I Played Their Affair at His Family Party novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Lunch With Theron

Ciara plays the loving girlfriend while Theron asks for the navy dress at the family party. A cold man at the next table has been watching, and he slides into her booth.

Theron took me to lunch on the second of January to make up for New Year's Eve.

He chose the bistro two blocks from his office, the one with white tablecloths and a waiter who knew his name.

He was already there when I arrived, standing up with his arms open.

"There she is."

He kissed me, and he smelled like his usual cedar soap.

I looked at his wrist while he pulled out my chair.

The rose-gold watch caught the light from the window.

"I'm sorry about the other night," he said. "The quarter-end numbers ate me alive."

"You must be exhausted."

"Completely." He took my hand across the table. "I fell asleep at my desk and woke up at midnight."

He looked straight into my eyes and told me that.

I had loved those eyes for five years.

I had thought I could read every look in them.

"Poor you," I said, and I squeezed his fingers.

He relaxed, and I watched it happen, the small drop of his shoulders when he decided he had gotten away with it.

The waiter brought bread.

Theron ordered for both of us, as he always did, and I let him.

"So the eighteenth," he said, and his voice went warm and low. "You're keeping it free, right?"

"Of course. The Preston party."

"The whole family will be there. Both my parents, and my aunts, and a hundred people who have been waiting for me to bring someone home."

He turned my hand over and traced my palm with his thumb.

"I want it to be you."

Three weeks ago that sentence would have made me cry.

Now I tried to find a feeling in my chest and found only a clear quiet.

"Will I get to speak?" I asked lightly. "I heard there are toasts."

"The toasts are only for married Prestons." He said it like a joke he had told many times. "That's the family rule. Each husband and wife stands up at the big screen in the ballroom and says a few words. My father started it forty years ago."

"And girlfriends just clap."

"Girlfriends sit." He grinned. "Don't worry. After the eighteenth, you won't be a girlfriend anymore."

He let that hang between us and waited for me to blush.

I blushed on cue, and I hated how easy it was.

"Wear the navy dress," he said. "The one with the low back. I want to remember you in it."

"I'll wear it."

"Good girl."

I looked down at my napkin until the urge to throw my water in his face passed.

The food came.

I ate slowly, and I let him talk about a client he didn't have and a deal that didn't exist.

I tracked the lies as he told them.

At one o'clock his phone buzzed against the table.

He glanced at the screen, and something went tight and quick across his mouth before he smoothed it.

"I'm sorry, I have to take this."

"Go ahead."

He stood, kissed the top of my head, and walked out toward the street with the phone pressed to his ear.

I watched him through the window, pacing near the curb with his free hand on the back of his neck.

He didn't look like he was talking to an office client.

He looked like he was calming somebody down.

"He's good," said a voice beside me. "I'll give him that."

I turned.

A man had risen from the table behind us and was sliding into Theron's empty chair.

He was somewhere in his mid-thirties, with black hair and gray eyes and a charcoal suit that fit him.

On his wrist he wore a plain steel watch.

I had seen his face once, at the back of a family photograph in Theron's hallway, standing apart from everyone else.

Cade Preston.

Theron's older half-brother, the one the family called the Devil when they thought nobody could hear.

"I'm not here to eat," he said. "I've been at that table since noon."

"You've been watching us."

"I've been watching him." He put one finger on the tablecloth, exactly where Theron's hand had been. "You're the girlfriend. Ciara, isn't it?"

I said nothing.

"My brother plans to give you a ring on the eighteenth," Cade said in a voice with no heat in it at all. "And the night after, he plans to give another woman a ring in the same house."

My fork was still in my hand.

"Both rings are in the top drawer of his office desk right now," Cade said. "Go and look."

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