The Allure of Dean Harper (The Allure #2)(32)

Walking through the streets of New York at 4:30 AM wasn’t on my bucket list, but I didn’t have a choice. There were no cabs roaming the streets of the Upper West Side and I was too scared to go down into the subway stations. I’d already walked two miles south before I remembered Uber. Fucking Uber. I requested a ride on the app and a few minutes later a small Romanian woman with a head-wrap pulled up in front of me in a white Buick.

“You Lily?” she asked with a thick accent.

I nodded, slipped into her backseat, and typed in my address.

She peered back and scanned over my outfit. “You always run this early?”

“No.”

She veered out into traffic without looking—which was fine since we were the only car on the road—and then glared back at me. “Good. Bad for your knees. Running.”

I stared out the window. You know what else is bad for your knees? Wrapping them around Dean Harper’s hips.

By the time I arrived back at my apartment, I was ready for a full night of sleep. I wanted to crawl onto my futon and burrow myself under the covers so far that I would never wake up again. Unfortunately, when I pushed the door open, I was greeted by a wide-awake and frantic Josephine.

“You idiot! You stupid idiot!” she said, waving a spatula in the air like she was going to hit me with it. Had she even slept? Or had she been awake the whole night stewing because I wouldn’t answer her phone calls?

I dropped my purse on the table near the door and shook my head. “You’re not allowed to be mad at me for sleeping with Dean.”

Her eyes widened. “I’m not mad about that! I’m mad because you just walked home by yourself at 4:30 AM. Dean called me twenty minutes ago demanding to know where you were.”

My heart stopped. “He called you? This morning?”

She narrowed her eyes and studied me. “Of course. You left and he had no clue where you went. That was really stupid, Lily.”

Knowing he’d woken up, knowing he cared that I was out by myself did a weird thing to my heart. The sick, selfish part of me wanted him to be up, worried about me.

Josephine huffed and turned back toward the kitchen, and finally, I registered the smell of fresh pancakes. That explains the spatula.

“It’s not like I could go out looking for you,” she said, answering my unspoken question. “So I decided to make breakfast for when you got here.”

I smirked and walked closer to the kitchen. “I could have been dead out on the streets, and you’d be here, enjoying your fluffy pancakes.”

She glared at me, still pissed. “Pancakes soothe me.”

I edged around the counter, dropped my head on her shoulder, and flashed her my best attempt at puppy dog eyes. “Remember when I babysat you that night you got super drunk last month? When you fell into the ditch and couldn’t get out?”

She groaned. “Please don’t ever remind me of that.”

“Well, now we’re even, okay?”

She pointed to the plate of warm pancakes sitting beside the stove. “Fine. Eat up and let Dean know that you’re home safe.”

My stomach clenched at the reminder of Dean. I knew I had to text him; only a true psychopath would let him worry for nothing. I went to retrieve my phone from my purse and found the evidence of his worry: two missed calls and three texts messages.



Dean: Did you leave?

Dean: I just searched my entire house looking for you.

Dean: Call me when you get home.



I skipped the call and instead shot him a quick text.



Lily: Home.



One word. One word that would guard my heart and make it impossible for him to know how affected I was by the last twelve hours.

“Anyway, how was it? Last night?” Jo asked behind me. I swallowed and stared down at my phone.

The pretend answer, the answer I fed to Josephine and kept repeating to myself, was that the night was fun, simple, “nothing serious”.

The real answer, the answer that I would never utter aloud, was that it had been life-changing. I’d laid on Dean’s bed, staring up at the ceiling with his head between my legs, and I’d begged the universe to freeze. I’d gripped his hand in mine and pleaded for one more second, one more hour, one more night.

But then I’d woken with a start a few hours later, sad to find that the universe didn’t pause…not even for me.





Chapter Twenty-Six


Lily





The suitcase I’d borrowed from Jo had a wheel that rattled nonstop. I would have checked it at the entrance had Dean not explicitly forbidden us from doing so. “We don’t have time to wait for bags when we get to Vegas. Pack light.” I cursed him in my head as the wheel got stuck for the fifth time since entering the airport. I kicked it back into alignment and then locked eyes with the girl standing in front of me in line at the airport Starbucks.

She was wearing Uggs and jean shorts, and rolled her eyes at the audacity of my squeaky wheel. She turned back to her friend and leaned in. “Soo ratchet.”

Did she think she was whispering? I could hear every word she said and I desperately wanted to tell her that “ratchet” wasn’t a real word—not unless she was working from the Kardashian-Webster Dictionary.

“Oh my god, she’s so basic,” her friend said, angling back to get a good look at me. I tilted my head and smirked. I knew these girls. They were the type to sit behind their iPhones and tweet mean shit out into the world.