by Nan Comargue
Missing her company would have signified an emotional need he wasn’t sure he actually felt. What he missed were her breasts and the big, soft nipples that topped them. He missed her sweet, tight pussy and the way it grabbed his dick and held on for dear life. He missed the dreamy green of her eyes when she smiled up at him from his bed and the golden color they took on when she climaxed. He saw her eyes every time he shut his own.
It was only day three of the exorcism.
Fuck, this is bad.
Whose idea had it been to spend all their time together? Mine. So he only had himself to blame for the fact that Leda Mills had gotten into his bloodstream.
He was convinced his basic premise was still correct—a dose of the disease in order to inoculate himself from a real dangerous case down the road. It was the same way vaccines worked.
Except the cure might end up killing him, anyway.
His phone rang as he sat daydreaming.
“Benson.”
“Hi. It’s me. What are you thinking for dinner tonight?”
It’s me. The sheer arrogance of the woman, yet even the arrogance was endearing because it was so perfectly innocent.
“I haven’t thought about it,” Zach admitted. It was barely past nine.
“My friend Gerry said the tacos at Hola Hola are really good. Authentically Mexican.”
Gerry. Zach wondered if that was conveniently spelled G-E-R-I and turned out to be another arty female who couldn’t hold her liquor.
Leda had a lot of friends in Regina, both male and female. They were constantly bumping into them in the trendy parts of the city, where his suits made him stand out the way their bohemian garb would have made them pariahs at the places he attended—or kept them from setting foot in the door to start with.
“I’ve never been to Mexico,” said Zach, “so I wouldn’t be able to tell if the tacos were any good. But if you want to go, we’ll go.”
“I’ve never been, either,” she told him, a note of very Leda-ish laughter in her voice—laughter for no reason he could discern, just bubbling up out of her as if from a spring. “This will be the next best thing.”
“I guess.” Zach cleared his throat and shifted the phone in his hand. The hint of laughter was making his dick harden. “Look, about lunch—”
“I would have packed you one,” she said. Now her laughter was outright. “But I couldn’t figure out how to wrap up a quickie, so I guess you’ll be home for lunch—just like yesterday…and the day before that.”
After she’d hung up, he thought how right she had been to point out how he’d made it a habit to go home at lunchtime, though he’d never even thought of doing that before. The protein bars he ate at his desk were the same kind he had at home, so the trip would have been pointless anyway. It was far easier to eat at his desk and keep working. Sometimes, to appease a client, he dined at one of the fancier restaurants that catered to harried business people with little time and the money to pay for a meal that could be produced according to their timetable.
He hated work lunches, not to mention the dinners and other events he was required to attend. Often, he tried to pawn these off on his immediate underlings. What was the point of hiring vice-presidents at astronomical cost if he couldn’t delegate unsavory tasks to them? Except his staff considered the dinners and events a treat rather than a chore. Strange.
Spending time socializing without a business or networking agenda beneath it was alien to him. It was purposeless time. Wasted time.
Leda wasn’t a chef, by any means. Years ago, she’d tried cooking a few dishes off one of those traveling chef shows she and her aunt liked to watch. Most of the results had gone into the compost bin.
Dining out with her was a different kind of adventure.
The restaurants she found—and they could only loosely be termed ‘restaurants’—were not in newspapers or even reviewed online. They were tweeted about for a day or two and photos were snapped of their current locations, either in a mobile truck or a temporarily vacant storefront, then they were gone again, leaving only filled stomachs and the original tweets.
The previous night they’d followed an excited tweet stream across the city while they chased down a truck promising to sell fresh-baked rolls stuffed with meltingly roasted pork belly. They’d spotted the truck twice down the street and Zach had broken all kinds of traffic laws trying to catch up to it but, being unlicensed, it was also operating illegally and tended to stop in alleys and derelict parking lots rather than come out into the open. Leda had spent minutes decoding each cryptic tweet before she’d pointed him in the next direction.
Eventually, they’d given up and ended up eating French fries and ice cream cones from a long-established truck parked up in front of city hall.
Leda’s kisses afterward had tasted like vanilla.
Putting those unproductive thoughts aside, Zach launched himself into his email inbox and, by eleven, had succeeded in cutting it down to less than a hundred messages that needed his, rather than his secretary’s, follow-up. Over the last three days he’d let his fabled twenty-four-hour turnaround stretch into two or three times that—and clients wouldn’t understand that he was busy with an exorcism.
His desktop phone trilled. “Mr. Zach? It’s Ms. Kennedy on the line again about that inventory tracking glitch. She says the fix from last week hasn’t worked out.”
“Irate?” Zach wanted to know, already suspecting the answer. His desk phone didn’t ring very often and, when it did, it was invariably with a problem.
“Extremely.”
Zach leaned back in his chair and tried to think about the pleasures of the lunch hour awaiting him. “Put her through.” He waited for the familiar connecting click before he spoke. “Denise, how are you?”
“Not happy, Zachary. Not happy.”
Zachary. She was the only person who called him that. Well, except for Leda—and she only called him by his full name in bed.
Focus, man.
“I’m sorry to hear that. My IT manager swore that last week’s patch would fix the glitch, but I understand that it hasn’t been working out?”
His tone was low and unconsciously soothing. It was a manner that didn’t come naturally to him but one he had cultivated during the more difficult phases of his meteoric rise to success. Without it, he was certain he would have ended up in jail for murder.
“You know it’s not working,” Denise said. Her voice was like fingernails being drummed impatiently on a table. “I didn’t hire you to create a program that works when it feels like it. I’ve got enough lazy slobs on the payroll for that.”
Zach imagined she had as many lazy slobs working for her company as he did in his—which was zero. But it probably helped her to pretend she did so she could properly vent at him.
“What can I do to make it right, Denise?”
“You can refund me for the month’s licensing fee.”
“Done.”
“And all of the tech help hours.”
Zach closed his eyes. Of course, she hadn’t purchased the comprehensive technical assistance package. Still, it wasn’t her fault they’d shipped her a deficient product. They’d branched out with the new inventory software and perhaps they’d moved too fast on making it public, although the technical team had assured him it was ready.
“Of course, I will do that, Denise.”
“Good.” She was silent for a moment, perhaps trying to figure out what else she could wrangle out of him. “What are you doing for lunch?”
“Lunch?” He repeated the word blankly. Does she want to come over and harangue me in person? It would be a long trip from the northern end of the province.
“I’m in the city for the day,” she informed him, the nails-on-the-tabletop tone suddenly replaced by a different one, a slower, back-scratching tone, “for a conference. But I can’t take eating with these idiots.”
Zach wondered absently how many of her colleagues were in the conference room listening to her ca
ll them idiots.
“I’d be pleased to take you out to lunch if you’re free,” he said, making the obvious leap.
“Monaco’s?” She quickly suggested, naming the most expensive Italian restaurant in Regina.
Zach thought of tacos eaten standing up over a battered table probably converted from a barn door and wondered why that cheap and cheerful dinner sounded far more appetizing than Monaco’s famous bucatini.
Not to mention having to forgo the quickie.
Fucking IT.
* * * *
‘I’m going to be very angry if you play by yourself.’
Leda laughed as she hung up the phone, but, a few minutes later, the teasing command no longer seemed funny.
Zach had canceled their lunch engagement. Who was she kidding? It was supposed to have been a stolen, midday fuck. He had to work, of course.
She wasn’t surprised. According to his father Mike, Zach did little else. He’d slaved his way through his teens and twenties, often working several jobs at a time, not wanting to strain his parents’ modest means with tuition fees. He’d also had his own agenda. He always seemed to have one.
Banging his stepcousin was part of that agenda. More of a housekeeping chore than a spontaneous indulgence. A way to get her out of his mind—like overdosing on drugs one time ever got the drug completely off the addict’s mind.
Who was she to quibble? She never told people how to live their lives. Most often, people were trying to do that to her. Even her most amiable friends were tempted to interfere, trying to set her up with dates or offering advice on how to be more of a temptress. Being a successful designer, they seemed to feel she was failing to live up to the brand. But if tottering heels and a boy-toy on her arm were supposed to be the brand, then she would rather be the cheaper, generic version.
Leda didn’t regret not having Zach’s overwhelming drive to succeed. She preferred to have a job she liked and to do it well rather than rocket to fortune and success as he had done. She wanted people to like her, not to eat their hearts out with jealousy.
Jealousy wasn’t part of her makeup, either feeling it or instilling it in others. She hadn’t dated anyone long enough to be jealous over them. Except for Andrew, she hadn’t dated anyone for long at all.
Andrew.
She used to think about him every day and wonder how he was doing, whether he was dating, how his career was going.
For a while she thought every cruiser that passed on the street would have him inside. Every crime story she saw on television might have something to do with him.
She hadn’t thought about Andrew in…well, days. Longer. Since Zach had confessed the crush. The crazy, secret, threatening-to-overtake-his-life crush.
Meanwhile, Zach had always been distant toward her. Unfriendly, even. It just went to show how little she could know about a person’s inner life.
Yet, she couldn’t imagine a friendly, outgoing Zach. That wasn’t him. He was comfortable being the man in charge, but he preferred to command from behind the scenes, letting others take the glory for the ideas that he’d helped to successfully bring to life.
She wouldn’t have been flattered and titillated by the crush if he were different from who he was—if he displayed emotion, if he showed weakness.
It was far more thrilling to be part of his secret—the cause of his secret. To be his hidden weakness, the one he couldn’t even go an entire eight hours without needing to feed.
An exorcism was a fun, strange project to share—a deliciously naughty good deed. But a relationship with Zach would be exhausting. All those traits that excited her—his demanding nature, his jealousy, his arrogance—would end up driving her up the wall on a daily basis. Heck, they drove her up the wall even on an occasional Sunday dinner playing Happy Stepfamilies.
For now, he was willing to put himself in her hands and live the next few days together according to her whims. Even on his most indulgent, unproductive day, art museums and pop-up restaurants weren’t in Zach’s calendar.
At his insistence, she was showing him how she lived because it was so different from his everyday life—because it was a life they both knew he would never want for himself.
Walking through a museum meant appreciating other people’s creativity without producing anything of your own. Eating at a pop-up restaurant meant putting your ability to choose your own meal—and the safety of your stomach—in the hands of an unknown chef. Both meant experiencing, instead of doing, and that wasn’t Zach.
Once she’d gotten over marveling at how willing Zach was to live like her, she’d inevitably started to think about what it would be like to live with him, not for a few days but for a year or more.
He was obviously missing adventure in his life, even if their trips only took them through parts of the city he’d only heard about but never visited, rather than to a remote island or mountain peak.
He needed more than a few days of that. He needed a steady dose of reckless behavior so he didn’t become even more rigid and self-restrained.
Living with that teenage crush had worked on him when he hadn’t had an outlet for it. It had twisted and solidified in his head until it became a full-blown obsession. That wasn’t normal. Another man—one with less control and less need to control his natural urges—would have gotten over it a long time ago. Not Zach.
So why was she indulging a man who eschewed all personal indulgences?
After a hard hour spent on the couch, staring at, but not seeing, the TV, Leda had the unwelcome answer.
Zach’s ‘leftover’ crush stroked her ego. After a lifetime of trying to please everyone—and yes, always saying yes—she finally had a man who wouldn’t say no to her, not because he didn’t want to but because he couldn’t. He literally couldn’t resist her.
Leda, who’d spent years trying to get on friendly terms with her aunt’s stepson, now had the upper hand. And while she meant to be kind about the power she now held over him, she was also keenly aware of how heady it was—a delicious power over such a very attractive and usually principled man.
Just as she appealed to Zach’s base instincts in a completely irresistible way, he appealed to her desires, too, from the most primitive sexual ones to the more complex need to feel important and be loved.
But she had to be careful. Zach was just as much a weakness for her as she was to him.
Zach was red velvet cake. Her favorite. A thin slice now and then was plenty. Any more and she’d end up feeling very sick.
* * * *
Denise Kennedy was flirting with him—purposely, outrageously and absolutely blatantly.
As the lunch went on, Zach’s temper swung from amusement to irritation and back again.
Denise was very attractive. Not yet thirty, with icy-blonde looks and a touch-me-not air, she was the sort of woman he usually dated, the kind who knew the score and how to handle themselves, except Denise was far more successful than most of those women.
Far more successful than Leda, who was rather languidly unemployed at present. She didn’t even seem disturbed about it, speaking vaguely about other opportunities in different areas.
Leda again. She was responsible for his shifting moods.
Whenever he started to relax and enjoy Denise’s sharp wit, he began comparing her to Leda. It was madness. Still, the exorcism wasn’t done yet. It wasn’t like he was sitting around pining or wasting valuable energy trying to ignore the leftovers. He was doing something about Leda. He was getting her out of his system.
Perhaps—he probed his brain a little—she was already on her way out.
Sex with Denise was not an unwelcome idea. Even clad in a boxy gray business suit, she managed to look extremely feminine. Perhaps it was the heels. He liked stilettos. He’d never seen Leda wearing high heels.
Fuck! Again, he was back to Leda. She was still there, lodged in his head like a sesame seed between his teeth.
“I hate this conference,” Denise said, not for the first time. She li
fted her clear blue gaze to his face. “Maybe I could skip out a bit early. Feel like playing hooky with me?”
“Yes”—it was the truth—“but I’ve got my stepcousin staying with me.”
Denise lifted her eyebrows. “Somehow I don’t see you as the cousinly kind. Are you a big cousin or a little cousin?”
He leaned forward and caught the scarlet-tipped hand lying on the table. “I’m not a little anything…”
Her throaty laugh was a fitting reward. No girlish giggle or—fuck, no, I won’t think about her, not again.
“I’ve got a lovely, big suite,” Denise said. “Perfect for playing hooky in.”
Should I?
Zach thought about that disturbing third hand in his stomach, the one that got all balled up into a fist sometimes—because of Leda. Always because of Leda.
He had to get rid of that fist before he considered getting involved with a woman like Denise, a woman who would be a match for him in every way.
“Hey, if it isn’t everyone’s favorite cousin!”
The smooth drawling voice immediately got under Zach’s skin, just like the last time, so he wasn’t surprised to turn and find Jacob Greenglass standing by his chair. He was surprised to see the other man with his hair tied into a neat ponytail and wearing a very smart suit. Obviously, the ‘hobo artist’ was only an occasional costume.
“How’s Leda?” Jacob asked when Zach didn’t take up his original comment. “Actually, where’s Leda?”
Zach refused to keep eye contact with the other man so he turned back to face his companion. “At home.”
Jacob staggered back dramatically. “Not back in your cave while you exercise your Neanderthal instincts here, is she? That’s really mean of you, you know. Better men than you have tried and failed to catch that woman by her pretty curly locks and you leave her alone all day? Really, really mean.”
“Who’s Leda?” Denise asked, watching Zach’s face with frowning interest.
Zach’s head was suddenly pounding. Two words repeated themselves over and over in it, bouncing around like a pinball. Better men. Better men. Better men.