“I need you, baby.”
She needed his checkbook. The allowance he’d given her had paid for her lifestyle. “Dez, cut the bullshit.”
“You know, I never got mad at you when you cheated on me.”
“That’s because I never cheated on you.”
“Oh, come on now.” Dez’s voice dropped into the sexy, wheedling purr that used to drive him crazy in all the right ways. Yeah, not working so much now. “There had to be one or two on those long, long tours.”
“Nope, not one. I promised to be faithful to you, and I was.” Lots of cold showers. A couple of porn-per-view movies. Many, many conversations with Bear about quality. All of which had netted him a cheating wife while Bear waited around to bump into the love of his life and had fun doing it. “Dez, the bank is closed and so is the bedroom door. I told you how I felt about cheating when we got married. You broke the deal. Now I want you to stop calling me or I’m going to have to take legal action.”
Nothing.
“Dez?”
Still nothing.
Marc glared at the phone. “Bitch.”
“Who was that?”
“My ex-wife.”
“What did she do?” Alex asked.
“She hung up on me.” He chucked the phone on the table. It slid all the way across and fell off the other side. He should have done that when it rang instead of answering.
Alex sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. “To become the ex, she had an affair?”
“You make it sound almost classy. She hooked up with her personal trainer while I was on tour and the dude cannot abide.” How much did it suck the bitch could wind him up this bad after so long. Maybe his office manager Helen was right, and he did love her. Either that or his drummer Bear was right, and he hated to lose.
He really hated to lose.
“What?”
Marc turned to Alex. Oh, right, he had a woman here with him. He shouldn’t be dwelling on the ex. “I just can’t stand cheaters. I’ve seen a lot of people ripped apart by cheaters.”
“So you’re a monogamy advocate.” She leaned back against the arm of the couch and crossed her arms. Her hair was screwed up from falling asleep with it wet, and she didn’t seem to care. She was also not lowballing him with questions packed with single syllable words about where his ideas came from. Cool.
“Not really. I think once you say “I do,” it’s part of the deal, but if everybody knows the score, it’s your private life.”
“You value honesty then.”
“You could say that. My buddy Ty used to date Candy, she’s our publicist, but he wanted to play the field and she wanted him to be hers and hers alone. He couldn’t do it, so they broke up. We all still work together, and it’s okay because they were honest about it.”
Alex frowned. “You make it sound like they had a rational conversation over coffee.”
“No, if I remember correctly there was a huge screaming argument in a hotel hallway in the middle of the night during of one of those endless tours we did at the beginning.” Marc shrugged. “But Ty has always been kind of an idiot. Lucky for him, singers are hard to replace.”
“But they were honest about it.”
“Sure. After a while.”
“Are they back together?”
“No. There’s no hope for them as a couple. What she wants and what he wants are diametrically opposed.” God, he sounded like an old man. Hot girl half naked on the couch next to him and he was waxing poetic about thousand-year-old gossip. He grinned. “‘And these are the days of our lives.’”
“So what are you looking for?”
“Now?”
She nodded.
The love of my life. Somebody willing to be as true to me as Maureen was to Bear. That would go over beautifully with the bright young thing on the other end of the couch taking pity on his old ass. “Fun with an option for long term. You?”
She shrugged. “That’s acceptable.” Then she jumped up. “I’m starving. Is there anything to eat around here?”
Something else she wasn’t obsessed with. He wouldn’t have to listen to Alex complain about being full after a side salad and wake up in the middle of the night to find her stuffing her face from a convenience store bag. “Depends on how hungry you are. I don’t eat in much.” He followed her to the kitchen.
“I noticed.” Alex was standing in front of a cupboard studying the contents, an open box of Ritz crackers.
“I can call the diner and have something brought up if you don’t want to go into town. Or I could call the grocery store and have them bring up something from the deli.”
Alex shrugged, still staring into the cupboard. “‘No legacy is so rich as honesty.’”
Marc leaned to one side so he could get a better angle into the cupboard. Everything had been going so nicely. That was the end of that. “What?”
“What?” Alex turned around, closing the cupboard as she did, and smiled at him. “It’s Shakespeare. It popped into my head.”
“Okay.”
“I have a confession to make.”
Shit, here it came. All that big talk about honesty when he should have just kept his mouth shut and enjoyed the ride. There were four honest women on the planet, and two were married to other guys in his band, one was Suzi who was in a serious relationship with that dipwad from Savitar, and the last was Tessa who was about as likely to settle down as a plastic bag in a windstorm.
“I knew who you were before we hooked up.” Alex flexed her fingers like she was warming up to play a grand piano. “Not when I first met you, but before you came into the diner after we closed that night and you fixed the dishwasher. I mean, you couldn’t walk down the street for about three years without hearing that ‘Lucky Charmer’ song.”
“And?”
She shrugged. The material of her T-shirt tugged around her small breasts. “That’s it. I just played it like I had no clue who you were, and I did it because I figured you want a woman who wasn’t after you for what you are.”
Marc thought the breeze from the train that had nearly hit him should be ruffling his hair at least, but there was nothing. When Bear and Maureen met, he remembered telling Bear he’d never find a woman who loved him for who he was instead of who he was. In his head, it had made sense, but Maureen did love Bear for himself and not his bank balance or his connections. The unicorn did exist. So Alex knew who he was around the time she met him. That was more believable than her not knowing who he was at all. She didn’t appear to be after anything more substantial than stale crackers. “No harm done. Now, what were we talking about?”
She smiled. “We were talking about food.”
“I thought we were.”
She sauntered across the kitchen and put her arms around his neck. “We could talk about something else.”
“Like?” Her body pressed against his, warm and delicious, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d missed something in the conversation. Like the point.
She rose up on her toes. “Shakespeare.”
That was one hell of a sexy name and the point was overrated. Half of Potterville hadn’t been trying to fix him up with a life partner. They’d been arranging a nice summer vacation for him, and everybody knew it up front. He wrapped his arms around her waist. “I thought you were hungry.”
“Peckish, but I could be distracted.”
So could he. Marc tasted her lips. He scooped her up and carried her back to the couch. She stretched her arms over her head thrusting her small, round breasts up, already tensed for his touch. Marc lay down next to her. “Alex?”
Her eyes were dark and focused on his like she’d devour him if she could. “Shh.” She pulled him down to kiss her as she guided his hand under her shirt.
His fingers glossed over her soft skin as the heat of her mouth plied him. Something had been bugging him a minute ago, but damned if he could remember. Her leg coiled over his, pulling
him on top of her. It was like drowning and loving it. She broke their kiss to shift to his ear. Her hot breath made him shiver. He’d never been with a woman like this. Alex had a single-minded passion he’d never encountered. She was a level beyond any groupie he’d ever been with. Her hands reached into the waistband of his jeans at the back, working their way around to the zipper. He needed to move before he lost control of this encounter.
Before she could get him undone, he slid down her body, pushing her shirt up at the same time. No bra to get in the way. Her creamy pale skin accented her pink nipples. “Have I mentioned how smokin’ hot you are?”
“Once or twice.”
He laved his tongue across her nipple. She dug her fingernails into his shoulders. She made little gasping noises like she was smothering herself. He’d get a scream out of her yet. He pushed her shorts and panties down, dragging them the rest of the way off as he licked his way down her smooth flat belly.
“No, no we can’t.” She twisted as if she wanted to escape, but he caught her hips and kissed the inside of her thigh. She wilted on the cushions, still making those desperate little gasps. He spread her open with his thumbs, searching for her rose bud. The first taste was sweeter than he’d imagined, and as he worked her with his lips and tongue, her gasps deepened to strangled moans before she tensed and arched. The only way he knew she’d climaxed was when she slumped, panting.
Marc eased his way up beside her.
She blinked at him and smiled, her skin sweaty. “Your turn?”
“We’ll let this one be about you.”
Alex opened her mouth and then closed it again. With a deep sigh, she snuggled her cheek into his chest and closed her eyes.
She never made noise when they had sex. He couldn’t tell her it bothered him enough that he’d lost steam altogether. There was honesty, and then there was unnecessary roughness.
Some women didn’t make a lot of noise during sex, but Alex always sounded like she was forcing herself to stay quiet. Most of the ones he’d known went out of their way to be as noisy as possible. Could be linked to the deep dark secret relationship everyone said she’d just gotten out of. What the hell could she have done? Hooked up with a girl? If that was her thing, whatever, but she might be embarrassed about it. Damn, what if he was her beard? That would suck, but what the hell else could it be? Something was rotten in the state of Denmark.
* * * *
Alex propped her chin on her fist. Marc rolled the dice. She’d barely bested him at Scrabble. When he had started with ant as his first word, she’d figured it was going to be a slaughter until he had turned it into vagrant on the next turn and sneaked ahead. From there, it had been neck and neck until she started throwing tiles into his lap to distract him, and he refused to play the game anymore so they had switched to Monopoly. Birds chirped outside the window as he worked out whatever complex calculations he needed to decide what to do next.
“Damn.” He shifted his tiny Scottie dog to Park Place. “I think I’m out. What’s the rent?”
“More than you have in the whole wide game.” Alex grinned at him.
“I don’t understand how you did it. I was killing you at first.”
“That was when you started taking sexual favors as rent.”
“You had no money.”
Alex slid her hand under the board and pulled out her stash. By this point, the colorful pile was pretty bulky.
“When did you do that?”
“I took half my money at the beginning of the game and tucked it under there for emergencies.”
“And you had me giving you advice on how to play.” Marc glared at her playfully. “You lied to me.”
“No, I didn’t know how to play. I just like to have a cushion. But it was very sweet of you to remind me to buy every property I landed on.”
“Including the one you just beat me with.” He reached across the board and slid his hand around the back of her neck. “Cheater.”
“This is caution, not cheating.” She allowed him to draw her closer, focused on covering the fluster he brought on by calling her a cheater.
He brushed his lips across hers. “Let’s get this cleaned up before we end up with play money all over the room.”
“Well, we don’t want to have to replace all of Jason’s games.”
“It wasn’t my idea to start throwing Scrabble tiles.” Marc swept up the money and sorted it with his long fingers before sliding it into the plastic tray. “So you want to go to Italy.”
“Is that a question or a statement?” Alex put away the pieces and folded the board. Just when she was acclimating to temporary joy, he had to bring up future plans. It had taken half the Scrabble game before she’d been able to stop ruminating on that long-term option thing, and now she had the cheater thing chewing on her subconscious.
“You said you wanted to go to Italy. I was thinking.”
“A first for everything.” Maybe that would break his focus and get him off the subject.
He slid the lid on the box and picked it up. “My buddy’s wife is expecting so I’m not going to be doing much work for at least the next year. Can you take time off from your school stuff?”
“I’d have to pay tuition for the semester.” The math superseded the subconscious cheater rumination. The whole point of coming here this summer had been to earn money to pay for school, and if she didn’t go back in the fall, all her student loans were going to crash down on her head.
He shrugged.
Of course, a measly semester of tuition would be pocket change to him, and what was a hundred grand in school loans when she could spend more time with Marc? It wasn’t as if he loved her. “I suppose I could.”
“Let me take you to Italy for a couple of months.”
Alex blinked. He could not have said what she thought he said. “Months?”
“Why? Don’t you want to take that much time off?” He slid the game box back on its shelf and turned to her, all tall and lean with a serious look on his face.
“Italy. For months.”
“Do you think we’ll need four months? I was thinking three, but it’s a whole country and there is a lot to see.” No hint of a smirk to tell her he was joking.
“No, I mean you want to spend months in just Italy.”
“You said you wanted to go there. Is there someplace else you want to go?”
Alex licked her lips. Still no hint that he might be joking. “What about my job at the university? If I quit, I won’t be able to pay for tuition spring semester either. And all my loans will come due.”
“That’s true.” Marc shoved his hands in his pockets and cocked his head. “I guess I’m getting a little ahead of things. What do you want to do now?”
“Throw myself off a cliff because I think I just screwed myself out of a trip to Italy by being practical.” Oh jeez, she’d said that out loud.
Marc laughed. “Unlikely.”
What the hell did that mean? Roger, for all his disaster and misery, was at least predictable. Hurried sex on the desk. Invisible to him in public. He couldn’t live without her, but he couldn’t leave Carla. Around and around like a really terrible carnival ride.
Marc was much better, but unpredictable.
“Is there any of that chicken left?” Marc headed for the kitchen.
“They brought up an entire chicken dinner for six. Of course there’s chicken left.” She crawled over to a shelf of DVDs.
“I’m making a sandwich,” he called from the kitchen. “You want?”
“Sure.”
“Mustard or mayo?”
“Mayo.” It was a much broader collection than the books. No Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though.
“There’s no mayo.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“To tease you.”
“There are better ways for you to do that.”
“Eat first, then I’ll practice various ways of teasing you.”
“Promises, promises.”
He leaned around the arch from the kitchen. “Oh, darlin’, it’s a guarantee. That’s a good one. You want to watch it?”
Alex read at the box in her hand. Airplane! It looked stupid to her, but if he liked it, fine. It would fill time so she didn’t have to worry about what to talk about. “Sure. I’m peach-eating this week.”
“Nuked or not nuked?”
“Surprise me.”
The microwave door popped open and closed, then he stepped out of the kitchen. “You’re what this week?”
“Peach-eating.”
He shook his head. “Never heard that one before. Educate me.”
He’d said the same in the middle of Scrabble when she’d turned robe into chifforobe and he had wanted to know the meaning. Good thing there was an excellent film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.
“It’s from a poem, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ That’s what I’m doing my master’s on.”
“Peaches?” The microwave dinged, but he didn’t move to get the food.
“Prufrock.” Alex sighed. Eventually she was going to have to start talking about her thesis. Might as well start now. “It’s about a man at a garden party trying to decide if he should eat a peach.”
“The entire poem?”
“He’s got dentures and they might slip. It’s about regret and lost opportunities.”
“In the context of a garden party where they served peaches to a man wearing dentures.”
“Yes.”
He went into the kitchen and came out with sandwiches and potato salad on two plates. “How long is this poem?”
“A couple of pages, but it’s a masterpiece because it focuses on the thoughts of one man, and it’s stream of consciousness. My thesis discusses the poem’s place in the continuum of development of the individual self in literature.”
“Come again?”
“It’s a little esoteric.”
“No kidding. But the whole poem happens at a tea party.”
“Prufrock is at a party, and he thinks all the women there are picking him apart because he’s getting older.”
Waiting for a Girl Like You Page 8
