The Secrets She Keeps

by Jolie Moore

  The Secrets She Keeps

  Jolie Moore

  Also by Jolie Moore

  Maybe Baby

  Maybe Him

  Maybe Again

  Maybe Now

  Maybe You

  * * *

  Taming the Bad Boy

  Someone Else’s Wife

  * * *

  What Was Perfect

  What Was Lost

  What Was True

  * * *

  First Must Burn

  Her Secret Crush

  * * *

  Fifty First Dates

  Chapter 1

  Nari

  I was competing with a luau for attention. The hula dancers in grass skirts were winning. The bar had been packed to the gills the first three nights I’d been there. Now it was less than half-full. And there was nothing more pitiful than drinking in an empty bar.

  Every year the medical conference coordinator trotted out the same tired luau, same hula dancers, same whole roasted pig, same hollowed out pineapples filled with alcohol. And every year, my doctor colleagues flocked to the flaming tiki torches like moths. Maybe I would be better off picking someone at the luau for a hookup, but the pseudo native display made me more queasy than poi.

  I surveyed the bar again. Still pretty empty, but then so was my glass. Signaling the waiter, I ordered something called a Tai Chi from the twenty-dollar cocktail menu. The server offered up sushi, but I waved him away. So didn’t need any rice soaking up the alcohol and killing my buzz.

  It only took a few minutes before the first guy came over.

  “Nice dress,” he said. The man helped himself to one of the three empty stools at the high, square table.

  “Billabong,” I supplied.

  “What?” He shook his head. Off-kilter. Good.

  “The designer. They do great beachwear. I’m Nari Yoon.”

  “Dr. Colin Mann.” He extended his right hand.

  I looked down at his other hand. No ring on the fourth phalange. So far, so good. The name wasn’t too bad either. His hair was on the longish side, and going a little bit gray. Ten years ago, I’d never have given a guy with salt and pepper hair a second glance, much less my real name. But I wasn’t the only one getting older.

  “How long have you been in practice?” I asked, trying to gauge his age and more importantly, his stamina.

  “About ten years in Nashville,” he said. Shifting on the stool, my mark leaned forward expectantly.

  Dr. Colin Mann looked like he wanted to impress me with some incredible stories of heroic patient care. But I wasn’t interested in medicine tonight. Not the practice of it, at least. I needed a balm of a far more basic form from him.

  “You here alone?” I crossed one leg over the other. The cascading hem of the rayon dress revealed a significant portion of leg and thigh. He was pretty cool about the reveal, and I liked that about him. Maybe that control extended to the bedroom as well.

  “Yep,” he said, offering no more.

  I drained the Tai Chi and closed my eyes for a long moment, enjoying the lightheadedness. For an instant, I wished I could float right out of my body.

  After opening my eyes again, I gestured outside.

  “You going to the dinner?”

  “Things look much more interesting right here,” he said.

  Right answer.

  Forty-five minutes and two more Tai Chi’s later, I gave Dr. Colin my room number. I excused myself for a trip to the ladies before coming back to settle the bill and seal the deal.

  But when I carefully placed one foot in front of the other, completing the balancing act of walking while drunk and successfully making my way back to our table, I was disappointed to find my companion had disappeared. I looked around, making sure I had the right chair. In a room full of identical square black stools, and dulled mental acuity, perhaps I’d made a mistake.

  “No mistake,” Dr. Lucas Tucker said as if reading my mind. Eerie. “Dr. Colin Mann had an emergency call that took him away.”

  Turning my wrist toward my face in what I hoped wasn’t too exaggerated a gesture, I peered at the little gold hands set against the blue mother of pearl. Ten-thirty. I had to be up in my room grinding it out before midnight, and I’d lost a sure thing.

  Tonight, I needed sex like a fish needed water. It was the only way I’d ever made it through days like these without gasping for air, dying on land. And the night was escaping me quickly. I looked at Lucas a little differently. Cocking my head to examine him more closely made my head swim a little, so I straightened up. Alcohol was the second best path to oblivion. But the morning after was murder. Time to split my hand and double down.

  “Well, I need another Tai Chi, then,” I said, wincing a little at my slurred words.

  “How many have you had?” Lucas’ eyes narrowed in doctorly concern.

  “Not enough.” To the attentive server who appeared at our table as if teleported, I said, “Two Tai Chi’s.”

  “Did you enjoy the luau?” he asked.

  “Skipped it. Once was enough. You?”

  Lucas hesitated for a moment.

  “It was…interesting.”

  “Seems a bit imperialist to me. But to each his own.” Lucas turned his light brown eyes on me. Were they hazel? Under the clinic’s fluorescent lights, I’d thought them brown. But now I could see that tiny flecks of green and gray dotted his irises. My heart gave an unexpected thud.

  Damn.

  I had never noticed he was a man before. I shook my head with exaggerated movements. No, that wasn’t it. Of course I’d noticed he was a man. There seemed to be a great shortage of them in the primary care field these days. So a new one and a single one at that, in the office, had sparked weeks of speculation. No, it was something much simpler. I’d never noticed he was a man who could possibly rock my boat. I took a glance at my watch again. My boat needed some serious rocking soon.

  “Why are you shaking your head?” he asked, sipping cautiously at the drink. My sips were smaller this time around as well.

  Like a light switch in my head, I turned off Dr. Yoon.

  “You look very good tonight. Nice to see you out of a white coat and comfortable shoes.” I lifted my own three-inch Jimmy Choos and propped them on the chair next to him. His eyes traveled the length of my leg, stopping only where the dress landed. I bent my knees, ostensibly to get comfortable, but in reality it revealed more leg. Lucas’ eyes traveled farther up to the hem again. My criteria narrowed sharply to straight and interested. Dr. Lucas would certainly do.

  Suddenly resolved, I stood, gripping the table for balance.

  “I’m going up to my room. I’d love it if you joined me. Maybe we can get to know each other better,” I said, putting it frankly.

  Assuming he was wired like most men, he’d close the tab and knock on my door in five minutes or less. I opened the tiny purse at my side and dropped a duplicate of my own keycard on the table.

  “Fourteen twenty-two.”

  I’d peed again, then artfully arranged myself on the chaise when the snick of the lock echoed in the room. Lucas’ expression was somewhat wary, so I stood and took four long steps to close the distance. Simultaneously I pulled him toward me with one hand, and pushed the door closed with the other. Good coordination for the inebriated.

  “Nari—”

  I silenced his protest with a solitary finger against his lips. He needed no further prompting. He pulled me to him, pursuing my mouth for a kiss. I turned my head from the sudden intimacy.

  His hot mouth was against my neck and moving down, seeking sensitive skin and a reaction.

  This.

  This is what I needed on tonight of all nights. By waiting so late, grief and memory had started t
o crowd in on the periphery. There was no time to waste.

  Sliding a hand down his chest toward his khakis, I felt for and found his belt buckle. With a single hand I pulled the leather from its brass hold and slipped it from the loops. It dropped to the wood floor with a soft clink.

  “Nari, slow down. I didn’t expect for you to—”

  I didn’t want talk. I needed action. A flick and the button of his slacks was undone. Rubbing my hand alongside the zipper I’d released, I realized he was well and truly aroused. No worries there. I’d only have to push past any scruples he had. I’d played most of my cards, but not all. Time to pull the ace from my sleeve.

  Men were visual. Turning on the bedside lamp, I grabbed fistfuls of fabric in my hands and pulled the thin dress over my head, playing my trump card. Other than a thong and three-inch nude heels, I was naked. Like iron filings to a magnet, Lucas’ hands were on my tits in the space of a heartbeat.

  Yes. This. I wanted to scream with relief.

  Alternately, he squeezed and rubbed his fingers along the engorged tips. Pleasure flooded my brain, and everything else left. Sweet, sweet oblivion was around the corner. I sat, pulling him down on the bed by his shirt.

  “Take this off,” I begged, pulling apart the stiff collar. A button pinged against something metallic. He complied, taking the shirt from my hands and releasing the final closures himself. Then I urged him over me. The heaviness against my slightness, the rough body hair against my smooth skin was almost too much to take. Almost. But not quite. Another kind of emotion was sneaking in. That had never happened before.

  Mentally squashing it like a bug, I plowed forward. Feeling along the duvet, I found the condoms I’d stashed next to the bedside clock hours earlier. Rolling over, I tugged at his boxers, releasing the thick member. Were I sober, I’d have been impressed.

  But now all I wanted was to fill the emptiness. I swirled my tongue around the tip, earning a guttural moan from the man. He was mine now. I licked again, the smell and taste making me more buzzed than the alcohol. Slowly, I slipped on the condom, smoothing it with my hands. He pulsed and twitched against me. God knew he felt hard as a rock and as ready as I was. We rolled over again and I notched him against my opening. Pushing out a deeply held breath, I guided him in.

  “Ah!” he cried out, trying to stop the movement of his hips. “Is this okay? Are you—”

  “More than ready,” I said. Looping my heels on his shoulders, I urged him on. What little control he’d had was gone in an instant. He grabbed on to the ankles by his ears and slammed home.

  If I could have kept him hard inside me for a single hour more, that’s what I would have done. But nature didn’t work that way. Eventually, he pulled out and found the bathroom. In less than a minute, he was back.

  Fuck me pumps off, I camped under the covers.

  “Did you…Do I…” he stammered.

  I shook my head. It wasn’t about an orgasm as much as it was about making it past midnight. I looked at the glowing orange clock. It was well past. Lucas looked like he wanted to say something. Sleep, not words.

  I pressed a single finger to his lips. “Sleep now. Talk later,” I said.

  I had no plans on talking later, but I didn’t say that. I closed my eyes. Nothing flickered in my mind. It had worked. I let myself drift. The alcohol’s sedative effect was strong and pulled me into unconsciousness.

  I had a perfectly intact, completely non-mutated aldehyde dehydrogenases gene. In short, I could hold my liquor. I’d never sat at a bar, face beet red, one step away from falling down in the street, ass over tea kettle in my own vomit.

  Genetically, I may have been fine, but I’d made a big mistake last night. I’d gone to sleep with a man on the wrong side of the hotel room’s door. I’d have to rethink my liver’s tolerance.

  When I drank, my preference was for soju, easy enough to get in Los Angeles, even outside Koreatown. But last night, in the resort’s hotel bar, it hadn’t been an option. Instead, I’d downed too many of the house special: a Tai Chi, the Mai Tai on steroids.

  The combination of coconut rum, spiced rum, and dark rum had tasted yummy the first time around. A second had been the start of a divine slide to oblivion. The third…well, the third was probably what landed me in this bed with a hulking bear of a man next to me.

  I’d fucked up my hookup.

  Waking up alone had always been my preference.

  I moved my foot again one last time to make sure my sense of touch wasn’t faulty—set off by alcohol-related hallucinations or psychosis. Nope, there was a hairy leg in the bed next to mine.

  I cracked open a single eye, squinting. Maybe I’d dreamt the whole thing. But no, he was right there, half a day’s blond stubbly growth shadowing his jaw. Slipping from the covers, I did my best not to shake the bed and wake the sleeping giant.

  What happened in Kauai, stayed in Kauai, right? The one year I’d decided not to drag my best friend Daisy along, this had happened. My best friend had felt slighted by the absent invitation. After all, we’d gone on this trip together every year for the past three. But the conference had fallen on the tenth anniversary of Andrew’s death. And I didn’t want to have to battle heart-wrenching sadness, tears, all the while steering a best friend straight who was putting her own life on the path to ruin.

  Once, maybe twice a year I craved, no, needed the oblivion only copious alcohol and anonymous sex could bring. It made the days bearable and the nights non-suicidal. A dozen or so hookups in nine years with nameless faceless men, nothing I was ashamed of. In March, and sometimes in July, I waltzed into a bar and made myself an easy mark.

  This year, Lucas Tucker had somehow slipped under my radar. I squeezed my eyelids tight, trying to remember what had happened to that other guy. Connelly, Conlin, something like that. Five hundred randy men away from home, and I’d been desperate enough and stupid enough to bed the only one I knew in Kauai.

  Mentally I snapped my fingers. Colin from Nashville. That had been his name. He had been my intended target. Maybe I needed to check my judgment too. Because now that my more sober brain thought about it, what medical emergency could the guy have had? Rum not only killed the liver, but brain function as well. Someone should have written that down in a medical journal somewhere.

  I took a deep breath, and the nausea eased for a moment. All that mattered was that I’d made it. Today was March twenty-fourth and my world hadn’t ended on March twenty-third, even if it felt like it would when the sun had come up yesterday morning.

  I was alive. Andrew wasn’t. Those fundamental facts would never change.

  The pounding intensified in my brain, as I lifted my body and tiptoed to the bathroom, reminding me of my continued existence on this earthly plane. I pawed through my makeup case, looking for something to stop the pain.

  Four years of medical school, several years of practice, and I’d yet to come up with a cure for a hangover, not that I was trying. Maybe I should have gone into research. Probably a billion dollars in that kind of cure. My parents would shout with pride from their Riverside rooftop if I made a big a success of myself off a patent like that.

  Shaking my Tory Burch makeup case one last time, I had to accept the sad truth. The turquoise bag held nothing stronger than naproxen, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen. I contemplated taking a few of each. But mixing drugs was not a good idea. I pushed the Tylenol back into the bag. It was too easy to overdose on those, especially with the night my liver’d had.

  Instead, I poured out four of the brown pills, a total of eight hundred milligrams, threw them back with rank tasting hotel tap water and hoped that would ease the pain, if only a little.

  For some reason I couldn’t put a French manicured finger on, this tenth anniversary of Andrew’s death was harder than any of the last nine. And it showed on the reflection of my face in the stark bathroom light. Whomever said time heals all wounds, lied. I was living proof that hurt could be as fresh on day three thousand six hundred fifty one as
the first.

  Wrapping my hair into a tight twist, and jabbing in a few bobby pins, I winced at the pain in my scalp and my puffy face. For a regretful second, I wondered if having a real friend by my side last night would have helped me avoid the mistake I’d probably made.

  For all the previous years, I’d been in Los Angeles when this day came. And being in the nearly four million strong City of Angels was the equivalent of being alone. With a one-week shift in the dates, instead of flipping through photos and letters in the privacy of my own bedroom, I was in Kauai rubbing shoulders with disorderly doctors and brushing up on pre-diabetes indicators.

  But I’d avoided spending the week with Daisy because I didn’t want to have to put on a pretty face for my best friend. If I told Daisy the truth about my yearly pity party, there wouldn’t be any sympathy. I expected I’d hear the same thing my pragmatic Yankee friend had intimated only once, Your college boyfriend died. It’s time to move on. Get over it.

  But the sting still remained like a thorn in my heart. Even if Daisy had never said those cold and exact words aloud, the message was the same. Because I was supposed to have gotten over him if not ten years ago, then at least by now.

  “Nari,” a hoarse voice called.

  Lucas.

  With the sound of the shifting bedsprings, heat suffused my face. I looked in the mirror again. Post coital awkwardness made my face red in a way alcohol never did.

  What sounded like a foot thumped on the floor. The bed squeaked. Another foot hit the wood floorboards. He sounded like he was shuffle-walking in my direction. I steeled myself for what needed to come next: a gentle nudge or big shove out the door.

  “Ow!” was followed by a curse. “Shit!” The bedsprings groaned in protest.

  Damned healing instincts kicked into gear a nanosecond later. Against my better judgment, I wrenched the faucet shut and ran around the wall separating the vanity and sink from the four-poster. Lucas was back on the bed, holding his foot in his hands.