“Have you come to apologize?” Serena asked me. She crossed her arms over her chest, deepening the cleavage her tank top showed off.

I shook my head, trying to refocus. I’d been so shocked when I saw her again the night before that I spent the rest of the evening in a state of confusion.

Confusion, anger, hurt, desire, longing.

For a man who prided himself on being self-aware and in control, I’d felt anything but. She was one of the few people on the planet who could have that effect on me, and I hated it.

Goddamn Serena Rossi.

My hands had tapped nervously on the steering wheel on the way to my usual hotel. When I got into my room I still felt edgy, like I’d had too much coffee. I’d taken a few deep, cleansing breaths, and decided to do a mindfulness exercise to restore my equilibrium.

Hopefully the hotel management wouldn’t mind the damage to the lamp.

Now I stood on her doorstep, and I wasn’t even sure what I was doing here. Apologize? My mind flashed on the way my mom recognized Serena—the friendly smile on her face—and something curdled in my stomach.

Shit. I was going to have to apologize.

She had stepped back into the house and was about to slam the door, when I wedged my foot in.

“I’m so—I’m sorry.” I stared down at her unpolished toes. They flexed, like she was a cat getting ready to pounce. Escape.

Serena sighed. “No, I’m…” She trailed off, and I looked up at her. Her eyes looked bluer than I remembered, but they were also bloodshot. “How about breakfast? I think we need to—I’d like to talk.”

I blinked. “You’re not ashamed to be seen with me?”

Her mouth tightened at the acid in my tone. “Marcus.”

I waved a hand. “Sorry. Reflex, I guess. Go get changed. I’ll wait.”

Being here, seeing her, seemed to trigger all my old instincts. The desire to hide from the beautiful blonde cheerleader battled with the desire to open up to her. It brought back the supercilious belief that I was smarter than she was, but she was still better than me.

For all that she’d said we needed to talk, we said nothing on the way to the diner by the high school. There were any number of cute bistros and brunch places, but by unspoken agreement we ended up at the scene of the crime. Well, one of the crimes.

We ordered then sat in an awkward silence. A smile teased at my mouth as I watched her grab the sugar.

“You still take your cream and sugar with a little coffee?”

She froze, the spoon still in her hand and the coffee swirling around it. “I can’t believe you remember that,” she said faintly, looking up at me.

I shrugged. Sometimes my memory was my downfall, especially when it came to her. “Some things don’t change in people.”

“You still drink yours—”

“Black as my heart, bitter as my soul.” I raised my white porcelain mug in a mock toast as her face flamed.

“I sent you so many emails,” she said.

I knew that. I’d seen them collect in my inbox. They sat there for that whole summer after graduation, taunting me. Mocking me. Until I left for college and I mercilessly deleted everything, without even opening one of them up. I never thought I’d regret not reading them, until now.

She twisted a paper napkin between her fingers. No manicure on her now, not like the white tips she’d had in high school. My gaze traveled up her arms, and I looked at her—really looked at her.

Her blonde hair was pulled back into a casual ponytail, freckles peppering her face without a mask of foundation to hide them. There were lines around her eyes that weren’t there before, and her bottom lip was pink from her biting it nervously, not from carefully applied lip gloss.

Serena Rossi was no longer the bubbly cheerleader that I crushed on back then, and who crushed me. The realization startled me; even though it made perfect sense that she’d changed. I had, after all. She was still beautiful, only now her… “realness” made her even more dangerous.

A line appeared in her forehead. “How did you know where to find me?”

“I picked you up once or twice, remember?” Memory like a steel trap—with claws just as sharp.

“Yeah, but I only just—” She dropped the napkin and reached for her coffee mug. “I moved back around six months ago. When my parents died.”

Oh.

It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d moved on in life, like I had. Somehow I imagined her sitting in her room for the past ten years, like Miss Havisham in a dusty wedding dress. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too.” She gave me a weak smile.

My mouth opened, then shut again. What was the polite way to—?

“Drunk driver,” she said as the waitress dumped our plates on the table. “Anyhow, I didn’t want to sell the house—yet—and I had no reason to not to come back.”

“No husband? Boyfriend? Girlfriend?” No, I wasn’t fishing. I was just… curious.

She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Marcus. My experience with you turned me off men forever. What the hell?”

“I didn’t mean to offend you.” I stiffened.

“Yes, you did. But I’m more offended on behalf of the gay community for such a dumb, narcissistic assumption. I thought Mister ‘Help Yourself’ was more enlightened than that.” She brandished a fork with one of her air quotes, then stabbed at her eggs.

“Fair enough. It would be more likely that—”

Snort. “I would turn you off women?”

“Now who’s being narcissistic?”

“Well, did I?”

My body heated, and I shifted on the vinyl bench seat. My gaze wandered over the curve of her neck, the line of her shoulders, the faint impression of a lacy bra embossing her blouse. I could tell the moment she realized I was checking her out, because her nipples tightened and pressed against the thin material. She sucked in a sharp breath, but said nothing.

So I looked my fill. And, with her pulse thumping in her throat, she let me.

“No,” I said slowly, reaching for my fork. “You didn’t turn me off women.”

We ate in silence for a moment. Rather than a chilly, awkward gulf between us, though, the air around our booth seemed charged. Expectant. It was what I probably would have described in a talk as “active calm.”

“I-I don’t expect you to forget what I did,” Serena said in a low voice. “But I’m hoping you can forgive me someday.”

I made a non-committal noise in the back of my throat.

“You seemed to do okay for yourself,” Serena said. “And your mom is doing pretty well, isn’t she? It’s been nice to see her again. You must be really proud of this award thing.”

I nodded, the guilt over not visiting often enough needling me. “I could do without the whole reunion presentation thing, though.” I waved my hand, like I could make it disappear. I just hoped I could get out of town in the next week without—

“Marcus Blake!” A hand slammed between my shoulder blades, almost making me choke.

I dropped my toast just as Principal Lemmon dropped onto the bench beside Serena. He beamed at me. “You’re a hard man to get a hold of!”

On purpose, asshole. Serena raised a conspiratorial eyebrow at me. Oh yeah, she knew I’d been avoiding him. She could probably guess that I’d been avoiding this whole stupid thing.

“—haven’t been responding to my emails,” Lemmon was saying. “But now that I have you, I’m going to pin you down for the valedictorian speech at the reunion. I know you’re a celebrity now, but hopefully we can convince you to waive your fee for your alma mater.”

He chuckled before bulldozing on. “Something inspiring, something motivational from your last book. Oh, I wish we had the budget to give every graduating senior a copy. You could be like the new, modern version of Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” He glanced out the window, grumbling under his breath. “Maybe that’d light a fire under their collective backsides. Lazy, entitled—”

My gaze fixed on Serena, I murmured, “’Un-slumping yourself is not easily done.’”

Her eyes widened.

Lemmon blinked. “Excellent! See you at the meeting tomorrow, Serena. Do what you have to do to convince him.” He jerked his chin toward me and slapped the table as he stood. My knife fell off the edge of my plate, peanut butter grazing my leather cuff.

“Yes, sir.” She nodded then hid behind her coffee mug. I was pretty sure it was empty, but she tipped it back as though it was water in the desert.

I leaned forward, my hands planted on the scarred diner table. “Serena,” I growled, “are you organizing this reunion?”

Apparently there was enough coffee left in her cup for her to choke on it. At least she had the grace to flush with embarrassment. “I kind of got volunteered.”

“Traitor.”

“I was at a low point. They got me at my weakest.” She was joking, but I suspected that there was some painful truth in it. “You’ll give the speech? I mean—you are a big-time motivational speaker.”

My eyebrow lifted. The truth was that stroking my ego was usually a pretty good way around my defenses—except in the case of Serena. Did I really want to give this stupid grown-up prom more time and attention than it already required?

“A million hits on your last TED talk…” She trailed off as the waitress whisked our abandoned plates away. “Think of the children,” she joked.

“Maybe they’d be better off with Doctor Seuss.”

“Aw, come on! Think of your mother—she’d be so proud.”

The toast sat like a dry lump in my stomach, and I reached for my water glass. I’d forgotten about the peanut butter smeared on my cuff until her hand darted out to touch me. The tip of her finger was cool against my wrist as she swiped it off.

“You’ll ruin your shirt,” she said. My gaze followed her thumb as she casually took it in her mouth and licked off the peanut butter.

Fuck.

“What are you going to do to convince me?”

She colored again. I didn’t remember her blushing like that in high school, but maybe she just had so much make-up caked on her that it was hard to notice. At the time I thought she was beautiful and glamorous, but now I couldn’t even visualize her.

My memories of her were more sensory, like the taste of her lip balm and the way my teeth clinked against hers in an awkwardly enthusiastic kiss. The gleam of her skin above her strapless gown, in the yellow light streaming through my car windows. Her soft moan in my ear when I sucked on the pulse in her neck like a damn vampire.

And, now I was hard. It was high school all over again, getting a chubby while sitting with the cheerleader who deigned to be my friend.

Until she wasn’t.

“What would it take to convince you?” she asked silkily.

My eyes narrowed and I shifted in my seat. My high school self would have hidden my boner behind behind some books and done anything she asked. Now, I was wealthy and wise. Use or be used—that was my motto.

“Marcus,” she sighed. “What would it take?”

“To give the speech?”

“That, too. I’d like—I’d like to be friends again.”

Ah. She meant my forgiveness, as well.

I leaned forward and motioned her closer. The noises of the diner faded around us as she tilted her head toward mine. Wispy blonde curls were escaping her ponytail, and I noticed flecks of hazel in her blue eyes. Her lips parted.

“I want you,” I began. Pausing, I reached out to trace her lower lip. It quivered a little. Her eyes darkened. I thrilled at the realization that I still affected her as much as she did me. “I want you to go under the table, on your knees, and suck my big, rich, motivational cock.”

Her head whipped back in shock. “What?”

I sat back, my arms stretching out to rest on the back of the booth. If she came around to my side, she’d see the bulge in my slacks that I was taking no pains to hide. High school Marcus Blake had graduated, and she was a fool if she thought I’d fall at her feet just like that.

Maybe she thought I was joking. Maybe she thought I was an asshole. Either way, her chest moved up and down with choppy breaths and her nipples still pressed against her shirt.

I dropped my arms; reached for my wallet, in my uncomfortably tight slacks. She was still speechless as I pulled out some bills to cover breakfast plus a healthy tip.

Then, I forced myself to unfold from the booth and stretch without shame or hesitation. My erection had gone down—slightly. I shoved my wallet back in my pocket, acutely aware of where her gaze had landed.

I didn’t mind her knowing what she did to me. Hell, I wanted her to know. I wanted her to fucking ache with it. I imagined her going back to her old room in her old house and fingering herself on her teenage bed. It would serve her right.

Suddenly, it hit me.

“I’ll do it,” I said. “But I want a do-over.”

She tore her gaze away from my crotch, her cheeks red. “What?”

“You. Me. Homecoming. In one week.”

“As friends?”

I tilted my head, considering it. There was an ugly, immature monster inside me, screaming, “Give her a taste of her own medicine!”

“Friends,” I echoed. “Were we friends, really?”

She looked like I’d just slapped her. I instantly regretted my words, but it was like I wasn’t in control of myself. I kept lashing out. It wasn’t like me. Serena Rossi had gotten deeper in my heart and head than any other woman I’d met. Clearly ten years hadn’t been enough time to debride the scar tissue around my ego.

“You were my friend, Marcus. Whether you believe it or not.”

At the time, I didn’t believe her. Now… I wasn’t so sure. I wanted to. I wanted to be the bigger person, here. But did I want to give her that power over me again—the power to reject me, to humiliate me?

“I know I hurt you,” she said softly, “but I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry—so sorry. But I’m not a bad person.”

“Then why do you need my forgiveness?”

She stood up, shoving her arms into a chunky knit cardigan. Gave me a pitying look. “I don’t. It’s not for me, Marcus. It’s for you.”