by Cari Quinn
And she needed a man who would never, ever waver in a commitment he made, who would never forget his priorities—once he finally figured out what he wanted. Who would always challenge her and keep her guessing and make her laugh.
She was beginning to think she knew exactly who that man was.
Cory had always driven home how important it was to shift strategies once new information came to light. If it was up to her to show him how right they were for each other, she’d take to her task with zeal. She’d do whatever it took.
“Victoria? Are you all right?”
The momentary indecision on his face cemented her decision. He cared for her, she knew he did. If they were meant to be more than lovers, bumping up the depth of their lie wouldn’t change that. And it might just make things clearer for them both.
Before she could respond, Cory steepled his fingers, obviously weighing something in his mind. “Minus a few snafus, this evening went well, I think?”
It could’ve gone worse, she supposed. She mumbled in agreement.
“I think we should take advantage of our apparent…compatibility and schedule a few more social events.”
“You only have me for two more weeks until your parents have their going-away party.” As Cory cut his gaze to hers, she realized her reminder of their limited time had not done what she’d hoped. “I mean, I have a lot of work commitments coming up, along with magazine business, but with proper notice, we can—”
His jaw clenched, emphasizing the shadows highlighting his sharp cheekbones. “How much proper notice are we talking about? You are supposed to be my girlfriend, are you not?”
So much for making him want more. So far all she’d done was annoy him. As usual. “I am,” she agreed quietly. “The love of your life.”
He shifted his face away, his profile so stark that she couldn’t decide if she wanted to smooth a kiss over his temple or tickle him to loosen him up again.
Still, she couldn’t make herself too available to him. Part of their heat, she knew, was her absolute unwillingness to concede ground to him easily. It made sense to continue with a winning formula.
“As long as you give me proper notice, I’m sure we can mesh our schedules,” she added, not expecting him to turn back with a snarl.
“What is this proper fucking notice shit? You used to be available when I wanted you. Now you’re so important that I need to schedule everything?”
“Oooh, swearing. The master of all he sees is pissed.”
His lips twitched around a smile. “I’m not pissed. I just think it’s obvious how good we are together. That’s why I think we should go out more. It would make things more believable.”
Vicky rested her elbow on the back of the sofa and carefully nudged his hand off her leg. “We can probably work something out.”
“Is that your way of brushing me off?” He looked down at his hand as if he was stunned she hadn’t launched herself at him. It had been touch and go there for a while.
She needed to devise her game plan and snap her sexy back into place. It was definitely at low ebb. If she crawled all over Cory now, she had no doubt whatsoever that their hot sex would screw with her already-addled brain until she fell so far she couldn’t climb back out. Taking the night to think would allow her to clarify her goals for this experiment. Setting the parameters in her mind for what she wanted to achieve would minimize risk.
Dirty deliciousness with an option to buy long-term. Sounded about right.
“Of course not. I just didn’t realize how late it was.” She struggled to keep her voice even as she got to her feet. “Speaking of late…” She trailed off and feigned a yawn. “I should get to bed.” Alone.
“Early day tomorrow?” His tone was rigidly polite, as if they hadn’t fucked in the hay two hours ago.
Better yet, as if she didn’t wear the proof of his lies on her body. The red marks from his lips on her neck. The bruises blooming on her hips from his rough grip.
The three little words he’d uttered that were practically imprinted on her psyche.
“Not earlier than normal, but busy. Jill and I are going on a buying trip for Friday’s shoot.” She tried to sound cheerful. “Keeping her busy and out of trouble is my life’s work. At least until she’s thirty or so. Only eight years to go.”
Rising, Cory let out a stilted laugh. “Why?”
“Because I told someone I cared about that I would,” she snapped as if that explained everything. Now that she’d decided it was time for him to leave, he needed to just go before she changed her mind.
She didn’t want to talk anymore tonight. Particularly not to him. She felt way too raw and vulnerable.
Her cell rang and she snatched it off the coffee table. “Hey, Dill. Is Nellie okay?”
“She’s fine. She and Jake—and Lex, who’s in full fret mode—went home to relax. It was just those Braxton-whatever contractions. And gas. Man, I hate when my mom’s right.”
Dillon’s tone was so dry that she had to chuckle. “In this case it’s a good thing though, since her being right means Nellie and the baby are okay.” She added a little happy dance. “Tell Nellie to give me a call when she’s got some time. I told her I’d help her plan out the nursery.”
“Will do. Pass on the info to Mr. Inscrutable if you don’t mind.”
Vicky snuck a look at Cory, biting her lip. “Sure thing, handyman.” Her endearment made Dillon laugh and Cory scowl. “Thanks.”
She turned off her phone and started to speak, but Cory cut her off. “Nellie had some sort of women’s issues this evening, I presume? The baby is fine?”
It only took ten sentences for Cory to sound like a jerk. She had to hand it to him. “You presume correctly.”
“Glad to hear it.” He shoved his hands in his pockets and rocked back and forth. “You only met the lot of them tonight, right?”
She frowned. “Nellie and Jake and Lex? Yeah. I’ve seen them around when I’ve stopped into Divine Flowers, but this is the first time we got to hang out.”
“Yet they’re your new best friends.” He shook his head. “You are a wonder.”
Before she could respond, he tilted his head. “You’ve told Jill and Bryan and your sister about…us?”
“Yeah. Seems like necessary info for my family and a close friend, doesn’t it? The photos told a good part of the story and I filled in the rest. Especially since if I hadn’t, they would’ve heard the scuttlebutt around town and then gotten pissed.”
Rather than looking less uncomfortable, he looked more. “I know this is awkward for you, lying to your friends and family. Even lying to mine bothers you. I’m sorry to put you in that position.”
She slanted him a sly smile. “The only position you put me in tonight involved being legs-up in the barn. I didn’t mind.” When his serious expression didn’t change, she gave him a not-so-gentle push toward the door and yawned again. “Sorry to be such a bad host.”
“I’m not a guest.”
“No. For now, you’re the love of my life.” She stepped around him to pull the chain off the door and opened it to a chilly wind. It really was late, and she probably should’ve asked him to stay. Knowing he wouldn’t alleviated some of her guilt. Some.
She looked back and found him studying her, his eyes hooded. “Maybe we should both take some time to think about what that means, Cory.”
Chapter Ten
Monday morning’s magazine meeting went off without a hitch.
All right, there were a few hitches, Vicky acknowledged. For all their supposed eternal love for each other, they still bickered like angry cats about light fixtures and magazine advertorial articles and everything else under the sun. The only difference was that this time Cory got his way in an argument by fisting his hand in her hair and covering her still-going mouth with his. And she let him.
She spent the afternoon at the furniture store with Jill, arranging for a few last pieces for the cover photo shoot to be delivered Thursday afternoon
. The Chinese screen and the pair of ornately carved mirrors she’d ordered from another store were due in Wednesday. Not only did she love them, they would contribute to the staged room’s positive feng shui.
Now if she could just feng shui her head, she’d be in business.
“You don’t really like that, do you?��
Vicky looked up at Jill’s approach, noting the shock of lavender that now layered through her assistant’s baby-fine blond bangs. At twenty-two, Jill still hadn’t lost her desire to grab attention by any means necessary. She was lucky many people thought interior designers had a little room for creative personal expression or she would’ve had to settle for a more natural hair color. Not that Vicky was that kind of boss. Even if Jill hadn’t been her best friend, she wouldn’t have made her change. Changing was no bueno, except when it came to the one thing Jill sought to change most—her status as a virgin.
That V-card was a boulder on Jill’s back she tried to shed on a regular basis. Vicky wasn’t about to allow such a thing to happen on her watch. If she herself couldn’t have a long-term, stable, normal relationship, she was going to make sure Jill didn’t throw away what should be a special occasion on somebody who wasn’t worthy of her. She could just forget it.
“Hello? You can’t be serious.” Jill gestured at the floral-patterned sofa Vicky had been fondling for five minutes. “That thing is hideous.”
“No kidding,” Vicky muttered, consulting her checklist to avoid Jill’s perceptive blue gaze. “Okay, I think we have everything we need from here. We’ll just stop by Divine Flowers and pick up—”
“What’s wrong with you? You’re acting weird.”
Vicky got the same funny catch in her chest that she got whenever she thought about Cory and their big lie. It usually accompanied a head rush and a sudden urge to remind herself of her coping techniques. “Sorry. I just have a headache.”
“Didn’t you have a headache the night of my birthday party too? Isn’t that why you skipped it?” Jill smirked. “It had to have been bad, if you missed a chance to chaperone me at a place where there’s drinking and body grinding.”
“Oh, it was bad,” Vicky agreed, tucking her list into her purse.
“Yeah, that was the night after you and Cory got caught fucking.” She batted her lashes. “Excuse me. Making sweet love. In a fracking gazebo.”
Vicky walked faster to the checkout counter. “Don’t remind me.”
“But that’s what happens when you’re in love. You can’t control yourself, right?”
Vicky glanced at Jill, her head rush turning into a sinking feeling that submerged her whole body. God, that was truer than Jill knew. More true than even she’d guessed.
“What about all the Christmas stuff for the shoot?” she asked weakly. “You and Lorelie took care of it, right? The tree and ornaments, all the other things we discussed? I called ahead to Value Hardware and they’d arranged to have a lot of it ready for us from their early stock—”
“Dude, I handled all that.” Jill grabbed her arm and propelled her through the miles of sectionals and recliners toward the checkout area. “Which I told you earlier. Weren’t you listening?”
No, not really. She was completely off her game. Cory had thrown her in too many ways to count, from submission in the barn right on down the line. “Just as long as I don’t have to deal with any of that crap right now. I can’t handle Christmas stuff on top of everything else.”
Jill peered up at her, her normally lively eyes surprisingly narrow. “Why? What ‘everything else’ is there? You’re supposed to be happy about being in love, Vic. You’ve been waiting for it for so long.”
“Who says?”
“Me. Your best friend who knows you better than anyone else who doesn’t share a bloodline with you.” Grinning, Jill tapped the diamond starfish necklace Vicky never took off, a present from her mom years ago.
Surprised by a wave of sudden tears, Vicky glanced down just as her cell went off in her purse. She tugged it out, saw Cory’s number, and let it go to voice mail, then listened to his message.
“Honoring your advance notice policy, there’s a thing Wednesday night. I think it would be good for us to go. There are some people I could introduce you to that I think might be beneficial contacts for your business. Let me know.” She could tell he was about to hang up when he added with an audible edge of amusement, “Sugarplum.”
Swallowing hard, she glanced at Jill, grateful to see that her assistant was chatting with their salesperson, finalizing their Thursday deliveries.
God, she wasn’t in love with him, was she? Not all the way. She still had a little bit of an escape route left.
She didn’t agree to go to the shindig with him until Tuesday. It hadn’t been her intention to string him along, more that she couldn’t bear to talk to him. Unsurprisingly, he was not pleased by the lateness of her reply, which she got when he proceeded to be chilly as hell to her Wednesday night at the “get-together” that was really a catered affair with tuxedoed servers, premium champagne, and caviar. So not her scene.
At least he kept up his end of the bargain and introduced her to several influential people, two of whom had upcoming interior design jobs—one for a private residence that was closer to a mansion than a house, and one for a new art gallery in Philadelphia. Throughout the evening, she passed out business cards to wealthy, important people and collected icy, impervious looks from her lover and tried to act like she wasn’t overwhelmed by either.
He dropped her off and they agreed to see each other on the shoot on Friday. And that was that. No kiss good-bye. Just a sort of unexplainable chill, which might’ve come from her lack of haste to accept his invitation or maybe, more likely, he’d already started to pull away.
This was all just temporary, after all.
Vicky tossed and turned half the night, then got through the next day at work like a zombie. When she ended up tossing and turning again the next night, she pounded her pillow and relived the previous night’s crappy non-date all over again. In spite of her supposed plans, she’d come so close to spewing out her confusing feelings in the car—even in spite of his unrelieved coldness to her—that she’d had to get away before she ruined everything. Those feelings had nothing to do with harmless infatuation. They went way deeper than that, and denying them only made her more of a liar.
Lying ran deep in her family, at least in her branch of it. She’d lied to her mother during their visit that evening, putting on a happy facade because she knew her mother needed to see that. She didn’t understand that Vicky still had bad dreams about being left. And lately, she had daydreams about leaving herself. Running away from her problems and her life. Tossing her chips on the table just like good ol’ dad. Why not? What did she have to lose?
The faces of the people she loved scrolled through her mind, and she sighed. She had a lot to lose. A lot. She was just overtired and overstressed and overcome. She’d soldier through, like she always did. She wasn’t the type to bail when the going got tough—even if she couldn’t help imagining it now and then.
And…sleep was not happening. Again. To try to keep her mind busy, she finished her antiquing article—her final article for this issue of the magazine, thank God—and e-mailed it to Cory, then aimlessly surfed the web.
Was he still up, too, staring at his ceiling? Maybe working in bed, barefoot and bare-chested and looking unspeakably delectable? Perhaps he was online, talking astronomy with his fellow geeks. What had his chat group been called? Skychat or Moonview or something. She could run a quick search, see what came up. He’d told her about it willingly, so she wouldn’t be stalking him. Much.
After a fruitless half hour, she hit pay dirt. The group was called Celestia, and it was based in nearby Penderville. She clicked into the chat room, and lo and behold, there were five other people logged in. One of them might even be Cory.
A member had used the name Ra, so she played a hunch and chose the name Goddess Nut. In many versions
of Egyptian mythology, Ra was the god of the sun and Nut was the goddess of the sky, as well as Ra’s wife. She was also the mother of Osiris, whose embodiment in the stars was sometimes said to be Orion. Freaking Orion.
Sometimes being a nerd came in handy.
Though she knew she was likely wasting her time, she started chatting with the group about the recent meteor shower. Almost right away she got an instant message from Ra. Her heart picked up speed as she clicked on it, but she tried to remain calm. It might be him. It might not be.
So you sleep with your brother?
She laughed out loud. In mythology, the father of Nut’s children was her brother Geb.
Only when the pickings are slim.
A reply appeared immediately. They are tonight.
I’m talking to you, aren’t I?
Yes, for the next few minutes. How are you this evening?
She bit her lip. Did she dare? The style of speech and lack of typos fit Cory, but it was a pretty big leap. She didn’t even know he was online. Hell, she didn’t even know if he was home.
Ah, what the hell. If she got a weird feeling, she could always hit the X.
I’m horny. Just typing those two words made her flush. Are you?
The resulting pause lasted so long she thought Ra had signed off. She kept chatting in the main room, one eye always on that solid blue box at the side of her screen. Then it blinked.
You do realize this is Celestia and not Sexee Chat, right?
She laughed again. Sexee Chat was a local phone line advertised on the cable channels late at night.
Maybe I like geek sex. Game?
How do you have online sex? Do you rub on your monitor? Mount your hard drive?
A helpless giggle spilled out of her. Yes. Lots of rubbing. Lots of fingering…the keys.
So is this where I ask what you’re wearing? And you answer a thong and a smile?
I’m actually wearing a nightshirt with Hello Kitty on it. Please, no pussy jokes.
I’ll try to refrain. So what now?