Unfinished Business. Inglath Cooper

much to hope I’ve matured since then?” Culley asked in a neutral voice while a knife of familiar pain did a slow turn inside him, its edges sharp enough to make him wish he’d never agreed to this buddies-weekend.

      “We’re supposed to be taking advantage of this, aren’t we?” Paul held up the red-embered tip of the thirty-five-dollar cigar he’d been pretending to smoke for the past hour and a half. “We’re in New York City, the Oak Bar, no less. No wives. No children. No patients. I’ve seen at least fifteen bombshells walk through that door since we got here,” he said with a meaningful head tilt toward the bar entrance. “Does life get any better?”

      Culley had once been the least serious of the foursome. And there had been a time—surely, it hadn’t been that long ago?—when he would have agreed and ordered the next round of drinks. Actually, he would have been the one to make the statement in the first place. Actually, he would have already left with one of those bombshells Paul had been ogling.

      Until he’d run head-on into a wall called consequence, and everything had changed.

      Now he was just another guy closing in on thirty-five. He checked his watch to see how much longer he’d have to stick with this group before he could escape to their hotel down the street and the decently comfortable bed waiting for him there without having to cart along more than his share of ridicule for being an old party pooper.

      The three other guys at the table— Paul, Wallace Mitchell and Tristan Overfelt—had hounded him by e-mail until he’d finally agreed to come this weekend. Culley had nearly backed out at the last minute—there would have been plenty of excuses that held water—but even he had thought it might be good for him to try to start being sociable again.

      “This next round has your name on it, Culley.” Tristan helped the hovering waiter pass around the drinks from the tray in his hand, then threw the check across the table to Culley. He pulled a fifty out of his wallet and handed that and the bill back to the waiter who nodded and moved on.

      Another hour passed during which they waded through some of their more memorable med-school experiences: the day Paul had passed out when they’d delivered their first baby (he still swore on his mother’s Bible that he’d had a virus; he was an OBGYN, for heaven’s sake, he had a reputation to uphold). The time Wallace had spent their rent money on tickets to an AC/DC concert, and they’d gotten thrown out of their apartment, spending the rest of the semester living out of their cars.

      And there was the usual guy stuff. Bad dirty jokes. Boasts from the still-married guys about how their wives wanted to have sex five nights a week, none of which any of them believed. Everybody except Culley ordered another cigar, stage-smokers all. They didn’t actually like smoking them; they just liked the way they looked pretending to smoke them.

      “Now there’s one I’d give it all up for.”

      Culley glanced at Paul who was doing a dead-on imitation of a balding, sex-deprived, turned-loose-for-the-weekend husband who’d just caught a glimpse of what he’d been missing. His tongue was practically hanging out.

      A look at the door revealed why.

      She was a knockout. Even Culley, disinterested as he was, would admit that. And he’d barely noticed the fifteen women Paul had pointed out before her. With a seven-year-old daughter, dating just wasn’t worth the complications it inevitably created. He hadn’t been with a woman in—

      He didn’t want to think about how long that had been.

      Wallace and Tristan were busy agreeing with Paul that the breasts were real. The figure-defining black dress certainly gave ample evidence on which to base their conclusions. A low dip at the front of the dress revealed a vee of cleavage. Something inside him stirred, and for the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt the itch of physical need for a woman.

      His gaze went to her face. She didn’t have the expectant expression of a beautiful woman meeting a date or a husband. There was sadness there, disappointment of some kind.

      He had a ridiculous urge to ask her if she was alone.

      She followed the maitre d’ across the floor, winding through the busy bar past their table.

      There was something awfully familiar about her. And then recognition jolted through him. It couldn’t be. No way.

      Paul, Wallace and Tristan stared like three men who’d spent the last six months at sea. Culley stared, too, but now for a different reason altogether.

      Addy.

      Addy!

      The woman whose breasts he and his friends had been assessing with clinical horniness was Addy Taylor.

      Culley got up from the table as if puppet strings pulled him out of the chair one limb at a time.

      “You’re not going over there, are you?” Paul laughed. “We know you’re probably short on goddesses down there in Podunk, Virginia, but this would be ballsy even for the Culley of old.”

      “I know her,” Culley said.

      “No way,” came back the chorus of three.

      “And we thought things had changed. You still get all the hot chicks,” Paul grumbled.

      Culley tamped his friend down with a look of disapproval. “I’m just going over to say hi to an old friend.”

      “How do you know her?” Tristan piped up, suspicion drawing his brows together.

      “We kind of grew up together. She married a friend of mine from high school.”

      “Oh, yeah, Mark—” Paul searched for a last name.

      “Pierce,” Culley finished for him.

      “So where is he? If she were mine, I sure wouldn’t be turning her loose in the likes of this city.”

      Culley shook his head. “You always did hold the reins way too tight, Evans. Don’t you know that just makes them want to run faster?”

      Paul frowned while Tristan and Wallace laughed, their hoots ripened by the Scotch they’d been drinking like Gatorade.

      Culley headed across the room on the crest of their still rumbling laughter. Six paces into it, an extended family of butterflies had taken up residence beside the campfire still smoldering in his stomach. How long had it been since he’d seen Addy? Years. His brain couldn’t seem to wrap itself around a number, but he knew it had been shortly after Mark and Addy had gotten married, definitely not since Mark had stopped keeping in touch, quit returning Culley’s phone calls.

      Just a few feet from her table now, he was struck again by the differences in her. He remembered her in her wedding dress, how perfect and…virginal she had looked that day.

      He remembered how envy had nearly eaten a hole in him.

      The woman sitting at the table in front of him did not look virginal.

      She looked…hot. Paul’s word, but appropriate here.

      She glanced up then, cutting short his visual assessment.

      “Hello, Addy,” he said, his voice sounding like it needed to go home and come back after it had gotten some more practice.

      The surprise on her face fit every cliché ever used to describe it. “Culley?”

      “Small world, huh?” He tried for a smile, but found it had apparently unionized with his voice, and they were both on strike.

      “What are you doing here?” she asked, one hand fluttering to her throat.

      “Ah, conference, with those guys,” he said, hitching a thumb back toward his table. He didn’t dare look around; his three friends had lost any nuances of subtle behavior several jiggers ago. “How about you?”

      She cleared her throat, looked down, then, “Just here for the night, actually. I’ve been working in the city this week.”

      Culley