by Maya Rodale
“But what about Duke?”
“What about him?”
“He’s still into you.”
“Maybe. But not enough. I think he’s mainly interested in a girl on the side while he works 24/7.”
“You would get something out of it, too. Orgasms.” I blushed. Roxanna continued. “And I bet he’ll provide lots of material for a new book.”
“It’s fiction, not autobiography.” Yet I was shamelessly drawing from my real life experience now. Something a girl just couldn’t make up.
“Keep telling yourself that,” Roxanna said. “Where is Sam taking you for dinner?”
“Balthazar.”
“Interesting choice,” Roxanna remarked, with a mildly approving nod of her head. “Classic New York, but now mainly the domain of out-of-towners and the unimaginative. However, dinner at Balthazar is not just a casual night out.”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear anything you said after ‘classic New York.’”
Balthazar
“AND THEN REMEMBER how we caught her spying on us when she nearly fell out of her window?” Sam and I both burst out laughing at the memory of our crotchety and meddlesome old neighbor, Mrs. Baldwin.
“I used to take such care to keep the curtains closed, but now in New York, I don’t even bother. I’ve seen my neighbors and I’m sure they’ve seen me,” I said. We were halfway through our plateau de fruit de mer and having a really lovely time when I got a text message. I felt my phone vibrate in my clutch, which I kept on my lap.
Duke Austen: How is your date going?
I didn’t need to ask how he knew I was on a date—I had checked in on Foursquare out of habit. But I might have, perhaps on purpose, tweeted about my dinner companion.
“What is it?” Sam asked.
“Oh, nothing,” I replied. “Just a quick question from Roxanna.” I quickly typed “fabulous!!!!!” and slipped the phone back in my purse.
“I had an interview at NYU today,” Sam said. My heart sort of stopped, not just by what he said, but by the question, warmth and hesitancy in his brown eyes. This wasn’t about NYU or his career prospects at all.
“Really? How did it go?” I took a sip of my cocktail.
“Good. Really good,” he said, smiling. God, he looked handsome when he smiled like that. “I hit it off with the dean, and I have another batch of interviews with other faculty members tomorrow.”
“Are you interviewing any other places?”
“A few. UC Berkeley wants me to come out for a meeting.”
“California?” “But that’s so far!”
Once again, I was faced with the prospect of losing Sam. If he moved to California we would almost never see each other. He’d no longer be just an hour’s drive outside of the city—or just a few blocks away in the village, if he landed the NYU job. Just when I thought I had recovered from losing him, and just when I thought we might have a chance again.
“I know it’s far,” Sam said, “But it’ll be a big opportunity if I get it. And it’ll be a fresh start.”
“What about Kate? How will she feel about you moving across the country?”
“We’re not that serious, Jane.” Sam took my hand in his. I lost myself in his warm brown eyes. My gaze drifted down to his mouth. My memories of his kiss were hazy—and I thought I would never forget. I wondered what it’d be like to kiss him again. Would it be like old times, or new and wonderful and thrilling? I noticed Sam’s eyes drop to my lips, which curved up into a coy smile when I realized we were probably thinking the same thing.
My phone vibrated again, jolting me out of this moment with Sam. When Sam ordered more drinks from the waiter, I took the opportunity to check.
It was a Snapchat from Duke. He was smiling that roguish grin of his. Also, he was shirtless. Also he had written, “Miss Me?” over the picture of his bare chest.
I nearly spit out the last sip of my cocktail.
“Excuse me,” I murmured.
“What is it?”
“Boy drama,” I answered. “Roxanna’s boy drama.” I put my phone back in my purse and set it on the floor so I wouldn’t feel the vibration of another new message. It was so loud in the restaurant there was no way I’d hear it.
But as I sipped my wine and picked at my salad, I realized I couldn’t quite forget it. I kept thinking about that picture of Duke and my mouth went dry. If I were so inclined, I could walk over to his place after dinner and have a night of multiple orgasms and outrageous pleasure. But I was nobody’s girl on the side, and Sam was here, and he was my great love, and the night was ripe with possibilities.
“How did you and Roxanna meet anyway? I don’t think I got the story.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got all night, Jane,” Sam said in a low voice. “How about you?”
I started telling the story.
“I had been searching for apartments with a broker, but anything that wasn’t an absolute hovel was too far out of my price range. One day my broker got so frustrated with me that he said I should just look on Craigslist already.”
“You? Meeting a stranger on Craigslist?”
“I know. But I was desperate and Roxanna had posted a really funny ad. The place was small, but clean. And she and I hit it off right away, even though we’re a bit of an odd couple.”
Sam shook his head. “I can’t believe how you’ve changed, Jane. But it’s like you’ve blossomed or something. I’m afraid—”
“What?”
“What if I was holding you back all those years?”
Our entrees arrived just then, sparing me from having to reply. I’d never thought of us like that. After he left, I assumed I was a dead weight he had cast off. But if Sam had proposed that night instead of breaking up with me, we wouldn’t be here. He’d been working at Montclair and I’d be back in Milford, planning a wedding and when I’d get pregnant. Romance novels would be books stashed under my bed, not books I wrote and published.
After dinner, I slipped off to the ladies room. As I waited in line in the darkened vestibule outside the restrooms, I gave in and checked my phone.
There was another Snapchat from Duke. I opened it up only to see a picture of him, without his shirt. This time he gave the camera the sort of smoldering look that made girls swoon. Over the picture he wrote: I miss you.
I gazed at it for five, four, three, two, one seconds before it was gone.
I texted him back.
Jane Sparks: You tease.
Duke Austen: What are you wearing?
I awkwardly took a selfie with Snapchat and added some text: “See Jane Date.” I gave him just five seconds to look at it and just a few seconds after that I got a reply.
Duke Austen: You look hot in that dress. But you’ll look hotter in my bed with that dress on the floor.
Jane Sparks: I’m on a date. With someone else.
Duke Austen: So come over after.
He was persistent, that rogue. He knew what he wanted and he pursued it. And I knew if I went over there I’d have a night like no other. With shaky hands, I typed my reply.
Jane Sparks: We’ll see.
Duke Austen: Let’s see if I can tempt you.
Another Snapchat came through, but I tucked my phone in my bag without looking at it. OK, then I took my phone out and looked. I mean, really. Another pic of Duke that made me all hot and bothered. And then, in six seconds it was gone.
“Is everything alright?” Sam asked when I returned to the table.
“Of course! Why?”
“You’re flushed.”
“Oh, it’s nothing,” I said with an awkward laugh. It was the Ashbrooke Effect or the Austen Effect or whatever you wanted to call it. My freaking phone pinged again. There was no way I was looking—Sam had ordered profiteroles for dessert and another round of drinks and I was here, with Sam. Love of my life. Right?
But I was all too aware of another guy, waiting for me—if I wanted—just a few blocks uptow
n.
“I think if I get an offer from NYU I’ll take it,” Sam said.
“Oh, wow,” I replied. “It would be amazing if you did.”
We would get back together then. I just knew it. Then we would get married. We would have babies, lots of books and a couch from Pottery barn—none of which would fit in a Manhattan apartment, so we’d have to move to New Jersey.
Suddenly, my dream life wasn’t my dream life anymore.
“So we haven’t talked about your book yet,” Sam said. “I was up all night reading it, Jane. I couldn’t put it down.”
“I never thought you were the romance novel type.”
“I didn’t think I was either. But Jane . . . . It was good. But what really gripped me was the story of Emma and Benedict.”
Emma was my heroine. Benedict was the man she loved and expected to marry and who never quite came through. She would have done anything for him—she did do anything for him. And in the end?
He wasn’t who she wanted after all.
“It’s just fiction, Sam.” I tried to laugh it off. It was so cathartic to write it—talking about it with the man in question was not something I was prepared to do.
“I’m a professor of English Literature, Jane. Nothing is just fiction.”
Talking about my book with a character based on my ex-boyfriend who was a literature major was something I desperately wanted to avoid. There just wasn’t enough wine in the world for that.
“Listen to you, finally finding validity and literary merit in a bodice ripper. Don’t worry, I promise I won’t tell the faculty at the places you’re applying to.”
“Jane, I just felt so stuck on the same old path,” Sam said earnestly. “We’d been together so long, and had plans to be together forever. It just seemed like more of the same. But everything is different now. Except that I still want you, especially this new version of you. Jane 2.0. Maybe this break was what we both needed.”
It was everything I’d ever wanted to hear. I had hoped for this. Prayed for it. Faked an engagement with another guy in the hopes it would lead me around to this moment where Sam wanted me back. But all I could think about the text messages from Duke. He was so close I could walk to his place in heels.
“But what can really happen, Sam? I live in the city and you’re still back in Milford. Plus, you’re with Kate and—”
“You’re not over that guy,” Sam said bluntly. Shocked at the accusation, I stumbled over my words when I replied.
“Like we said on Facebook. It’s complicated.”
He leaned in close.
“Was it fake, Jane?”
“Sam . . .”
“You can tell me. I know all your secrets. And I know you. So I don’t think it was fake.”
At the end of our meal we lingered outside under the streetlights on the corner of Spring and Crosby. Sam pulled me close—and I didn’t pull away. Call it curiosity. Or old habits dying hard. I let him wrap his arms around me and I savored this old, familiar and comforting feeling I thought I’d lost forever.
But that was the thing, wasn’t it? In his arms, I felt the old and familiar and comforting. And these days I knew exciting, thrilling, and utterly wonderful.
I knew Sam was going to kiss me. It would be like another first kiss. I was nervous. Did I want this? Or not?
His mouth pressed down on mine before I had decided what I wanted. He pulled me closer into his embrace. But instead of feeling wanted and cherished, I just felt stifled. This was something I had wanted for so long but now it didn’t feel right anymore. I tried to break free of his embrace—I need to breathe. It was a moment before he let me go.
“Sam, stop,” I said insistently. He stopped.
“I know—we’re on the street where anyone can see,” Sam said, even though that wasn’t it at all. “Want to come back to my hotel, Jane? It’ll be just like old times.”
I felt another text message come through. I didn’t have to look to know who sent it or what it said. I knew it was Duke.
“Not tonight, Sam. I’m not saying no forever. Just not tonight.”
There was something I had to take care of first. His name was Duke Austen, and I needed to personally deliver a piece of my mind. He was ruining my date, and possibly my life.
Sam insisted that I get in a cab—which I did. But two blocks later I told the driver to take me to Bowery and Bond instead of Fifteenth Street and Eighth Avenue. As he sped off into the night, I gave in and checked my phone. Another sexy picture from the bad boy billionaire that vanished before my eyes. It was time to reply. In person.
Bowery and Bond, Duke’s apartment
I STORMED INTO his apartment the second the elevator doors opened and launched into my tirade, having worked myself into quite a state on the ride over and during the length of the elevator ride.
“WHAT ARE YOU thinking to interrupt my date like that?”
“Hey Janet,” Duke said, looking up from his computer. “I was hoping you’d reply with a picture but the real thing is so much better.”
“My name is Jane.”
“Aw, I’m just trying to be cute. Besides, the name Sweater Set just doesn’t work for you in that dress.”
He stood up and came over to greet me, sliding his hand around my waist and pulling me flush against him. I couldn’t help it: I sighed. The man just did things to me.
“What are we doing?” I gasped as Duke started kissing my neck.
“Skipping over everything until we get to the naughty bits,” he murmured. I shivered from feeling his breath steal across the sensitive skin of my neck.
“Did you really read my book? Or just the sex scenes?”
“Yeah, I read it all,” he said, pulling back. “I couldn’t put it down. I read it when I should have been interviewing developers, meeting with my sales team and a hundred other things that would bring me closer to everything I ever wanted. You see, Janet, I thought you were a good girl but it turns out you’re all kinds of trouble.”
“Me?” I had to laugh. I’d never had a detention, or broken the law, or even gotten a speeding ticket.
“And you know what they say about me and trouble,” Duke said with that impossibly seductive grin of his. He pulled me close again and this time I didn’t resist, but placed my palms on the hot skin of his bare chest. I felt his heart beating.
“They say you and trouble are notoriously inseparable,” I answered softly.
My own heart was pounding, and I felt my blood thrumming through my veins. I felt desire taking over, too. There was a tightness inside and heat and a driving need to feel his hands all over my body and to feel him deep inside of me. I breathed him in and his scent made me feel more intoxicated than I already was.
Old Jane played by the rules. But tonight, I was new Jane. I was trouble. And I was going to break the rules. This wasn’t getting together or some meaningful and significant lovemaking, this me in a sexy dress, having drunk some wine, and wanting to lose myself with this hot guy. Just for one night. To hell with the consequences.
My heart was pounding. Did I mention that? It set a wicked rhythm I couldn’t resist. My whole world was suddenly nothing more than the bump bump bump of my heart. I felt it like I felt a thick, heavy bass line thumping in the club. Felt it in my chest, in my belly, and lower.
Duke hadn’t even touched me yet.
I knew what was about to happen.
I reached out and traced one fingertip from the hollow of his throat, down along the soft skin of chest, savoring the taut planes of his muscles before dipping lower still, until I stroked along the edge of skin where his jeans hit.
He grabbed my wrist when I started to fumble with the button.
With a firm grasp, he started taking a few steps back, pulling me with him.
“Where are we going?”
He replied only with another wicked, roguish grin. No words were necessary for me to understand that we weren’t going to the bedroom, but that he was still going to make love to me
.
Did I mention the pounding heat? Add dizziness. And breathlessness.
Carefully stepping one foot in front of the other, I followed his lead through the large living area, around the couch. Duke paused in the doorway to the wraparound terrace, the city all lit up behind him.
“Outside?”
“Let’s give you something to write about.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“The lady needs to be persuaded,” he mused. With a little tug of my wrist I stumbled forward on my high heels and fell against his bare chest. He slid one hand around my waist, holding me flush against him.
Then he claimed my mouth for the kind of kiss that was relentless, devastating, powerful and all- consuming. Our tongues tangled, our breath mingled, and with just this kiss we were one. This was the sort of kiss girls dreamed of—when they were drunk and uninhibited. I lost myself to him, to that kiss. I felt my bones turn to molten liquid. My muscles surrendered, and I melted against him.
He leaned against the sliding glass doorframe. I leaned against him. The wind whipped behind him, tousling his hair.
“C’mon,” he murmured, tugging me out onto the terrace, which had tons of small trees and plants in containers, making it feel almost like a garden. It was a hot summer night with a warm breeze stealing over the city, slipping between the high-rise buildings and low historic structures. All of it was lit up, and loud and full of millions of people in the midst of their own dramas. And yet, it felt like there was no one else in the world except for me and my bad boy billionaire.
Still locked in an embrace, Duke led the way over to the very edge. He spun me around so my back was to the city.
He placed my hands on the railing behind me.
“Don’t move,” he ordered.
Then he sank to his knees before me.
My panties were gone in an instant. My attention was drawn to the exquisite sensation of his open palms skimming up the inside of my legs.
“You look hot in these heels, Jane.”
“Good, because they hurt like hell.”.
“You won’t notice in a minute. I promise. I’ll make you forget the pain.”
