Passion on Park Avenue (Central Park Pact #1)(20)

She swallowed, suddenly very aware of her ratty jeans and T-shirt. It was annoying as heck that this man could make her feel like a nine-year-old again, wanting desperately to belong in his world.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” he said with a slight smile. “Just wanted to say welcome to the neighborhood. We could use some fresh blood around here.”

So that was how it was going to be. He was playing nice, as though they hadn’t been like oil and water at her interview for this apartment. As though he hadn’t made her childhood completely miserable.

Naomi didn’t smile back.

And it took all of her self-control not to retort that she wasn’t fresh blood at 517 Park Avenue, and if anyone should know that, it should be Oliver Cunningham. After all, it had been his casual lie that had damned Naomi and her mother all those years ago.

But judging from his bland smile? He still didn’t have a clue that he was standing face-to-face with the childhood nemesis who’d once thrown a soccer ball at his face.





SATURDAY, OCTOBER 6

Oliver didn’t have sisters, but he’d had enough girlfriends over the course of his life to know when to tread carefully. Stumbling unwittingly into a girls’ night was one of those times.

The pretty brunette who’d answered the door seemed friendly enough. Tall and slim, she had a refined prettiness that reminded him of the girls he’d gone to prep school with. Thankfully though, her smile was genuine and refreshingly free of the snobbishness he so often saw among what he thought of as the “headband set”: girls whose primary goal had been shiny hair, Ivy League, and marrying money.

But while the brunette was friendly, the redhead he’d come to see in the first place looked . . . well, ready to shank him.

If Naomi Powell had seemed surprised and irritated by his very existence when he’d met her last week, she looked as though she’d had some time to think on it and had come up disliking him even more.

The thought was intriguing. And a little puzzling. Truth be told, Oliver wasn’t really accustomed to people not liking him. He’d heard his mother telling Ruth once that she was almost grateful he’d been such a menace as a kid, because he’d worked out all the bad parts of his personality early on. He supposed it was probably true. He had been a bit of a jerk as a boy, but by high school he’d sort of figured out who he was, or who he wanted to be, and had quit being the nightmare on the playground, so to speak. Now he thought of himself as perfectly affable, if perhaps a bit reserved and sarcastic.

Naomi Powell didn’t seem to agree. Her blue eyes were narrowed, arms crossed, as though he’d brought her a rat from the subway instead of some rather expensive champagne.

“Oliver?”

He dragged his gaze away from the irrationally irate redhead as he finally registered the third woman in the room. He blinked in recognition, quickly filed through his mental Rolodex, and came up with a name. “Claire. How are you?”

Then he winced, as his brain caught up to what he knew about Claire Hayes. What a crap question to ask to a recent widow.

“I was sorry to hear about Brayden,” he said, going to her, and, setting the champagne on the table, took both her hands in his.

She squeezed and gave a brief, forced smile. “Thank you.”

“You two know each other?” Naomi asked, sounding severely displeased about the fact.

“Loosely,” Claire explained. “Oliver and I . . .” She looked at him. “Well, how do we know each other?”

Oliver scratched his cheek and thought it over. Claire and her husband, Brayden, weren’t friends of his, per se, but they’d been friendly enough when they saw each other at the same fund-raisers and holiday gatherings. The New York elite set could be a little incestuous in its connections—everyone knew everyone, but you rarely knew how you knew someone.

“Rob Eagel?” Oliver said, taking his best guess.

Claire snapped her fingers in confirmation. “Yes. He used to work with Brayden.”

Oliver pointed at himself. “Rob’s my poker buddy.”

He didn’t add the fact that Brayden had joined them a few times for poker night as well. He doubted a recent widow wanted to hear that her late husband had generally lost large sums of money before drunkenly announcing he was headed over to his mistress’s.

“How do you all know each other?” he asked politely but also curiously. He and Claire had never gotten much beyond small talk in their various run-ins, but he had a hard time imagining the calm, mild-mannered Claire being close with Naomi. One was friendly and socially appropriate, the other snarly and volatile, from what he’d seen so far.

There was a long moment of silence, and Oliver was astute enough to notice that the look the three women exchanged was loaded. He couldn’t quite decipher their silent communication, but apparently Claire did, because she nodded slightly at Naomi, who gave him the sweetest smile he’d ever seen.

Oliver immediately was on edge. A sweet smile from this woman somehow felt like a weapon.

“Audrey and I were sleeping with Claire’s husband.”

As Oliver blinked, trying to absorb that, Naomi’s smile grew even more sugary. And more dangerous. She nodded at the champagne, fluttering her eyelashes. “Is that for me?”

He looked down at the Dom Pérignon, still too stunned by her bombshell to do anything other than wordlessly hold out the bottle.