Just About Sex (29 page)

Stunned, Simone stared at the computer screen until the words bled together into one squiggly black mass. She couldn’t believe it. Celibate her entire life until last night, she’d had sex a sum total of five times with only one man.

And now the whole world thought she was a slut.

Planting her elbows on the desk, she buried her face in her hands and tried to stay calm.

“Simone, honey,” Pat said, “we’ll regroup. In a few months this’ll all die down and—”

Alex Greene is still very much in the picture, and confirmed that he spent the night with Simone as recently as last night.

“—we can ask them to reconsider the column. And your book is still coming out—”

…confirmed that he spent the night with Simone…

Simone raised her head. Ignoring Pat, she looked over her shoulder to Alex, who met her gaze evenly. “What does this mean?” she asked him. “‘Confirmed that he spent the night with Simone.’ That’s not true, is it?”

His face tightened. “Simone—”

“That’s not true, is it?”

“Simone, I—”

Deep inside her, something snapped and broke loose. She slammed her palms on the desk and Alex and Pat jumped with surprise.
“That’s not true, is it?”
she shrieked.

“Yes.” Alex held her gaze for a long, painful moment, then dropped his head.

Chapter 24

A
silence fell, broken only by the tick of her brass clock on the nightstand. Even Pat, for once, realized the wisdom of keeping her mouth shut. Finally Simone turned to Pat. “I need to speak to Alex. Alone.”

“But—”

“Now.”

Huffing with indignation, Pat wheeled around and marched stiffly down the steps. At the bottom she snatched up her purse and paused at the door.

“Call me,” she told Simone, who didn’t bother answering. Shaking her head, Pat left.

Simone and Alex stared at each other from a distance of five feet, but it felt as if they faced off on opposite sides of the Grand Canyon, with the Colorado River separating them. Simone felt dead. He’d taken everything she had to give, leaving only the empty husk of the Simone she’d been before she met him.

Who was Alex Greene? This untouchable, scowling man was as much a stranger to her as he’d been the day they met. Was this the same man who’d lavished her with such unspeakable pleasure just hours ago? The man she trusted and loved? Whose body she’d explored all through the night? It didn’t seem possible.

Maybe she’d never really known him at all.

“Where were you?” he cried. “I’ve been trying to find you all day to tell you what happened. Why did you leave like that this afternoon?”

“I didn’t leave like anything,” she lied. “I just left. And why should you care, anyway? You said you needed some time, and I gave you some time.”

“I didn’t want you to run off and hide from me!”

She shrugged. “Maybe I wanted to spare us the big goodbye scene.”

He cringed and froze, reminding her of a deer who’d realized he was in a hunter’s sights, and didn’t know whether to stay or run.

“What are you talking about?” he asked in a hoarse, high voice. “Why would we have a goodbye scene?”

A cold, brittle laugh came out of her mouth, even though nothing about this scene was remotely funny. “Well, what’s the point of dragging things out, Alex? You’ve gotten everything you wanted, haven’t you?”

“No.”

“Oh, come on, Alex! You wanted two things.” She held up her fingers and ticked off her points. “To make me sorry for the column and to get me in bed.”

“No.”

“Oh, wait, sorry. You wanted to make me sorry
and
prove you’re great in bed. Haven’t you done all that?”

For the longest time he just stared, and she knew that behind his hurt, vaguely reproachful expression, his brain was busy outlining strategies for reasoning with her.

After a while he crept closer, with his palms up. “I know how this looks,” he said quietly. “I don’t blame you for being upset—”

“Well, thank you so much.”

“—but I did
not
brag to that reporter about sleeping with you.”

Oh, how she wanted to believe him. “No? What did happen? Why don’t you go ahead and explain why what you told her was any better than what Juan told her.”

That brought him up short. Growling with obvious frustration, he ran a hand through his hair. “She came just as you were leaving. Had all kinds of questions about you and Romero—”

“The best thing to do with reporters is just say
no comment.
”

“I know that. And that’s what I told her, at first—”

“Until you admitted I’d spent the night.”

“Well, she’d seen you herself, and I—”

“You just confirmed it for her.”

“I—I d-didn’t mean to. It j-just…slipped out.”

Far in the back of her throat she tasted bile and wondered if a person could actually throw up from being exposed to too much crap. He didn’t really expect her to believe this nonsense, did he? And why was he bothering?

Men can’t be trusted.

Betrayed, humiliated, she latched on to the most hurtful thing she could think of to say. “Poor Alex. You’re not the best talker in the world, are you?”

He flinched, and she knew she’d hit her mark. “Is this what we’re d-doing now? Being cruel to each other? Why won’t you b-believe me?”

“It would be easier to believe you,” she said, her voice rising with hysteria, “if you hadn’t come into our little relationship—such as it is—with agendas. And it would be much easier to believe you if you hadn’t blown me off this afternoon.”

“I knew it.” He stared off across the room as if he couldn’t believe how stupid he’d been. Shaking his head, he let out a halfhearted snort of laughter. “Simone, I wasn’t blowing you off. I just n-needed a little time to think about what happened, and what you s-said…” He trailed off.

Flames of mortification burned her cheeks, and she wished she would just die right now rather than endure some speech about how sorry he was to have given her the wrong impression, and blah, blah, blah. No man had ever felt sorry for her, and she wasn’t about to start now.

“Oh, don’t worry.” She managed a tight smile and flippant laugh. “You don’t have any special duties just because you were the first man I slept with.”

His eyes rounded with obvious horror. “The…
f-first
man?”

“Of course.” She widened her smile and added a careless little shrug for emphasis. “You didn’t think you’d be the last, did you?”

Alex roared with rage and she knew she’d gone too far. She backed up several steps, but wasn’t fast enough to escape him. Eyes flashing and nostrils flaring, he lunged and caught her by the shoulders with hard, digging fingers. She cried out, but he tightened his hold, raising her until she was eye level with him and only the tips of her shoes touched the floor.

“You l-love me,” he said, his voice deathly quiet. “You’d never have s-s-slept with me if you didn’t
l-love
me.”

Don’t ever trust or love them.

Mama had been right of course. Why hadn’t she listened? Why had she confessed her real feelings to Alex? Look how quickly her foolish declaration had come back to haunt her.

She should’ve known he’d rub her face in it: he didn’t love her but he sure wanted every woman he slept with—including all those poor women he’d audited—to die of love for him. Well, not her. Never her.

She manufactured another smile, but it felt hideous and feral. “You didn’t believe me, did you? You should know by now you make women crazy in bed, Alex. We’ll say anything in the heat of the moment.”

With a sharp hiss of breath, he froze. She felt a brief, powerful surge of satisfaction. But then his eyes, jaw and chin hardened, as if someone had taken his head and dipped it, bit by bit, into wet concrete and let it dry. In his eyes she saw only revulsion.

Her heart twisted and withered.

Very carefully he lowered her to her feet, removed his hands and backed away from her. “W-well,” he said, his unblinking gaze riveted to her face, “like mother, like d-daughter, eh?”

Her heart died.

Backing up another step, he turned, walked down the steps and slipped out the front door. He didn’t look back.

Alex heard, and ignored, the insistent ringing of his front doorbell, which was closely followed by enough pounding on the door to register six-point-five on the Richter scale. Instead of answering, or even bothering to look and see who was there, he rolled his brush in the paint tray, skimmed off the excess, and turned to his half-painted dining room wall.

Sage, the woman at Home Depot had called the color. Whatever. It looked green to him, and he didn’t really care anyway. He’d only decided to paint the walls to give himself something to do to keep from going insane.

It wasn’t working.

Angry footsteps drummed on the porch right outside the window where he stood, and Laurel’s scowling face appeared on the other side of the glass. Squinting against the sunlight, she shrugged, palms up, in a
what-the-heck
gesture.

Sighing harshly, Alex dropped the roller back in the pan, shuffled past his white-sheeted furniture, and opened the door for her.

She stormed in and he braced for a lecture. But when she got a close look at him, her jaw dropped and he knew why. He looked like day-old trash and probably smelled the same.

It’d been at least twenty-four hours since he showered, and his white T-shirt and jeans were starting to show the strain. Since he hadn’t bothered to shave, either, he suspected he looked like Grizzly Adams.

After three nights of tossing and turning in bed, he’d given up trying to sleep at all for the last couple of days. So most likely he had a hollowed-out, raccoon look about the eyes.

“What happened to you?” she cried, aghast.

“Nothing.” He went back to the dining room and picked up his roller.

“Something’s happened,” she said, following right on his heels. “You haven’t been to work in
two days.
”

Something in her inflection made it sound as if he called in sick last year and never went back. “I took a couple days off, Laurel. It’s not a crime. I have about a thousand days coming to me.”

“You
never
take time off.”

Alex snorted but didn’t answer. Lately he seemed to be doing lots of things he’d never done before. Slacking off at work. Sleeping with virgins. Getting his heart smashed.

The perma-lump in his throat tightened, refusing to be swallowed. Raising the roller, he picked up where he’d left off, making rhythmic green zigzags against the existing off-white paint.

Laurel cleared her throat. “How’s Simone? She must be pretty upset about that
Inquisitor
article.”

The name jarred his fragile concentration and the brush skittered, making unsightly splotches. Tightening his grip on the roller, he covered over his mistake. “How should I know?”

Laurel, always tenacious, tried again. “I guess I was thinking there was something special between you and—”

“Yeah, well, whatever it was is over, and I don’t want to talk about it. Okay?”

Spinning on his heel, he went back to the table and rolled the brush in the paint again. From the corner of his eye he saw Laurel standing motionless, watching him with shocked wide eyes.

He prayed she’d drop it because his hold on his temper was weak at best, which was one of the reasons he’d taken time off to quarantine himself here in the house, where he couldn’t hurt anyone.

“I…thought you really liked her, Alex.”

“I never said that.” He rolled the brush a little too hard and paint oozed over the sides of the aluminum pan and onto the white drop cloth. Cursing, he tried to sop up the mess.

“But you
did
like her.”

And with that simple statement, Alex lost it.

The rage that had simmered below the surface all week finally erupted. Without thinking, he snatched up the wet roller and hurled it at the far wall over the sideboard, which it hit with a squelch before clattering to the floor. Paint made a roughly rectangular mess on the wall and splattered all over the white drop cloth. A couple of drops ricocheted and hit him on the lip and cheek.

Laurel froze with astonishment.

“Like her?”
Alex roared, waving his paint-covered hands at his sister. “I was crazy about her! I would have done

anything
for her!”

“Then what happened?” Laurel hustled around the table to him and, ignoring the mess on his hands, grabbed and squeezed them. “What could be so bad? Didn’t you apologize?”

“I blew it, okay?” He snatched his hands away. “She doesn’t trust me, and I’m not sure I blame her. We said things. Terrible things.” Suddenly his strength gave out and he collapsed onto the step stool. Leaning his elbows on his knees, he dropped his head. “And I’m not sure how she felt about me anyway.”

“Oh, I see.”

Alex heard the unmistakable taunt in her voice and looked up.

“You’re just giving up. Is that it? Mr. Tenacious is throwing in the towel?”

“Well, what else do you suggest I do?” he shouted.

“Do what you always do. Think of a plan. Fight. Win.”

Deep in his belly, beneath the tiny blossom of hope, pulsed a knot of fear. What if Simone never spoke to him again? What if he never saw her again?

What if he did?

“The thing is,” he began slowly, “she’s not really a quick affair type of woman.”

A wry smile turned up one side of Laurel’s mouth. “Of course not,” she said. “She’s going to be your wife. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

He had, but saying it aloud gave it a whole new terrifying dimension. How did this happen—to him of all people? Getting married had been the last thing on his mind. Why get married when there were so many sexy women in the world to sample? When he could have all of the pleasure and none of the entanglements?

And yet…had anything in his life ever been more fun than the time he’d spent with Simone? Could any other woman possibly be as sexy and thrilling? Was anything more exciting than the thought of Simone living here, with him and, eventually, with their children?