lived here of an appointment with her gynecologist.
The coffeemaker must have been on a timer, because there was no evidence of anyone stirring but him. Glancing down at his watch, he saw that it was just after five, which helped explain why no one was stirring. Except that the coffeemaker timer must have been set for now, so whoever lived here was normally up at this ungodly hour.
He crossed the kitchen in a single stride and exited on the other side, finding himself in a living room that was barely as big as the bedroom. Enough light from the street filtered through the closed curtains for him to make out a lamp on the other side of the room, and he was about to move toward it when a sound to his right stopped him. It was the sound a woman made upon stirring when she was not ready to stir, a soft sough of breath tempered by a fretful whimper. Through the semidarkness, he could just make out the figure of a woman lying on the couch.
Peyton had found himself in a lot of untenable positions over the years—many of which had included women—but he had no idea what to do in a situation like this. He didn’t know where he was, had no idea how he’d gotten here and was clueless about the identity of the woman under whose roof he had passed the night. For all he knew, she could be married. Hell, for all he knew, she could be a knife-wielding maniac. Then his hostess made that quiet sound of semiconsciousness again, and he decided she couldn’t be the last. Knife-wielding maniacs couldn’t sound that delectable. Still, if she was sleeping out here and he’d spent the night in her bedroom, he had nothing to feel guilty about, right? Except for tossing her out of her bed when he should have been the one sleeping on the couch. And except for passing out on her in the first place.
What the hell had happened last night? He mentally retraced his steps from the moment he set foot back on his native soil. Although he’d left Chicago via Greyhound bus more than fifteen years ago, his return had been aboard a private jet. His private jet. He might have been a street dog in his youth, but in adulthood... Ah, who was he kidding? In adulthood, he was still a street dog. That was the reason he was back here.
Anyway, after landing, he’d headed straight to the Hotel Intercontinental on Michigan Avenue. That much Peyton remembered with crystal clarity, because the Hotel Intercontinental was the sort of place that A) he never would have had the nerve to enter when he was a kid, and B) would have tossed him out on his ass if he had tried to enter when he was a kid. Funny how they’d had no problem accepting his platinum card yesterday.
He further remembered walking into his suite and tossing his bag onto the massive bed, then going to the window and pushing aside the curtains. He recalled looking out on Michigan Avenue, at the gleaming high-rises and upscale department stores that had always seemed off-limits to him when he lived here. This whole neighborhood had seemed off-limits to him when he was a kid. In spite of that, he’d come to this part of town five days a week, nine months a year, because the Emerson Academy for College Preparatory Learning sat in the middle of it. For those other two days of the week and three months of the year, though, Peyton had always had to stay with his own kind in the rough South Side neighborhood where he’d grown up.
Yesterday, looking out that window, he had been brutally reminded of how his teenage life in this part of town had been juxtaposed to the life—if he could even call it that—that he’d led in his not-even-marginal neighborhood. As much as he’d hated Emerson, it had always felt good to escape his home life for eight hours a day. Yesterday, looking out at the conspicuous consumption of Michigan Avenue, Peyton had, ironically, been transported back to his old neighborhood instead. He’d been able to smell the grease and gasoline of the garage he and his old man had lived above—and where he’d worked to save money for college when he wasn’t at school. He’d heard the police sirens that pelted the crumbling urban landscape, had seen the roving packs of gangs that considered his block fair game. He’d felt the grime on his skin and tasted the soot that belched from the factory smokestacks. And then...
Then had come memories of Emerson, where he’d won a spot on the school hockey team—along with a full scholarship—thanks to his above-average grades and his ruthlessness on the rink. God, he’d hated that school, teeming as it had been with blue-blooded trust-fund babies who were way too rich for his system. But he’d loved how clean and bright the place was, and how it smelled like floor wax and Calvin Klein perfume. He’d liked the quiet during classes and how orderly everything ran. He’d liked being able to eat one decent meal a day. He’d liked feeling safe, if only for a little while.
Not that he would have admitted any of that back then. Not that he would admit it to anyone now. But he’d been smart enough to know that an education from a place like Emerson would look a hell of a lot better on a college application than the decaying public school he would have attended otherwise. He’d stomached the rich kids—barely—by finding the handful of other students like himself. The wretched refuse. The other scholarship kids who were smart but poor and determined to end up in a better place than their parents. There had been maybe ten of them in a school where they were outnumbered a hundred to one. Peyton hadn’t given a damn about those hundreds. Except for one, who had gotten under his skin and stayed there.
Ava Brenner. The Golden Girl of the Gold Coast. Her daddy was so rich and so powerful, and she was so snotty and so beautiful, she’d ruled that school. Not a day had passed at Emerson that didn’t revolve around Ava and her circle of friends—all handpicked by the princess herself, and all on eggshells knowing they could be exiled at her slightest whim. Not a day had passed that Peyton hadn’t had to watch her strolling down the hall, flipping that sweep of red-gold hair around as if it was spun copper...and looking at him as if he were something disgusting stuck to the bottom of her shoe. And not a day had passed when he hadn’t wanted her. Badly. Even knowing she was spoiled and shallow and vain.
He opened his eyes. Yeah, he remembered now that he had been thinking about Ava yesterday. In fact, that was what had made him beat a hasty retreat to the hotel bar. He remembered that, too. And he remembered tossing back three single malts on an empty stomach in rapid succession. He remembered being politely asked to leave the hotel bar and, surprisingly, complying. He remembered lurching out onto Michigan Avenue and looking for the first place he could find to get another drink, then being steady enough on his feet to convince the bartender to fix him a couple more. Then...
He tried harder to remember what had happened after that. But all he could recall was a husky—sexy—voice, and the soft scent of gardenias, and a pair of beautiful sea-green eyes, all of which had seemed oddly familiar somehow.
That brought his gaze back to the woman sleeping on the couch. In the semidarkness, he could see that she lay on her side, facing the room, one hand curled in front of her face. The blanket with which she had covered herself was drooping, part of it pooled on the floor. For some reason, he was compelled to move to the couch and pick it up, to drape it across her sleeping form. As he bent over her, he inhaled the faint scent of gardenias again, as if it had followed him out of his memories.
And just like that, he was pummeled by another one.
Ava Brenner. Again. She was the one who had smelled of gardenias. Peyton remembered the night the two of them had— Well, the night they’d had to finish a school project together at her house. In her room. When her parents were out of town. At one point, she’d gone downstairs to fix them something to eat, and he’d taken advantage of her absence to shamelessly prowl around her room, opening her closet and dresser drawers, snooping for anything he could discover about her. When he came across her underwear drawer, he actually stole a pair of her panties. Pale yellow silk. God help him, he still had them. As he’d stuffed them into his back pocket that night, his gaze lit on a bottle of perfume on her dresser. Night Gardenia, it was called. That was the only way he knew that what she smelled like was gardenias. He’d never smelled—or even seen—one before that night.
As he draped the cover over the sleeping woman, his gaze fell to her face, and his gut clenched tight. He told himself
