by Jane Graves
Then he had a horrible thought.
What if Darcy let on to Tony and Amy that the two of them were seeing each other? He’d protested so much about wanting nothing to do with her that if Tony found out, he’d rib John about it endlessly. And Amy. If she found out, she’d want to know just how serious it was, and no matter what he answered, she’d start planning the wedding. As flamboyant as Darcy could be, he was afraid she’d walk right into his office, throw her arms around his neck, and kiss him.
Please, God, don’t let her do that.
A few minutes later, Amy got to work, followed shortly by Tony. Darcy arrived her usual ten minutes late. His nerves jangled a little when he saw her, and all kinds of erotic thoughts flooded his mind.
No. Concentrate. Watch for any indication that this thing’s going to blow up in your face.
Darcy put her purse on her desk, then went to the coffeepot, poured herself a cup, and returned to her desk. She turned on her computer, then sat down and sipped her coffee as the screen came to life.
John breathed a sigh of relief. At least she hadn’t walked into his office right off the bat and hit him with a great big public display of affection. It was even good that she hadn’t immediately come into his office to say good morning. She didn’t usually do that, so if she did it now, it might look suspicious.
A few minutes later, he headed to the coffeepot for a refill.
“Good morning, Darcy,” he said as he poured, smiling a little, but not too much. Amy had a direct line of sight right to his face.
“Hi, John,” Darcy said as she typed. “I’ll have the morning report for you in just a few minutes.”
He stood there a moment more, waiting for her to say something else. But she didn’t even look up, so he just went back to his office, feeling a little disappointed. That was it?
No. This was a good thing, too. It appeared she wasn’t going to be one of those needy, insecure women who would eventually ask him stuff like What are you thinking? and Where is our relationship going? and all that other nonsense.
For the next hour, he glanced at her repeatedly through his office window. He watched her file, particularly when she reached into a lower cabinet and her skirt pulled tight across that pretty little ass. He watched her talk on the telephone, twirling her hair around her finger. He watched her type not nearly as fast as a clerk ought to. He watched her cuss out the copier as she cleared a paper jam.
He watched her breathe.
Finally he got up to leave on a repossession. He told her he’d be back in a few hours. She acknowledged that with a nod, then got up to go to the storeroom.
Had it been a dream? Had he not had wild, screaming sex with her just yesterday? She was supposed to be gazing at him all day, giving him those suggestive little looks that said, Can’t wait until tonight. What was wrong with her?
He picked up one car that morning, then hit two after lunch. When he got back to the office after the last repossession for the afternoon and passed by her desk, she barely looked up. He went into his office and stared at her through the window, but he finally got so frustrated that he closed the blinds so he wouldn’t be tempted to count the number of times she blinked.
Finally, at about three-thirty, she came into his office. He looked up at her expectantly. She put a new set of repossession orders in his in-box, then turned around to leave. No sexy smile. No suggestive little wink. Nothing.
Enough was enough.
“Darcy,” he snapped.
She turned around. “What?”
“Get back in here.”
He came around his desk, closed the door, and glared down at her.
“What are you doing?”
She blinked. “What do you mean, what am I doing?”
“Have you forgotten we spent the whole day yesterday in bed together?”
“Of course not. How could I forget that?”
“Then why am I getting the cold shoulder today?”
“Cold shoulder?”
“You haven’t spoken ten words to me all day.”
“There have been a lot of days when I didn’t speak ten words to you.”
“Not after we spent an entire day in bed together.”
“That’s supposed to make me more chatty at work?”
“Where do we stand, Darcy? Are you just going to pretend nothing’s happening between us?”
“Is something happening between us?”
“Of course it is!” he snapped. “We spent an entire day in bed together!”
“Yes, John. I remember. But that was just sex.”
Her words startled him. Of course that was what it was. He’d already told himself that. He just hadn’t expected her to say it.
“Just sex?” he said. “Was that all it was to you?”
“Was it something else to you?”
He froze, his mind suddenly failing him. He hadn’t expected that, either. “Uh . . . maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“I mean, we are seeing each other,” John said. “Aren’t we?”
“I don’t know. Are we?”
“Will you stop talking in circles?” He let out a breath of frustration. “Would it have killed you to at least come in and say hello first thing this morning?”
“I just thought I should play it cool. Do we really want Amy and Tony knowing what we’ve been up to?”
“Saying hello tells them we’ve been sleeping together?”
“Better safe than sorry, right?”
Wrong. Saying hello wasn’t a problem. Not unless she did something else along with it, like kiss him right out in front of everyone. But it was hard to know where to draw the line.
“Yeah,” he said finally, a little confused. “I guess that’s right. You know. Better safe than sorry.”
“So we need to keep things hush-hush.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Hush-hush.”
She started to leave, then turned back, leaning in and speaking softly. “John, in case you didn’t know, any relationship that’s hush-hush is always just sex.”
No. No way. He wasn’t letting it go at that. He wasn’t about to let her tell him yesterday meant nothing to her, because he knew better. He knew better.
He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back.
“John? What are you—”
He dragged her up against him, took her face in his hands, and smothered her words with a kiss. Hard and deliberate at first, just to make the point, and then he eased up, stroking her cheeks with his thumbs, twining his tongue gently with hers. When he finally melted away from her, she dipped in to touch his lips one last time with hers, as if she couldn’t bear for them to part. She opened her eyes, a dreamy expression filling her face.
“Does that feel like just sex to you?” he asked.
She sighed. “Uh . . . no.”
“Damned right it doesn’t.”
He yanked open the door and walked out of his office, and Darcy followed.
“Tony! Amy!” John said.
They came to attention.
“Darcy and I are going to be seeing each other. As in dating, and everything that goes along with it.” He pointed his finger at Tony. “I don’t want you to tell me I’m doing something I swore I never would, because a man’s entitled to change his mind. And you,” he said, swinging that finger around to Amy. “This doesn’t mean it’s time to drag Darcy to pick out china patterns and start planning wedding showers.” Then his finger came around to Darcy. “I’ll be at your apartment at seven o’clock tonight. I hope you like Chinese, because that’s what I’m bringing for dinner.” He fanned all of them with one last look that said they’d better toe that line, or else. “Everybody got that?”
There were murmurs of assent.
“Now get back to work.”
He strode back to his office and closed the door behind him.
Darcy just stood there, staring at his closed door, amazed at this turn of events. Finally she walked over to Amy’s desk, so stunned she c
ould barely speak.
“I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “Did you hear what he just said?”
Amy grinned. “When you showed up at his house yesterday, I wondered what was going on between you two. Evidently quite a lot.”
The most delicious little thrill raced through Darcy. She’d been so careful all day not to be one of those clingy women who thought she had a relationship with a man just because they had sex, even though it had just about killed her to keep her feelings to herself. Instinctively she knew if she assumed anything, a man like John would run for the hills. She had to wait for him to make the first move. But never in her wildest dreams had she imagined he’d make a move like this.
“I can’t believe the bullheaded way he charged out here,” Amy said with a grin. “That was unprecedented, even for him. He must really be a goner.”
A goner? Darcy wondered what Amy meant by that. Their relationship might be more than sex, but it was a far cry from anything else. Someday Darcy intended to get married again, and it wouldn’t be to a man like John.
At least, she didn’t think it would.
Would it?
“What are you two chatting about over there?” Tony asked.
“None of your business,” Amy said.
“John was quite the lunatic there, wasn’t he?”
“Yep.”
“Shall I tell him you’re talking about him behind his back?”
“You do,” Amy said, “and I’ll tell all the women you’re seeing about all the other women you’re seeing. Pretty soon you’ll be out in the cold, buster.”
Tony grinned. “Well, then. By all means, talk away.”
Chapter 17
A my told Darcy that dealing with John was like feeding pigeons in the park. Even though the bread crumbs were good for them, if you threw them at them and demanded they eat, they’d run like crazy. But if you pretended you didn’t care if they ate or not, pretty soon they’d come begging. John, she said, was the big, cranky bird in the middle of the flock who was starving and didn’t even know it.
After Amy’s insight into her brother’s psyche, Darcy had planned on playing hard to get for at least a little while longer. Trouble was, playing hard to get was harder than it sounded. Every day Darcy told herself that this would be the evening when she’d say, No, sorry, can’t get together. I have other plans, but every time the words were on the tip of her tongue, she’d think about his hands and his mouth and his big, strong body and the way he always knew what made her crazy with desire.
But it wasn’t just the sex. It was the way he insinuated himself into her life as if he’d always been there. She knew it was merely his ever-present need to command any environment he found himself in, but Amy said it had to be a miracle straight from God that her brother had spent two whole weeks with a woman and he wasn’t making up excuses not to see her.
This evening John sat on her sofa with his shoes kicked off and his gigantic feet on her coffee table, looking at the movie ads. Pepé was sprawled out beside him on the sofa. It had taken the dog no time at all to warm up to him, once he realized John wasn’t going to yell at him and would pet him as long as he wanted the attention.
“Okay,” John said. “Here’s a movie we can see.”
He rattled off the name of a new action-adventure flick. Darcy turned up her nose. “You’re kidding, right?”
“What do you want to see?”
“That one with Julia Roberts.”
“It’s a chick flick.”
“So?”
“So I hate chick flicks. We’ll flip a coin.”
Darcy knew better than to gamble. After all, look what had happened to Warren. And her gene pool didn’t exactly produce the luckiest of people—her mother had never come home from Vegas with a dime to her name. So when Darcy called tails and it was heads, could she really be surprised?
“Oh, boy,” she said with a sigh. “Two hours of gratuitous violence. I can’t wait.”
“Hey, I have to deal with weepy women the next time we go. You think I’m just dying to be subjected to that?”
“Why do I put up with you? You’re the most insensitive man I’ve ever met.”
He grabbed her arm and pulled her to the sofa beside him. Pepé scurried away, and in the next second, John had Darcy flat on her back, kissing that one spot at the junction of her neck and shoulder that drove her absolutely wild.
“No sensitivity?” he said, his lips tickling her ear. “I think you know better than that.” He slid his hand beneath her shirt and closed it around her waist, kissing her at the same time.
Yes. She did know better.
“Thought you wanted to see a movie,” she murmured.
“I do. As long as we can make out in the back row.”
“You might miss an explosion or two.”
“Oh. Good point.” He stood up from the sofa and pulled her to her feet. “Then never mind on the making out. A man has to have his priorities.”
Darcy took that as a challenge, and half an hour later, when they were sitting in the deserted back row of theater number six at Tinseltown, she managed to hold his attention significantly better than the movie did, even though it was filled with more guns and explosives per capita than any movie she’d seen in the past ten years. She decided when it was her turn to choose the next movie, she was going to pick the girliest, most estrogen-enhanced tear-jerker possible just so she could watch John squirm.
“Good movie,” John said as they left the theater.
“You’re kidding, right? A man’s head actually exploded.”
John grinned. “Yeah, that was great, wasn’t it? You don’t see something like that every day.”
Thank God.
Just then the door to another theater opened, and half a dozen preschool boys swarmed out, followed by a momlike woman with a chocolate smear on the arm of her blouse and a harried look on her face. One of the boys wore a paper crown and a big button on his shirt that said, “It’s My Birthday!”
The mom murmured an apology and took the birthday boy by the hand, but before she could get a good hold on him, he jerked away from her and took off down the hall with the other five boys in screaming pursuit. She blew out a breath that puffed her bangs away from her forehead and took off after them.
Darcy shook her head. “That poor, poor woman.”
“Why did you never have kids?” John said as they walked toward the lobby.
“Are you kidding? You just saw why not.”
“All kids are like that.”
“Exactly.”
“So you never even thought about having any of your own?”
Darcy tossed her soda cup in a nearby trash can. “Oh, sure. I guess every woman thinks about it. But Warren thought he was too old. And now I am, too.”
“I don’t know. A lot of forty-year-old women are having babies.”
Darcy grabbed his arm and pulled him to a halt. She looked left and right, then whispered, “I’m not forty!”
“But you’re almost there, right?”
“God, you’re infuriating.”
She stalked off and John followed. She glanced over her shoulder and saw him smiling, which irritated her even more. They left the building and went into the parking lot, where the evening air felt like a blast furnace compared to the cool air inside the theater.
John strode alongside her. “So when’s your birthday?”
“Can we talk about something else?”
“You and that age thing. Will you cut it out? People are living to ninety these days, so you’re not even middle-aged. And age is just a number, anyway.”
“Age is just a number?” She rolled her eyes. “You’ve been reading Redbook, haven’t you?”
“Seriously. I don’t see what the big deal is.”
“Well, let’s see. For one thing, if I don’t color my hair on a regular basis, you’ll see just how gray it really is.”
“So what? Look here.” He pointed to his temple, where a few gray h
airs were showing through.
“Gray makes men look distinguished. It makes women look old.”
“That’s crap.”
“No, it isn’t. And if I don’t get back in for more Botox, my forehead is going to look like a cotton shirt that got balled up in the dryer.”
“Botox?” John said as they approached his SUV. “I don’t know anyone who’s actually done that.”
“I don’t know anyone who hasn’t.”
“Doesn’t that wear off in six months or so?”
“Yes.”
“Let it.”
They reached the car, and Darcy faced him, laughing humorlessly. “You wouldn’t like the result.”
“What? A normal face? What’s wrong with that?”
“You don’t understand. In a matter of months, I’m going to look like a Shar-Pei.”
He shrugged. “So what? I like dogs.”
She smacked him on the arm. He grabbed her wrist, pulled her up next to him, and kissed her. “Wrinkles are no big deal. They give a person character.”
“Wrinkles give men character. They give women hives.”
“Some women worry too much about things like that. You’re one of them.”
“That’s easy for men to say. Men only seem to get better. Women fall apart.”
“Maybe if they didn’t use all that crap to build themselves up so much, there wouldn’t be so far to fall.”
Darcy had to admit that was probably true. But since she was used to looking fabulous, taking it down several notches was a blow to her senses. And when she turned forty this Saturday, it was going to be the biggest blow of all.
A few minutes later they were driving back to her apartment. John had taken a route through west Plano that Darcy wished he hadn’t, because it took them only blocks away from her old house. As they drove past the places she used to frequent—the Shops at Legacy, the Victorian Tea Room, her favorite Starbucks—she couldn’t help imagining what her upcoming birthday would be like if her life hadn’t taken such a drastic turn. Warren would undoubtedly “surprise” her with whatever lavish item she’d been hinting about for the past month, then take her out to the obligatory dinner at some overpriced restaurant, where she would have basked in all the opulence and reveled in the fact that even though she was a year older, she had enough money that she didn’t have to look like it.