by Nan Comargue
“I’ve tried fucking women who look like you,” he went on. “I’ve tried fucking women who are your exact opposite. It’s been ten years. Nothing works. I know.”
She believed him. Zach Benson would have tried everything, no pain or expense spared. He truly wanted to exorcise her because, to him, she must be haunting his life.
What a burden he must have carried for so long and so uncomplainingly. And it was her own stupid fault it had come out now, embarrassing them both. She’d practically pushed him into a confession.
“I don’t really find you…appealing,” she said apologetically, still mindful of his long years of silent suffering—although, that suffering didn’t seem to have stopped him from having an active sex life. Connected by marriage, it was hard not to know how many women he’d dated.
He laughed shortly. “I know that, too.” He closed the distance between them in one long stride. “The man you end up with is going to be artsy and soft, and he’s going to give in to you, even when he shouldn’t, because you look so cute and sweet.”
Leda couldn’t resist smiling. “I am cute and sweet.”
He loomed over her. “Sweet enough to say yes to me?”
She shook her head furiously, sending curls flying. “Not that sweet.”
He caught a handful of her hair and crushed it between his fingers. “I’m hurt. Now where’s that accommodating woman I’ve come to know?”
Searching his hard face, Leda concluded that his so-called hurt was no more than a bare statement. If she had damaged his feelings—as opposed to his ego—he hid it well.
She wanted to help him. She really did. She couldn’t stand suffering of any variety and she particularly hated being the cause of it. But she still couldn’t quite believe that Zach—Zach!—needed her help.
Zach didn’t need anyone.
Chapter Two
Zach had made it clear on his last visit that he wasn’t going to give her lifts into town unless she agreed to spend the night with him once there. Leda, weighing this price against a long, uncomfortable bus ride, was suddenly eager to find out the bus schedule.
As she’d suspected, the city buses didn’t come into Heart Lake, but the local bus took her to a central station a few towns away and that allowed her to hook into the provincial transit system, which deposited her—four hours later—in Regina. Not bad for a total of five dollars, fifty cents.
She arrived in the city in time for lunch with her friend Rachel, a.k.a. Rae, the cause of Zach’s jealousy and subsequent revelations the week before.
As the two women embraced, Rae whispered magic words in her ear. “I’ve got lunch this time.”
Leda drew away. “You picked up the tab last time…and the time before that.”
Rae waved this objection aside. “When things pick up, you’ll buy me dinner at Ulysses.”
Leda managed to hide her inward cringe. She’d decorated a condo for the owner of Ulysses Steakhouse. “You’ve got a deal.”
Lunch was delicious and their accompanying chatter was strictly light and gossipy, growing more biting and catty with every drink. Leda tried not to be too disappointed, though she knew her friend’s pointed silence on the topic meant there were no promising leads in the luxury design game in town at present.
Finally, when she could no longer hold her tongue, she asked, “Did the Thomases end up doing over their cottage?”
Rae avoided her stare. “Yeah. They went with Almanac’s.”
The Almanac Firm was a rung below Leda’s old design firm, which meant even the extremely wealthy Thomases were bargain-hunting for services.
Leda wanted to know about her old firm. “What has Edwards Wright done lately?”
“In luxury? Very little. They’ve just been finishing off projects where the contracts were signed over a year ago and the clients would have lost more money breaking them. That’s it.” Rae lifted her gaze from the table. “I’m sorry, Leeds.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. The luxury market has dried up here. I heard a rumor that some of it has moved to Alberta, where the industry is still booming. Maybe I should go there.”
“Move to Alberta?” Her friend sounded shocked. “But you don’t know anyone out there.”
“I’ll make friends.” A bitter smile touched her mouth. “I always do—because I always say yes.”
Rae looked puzzled. “You always say yes?”
Leda shook her head. “It’s nothing. Just something my cousin said. I think he meant it to be an insult.”
“It usually is,” Rae agreed, “especially when applied to a woman. But you’re not promiscuous, if that’s what he was trying to imply. Where did he get the idea that you were?”
“I don’t know,” Leda said. “Maybe he wishes I was. That would solve his problem pretty conveniently.”
Her friend appeared more confused than before the explanation. “I’m not getting it.”
Leda sighed. “Well, it’s a bit complicated.”
She proceeded to tell Rae the entire story, starting with the confusion over her own name, which made Rae laugh.
It was a weird story, for sure, and Leda hardly knew if she’d come out of it looking well, but the accumulated weight of carrying Zach’s revelations inside her for the past few days had become a heavy burden. Sharing it with Rae lessened that load. It also proved that it wasn’t a secret but a strange and somewhat humorous story Leda could tell others about. Her aunt and uncle were the only ones from whom she had to keep the truth.
“Ten years!” Rae said at the end. “And you saw no signs of his true feelings in all that time?”
“True feelings.” Leda smiled slightly. “Is lust a feeling?”
“It’s a feeling,” said Rae. “It’s probably not, practically speaking, an emotion.”
That was a clear differentiation. Emotions were deep and complex. Feelings came and went with the passing hours. You felt cold and you came inside then you were no longer cold. That was a feeling.
Except Zach claimed to have been standing out in the cold for the past decade.
“Maybe it was a joke,” Leda suggested.
“You said he was obviously resentful of the feelings he had for you. That doesn’t sound like he was joking about them.”
“Argh,” Leda said, putting her hand over her face. “I really wanted it to be a joke.”
The waiter reappeared with offerings of butter and sugar and liqueur-laced caffeine, none of which they’d been able to resist. When he left, Rae seemed thoughtful as she dug her spoon into the custardy crème brûlée.
“Your uncle’s son is Zach Benson, isn’t he?”
“Yes.”
She sometimes forgot how well-known Zach was in Regina. The city had few homegrown millionaires. Most of the natural-resources tycoons living there were Americans who were seen as temporary residents—in town only for the boom times and due to leave in the next bust.
“I’ve seen him in the Register,” Rae said, naming the city’s largest daily newspaper. “From everything I’ve read, he doesn’t joke about anything. Is he that stiff in private?”
“Yes,” Leda confirmed, wondering for the first time if any of that stiffness was a cover for the ‘crush.’ “He’s about as stiff as they make them.”
With half a bottle of crisp Pinot Grigio and Kahlua coffee in each of them, this struck both women as hysterically funny.
“He’s good-looking,” said Rae when they calmed down again, “if you like red hair.”
“I don’t,” Leda put in for the record, “but I don’t think it’s the hair or the eyes or any one thing that makes him attractive. He’s got this immense air of self-sufficiency that makes him stand out.”
Rae nodded. “The one trait a woman can’t resist is a man who can resist her.”
Leda waved her spoon in thoughtful arcs. “It’s narrower than that. What no woman can resist is a man who can resist every woman—except her.”
Rae’s nod became an enthusiastic bob. “I think y
ou’ve hit it. It explains why you’re suddenly so intrigued by your stepcousin.”
Leda took a leisurely bite of dark mocha chocolate cake before responding. “I’m intrigued because he’s admitted to having a crush on me—or the leftovers of a crush, as he calls it, for the last decade.”
“And all because he thought I was a man.”
They started giggling again at Rae’s placid, wondering tone.
After the bill was settled, Leda’s friend got up with a determined look on her face. “I want to visit your stepcousin, Leeds. He works in the city, doesn’t he?”
“Not far from here,” Leda confirmed. “Why on earth would you want to visit him?” For some reason, Zach’s office had never been a destination to which spontaneous impulse took her.
“For sheer curiosity,” Rae said promptly, “and also to properly present myself before him as a lovely female friend of his stepcousin’s to be embraced, rather than a terrible male friend to be firmly and brutally dealt with.”
Leda wasn’t surprised by the sudden eloquence. Having known Rae since their college days, she knew such poetic bursts were likely when her friend was drinking, but she’d never seen Rae drink so much in such short order. She was usually much more circumspect.
“I don’t know,” Leda protested, skipping along in her friend’s swift path, “that Zach would be interested in meeting either version of you.”
“Now that’s rude,” Rae chided.
“That’s rude? And barging into someone’s office isn’t?”
Rae stopped so abruptly that Leda collided with her. “I don’t actually know where he works.”
“Then why are we going in this direction?”
Rae pulled out her phone and starting typing into it rapidly. “This is the financial sector. I figured your stepcousin would have an office here. At least now I know I must have been going in the right direction.”
“How so?” Leda asked. The word ‘stepcousin’ was starting to grate.
“Because you didn’t stop me.”
“Rae—”
Her friend waved off her next words. “Damn, I can’t get his business address through googling his name. What’s the name of his company?”
This time Leda remained stubbornly silent.
“Fine,” Rae said. “I can google that, too. Okay, here we go. One-twenty-five— Oh, it’s right across the street. Lucky us.”
Leda had no chance to say anything while she chased her jaywalking friend across the road. Fortunately, the fact that it was a one-way street helped them to avoid being obliterated by a passing car.
In the lobby of the office building, she managed to catch her friend by the shoulder and swing her around. “Rae…again, why are we doing this?”
Her friend blinked at her. “I told you—sheer, rank curiosity.”
“So, search for him online. You’ll find out everything you want, I bet.”
“I’m not curious about when his birthday is or how many millions he’s worth.” She grinned suddenly. “I want to see how he reacts to you.”
“Rae!”
“I’ve met him before. Maybe you don’t remember. I’m sure he won’t. But I’ve seen that thousand-yard stare and cool aloofness he’s got about him. I would love to see that arrogance humbled.”
Leda wasn’t so sure she wanted to bear witness to that sight. Zach without his confidence just wasn’t Zach.
“I’m sure nothing has changed,” she told her friend. “Zach is still…well, Zach.”
Rae stepped into an opening elevator. “We’ll see.”
Once again, Leda was forced to follow.
Chapter Three
Nothing had changed.
Images of Leda didn’t dominate Zach’s thoughts. He’d gotten through the week fine. The demanding work was its own form of temporary amnesia. When he was working, he didn’t have time to think of anything else—or anyone.
But the odd flashes still persisted. The leftovers, as he’d come to think of them—remnants of a crush that had begun when he was a teenager yet had never had the decency to fade away like everything else from that awkward time. Snatches of words or music or even scent would remind him strongly of Leda. Then the long amnesia lifted and he was engulfed by something altogether different.
Memories of the first day they’d met… Of dancing together at his father’s wedding to her aunt… Of holding her hand at the hospital while her aunt had told them about her breast cancer diagnosis, now three years in remission…
She was all he could think about. Leda. Often it lasted no more than a minute or a second or just an instant, yet the absorption was complete, pushing out everything else…for a minute, a second, an instant. It was still enough to possess him completely.
He’d come to detest the leftovers.
Zach hated being weak, even for the briefest of periods. The need to be in control of himself was a constant in his life. When he’d lost his mother to leukemia at five years old, he hadn’t been able to take in the full, cruel and haphazard nature of the disease. He’d only known that he’d felt small and helpless and out of control.
Later, he’d vowed to never feel that way again.
When childhood had offered its pains and agonies, he’d struggled to press them down inside. He’d had a plan, yet unformed, to spend adulthood free and rich and independent. Then, like a cosmic joke, the world had presented him with Leda. Not so fast, it seemed to be saying. Here is something—and someone—that will forever challenge your goals with your baser needs.
By then, he had been eighteen and his plans had been more definite. Never the dreamer, he’d managed to meet scores of fellow students at university who also dreamed big, yet didn’t have any instinct for putting their ideas into concrete form. That was where he’d come in.
That was also when she’d come in—into his life and into his head, almost from the very start.
With any other woman, he would have run a mile and put as much distance as possible between them.
With Leda, proposed as his future cousin almost from the moment he’d met her, he couldn’t run.
He’d had to keep seeing her and talking to her, and the more he had done either, the more obsessed he’d become with her and the more he’d hated himself for his lack of control.
Leda hadn’t been part of the plan. She couldn’t have been. She had been his exact opposite—years older, short, cute and dreamy-eyed. She had been nothing like the sort of woman he’d vaguely imagined he would end up with much later, when he was in his forties, had made his fortune and had also finished enjoying it to its fullest.
When the crush persisted into his twenties, he’d sat down and looked at it hard. Could he make it work? Could he see a life with Leda in the center of it, as his girlfriend, his partner, his wife?
By then, it had been clear she didn’t care for him. He’d often caught her looking at him with puzzled eyes, particularly when he’d been unable to match her cheerful blitheness. At family dinners, she’d tried to draw him into the conversation and made obvious efforts to be friendly whenever they had been together at social events, but Zach had stuck to his campaign to maintain his distance and, eventually, she’d stopped trying so hard. Not that she’d stopped trying altogether, but it had gotten so he’d rarely seen her approach with a Scotch in her hand and a determined smile on her face—both of them meant for him, as if the overture would somehow end differently than the many previous ones.
If there had been one good thing about Leda’s dreamy, glass-half-full attitude, it had been that she’d failed to see how he really felt about her. She hadn’t been offended by his aloofness, but she’d also never expected it to be concealing a dangerous, primitive hunger. If she had—as he sometimes thought she must have recognized the crush—she would have never dared smile at him again.
Why the hunger? That was a question Zach had asked himself a thousand times.
He’d wanted women before, quite badly, and most often he’d gotten them. As he’d grown wealth
ier, he’d gotten them even more often. But whether he bedded a woman or she slipped past his bedpost, he never failed to get over it in short order.
Not with Leda.
So, he was stuck…with a woman who wanted him to be nice and sweet, to whom he could never allow himself to be nice and sweet—assuming he was even capable of that treatment at this point. A woman who he had to call his cousin and one he had to see all the goddamn time, even more now that she was temporarily living with her aunt. A woman he wanted nothing more than to fuck and kiss, then fuck some more.
But the worst parts weren’t the fantasies of her beneath him or straddled on top of him. They were of her wrapped in his arms, her curly head tucked beneath his chin.
The scariest fantasies he had about Leda weren’t sexual at all.
In a way, he was relieved it had finally come out in the open. It had been stupid and embarrassing to show his jealousy so obviously, but it had come over him like the leftovers always did, like a bullet train. He could either lie down on the tracks and let it rumble over him or stand firm and let it knock him to smithereens.
For an entire decade, he’d lain down and let the danger pass over his head.
Now it was time to take the hit. He would pick up the pieces afterward.
* * * *
“I’m sorry,” the assistant said for the second time, “but if you don’t have an appointment, Mr. Benson cannot see you. He is incredibly busy.”
The middle-aged woman had the efficient good nature of a kindergarten teacher, but it was clear she wasn’t about to tolerate any tantrums.
And Rae seemed to be on the verge of the mother of all temper tantrums.
“Come on,” Leda said, tugging at her friend’s arm. “We can come back another day.”
She had zero intention of doing so, but Rae didn’t need to know that. By the time her friend sobered up and figured it out, Leda would be safely back in Heart Lake and Zach would be in his bed—or someone else’s.