Page 127 of Dirty Like Dylan

She had a smile pasted on her face but her eyes picked over me like a vulture sniffing out rot. Probably hoping to discover that something horrible had happened to me since we last saw each other.

Finding me intact, the smile got bigger and faker. “How the hell are you?”

“Great. You?” I asked, because it seemed like the quickest way to get this run-in over with. I was instantaneously regretful that I didn’t have my two hot men hanging off of me at the moment, and yet grateful that Dylan and Ashley were nowhere in sight. Stacy the Slut would be on them like white on rice. Or like a groupie on… well, a rock star.

I definitely wasn’t the one who’d come up with her cruel nickname. The first time I heard it, I was horrified. However, when the nickname fit…

“I’m epic,” she said, wobbling a little, at which point I registered how wasted she was. “You know… Johnny’s here.”

I felt my face freeze up in the fake half-smile I was wearing. And hers spread across her face as she realized that no, I did not know that my ex-husband was here.

“Haven’t seen him in a while myself,” she said. Then she leaned in and added, “I think he’s even hotter now than he was… back then.” She dropped her voice like we were sharing a special secret. You know, because we both knew how hot he was back then.

As in, back when she fucked him while he was married to me.

But she probably didn’t think I actually knew about that. Stacy had always seemed to think I was way dumber, and she was way smarter, than was actually the case. I refused to let it bother me, though. Any of it.

Water under the bridge, right?

“Where is he?” I asked sweetly, like I actually cared. All I cared about was not running into him.

“Oh, right over there.” She waved her hand in the direction I was headed, where the crowd buzzed and swirled in a fangirl vortex, the way it had around Dylan and Ashley everywhere we went tonight, and it was pretty clear there was a VIP sitting over there.

Fuck.

I pushed past Stacy, not even bothering with a Nice to see you or a Hope you get herpes. I put my head down and tunneled through the crowd, aiming well around the rock star vortex—when a giant wall of a dude blocked my path. Incongruously, he had a girly-looking glass of pinkish bubbly in his hand.

“From Johnny O,” he said when I looked up. He put the drink in my hand as I just stood here, caught off-guard. “This way.”

Then he threw up a meaty arm and parted the sea of people—and there was Johnny O’Reilly. My ex-husband, seated in a booth with a bunch of people, mostly hot chicks, on either side of him.

When the crowd shifted, he looked up and saw me. And he got the most smarmy, self-satisfied smirk of a look on his gorgeous face—even as his gaze traveled down my body and back up, checking me out.

I drifted toward him, because I wasn’t about to let him see me run away. It was like we were in a tunnel; him at one end and me at the other, and there was nowhere else to go. He stood to greet me as I got close, the smarmy look fading—maybe I’d imagined it?—and his face kinda lighting up a bit. But he was definitely checking me out.

My tiny yellow dress, which had felt so damn demure in Kitty’s club, now had me feeling pretty naked.

“Amber,” he said, in a low, sexy voice, reaching across the table to gently grasp my elbow and pull me in. He gave me a quick kiss on the cheek as I stood here, not knowing what to say. I really had nothing to say to him at all.

Yet here I was.

“Hi, Johnny,” I managed.

He gestured to the empty chair next to me, across the table from him. I put the drink he’d sent me on the table. I didn’t plan to drink it. I didn’t want a thing from him.

But I sat down, and he did the same.

“How the hell have you been?” he asked me, his gaze crawling all over me.

It was a stupid question. He hadn’t seen me or talked to me in four years. There was no way to answer a question like that succinctly and even approach honesty. No way to fit four years of my life into one simple sentence.

So I went with a one-word answer, not really saying anything at all. “Good. You?”

“Always,” he said, as if that said anything at all. “You look great.”

“Thank you.” I didn’t bother saying a thing about how he looked, obviously. He looked fucking hot, and he knew it. If the half-dozen scantily-clad young chicks with the midriff-baring shirts and big boobs, lined up on either side of him, didn’t already tell him so, the way I was looking at him probably filled him in.

Johnny was Irish-Italian and naturally dark-haired, but he highlighted his hair blond and it looked killer on him, that contrast of dark and light. His eyebrows were dark, his skin deeply tanned, his teeth as white as his T-shirt, and his jewelry gleamed. His eyes were an aquamarine-blue that I’d thought had to be colored contacts the first time I met him. They weren’t. And his body was seriously ripped, but not in any kind of practical way. Ashley was ripped because he worked hard and played hard—in the gym, on a surf board, on his mountain bike. Dylan worked out like crazy but he also got a workout on the drums daily.

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