by Dee Tenorio
“I thought maybe we could go to breakfast or something.” Sex still poured through her voice as she rolled onto her back, not covering her breasts with more than a haphazard pull of the sheet over one shoulder. The peachy tip of one peeked out at him over the fold of her arm, teasing him with its already puckered state. It took all his will to tear his eyes away and meet her dawning gaze. “Lucas?”
“What?” Sharper than he meant, but damn it, did she think this would be easy for him?
She didn’t shrink away into the blankets, but her dark eyes narrowed, accentuating the tiny fissure that split the very end of her eyebrow nearly to the corner of her right eye. “Where are you going?” she asked again, probably finally realizing.
“Home,” he repeated, softer now, looking away from her to the door. A few steps and he’d be out. Gone. Alone. Forever.
“So that’s it? Again? Make me bowlegged and disappear into the night.”
“It’s day already, Belle.”
“Oh don’t get analytical with me. I know what damn time of day it is.” She sat up fully, the blankets sliding to her waist, but it wasn’t a problem because she drew her knees to her chest, looping her arms around her legs and resting her chin on the highest point. With her spiky cut hair going in every direction, her eyes narrowed to slits, she looked like an angry cat, preparing to pounce. “You’re running away.”
Like I’m on fire.
“You’re a coward.”
“You’re hardly one to talk, Belinda. You knew this was coming.” Didn’t she? He tried to think back to the night before. Hadn’t he been clear? Didn’t he tell her exactly what the night was about? He was sure he did. He knew he did.
“Maybe I got confused by all the thrusting and praying to God. You didn’t sound like someone desperate to escape.”
He closed his eyes. No, escape was anything but his plan the night before, but he had a resolve to keep. This wasn’t just about setting her free. Maybe without her, he’d finally get a life instead of waiting for her to stop wanting Kyle.
“See, I knew we shouldn’t have done this. I knew you’d want to get emotional about it. Not everything between us has to be a federal case. We’re good at this part. Why are you making it into one?”
“I’m doing this because it’s what has to be done,” he uttered, reminding himself, too.
“Says who?”
“What do you want from me, Belinda?” he snapped, glaring at her finally. Fresh-faced, pink lips slightly parted in surprise, she was everything he’d loved since he was six damn years old. But she’d never be his. Never. She didn’t want to be. He had to remember that.
“You wanted sex. I gave you that. You don’t want anything else from me. You don’t want me to love you. Or care about you. Or be part of your life. You never have. You want Kyle. Now you can have him. I’m not in your way anymore.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You said that as long as I wanted you, he never would. You said I was killing you, remember?” He sure did. “You might tell yourself I’m inhuman, but I’m not a monster. And I’m tired of being your dog, just a poor, unwanted substitute. I’ve had my fill, Belle. I’m done.”
“What?” Her dark eyes were wide. Afraid, again.
Lucas turned away from her. All his life, it seemed, had been lived for her protection, her happiness, to keep her from being afraid. He couldn’t do it anymore. This was for the best. This was the only way for either of them. This is what she wants.
“I’m done with you.” He took those steps to the door and walked through it.
He never looked back.
Chapter Three
Belinda stared at the closed door of the loft for ten minutes. Ten. She knew because she counted each and every second. Lucas didn’t come back.
“This is the most psychopathic relationship I’ve ever fucking heard of,” she said to no one. No one but herself, anyway, and she didn’t exactly believe it. Oh, she and Lucas were good at sticking it to each other, there was no doubt about it, but her parents took that particular cake and she knew it.
When she was growing up, her father only showed up to make his overworked wife pregnant and broke. It often became her job, as the oldest, not to give her harried mother messages that her father was on the phone. Or to keep the kids from expecting much from the old bastard, so they wouldn’t get their hopes up that he might stay. But six kids were hard to corral, especially with her working part-time and going to school. By the time she was a senior in high school, she was tired of relationships on the whole. She’d vowed never to get involved in one, either.
The vow lasted only as long as it took Lucas to lay her down on the grass by the lake on prom night.
Belinda rolled her eyes now. Okay, their relationship probably started a lot earlier. Like the day she met him, parked on the top of the slide, ignoring all the kids behind him yelling for him to move. Kyle had dared him to try the “big kid” slide. They’d gone up together. Kyle had come down alone. Lucas got scared and refused to budge, frowning over the edge at the woodchips below. She’d stomped past Kyle, kicked off her shoes and socks and clambered up the metal slide from the front. It took some pounding on his hands to get his grip loose and finally she shoved him until he began the descent whether he liked it or not.
Of course, he’d grabbed at her dress and accidentally sent her wheeling over the side of the slide to the ground in an arm-breaking crash as thanks. No good deed going unpunished seemed to be his mantra in life.
Oh, he was sorry about the broken arm. He’d stayed with her, screaming bloody murder for the recess aides and not leaving her side until the ambulance carted her away. Lucas always did sorry well—hadn’t he spent a whole decade trying to make up for her lost virginity?—but she was tired of being the one getting broken whenever they tangled.
“I’m not going to cry.” She slid her hands into her hair. It was weird to have it dry natural, but it was what he’d wanted the night before. After their little water escapade, he’d washed her carefully, massaging her soreness away, lathering her hair twice and getting a little carried away with the conditioner while he was at it. Probably trying to scrub the black dye out and get to the white gold beneath. Little did he know, no amount of scrubbing was going to make the stupid girl he’d once made love to come back, no matter how badly he wanted her.
Or was figuring that out what made him leave?
She scruffed her hair once more and threw back the blankets. She couldn’t stay in bed and try to make sense of Lucas Lonnigan. If twenty-five years of knowing him hadn’t given her any insight, one morning in the bed where he’d slept certainly wouldn’t.
Getting up was a revelation. Her body was sore, but her joints glided smoother than ever. She groaned a little, arching her back, wondering if maybe she shouldn’t have said the word bowlegged; it was coming back to haunt her. Most men couldn’t actually keep going until you couldn’t walk straight the next day, but Lucas apparently never had to worry about stamina. She caught sight of herself in the mirror over her sink and gaped.
Her hair stuck off her head on the left side and fell stick straight on the right. Her mouth was swollen, still red, and from her chin down she had the pink, freshly scrubbed look only a prickly morning beard could produce. If you dragged it all over your body. The damn man.
Anger flooded her. First he ruined her boots with water. Then he ripped her pants right off of her. Now he’d gone and tattooed her. When she saw him next she was going to—
To what? Yell at him for making love to her until she forgot everything else in the world? For spending an entire night giving her hope that maybe she’d been wrong to push him away all these years. That they might be able to…to… God, she couldn’t even think of where she’d been going with such an idiotic plan. Not that it mattered. He was done with her.
Belinda reached past the curtain and turned the hot water on full blast. She jumped in, sure to put her face directly under the spray and take the s
tinging behind her lids away. But it only intensified.
Done with her.
How did a man make love to you with so much passion, with so little control, and claim to be done with you the next morning? Was he human? Was he unfeeling? Didn’t he understand anything at all?
She put her hand on the wall to support the weakness in her legs. The ache in her heart threatened to break her chest open. When she pulled in a gasp of air, it echoed off the walls of the oversize stall like a sob. But she wasn’t sobbing. That would mean she was crying and you couldn’t be crying without tears.
She put her other hand on the wall and fought the wracking of her shoulders. He was done with her.
It was for the best. Wanting Lucas was a bad thought from its inception. Kyle was the one she could rely on. Kyle didn’t inspire passion. He didn’t get angry. His eyes didn’t burn when they looked at her. He would never possess her the way Lucas had. Could. Did, anytime he put his mind to it.
After last night—clearly after this morning—she could put her desire away, the way he was doing. Unlike her mother, she wasn’t going to be ruled by it. She wasn’t going to be carting around kid after kid, every year taking her further from her dreams of being a respected and successful artist. She was struggling now, yes, but she wouldn’t be struggling forever. She was free.
She didn’t need Lucas Lonnigan.
She certainly didn’t want him.
She was free.
Which was exactly what she repeated to herself over and over as she sank to the floor of the shower stall and cried, no longer able to hold it in or pretend it wasn’t happening.
It would have been nice if the next time Lucas saw his brother, Kyle were in some kind of full-body cast. But no. He found the idiot parked on his front porch as if he’d be welcome. Worse, he refused to go away.
Kyle had it in his head that he was interested in Jessica, his date from the night before. The date that was little more than a ruse to get Lucas alone with Belinda again because Kyle couldn’t mind his own business.
Karma hadn’t been kind. Jessica’s reaction to being duped with a doppelganger had been to crush Kyle’s adoration beneath a sedate, lawyerly high heel of total rejection.
If Lucas didn’t want to kill him, he’d be laughing at the sap.
At least, he would if Kyle would go away. It was going on three in the afternoon and the pathetic bastard was still in Lucas’s kitchen, whining.
“I’m just going to have to be persistent. She feels it, too.”
“Feels what?” Lucas asked wearily. At best, he could hope they shared the similar feeling of Jessica’s foot up Kyle’s ass, but he doubted his brother would be so positive about something like that.
“She’s the one, Lucas. My one in a million.”
Great, the one time Lucas attempted to be comforting in ten years and the moron didn’t get it right. Kyle had been going on about wanting to end his boring existence of wine, women and song to settle down and have a few miniatures of himself to fawn over. “I said you have a basic search cell of a million women in the regional area for your ridiculous breeding hunt, not that you’d find one in that million. You’re technically looking for one in five-point-five billion.”
His brother leveled a surprisingly good bland look his way. “You have no sense of romance, do you?”
Lucas surveyed him sourly from his small dining room table. That was a rotten accusation to make on this, of all days. Hadn’t he bent over backward to be everything Belinda asked him to be, to no avail? Wasn’t he about to sacrifice his own happiness for the contentment of the woman he loved? No sense of romance? He was the epitome of romance, goddamn it.
“Romance is an overused term for an under-appreciated emotion.” Extremely under-appreciated.
Kyle grinned, back to being cocky and easy in his skin. “So that’s a no, then?”
Lucas tightened his death grip on his coffee mug, grumbling into it as he drank. “I like you less and less as the years go by.”
“Nah, you love me.” Kyle bent back into the fridge and dug out the lasagna leftovers from a lunch with a client. “More importantly, so does Jessica. I have to admit, when I thought up sending you to meet Belinda, it never occurred to me I’d find someone for myself. Talk about lucky.”
Yeah, lucky. Stupid. Either or.
“I just have to put a plan together,” Kyle continued, oblivious. “A way to get her to forgive me. Then everything will fall together, the way it should.”
“She’s a lawyer, Kyle. She’s trained to see through clouds of bull—”
“She loves me,” Kyle interrupted adamantly.
Since his twin said almost nothing with that degree of firmness, Lucas took a second to rethink his position on Kyle’s seriousness. This might be worse than he thought. “Does this mean you think you love her, too?”
“Not think. Know,” Kyle corrected with a raised forefinger. “She’s the one, Lucas. She’s everything I want.”
Much worse. The bridge of Lucas’s nose began to hurt. Come to think of it, his brain was starting to hurt, right at the temples and deep into his eyes. Or was it just aggravation? “You don’t even know her!”
“I know what I feel.”
“Oh, please,” Lucas scoffed. “Hard-ons are not synonymous with love.”
Kyle snorted. “Like you would know. Your idea of deep affection and commitment is letting your date figure out how to split the bill.”
“You don’t think I’m capable of love?” That egg of theirs should never have divided.
“You’re as capable of it as the next guy. You don’t seem to believe it, though, so why should anyone else?”
Lucas felt his mood slip to rancorously grim. “As if you’ve ever done anything in your life for the sake of love.”
Kyle’s confidence took a definite hit, his smile faltering and his head tilting to the side before he looked back at his food. He stabbed his utensil at it a few times like a pitchfork into hay. “Yeah, well…I didn’t have a reason before. I wasn’t in love with anyone.”
He gave Lucas a strange sideways look. A look Lucas didn’t want to interpret. “So how did things go with you and Belinda?”
“None of your business.” Lucas might have to suffer watching Kyle and Belinda live happily ever after, but he wasn’t sharing anything about the one night she was his.
“Uh-huh, just what I thought.” The smug twit.
“Oh, shut up. You don’t know anything.” Now he couldn’t even drink his coffee anymore. He shoved the cooling mug to the other side of the table in disgust.
“I know this much: The last time you stayed a whole night with a woman, you were in the womb. And yet, here you were dragging your sorry ass in the door after eight in the morning. Wretchedly, I might add. Proof positive that you’re in love. You know as well as everyone else does that you want to be with her. Why do I have to constantly force you into going out with her?”
Honesty twisted Lucas’s mouth. “Because no one ever asked what Belinda wanted.”
Kyle only laughed, back to his happy-go-lucky, blind, pain-in-the-ass self. He found some bread and wandered over to the toaster. “No one ever had to. She’s pretty clear about what and who she wants.”
No shit. She’d been clear for nearly two decades. “That’s never bothered you?”
“Why should it bother me? I think it’s great.” He would. The whole world was supposed to adore Kyle, wasn’t it? And he owed no one anything in return. Just being there for the adoration was enough, right?
Wrong.
“You jackass!” Lucas snapped, anger flooding him. “How could you do that to her? String her along, knowing—”
“Me?” Kyle’s surprise was nearly genuine. He pushed the toaster knob into place with a click and laughed. “Belinda doesn’t want me.”
Blind, stupid fool. “Then you’re not even half as smart as I gave you credit for.”
“I’m not the idiot here, Luc.” Kyle leaned his back to the counter a
nd crossed his arms, still smug, still annoying. “Ask anyone. The only one Belinda has ever wanted was you. I’m her pal because you, my uptight, high-strung placental partner, drive people to acts of insanity and she needed me to make sure she didn’t kill you.”
Yeah, right. “Like I said, try asking Belinda sometime. She has very specific answers on the subject.”
“Was that what you were asking her last night?”
“Kyle,” Lucas growled, curling his fingers around the edge of his kitchenette table. This one would probably fly further than the one at Vino’s would have.
“Okay, fine, I won’t ask about last night, but you’re nuts if you think I’m going anywhere near Belinda.” Then he laughed. He actually laughed. The toaster sprang, grabbing Kyle’s full attention until he’d juggled his food across the kitchen and back to his plate.
The hair on the back of Lucas’s neck rose as he watched the display. “You say it like there’s something wrong with her.”
“Aside from the fact she’d hand me my teeth and my nuts if I so much as laid a hand on her? Or that you would?”
Lucas could only hope his look was as baleful as he felt.
Kyle leaned over his plate on the kitchen island. “There’s plenty wrong with her. She’s hung up on you. That alone indicates deep-seated psychological problems I don’t want to deal with. It’s bad enough I’ve had to put up with Mom and how much she likes you, insisting we keep you fed and housed and inviting you to holiday dinners. I’m a saint, if you ask me, but do I get an ounce of appreciation? Nope, not a drop. And now here you are, asking for more.” He sighed, nearly a groan, and picked up his fork to eat.
Lucas stared while Kyle seemed utterly oblivious to the fact that they hadn’t finished talking. He just chewed, swallowed and took another bite, looking forward blankly. Then he repeated.
“Kyle!” Lucas snapped, ready to do him in all over again.
His brother’s head came up and his gaze focused as if he’d been awakened. “What?”