“Then do it, but hard, I want it hard. Fill me up, and up, and up.” So he withdrew all the way, then pushed all the way in again. Stop. Counting in his head to try to control the animal urge. “That’s sooo good,” she moaned out, and he withdrew again but try though he did to regulate himself, when he plunged into her again he went so violently she shifted a foot along the floor. He stopped again, fearful that he’d been too rough but she didn’t flinch and she didn’t let go of him and he sure as hell wasn’t letting go of her.
And then it was on. Ruthless. This was more than wanting her. He was claiming her as his so that whoever came after him could never own all of her. One, two, three, five, ten thrusts. Stuffing himself inside despite the constriction of her almost-closed legs, thankful for her drenching moisture but for which he could never have found his way. Whatever was happening, it was tighter, hotter, wilder than anything he’d ever experienced.
Missionary position. As vanilla as you could get, but this was hot vanilla. Hot and intense, like a secret flavor, hidden away for only him to taste.
All too soon the rush was there. He threw back his head, a “Gaaaaah” tearing from his throat as he tried to stop himself from coming and then he felt her inner muscles clamp. Another cry ripped out of him, like an endless death, in sync with her own, and he was coming and coming and didn’t want to stop, never, ever stop. Didn’t want to leave her heat. Never...ever...leave.
CHAPTER TEN
ROMY FLOATED BACK to earth slowly, breaths settling inhalation by exhalation, heart rate decelerating beat by beat.
She wanted the world to stop so she could keep savoring the feeling of Matt still inside her, his head nuzzled between her neck and her shoulder.
Her limbs felt heavy, her eyelids, too; she was warm and drowsy and replete.
She almost couldn’t believe the things she’d said, telling him to go deeper, to stay there, to fill her. Unfiltered demands she couldn’t imagine making of any other man. She felt a laugh burble up, because the moisture coating the inside of her thighs told her he’d taken her at her word and filled her all right.
He raised his head and looked down at her, and for a moment his eyes told her he could belong to her, and only her, forever. His eyes told her that he loved her.
She held her right hand to his face, and he turned his mouth to it, kissing her palm.
“Take it off,” she said.
“Hmm?”
“The ring, take it off.”
And in the time it took her to blink, the poignant tenderness she was so sure she’d seen in his eyes was gone and in its place was that other look, the one full of despair at what he’d done, what it meant. But that was just as fleeting, replaced by an emptiness so icy it made her shiver.
Funny how the springlike warmth their friendship had basked in for so long had transitioned so quickly into a season of extremes—the sear of summer, the frost of winter, no temperate zone.
Matt removed her hand from his face, withdrew from her body swift and hard, and stood. One hand hitched his underwear and jeans back into place. And it seemed they were back to square one: she may or may not be pregnant; he may or may not be interested; and sex was definitely not love.
Unutterably depressed, Romy moved more slowly—getting up off the floor, refastening her jeans, plucking the destruction that was her blue silk underwear off the floor and stuffing it out of sight in her back pocket because she didn’t think he needed the reminder.
And then she fixed her eyes on him. “If you didn’t really want me to take off the ring, what was the point of demanding that I tell you I want you, only you?”
He hunched a shoulder. “They’re just...words.”
“Just words,” she repeated. “I see. Like love. And saying them during sex makes them meaningless?”
He took a step toward her. “Romy, I just—”
“No!” Pulling back.
“I wasn’t going to—Ah, Jesus! I just—I want you to know that whatever applied before still applies, that’s all.”
“What does that mean?”
“Arrangements. The trust fund.”
She took a slow, do-not-punch-him breath. “You know what? Go ahead and set up the trust fund—or not. I don’t care. See your lawyer—or not. I don’t care. I don’t even care if you’ve been with fifteen women in the past month, as long as you give me a shout if you discover you’ve caught something nasty.”
“I haven’t.”
“Caught anything? Good to know.”
“Been with anyone. I’m monogamous on request, remember.”
“I didn’t request it.”
“It was implied.”
“Well, good for you, but like I said, I don’t care.”
“It’s the truth.”
“How many ways can I say I don’t care?”
His jaw had tightened. “Just so you know, Romy, I’ll care.”
“You’ll—?”
“If you’re not monogamous, I’ll fucking care.”
“My, my, how bourgeois! But I suppose you have to have some guarantee that valuable trust fund won’t be supporting another man’s child, right?”
“I don’t give a fuck about the trust fund.”
“For someone who doesn’t give a fuck about it, you talk about it a lot. But anyway, back to the new plan.”
“We don’t need a new plan.”
“Sure we do, Matt, because whatever we’ve been doing for the past ten years isn’t working for me anymore. For ten years, I’ve wanted you. And you’ve known it, and ignored it, because I guess you wanted me just as much as I wanted you but in a different way.”
“Romy—”
“Please, just...let me say this. Think of us as actors in a movie, filming a scene that goes on way too long because nobody’s prepared to call ‘Cut.’ You, our hero, are walled up in a castle tower surrounded by a moat. One by one, the best and strongest women in the kingdom have been diving into the moat and swimming across to the tower hoping to scale your impregnable wall, yet not one of them has made it inside.
“Enter the heroine of the piece—that’s me, in case you’re wondering. I’ve been assessing the structure of your tower for ten years, learning the makeup of the stone and waiting for the perfect moment to make my own attempt. And a window of opportunity opens, and I can see you framed in that window. So I jump into the moat and swim like crazy, but the water is murkier than I expected, choked with weeds, so it’s hard work—so hard, I’m exhausted by the time I get to the tower. I don’t care, though, because I’ve found a gap in the stonework at last, and even if it’s not quite big enough to slip through, it’s there, and I figure if I scrape and claw and gouge and dig, I’ll find my way in. But it takes me a while to realize I’ve torn open my flesh trying to reach you, and my heart...my h-heart is on display. But when I look up to the window in that tower to ask you to open the drawbridge, because my heart needs you, and I know you can see me, clinging to the wall with my heart bleeding, Matt, bleeding for you...you turn away, even though you know I’ll drown if I fall back into that moat.”
“Stop, Romy.”
But she wouldn’t stop. She couldn’t. “So I think we need to recut that scene, change it from a heart-wrenching drama into a fun comedy. Which is what we’ve done for the past ten years so it should be easy—all we really have to do is go back to being just friends. We even have a new window of opportunity, because you’re here and I’m here, but this time, we need to stay here, as in together, so as to avoid any unfair accusations about who hasn’t contacted whom in two weeks’ time when I find out if I’m pregnant. My plan—let’s call it Plan C—has two possible outcomes. One—I’m pregnant: we draw up new paperwork according to the level of friend zone success we’ve achieved. Two—I’m not pregnant: you go home and keep the hell out of my life.” She offered him a wintry smile. “Deal?”
“I won’t be in your life if you walk out that door, because I will never see you or speak to you again.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Your definition of fair doesn’t suit me. I’ve spent too long waiting for you to see me.”
“I do see you, Romy.”
“You see what you want to see, but I dare you to look harder. I dare you, Matt. Stay and play it out.”
“Jesus!” he said, and picked up his overcoat.
Romy said nothing, did nothing. Even though she knew it would half kill her if he left.
And then he yelled, “Fuck.” He glared at her. “FUCK!” He threw his overcoat and duffel bag across the room. “Fuck this, and fuck you for doing this to me.”
Up went her chin. “You won’t be fucking me, Matt, but other than that, I’ll take your response as a yes.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
PLAN FUCKING C.
Matt gave his duffel bag, sitting innocently on the floor of the spare room to which he’d been relegated, a savage kick.
Fun comedy—so why wasn’t he laughing?
Just friends—when it was fucking obvious that things had changed and he’d just made it fucking obvious to both of them the only way he could keep his hands off her was to do it from the other side of the fucking Atlantic!
He didn’t know how to describe the way he was feeling. Like he desperately wanted to get away from her...yet he was terrified of not being with her. Like he was a wolf baying for a mate...but strangling himself to silence.
Excruciating. Agonizing. Confusing. Bewildering. All of those things together. With an overlay of panic that in two weeks’ time she’d be pregnant...but maybe she wouldn’t. That he couldn’t control what happened, and couldn’t even blame her for taking control out of his hands because he’d made a fucking mess of things in two countries!
Ha. To think he was in this latest mess all because of an X in an email. That pathetic X of a kiss, which was the way Romy signed off her emails to everyone—even that prick Lennie—and to which Matt had taken exception on the basis he wasn’t going to start being an “everyone” to Romy after ten years’ being number one with her!
And then to get to her apartment, and see Teague and...and resent him, in part because Teague was so damn perfect he hadn’t slept with her when he’d had the chance?
Up came his hands, fingers rubbing at his forehead.
It was going to be a struggle to live with Romy in this tiny place for two weeks. She’d complained about noises through their old thin walls, but she’d hear his thoughts ticking in this apartment—and his thoughts were far from celibate. God help him if she came into this room, because there was barely room for the two of them to stand. He could probably cross it in three strides.
He took one long step past the single bed to test that theory, another, stretched his arms out and up and...stopped, mid-third-stride, because his hand had hit something.
He looked up and saw the mobile hanging from the ceiling—silver-and-white stars.
With a sense of foreboding, he turned a slow circle, taking in the freshly painted walls—a silvery gray with a scatter of white stars on one wall, the small rug on the floor with the same white stars on a gray background, a new white bureau against one wall.
Bump-bump-thump went his heart.
Because he was standing in the nursery.
He’d be sleeping in his baby’s room.
He looked around the room again, soaking in the details. Typical of Romy to have the interior decorating under way before she was pregnant. Not that there was a lot to see other than the paint scheme and the star/moon theme. A lamp sitting on his bedside table—a full moon—was clearly intended for the baby. And the bureau, in white—that had baby clothes written all over it.
Curious, he went over to it and opened the top drawer. “Oh!” he breathed, as he saw the cache of tiny garments.
He lifted out a minuscule white cardigan, raised it to his face, rubbed the wool against his cheek. Soft as a cloud.
One by one, he opened the drawers, taking out all the other perfect things, holding them to his face, inhaling their pure scent. Three sleeper suits. Two pairs of knitted booties. A cap in white wool that matched the cardigan. Baby vests and leggings and tops. Wraps and rugs, a small fluffy towel. The tininess of each item as he carefully placed each item back in its spot squeezed his heart until he felt like it had been pushed up into his throat.
When only the little white cardigan remained, held against his chest, Romy knocked on the door. “Matt?” she asked. “Dinner will be ready in twenty minutes if you want to grab a shower.”
He couldn’t speak.
“Matthew?”
He took a moment to reel everything back in, hand rubbing his throat to ease the choking sensation there, and then forced out a “Got it.”
Pause. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. Because he was fine. Just fine.
If you didn’t count that stinging at the back of his nose and the longing to tuck that tiny white cardigan under his T-shirt, right against his still-throbbing heart.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DINNER WAS...NOT GOOD.
Oh, not the steak and ale pie, which was as it always was, but the general atmosphere of What the hell are we doing? that had pervaded the flat.
Or perhaps the more accurate question was What the hell am I doing? because Romy knew very well she was the one who’d pitched them into this awkward hell. She’d wanted to have sex; she’d blackmailed him into staying; she’d positioned her heart ready for a trampling at the end of the two weeks when Matt left—as he would do, no matter which of her two scenarios came to pass.
She might have enticed him into having sex with her—twice, now—but the scalding truth was that she loved Matt and he didn’t love her.
Love? Ha! He didn’t even like her anymore, judging by his nonexistent dinner conversation. Her own dogged attempts at it—questions about Matt’s flight, the chaos of Heathrow, the weather in San Francisco, his new business venture with Artie—were met with such headache-inducing vagueness, Romy almost wished for a return to the rage that had had her fearing he’d spontaneously combust before she’d shown him to the spare room and left him to froth at the mouth in peace.
When Matt opted to work in his room straight after dinner, Romy was relieved but also apprehensive. From tomorrow, she’d be at work during the days so the after-dinner hours would become important harbingers of the direction their relationship would take. Two weeks suddenly seemed a very short time to navigate their future as potential parents—it would be even shorter if they spent every possible minute of that time avoiding each other.
Romy didn’t expect to fall into an easy sleep—and she didn’t. Dreams of Matt had haunted her ever since she’d left San Francisco, and his presence in the flat acted on those dreams like an injection of steroids, supersizing them. The taste of his mouth, the feel of his hands, the way he fit inside her—they were all there. Right along with the things he’d said to her that night, which played in her head over and over... If I said I wanted to see you on your knees for me, with my cock in your mouth, sucking... All that’s of interest to me right now is if you’re wet... I won’t be satisfied until I’m buried inside you...
No romance, not love words, but dear God, so indescribably, feverishly arousing she had to struggle not to go to him and tell him she was ready to suck anything he wanted her to suck.
Such a night left her ill prepared for seeing him in her kitchen the next morning. He’d gone for a run—as he always did—and looked so sweatily, deliciously scruffy as he scrambled eggs, she didn’t trust herself not to lick him so she mumb
led an apology about being late and left the flat without eating.
And despite lecturing herself half the day about Plan C’s restrictions, when she arrived home that night all it took was one look at Matt sitting on her couch with a beer in his hand to knock her straight into the same state of salivating hunger in which she’d left that morning.
Matt’s eyes locked with hers, the beer he’d been raising to his lips stalling halfway to its destination. He got to his feet as though hypnotized and the air thickened so that it would have taken a chain saw to cut through it—and Romy’s briefcase slipped from her now-nerveless fingers and hit the floor, jarring them out of a trance that had nothing of friendship about it and everything about sex. Saved by the briefcase!
Romy blurted out something about chicken curry, Matt said he’d set the table, and they proceeded to keep out of each other’s way until dinner was served.
They set the pattern that night for the rest of the week. A stilted conversation over dinner, followed by watching a movie on TV while occupying uncomfortably opposite-end-of-the-couch positions so as to avoid accidentally touching. Not exactly a return to their old friendship.
Matt gave up halfway through the movie, citing the need to check in with the manager he’d left in charge of his San Francisco hub, and Romy surrendered to a tension headache and went in search of painkillers and a restless night’s sleep.
The next morning, when Romy cried upon waking at the prospect of seeing Matt in his running gear and actually touched the walls in the shower as she imagined soaping Matt’s naked body, she knew she wasn’t going to survive two weeks of living this way.
It was with considerable trepidation that she ventured out to the kitchen, where she found Matt looking hotter than sin. He plonked a plate of scrambled eggs and a mug of steaming coffee on the counter for her, giving her a rusty “Good morning” that melted her insides. Thankfully he then promptly took himself off for his turn in the bathroom, leaving her to choke down her breakfast around a mouthful of drool.
Getting Lucky Page 10
