by Julia London
“Thought what?” he asked, confused, and all right, a little lost in the lush pout of her lips again.
“Did you ever think that you didn’t really think that you’d be something?”
That gave him pause—primarily because he had to repeat the question in his head to decipher it. But then he said honestly, “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” she uttered softly, clearly disappointed.
He hadn’t thought that, had he? He’d always imagined himself a lawyer. His grandfather had been one, his dad was one. And didn’t he believe that he’d follow in his dad’s footsteps and be a judge one day, too? So why, then, did he feel so uncomfortable and have that vague notion he ought to be doing something good with his life instead of chasing a buck? Because he was hungry. He honked for the damn valet. When none appeared, he sighed and looked at Rebecca. “How exactly did you end up as Miss Texas if you didn’t really want to be Miss Texas?”
Rebecca looked up from her study of the radio and pierced him clean through with those blue eyes without even trying. How she did that was really starting to unnerve him
“I guess because . . . because everyone wanted me to.”
“Who, your parents?”
“Yeah, my dad. And my boyfriend. Or husband. Well, he was both,” she said, and dropped her gaze to the radio again. “Bud. He was both.” She made a whirling motion with her hand. “Boyfriend. Then husband. Oh . . . and jerk.” She laughed at her little joke.
This was not exactly territory Matt wanted to enter—not that he wasn’t mildly curious about the dolt who was stupid enough to let go of a woman like Rebecca. But then again, she did raise big red flags on a routine basis.
“But it wasn’t just them,” she continued, sounding almost as if she was arguing with herself. “It was me, too. I mean, I didn’t enter the pageant at gunpoint, did I?”
“I would guess not.”
“And I went through all that stuff to get there, didn’t I?”
“I would assume,” he said, and tried to imagine Rebecca putting hemorrhoid cream under her eyes. Nope, couldn’t see it.
“No, I did it. But still . . .” she sighed, swung a hooded gaze to him. “Hey, Mattie, do you remember when you were young and full of . . . of . . .”
“Piss?” he offered, noticing how elegant her hands were.
She smiled; her eyes were now an incredible smoky blue. “Hope. You know, hope about life. The future and who little Mattie was going to be. Remember?”
“I suppose so.” Although it was near to impossible to conjure up the young Matt anymore. That was such ancient history.
Rebecca nodded slowly and looked down, and he wondered if she was having A Moment. “Sometimes, I wonder if the young Rebecca would have liked me very much,” she said, and propped her head on her fist, slanting toward him. “I wonder if she would have liked me at all.”
The hair on Matt’s neck rose; danger, danger Will Robinson! He cocked his head to one side, tried to see if she was crying. He couldn’t tell, but in a valiant effort to stave off any tears (Over what again, exactly? Having won the Miss Texas title?), he said, “Everyone wonders, don’t they? Don’t we all wonder if we have achieved what we set out to achieve? Or if we became the man—or woman—that we’d always believed we could be?”
Rebecca didn’t say anything.
Damn it, where the hell were those steaks? “Look, let’s talk about something else, okay? Let’s talk about . . . hey, what about your son? So what is he, like seven? Eight? In school? What does he like to do?” Against his better judgment, Matt dipped his head a little lower to see if she was crying. “Rebecca?”
But instead of answering, Rebecca’s head slid off her fist, and landed, facedown, smack in the middle of his crotch.
Chapter Thirteen
One reason I don’t drink is that I want to know when I am having a good time . . .
NANCY ASTOR
Just as that mushy spot on his body registered in Rebecca’s brain, Matt had her by the shoulders and was propping her up in her seat.
“Whoa!” she exclaimed, mortified, and gaped at Matt, who was likewise gaping at her, apparently just as mortified. Oh, for the love of Pete, how did that happen? Rebecca blinked several times to clear her vision, and noticed that Matt was staring at her so intently that she began to worry how long she had actually been lying facedown in his crotch. And to make matters worse, there was a guy at Matt’s window, tapping on the window. Only Matt didn’t seem to hear it. He didn’t seem to be even breathing.
“Ah . . .” She gulped, wide-eyed.
“You have my undivided attention,” he said.
Rebecca pointed at the window.
Matt slowly turned his head, at which point Rebecca covered her face with her hands. Humiliation aside (not possible)—she couldn’t remember the last time she had drunk too much, and really, at the moment, she couldn’t remember where she’d left her car. She took a breath and reminded herself that all of her books said there was always more than one way to look at a bad situation. So what if she’d just made a huge and enormous jackass of herself? Maybe she was just being the new Rebecca, the carefree let’s-have-a-little-fun Rebecca, who could let her hair down every once in a while instead of just dreaming about it.
Rebecca lowered her hands as Matt handed the guy a wad of cash. “Keep it,” he said, and took the Styrofoam containers the guy handed him, rolled up the window, and turned and deposited the containers on her lap. “Try not to pass out on those, will you?”
Rebecca blinked at the white containers and laughed desperately. “This is not what you think!”
“What I think is that you need a steak and a bed.”
“I just slipped. Haven’t you ever slipped?”
“Yes. In fact, I think I might have slipped right off my rocker,” he said and smiled a little. “But either you have a strange way of trying to get in my pants, or you’re seriously inebriated,” he said as he put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb.
“I am not seriously inebriated, only a little,” she said, holding up thumb and forefinger together to show him just how little. “And if I wanted in your pants, I’d be a whole lot more . . . more . . .”
“Careful?” he suggested.
“Interested,” she said, pleased that she’d actually thought of a word.
Matt laughed at that. “Admit it. You don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“I know,” she insisted. “I am talking about never wanting sex from you, so . . . read something else into it,” she said, fluttering her fingers at him.
Matt was still grinning as the light changed. “Hey, sex with me is not half bad, if I do say so myself. But okay, let’s just pretend that you did want in my pants. How would you get there?”
A better question was, how were they having this conversation? Rebecca felt pretty certain that the words sex and Matt were a dangerous combination. “Come on,” she said, shaking her head.
“You know what I think?” Matt continued, clearly ignoring her. “I think you’d smile that little smile of yours,” he said, glancing at her from the corner of his eye. “You know, that pretty little come hither smile you have.”
“Puh-leez,” Rebecca said, swaying too far and bumping into him when he turned a corner. “I don’t have a come hither smile.”
“You do,” he insisted as he turned into a parking garage. “You’ve even shot it at me a couple of times, and don’t lie,” he said as he coasted into a reserved spot.
“You honestly believe that?” she exclaimed, almost dumping the containers in her determination to set him straight. What was he talking about? When had she ever smiled at him, much less in a suggestive way? “Whatever I flashed at you was not a come hither smile, Popinjay,” she said heatedly. “Because I smile all the time and I haven’t had sex in four years—” Something in her Chablis-soaked brain stopped her—she sure hadn’t meant to say that out loud.
For his part, Matt didn’t even move, j
ust stared at the concrete wall in front of them. “Did you . . . did you just say what I think you said?” he asked at last, his voice full of awe. “I mean, I was just kidding around. So were you kidding, right? Right, Rebecca?”
“Where are we?” she asked, trying to change the subject.
“Ohmigod, how is that possible?” He turned to look at her now with the same morbid fascination of viewing a wreck on the highway. “How can someone go four years without sex?”
“Well, it’s not easy!” she snapped, fumbling to open the car door, which she could not, for the life of her, figure out.
“Not easy? I’d say it was goddamn near impossible,” he said, shaking his head, and got out of the car. He ducked his head back inside. “You really are an alien, aren’t you?” he asked, and then disappeared. But before Rebecca had a chance to collect her many wild and loose thoughts, Matt was at the passenger door, relieving her of the Styrofoam containers as he simultaneously grabbed her elbow to pull her out.
She stumbled out of the car, but as everything was sort of swimming around her, she caught the door to steady herself and very cautiously dipped down to retrieve her bag.
“Are you all right? I mean, besides . . . you know . . . that?” he asked, gesturing vaguely at her. His question didn’t really sink in, however, because Rebecca had noticed his face was looming large in front of her, still smiling, and he seemed a little softer now, not all hard edges, and she was a little taken aback by how handsome he was. So handsome that she unthinkingly reached up and touched his cheek to feel his five o’clock shadow. “You know, you really are cute.”
With a roll of his eyes, he shut the door behind her. “So you said.” He put an arm around her waist, and pulled her into his side as he balanced the steak containers. “Okay, one foot in front of the next.”
“I know,” she said, even though she was stumbling along beside him. And she was concentrating so hard on walking straight that she didn’t even notice where they were until they were in an elevator and he punched the P. She hiccupped. Tried to think of what Peeeeeee stood for. “Where are we again?” she asked.
Matt sighed loud and long.
When the elevator door opened onto a carpeted corridor, Matt grabbed her hand and stepped out, pulling her along with him, and causing her very large bag to bang against him and almost topple the containers. There were no doors in the hallway, just one on either end of the long, long corridor. Matt pulled her along to one at the far end, stuck a key into it, and pushed the door open. Then he pushed Rebecca through it.
She stumbled into a large room painted white, with gray tile floors covered with Pottery Barn rugs (she had studied the catalogs at length during periods of raging insomnia). The furniture was black and chrome; the light fixtures were chrome, too. It was like walking into a page from Architectural Digest. Clean. Stark. Uninhabitable. “Wait a minute . . . what is this place?” she asked, turning around slowly so as not to make her head swim any more than it already was.
“My place,” Matt said, depositing the Styrofoam containers on a granite bar. “Welcome to Chez Parrish,” he said, shrugging out of his coat.
Chez Parrish. Whoa. How had they ended up here? “Wait a minute, bucko—”
“Ach!” Matt said, throwing up a hand and stopping her before she could begin. “Not getting in your pants, remember? But you’re too intoxicated to drive, and I am sure as hell not driving you all the way out to Ruby Falls. Why the hell are you living in a retirement community anyway?”
“Why are you living in a . . . a sanitary penthouse?” she shot back.
Matt put his hands on his waist and frowned at her. “Okay, Mork, time to put some steak in there and soak up that barrel of Chablis.”
“I’m not hungry!” she stubbornly protested, and lurched toward the full plate glass windows that formed one wall of his apartment.
“At least now I understand what it is with you,” he said, loosening his tie as he followed her to the windows. “I’d be a little uptight, too, if I’d been in the desert for four years. Judas Priest,” he said, shaking his head again with that bewildered look as they stood, side by side, looking out over the lights of the city. Or the huge blurry blob of light as it were. “Why haven’t you?” he asked after a long moment.
“Huh?”
With a chuckle, Matt looked at her. “You know what, Rebecca Lear? You’re a mess.” He smiled and tucked her hair behind her hear. “I’m asking why someone as beautiful as you hasn’t had sex in four years.”
Dear God, was that her heart thumping in her ears? “Because,” she said, folding her arms across her middle to steady herself, “I was married to a jerk, and then I wasn’t. You can’t just order sex up from the yellow pages, you know.”
“Actually, you can,” he responded, and flashed a sexy, George Clooney smile as his eyes wandered the length of her, from the top of her hair, down to the tips of her toes. “That’s really a shame,” he uttered, lifting his gaze to hers, his smile now shining through his smoky gray eyes. “I would think the vast majority of men on this planet would think they had died and gone to heaven if they had a chance to be with you.”
The unexpected sentiment unhinged her. She wanted to say that Bud sure hadn’t wanted to be with her, and at present, she wasn’t exactly turning them away from her door and that really, in spite of what everyone seemed to think, men rarely approached her. But Matt was standing there looking so handsome, so . . . manly man, that for a moment, Rebecca couldn’t remember why she didn’t like him. And to make matters worse, the new Rebecca—the saucy drunk one—reminded the old Rebecca that it had indeed been FOUR YEARS. Four long years. Boring years. Achy years.
“What?” he demanded of her casual perusal, still grinning.
“Would you?” she asked in a whisper, and through no conscious thought, stepped forward, stepped into him, stepped so close that her breasts brushed against his chest, and she lifted her hand, laid it against the hard wall of his chest. “Would you want to be with me?”
Matt’s gaze drifted to her hand on his chest, her breasts. “I don’t know,” he said softly. “I’ve never made love to an alien before. And besides,” he added as he lifted his hand to brush hair from her eyes again, “you’re drunk.”
“I’m free,” she corrected him, amazed at how free she did suddenly feel. “Come on, Mattie . . . you owe me a favor, remember?” she murmured, and closed her eyes.
Nothing happened.
She felt a tug of disappointment and the world spinning furiously beneath her, and just as she was about to let go and fall into the vortex, she felt the slightest whisper of breath against her lips.
Rebecca froze; the feel of it was shockingly raw. Come back, her heart whispered. Come back, come back. For all she knew, she said it out loud, because the next thing she knew was the pressure of his lips on the skin of her neck, a pressure so softly demanding that it immediately fired down to her groin.
The sensation of it rocked her; it was a thousand-watt, searing jolt of life through her body, a sensation as deeply familiar and buried as it was new and fresh. Like silk against her skin, his lips slid to her mouth. Her heart and her body were instantly on fire, a raging inferno. Rebecca opened her mouth, and the pressure of his lips intensified as his tongue dipped into her mouth. Matt’s fingers tangled in her hair as he pulled her closer, lifting her to him. Held tightly against his chest, his scent filling her nostrils, his taste filling her mouth, she wondered if he could feel her heart pounding, because this was, she realized, the most exquisite feeling. She’d forgotten how exquisite, how exhilarating.
That feeling quickly turned to fever that built in her chest, filling the space her pounding heart did not, then traveling fast and furious to her groin. Matt shifted, pressed his body tightly against hers, and Rebecca realized in that sensual fog that her body was eagerly curving into him, melting against the hard ridge of his desire. Matt’s hand drifted from her face to her breast, brushing his palm lightly across it, then cupping i
t, feeling the swell of it in his palm.
She felt herself melting away when his lips sought her neck again, and she let her head fall back, let her entire body melt into that oblivion of pure sensation, until she was floating and spinning below the weightlessness of his kiss.
They were moving, waltzing backward, Matt moving her, Matt’s hands on her back, lifting her, moving her. Her body was shimmering, pulsing around him, absolutely alive, and she drifted onto the leather couch when he gently pushed her into a sitting position. Smiling, her head lolling along the top of the couch, she felt him go down one knee before her, unbutton her blouse, his hand on her breast.
“It’s unnatural, four years,” he murmured. “No one should have to go so long as that.”
“I should stop,” she said breathlessly to the ceiling. “Make me stop.”
“You want to stop? Or do you want to end the drought?” he asked, his voice deep and soft. “Rebecca . . . do you want me to make you come?”
“Ooooh,” she breathed. She could feel the dampness between her legs, and felt her alter ego, the new Rebecca, take firm control. “Yes!” she whispered, and lifted her head through the fog to smile dreamily at the man on his knees between her legs.
Matt did not hesitate; he surged upward so that his mouth was on hers, devouring hers, as his hands slipped into her filmy blouse, pulling her forward until he could slip it off her. She felt a cool burst of air on her back, felt the heat of him on her chest as his fingers sought the hook of her bra and released it. Her bra went slack and slid down one arm. She grabbed it, fumbled out of it, and tossed it somewhere, who knew, because Matt’s mouth was on her breast, devouring first one, then the other, and she couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Every flick of his tongue, every nip of his teeth shot down to the apex of her thighs. The sensation of his mouth and hands washed over her in one hot tide, pulsing between her legs.
He pushed her skirt up, pushed her legs apart, while she just sat there, the pulse racing between her legs now, beating out a desperate rhythm toward a climax her body had been denied for four years.