by Alyssa Kress
He'd made her feel loved.
She swallowed, staring down at him. Yes, that's how good he'd been. He'd made her feel, for a few hours, the way no man had ever made her feel — like she was important. No, more than that. Like she was essential.
Valerie sucked in her lips. The only thing that could be more beautiful than last night was if it could still be true this morning. If he would open his eyes, look at her, and show that same emotion of love and deep caring.
Time seemed to stop. The idea exploded in Valerie's mind. Oh, God, what if it could be true? What if everything it had meant to her, it had meant to him? What if he really was the great guy he seemed to be? This morning wouldn't have to be the end. They could continue, sweet and tender and caring.
Time started up again, abruptly. Valerie gasped in a breath. What was she thinking? It could be true? What kind of insanity was that?
They'd made a deal. He'd agreed to the deal. Gratefully. Good God, he didn't love her. Besides, she didn't even know him!
Valerie pushed herself up, making sure not to wake Roy. Very slowly, she eased out from the covers.
He didn't move any of his oh-so-capable muscles.
Okay, okay, she thought, the blood pounding heavily in her chest. She had to get dressed and pack. Very quietly.
Then she could be out of here. Safe. Safe from believing this could be anything more than it was.
A frolic, a good time. For one night only.
Barely breathing, Valerie picked up her clothes that were scattered about the room. Clutching the lot of them, she found her suitcase in the closet, quietly unzipped it, and found a clean shirt and pair of jeans. She wouldn't use the bathroom here, she decided. Too noisy. She'd just slip on her clothes and use the public restroom down in the lobby.
Working quietly, she put on her clothes, stopping every once in a while to listen.
He didn't wake.
Valerie buttoned her jeans, zipped her suitcase, and straightened.
Her gaze slipped, despite herself, to the bed. His hair made a dark splash against the sheets, his body was a potent presence barely covered by the tousled bedclothes.
Beautiful. He was in every way beautiful. And pure fantasy. Yes, that was the way he had to stay, in some dreamy part of her memory. To imagine anything more would be...catastrophic. A kind of vampire that would hang on and suck the blood out of her.
Valerie picked up her suitcase and let herself out of the room, making sure the door closed very quietly behind her.
~~~
Roy woke up feeling happy. A smile curved his lips as he opened his eyes. He was back in the place of unreasoning joy.
Then he noticed something wrong with the picture.
"Valerie?"
Her head was not on the pillow next to him. Roy rose and twisted to look toward the foot of the bed. "Valerie?"
He couldn't see her in the room.
His tone turned peremptory. "Valerie." He tossed off the sheets and got out of bed. Stalking to the bathroom, he found the door open. Roy gazed into the empty room with its row of hand towels stacked neatly above the sink and felt his heart start to beat heavily. Words came back to him, like stones dropped into a still pond.
Whoever wakes up first should just leave. I don't want a 'morning.'
No, Roy thought, staring at the damn hand towels, white and untouched above the sink. She couldn't have. Not after what they'd shared, how it had been. She couldn't have carried out the terms of that stupid deal.
He whirled. Maybe she'd just gone down to the lobby to get a cup of coffee. Right. That had to be it. He frowned his way to the closet and whipped open the door.
Empty. No suitcase on the floor, no jacket hanging on the clothes rod. Not a sock. Come to think of it, the bathroom had been empty, too. No personal items, like a toothbrush, comb, or bottles of make-up.
Roy gazed at the bare rug of the closet and felt his heart nearly pound out of his chest. She'd taken all of her things.
She'd left, without intending to return.
"Okay," Roy said, concentrating on breathing. "Okay."
But it wasn't okay. Dammit! How could she have gone? Hadn't she — ? Didn't they — ? God, it had been so beautiful.
Roy swiveled to confront the bed with its mussed sheets. His heart pounded in his ears. Well. Apparently, it had only been beautiful for one of them.
Roy had been — he'd been — Well, suffice it to say he'd not been in a place that would have allowed him simply to walk away this morning.
A choking sound came out of his throat. He stalked to the bed, grabbed one corner of the counterpane and gave it a hard toss, sending most if it onto the floor.
Acid leached through him. Although it was ironic, really. One could even call it poetic justice. The one time he'd actually wanted a woman to stick around, she'd left him.
Roy laughed, a short, black bark. Yes, for the first time in his life, he'd actually wanted a woman to stay, he'd wanted to deepen what they were starting together. He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head.
Huh. That wasn't going to happen. She'd left. He breathed in and out, slowly. Okay. Time to get rational, instead of pathetic. So, she'd left. A woman he'd had sex with had done exactly what she'd said she was going to do, and left.
Big deal.
But the pain still bit at him as Roy strode back to the bathroom. He splashed some water on his face, deliberately shocking, then used one of the pristine hand towels to dry off. He gave himself a disgusted look in the mirror.
What kind of fool was he? He'd wanted — He'd wanted probably the impossible, that's what he'd wanted. He'd wanted Valerie to fill the itchy hole left by the emptiness of putting that last hundred grand in the bank a week ago, the amount that topped him over thirty-five million.
Unsurprisingly, she hadn't been able to do that.
Shaking his head, Roy tossed the hand towel onto the sink and went back into the room. Ignoring the mild destruction there, he picked up his pants. With a sardonic twist of his lips, he set back to rights the pocket he'd turned inside out the night before in his frantic rush to get at his condoms.
He'd been hot to get at her, that was for sure. But, in truth, had she, herself, even been the goal? What he'd wanted was...to forget this awful emptiness.
Roy's dry smile faded. He shook out his pants and stepped into them. Maybe if his father were still alive Roy would have gained a sense of accomplishment at having achieved his life goal. His dad would have had to acknowledge, finally, that Roy had amounted to something, after all. Roy wasn't "completely irresponsible, a spoiled child," as his father had claimed during their last, big fight. His money was folded into a variety of solid investments, the sort of thing that made the world go round.
Scowling, Roy picked up his shirt and slipped it on. The problem was, he had a feeling that even if his father were still alive he'd find something to pick apart in Roy's life, something to disapprove of. Perhaps it was wrong to speak ill of the dead, but Spencer Beaujovais had been a master at criticism. He'd always given Roy excellent reasons to feel inadequate.
Roy reached for his cashmere sweater. "Now, if I could only find my wallet... Ah." He plucked his wallet off the night table and shoved it into his back pants pocket. On the way to the door, he took a last look around the room, to make sure he'd got everything.
Instead he caught her scent, a tart tang lingering in the air. As scents do, it went straight to Roy's memory center. The emotion in her dark eyes, the sweetness of her smile, the feel of her moving, sinuously, yearningly, beneath him. As if she were the other half of him.
Roy closed his eyes against an unwanted hit of grief.
Don't be stupid. Illusion. It had all been an illusion. There'd been no deep emotion, on either of their parts. Just a trick of the night, of two people needing a connection for separate reasons of their own.
Turning on his heel, Roy made for the door. A good time, that's all it had been. One really good, but ultimately forgettable, time.
CHAPTER FIVE
"Valerie, are you listening to me?"
"Hm? I'm sorry. Were you saying something, Peter?" Valerie made an effort to shake herself back to her surroundings. It was Monday morning and she was standing in the hall for the examination rooms of Desert Valley Pediatric. Planted before her was Dr. Peter Lindstrom, recently engaged but who, up until four months ago, had been sleeping with Valerie.
Valerie blinked up at tall, lean, vaguely Nordic Peter, and registered that she wasn't feeling a drop of emotion about him. No pain, no shame, not even anger. This morning he was just...Peter. No big deal.
Whoa, Valerie thought. I don't care. One night of great, but meaningless, sex with a total stranger and I'm all over my humiliating crush on the man who rejected me.
"I said," Peter repeated slowly, "Did you ever get the blood test results for the Carruthers baby?"
"What? Oh, yes. Yes, I did. Everything checked out fine."
Peter nodded, momentarily satisfied before his expression turned concerned. "Are you okay?"
Valerie blinked. "Excuse me?"
"You seem out of it this morning."
"What? Oh. Well, maybe I could have slept better." Understatement of the year. "Stress, stress, stress." Valerie brushed it off with a bright smile. "Bane of modern-day existence." It hadn't been stress that had kept her awake, however, but vain regrets. Totally vain. As if she'd done anything to regret. She hadn't!
While Peter continued frowning at her, Valerie spied Cherise coming out of one of the examination rooms. With skin the color of pale chocolate milk, Cherise managed to make her bland nurse's jacket look like Versace.
So far this morning Valerie had managed to avoid Cherise. If she were quick, she could do so again.
"Next patient," Valerie said to Peter. "Gotta get to him." She whirled, saw a chart with her color poking out of the holder on Examination Room 6, and stalked determinedly toward it.
Valerie feared that Cherise would take one look at her and know what had happened in Las Vegas. Even dense old Peter noticed something.
Coming to work this morning had not turned into the balm Valerie had hoped for. She was still...thinking about Roy, still remembering and — and — wishing there could have been more.
Silly. And stupid. She didn't even know the man with whom she thought she wanted 'more.'
Valerie glanced at the name on the chart, raised her eyebrows when the name registered, then walked into the room.
"Nicky," she said, and smiled at the boy sitting on the examination table. Nicky Gordon, now eleven, had been one of her first patients when she came to Desert Valley Pediatric a year ago. If she could admit she had favorites among her patients then Nicky, bright and outgoing, was one of them.
"Dr. K.," he said with a grin, and held out his hand to give her a complicated handshake, one that Valerie could barely follow.
"I swear he changes that every time I see him do it," his mother complained from her seat to one side.
Valerie laughed and threw a smile at Mrs. Gordon before turning back to Nicky. "So, what are you doing here in my office this morning, instead of having fun at school?"
Nicky sighed and shot a long-suffering glance toward his mother. "It was Mom's idea. She thinks I don't have as much energy as I used to."
Mrs. Gordon's polite smile faded. "It's true."
Nicky lifted a shoulder.
"Not as much energy," Valerie repeated, and went to the sink to wash her hands. "What do you think, Nicky? Think you have less energy?"
"I dunno. Maybe."
"Maybe." Valerie dried her hands. Well, that was sufficiently vague. All the same, if a busy mother noticed something was different, it probably was. "I don't suppose you've run a twenty-six mile marathon lately or anything?"
Nicky chuckled as Valerie put her fingers under his jaw to feel his glands. "Nothin' like that," he said.
His glands felt normal, as did his abdomen when she checked. Valerie took out her light. "Open your mouth, sport."
Nicky obediently opened his mouth. His throat looked fine.
"How about late night movies? Playboy magazines under the covers with a flashlight?"
"Over my dead body," Mrs. Gordon said.
Nicky laughed. "Nah, I haven't been doing anything like that."
"Mm." Too bad. It would have been nice to have a reason to blame for the vague symptoms. Valerie took out her stethoscope. Nicky's heart sounded good, if a little fast. She took his wrist to time his pulse. Just a tad on the fast side.
Valerie took a step back and simply looked at him. Was his face paler than usual? Nicky came from a fair-haired, fair-skinned family, but perhaps... It could point to anemia, though that would be mighty unusual in a boy Nicky's age.
"Hm. Let's take a sample of your blood," Valerie decided. "Just to make sure you've got all the right stuff splashing around in there."
Nicky grimaced. "A needle?"
"Well...unless you'd prefer a dagger?"
Both Nicky and his mother laughed.
Valerie smiled. "I'll send the nurse in to do the vampire thing, and I'll let you know the results in a few days."
"Thanks." Nicky's mother sighed. "I'm probably overreacting, but we want Nicky to be his usual self."
"Well, I do, too." Valerie attempted to ruffle Nicky's crop of blond hair, hair that begged to be ruffled. But Nicky ducked out of the way, shooting her a reproachful look. For an instant, one terrifying split second of time, Valerie's heart turned over in her chest.
Because for one split second, the look in Nicky's eyes, part shy, part ferocious — and all innocent — reminded her of Roy.
Valerie's eyes widened at herself. Innocent? She was thinking innocent described Roy? Puh-leeze!
"Ahem. I'll call you as soon as I get the results," Valerie repeated. She grabbed the chart and whipped open the door. For goodness' sake, Roy hadn't been innocent!
Thus absorbed, Valerie walked out of the hall, and straight into Cherise.
"Girlfriend," said Cherise. Her smile was wicked.
"Cherise," Valerie squeaked.
Cherise tipped her weight onto one slim hip. Standing five foot ten in her stocking feet and with the face of an African queen, Cherise could make grown men quake in their boots. "Girlfriend," she repeated. "You did not call me when you got home Sunday." Cherise paused. "You did get home on Sunday?"
Valerie could feel her face turning a traitorous red. "Of course I did." It was the truth.
"Mmmm." The corners of Cherise's lips tipped upward. "But you're hiding something."
Valerie was on the verge of an automatic "no" when she caught the gleam in Cherise's eyes. She couldn't pull it off. Cherise was going to wrestle the story out of her, no matter what. "I'll tell you over lunch," she mumbled.
Cherise's lips pulled back into a triumphant smile. "Your treat."
~~~
When Valerie and Cherise wanted to have lunch privately, with no familiar faces from the clinic, they went to King Wong, a dark storefront in a strip mall that also housed a laundromat, check-cashing service, and donut shop. Despite its greasy spoon appearance, the King Wong served food that was fantastic.
"Okay, okay. We're here." Cherise sat at one of the fake wood tables. "Now tell me what happened in Vegas."
Seating herself, Valerie picked up one of the plastic menus. "Can I decide what I want to eat first?"
Cherise put a hand over Valerie's menu. "You order the General Tsuo Chicken lunch special every time we're here."
"But — "
"Stop dilly-dallying, girl, and spit it out. Did you sleep with him?"
Valerie drew in a sharp breath. "I — How did you know?"
Cherise removed her hand from Valerie's menu. "It's only written all over your face. Guilt. Sheepishness. And..." Cherise's expression grew thoughtful. "And talking to Peter didn't bother you. So it's true, huh?"
Valerie sighed. It was both true, and a fantasy.
Cherise leaned back. "Mr. Yummy. I was la
ughing at you, but you were being serious."
"No." Valerie could deny that much. "I wasn't being serious then. We hadn't even spoken a word to each other. I thought he didn't even notice I was in the world." But then he had noticed. Oh, boy, had he noticed. Valerie couldn't help feeling the wonder of that all over again. He'd walked across a room to meet her.
Cherise tapped a thumb on the tabletop. The gesture had an air of disapproval about it.
The waitress appeared, looked from one to the other of the seated women, and said, "General Tsuo Chicken lunch special, and Chow Mein Salad?"
Cherise turned to give the woman a sweet smile. "How did you ever know? And yes, thank you."
The waitress giggled, scribbled on her pad, and walked off.
"Okay," Valerie said, squinting. "What's with the tapping thumb?"
Cherise expelled a breath. "You jumped into bed with a complete stranger. I can't believe it!"
Valerie's eyes widened. "You're the one who told me to go to Las Vegas. You're the one who told me to see there were other fish in the sea."
Cherise widened her own eyes. "The operative word being 'see.'"
Valerie snorted.
"I sure didn't mean you should jump into bed with the first man you saw."
"He was not the first man I saw." He was the only man she'd seen, the only one who'd been worth noticing. Valerie shook her head. "It wasn't like that."
Cherise scoffed. "Oh, I think I know exactly how it was." Despite Valerie's warning look, Cherise plowed on. "You attended a staff meeting last Monday — Valentine's Day — wherein Dr. Peter Lindstrom, formerly your steady boyfriend, announced his engagement to the hygienist in the dentist office next door. With your ego battered, you decided now was the time to finally go see Las Vegas — "
"Hey, that was your idea!"
" — and once there," Cherise continued, "and with your ego still battered, you went absolutely wacko."
"I did not go wacko."
Cherise's eyes narrowed. "Tell me sleeping with some man you'd never met before isn't wacko."
"Not wacko." Valerie was getting seriously annoyed, particularly since Cherise was saying out loud what she'd been privately thinking, herself. "I chose to do it, and I'm not sorry." Really, she wasn't. Making love to Roy had been beautiful and wondrous. For a short time she'd been able to feel important to a man.