“No.” He rested his forehead on her shoulder, loving the smell of her skin. “I’m going to enjoy it. It’s the closest thing to sex I’ve had in a long time.”
She ran another hand through his hair. “Is this what you call vibrating phone sex?” she joked. Her laugh shook her body, which felt really good because his body was still pressed up against her.
He leaned up a bit, hopeful. “Phone sex? Would you have phone sex with me?”
“Probably not.” Smiling, she scooted out from under him and sat up.
He studied her expression, humor and desire dancing in her eyes. Lowering his gaze, he saw her nipples pressing against her red bra. Sue followed his gaze and snagged her red top and slipped it back over her head.
Before he could sit up, he had to reach inside his jeans to readjust. Finally pressing his feet to the floor, he rested his elbows on his knees, dropped his head into his hands, and took several deep breaths. When he looked up again, she was on the floor, organizing the pages of the two manuscripts.
He touched the top of her head. “Sue?”
“No.”
“I wasn’t going to ask that.” He exhaled in frustration. “Look, it’s not that I can’t take no for an answer. I’m just curious. I know you want it. I want it and—”
She looked up. “When I was fourteen, I wanted my nose pierced. When I was sixteen, I wanted to kill my mom.”
He stared at her. Women had always perplexed him, but Sue took that feeling to a whole new level.
“Okay, I’m biting. What does having your nose pierced and killing your mom have to do with us having sex?”
“Nothing, exactly, but now I’m kind of glad I didn’t get an extra hole in my body. And I’m glad I didn’t do my mom in.” Still down on all fours, she paused. “Well, some days I’m glad. Today wasn’t one of those days.” She sat back on her bottom. “Anyway, the point is that you can’t go through life simply doing what ever you want.”
“You can’t tell me that you’ve never followed your instincts, done something because it feels good or right!”
“I have lousy instincts,” she muttered.
“So you don’t listen to them ever?”
“Not when they’re about piercings or killing people. And not about men. Not anymore at least.”
Shit. A lightbulb went off. Why hadn’t he realized sooner? “This isn’t about me. It’s about him.”
“It’s not about Paul. Yes, I’m mad that he made a fool out of me—”
“Not Paul. I mean your ex. What did he do, Sue? What did he do to you?”
Sue looked back at the window. “It looks like rain.”
“What does rain have to do with your ex?” He struggled to follow Sue’s logic.
“Nothing. It’s a polite way of saying, ‘Go jump off a cliff. I’m not talking about this.’ ”
“Okay, he hurt you really bad.” He studied her. “And it was probably raining at the time. Now tell me the story.”
The memory came on so strong that Sue could smell the rain and the sweaty scent of Collin’s gym clothes. She saw herself at the grocery store parking lot, rain beating down as she attempted to put the soaked bags into the trunk of his car. His car, because he’d asked her to have his oil changed. Collin’s gym bag had been left unzipped in the trunk, and red silk peeped from the faded leather.
Delete! She attempted to shake the image out of her head.
She looked at Jason. “I’m not talking about this.” She stood and tried to step around him, but he blocked her.
“He cheated on you, didn’t he?”
“Make that a really high cliff you’re going to jump off.”
“That’s why this hurts so much with Paul.”
“I’m not talking about this,” she reiterated.
He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “But, Sue, don’t you see? This isn’t a problem with us.” His fingers lingered against her neck.
“It won’t be a problem if you dive off that cliff right now.” She pushed his hand away.
“It’s not a problem, because I don’t cheat.”
“All men cheat.” Collin had cheated her out of five years. She’d worked at being a good wife. Dreamed of babies. She’d even planned on taking cooking lessons.
“I don’t cheat. I’m a one-woman man.”
His words swam through her head. She focused on Jason instead of the past. She couldn’t change her past, but she could change her future. She’d almost slept with Paul, almost been another notch on his bedpost. And now, twice she’d almost slept with Jason. She had to be careful. As Kathy would say, she had to be always on guard for men and their warts.
“You’ve never cheated on a girlfriend. Never?”
“Never,” he said.
She didn’t believe him. “What about the phone call you got while we were at your apartment? The one where you didn’t tell the caller you were with me.”
His brow wrinkled. “The only person that called that day was Maggie. And I didn’t tell her because…I don’t tell Maggie about everything I do. Do you tell your mom everything?”
She swallowed that bit of logic but refused to give up her point. “You’ve never had a relationship with one woman and then met another you liked better?”
“Yes, but I didn’t cheat.”
“So, let’s say you’re in a bar. You have a thing going with one woman but she’s not there. Then you meet someone who’s hot. What do you do, call the girlfriend and tell her it’s over while you have your next bang toy hanging on your arm?”
The look on his face took her by surprise.
“You have! You’ve actually broken it off with a girl on a phone in a bar because you met someone else.”
The guilt in his eyes intensified. “The relationship was practically over. It had dried out.”
“Dried out?” she repeated.
“Gone stale.”
“Stale? Like bread goes stale?”
“Yes,” he said. “I mean, no.”
She got a mental image of him trying to pull his foot from his mouth. But it was too late; he had to either choke or swallow.
She sighed. “Life’s too short to eat day old bread, isn’t it? So…how long does it take for a woman to go stale?”
He stared at her, then tried to change the subject like she had earlier. “You’re right. It’s going to rain.”
“Oh, no. Tell me.” She needed to know this. She needed to tattoo this information across her heart so the next time she even considered having sex with Jason Dodd, she’d know that to him she was nothing more than a leftover dinner roll waiting to be tossed out with the table scraps.
She eyed him from beneath her lashes. “What’s the longest relationship you’ve ever had?”
He stared back. “Fine. I’ll answer if you’ll tell me why you divorced your husband.”
It was a tough choice. She debated.
“He cheated, didn’t he? Did you find him in your bed with a friend? Oh, God, not your mom?”
“No!” She started to walk away, but then again, she really wanted to know everything about Jason. Could she tell him the truth? Tit for tat? She would give him an answer for one of his own. It would be worth it.
She met his gaze. “Deal. I found some sexy underwear in his trunk and it didn’t belong to me. And yes, it was pouring down rain at the time.”
This wasn’t a lie. Let him think what she herself had until two months after the divorce, when a drunk, vaguely familiar-looking woman who called herself Colleen had shown up on her doorstep wanting to explain. When Sue had found the teddy, she’d thought nothing could be worse than knowing the man you loved had turned to another woman for sex. But she’d been so wrong. Having your husband turn to a woman wasn’t near as bad as having your husband want to turn into a woman.
I still love you. Collin had tried to explain how the woman trapped in his body was actually a lesbian. While he enjoyed flirting with men, it was just to prove he was feminine. He’d confessed that al
l his boys’ nights out for the last year had really been a girl’s night out. And while Sue had been home trying to figure out how they could afford to have a baby, worrying about her husband’s hair loss, Collin, AKA Colleen, had been using hair-be-gone and was bar-hopping.
If that wasn’t enough, that skinny excuse of a man had worn her clothes to do it. Well, everything except her lingerie.
Jason’s touch to her arm brought Sue back to the present. “He was a fool to have cheated on you. Just like that freaking foot doctor. But I’m telling you, I wouldn’t do that.”
Sue glanced at Jason. At least he’d never fit into her clothes. Then again, she didn’t suspect him of being a cross-dresser. He was one hundred percent playboy, a man who toyed with a woman until he found a better play toy. And obviously he’d found someone better four months ago or he’d have called her.
“So that’s why you didn’t call me. Because you’d met someone else,” she said.
“No!” he protested.
“Then why?” she asked.
He shook his head, clearly not wanting to answer, but he’d agreed to answer her other question. Tit for tat.
“What’s your record in relationship endurance?” she asked.
He hesitated.
“We had a deal. Come on, Jason. What is it—eight months? Less?”
His frown deepened. “Three months,” he finally confessed. “But—”
“Three? I should have known!” She shook her head. “You didn’t even name your cat or know its sex.”
“I can guarantee you that I knew both the name and the sex of all the women I dated.”
He might be surprised, Sue thought, remembering Colleen.
Jason passed a hand over his face. “This isn’t fair. You can’t judge what we might have by…the past. We don’t know what could happen.”
A little hope flourished. Was he trying to tell her that what he felt for her was different from the others?
“Why shouldn’t I judge you by your past?” Part of her longed to hear something that would convince her to risk it all, to throw caution to the wind.
“Because,” he said. “ We don’t know how things could go. We could last…for a long time.”
It was the pause that did him in. And “a long time.” Not forever. Forever wasn’t in Jason’s relationship dictionary.
“How long? How long might we last, Jason? Six months? Doubling your record? Maybe a year? How long before you decide I’m just not worth calling back?” Hell, Collin, who claimed to be a woman on the inside, had lasted five years. She turned to leave, then decided she wasn’t finished and faced him again. “Wow. If we accidentally made it a year, I’d have mold growing on me.”
“I didn’t mean it like that!” he bellowed.
“I know exactly what you meant.” And knowing, she took off down the hall, her loyal cat making the walk with her.
“We’re not through talking!” he yelled. “Damn it, Sue, I’m calling you! You’re going to talk to me. You can’t—”
“No!” She got to the bedroom and was about to fall back on the bed when, dang it, true to his word, her phone rang.
“Not to night, buddy,” she seethed and grabbed up the receiver. “Listen to me and listen good. I’m not going to sleep with you. I won’t have phone sex with you. Keep your tongue out of my throat. I don’t care how good-looking you are, or how much I appreciate all you’re doing for me. Or that you wear an extra-large condom. Sex is out. No sex. You got that, Buster Brown?”
That’s when she saw Jason standing in her opened bedroom door. He didn’t have a phone in his hand.
“Oh,” a feminine voice echoed through the line. “I…uh, this is…Maggie. Jason’s mom.”
Oh, crappers! Sue felt her face turn red.
Maggie continued, “Jason gave me…this number and said if I couldn’t reach him to try it.”
Sue had heard that there were times to cut your losses and shut up. Being a writer, who made her living using words, she had never believed it.
“I didn’t mean I wouldn’t have sex with you,” she said. “Not that there’s anything wrong with you. I just…” Sue forced her mouth closed. Okay, now she believed it. She held the phone out to Jason and saw the question in his eyes. “It’s your mom.”
He laughed—one of those really hard belly laughs.
“Talk to her.” Sue forced the phone into his hand.
Taking a deep breath, he pulled the phone up. But before he started talking, his laughter exploded again.
It stopped at the sound of shattering glass in the other room. The noise was like an explosion. Jason took off to see what had happened.
Sue shot after him, coming to a dead stop when she saw the broken glass and still-wobbling rock on her dining room floor. Taped around the rock was a note. Just like in her book.
“Jason?” Maggie’s voice rang from the phone.
“I’ll call you back.” He hung up.
Sue continued to stare at the rock. If it was really like her book, that note wasn’t going to be an invitation to tea.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“It was straight out of another scene from her book, too,” Jason told Chase.
“Get her ass out of there!” his friend replied.
Jason cradled the phone to his ear, leaned back on the sofa, and glanced down the hall to where Sue had retired for the night in her bedroom. “I suggested we go to my place, but she wouldn’t hear it.”
Chase growled. “You see? This is what I meant about her not taking things seriously. She has a freak threatening to kill her, and she wants to stay home and nest.”
“She is taking it seriously,” Jason said, feeling the need to defend Sue. The look on her face when she saw the words You’re dead, bitch, on that note kept flashing through his mind.
“Not serious enough to get her ass out of there,” Chase muttered.
“Would you leave?” Jason asked.
“That’s different,” Chase said.
“Not really. Besides, her leaving for a few days isn’t going to do it. If he’s really serious, and it damn sure looks like he is, he’ll just show up again when she comes back.”
Chase let go of a deep breath. “I don’t want anything to happen to her. She’s half nuts, but she’s good people.”
“I’m not going to let anything happen to her.” Jason was almost offended that his friend thought he might.
“Maybe I should change our flights and we can head home tomorrow, instead of Friday,” Chase suggested.
“Why? Don’t spoil your trip. What can you do that I can’t? I got this.” Jason also remembered that Sue had only agreed to let him stay until Chase returned, and the idea of being pushed aside rubbed a raw spot in his chest. His grip on the phone tightened. “It’s personal for me now. I’m going to catch this freak. Myself.”
The next few seconds of silence told Jason that Chase was half picking up on what he really wanted to say.
“Sue’s not driving you crazy?” he asked.
She was, but not how Chase meant. “No. We’ve got past that whole kiss thing.”
“Got past it?” Chase sounded surprised. “How did you do that?”
“We moved on.”
“What about the whole ‘no call’ thing? Lacy seems to believe that’ll be the one to drive a nail in your coffin. You move past that one, too?” Jason didn’t answer. Instead he said, “The Hoke’s Bluff people took the rock and note. But they aren’t going to get anything more.”
His partner was quiet for a moment. “You still betting on that critique partner being behind this?”
“Yeah,” Jason said. “I’m still waiting to hear if they come up with anything on the Saturn that was stolen, and I’m checking into some people who Sue mentioned might have a grudge about her success. And I still haven’t ruled out her agent being behind it all. But it’s turning into more than a damn PR stunt. So yeah, I got my money on him.”
“Did they arrest the nurse that shot the doc
tor?”
“I hear they brought her in. Peters hasn’t let me know anything else.”
“That’s because he hates your ass.”
“Yeah, and he doesn’t care too much for yours, either.”
Chase chuckled. “True. The doc still doing okay?”
“Yeah, he’s gonna live. But he got what was coming to him if you ask me.”
“Yep. Hey,” Chase said. “My sister is calling me, so I ‘d better head out. But…look, I don’t want to get in your shit, but…just be careful where’s Sue’s concerned. You hurt her, and Lacy—”
“I hurt her and Lacy’s going to have my nuts—I remember.” Chase laughed. “I don’t think it was just your nuts.” “Funny.” Why the hell did everyone assume he would hurt Sue? It was all very frustrating. “Go see to your sister,” he said, and he hung up.
That night, Sue tiptoed out of her room. Silence filled the house. Unable to sleep, wondering which scene of her book the stalker would try to emulate next, she’d suddenly remembered she hadn’t taken her vitamin C.
Determined to not even glance toward the sofa, she moved to the kitchen table and, trying not to rattle the container, lifted the bottle of pills.
“Hey.”
Startled, she tossed up the pill bottle, which crashed against the ceiling before rocketing back to the floor. Jason chuckled, and the lamp beside the sofa came on. Sue’s eyes adjusted to the light, but she wished they hadn’t. Wearing nothing but silk boxers again, Jason rose from the couch and stepped toward her. Bare-chested. And oh, he looked good bare.
“I…forgot to take my vitamins.” She got on her hands and knees, searching for the bottle, and while she was looking she hoped to find some willpower.
Appearing beside her was a pair of bare feet. Hair, dark blond hair, grew on his legs, on his calves, ankles, even a few strands on his big toes. If he ever went into cross-dressing, the stock in hair removal companies would shoot up.
She moaned. Why was she thinking about that? She’d managed not to think about Collin for a long time.
Spotting the vitamin bottle, she snagged it but didn’t stand up.
“You going to stay under there?”
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