CRUEL KING (Cruel #7)

2. Gavin

2

GAVIN

“Holy s**t, King. I know you pull hot girls, but that girl?” Blake Holliday asked to my left.

Yeah.

That girl.

I watched Whitley Bowen traipse out of Percy Tower in that ridiculous fur coat with lavender hair swishing at the same tempo as her ass. Seeing her had momentarily paralyzed me. I couldn’t even get words out.

Blake wasn’t wrong. I could get with plenty of hot girls. Even by my own standards, I was a notorious playboy. I’d dated celebrities and models and socialites alike. I had a different girl on my arm at every event. None of them made much of an impression on me. In fact, I’d been so bored the last couple months that I showed up stag to events. My friends joked that I’d gone through every eligible woman in Manhattan. But that wasn’t it. I was just over the monotony.

None of them were Whitley Bowen.

A certified wrecking ball, who tumbled through relationships about as destructively as I did. We had been close friends for a few short years before we crossed a line we could never come back from.

“Who was that?” Merritt Locke asked next to me.

I glanced over at the guy who was soon-to-be family. In a month, Locke would be marrying my cousin back home in Midland, Texas. New York royalty officially merging with the King oil dynasty.

A wedding that I still didn’t have a date for.

“That was Whitley Bowen.”

Blake and Locke exchanged a look. They’d been best friends since their Stanford days, when they both were college swimmers. Now, Locke was Olympics bound, the fan favorite. I thought he had a real shot at gold. And Blake was returning to New Mexico were his family ran a ski resort.

“Can’t believe you let a girl like that walk away,” Blake said.

Again.

I didn’t say that out loud, but it was an echo through my mind. I’d let that girl walk away once before and regretted it. I damn well wasn’t doing that again.

I winked at them. “Gentlemen.”

Then, I dashed out of Percy Tower, my lunch plans forgotten as I chased after Whitley. She had a head start. If she wanted to escape me, she could thoroughly disappear into the New York City traffic.

But when I rounded the corner, looking right and left, hoping to catch a glimpse of her lavender hair, I found her with her hand against the building, taking a deep breath. She hadn’t run away at all.

“Whit,” I called, catching up to her.

She jolted. For a split second, we were back in time. Three years ago, when I’d chased after her after the Fashion Week debacle. I wanted to make things right after what happened with Robert. But when I’d slipped outside, looking for the rush of tulle, she’d already sunk into a cab and disappeared from my life forever.

I didn’t regret much in my life, but I regretted everything about that day.

“Hey,” she said, a wide smile hiding any trace of fear from her face. “What are you doing out here?”

“What am I doing out here? Whit, you’re in New York.”

“I am.” She shrugged. Her petite shoulders barely noticeable under the mound of fur. “But weren’t you in a business meeting or luncheon or something?”

“Oh, that? No, Locke is marrying my cousin.”

She arched an eyebrow. Right. She hadn’t been here when Locke moved back to New York. She hadn’t been here for any of it.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said in a rush. “What are you doing here? And dressed like this?”

“What? Can’t a girl get dressed up?”

I chuckled. “Sure. Where exactly are you going?”

“I’m meeting English at The Plaza.”

“Dressed like that?”

“What do you have against my outfit, King?”

Not a damn thing. In fact, my first thought was, How long would it take me to get it off? But I couldn’t exactly say that.

“It’s great.”

She gestured up the street. “Can we walk and talk?”

“Yeah. Sure,” I said, falling into step beside her. “I have to get back to work but—”

“Aren’t you the boss?” she teased.

I was heir to the Texas fortune, Dorset & King. My cousins ran the main branch of the oil corporation back home in Midland, where they could handle the day-to-day operations in the field. But I ran the New York division, which meant meeting with investors and business executives and handling the northeast refineries. Since I’d graduated from Harvard and I was friends with Upper East Side business types, I had volunteered. Anything to keep me out of Texas.

“I’m the boss,” I agreed with a grin. This teasing behavior was way easier to handle than anything serious that was threatening to come out of my mouth. We’d always worked like this. Flirting was ninety percent of our personalities. “Now talk, Bowen.”

She pushed her shoulders back. “I’m back.”

“Back?”

“Back, back,” she confirmed. “My old boss, Kevin Varma, poached me from my LA position. He put me up in Percy Tower until I can find a place in the city.”

“You’re moving back.”

She laughed at my flabbergasted expression. “Yeah. I didn’t think I’d ever do it. My clients were pissed when I told them that I’d be leaving, but the money was too good to turn down. Not to mention, Kevin is bringing me on as a partner.”

“Really?” I asked after schooling my features. “You’re going to run the place?”

“Well, Kevin’s in his late seventies. He has three daughters. None of them followed in his footsteps, and he wants to see his practice, which he brought up from literally nothing, continue. For some reason, he sees me as surrogate family. You’d think I just annoyed him.”

“That’s probably why he thinks you’re family.”

She snorted. “Classic, King. Thanks.”

When she smiled up at me, it felt all strangely normal. Like she hadn’t left for three years and put thousands of miles between us.

Then, her smile dimmed, and she faced forward again. We passed Bergdorf on our left and stepped into the square, where The Plaza resided just off of Central Park. It was a trademark location with an enormous fountain at the center of the square, tourists galore, and even a few horse-drawn carriages.

Our close friends, English and Court, would be married here this fall. It was going to be the wedding of the year. Court’s mother, Leslie Kensington, was the current mayor of New York and determined to have the blowout wedding she had been denied by her younger son. I wouldn’t have blamed English and Court if they’d also eloped in Paris, like Penn and Natalie.

Whitley’s outfit suddenly made sense if she was here to deal with wedding plans. She didn’t care about anyone’s approval and could take the heat off of English.

“Are you here for the wedding?”

Whitley nodded as we crossed the street, narrowly avoiding a gaggle of tourists. “English is frustrated with the wedding planner.”

“And her soon-to-be mother-in-law, I assume.”

She wrinkled her nose. “You have no idea.”

“I think I do. I went to the engagement party.”

Whitley’s cheeks colored. She’d still been in California when that little catastrophe took place.

“Was it that horrible?”

“Worse than horrible,” I confirmed. “I thought for sure that someone was going to come to blows. I ended up leaving early with my date because it was such a f*****g mess.”

Whitley’s eyes widened a fraction, and then she dipped her head to dig into her purse.

Why the f**k had I said that? Of course I’d dated while she was gone, but I hadn’t had to bring it up. That was just how we’d always worked.

She had been the best wingman I’d ever had. Who could have known that all of that time we’d been trying to find people for the other to hook up with, the person standing right next to me had been the answer?

“f**k,” Whitley said. “English is SOS-ing me. I have to get in there before she does more damage.”

I nodded easily. “Sure. I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

“Definitely,” she said, but she still wasn’t meeting my eyes.

I’d f****d up. Maybe I’d said it because I was mad that she’d left before we could figure this out. Now that she could barely look at me, I realized that I didn’t want her to go like this.

“Hey,” I said, reaching for the sleeve of her fur coat.

She blinked back at me, her hazel eyes a honey color in the afternoon sunlight. There was something in those eyes, like panic. She looked … terrified. As if she thought that I might say something horrible to her.

I withdrew suddenly. I didn’t like that look in her eyes. I didn’t like it one bit. And I wasn’t going to get rid of it by asking her out right here on the street when she had somewhere else to be. I’d need to play a longer game for her to see that I was serious.

“Good luck.”

Her smile brightened, as if she’d dodged a bullet. “I don’t need luck.”

She winked at me and then disappeared inside.

Fuck. I was f*****g f****d up about this woman.

I jerked my phone out as soon as she was gone, dialing Court Kensington without missing a beat.

Court’s baritone filtered through the phone. “King.”

“You f*****g asshole.”

Court laughed, low and resonant. “So, I’m guessing you heard Whit is back?”

“Heard? I just saw her in Percy Tower in a silver minidress. I walked her to English’s meeting.”

“She was wearing a minidress to the meeting with my mother? God preserve her.”

“Yeah. I think she’s trying to take the heat off of English, but that’s not the point, asshole.”

“What? Should I have told you that she was back? Still got a thing for her?”

I gritted my teeth. Court Kensington, Camden Percy, and I had met at Harvard. We’d become fast friends despite the fact that they had known each other their whole lives and didn’t like outsiders. Court had known exactly what he was doing by not telling me that Whitley was back.

“That was three years ago.”

“And?”

“And … I didn’t want to be blindsided.”

Court snickered. “Sure. Keep telling yourself that. Anyway, that’s why we’re all going out tonight. We were going to surprise everyone.”

Fuck. So, that was what that was about.

“I’ll see you tonight,” Court said.

“Yeah, whatever, fucker.”

Court laughed and then hung up.

I shouldn’t have been this worked up about it, but Court wasn’t wrong. I’d never really gotten over what could have been with Whitley. She’d made herself perfectly clear that she didn’t want to try this by moving across the country. And I didn’t think that I could change her mind now … but I was willing to try.