The Derby Girl

by Tamara Morgan

  “Are you going to start yelling again?”

  Gretchen didn’t miss the look of hope in his cocky, gleaming eyes. She was pretty sure no one in the bar missed it. They’d returned to their sticky mess of a table, nothing touched or cleared away, and had been given a wide berth ever since.

  In her not-exactly-vast experience, it was considered good form to make a discreet exit after bathroom sex. Bars didn’t particularly care for hangers-on in the afterglow. She didn’t particularly care for hanging on, either, but she also wasn’t about to let Jared walk away without offering her some kind of contrition.

  “Believe me—you won’t like it if I start yelling again. Are your parents ill?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.”

  “In some kind of trouble?”

  “They’re not the type.”

  “Blackmailing you with a sex tape from your wayward youth?”

  “I didn’t have a wayward youth, though there might be a sex tape or two floating around somewhere.” He paused, a smile wiping the smug look from his face and replacing it with genuine warmth. “And I hope to God my parents have never seen them.”

  Gretchen’s lips twitched. “Stop trying to be charming. I’m angry.”

  “I know it’s not a very good excuse.” Jared reached out and toyed with Gretchen’s fingers, which drummed an irritated beat on the tabletop. She didn’t snatch them back right away, which filled him with hope that not all was lost. “I overreact to situations—especially ones involving my dad.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t like him.”

  “Why, Jared?” She snatched her hand back. “If you really want me to forgive you for walking out, you have to give me more than a vague man answer. That’s the deal I’m putting out here. Take it or leave it.”

  She was right. Of course she was right. Unfortunately, this whole unburdening of his sins was turning out to be much harder than he’d expected.

  He leaned on his elbows, gripping his hair with both hands. “Because I don’t like what he does to people. He’s been unfaithful with my mom three times—that I know of. I can only imagine there are affairs I haven’t even begun to uncover. He cheats at poker with his friends. He manipulates his peers to boost his own career. He ignores everything I want or desire unless it aligns with his own goals.”

  He forced himself to look up and meet Gretchen’s softening gaze. “In other words, he’s me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “Unfortunately, it is.” His breath moved in and out in a painfully controlled rhythm. “I’ve done some stuff in my life I’m not proud of.”

  Gretchen’s eyes flew open. “The seven deadly sins.”

  “Well, I’m no saint, but I’m not that bad.”

  “No—your friends mentioned something along those lines.” A grin spread slowly across her face. Her lipstick had long since smudged away, along with the rest of the pinup-girl eye makeup, but the sweet, unpainted bow of her lips was more enticing than all the rest combined. Too bad the words coming out of those lips made his heart pound in a less appealing way. “They said you’ve got the complete list lurking in there somewhere. I’ll admit—I’m intrigued.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “Not the secret one, if that’s what you’re afraid of. Did you know your right eye twitches when you’re trying very hard not to explode?”

  Jared lifted a hand to his eye. “It does not.”

  Laughter spilled from those sweet lips, mocking him. “No, but from now on you’ll be completely paranoid when you lose your temper.”

  He let her laugh. It was probably the last time he was ever going to have the privilege of hearing it. The implications of what he was about to confess weren’t lost on him. As a man who didn’t say no to a good, friendly bet every now and then, he’d say there was a ninety percent chance Gretchen was going to walk out that door and never speak to him again.

  “It’s not really a secret. It’s just not something I like to talk about—and it doesn’t segue well into everyday conversation.”

  “We just had angry bathroom sex. I don’t know about you, but this isn’t an everyday conversation sort of thing for me.”

  He felt a smile rise to his face even as he took a deep, bracing breath. “You know that Whitney and I used to date.”

  “I do now.” She scooted her chair closer to the table and leaned in, allowing him to drop his volume level. It was a nice thing to do, thoughtful—one of the small gestures in life that always seemed to elude him. “Whitney told me when we ordered the first round. To be honest, I think it might have been careless of you to let her go. I’m half in love with her myself.”

  “She’s a horrible person to love, Gretchen. Believe me. It was like living in a minefield.”

  “Did you love her?” The question was asked with curiosity, nothing more.

  “I did.” It seemed eons ago now, though it was only recently that he’d been able to work through the long-term implications of their relationship. “But we weren’t a good match, she and I. A huge pile of explosives and a short fuse. Too alike. We did fine while we were both busy with school and our separate lives, but once we joined Make the World Smile together, it was a constant twenty-four-hours-a-day familiarity. It didn’t work.”

  “Lots of fire?”

  “She doesn’t have your knack of defusing me.”

  “So you’re the explosives, not the fuse?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “I’m just checking.” She smiled warmly, and Jared let himself bask in the glow of it for a moment. So far so good. Maybe this wouldn’t be as terrible as he thought.

  “Too much Whitney made things blow up—so what?” Gretchen asked. “She seems happy now.”

  “She is, I think. And I’m glad. She deserves to be happy.”

  “Of course. Everyone deserves that.”

  He shook his head. “No. Not everyone.”

  Gretchen watched Jared with a mingled sense of amusement and exasperation. Okay, so he’d once dated a gorgeous, confident woman who also happened to be a successful plastic surgeon and one of the funniest individuals she’d ever met. No worries. Gretchen was used to being measured against incredible people and being found wanting.

  Besides, it wasn’t as though she wasn’t already aware of the discrepancies between her and Jared—or what it meant for the long term. But did he have to be so dramatic about everything?

  “So what happened?” she asked, playing along.

  “I cheated on her.”

  Well, hello there. Maybe the drama was necessary.

  Gretchen sat up, blinking as if to clear some debris from her eyes. “When you say cheated, you mean...”

  He propped his face on his hands, elbows on the table, looking far more dejected than she’d ever seen him before—and he’d already had some definite low points. “I mean I had sexual relations with another woman while we were together. And worse, I did it with a woman who was a coworker and in a place I knew we’d be caught. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. I already know. It’s awful.”

  “And this happened when?”

  He glanced up, startled. “Twelve years ago. In Guatemala.”

  “That’s a long time.”

  “Not long enough.” He sighed. “You have to understand who I was in those days—a kid. An arrogant, selfish kid who should never have been put in charge. I was untrained in the field, fresh from residency, equipped with a generous budget and one of the best teams they had. I was king of the hill. Master of my domain.”

  “I don’t think that last one means what you think it does.”

  He refused to let her humor derail him. “Things started to fall apart almost immediately. We got hit with a series of tropical storms—bad one
s—and the whole camp was waterlogged for weeks. Thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment was ruined, and we almost lost a couple of patients because of the conditions. It was awful.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  How easy to say those words. How difficult to believe them. “But it was. I made a few terrible judgment calls, refused to listen to people with more experience than me. Just when I started to realize I was in over my head, I found a letter. The letter. God—what I wouldn’t give to not have opened the letter.”

  She waited patiently while he sorted out the words, sifting more easily through the memories now that he and Whitney had finally talked about them.

  “The letter itself wasn’t a big deal, basically just Whitney venting to her parents about how unhappy she was—hell, we all were by that time. I wish I’d written a letter or two myself. Purged some of the emotion.”

  “What did she say?”

  “The truth,” he said simply. “She saw me clearly for the overconfident, foolhardy bastard I was. Realized she didn’t love me anymore. Wished herself as far from our life together as humanly possible.”

  “Oh.”

  Oh was right. “I hated her for throwing it out there like that, for having the guts to put into words what I refused to acknowledge even to myself. Most of all, though, I think I hated her for forcing me to publicly acknowledge my pain. I was supposed to be infallible. She proved I was anything but.”

  There. Maybe Gretchen was right. That was pretty much all of the seven deadly sins, wasn’t it? Lust, pride, wrath, envy, greed...it was certainly enough to make any man ashamed of himself.

  “So you cheated on her.”

  “I did. The same day I found the letter. With the first warm body I could find.” He forced himself to meet Gretchen’s gaze, grateful she could still look at him with that warm sincerity. “It wasn’t about the sex—it was never about that. I just wanted to hurt Whitney as much as she’d hurt me.”

  And it had worked. She spent a very long time hating him.

  “She’s forgiven you since then?”

  “Sort of.” He frowned at his hands. “We’ve come to a truce, she and I, for the sake of business. The truce is of recent origin, I might add, since they need me and my reputation to keep things running at New Leaf. Consider it a stipulation of my release. My parole.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. Gretchen had seen the way the medspa team talked about him, laughed about him, cared about him. That sort of thing wasn’t a truce—it was friendship, whether he chose to see it or not. Based on the look of misery on his face, it was clear he chose very adamantly not to see it. He preferred wallowing. He reveled in it.

  And that was when it hit her.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said, louder than she intended. “I should have seen this coming. It makes so much sense now.”

  “It does? What?”

  All of it. Everything. The broody man-child. The God complex. The self-inflicted misery. The preference for dogs over people, despite how much the latter adored him.

  “Why you’re with me,” she said, summing it all up with a sad smile. “I’ve been trying to figure it out for weeks. You’re one of the top plastic surgeons in the world, Jared. People love you—especially female people. There’s no earthly reason you should choose to spend your time with an underemployed roller derby girl from the ‘burbs. Yet here we are.”

  Wait—what? Jared knew he was a man given to miscommunication, but surely he hadn’t said anything to that effect. “No, Gretchen, you don’t understand. I realize I should have told you this earlier, before we...you know.”

  She lifted a brow. “Before we fucked?”

  “Well, yes, to put it succinctly.”

  She grabbed his hands, pulling them across the table and clasping them tightly in her own. He thought for the briefest moment that she was going to head-butt him—but that was ridiculous. Wasn’t it?

  “Have you cheated on anyone since then?”

  “No. Never. And I’ve done everything in my power to avoid repeating that mistake.” Worked hard, kept his head down, never dated anyone seriously. Definitely never dated anyone seriously enough that this conversation was required.

  “Aha. There are so many lightbulbs going off right now, it’s like the paparazzi took up residence in my head. You’re a textbook case.”

  He didn’t care for the way that sounded, the idea that he was no different than any other man, their story etched in vanity and air. “I am?”

  Gretchen’s voice took on the deep tone of a movie announcer. “A young man makes a mistake and spends his life trying to atone for it, creating a name for himself but never able to overcome the darkness in his soul. He pushes everyone away in hopes that he’ll never have a chance to hurt again. It’s my favorite kind of story.”

  “I’m glad this is so amusing for you.”

  “Would you rather I cry and storm out?”

  “Of course not,” he said. But this wasn’t at all how he expected things to go. He’d expected to have to grovel and beg, to be heaped with a fitting Gretchen-punishment that would help erase the lump of bitterness in his stomach that no amount of hard work had been able to dissolve.

  She tilted her head and smiled softly. “I’m sorry, Jared, but I think maybe you’re using this whole damaged-goods-bad-boy thing as a way to avoid the real world. What better excuse is there to act like an arrogant jerk toward people than believing you’re past redemption?”

  Panic seized him at the implications of that statement, but Gretchen lifted a hand to stop him. “No—don’t answer that. I’m the last person in the world to critique the choices you make. A grown woman who makes mediocre coffee and tells kids not to roughhouse in the deep end doesn’t get to cast stones, and I’ve long since outgrown my judgment pants.”

  Blinking took more effort than he cared to admit. “So...that’s it? It doesn’t bother you that I’m capable of doing something that horrible to another human being—a human being I once loved? You don’t care?”

  “Of course I care.” She reached up and touched the side of his face, so lightly he wasn’t sure he could count it as a caress. “I care a lot more than is good for me. But you’re a complicated man, Dr. Jared Fine, and I haven’t yet decided what I’m going to do with you.”

  “If you were smart, you’d run as fast as your legs could take you.”

  She pulled away, laughing softly. “You should know by now that I don’t flee from signs of danger. I run back after it, fully packing.”

  He felt he had to give her one last chance to leave. Just one—he was too selfish to offer more. “I warned you I don’t improve on better acquaintance.”

  “Please. You just insulted me in front of my team, seduced me in a fit of anger and confessed to infidelity. How much more could you possibly descend from here?”

  He grimaced. She had no idea.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “You’re going out with your young man again, aren’t you?” Gran looked up from her magazine—a Victoria’s Secret catalog hidden inside Newsweek—and shook her head. “I can tell because you look like a street performer.”

  Gretchen surveyed her clothes with a frown. The black leggings and zippered corset top might have been pushing things a bit too hard, but she had an image to maintain here. Jared wasn’t the only one who saw her rough exterior and granted her immediate badass status, exempt from pesky human sentiments like sadness and frailty. Her sister was also easily manipulated that way.

  Ever since she’d gotten her first tattoo—a dragon on her right forearm, courtesy of a fake ID and a sketchy tattoo parlor she’d been strictly forbidden from entering—her family began treating her differently. Respect was too street of a word to use in a place like Pleasant Park, but that was exactly what had happened. It was as though once Gretchen c
rossed that line, she became tougher. Untouchable. Never mind that she’d still been an awkward, undersized teenager who didn’t fit in—she’d become something better than herself.

  Hence the additional tattoos. And the running away from home to live with her curmudgeonly grandmother. And the roller derby and the hair and the closet full of costumes that allowed her to transform into anyone she wanted to be.

  Of course, it was now sixteen years later and she’d lost the ability to distinguish between her make-believe self and her real one. At some point, those two things had practically become one and the same, so it no longer mattered anyway.

  “In that getup, you’re either hooking or seeing your young man,” Gran persisted. “I just need to know which, so I can decide whether or not I’ll need to bail you out later.” She didn’t sound judgmental, bless the old bat. There was a reason Gretchen preferred her grandparent over any other member of the family.

  “Jared likes my outfits,” Gretchen said, even though he wasn’t the impetus behind her wardrobe choices today. “He believes himself to be some kind of dark, twisty monster unworthy of true affection. My image fits his personal requirements for the proper level of debasement.”

  “This is the same guy who spent his whole life saving kids’ lives?”

  “Yep.”

  “The one who does all that free work at the hospital?”

  “Yep.”

  “The one who just helped some underprivileged teenager from St. Louis get a full scholarship to his alma mater?”

  “What? I hadn’t heard that one.” Gretchen craned her neck to look at the article Gran pointed out. Sure enough, a full-page spread of Jared not-smiling at the camera greeted her. Damn, he wore not-smiling well. His sharply flashing eyes looked ready to devour anyone who had the audacity to glance at that page. “When did that happen?”

  “Last month, it seems.” Gran shook her head and flopped the lingerie catalog more firmly over his face. “If you’re smart, you won’t trust anyone who looks that good in a suit. It’s not a man’s natural state.”