“Where would you want me to touch you?”
A red wave swept through her, a sudden fever of heat and confusion. It left her heart thudding against her ribs, her cheeks burning, her palms and underarms damp.
She squeezed her eyes shut. “This is a stupid idea.”
“It’s just practice. It doesn’t mean anything.”
Not to Caleb. She’d seen him flirt before. He did it well, like he did everything else, but she’d never seen it mean anything to him. She’d never seen him floored by a woman, bowled over, changed. She’d never seen him full of longing or hunger or desperation.
“It just feels weird,” she said brusquely. “I can’t do it. I can’t think of you as anything but . . . well, Caleb.”
A short silence. “I thought you were supposed to have such a good imagination?”
“I guess not. Because I can’t even imagine being attracted to you.”
It was a lie, and not a good one. It was so bad, in fact, that she was sure Caleb would see right through it. She was afraid he’d realize that the truth was the exact opposite—that she was attracted to him, and had spent years pretending she wasn’t.
“Wow,” he said after a moment, speaking lightly. “That’s brutal.”
“Because you’re like family,” she said.
He couldn’t be buying this, could he?
“Yeah, I get it. So I guess you’re on your own, then. With the whole flirting thing.”
He had bought it.
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll figure it out.”
“Or you’ll die alone.”
“Now that’s brutal.”
It also sounded like the Caleb she knew, teasing her like a brother. She felt herself relaxing, only now realizing she’d been gripping the phone so hard her knuckles had turned white.
She felt tired, too. What time was it, anyway?
Almost midnight.
“It’s past my bedtime. Good night, Caleb.”
“Good night, Jane.”
Caleb lay in bed with his eyes closed, his body on fire. There was no way he could pretend, now—not to himself. Not anymore.
He wanted Jane.
He wanted her more than he’d ever wanted a woman, and he’d had a vigorous sex drive from the time he was sixteen years old.
He wanted her, and he could never have her, and he’d come really close to fucking up his life tonight. His friendship with Jane, his friendship with Sam, his business and his personal life and everything in between. All because he’d been lying in bed thinking of Jane and his body had hardened in a swift, brutal rush, and he hadn’t been able to keep from calling her.
His next expedition couldn’t come soon enough. He had too much time on his hands here, time to think about things he shouldn’t think about.
Time to screw up the best things in his life.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, willing his body to cool down.
Of course there was an easier way to get that done. He could think about Jane, fantasize about Jane until he spilled into the sheets like a teenager. As tight as he was wound right now, it wouldn’t take long.
And no one would ever know.
But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t give in to that urge. Because the more he gave in, the more he let himself think about Jane like that, the easier it would be to screw up like he’d screwed up tonight. He needed to show a little goddamn discipline, and he needed to start right now.
Don’t think about Jane. Don’t think about Jane. Don’t think about—
He threw off his covers in frustration. Then he levered himself up, swung his legs over the side of the bed, and headed for the bathroom with his jaw tight.
He’d never actually taken a cold shower before, but he would tonight.
And if that didn’t work, maybe he could knock himself out with a hammer.
Chapter Eight
Caleb spent the morning on the part of his business he hated—at the tax accountant’s talking about receipts and deductible expenses and operating costs. The sheer tedium of it drove Jane from his thoughts for a few hours, which was a relief. But as soon as he left the midtown office building, it all came flooding back.
He had to see her. He had to find out if he’d screwed things up between them. He’d know the second he saw her.
He had one more obligation to get through first: a lunch date with two former clients. They’d fallen in love on one of his expeditions, and they insisted on treating him to an overpriced meal once a year.
Today they met at an Italian place on the Upper East Side. The food was good and the conversation was pleasant, but he was glad when the meal was over and he could flag down a cab.
The snarl of midtown traffic made him want to tear his hair out, but eventually they made it through. It was three o’clock when the taxi pulled up in front of Jane’s bookshop. He paid the driver, slammed the door, and strode across the sidewalk to the store.
Once inside the warm, quiet space—an oasis of peace after the street noises outside—he looked around for Jane and didn’t see her.
Where the hell was she? Finding Jane in her shop on a weekday afternoon was as sure a bet as finding snow in the Alps or pigeons in the park. Was something wrong? Had she gone home?
Jane had created a few hidden nooks here and there for leather chairs and reading lamps. It was in one of those spots that he found her.
She’d taken off her shoes and pulled her feet up on the chair. Her legs were bent, her arms were wrapped around her shins, and her forehead was resting on her knees.
She sat so still that he froze, as though he’d come upon a woodland creature he didn’t want to startle.
There was a lamp with a rose-colored shade beside the chair. It cast a soft pool of light over Jane, making her brown hair shine like polished wood.
He wasn’t sure how long he would have stood there in silence, wondering if he was the reason she looked so sad and wishing he could go back in time and stop himself from calling her last night. But then her assistant, manning the register, called out to a customer, “You forgot your purse!”
Jane glanced up, startled, and caught Caleb staring at her.
“Hey,” she said, blinking.
“Hey.”
A beat went by.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I just, uh, wanted to check on you.”
“Check on me?”
Check on us, he wanted to say. Is everything cool?
But asking that would make her think about last night, and he didn’t want that. What he wanted was proof that last night hadn’t changed anything between them.
Which meant he needed to come up with something else.
“To see if you’d read those books I bought. And if you’re ready to come hiking for Sam’s birthday.”
She blinked again. “Oh.” She took a deep breath and let it out, and he had a feeling she was coming back from someplace far away. “No, I haven’t read the books, and no, I have no desire to go hiking. Sorry.”
“What were you thinking about just now?” he asked abruptly. It wasn’t the kind of thing he usually asked, and the question sounded strange coming from him.
Jane’s eyebrows went up. “You want to know what I’m thinking?”
“You look sad,” he said, a little defensively. “Is everything okay?”
Sitting like that, with her arms wrapped around her knees, she looked younger than she was.
“Oh, sure. Everything’s great.”
He shook his head. “Come on, Jane. Tell me what’s going on.”
She was quiet for a second. Then: “I met Dan for lunch, and I lied to him.”
“Lied to him? About what?”
“About Sam.”
“But that was the plan, wasn’t it? You were going to tell him she’s seeing someone.”
“Yes, that was the plan. But I didn’t stop there.”
“Meaning?”
She rested her chin on her knees. “Mean
ing I went full Cyrano de Bergerac.”
He looked at her for a moment. Then he went into one of the other reading nooks, grabbed the chair from it, hoisted it over his head, and carried it back. He set it down right in front of Jane and sat down.
“I don’t know what that means,” he said.
She frowned at him, and her skin was so smooth, the crease between her brows was like a ripple on a still pond.
“Cyrano de Bergerac is a soldier and a poet with a really big nose. He loves Roxane, who’s an intellectual like him but beautiful. She falls in love with Christian, who’s handsome and in love with her, but he’s afraid to woo Roxane because he has no intellect or wit and can’t write love letters. So Cyrano speaks for him, giving him the letters he wants to write Roxane himself and giving Christian the words to win Roxane’s heart.”
“I’ve heard of Cyrano, Jane. But what does he have to do with you?”
She sighed. “I met Dan for lunch, and he was so . . .” She took her arms from around her knees and waved them in the air. “So perfect. Funny and charming and smart and . . .” Her hands fluttered down and settled on the arms of her chair. “Totally infatuated with Sam. I told him she was seeing someone, just like I’d planned, and he was okay with it. Disappointed, of course, but he said she might be single again someday and he wouldn’t give up hope. Then he asked me to tell him about her. What she’s like, what she’s interested in, what her passions are.”
She stopped.
“And?” Caleb prompted after a moment.
“And I told him what I’m like. What I’m interested in. What my passions are.”
He was starting to understand.
“Oh.”
She spoke quickly. “He doesn’t live in New York. I’ll probably never see him again. I just . . . I just wanted . . .” She trailed off and shrugged. “I don’t know what I wanted.” Then suddenly she sat up straight. “No, that’s not true. I do know what I wanted. I wanted him to fall in love with me.”
As suddenly as she’d jerked upright, she slumped down in her chair again. “And he did,” she said softly.
A sick tug inside his gut. “He did?”
“Well, not with me. With a hybrid.”
“A what?”
“My brain in Sam’s body. A hybrid, like Cyrano and Christian. A person who doesn’t exist.” She paused. “I watched it happen, Caleb. All the while I was telling him about Sam . . . about me . . . all my stupid ideas about the world . . . I could see him falling in love.”
She took a deep breath. “I babbled to him. I never babble. But it didn’t seem to matter, you know? He’s not going to be with me, and he’s not going to be with Sam, so what difference did it make what I told him?” She took another breath. “But it did make a difference. Because he’s crazy about the woman I made up.”
Something strange was happening inside him. Watching her talk about Horn-Rims like this made him tense and angry and—okay, jealous. What the hell had this asshole ever done to deserve a woman like Jane?
But at the same time, he wanted her to be happy.
He slid his hands into his pockets.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it seems like there’s a pretty obvious solution here. If this guy liked what you told him, if he’s in love with the woman you talked about, then all you have to do now is tell him it was you.”
She gripped the arms of the chair. “I can’t. Don’t you see? I can’t do that. Because here’s the truth about men—and maybe women, too. Faced with a choice between the inside and the outside, we choose the outside every time. Oh, you might say you wouldn’t. You might say it’s the inside you care about, the beautiful personality, the mind and the heart and the soul. But you don’t see a lot of Miss America Beautiful Soul pageants, do you? Or Miss USA Beautiful Mind? No, you do not. You see swimsuit competitions. And it’s not your brain you show off in a bikini, Caleb, in case you didn’t know.”
“Jane—”
As suddenly as she’d burst out with all that, she stopped. She slumped down in her chair and sighed.
“Oh, it’s fine. It sucks, but it’s fine. I’ve read a lot of books, you know?”
Nope, he didn’t. If by you know she meant I’m sure you understand what I’m driving at, Caleb.
“What does that have to do with—”
“All the books I read, and I think I know so much and understand so much and that’ll keep me safe or something. But it doesn’t. I’m still just a younger sister, the plain one in the family, and no matter what they tell you, that’s what people notice. I’ll never be as pretty as Sam is, and men like Dan will always want her and not me even though I’m the one they’d really like.” She slid down a little farther. “I’m still just as small and petty and jealous and pathetic as I was twenty years ago.”
He remembered something he’d told Sam once. He’d said that trying to keep up with Jane when she was on a roll made him feel like a big galumphing dog trying to follow some small, darting creature through a maze she knew perfectly because she lived there.
“That’s a good description,” Sam had said. “I like that. I know it’s irritating, but that’s just Jane. You have to just tune her out when she gets like that. Chances are she won’t even notice. Just nod a lot.”
But it didn’t irritate him. He liked it. He liked chasing after her, trying to follow her thought process, even though he knew he was missing at least half of what she was trying to convey.
In this case, he was sure of one thing Jane was conveying: she was running herself down.
He responded to one of the words she’d used. “You’re not pathetic.” He grabbed onto another word. “And you’re not plain. You’re—”
Beautiful. He was going to say beautiful. But the word stuck in his throat, full of implications he couldn’t speak out loud.
It stuck long enough for Jane to take a deep breath, sit up, and put the conversation behind her with a quick shrug.
“Oh, it doesn’t matter. It’s fine. I mean, it’s just life, you know? Stupid and sad and predictable. Just like me, I guess. But—”
The little bell above the shop door tinkled, and Jane looked over Caleb’s shoulder to see who was coming in.
The expression on her face made him twist his head around, and there was Horn-Rims standing at the door, peering around the shop until he spotted Jane.
Before he had time to think, Caleb surged to his feet, shoved his chair out of the way, and stood in front of Jane as Horn-Rims approached.
“What are you doing?” Jane hissed in his ear, which meant she was on her feet, too.
Protecting you, he thought—but from what? Horn-Rims wasn’t dangerous. He was just an idiot who thought he was in love with Sam, and he was hurting Jane in the process.
And that’s what he was protecting her from, of course. Or what he wanted to protect her from.
Being hurt.
“Get out of the way,” Jane muttered, smacking him on the arm as she stepped forward.
“There you are,” Horn-Rims said, an eager smile on his face as he strode toward her. He was holding something in his right hand, and when he stretched it out toward Jane, Caleb saw that it was a letter in a cream-colored envelope. Miss Samantha Finch was written on it in elegant script.
Horn-Rims came to a stop and handed the letter to Jane. “I came to give this to you. For your sister.”
Jane took the envelope and looked down at it for a moment before looking back up. “A letter for Sam?”
Horn-Rims nodded. “Yes. A love letter. I know she’s started seeing someone, but if it doesn’t work out, will you give it to her?”
“I . . .” Jane paused, took a quick breath, and continued. “Of course I will.”
He grinned in relief. “Good. Wonderful. Thank you, Jane.” He glanced at Caleb for the first time, still smiling broadly, but Caleb didn’t even try to muster up a smile in return.
“That must sound crazy, right? Writing a love letter to a woman you just met?”
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“Actually, yeah,” Caleb said. “It does sound crazy. In fact, if you want my honest opinion—”
Jane elbowed him in the ribs hard enough to make him grunt.
“You don’t want his opinion,” she told Dan. “Caleb’s not exactly a romantic.”
“He just hasn’t met the right woman yet,” Dan said, smiling once more at Jane before turning to go.
When he was at the door, he turned back. “I’m leaving the city in a few days. When you give the letter to Samantha, would you . . . put in a good word for me?”
Jane didn’t say anything for a moment. When the silence stretched into more than a few beats, Caleb nudged her arm with his.
“Sorry. A good word. Yes. Absolutely.”
“Thank you, Jane.”
And then he was gone.
Jane stared down at the letter in her hand, tracing over the script spelling out her sister’s name with the tip of a finger.
Caleb reached out and grabbed the envelope.
“Give me that damn thing.”
She tried to snatch it back, but he was too fast for her. He stuck it in his back pocket and folded his arms.
“What are you doing?” she demanded. “Give that back!”
“You were looking at it like it’s the Holy Grail.”
“You don’t even know what the Holy Grail is.”
“God, you’re a snob.”
“What?”
“Because I wear a cowboy hat, you assume I’ve never heard of the Holy Grail or Cyrano de Bergeron.”
“Bergerac.”
“Whatever. I’ve heard of him. Books aren’t the only way you hear of things.”
She was glaring at him. “Fine. I’ll never assume you haven’t heard of something ever again. Just give me the letter.”
“It’s not for you.”
“It’s not for you, either.”
“I can give it to Sam. I’ll go give it to her right now.”
“But he gave it to me to give to Sam. And anyway, why do you care? Why won’t you let me have it?”
That was a damn good question. Why wouldn’t he?
He pulled the letter from his pocket and handed it to her. “Fine. Here it is. But try to keep some perspective.”
Tell Me Page 7
