by Julia London
Dagne had been so right—who hung on to ex-boyfriends after the affair was over? Fat chicks who were afraid of never having another boyfriend, that was who.
Just mentioning Myron reminded her of how sad she was, and she always changed the subject when he came up, usually by asking about Flynn’s life.
He talked a lot about his family, rolled his eyes when he told her his mother was obsessed with their connection to the Duke of Alnwick.
“Really? You’re part of the aristocracy?” she had asked, suitably impressed.
“Hardly,” he had replied. “I worked it out once. We’re several hundred steps removed from the mayor of Butler Cropwell, and many, many more from the unfortunate Duke of Alnwick.”
“Unfortunate?”
“Tragically so, for my mother believes there is some connection and therefore writes him rather frequently, including the obligatory Christmas letter about all the goings-on in our branch of the ‘family.’”
Rachel laughed, looked at the plate of Lebanese food they had ordered at a local restaurant. “Is it your mother who calls in the middle of the night?” she asked slyly.
His first reaction had been to wave a dismissive hand at her and claim it was just an old friend. But when she reminded him that he’d actually raised his voice on one of the calls, he sighed. “All right . . . the fact is, I was recently engaged to a woman in England.”
At Rachel’s look of surprise, he quickly added, “But I ended it with her. It really wasn’t meant to be, and I told her so, but she’s been rather gormless about the whole thing and has had a rather difficult time coming to terms, as it were.”
“Oh,” Rachel said.
“More importantly, how do you find the tabouleh? I think it’s rather too tart, don’t you?” he asked, quickly changing the subject, and leaving Rachel feeling strangely unsettled.
The other thing Flynn was vague about was his work. This stood in stark contrast to her, of course, who went on like a Chatty Cathy with her many tales of temporary assignments—fish packing, receptionist, mailroom clerk, check-out girl at the strip club, of all things. But Flynn preferred not to speak of his work. “It’s frightfully boring, really,” he told her.
“But you work such long hours. There must be something interesting.”
“No, really,” he would insist, and silence any more questions from her with a kiss.
Rachel didn’t mind. She chalked it up to his obvious boredom with his job, and when he couldn’t answer some of her questions about her laptop, she figured he was trying to keep his work from their relationship.
So the only question Rachel was left with was the one that needed asking before she went any further, but the one question she couldn’t scrounge up the guts to ask: How long was he in America?
That question dogged her through endless hours of temp work—she was so torn between dying to know the answer and refusing to acknowledge the inevitable ending to the sweetest thing she’d ever known. She wanted there to be more to their relationship, to see it go on and on . . .
But she couldn’t possibly see how it would ever work.
First of all, there was her, Miss Fortune, an heiress who had been cut off from her fortune and couldn’t get a real job for love or money. Several applications for teaching positions had gone unanswered. As far as she knew, she’d be working temp jobs to pay the utility bill for the rest of her life, and Flynn was not the sort of guy to be attracted to that sort of poverty—she could tell by the cut of his clothes and his penchant for the finer things in life. He was a man who could have any woman he wanted—why would he saddle himself with someone who packed fish? Even if it was a temporary job.
And then there was the prospect of explaining Miss Fortune to him, and how she’d ended up like this. Every time she tried to think of how to say it, the words just sounded ridiculously stupid. “I’ve been cut off because I couldn’t seem to get out of school,” she could imagine saying, or “Honestly, my dad is a prick, and that’s why he cut me off to be mean and spiteful.” Or how about: “I lived off my dad for the first thirty years of my life, but I’ve turned over a new leaf I swear.”
Nevertheless, there was something between them that could not be denied, and if Rachel ever had any doubt of it, Flynn put that doubt to rest over and over again, and especially at night, when they would invariably end up in his little apartment, in his bed, making wild and passionate tantric love, complete with strangely shaped pillows and arousing creams, both fiercely determined to explore each and every chapter of the tantric sex book before she mailed it off to her sisters.
So it was, for the time being, anyway, her heaven on earth, and at the very least, a few moments in time she could cherish as long as she lived.
When it was over, she fully intended to write Cosmo and tell them that their research on the British men had been so far off base as to be laughable. Where did they think James Bond got his swagger?
Rachel wasn’t the only one caught up in their time together—it wasn’t something Flynn would bloody likely well forget, either. And, like Rachel, he couldn’t have been more surprised. Not because she wasn’t his type—surprisingly, she was more his type than any woman he’d ever met. But he’d never expected to get as caught up in this affair as he had. He’d expected to go back to Iris once the sting of her betrayal had left him, and naturally, he’d assumed the sting would leave him. Affairs among his crowd were not exactly news, as almost everyone seemed to have them now and again.
But Iris’s affair had not left him. In fact, the more he had thought of it in those days and weeks after it had happened, the angrier he became. What infuriated him was that Iris believed it to be something he should overlook. She was never sorry for it, not really, and that said more about her as a person than he’d ever really seen before. It was plainly evident that Flynn did not really know the woman he almost married.
Moreover, that circle of people who thought occasional affairs were quite all right was not a circle he’d ever aspired to. In truth, it was a circle that had annoyed him for far too long.
So here he was, caught up in a real love affair, one he was grateful to have found and experienced. And he would have been perfectly content to have gone on with it, but then reality would seep in.
It did not help matters that Joe thought he was quite off his trolley. “Dude,” he’d said with great exasperation, arms rather akimbo, “You can’t be banging the perps!”
“There is no evidence she is a perp,” Flynn had calmly informed him, “and I am not banging her. I’m really rather fond of her.”
“That chick is wacked. Wacked!”
“She’s unique. She’s really quite witty and very smart, and compassionate,” Flynn argued.
Joe looked at him as if he’d lost his mind, his mouth gaping open to his lap, his eyes bulging out quite horribly. He managed to poke his eyes back in his head and ask, “Are you serious?”
“Quite,” Flynn said evenly, and moreover, of late, he was a firm believer in the power of witchcraft, too, because the chemistry between him and Rachel was sizzling. He adored her.
It was a first for him to adore someone, to truly adore them, and it was as unexpected as it was unwanted. Really, he wasn’t certain what to do with it, particularly since this was more than a transatlantic fling—Rachel was not just an American girl to whom he’d formed an almost instant and an increasing attraction.
She was also a suspect in a major crime.
That was the problem that kept Flynn awake at nights. He couldn’t conceive of her being involved in the nutty professor’s scheme, but nor could he prove otherwise, not yet.
All that being said, his involvement with her, undercover notwithstanding, was reaching a point where Flynn was teetering precariously on the edge of a serious and career-ending lack of professionalism.
At some point, he had to confront what was happening to him and come to terms with the realities of this particular case. And if he didn’t do it soon, he had the distinct f
eeling Joe would do it for him, if he wasn’t already, with remarks such as, “What, they don’t have any ass in England?”
“I’ll kindly ignore that,” Flynn had said, quietly seething. “But really, Joe, are you so bloody macho that you haven’t been smitten once or twice in your life?”
His partner had blushed fiercely at that, and he’d looked out the window, muttered something that sounded a bit like maybe. “Well, whatever,” he said, a little louder. “You’re nuts, pal. That chick is so in on this deal she’s drowning in it.”
Flynn had smiled darkly at that. Until he’d been in her bungalow and determined what she did indeed have in her possession, he couldn’t say one way or the other, but he knew Rachel. He knew Rachel. “Would you care to place a gentleman’s wager on it?”
“Sure,” Joe said, grinning like a man quite sure of himself. “What would you like to wager?”
“One thousand American dollars . . . or is that too rich for your blood?”
That made Joe chuckle. “You’re on, little Lord Fauntleroy. You’re on.”
They had dropped the subject in favor of wrapping up the homicide they were working, and drove down to the shore to have one last chat with a young man who had served a little time for breaking and entering a few years ago.
Back in New York, Aaron noticed that Daniel had new office furniture. Giant butterfly chairs and a big, sixties-type cubed ottoman between the clients and the master manipulator, which is how Aaron had begun to think of the idiot therapist, because damn him if he couldn’t get him and Bonnie to do the most ridiculous things. This week had been their at-home experiment in touching. Fingertip to fingertip, hand to hand, elbow to elbow, and so on.
Daniel seemed pretty pleased with his furniture and himself, and was beaming at Bonnie as she talked about the touching exercise. “It was really . . .” She paused; cast her gaze heavenward as she tried to think of the right word. “Something close to . . . magical. Not sexual, really,” she said, lowering her gaze and trying to find a comfortable position in the new butterfly chair, “but I was cognizant of the connection, you know? I was struck with how long it had been since Aaron and I had been aware of each other on a purely physical level. I didn’t remember Aaron’s skin was so smooth.”
Aaron moaned.
“Aaron?” Daniel asked, smiling at him. “Was there something you wanted to say?”
“My skin is smooth because I live in hospitals and they are turning me into an old man,” he said gruffly, and tried to sit up in that fucking chair.
Daniel was still smiling. “Is there something wrong with smooth skin?”
“If you have to ask, yeah.”
Daniel nodded. “Let’s talk about what you took from the exercise, Aaron,” he said, leaning forward and looking concerned and interested.
“Well, Daniel, I learned that I can’t get it up anymore. When a beautiful woman touches me, there ain’t nothing going on downstairs. Not even a whimper. Might as well lop the damn thing off.”
“Oh, honey . . . you think I’m beautiful?” Bonnie asked.
Aaron looked at Bonnie like she was nuts, which she certainly was if she didn’t know that he thought she was beautiful. “Hell yes I think you’re beautiful, Bonnie! What do you think?”
“I haven’t heard you say it in so long.”
“And how does it make you feel to hear him say it now, Bonnie?” Daniel asked, shifting that concerned look to her.
“It makes me feel beautiful. And loved.”
Judas H. Priest, what was it with women? Of course he thought she was beautiful, the most beautiful woman in the entire fucking world!
“Aaron? Do you understand that Bonnie needs that sort of reinforcement from you?” Daniel asked carefully, as if he were speaking to a moron.
“Yes. I understand that I have to tell her five thousand times over that I think she’s beautiful, because I cannot trust her to remember it or believe it from one day to the next,” he groused, but his tone did not douse Bonnie’s pleased-as-punch smile in the least.
“As we have discussed, women respond to aural stimulation,” Daniel said, gesturing to his ears. “Talking and sharing feelings are important to them. When you have thoughts about Bonnie, they may not seem important to you, but they are very important to her. It’s just as I’ve suggested to Bonnie that for most men, doing is the preferred verb.”
“The preferred verb?”
“In other words,” Daniel said patiently, “Bonnie should show you more than tell you how she feels, because men respond to visual stimulation,” he said, gesturing to his eyes with two fingers. “But you should tell her, because women respond to aural stimulation.”
“The same is true for our daughters, honey,” Bonnie said.
“She’s right,” Daniel quickly added. “Your daughters will respond to a more sensitive, aural approach.”
“Whatever,” Aaron said.
Bonnie exchanged a look with Daniel. “So . . . for example, when you go and see Rachel over Thanksgiving, I think it would be very good for you to explain to her that you love her and you think she’s beautiful and you really care what she thinks. You know, have an exchange with her.”
“That’s an excellent suggestion, Bonnie,” Daniel the ass-kisser said. “What we’re saying here, Aaron, is that your daughters will really respond to conversation as opposed to dictation. They don’t necessarily like to be told what to do, but like most women, prefer to have a discussion and reach a consensus. The challenge for you, of course, is to take off your CEO hat and put on your daddy hat. Instead of issuing orders for the good of the company . . . or the daughter, as the case may be . . . try having a conversation and gently guide your daughter to reach a reasonable conclusion.”
No, the challenge for Aaron was not to punch the man’s lights out, a struggle that was becoming increasingly difficult with each session. But Bonnie was nodding so hard that she almost levitated out of her butterfly chair, and he wondered, like he always did in these situations, if he hadn’t been living on another planet all these years while the rest of the world was spinning around somewhere else to a completely different set of rules.
“Aaron?” Daniel said softly. “Do you think you can do that?”
“Hell yes I can do it,” he said irritably.
“Oh God, it’s a breakthrough!” Bonnie said dramatically, and looked to Daniel for confirmation.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Subject: Thanksgiving
From: Aaron Lear
To: Rachel
Hello Rachel. This is your father. I have tried to contact you by phone but you have not returned my calls. I am using this method to inform you that I intend to come to Providence on the morning of Thanksgiving. You are my daughter and you cannot shut me out of your life, no matter what you might believe, and therefore, avoiding me seems pretty futile to me. I am coming, and if you lock the door, remember that I have a key. If you disappear, I will wait until you come home. So instead of avoidance, let’s try to work together to resolve our differences. I look forward to seeing you. Love, Dad
Subject: FWD: [Thanksgiving]
From:
To: Mom <[email protected] >
Mom is this your idea???? This marriage counseling is making you guys crazy! It’s making ME crazy!! Please don’t let Dad come here, I am begging you. We never do anything but fight and I do not want to fight with him. I’M NOT MAD! I AM BUSY! I really don’t want Dad to come, Mom. I am sorry if I am being a bad daughter but I’m sooo busy right now that I really don’t have time for all his bullshit. Please call him off!
Subject: RE: FWD: [Thanksgiving]
From: BonLear <[email protected] >
To:
This is an automated message from Bonlear [email protected]:
I will be out of town from November 18 through November 30. If you need to contact me, please call my cell phone, 212-555-9035, and l
eave a message. Thank you, Bonnie Lear
Subject: Re: Thanksgiving
From: Rachel
To: Aaron Lear
Hi Dad. That’s great that you want to come to Providence! You will get to meet all my friends. I am having several people over Thanksgiving Day, mostly from my weaving class. You remember that I teach “a bunch of losers” how to weave medieval tapestries, right? Anyway, this is great, because hopefully, you will get a chance to meet and talk with “Byron” and I know you’ve really wanted to do that. And oh yeah, I almost forgot—my best friend Dagne is a witch! She wants to try a couple of spells on you and see if she can cure the cancer so you won’t have to have surgery. The spells won’t hurt but they might stink a little. Okay, see you next week! And listen, if I’m not home, just let yourself in with your key. Yes, I remember you have it, and honestly, I’d never forget that in a million trillion years. Rachel
Rachel was convinced her dad’s determination to come to Providence was a full-fledged, disaster and figured this was some sort of cosmic punishment, seeing as how she’d been dabbling in witchcraft and enjoying it.
But Dagne was optimistic about it. “He’ll love your class, he’ll love Flynn—I mean, I am assuming he will, just as I will, if I ever get to meet him. But keeping him such a top secret might work against you,” she said with a sniff, still miffed that Rachel hadn’t found time to introduce them. “And then your dad will say, I was so wrong about you, Rachel, you’ve really got it going on, so I am going to restore your entire bazillion-dollar fortune this very minute.” And with that, she lifted her third glass of wine in a toast.