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The door still a little bit open.
Shock, far too delayed, trickled icily through. Good grief, where was her brain? Her sense of self-respect, if anything, and yet…
She felt better than she had since she’d first crept out of his hotel suite. Maybe she really had needed this again. Maybe she needed a fling to rid herself of all the hang-ups of her past. Not the usual method advised by therapists and counselors, but the self-help stuff she’d tried hadn’t worked. She still had trouble trusting men. Trusting herself. And too often she woke up in a cold sweat from a nightmare of Jack’s sneering face…
With that thought, reality started creeping in like a cold dawn mist, edging out the heat and satisfaction she’d felt only moments before. She eased back, wiped the hair from her face as she looked into his sleepy eyes. “I didn’t think you did repeats.”
Jaiven gave her a catlike smile. “Once in a while I make an exception.”
“And you made an exception because…?”
“Because I wanted to. I told you, I had this fantasy…”
“Well, you’ve enacted your fantasy then. Sex with a college professor on a pile of essays, no less.” She scrambled out from underneath him, tidying herself as he disposed of the condom and buttoned up his trousers.
Why did the aftermath feel so sordid, she wondered, when the sex felt so incredible? She pushed a few pins randomly back in the mess that was her hair and turned to him with what she hoped was a smile. “So, no more fantasies.”
Jaiven regarded her thoughtfully. “Actually, I have a few. And I’m betting you do too, even if you like to act as if you don’t.”
Fantasies? She hadn’t had the emotional space to fantasize. “Seriously, Jaiven…”
“I am serious.”
She shook her head. “Look, I thought I told you before. I’m not really into casual sex.”
“Could have fooled me.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “I know. I’m attracted to you. Obviously. But we’ve had our…thing and we should probably just move on. Right?”
“Definitely, when we’re ready to.” He took a step closer to her, and with a little smile on his face he started rebuttoning her blouse. She glanced down, saw she’d done it up completely crooked. And as he tucked her shirt back into her trousers she felt weirdly, stupidly touched.
She could not let this man affect her emotionally. That would be beyond stupid. It would be bordering on insane.
“I’m ready to move on,” she forced out, and Jaiven arched an eyebrow.
“You sure about that?”
No, she absolutely was not. But she wanted to be. She needed to be, because anything else was akin to juggling bombs. Exciting, yes, but eventually one would explode in her face.
She wasn’t about to explain that to him right now, though. “What do you want from me? Really?”
He met her gaze with an even one of his own. “Just a little more of what we’ve been having. Look, Louise, I’m not into commitment. Or relationships of any kind, emotion, that whole thing. I think you know that.”
“Yes…”
“And you seemed like you weren’t interested in it either, at least with a man like me.”
“I suppose…” Her brain snagged on that phrase, a man like me, and wondered what he meant by it. But before she could work up the courage to ask, he was onto the next thing.
“So why not enjoy what’s between us? I’ve got a fantasy about buttoned-up academics. You’ve got a fantasy about bad boys with tattoos. Let’s go with it.”
“How do you know I have a fantasy about bad boys with tattoos?” she asked, folding her arms. How could she have a fantasy about bad boys with tattoos when she’d been married to one, and he’d been an utter bastard?
Maybe this is how you can redeem the past. Make sense of your marriage. Feel strong again.
Or was she just seriously screwed up?
He shrugged. “Maybe it was how you kept sneaking glances at my tattoo at that party. Or possibly how you licked it a few nights ago.”
“I think one rule of any possible fling should be you don’t say things like that.”
“Why are you embarrassed?” He lifted a hand, pressed it to her cheek. “Your face is on fire.”
She closed her eyes and willed the heat to fade from her face. From her body. Humiliation came so easily to her, still. “Thanks very much.”
“All I’m saying is,” Jaiven told her, his hand still on her cheek, “this doesn’t have to be awkward or something to regret. We could both enjoy it. We’re not looking for commitment, we’re not hurting anyone, and frankly, I’d love to know a few more of your fantasies, especially if they involve that underwear you wore the other night.”
She opened her eyes, felt a bubble of laughter rise inside her. “Do you have some weird fetish for figure-controlling undergarments?”
“Possibly.” His teeth flashed in an answering, wolfish grin. “I might have all sorts of fetishes and fantasies I didn’t know about before. You’re opening me up to a whole new world of possibility, Louise.”
That bubble of laughter escaped and she shook her head. “That would be novel. I’ve got probably a thousandth of the sexual experience you do.”
“So?”
So? How was she supposed to answer that? The truth was she was tempted. Tempted to say yes to a fling, yes to fantasy sex with the hottest man she’d come across in a long, long while.
She’d lived her life like a nun for the past five years. Ten years, really, if you discounted that one unfortunate relationship that had lasted all of three weeks. She’d thought closing herself off meant keeping herself emotionally safe, but maybe it just kept her bored, frustrated and lonely.
She was tired of all three. Tired of living like a ghost because the past haunted her so much.
Why shouldn’t she choose this, for a little while at least? Jaiven wasn’t asking for a relationship. If they kept their encounters purely physical, there was no real way she could start to care about him. No real way he could hurt her.
And there was something fitting that Jaiven reminded her of Jack except about a thousand times better in every way. He had the tattoo, that bad boy charm, but he didn’t lose his temper and he hadn’t hurt her.
Yet.
Even now her self-doubt rose up in a howl of fear. You don’t really know this man. And you have a proven track record of picking losers.
But this wasn’t a relationship, she reminded herself. This was just sex. Sexual liberation.
Maybe, through Jaiven, she’d finally free herself from the past.
Or maybe she’d just get her heart broken.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, and Jaiven gave her one of his slow, toe-curling smiles that she’d come to know—and respond to.
“You do that,” he said, and he leaned forward and kissed her. A soft kiss, not one that was a prelude to sex but one that was just because. And it affected her more than anything else he’d done to her so far.
He stepped back and she blinked, suddenly, bizarrely near tears. This was so not a good idea.
Those bombs she was juggling? One had just started to tick. She needed to be smart, and smart meant never seeing him again, ever. Never cracking open the window to her soul even a little. Sex was personal and intimate and incredible, and you couldn’t have it with someone and then just walk away. At least she couldn’t. She’d start to read things into it, to feel things she absolutely couldn’t feel.
And she didn’t have any fantasies, anyway.
“I’ll be waiting,” he said softly, and with one last knowing grin he stepped backward, opened the door, and then was gone.
Louise sagged against her desk, her mind spinning, her heart still thudding. What on earth was she getting herself into?
Nothing, she reminded herself. You are not doing this. You will not see him again. Your one foray into casual sex is officially over.
What she should do was find a nice, respectable, safe, boring man to go out with. Have vanilla sex and spend the weekend reading the newspaper in bed. Totally her style.
Jaiven was so not.
And yet it was Jaiven she wanted. Jaiven she dreamed about, Jaiven who came into her office and woke up her body so she felt more alive and real and whole than she had in ten years of staying safe.
She was in so much trouble.
Chapter Four
THIS WAS NOT the way he operated when it came to women, Jaiven had to acknowledge as he stood in the kitchen of his brownstone in the Bronx and wiped at the already-clean counters. His mother was coming over for her monthly dinner and criticism-fest, and Jaiven was making the pointless effort of cleaning up. His mother refused to be impressed by anything he did or had—not his global shipping empire, or his renovated brownstone, or even a clean countertop. Nothing he did would make a difference to his mother, Jaiven knew, because he’d broken her heart fifteen years ago and she would never forgive him for it.
He wouldn’t forgive himself, either. He couldn’t.
At least, he told himself tiredly, she was coming for dinner. These monthly meetings had been happening for less than a year, after over a decade of estrangement. He’d been trying to reconcile with her since he’d been released from prison, but for years his mother wouldn’t take his calls. Slammed the door in his face. Said he was dead to her, just as his father was dead. Just as an innocent woman was dead.
Jaiven closed his eyes, willed such thoughts away. He couldn’t keep his gut from churning with an all too familiar mixture of grief and regret. Mindless sex and a lot of antacids were the only things he’d found to help.
And mindless sex made him think of Louise. Four frigging days since he’d had her on her own desk and she still hadn’t been in touch.
He’d really thought she’d take him up on his offer. Fantasy sex, a no-strings fling. How much better did it get? He didn’t need to be Freud to know what was going on with his own little fantasy. Dressing up as a delivery boy and showing up at her office, making her want him? Talk about trying to rewrite history.
Still, he wasn’t going to go to her first. This time the ball was in her court, and he just hoped to hell that she hit it back.
Game on, Louise. Come on.
He’d told himself a dozen times that he didn’t need her. He could have just about any woman he wanted, anytime, and yet he hadn’t taken up any other offers since he’d been with Louise. Maybe she was just a challenge, he told himself, even though he knew she was more than that. So, fine. He actually liked her. That didn’t have to be a game changer. He’d just get her out of his system. She’d get him out of hers. They’d both move on, happy and definitely satisfied.
The doorbell rang, and he went to open it, dutifully kissed his mother hello even as she angled her head away from him, and then watched as she bustled into the living room of the boarded-up brownstone he’d bought five years ago. It had once been a crack house, and now it was a top-of-the-line residence, although admittedly in a less than savory neighborhood.
He might have moved on up, but he wouldn’t abandon his roots in a Dominican neighborhood in the Bronx. He would never pretend he was something other than he was or had been, which was a boy with an eighth grade education and a criminal record and a truckload of guilt.
Not that he advertised any of those facts. But he knew what he was, what he was capable of—and so did his mother.
He wondered what Louise would do with that information. Would it just add to the bad boy fantasy, or would it be a little too real for her taste or comfort? Everything inside him shrank and cringed as he imagined her horrified reaction.
In any case, he had absolutely no intention of telling her anything personal about himself. Their relationship was about sex and sex only, and he really hoped they had it again soon.
“Look at this!” Triumphantly his mother lifted her finger from where she’d been running it along the top of his TV cabinet. Jaiven briefly closed his eyes. So he hadn’t dusted there, and neither had his housekeeper.
“What can I say, Mama? I need you to keep me on track.”
She just pursed her lips, which was as close to a smile as Jaiven had ever got, because he was the screwup and his brother Marco was the saint.
“I brought empanadas,” she said, proffering a foil-wrapped casserole dish that Jaiven took with murmured thanks. His mother always brought dinner, because she refused to eat takeout and Jaiven’s cooking wasn’t up to scratch. He made a mean scrambled egg, but nothing his mother would be willing to eat.
“So you got a girl in your life yet?” she demanded as he reheated the empanadas.
“No.” But he thought of Louise. What, he wondered, would his mother make of Louise? She’d disapprove of her career, definitely. His mother believed a woman’s place was in her home, preferably in the kitchen. She’d probably turn her nose up at Louise’s clothes too, because his mother liked women who “dressed like women,” as she put it. For her, it meant a dress and heels, no matter what the occasion. But nothing too clingy or revealing. His mother had plenty to say about that, too.
“When are you going to get married?” she demanded. “Be respectable, as much as you can?”
Because his past, Jaiven knew, made respectability a joke. Nothing he did would make up for his past sins. He knew that—of course he knew it. He lived with the awful truth of it every day, and every sleepless night. But stupidly it still hurt coming from his mother.
Sometimes he wondered why he endured these monthly rituals. His mother would bring dinner, heckle him to get married, complain about the state of his bathroom and clean while clucking about it all the while. He could handle all that, easily, if he didn’t feel her churning fury underneath all of it. His mother might come to dinner here at his brother Marco’s request, but she still didn’t like spending time with Jaiven. She refused to talk about the past because it was too painful, too terrible, but she muttered. Oh, how she muttered.
Once, only once, when she’d been angry at him for employing ex-cons as delivery guys, she’d said two terrible words.
Your father…
She hadn’t finished the sentence, but then she hadn’t needed to. That had been enough to make Jaiven hang his head, tears he’d never once shed stinging his eyes.
Usually she couldn’t bear to talk about his father, and neither could he. So he’d endure her visits and breathe a sigh of relief when she left, try to suppress the endless guilt his mother always called up in him.
And that was why he did it, why he endured. Atonement.
Too bad that wasn’t actually working out for him all that well.
They were just sitting down to empanadas, with his mother going on about his cousin Luis’s fiancée, when the front doorbell rang.
His mother’s eyebrows rose to her hairline. “Who comes calling at this hour?”
“It’s seven-thirty, Mama,” Jaiven answered mildly, although he had no idea who it could be. He rose from the table and went to answer the door.
And opened it, to his utter astonishment and delight, to Louise Jensen, wearing a belted trench coat and a pair of sky-high heels.
“So I decided to run with the fantasy thing,” she said, her voice high and breathless, and then she opened her trench coat to reveal what she was wearing underneath.
Precisely nothing.
* * *
As soon as Louise Jensen opened her trench coat she knew she’d made a mistake. A huge one, because Jaiven Rodriguez looked appalled.
Damn, damn, damn. What the hell had she been thinking, cabbing it to the Bronx in nothing but a coat and six-inch heels? Was she really that stupid?
Apparently, yes. Because Jaiven’s comment about sexual fantasies had lit a spark inside of her, and four days of celibacy—hardly unusual, yet now seemingly unendurable—had fanned it into raging flame.
