Put Me Back Together(18)

Brandon had never contacted me before, not once, not in six years.

I felt like I’d been caught with my hand in the cookie jar.

And as gorgeous as the cookie jar was, I was furious with myself. What had I been thinking? That I could break my rules with no consequences? That six years ago had never happened? That I could be just like everybody else? That was a laugh.

Just before I’d fallen asleep I’d made myself a promise. No more Lucas.

If for no other reason than because I was pretty sure he would probably break my heart and I was already broken in so many other ways. I needed to keep my heart intact.

Lucas was bad news. He was out of my league. He was one hundred percent trouble.

We finally made it to the front of the line and I followed Emily into the pounding beat of the club. The girls made a beeline for the standing tables clustered in front of the bar at the back of the first floor, and Em and I took drink orders. As we pushed our way through the crowd to the bar, I was about to comment to Em that Sally would be disappointed—I didn’t see a single guy anywhere, only girls—when she grabbed my arm so tightly I jumped.

“Katie, look who it is!” she said gleefully into my ear. “Why don’t I let you order the drinks?”

I craned my neck to catch a glimpse of who she was pointing at—why was I always stuck behind people who were so much taller than me? Through the crowd I spotted broad shoulders under a black t-shirt, dark hair, those honey-coloured eyes focused downward on the drink he was mixing, and, as he handed the drink over the bar, those dangerous dimples.

Our bartender was none other than bad-news-out-of-my-league-one-hundred-percent-trouble Lucas.





6





I turned back to my sister to tell her she could make the drink order while I went and hid in the bathroom—okay, I wasn’t going to tell her that part—but she was nowhere to be found.

Great.

I considered going to one of the other bars, but I didn’t know exactly where they were. Besides, it was a Friday night and the place was packed. It would take me an hour to get back to our table with all the drinks, by which time the girls would have probably disappeared onto the dance floor.

I glanced hopefully up and down the bar, checking if there was another bartender on duty on a night as busy as this, but no such luck. All I saw was Lucas and his crowd of adoring fans. Accepting my fate with a sigh, I half-heartedly placed my elbow on the bar, waiting my turn. My face felt heavy with all the makeup those evil harpies had painted on me and the contacts were making my eyes burn. I desperately wanted to yank them out of my eyes, but how would I even get in there with all the mascara in the way? (I’d drawn the line at the fake eyelashes.) I closed my eyes to try to ease the burning, and when I opened them again Lucas was standing in front of me.

Considering what I looked like, I was a little surprised at his reaction. He smiled warmly and asked how I was, then leaned forward so I could hear him better.


“Is your sister here with you?” he asked.

I gave him a confused look. Lucas had barely shown any interest in Emily before. “Yeah,” I said. “She’s over there somewhere.” I gestured over my shoulder, nearly hitting the girl standing behind me in the eye. She seemed pretty irritated, not because I’d almost blinded her, but because I was taking up so much of Lucas’s time. I mumbled an apology and she raised her voice as she called out her drink order to him for the third time. He ignored her.

“I don’t see her,” he said as he peered into the dark, trying to locate our table.

When he looked back at me again, he said, “I like your hair,” and I looked down at my dark locks hanging over my shoulder, super-straight tonight because of the magic flat iron Melissa had provided.

It suddenly dawned on me why Lucas was asking about Emily.

“Lucas, it’s me,” I said. “It’s Katie.”

The grin slipped off his face. His eyes widened with surprise and then darkened with something else as they moved from my eyes to my lips and then downward to the insanely tight black top I was wearing. Sally had wanted me to wear nothing but a black bra underneath the see-through material, but I’d insisted on wearing a camisole. She’d produced the laciest one I’d ever seen from her bag of tricks and pulled it over my head. I noticed Lucas’s gaze lingering on that lace stretched across my chest and the generous amount of cleavage just above it. More cleavage than I’d ever shown in my life, that was for sure. I felt my neck flushing, the redness creeping up to my cheeks. As much as being stared at made me want to break something, I had to admit the guy sure knew how to make a girl feel seen.

“Katie?” Lucas said. His voice was thick and at least two octaves lower than it had been a minute ago.

“You know, you might recognize me a little better if you looked at my face,” I snapped.

“Oh, I…right,” he said. Now his eyes were planted firmly on the bar in front of him. “You’re not wearing your glasses.”

“Emily made me put on these ridiculous blue contacts,” I replied. “She says brown eyes are boring.”

“She doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Lucas muttered so low I wasn’t sure if I’d heard him correctly. He cleared his throat and suddenly he was all business. “What’ll you have?” he said, picking up a cocktail glass.