The Sex Cure

by Cara Lockwood

  Harley imagined the governor, an older gentleman with a wife and kids, probably wouldn’t have been so flustered catching Wilder shirtless in his gym. Harley didn’t know where to focus her attention. Everywhere she looked, she seemed to see Wilder’s skin: in front of her and reflected back on the mirrored walls, all dimensions of him in view at once. It’s just a body, she told herself. We all have one. Of course, few people had one as impressive as Wilder Lange. Harley had no doubt about that. She knew that few men had abs so distinctly rippled, or that V of muscle diving right into the waistband of his shorts. Why was it that he was half naked but she was the one who felt exposed?

  “Well, glad I’m in good company,” she said. She took a step backward. “I guess I’ll be going to my room...if you can just point me in the right direction?”

  He hung the towel on his neck and grinned. “I’ll show you.”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “I don’t mind. I’ll drop you there, and then I’ll go shower.”

  She thought of him soaping up his sweaty body in the shower and started to feel her palms go clammy. What on earth was wrong with her? She was acting like a sex addict herself. Get a grip, Harley. She didn’t even like the man. Of course, she didn’t need a doctoral degree in human sexuality to know that not liking a person had zero to do with physical attraction. There was such a thing as hate sex. Plenty of people had it. Now her head was filled with images of savage hate sex with the already half-naked Wilder Lange.

  “Okay,” she said, suddenly grateful the man couldn’t read her mind.

  Thankfully, he tossed the towel aside and grabbed his shirt, a blank gray T-shirt, and slid it over his head, pulling it down over his impressive chest. With more of him covered, she felt less...exposed, somehow, and more like her old sensible self. As he led the way, she reminded herself of the main reasons she disliked him and shouldn’t, under any circumstances, think about him naked.

  “Did the move-in go smoothly?” he asked her, typical small talk. She almost resented the break in silence. She was here to do a job and then leave, not to be friendly. She could listen to his problems and give him advice without being his friend.

  “Fine,” she said, curt.

  “Is everything to your liking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you always use one-word answers?”

  “Yes,” she said. With him, anyway. She was here to treat him, save up her salary and then get out. Hell, if she found another paying job before treatment was done, she’d book it out of there.

  “You know we can be friendly. I don’t bite.”

  “No. You just fire entire staffs. Gut historic publications. Take credit for turning them into lightweight airplane reading material.”

  “So I see you’re still taking business personally.”

  “Hard not to.” She glanced at him. She knew she was being petty, immature, even, but she couldn’t help it. She had longtime friends who’d lost their jobs, friends who were having an even harder time than her finding work. She adjusted her bag, but as she did so, her elbow brushed his, and she felt surprised by the contact, by the warmth of his skin. She realized the hallway was entirely too narrow for her liking, and that they might well brush up against one another again. She wondered if she dreaded the contact or welcomed it.

  “You know, making those decisions is not easy for me.”

  “You don’t look like you’re losing any sleep over it.” He looked well rested and deeply tanned, his bronzed skin flawless, the whites of his eyes pristine.

  “I’m not heartless. I know my decisions can hurt people. But I cut the jobs so that I can save some of them, so that I can preserve what’s left of the magazine. So it doesn’t completely go under.”

  “By slashing half the pages of the magazine? Turning it into something completely without personality?”

  He sent her a sidelong glance. “I turn it into something I can sell. So I can keep the jobs I can.”

  They turned down a familiar corridor. She remembered this from her first visit to the penthouse. They were nearing the study.

  “And make a few bucks for yourself?” She was sure greed had quite a lot to do with it.

  “Actually, I lose money on almost every print venture. The magazines and newspapers are pretty much black holes. I do it because I don’t want to think of a world without those publications in it. I know my father wouldn’t have wanted that. He was a man who read five newspapers a day and more magazines than that every week.”

  This was news to Harley. She just assumed corporate raiders did what they did purely for money. Could it be that she’d been wrong about Wilder Lange? Maybe she had been slightly hard on him. Would she rather see all her colleagues fired from the magazine? No, she wouldn’t.

  “Besides, my brother Seth always reminds me to remember print. He loves a good old-fashioned newspaper or magazine in his hands, too.”

  “How many brothers do you have?”

  “Three. Half brothers, actually, not that I see them that way, and all hell bent on causing trouble. Someone has to keep them in line. So it falls to me, since I’m the oldest.”

  Harley could hear how much he cared for them. They neared the entrance of her suite.

  “Here we are.” He indicated the door. “I’ll be taking a shower then if...”

  “Yes.” She nodded. She knew he’d be going, but she wanted answers first. She wasn’t ready to part company with him. “But...your brothers...”

  “Yes?”

  “You love them?”

  He laughed. “I do. Even when they’re a pain in the ass.” He shook his head. “Don’t let the money fool you. It can cause far more trouble than it solves.”

  “How so?”

  “One brother wants to be a rock star. One wants to sail around the world in a yacht, stopping only so he can race other yachts.” He shook his head. “And then, there’s one brother who strictly does peace corps work, refuses to take a family nickel, even if it would mean finally getting the guy new shoes. Let’s just say Thanksgiving is interesting. And I’m the one controlling the purse strings. Dad made sure of that. Their mother, however, is still furious about it.”

  “What about your mother?” Why was she suddenly interested in his personal life? Yet, the questions kept popping out of her. It was for the coaching sessions, she told herself.

  “My mother was my father’s first wife. She was a model, her background mixed. Part Armenian, part Irish. She died in a skiing accident when I was five. My father remarried when I was eight.”

  “That had to be hard.” She hadn’t expected Wilder Lange to have problems. She always thought of him as a spoiled heir to a fortune, but she was beginning to realize she’d made assumptions that simply weren’t fair.

  “It was.”

  Harley paused, hand on the doorknob. “How did you get along with your stepmom?” She almost felt him stiffen at the word stepmom.

  “I’d rather not talk about Lucinda, if you don’t mind.”

  He offered nothing more, and Harley could almost hear the steel door snapping shut. He’d shared about as much as he planned to about that, she thought. He turned and left her then as she turned the knob to her room and opened the door. She’d hit a sore subject, she realized, one that she’d need to probe deeper in their session.

  CHAPTER SIX

  WILDER WAS BEGINNING to regret sex therapy. First of all, it seemed to have nothing to do with sex at all, and everything to do with his past. He’d been through several “sessions” now for the past two weeks, and all he could say was that he was slightly disappointed. Harley was turning out to be much more like all the other counselors he’d ever met. Except, of course, he hadn’t wanted to fuck all the other counselors he’d ever met. In fact, he hadn’t want to fuck someone as much in his life as Harley Vega. He sat across from her, watching her study him beneath
her librarian’s reader glasses, her full and all-too-kissable lips pursed in concentration. He was sitting on the couch, and Harley, the chair, a notebook open on her lap. It was for taking notes, except she seemed not to be bothering this session.

  She kept her legs crossed at the knee, and the coral sundress she wore had inched up, showing him more thigh than he’d seen before. He had a hard time not staring at the skin there, the delicate shape of her toned quadriceps. This was a woman who took care of herself. He wanted to talk more about her. Was she dating anyone? What did she like in bed and how could he get her into his? But she stubbornly refused to answer questions about herself. She kept the focus on him. He realized that most men would be glad to blather on about themselves for hours, but Wilder wasn’t that kind of man.

  At least the open hostility had faded a bit, now that she was starting to see him as slightly human. He understood, of course. He’d be upset, too, if he’d been let go from his job, but he was hoping she’d see that the magazine was dying, anyway. If he hadn’t bought it, another raider would’ve, or it would’ve simply folded like so many other print publications in recent years. Long gone were the days when Lange Communications could sustain itself entirely on the sales of glossy global magazines. Now, it was all about cable companies, airwaves and internet. Sure, outlets still needed content, that hadn’t changed, but everywhere was paying less for it than they ever had. Still, he didn’t blame Harley for trying to hold on to a way of life that was changing.

  And he knew she was tough. He’d done his share of research on her. He was a careful man. He knew her family was from Puerto Rico, that her parents came to Miami after a 1989 hurricane destroyed their home. She was born in Miami and went to school in New York, and had one older sister who’d married young. He knew that her father and mother ran a small restaurant and barely made ends meet. She’d come to New York on a scholarship to NYU and had stayed after graduation to make a name for herself. And make a name for herself she had. Not only had she been the youngest columnist ever hired by Femme, but she’d also been regularly featured in other magazines, and interviewed on countless daytime TV shows. He admired her grit, the fact she’d come from nothing and made something of herself. Most people thought he’d inherited a fortune when his father died, except that Lange Communications was near bankruptcy when he’d taken it over and had millions in debt. He’d single-handedly turned it around, made it profitable again. It had taken some doing. It was probably why Lucinda had been sniffing around for the first time since his father’s funeral seven years ago.

  “So, last time we talked a little about Lucinda,” Harley was saying. He flinched at the name. The last person on earth he wanted to talk about was his stepmom. The evil stepmom of all stepmoms.

  “I don’t see what she has to do with anything,” he said, feeling like a virus beneath a microscope. She was studying him clinically, when all he truly wanted was to take Harley into his arms and kiss the life out of her. He had never felt so drawn to a woman before. Never had trouble controlling his want. It was near impossible to ignore the obvious current between them, the hum of its power. Wilder knew how rare such chemistry was, such raw attraction that seemed to pull the need out of the deepest part of him. Sure, he found women attractive, and they him, but this was something else running between them. This was pure animal want. It was something even his wounded body seemed unable to resist.

  It maddened him that she seemed to be able to ignore it. Worse than that, she kept subtly glancing at her watch, as if she were counting down the minutes to the end of the session. He’d gotten the impression that she had half a foot out the door.

  “Why do you want to know so much about my childhood?” Wilder asked. “Aren’t we supposed to be talking about sex? About...getting me back on track?” He glanced down at his lap, which seemed to be having no trouble being on track at the moment, not with Harley Vega watching him with her sharp light brown eyes. Not when she uncrossed her legs, and he saw the pale inside of one thigh.

  “Sometimes, a past trauma can affect our sexuality. I’m just trying to rule out different possibilities. Plus, we need to get back to why you avoid relationships, why you prefer casual sex.”

  Wilder snorted. “That’s no mystery. I prefer casual sex because it’s damn fun.”

  Harley shook her head slowly. “No, it’s destructive. Especially in your case.”

  “Well, don’t hold back on me,” he said.

  “You told me to be blunt, so I am. You’re running through women, trying to avoid your problems. It’s absolutely obvious. You’re not having fun. You’re avoiding your issues.”

  “Avoiding my issues is fun,” he remarked.

  “You know what I mean.” She glared at him, nostrils flaring slightly. God, he loved getting under her skin.

  “So, let’s talk a little more about Lucinda. Try to get at the real reason you can’t commit to a woman. That might also be the real reason you can’t...have sex right now. Your body isn’t even able to make the commitment to have sex. Maybe if we figure out why, we can cure you.”

  “You’re saying my dick isn’t working the way I want it to because it’s commitment phobic?” The idea was laughable.

  “It’s as good a theory as any.” She stared at him. “So. Lucinda?”

  Wilder didn’t want to think about his past. He worked hard to lock it away, chain it away in the darkest places of his heart so it couldn’t crawl out and hurt him. Instead of focusing on his past, he chose to focus on Harley’s voice, which felt like raw honey, sweet and sticky. He thought about what other parts of her body might also be sweet, and about whether or not her skin was as soft as it looked. “How was your relationship with your stepmother?”

  His spicy thoughts about what her bare, tanned skin would feel like beneath his fingertips cooled. Nothing like the mention of Lucinda to douse any thoughts of passion. He needed to change the subject. He knew what would cure him and it had nothing to do with talking.

  “You sure seem interested in my childhood,” he said. “Is it because you’re trying to cure me, or you’re interested in finding out more about me?”

  A tiny little flame of a blush appeared on her chest. Interesting. Maybe he’d hit a nerve.

  “I’m not.” Her voice was sharp, annoyed. A little too annoyed and far too defensive. Ah, the crack in her armor. So she was intrigued by him, no matter how much she pretended she disliked him. Some of the questions she was asking weren’t purely clinical; they were because she was curious about him. About his past. About what made him tick. So, the truth came out.

  “You’re not the least bit interested?” he challenged.

  “Well,” she began, carefully. “I have to get to know you if I’m going to offer you decent advice. That’s what the last two weeks have been about.”

  “So this is all about the job, then. Nothing personal in it?”

  She waited just the tiniest of beats before answering. “Nothing personal.” Now, he knew she was lying. He could read people, always had, and she was definitely lying.

  “Fine.” He was starting to get frustrated. Maybe he’d been wrong about a sex advice columnist being able to jumpstart him, when so many others haven’t. Maybe his problems weren’t solvable. Yet, he couldn’t quite shake the feeling that Harley could solve them. If she wanted to. He knew exactly how she could start. By putting her lips on pretty much any part of his body. Or all of it.

  “So you’re saying my inability to perform in the bedroom is because my father’s wife was mean to me?” He never called her stepmom. To him, she would always be his father’s wife.

  “So, she didn’t like you.” Harley typed a bit more on her keyboard, but she kept her dark eyes focused on him.

  “No, she didn’t like being reminded that her husband had a life before her, no.” That was the understatement of the year.

  “That had to be difficult.” She seemed genuine
ly grieved to hear that he had had a difficult childhood. Interesting. He thought she hated him.

  “Does it really matter? Nobody has a great childhood, do they?”

  “So, why not talk about it?”

  “Lucinda drank a lot. She wasn’t nice to me or any of my brothers. There, I talked about it.” He leaned forward. “Can we finally talk about sex now?”

  “Okay.” Harley put down her pen and straightened her glasses on her nose. “Let’s talk about it. How do you feel about sex, Mr. Lange?”

  The way she said it, devoid of all interest, made him think of a doctor prescribing erectile dysfunction pills. This was not what he had had in mind.

  “Don’t make it sound so dull.” Wilder was only half teasing.

  “Sex is just sex. It’s not dull or exciting all on its own. It should be fun, but only if we let go of the things holding us back. But we have to make sure we’re not doing anything that’s harmful to us, to our self-esteem. Harmful like one-night stands.”

  “One-night stands are beautiful works of art, they are definitely not harmful. Have you tried them?”

  “We’re talking about your sex life, not mine.” Hmmm. There was the defensive block-out again. What was the woman hiding? He badly wanted to talk about her sex life. So badly he could almost taste the curiosity in his mouth. He wanted to know what he’d have to do to get past that hard protective shell of hers.

  “For the next five minutes, let’s talk about your sex life. Not mine,” he said.

  “No. No way,” she protested.

  He sat up a bit straighter, guessing that she might take the bait. “But you realize you’ve been asking me the same questions for two weeks and I haven’t given you any new answers.” He’d been a black box. And he could keep it up forever if he wanted.

  She bit her lip, considering, and then blew out a frustrated breath. “Yes, I noticed.”

  “Okay, then. You want to pry open this steel trap?” He tapped his temple. “Then, you’ll have to play my game. It’s just five minutes.”