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“I’m not finished.”
She waited, watching him warily.
“The kid’s going to be half-American,” he went on, “so if I’m only going to be guaranteed one visit a year, you need to bring it out here once a year. For...I don’t know...heritage purposes.”
“Easy! I’m already here once a year—and I’ll be over more often if I land Suzanne Plieu as a client. She’s keen to open a fine dining restaurant in New York and we’ve had a preliminary chat about what I can do to help her find a partner.”
“New York is Teague’s territory, not mine.”
“Well, yeees.” That same curious look, as though she were trying to work him out. “And if Suzanne needs a lawyer, he’d be—”
“I’m not talking about Suzanne’s restaurants or legal needs. I’m talking about you being needed in San Francisco with me, the kid’s father, not in New York with Teague.”
“It’s going to depend on whether I can afford it.”
“I can afford it.”
“My clients pay for my travel here and you’re not my client.”
“Then start working on your aversion to staying with me. No accommodation costs, and I won’t feel like your client when you sashay in with your briefcase.”
“I can’t stay with you, Matt.”
“Why not? You stay with Teague when you’re in New York.”
“Only when my work is finished.”
“Should I point out that you’re not working tonight?”
Pause. He knew that slight twist to her mouth. She was working out what to say. “Teague’s apartment is...spacious. It’s easier there.”
“And I now have a large house. So when you come with the kid, you stay. As long as your ‘form of words’ contains that, we’re good.”
“We’re not good in that case.”
“Why not?”
And she was up, out of her chair, walking over to the fireplace, dragging her hands through her hair—which she never, ever did.
“Why not?” he asked again, when she just stood there looking into the flames.
“It won’t work.”
“Asking again—why not?”
Shake of her head.
“Romy, what’s going on? Why did I buy a house with a million rooms if you and the kid are going to stay in a hotel?”
She turned to face him then. “But th-that’s not why you bought the house!”
“Isn’t it?”
He saw the breath she took, and prepared himself for an argument.
“Okay then, Matthew,” she said, “in the spirit of negotiation—”
“It’s not negotiable.”
“—I’ll agree to stay here, on the condition that I know in advance who else will be here and I can opt out if I’m uncomfortable.”
“Uncomfortable?”
“I don’t want to impinge on your lifestyle.”
“My ‘lifestyle’?”
“There’ll be times it won’t be appropriate for me to stay, depending on...on who...”
He shot to his feet. “Who I’m fucking? Is that what you mean?” He realized he’d yelled that, but couldn’t get the anger under control enough to care.
“If you’d let me expl—”
“You think I’m going to have someone stashed in my bedroom for after I’ve finished reading my kid a bedtime story?” Yelled again.
“I wouldn’t put it quite like—”
“Will I have to fill out a form? Name, age, occupation, social security number? Nominate what nights of the week I intend to fuck them?”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” she said, firing up at last and yelling back at him. “I already know what nights of the week! Every damn night of every damn week! That’s the problem!”
“I’m glad you appreciate my stamina!”
“That place we shared back in the day had paper-thin walls! We all appreciated your stamina! Veronica and I used to joke about buying shares in Durex, you went through so many jumbo boxes of condoms!”
“So you counted my condoms and listened in? Interesting.”
“Sadly, the pillow I jammed over my head to filter out the moans, grunts and squeals didn’t quite block everything.”
“What can I say? I do a good job. A better job than Teague, now I think of it, since he didn’t ever stay with you overnight.”
“This isn’t about Teague.”
“No, it isn’t, is it, or maybe I would have heard something.”
“Not over the racket going on in your room!”
“Jealous?”
She raised her chin. “Just over it! Okay? I’m over it! I don’t want to hear you anymore! I’ve had enough of hearing you!” And she was on the move again, storming over to the drapes, trying to drag them open as though their very existence was cutting off her oxygen supply.
He stalked across the room, reached her, spun her. “Then how about you stay tonight and test the soundproofing? In the absence of my usual fuck noises you can listen for the loud howl of sexual frustration that’ll be coming out of my room because I haven’t had sex for two fucking weeks! Does that scare you, Romy?”
“Why should it scare me?”
“Because you’re here alone with me and I...I... Arrrggh! It’s dangerous, can’t you see that?”
“Dangerous how?”
“Jesus, Romy, how naive are you?” Matt said. The room was hot, stifling, claustrophobic. He needed air, needed...something! “Fuck this!” He reached past her, grabbed a handful of velvet, yanked on it, heard a satisfying rip, and then the drapes dropped to the floor. He kicked them for good measure. “When are you going to accept that I’m not your damn hero, Romy? I’m not like Teague. I don’t do chastity, and yet I’ve just told you I have done it, for two weeks.”
“So what?”
“So I’m a sex addict. And you’re here.”
“A sex addict would have made a move on me the night we met! God knows I gave you the chance! So don’t talk to me about not ‘doing’ chastity when you’ve been nothing but chaste with me for ten years!”
“You’re not like the others!”
“Well, that just goes to show that you’re an idiot! Because I am like the others. I’m exactly like the others. I want what they want, damn you!”
Sudden, charged silence.
Matt’s skin prickled, his senses going on high alert. “Tell me what you mean,” he said, breathing the words. “What you want.”
She closed her eyes. Heartbeat. Opened them. “You know what I mean. You of all men know what women mean!” And it was as though the angry energy drained out of her, even though her hands had clenched into fists by her sides. “What I want is you. I want...you.”
CHAPTER THREE (#u0da82fe4-d91a-5bd7-b0f7-ca3238ce7d3b)
TEN YEARS OF not saying the words, and now they were out, hanging between them.
Romy’s heart was beating hard enough to leap out of her body. And Matt looked rigid enough to bounce the poor thing off his chest. Like a stone column. Or...or petrified wood.
Petrified being the operative word.
She choked down a rising bubble of hysterical laughter at the notion that big, bad Matt could be scared of her. She was the one who should be scared. Scared he’d tell her no and leave her with nothing: friendship in tatters, no baby and still no clue about what it was like to...to be with him like all those other women.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Matt said.
And on the spot, she consigned any last vestige of caution to hell. For ten long years she’d been subjugating her lust for him. That was long enough! “Yes, Matt, I do,” she said. “Exactly what I did say. I want you. But you can call it Plan B if that’s easier for you to deal with.”
“Plan B?”
“I need to get pregnant. You offered to provide the sperm. We’ve discussed the turkey baster method—Plan A—but there’s no reason it can’t be done the old-fashioned way—Plan B.”
“Old-fashioned way.”
“We have a window of opportunity here. It’s almost like fate stepped in.”
“Window of opportunity,” he said, like he was having trouble keeping up.
“Neither of us has someone in our lives—a minor miracle in your case. You said you were sexually frustrated, so you need a release valve, and here I am offering to be it.”
“Release valve.”
“From my perspective, it’s cheaper than IVF. It’s certainly more efficient. Like a direct deposit, cutting out the middleman.”
“Direct deposit.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, stop repeating everything I say,” she semiexploded as her resolve frayed around the edges. “It’s easy to understand, isn’t it? It’s just a one-night stand! We’ve already been through your ground rules about not mistaking sex for anything more, so don’t worry that I’ll be expecting a bourgeois romance. And you’re not the only one who knows what it is to be sexually frustrated, because it’s been a while for me, let me tell you, and I daresay it’ll be a much longer while once I’m pregnant.”
“One-night stand.”
“Yes, one night. No encore required. If it doesn’t work, we simply revert to the turkey baster/courier option and...and...and aren’t you going to say something?”
“No encore.”
“Something that’s not a stupid repeat of what I’ve already said.”
She waited; he stared.
Romy couldn’t recall an instance in which Matt had taken this long to make a decision. She wondered if she should shorthand the argument by taking off her dress.
“Matt...” she said, reaching for the zipper at her left side—but before she could touch it, a log fell in the fireplace, jolting the momentum out of her so that she lost her nerve. “Forget it. It was just a suggestion. If you can’t bring yourself to do it, there’s nothing more to be said. Plan A it is.”
“I’m pretty sure I can bring myself to do it,” he said, and then he started laughing as though she’d told the funniest joke on the world.
She drew herself up, glaring at him. “I’m glad I’ve managed to amuse you.”
She tried to push past him, but he blocked her. “Wait!” he said.
“We’ve wasted enough time. We need to go back to the paperwork.”
Again he blocked her. “I said wait. Let’s at least talk about Plan B.”
“I’m no longer interested in Plan B.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ve just reminded me how it ends.”
“How can that be when it hasn’t happened yet?”
“It’ll be a carbon copy of the time I told you Jeff Blewett kissed like his mouth was an octopus suction cup and you dared me to let you demonstrate the way you imagined that to be. I was stupid enough to say yes because I thought...I thought...never mind what I thought, it doesn’t matter what I thought, because at the last minute you changed direction and gave me a hickey right here...” jabbing at the center of her forehead “...and no amount of makeup would cover it up so I went around for two days looking like I’d been hit by a cricket ball and you thought it was all hilarious.”
“So how about I try it now?”
“I don’t need another forehead hickey, thank you.”
