“Show me your hands.”
When she failed to react quickly enough to his order, he took her hands and examined the palms. They were raw from her fall but the skin was intact. However, instead of letting them go, he curled his long, sensuous fingers around hers and squeezed. Unexpected tears of surprise stung the backs of her eyelids at his gentle touch.
“Darcy.”
“Beck.”
“How do you want to do this?”
She fought a smile. Barely won. Beck had never been one to waste words. “Seven years in a hundred and forty characters or less? Let’s see. College in Boston, traveled the world, returned to Chicago when Grams had a stroke three months ago. She’s on the mend.”
His eyes softened. “Sorry to hear about your grandmother. She’s a nice lady.”
At Darcy’s eyebrow lift calling bullshit, Beck’s wicked lips shaded a hint of a smile. “Okay, she’s crazy as a loon with a tongue that could slice prune cans, but I always liked her. Do you still draw?”
The lie came easily. “No.”
“And the rest of the family?”
“My parents finally divorced, which was really for the best. Jack’s running my father’s empire in London.” Unlike Darcy, her brother was never subjected to the same pressures to fulfill some grander role in the Cochrane dynasty. No need, when he was fast becoming a clone of her father.
Her turn. “How about you?”
“With CFD for seven years as of last September. That and this place keep me busy.”
So, barely a month after he dumped her, he got his wish and joined his brothers in the service. A small surge of jealousy pinched her. She wasn’t proud of it.
“Your family good?” With difficulty, she dragged her gaze away from his ruggedly compelling face to drink in the sausage fest behind the bar. Luke, with mink brown waves framing his handsome features, was not all that changed except for a slight hardness around his eyes. The tall blond must be Gage; he’d been barely sixteen when she saw him last at Sean and Logan’s funeral. Now he rocked a Hemsworth brother vibe as he impressed a gaggle of girls with a cocktail shaker at the other end of the bar. Mel’s Thor, Darcy assumed.
“They’re great,” he said. “All in. Even Alexandra.”
“Your father would be proud. Logan, too.”
Those shocking blue eyes flashed, and remembrance of that night flooded the space between them. The night they both lost something, and everything changed.
He angled his thumbs to stroke her pulse in tight, erotic circles. Unadulterated lust slammed through her. The power he had over her still . . . it electrified her to the core. Just one look stripped her bare and stunned her with want.
An attention-grabbing cough sliced through the loaded silence.
“Hi, I’m Mel.” Her friend thrust out her hand.
Beck released Darcy’s hands, shook Mel’s, and had already redirected his burning focus back to Darcy before he spoke his name. “Beck Rivera.”
Okay, this has been awesome. “We should go,” Darcy said.
“After you’ve rested that ankle and we’ve had a drink,” Mel chimed in. “A couple of G and Ts, please. Heavy on the G.”
“Sure, coming right up.” Beck wrapped Darcy in an all-encompassing look that left her feeling she’d been touched in an intimate way—and enjoyed it far too much. “Leave your boot off in case the ankle swells. I’ll check back on it later.”
He lifted a wooden flap at the end of the bar and went back to work.
“Okay, spill the juicy deets,” Mel intoned. “Now.”
“Well, my ankle really hurts when I put any weight—”
Mel cut her off with an exaggerated eye roll. “When and where did you do Wolverine?” She gestured violently to Beck just in case there was some confusion about which bearded sex god was under discussion.
“We were kids.”
Mel gave her the don’t-even look, which she had honed to eviscerating sharpness in the years since they had first met at Harvard.
“Popped your cherry?”
Darcy sighed heavily, caught between annoyance it was so obvious and relief her friend knew her well enough to guess. “Popped it, then popped a cap in my heart.”
“Ooh, you so ghetto, girl.”
Funny, that. Maybe if she had been, things might have been different between the Gold Coast princesa and the dangerous, furious boy who had lit her soul on fire. Before he doused it with an ice cold vat of adios.
Mel’s eyes widened in a way Darcy was sure she would not appreciate in three, two, one . . .
“He’s the one you cried your eyes out over all freshman year. The guy your father hated because he was a gangbanger.”
Ex-gangbanger, saved by the Dempsey fostering machine when his biological father died during a drug deal gone bad. Not that she had learned those details from Beck, who shared nothing. Jack had filled her in, trying to scare her away from him.