Sex & the Single Girl

by Joanne Rock

  She only hoped she hadn’t found the video too late.

  Judging by the shaky feelings of leftover panic that had dogged her since the afternoon, Brianne feared she was already half in love with Aidan. She’d always approached her relationships with just a little detachment in the past, careful not to get caught up in emotions— or men—she couldn’t handle.

  Granted, she screwed up in that department on a regular basis—hence her run-in with the stalker boyfriend. But she’d tried to maintain reasonable defenses with guys in the past.

  But Aidan had plowed past them with typical lack of concern for rules or boundaries, barging into her world on her security monitor screen and then heading straight for her heart in real life.

  The telephone rang before she had the chance to do anything with her tape. She caught herself hurrying toward the receiver and stopped herself. Aidan had no reason to contact her after the way she’d called it quits this afternoon. And she didn’t want to talk to anyone else. Summer had already called her twice since Melvin’s arrest today, insisting she take the night off so Brianne wasn’t concerned anybody would be calling from the club.

  Lingering near the answering machine on the off chance that the call might be important—and not just because she secretly hoped to hear Aidan’s voice on the tape—Brianne waited for her message to play. Hands pressed, white-knuckled to the cool, pristine tiles of her kitchen island, she listened for the beep.

  Silence on the other end.

  Not a dial tone. Not a hang-up.

  Just silence.

  Someone waiting for her to answer? Fear crawled up the back of her neck as it occurred to her that although Aidan had assured her Jimmy was in New York early yesterday morning, he hadn’t discovered whether or not Jimmy knew her current whereabouts.

  Her eyes darted to the shiny new set of kitchen knives by her espresso machine.

  But then, the phone connection clicked and a dial tone kicked in for a split second before the answering machine rewound the message.

  She’d need to start making a diary of the hang-ups for the police, just in case. The recent rash of calls could be coincidental, but she hadn’t survived months of stalking in New York by writing off episodes like this as coincidence.

  Willing her breathing back to normal, Brianne purposely returned her focus to Aidan and the video in her hand.

  She fanned herself with the documentary tape as she moved back to the VCR. She really didn’t need to watch it since she still recalled half the script and all the dangerous male archetypes anyhow. Jimmy Vanderwalk had been a brooding poet. Aidan tended more toward the daredevil category.

  But damn it, there was more to Aidan than that and she knew it. She’d romanticized Jimmy’s brooding into sensitivity and she’d paid for it dearly. That didn’t mean she had to overcompensate for her mistake by reading into Aidan’s risk-taking.

  He didn’t take risks for the sake of the thrill, after all. There was a nobility about his job that had attracted her ten years ago and continued to draw her now. After having tangled with enough men who walked on the wrong side of the law, Brianne found she appreciated Aidan’s sense of honor.

  Still, that didn’t change the fact that his job scared her to her toenails.

  Officially depressed, Brianne tossed the video documentary onto the shelf where it should have been in the first place. She stared down at the row of her favorite movie titles, the backlogs of unused film footage she’d shot on various assignments and the overflow of security video feeds taken at the club over the last two weeks.

  Including the very steamy footage of her and Aidan tangling limbs in the harem-themed room at the resort.

  Not that she’d checked out the tape or anything. She’d been tempted, but so far she had managed not to play voyeur on that particular scene. Somehow, it didn’t seem fair to watch them kissing, touching, heating up the screen without him by her side. How would she feel if he ever watched a video like that without her?

  Flattered.

  Unsure whether or not she was simply giving herself justification for what she wanted to do all along, Brianne tugged the video off the shelf and cracked open the clear plastic case. Shoving the contraband into her VCR she picked up her new all-inclusive house remote from on top of the television and dimmed the lights with the touch of a button. Clicked play on the VCR with another.

  She had no clue why she wanted to torture herself with images of her and Aidan when her heart already ached at the idea of losing him.

  Now that his investigation had ended, there would be no more long nights sitting side by side in her office. No more encounters on her desk or in the harem. She would go back to being detached. Alone. But safe.

  The tape whirred to life inside the machine. A noise just outside her window distracted her, made her grateful she had her house remote still in hand so she could double-check her security. The doors were locked. Windows bolted. Alarm activated.

  Could she be any more paranoid? No woman who jumped at every bump in the night could weather a relationship with an FBI agent. A fact that sucked in so many ways Brianne couldn’t begin to enumerate them, let alone decipher which one had made tears pool in her eyes.

  Sniffling, sighing, she heaved herself on to the loveseat and settled in to watch the show. Maybe if she granted herself this one last look at Aidan, a few moments to indulge all her heart’s hungry might-have-beens, she’d be able to walk away for good.

  If only she could have this final peek, maybe she could find the courage to burn the tape and move on with her life.

  Too bad the man on the screen in his suit jacket and crisp white shirt didn’t look like the kind of guy a woman could walk away from.

  She sat in the dark smiling past the tear sliding down her cheek as she watched Aidan on screen. The video had just reached the point where Brianne tumbled the wall of rattan baskets to get to him.

  Her bittersweet enjoyment of the moment was marred only by her delusions that a noise sounded outside her window again.

  Probably just neighborhood dogs.

  Still, her heart pounded with an odd mix of lingering paranoia from the days when Jimmy had been stalking her and the definite turn-on factor of watching her on-screen self crawl on all fours to confront Aidan.

  She’d looked like a woman on a mission.

  Brianne held her breath in rapt fascination as she and Aidan loomed closer. But she experienced more than just the flare of heat from watching a kiss in the making. Her director’s eye viewed the film from a more critical perspective, almost as if she was searching for the emotion behind an acting performance.

  Body tense, she saw the on-screen couple hover near one another. Then move toward one another like magnets in slow motion, drawn together like forces of nature.

  And in that moment of silver screen drama, Brianne saw what had eluded her in real life.

  The woman melting into Aidan on her television set was in love. Wildly, madly and passionately in love.

  She loved Aidan.

  The news thudded down on her with the force of a director’s slate snapping closed between takes. How could she have missed it when the truth stared back at her so obviously from the celluloid pictures flashing on the television in front of her? Her heart jumped, skipped, fluttered with the realization.

  The scene on the screen exploded into an R-rated kiss, making Brianne’s body ache to relive the moment, making her heart yearn to act on this newly discovered love.

  As for Aidan being a dangerous guy—she wondered if that was just an excuse. Maybe half the reason she went for troublemakers of all kinds in the past had been a way of keeping a real relationship at arm’s length.

  Falling for dangerous men had always kept her heart safe. Until now.

  Although, as she watched the enraptured couple kissing on the screen, Brianne realized that all this time she’d probably been running from Aidan and not his job.

  Behind her, another noise outside caught her attention. The sound made her
jump, and for a split second she wondered if Aidan might be dropping by to talk to her tonight after all.

  Until her bay window overlooking the back yard shattered.

  Jimmy Vanderwalk plowed his way through the breach, stumbling and falling in a sea of jagged glass.

  Brianne tried to scream, but her voice failed her. Which was just as well since she probably only had about five more seconds to save herself before he recovered.

  Clutching the house remote in her hand, she reached for the cordless phone still at her side and pressed the number three button on speed dial.

  Aidan.

  She lifted the receiver to her ear with painful slowness, not wanting to alert her intruder to her intent too soon.

  Still, she could hear the phone ringing.

  And ringing.

  Please let him be there.

  Jimmy started to move. Glass shifted and fell to the floor from the folds of his clothes as he rose to his feet. A cut on his forehead spilled blood down his cheek while his smaller scratches covered his arms. He wore jeans with a rumpled concert T-shirt bearing the name of an up-and-coming rock band.

  Cradled a sleek black gun in his right hand.

  “Hello?” Aidan’s voice in the telephone receiver sounded so far away.

  As Jimmy’s eyes focused, his gaze landed on the phone in Brianne’s hand.

  Words tumbled out of her mouth in a rush. “Help me, Aidan—”

  A shot blasted through her house, cutting her off.

  For an instant she thought she’d been hit until she realized she could hear the dead air where the phone had been shot off the wall.

  “And just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Jimmy held the gun in a white-knuckled grip as he stalked closer.

  “Nothing.” She choked out the word, afraid he’d shoot her, too.

  Panic welled with his every approaching step. How could her ex-boyfriend be here in her living room among shards of broken glass when Aidan had just spoken to him in New York less than two days ago?

  Brianne shook off enough of her trancelike fear to scuttle backward off the couch, all the while keeping her eye on him.

  His eye roved to the television where Aidan was slowly undressing her. The gun, however, remained pointed in her direction.

  “I swear to God I would have knocked on the door if I hadn’t seen this shit through the window.” He swung the gun around to gesture toward the television screen, but his eyes looked too wild, too on the edge for Brianne to use the moment to run. “What the hell am I going to do with you, Brianne? Of all the faithless…”

  His words spiraled downward into a gutter-spew of vulgarities Brianne refused to hear.

  Answering him with fear-induced silence she scavenged to find her voice. Had Aidan heard her plea before their call disconnected? Had he recognized her voice on the other end?

  She’d give anything for a dangerous guy like Aidan to arrive and kick some serious ass right about now. Of course, suddenly Aidan’s dangerous tendency struck her as more akin to a guardian angel’s than a daredevil’s. Why hadn’t she ever tried to see that big-picture reality before? Her heart slammed so viciously against her chest she felt pummeled from the inside out, her body rebelling against her and the situation in which she found herself.

  Then Jimmy shot the television.

  Glass exploded out from the screen. Blue sparks jumped from the wasted machinery while the steaming shell of lacquer cabinetry echoed with popping and hissing sounds.

  Holy crap.

  “Answer me, damn you!” He shouted the words, crunching through the glass-covered carpet to loom over her. “What the hell were you doing kissing another guy?”

  Shaking with fear and the realization that Jimmy had gone off the deep end somewhere between here and New York, Brianne dug her nails into the cold hard plastic in her hand. The house remote.

  She squeezed the new gadgetry in her hand, an idea taking shape. To buy time she blurted out the first answer that came to mind. “It was a mistake. A movie I was making. The kiss you saw on the screen wasn’t real.”

  “Don’t tell me your cold-as-frigging-ice lies.” His breath reeked of sickness. Madness, for all she knew. “I warned you not to mess around on me.”

  Her eyes fell on the gun despite her best efforts to look at him. She forced words out of her mouth to keep him distracted, to give him something to think about besides killing her then and there. “I was going to call you about the movie, actually. I thought you might put together a soundtrack for me.”

  There wasn’t a chance in hell Aidan would show up now to play guardian angel for her. Thanks to her inability to see beyond the filter of her bad experiences with the men in her past, she’d called it quits with him when she should have been working harder to understand him.

  But even if she didn’t have his solid presence to rely on, she still had his wisdom. And Aidan had shown her how to think outside the box.

  Brianne didn’t need a gun to defend herself. Sometimes it worked to pretend to be a telemarketer. Well, not in this case. But she could definitely call upon her own strengths in this situation as opposed to running away from a gun she couldn’t fight.

  She wouldn’t play in Jimmy’s court. She’d lead him into hers.

  Sure, she’d never fought off a criminal before, but she’d choreographed plenty of fight scenes for her films. And she knew a thing or two about utilizing special effects.

  “Damn you and your lies.” He stared at her across the living room with glazed eyes. Stalked after her into the hallway.

  With unkempt hair and a face full of scruff that hadn’t seen a razor in weeks, Jimmy looked nothing like the man she’d dated. As he closed the distance between them she smelled alcohol—possibly days’ worth of alcohol judging by his wrinkled clothes and the sharp acidity of his scent.

  “You’re a long way from home.” She commented only to buy herself time as she walked backward, hoping she could get him where she wanted him.

  Praying he wouldn’t shoot her first. She wanted the chance to tell Aidan she finally understood he wasn’t such a dangerous guy after all. That his quick thinking had inspired her plan to get out of this mess.

  “No shit, Sherlock.” Jimmy peered around her house with his red-rimmed gaze. “I wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t skipped town without even telling me. Now, I come all this way and it turns out you’re screwing around on me behind my back. I’m not a happy man, Brianne.”

  The back of her calf hit the bench in her foyer. The same bench she’d been sitting on the day Aidan had shown up at her house unexpectedly and caught her staring at erotic statues. She should have made love with him on the floor like she’d wanted to. Instead she’d walked away because of her fears. And now she might never have the chance to roll around with Aidan on the foyer floor.

  Her eyes itched with unshed tears while her heart ached with regret.

  “Don’t even think about heading out that door, Brianne.” Jimmy’s angry tone sliced through her thoughts, called her back to the present with frightening clarity. “I’ve got at least three bullets in here with your name on them if you get any closer to the exit.”

  His threat cemented her resolve, stiffened her spine. She couldn’t pretend that maybe he only wanted to talk to her or that maybe this encounter could end peacefully. He’d broken into her house with a gun and he intended to use it.

  Her fingers flexed around the master remote she still clutched in her right hand. She couldn’t afford to give away her plan with her eyes, but she sensed she’d drawn Jimmy into the proper position.

  Aidan told her once she was hell on wheels, and there was no time like the present to prove him right. She hoped.

  “I’m not going anywhere.” She felt for the circular button on the bottom right of her remote and squeezed it as she talked in an effort to mask the ensuing noise. “But you might be.”

  He didn’t look up until the last second.

  And he was either too drunk or too sur
prised to move.

  Brianne’s massive hallway chandelier rushed down toward the floor in response to her flick of the switch. Thankfully, she hadn’t had a chance to fix her faulty wiring job that had the contraption moving at high speed.

  The heavy wrought-iron fixture clanged him in the head and brought him to the floor, effectively imprisoning him between the bars.

  Not that he needed to be imprisoned. He slumped on the floor in what looked to be a total knockout.

  Brianne scrambled for the gun, unwilling to rely on her visual assessment of his condition. In the films she made, the bad guy never went down the first time. Picking up the heavy steel, she tested the weight of the weapon and turned it on him. Just in case.

  She hadn’t fought this much of the battle only to have him shoot her while her back was turned.

  After having been stalked, followed, harassed, vandalized and held at gunpoint tonight, she planned to live long enough to tell Aidan she wasn’t afraid of his job, her feelings or taking a few chances anymore.

  AIDAN’S BRAKES SQUEALED as he steered his flying car into Brianne’s driveway, taking out half a row of hedges.

  Fear twisted his insides, had been riding in his throat the whole way across town from the Palm Beach police headquarters. Thank God he’d been there and not down at his office in Miami when Brianne’s call came.

  Help me.

  He vaulted what was left of the hedges in his haste to get to Brianne, praying he wouldn’t be too late. He could have sworn the sound that cut them off had been a gunshot. His feet pounded across the lawn, the leaden weight of his shoes sprinting over the grass at only half the tempo of his racing heart.

  He’d been in the middle of wading through mountains of paperwork, talking to the press and initiating a high-level investigation into Jackson Taggart’s father when the call came that knocked him off his foundations.

  Scared the hell out of him.

  The cops were minutes behind him, but he wouldn’t wait. Couldn’t wait.