It’s In His Kiss. Eve DevonЧитать онлайн книгу.
CHAPTER TWO
Seraphina King had put sex and nakedness and ‘I Want You’ into spoken-out-loud sentences and quite frankly, even days later and watching Daisy for her in an effort to feel less bad about turning her down, Luke was still a little pissed off.
What the hell had she been thinking? Did she really not have any idea how long it took a guy to scour those kinds of words from his mind so that he got to enjoy a platonic friendship with someone like her?
He didn’t care how stressed she was over the launch of her business.
Okay.
He did.
He knew she had been finding it tough ever since her father died. Jeremy King’s reputation in business had to have her stressing over every decision, wondering what he would have thought. Or wondering what her brother, who ran a large property-acquisition company in New York and what her sister, who ran the family King Property Corporation, did think.
Plus, Luke knew her mother going to New York meant Sephy not only had to keep an eye on the estate, she also lost out on guaranteed childcare help, which meant fewer hours to sew and work on the launch.
Even so…
How did she not see that asking him to sex up her ad campaign was crossing a line?
And when he’d said no, like any sane non-professional-model friend would have, she had clucked at him like a chicken.
As if basically calling him a coward was going to help.
‘I now pronounce you husband and wife.’
Luke looked over the top of his laptop screen to where a half-pint Darth Vader was busy playing marriage celebrant to Princess Belle and a slightly dazed-looking Woody from Toy Story.
His smile reflex kicked in as Darth Vader, aka five-year-old Daisy King, decided the only obvious way to mark the end of the ceremony was to knight her newly married toys with her lightsaber.
Not quite what it had been designed for, but she definitely got points for imagination.
Bringing his gaze back to his laptop screen, Luke settled back against the sofa cushions and stared at his new computer-game project brief he’d helpfully titled: What Happens After All The Zombies Are Slain???
Two seconds into staring at it and his concentration wandered.
Helping out with Daisy was the kind of thing friends did for friends.
Helping out with that other thing? Insanity.
Thanks to Lily and Steve Jackson, Luke might not be the same shadow of a kid he had been under his biological mother’s roof, or all the other foster homes he had been placed in, but that didn’t mean he was happy being put on display.
He really had nothing to feel guilty about.
Daisy picked up Woody and Princess Belle and started walking them down the makeshift aisle she had created out of flowers pulled from the garden behind the row of garages that formed the ground floor of the apartment she and Sephy lived in on the King estate.
What he wouldn’t give right now for a dose of Daisy’s unfiltered imagination so that he could crack on with some work.
Actually, scratch that.
He had enough unfiltered, left-field, downright distracting imagination coming from her mother.
Luke stared at his screen and re-doubled his efforts to think about what types of challenges he wanted the users of his new world-building game to have to overcome, because his latest zombie evolution wasn’t cutting it for him any more. Lately, he’d get so far on development before hitting a brick wall, but he had to keep faith that the online multi-platform role-playing gaming community would love his new game as much as the Zombie Freedom Fighter series he had created.
He didn’t get why he was finding it so hard to create this new game. It wasn’t as if he was in the ‘second album’ slump of despair. He had managed to navigate that scary time by gritting his teeth and being so determined to succeed – to better the success of his first game even, that nothing could have stopped him.
So why the problem? This getting to the edge of a precipice and staring into the void beyond had started even before Sephy had thrown him a curve ball.
He tracked the mouse pad with his finger and clicked on his email inbox. If he couldn’t get into the design groove while Daisy was happy playing with her toys, he could at least deal with a few emails.
‘Traitor,’ he muttered under his breath when the arrow cursor on his screen bypassed the fresh batch of business emails and went straight to the middle of his inbox list.
Luke stared hard at the screen.
So, yeah, he thought he might know what had him so distracted from his work, and it all started and finished with the subject line: Get the cleaner in lad…Lily and I are coming for a visit!
It had to be the first time Steve and Lily Jackson had taken a break from fostering, and how had they chosen to celebrate that break? By visiting each of the brood that had flown the coop over the years, so that they could see them in their own habitats and check for themselves that they were all right.
Luke had taken great care over the years to assure them he was absolutely fine. Right up to the inclusion earlier this year of a little white lie that had put paid to the ever-increasing fretting that he was focusing way too much on work and not nearly enough on a personal life.
His fingers rubbed over his chest to ease the stab of guilt.
Yeah. Totally shouldn’t have lied like that.
Because now, if he didn’t come up with a plan and his lie was exposed, he was going to have to endure the unspoken lecture about how they had taught him differently. But worse than that, he would witness their disappointment morph into worry that they’d somehow failed him, and they deserved so much better than that.
‘Mummy!’ Daisy suddenly observed, at the sound of the front door opening, and Luke was saved from thinking about what he was going to do about the email and white-lie situation.
A couple of seconds later and Sephy King walked into her lounge.
Damn, but it was hard to stay mad at her, Luke thought, aware of his eyelids performing the slow-blink thing that they always did when he saw her.
He let the gesture slide because you couldn’t look at Sephy, register all the siren-like qualities – the oval-shaped face, almond-shaped eyes, bow-shaped lips, long jet-black silky hair, and a body that could, and probably had, made more than one man beg, and not react a little.
He was just lucky he had got it down to that small betraying tick.
Especially after what she’d so recently placed front and centre in his imagination.
‘Hey you,’ he greeted, as she came to a stop behind the sofa.
Swinging from her shoulder was the same huge soft brown leather tote exploding with vibrant-coloured interesting froufrou that had got him into trouble the other day. One of her hands clutched a tablet and large sketchbook and the other was wrapped around a travel mug. From the way she was white-knuckling the coffee receptacle, Luke guessed she was on at least her fifth refill of the day.
Dumping the tablet and sketchbook onto the sofa next to him, she let her shoulder slump so that the heavy bag could slip down to the cushions as well. With a hand now free she took the keys that she’d been gripping in her mouth, tossed them into the bowl on the coffee table and moved to flick her long hair over her shoulder with a grace that had absolutely no business beguiling him.
‘Hey you,’ she said on a long sigh, raising her ever-present drink to her lips to sip, before hesitating and obviously thinking better of it.
Definitely for the best, he thought.