by Julia Kent
“Love doesn’t have to look any different than it looks in any other relationship.”
“What about jealousy?”
“Does it need to be there?”
She gave him an incredulous look.“It’s always there when you have two men and one woman.”
Ah! She’d said it. Those words surprised him, given how simply she spoke them—no wincing, no aversion of eyes. Dana’s entire body had withdrawn, gone small, and while she’d gamely be up for anything when it was all about sex, when push came to shove she’d chosen Mike, and that had been the end of it all.
Because what Dana hadn’t understood was that Mike wanted what Jeremy wanted, too.
The question was: did Lydia?
“Jealousy doesn’t have to be anywhere it isn’t welcomed.”
“You make it sound like a vampire.”
He pondered that for a moment. “Isn’t it? All jealousy does is suck the emotional life out of you. It makes you crazy with fear. Perfect love means no fear. Only a deep knowing, a groundedness that comes from wanting the most for each other.”
She frowned. “That’s the best definition of love I’ve ever heard.”
“And sex. Lots of sex,” he added hurriedly.
She punched him in the arm and stood, reaching her hand down to him, the sun framing her face like an angel. “I need a triple latte after all that.”
“That’s right. Like we need more mental stimulation right now.” But he joined her and they walked in tandem, awkward laughter carrying off them in waves as the reverberations of choosing to be open echoed within him, joining together so many disparate parts that he didn’t know could come together to be whole.
As ten minutes rolled into fifteen, Mike wondered if Lydia was standing him up. Maybe it served him right. To do so would have a certain level of fairness to it, for never arriving was a form of disappearance, and to tip the scales to an even level she certainly had some rights.
Of all the nights to do it, though, this one would be the most difficult, for Mike felt like a live wire, capable of destroying anything that he touched if not dealt with by someone who knew how to handle his rawness.
The double shot of whiskey burned in his throat, and the simple cotton dress shirt under his wool jacket dug into his shoulders. Unable to make himself comfortable, he let his frenetic energy take over, succumbing to the reality of who—and how—he was in moments like this.
Tense. Eager. Aware.
And the plate of goat-cheese-stuffed figs with grated parmesan and a reduced balsamic glaze didn’t help. He should have waited to order, but the server simply brought the plate with his drink, adding a wink and “Compliments of the chef” with the delivery.
Ah. He’d been recognized. And so he had gone ahead and ordered anyway.
In his old life, even appearing at a restaurant could generate buzz and sales for a place, skyrocketing its profile and helping send restaurant owners into a frothing frenzy, thank-you cards and specialty dishes sent to his office by the truckload. For as much as his old life haunted him, this was one perk he didn’t mind.
Free food.
Biting into one of the tantalizing figs, he had to hand it to the chef—this was good. Amazing. Incredible.
And then he choked.
Lydia marched in, shoulders back, her gait one of purpose. A tight cotton v-neck, slacks that seemed tailored for those glorious hips, and hair pulled back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck, the ends curled, all rounded out with a light touch of makeup and silver hoop earrings.
So put together. So casual chic.
He wanted to rip her clothes off and take her right there.
Suppressing those baser natures, he stood and swallowed hard, nearly tearing up as the food made him wince.
“Mike.” She managed to make his own name sound like a rebuke.
“Lydia.” Considerably more sensual in his pronunciation of hers, he let the lovely three syllables slide over his tongue like an Irish cream. Pulling out the chair opposite him, she ignored the chivalrous gesture and sat, scooching in to the table with an inelegance that bordered on crass.
So that was how it was going to be.
If she had been indifferent, he’d have turned off and tuned out, knowing when it was time to throw in the towel. This? Her behavior spoke of a broken heart and an angry mind.
Both of those could be managed, revived, resurrected and reshaped.
Lydia gave him something to work with, and for that he was grateful. The absence of emotion would have ended this in seconds.
The presence of so much was what fueled his hope.
More than hope—his determination.
The server interrupted, and Lydia ordered a pitcher of sangria. “Thirsty?” he asked. Or did she intend to share it? Offering him some would be the tiniest bit of a peace offering.
“I’ll need all the alcohol I can get to make it through this meeting,” she intoned dryly, making his ribs ache, his back stand up straighter.
Among other body parts.
“Did you come here to spend this dinner insulting me, or to talk about the past?”
“Who says a girl can’t do both?”
Or have both. The line of her dark hair against her jaw gave her a pure essence, the look of a tightly wound librarian or a nun recently sprung free of her vows. Those alluring eyes, and lips, red and swollen, as if she’d been kissed a few too many times in private, emerging to the crowds to find equilibrium, revealing a bit more sensuality than was acceptable.
The light sweater she wore hugged each rounded mound of flesh in all the right ways, making her seem more substantial, so earthly and earthy, a woman with a centered core and a grace that charmed him, her confidence not at all fake. Anger may fuel that self-esteem right now, but under the fury was a very real, very adult Lydia,
The one he, like Jeremy, was falling for.
“Both.” His chuckle wasn’t bitter—in fact, it was quiet, a secret shared by lovers. “Of course you can have both.”
Her blush signaled something, though he was too captivated by the back-and-forth between them to understand what meaning it might hold.
The sangria delivered, she poured a glass and drank half before letting her eyes float around the room, taking it all in. “Nice place.”
“Yelp recommended it.”
That made her laugh and finally show a smile with teeth. “Relying on social media to find restaurants? How low the great Michael Bournham has sunk.” She drank more, then twirled the heavy glass stem between her fingers. “Now you’re going to tell me you spent the last month living in a Super 8 Motel.”
Not quite.
But…close.
Telling her the truth—the whole truth, and nothing but—was his purpose tonight. Exposing himself entirely, like a woman naked and in labor, caring only to get through the journey and to reap the rewards of the birth itself, Mike wanted to show her the real, pregnant self under the surface so that when he was birthed—the new Michael Bournham—it would come as less of a surprise.
But just as nature can’t predict when babies arrive, Mike hadn’t been able to tightly control his own journey down a very different birth canal.
“No. But I’ve been living somewhere very interesting.”
“Better be, considering you made everyone from Perez Hilton to Anderson Cooper speculate on your whereabouts.” More sangria. She emptied the glass and studied the reflection of the candles on the table in the drops of liquid remaining. Filling the glass once more, she took smaller sips this time.
“Do you really want to know where I’ve been?” Stop it, Mike, he berated himself. He was being a tease; there was no strategic reason for drawing this out. The truth, though, would hurt and confuse her, more than any rivalry between him and Jeremy. Mike had gone into her family compound and inserted himself into the cradle of her family, and when he owned up to his stunt, she wouldn’t understand.
Not at first.
Not ever, said his inner skeptic.
More sangria down that lovely throat, her neck bobbing as she swallowed, making him yearn for her. “If I ask where you’ve been, will I get a straight answer? Does it matter where you’ve been?” She sounded hurt. “What matters more is that you left in the first place.”
“Actually, you left.” The words were out before he could think them through, a blinding light filling his senses. So much at stake here—not money, not deals, not influence.
His own fucking heart.
“I left,” she huffed, “because you arranged for a sham job for me in Iceland.”
“Not a sham.”
“Not a sham,” she taunted. “Tell that to Siggi. His grope wasn’t exactly part of the Bournham Industries HR manual.”
Possessiveness stripped him of rational thought. “Who’s Siggi?”
“A coworker who put the basics together and figured out I was the woman in the video.”
Groan. “Fuck.”
“That’s what he wanted!” She drank another glass, cheeks pinking, showing the alcohol’s effect. “Turns out when you’re caught on camera fucking Michael Bournham, even people who live in the middle of nowhere know you.”
“And he….did he hurt you?”
“Only when Jeremy punched him and I was pinned under the body.”
Frowning, Mike reached for his glass and found it empty. Lydia grabbed the pitcher and poured a shot glass’s worth of sangria in it, which he drank without thinking.
“Pinned?” And punched? Jeremy wasn’t the type to use his fists. His mouth? Sure. The guy could use that as a weapon with pinpoint precision. But a physical fight? What the hell had really happened in Iceland? Disappearing was turning out to have been a huge mistake.
Possibly insurmountable.
She made a puffing sound with her lips. “You sent Jeremy to protect me. Which he did. You sent him in your stead.” She shook her head and her posture loosened as she leaned across the table. “I know you sent him to watch out for me, but you had to know he’d come on to me, too. Jeremy was at a nightclub with me when Siggi tried to coerce me into sex.”
“And he thought you were interested because…”
“Because I’m the corporate whore on the payroll for any employee’s pleasure, Mike. Didn’t you get the memo? Oh, that’s right….you wrote that fucking memo.”
The Lydia who said those words wasn’t angry; in fact, she said what she said with a monotone that worried him more than overt rage would have. Tight control was needed to defer so much pain.
He knew that all too well.
“That was never my intention.”
“Then what was your intention?”
“I tried to explain before the story broke.”
“And you failed. Miserably.”
“I own it.”
“Good. At least you’re not casting blame on anyone but yourself.”
“I never did.”
“No, you just left all the pieces for someone to pick up.” A quick signal with her wrist and the server delivered a second pitcher. Liquid courage.
The sound of his own breath through his nose and mouth felt like sandpaper, the touch of his fingertips against the cotton tablecloth like frostbite. Lydia wasn’t bitter, but she was loosening up, and for someone so tightly wound that meant he was about to have a snowball’s chance in hell at learning her true feelings.
She didn’t look tightly wound with Jeremy, said that ever-present fucking asshole voice that had appeared the second he found them in his bed.
As she drained the sangria and chugged it down like iced tea, her eyes were angry and passionate, giving him the kind of look only a woman with a shared past could give a man.
“Why did you invite me here?”
“I heard the food was good.”
Smirk. “If you want more than five minutes with me, you’d better drop the act, Mike.” The last word seemed to trouble her. “Or Matt. Or Michael Bournham. Or whoever you’re masquerading as these days.”
Double ouch. When he told her what he’d done at Escape Shores, she’d blast him out of her life forever.
So be it. Enough lies. Time for a flood of truth that might wash his sins away.
Or drown him.
The way she leaned across the table, how her lips worried a little umbrella that stabbed the orange garnish in the new pitcher, how her tongue licked and teased—her actions weren’t as angry as her words.
That, too, was a tell.
Mike was all too good at reading tells. Like a high-end poker player, he could size up a person’s emotional state with a few glances and enough time. Collect data by just sitting next to someone and you can profile them, inventorying their internal emotional state and how it will affect their actions.
Right now, Lydia’s body said want.
And so did her mouth.
When the words matched up, he’d be in heaven.
Too bad he had to go through hell to get there.
“I have a question for you, Mike.” Razor-sharp eyes, untouched by the alcohol, bored into his.
“Yes?”
Curling two fingers, she beckoned him to come closer. Ah, the scent of vanilla and musk, something sweet and dangerous. Rock hard in under a minute, he now ached with the need to be in her, buried and enveloped, making her his.
Leaning across the table, he opened his mouth to catch more oxygen, temperature rising. How hot could Lydia make a damned room?
“Tell me,” she whispered.
“Tell you what?”
“Tell me why Jeremy thinks it’s fine for me to sleep with you.” Those two hooked fingers rotated slowly and pressed against his open mouth, silencing whatever instinctive reaction he had, the cool chill of her skin against his ajar lips driving all reason from him.
“And not the party line. Tell me why I should violate every rule convention dictates and do this.”
“I—” Her fingers still pressed into his lips, his cock pushed against the fine cotton of his slacks, blood shoved through his body like a waterfall, and if the universe had split in half with a rift in dimensions that revealed every second of his life to this very point to be born of the imagination of a strange, dull writer on a distant planet, he’d have accepted that on blind faith.
If only to stay in her orbit.
“Shhhh.” Her lips spread out like a rose petal as she made the sound. “That’s not an offer,”
He found his voice. “Not an offer?
“No.” The swell of her breasts beckoned to him. He closed his eyes, inhaling her scent slowly, letting it infuse and direct him, as if a potion she made from her essence.
“Then tell me why you shouldn’t.”
This had gotten out of control. Fast.
Rather, she had lost her bearings. A pitcher of sangria may have been the gun, but her own wanton need was the bullet. And Mike could pull the trigger any moment he wished, if only he knew it.
Maybe he did.
Please let him.
The war of thoughts and fears and confusion and need—blinding, driving need—made her mind and heart a battlefield. Her body, though…where did it fit in the metaphor? She had full agency to use it at will, on her own terms, and without judgment or regret when it came to these two men.
Was she a weapon?
Of mass destruction?
Mike’s challenge hung in the air between them, her face inches from his, palm resting on his face, his lips ready to take her fingers in his mouth and show her what he could do to her. She would let him, if he dared. Thin restraint, weakened by a few drinks, was no match for the craving inside her, but she also knew that sex would never quench it.
What she truly needed was closure.
Beyond that?
Love.
The first time she’d met him, at that insipid orientation back during her first days at Bournham Industries, she’d been drawn to him. Trying to climb the corporate ladder had subliminally involved a swooning desire to climb him. Add in meeting Matt Jones and the love
-hate tension that might as well have made her belly tighten from its taut pull, and you had one Lydia Charles in love with a man who very much existed, who was so real she could still taste yesterday’s kiss…
And she had the open permission—nay, encouragement—to make love with him in every hedonistic, primal way possible, from her boyfriend. Her Jeremy.
Her something.
What they proposed, though…
“What?” she asked, addled and caught in her own flash of thoughts. Her finger now pulled back and drew a slow, wet circle around the rim of her glass, like the early stroke of a clit in foreplay.
“Tell me why you shouldn’t sleep with me.”
“Different question.”
“Same premise.”
“I object!” she called out, slamming her open palm on the table, feeling the slow burn of that unnamed, molten-lava heat that threatened to turn every movement, every word, every thought into one long inhale of Mike, and exhale of restraint.
“We’re not in a courtroom.”
“Then why do I feel like I’m on trial?” she rasped. “It’s my life we’re talking about, Mike. You seem so willing to forget that.”
“I’ve forgotten nothing.” His eyes meant it, raking over her with a precision she should have found maddening but, instead, couldn’t turn away from, inviting him to look, to catalogue, to admire and want.
Had she misjudged him? Perhaps the horror of the camera had made her blind to something that her heart wanted so desperately to believe: that the Michael Bournham really did want her. Rejecting the notion had been a protective measure, designed to blunt the damage, like breaking the windows of a burning home in order to escape, priorities triaged into life vs. death.
Her heart had died a little the day she watched her body move against his on video, the jokes and quips from newscasters detailing her—her passion, her naked need, her wholly unveiled heart beating without the case of her chest, all resting in Michael Bournham’s hands.
And he’d thrown it aside like a piece of offal.
Brutal, the imagery she’d shoved to the forefront of her mind, forcing herself to face all the cruelties that his withdrawal of interest could mean. The implications of being used and turned into a piece of meat were quite easy to mull over, examine and dissect, analyze and absorb.
