Guilt was a bitch.

Even worse than guilt? Shame.

As Luke stared at the frosted glass doors of La Parisienne, he felt a heavy mixture of both. The guilt was to be expected, considering that his old buddy Aaron Capton had turned into a complete douchebag.

The shame, though, came as a bit of a surprise.

Luke respected women—hell, he’d been outnumbered growing up and had been force-fed feminist ideology since before he’d had his first erection.

But Aaron’s objectification of Anna last night? Luke had overheard the miserable exchange and yet had only stepped in at the end.

That’s where the shame swept in, and the reason why he was standing on her shop’s front stoop right now.

The glass doors and bracketing glass windows provided a glimpse of the inner workings of the boutique. Women and men moved about the aisles, some clearly nervous as they ducked their heads to avoid making eye contact, others more carefree as they held up hangers and perused the racks.

As was becoming habit, he switched the cane over to his left hand so he could open the front door.

Luke didn’t know what he’d expected when entering La Parisienne. Maybe it was his own ego talking, but he’d fully expected to walk in and have women go shrieking in the other direction. But other than a few swift glances at his cane, no one made a fuss over his arrival. No doves bursting into the air, and definitely no scandalized glares that a man had interrupted a special haven.

Guess you’re a bit more egocentric than you thought, man.

Guess so.

He scanned the shop, searching for familiar blonde hair and high-as-hell heels. The longer he stood there, the twinge in his hip became a stronger pulse of pain. And the longer he stood there, the more unwanted attention he garnered from the boutique’s clientele.

“Can I help you?”

God, yes.

Luke whipped around, dropping his gaze to a short, curvy woman he recognized immediately. “Shaelyn? What the hell are you doing here?”

His best friend’s girlfriend raised a brow. “I own this place. Better question, though, is what in the world are you doing here?” She lifted a hand, palm faced out. “No, wait, don’t answer. You’re out to seduce a new woman.”

Seduction wasn’t really Luke’s M.O. He’d always gone for women who wanted what he did: no strings attached, casual sex. The minute he left for deployment, the relationship was over.

“I’m not seducing any—wait, you own this place?”

Shaelyn gave him a bright smile. “Guess Brady might have forgotten to tell you, since you were deployed and everything. My cousin, Anna—you probably don’t remember her. Anyway, she owns it but named me business partner when she realized I’m awesome.”

A feminine voice entered the fray. “I named you as my business partner because you have a knack for knowing exactly what our clients want.”

Luke steeled himself against the sight of her. He turned his head, just enough to watch her approach. Unlike on the date last night, she was in her element. She radiated strength and power, and the slim red dress she’d donned hugged her in all the right places.

Her blue eyes were cool when they landed on him, distant, with no hint of the sly wit he’d come to recognize and expect. “What can I do for you, Luke?”

Her tone matched the reservation in her gaze.

Luke balled his hand into a fist around the cane’s grip. He’d fucked up. One look at her face told him that she would accept no less than both of his testicles as an apology. When he’d called her a ball crusher, he’d hit the mark.

“Wait, wait!” Shaelyn flung out a hand to clip Luke in the shoulder. “How do you know my cousin?”

She knocked me over and then blackmailed me into becoming her matchmaker.

“We met at my mom’s shop over on Dauphine,” he said instead, going for the answer that wouldn’t require the family jewels served up on a sacrificial platter.

Brow furrowed with curiosity, Shae turned to her cousin. “What were you doing over there? Were you looking for a new perfume?”

Anna’s lips parted.

Luke grinned.

There it was, that hint of embarrassment. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, crossed her arms over her chest, and then let them fall loosely back to her sides. Her awkward silence was gold. He’d spent almost a full week trying to figure out what exactly she’d wanted to buy, and now here was his chance to uncover the mystery. Whatever it was, it had to be good.

Flicking her tongue out to wet her lips, she shot a hesitant look his way. “Ah, yes, I was looking for a new perfume.”

Liar.

He might not know her, but he knew her facial expressions well enough to realize one fact: she hadn’t come to Herbal Heaven for perfume.

But Shaelyn either wasn’t that well-equipped to decipher her cousin’s behavior or didn’t care because all she did was nod understandably. “Your collection of perfumes is pretty lacking.”

“It’s not lack—” Anna drew in such a heavy breath that her delicate shoulders lifted too. “Anyway, I didn’t have the chance to buy anything. I met Luke and then had to run out the door to grab Jules from practice.”

“Your cousin is forgetting something.”

Anna’s gaze zoned in on his face, and he didn’t have to know her at all to read the DANGER warning flashing in her blue eyes. He tromped on anyway. At the end of the day, it had been his ass crash-landing in a pile of tea bags. He’d been the one forced to smell like patchouli for the rest of the day.

He flashed Anna a winsome smile, taking it with a grain of salt when she mouthed, “Don’t you dare.”

Problem was, Luke was the daring kind.

He shrugged his shoulders, then turned to Shaelyn, who was looking up at him expectantly. “Your cousin wrestled me to the ground.”

Anna’s reaction was instantaneous and one-hundred-percent indignant. “I did not. You surprised me. I didn’t mean to break anything.”

Luke lifted a brow. “You took out my cane.”

“Not on purpose,” she snapped, a pretty flush turning her cheeks a warm pink. “It wasn’t like I saw you and thought, ‘He’s the one. Go for the crippled guy with the cane.’”

Even as Shaelyn stared at them both as though they’d each grown a pair of horns, Luke couldn’t help but laugh. This Anna wasn’t at all like the blonde he’d shared a booth with a week earlier. That Anna had been disarmingly charming, despite being two sheets to the wind.

This Anna was way too professional for his liking.

The blush suited her. Her flashing blue eyes, which threatened his imminent dismemberment, suited her.

Fuck it, but Luke wasn’t ready for it at all to end. He nudged Shaelyn in the side, mock whispering, “And after she threw me to the ground, she tried to pay me off. Shoved cash down my pants like I was a common hooker.”

Shaelyn clapped a hand over her mouth, her eyes squinting with laughter.

Anna looked ready to skewer him where he stood.

“Luke, may I see you in my office?” she asked, her tone deceptively calm.

“Should I be worrying about you trying to pay me off again?” he asked, his tone deceptively worried.

After thirteen years in the army, there wasn’t much that worried him. He’d served six deployments all over the world—seven if you counted his last stint in Iraq that had culminated in a shattered hip and months’ worth of physical therapy sessions that didn’t seem to be working.

Anna didn’t worry him.

He was coming to realize that, if anything, she was a balm to the monotony of his life.

Luke O’Connor was quickly becoming a pain in her ass.

As Anna opened her office door and waved him inside, it was hard not to contemplate all the different ways she really could wrestle him to the ground and all the ways she’d feel better after doing so.

His big frame paused to absorb the sight of her office. She’d just had it redone not that long ago, and it was with a burst of wry humor that she asked, “Feeling emasculated by all the pink in here?”

His gaze stopped on a portrait of a curvy woman modeling Shaelyn’s latest design at the most recent New Orleans Fashion Week. “The opposite, actually,” he said huskily, “I can’t help but wonder why I never brought a woman here to pick out something for herself.”

When he lifted one hand off the cane to trace blunt-tipped fingers over the mannequin’s lacy garter, Anna was the unfortunate victim of a good case of lust.

Tearing her focus away from his fingers, she circled the desk and seated herself in her plush chair. Stop noticing how good looking he is. Easier said than done. The man oozed testosterone, and . . . Focus, she needed to focus. “I thought you don’t bother with the seduction period. Better to just get them into bed and get it over with.”

His light green eyes found her face. “Who ever said anything about getting it ‘over with’?”

Her heart threatened to leap straight out of her chest it was thudding so hard. “You did, right before you told me that you weren’t interested in getting me into bed.”

He didn’t flinch, but there was a small enough pause in his crooked gait to indicate her words had struck a chord. “You were drunk,” he finally said, lowering his body carefully to the cushioned bench on the other side of her desk. “I didn’t want to take advantage.”

“There’s no reason to lie.” Anna crossed one leg over the other, propping her elbows on the desk. The silver bangles on her wrist jangled against the wood. “I’m obviously just not your type.”

In a second that felt a lot like forever, he studied her. She felt that one look as acutely as if he’d physically touched her.

“It’s like I told you at the bar. I’m not interested in anyone right now.”

Maybe, maybe not.

Either way, Anna wanted the upper hand in this situation. “In case you were wondering, you aren’t my type either. I prefer the men I date to be less . . .”

His eyes narrowed. “Manly?”

Yes. No. “Of course not.”

“Crippled?” he uttered the word as though it’d been ripped from deep in his soul. “Broken?”

Was that how he saw himself? A broken version of the man he once was? As much as she suddenly wished to offer him comfort, Anna didn’t think that he’d be game for anything that closely resembled pity.

“I was going to say that I prefer men who have a soft side.” She gestured toward the cane. “Even with the cane, you seem like the type of guy who likes things a bit rough.”

The corners of his mouth lifted in a panty-dropping grin. “Are you saying you don’t?”

I don’t know.

Two sexual partners, the last one of which didn’t really count because it had lasted all of five minutes five years ago, didn’t give her much experience in the bedroom department. But she refused to let Luke notice her hesitancy—or, worse, notice that Anna was on the verge of asking him to show her all the ways he knew how to treat a woman in bed.

She covered her interest with a dismissive scoff. “I prefer when things are orderly.”

He laid the cane across his lap, hands resting on the bench on either side of his hips. His legs spread in that typical guy way that tempted a woman to crawl into the V of his hard thighs and get down on her knees.

Not, of course, that she would ever get down on her knees for a man like Luke O’Connor.

So wrapped up in her own salacious thoughts, she barely caught the tail end to his sentence, “You like it in missionary and that’s it, don’t you.”

Not a question.

Anna swallowed past the sudden lump in her throat. “What’s wrong with missionary?”

“It’s boring.”

Maybe it was, but it was too late in the game to tuck tail and turn back now. “I like it when I can see my partner’s face,” she said, trying very hard to control the inconvenient breathlessness in her voice. “It’s romantic.”

He didn’t seem impressed. “There are other ways to see a partner’s face than just while laying on your back.”

“Yeah?” Curiosity had her sitting up straight in her chair. And squirming, too, because damn it, Luke O’Connor had the incredibly ill-timed ability to turn her on in her own office. “How?”

Something hot and heavy flashed in his green eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was as thick as molasses. “Are you asking me to give away all my secrets?”

She met his gaze head-on. “Why shouldn’t I ask? It’s not like we’re going to jump in bed together, so I might as well glean all the information I can get out of you.”

The sound of his laughter warmed her from the inside out. “Jesus,” he muttered, flicking the pad of his thumb under his eye, “I like you, Anna.”

But not enough to bring me to bed.

She refused to feel hurt over his easy dismissal of her. So what if she wasn’t his type? According to Shaelyn there were plenty of guys out there who were interested in her. She just had to find those guys—how hard could it possibly be?

Luke cleared his throat. “I actually came here to apologize,” he said, looking very much like a student on the verge of tearing out of detention. After a pause, he clarified, “About last night. I didn’t know that Aaron had become such a—”

“A twat?” she supplied.

His brows arched. “Now that’s not a word I hear every day.”

“I watch a lot of British TV.”

“The American stuff not good enough for you?”

“I like to explore different cultures.”

“This coming from the woman who thinks missionary-style sex is the only way to go.”

Anna’s jaw snapped tight. “I did not say—”

He cut her off, that increasingly familiar sly grin of his easing the harshness of his features. “You did.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be apologizing?” she muttered, leaning back in her chair and wondering how exactly Luke O’Connor had managed to get under her skin.

“I started to, but then you had to go and throw the word ‘twat’ around.”

Tilting her head, she tapped her finger to her nose and then pointed at him. “Coming from the army, I’d expect you to be ambivalent when it comes to curse words.”

“On the contrary,” he told her smoothly, planting his cane on the ground and shifting his weight forward, “coming from the army I do my best to catalogue each and every new curse word slung my way. I particularly like four-letter ones. The dirtier the better.”

It was only after studying him carefully that she realized . . . he liked this back and forth between them—the constant banter. It was in the half-smile playing at his lips and the wicked gleam in his eyes.

Even more confusing was the fact that Anna enjoyed it too.

But it was time to get back to business. End this . . . whatever it happened to be between them, that apparently only she felt. Anna wasn’t a masochist, and in this situation, she understood one thing: Luke O’Connor might be a natural-born charmer but that didn’t mean she had to let herself be charmed.

“You were saying about Aaron?” she prompted, rising from her chair to move to the window. She slipped aside the heavy drawstring curtain.

Her view? A parking lot.

To make up for the sight of concrete slabs and glistening cars, on certain days she could make out the tops of the cruise ships sailing down the mighty Mississippi River toward the Gulf of Mexico. Now that was a view that reminded her of how far she’d come. At the end of the day, Anna wouldn’t trade her ugly parking lot for anything.

Luke didn’t follow her lead and stand, though she figured it had more to do with his injury than anything else. He shifted his body to face her, so that he straddled the bench. His bad leg stretched out, blocking her exit to the door.

“Fact is,” he said, “I didn’t know how much of a dirt bag he’d become over the years. High school Aaron was nice, easy-going, and one of the more ambitious guys in our year. While the rest of us were fumbling around trying to figure our lives out, he’d already had a plan in place by sophomore year.”

“He wanted to be in a band?”

“He’s in a band?” Luke’s brows drew together. “He told me he’s a lawyer. Hell, I remember hearing him tell our teacher that he was heading to Loyola for a degree in pre-law.”

“Not a lawyer,” she said with a shrug. “By day he works in construction. By night, he’s your average Joe guitar player in a band.”

“Definitely twat-central.” Anna sent Luke an are-you-serious glare, to which he only added, “Your words, not mine.”

She let the window drapery fall back into place, turning to face the man who made her office feel about the same size as a toy figurine’s playhouse. “You were saying, about Aaron?”

Luke combed his fingers through his messy brown hair. “He’s a sexist asshole and I’m sorry you had to put up with him. My next date for you will be a thousand times better. Who knows, we might even find ourselves in American curse-word territory as a ranking. Starts with an L, ends in O-V-E.”

She couldn’t help but smile at that. “Don’t get my hopes up.”

“Isn’t that my job here?” He ran his fingers down the length of the cane’s handgrip, dragging Anna’s gaze along with it. “Get your hopes up, deliver on the package, and help you to find your happy ever after?”

“If we’re talking packages, you should know that I have another date tonight.” She waited, breath held, for any sort of reaction. Other than a deep V forming between his brows, he said nothing, leaving Anna no other option but to continue plodding forward. “He works with my friend in the NOPD’s Crime Lab.”

“And?”

“And what?”

He waved his hand for her to continue. “Who is he? Name? Age? Height?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t run his social security card.”

Tonight’s meeting was another blind date. She knew nothing about this Dev Smith guy, and for that she was grateful. She wanted to be pleasantly surprised. She wanted him to take her mind off the man lounging in her office like he was perfectly content to hang out with her. She wanted, more than anything, for Dev Smith to be the guy who turned her bad dating streak around.

Maybe she was asking for too much.

More realistic hopes would be that he had all his teeth and no bad body odor.

“What time is it for?”

“Seven,” Anna said, moving to stand behind her chair. “We both leave work around the same time, and, honestly, if I go home, I might not have the strength to change out of my house pants.”

Interest lightened his eyes. “House pants? Tell me more.”

She felt her cheeks warm. “Sweatpants, Luke, my house pants are sweats.”

He tipped his head to the side. “Yoga pants?” His tone was hopeful.

There were days when Anna deeply regretted being born a blonde with fair skin . . . this was one of those days. Trying to grapple for control of the conversation, she said, “I thought you weren’t interested in dating? Doesn’t that include flirting, too?”

He didn’t even have the grace to look ashamed. “I’m giving you practice.”

“For what?”

“Handling a man’s advances.”

“Is this what you’d call a man’s ‘advances’?” she said, her hands moving to close over the back of the chair. “Though I’ll say that this conversation is more digestible than anything that happened last night.”

His lips thinned. “Which is why I plan to meet up again with you tonight, just in case you need a hand.”

The idea of Luke O’Connor watching her on yet another date wasn’t nearly as appealing as it had been last week when she’d drunkenly concocted the idea. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

“I do.”

“We’ll be in public,” Anna said, “there’s not much he can do.”

“He can insult you.”

She lifted a finger in the air. “Couldn’t the same be said about you?”

Scowling, he muttered, “Not the same thing. You don’t know him.”

“That’s true. But once again, do I really know you either?”

His light green gaze met hers. “I know your name now. I know you own the hottest boutique in town. I know you have a son, Julian, who plays football. I know you came to Herbal Heaven for something other than perfume, but I haven’t figured out exactly what it was just yet.” He stood, straightening from the bench with a wince. “I’d say that we’ve moved on from being complete strangers.”

“I remember you from high school.”

The words were out before she could stop them, and she watched him freeze. “You went to De La Salle?”

“I graduated the year before you.”

His expression banked as he took her in, and Anna fought the urge to squirm under his heavy stare. When his chin tipped back, he planted the cane on the ground and loosely rested his wrists over the head. “You were a cheerleader. Homecoming Queen, am I right?”

Sometimes she wished she hadn’t been such a debutante back then. Her mother had wanted that upper-class lifestyle for her only daughter; Anna had only liked it for the clothes. She’d always loved fashion. Licking her lips, she murmured, “Senior year, yes.”

A small smile flirted with his lips. “I remember now—royal blue dress. All the boys were hot for you, Blondie.”

Blondie.

Unexpected delight warmed her, even as Anna’s insides felt all kinds of topsy-turvy. Luke O’Connor, the man who admitted that seduction wasn’t his M.O, and that his interest in women landed him in their bed and nothing more, was moment by moment leaving her more unsteady in her stilettos.

If she were a smart woman, she’d cut off this dating challenge now before she got in too deep. She was too old for the unrequited love that plagued kids her son’s age, but unrequited lust might be just as bad when it came to her mental health.

Anna watched him move to the door, his cane and bad hip throwing off what most likely would have been a long-gaited stride. She waited until his hand fell on the doorknob to say, “Take the night off. I’ll be fine with this Dev Smith guy.”

Luke glanced over his shoulder, his gaze resting on her face. “I’ll be there at 1830 hours to get a good table.”

“What, so you can watch the misery unfold?”

He shook his head. “No, because you’re the same as you were back in high school. The men are still hot for you,” he said softly, “and this way I can see your face the entire time. If you need me, I’ll know in a heartbeat.”