my head toward Damien and grin wickedly. “It’s Damien,” I say. “Excess is an art form.”
“Watch it,” he says, then lightly smacks my bottom before hooking an arm around my waist and planting a bone-melting kiss on me right there in front of my best friend. “Fuck reality,” he whispers when he releases me. “I want to stay in our bubble as long as we can.”
Yes, I think as I press my back to his chest and hold on tight to the arms he has wrapped around me. So do I.
“And where exactly are we going?” Damien asks from the Jeep’s passenger seat.
“It’s a surprise,” I say. “Now shut up before I kill us.” I’m not used to driving so big a car, especially on narrow, winding roads, but the surprise Jamie and I cooked up would be much less of a surprise if we told Damien where we are going.
He eyes me suspiciously. “The good kind of surprise where I get to slowly strip you naked? Or a bad kind of surprise?”
“Oh. My. God,” Jamie says from the backseat. “I’m going to just melt back here.”
I bite back a grin and focus on Damien. “Does any surprise that doesn’t end with me naked fall within your definition of bad?”
“Pretty much,” he says, and in the rearview mirror, I see Jamie clamp her hands over her ears.
I laugh. “Then I guess we’re deep in the land of horrible.”
He leans back in the seat at an angle so that he can stretch his legs out and examine me. He twines his fingers behind his head. He looks relaxed as sin and sexy as hell. “All right,” he says slowly. “Tell me.”
“You tell him,” I say to Jamie. “It was your idea.”
“We found a bar in Crestline that has a karaoke night,” she says.
“Did you?” he asks blandly.
Actually, Jamie found it, but I enthusiastically agreed to this night out. After the news he got on the plane, I am operating on the theory that the more fun the better. Or I was. Now, I’m not so sure. Because despite everything I have learned about Damien Stark, I cannot read his expression.
“Are you going to serenade me?” he asks.
“Nope.”
“Are you going to serenade Jamie?”
“Double nope.”
“I see,” he says.
My grin falters a bit. Jamie and Ollie and I used to get a huge kick out of karaoke bars, and they were always a cure for a bad week. But Damien is not Jamie or Ollie or me, and considering his current stony expression, it’s more than possible that I misjudged the appeal of this evening’s entertainment.
I meet Jamie’s eyes in the mirror and see her tiny shrug.
I am just about to announce that I was joking and that we are really on our way to a five-star restaurant where we’ll discuss business theory and stock prices, when his mouth twitches and his eyes begin to light with his slowly growing smile. “And here I thought you loved me,” he says.
I force myself not to sag with relief. “I do.”
“And you thought that singing bad seventies songs in public would be a good way to show it?”
I pause at a stop sign, and take the opportunity to glare at him. “Are you mocking me, Mr. Stark?”
“Never,” he says, but his eyes are dancing.
“Mmm. I was actually thinking along the lines of the Rat Pack oeuvre, but I’ll go with bad seventies if that’s what you want. I’m more than willing to compromise.”