Leigh Riker - Strapless

She felt sick.

“Well. Now I know.”

“Darcie, don’t make a big deal of this.”

She reeled back at his weary tone.

“No big deal? Just call me naive…” To her horror, she choked up. She hadn’t thought this would really matter, if it proved true.

“It isn’t what you think.”

“Oh, that’s too tacky. What a classic line.” She swallowed hard. She could smell his aftershave, expensive, woodsy. Smell popcorn on the air. Smell the more acrid scent of…betrayal. “Are you saying you’re not married?”

He turned away. Darcie snagged his arm.

“Merrick, you owe me an explanation.” When he remained silent, she said, “No wonder you didn’t remember your ‘nephew.’ Or are you more used to calling him your son?” She flicked a glance toward the table nearby. “Your daughter looks like you. So does he. How old is she?”

“Six. Yes,” he said. “I’m married.” The words came out loud, and he deliberately lowered his voice, color slashing across his cheeks as if Darcie had slapped him. Not a bad idea. “I’ve been married for ten years. Is that what you want to hear?”

“No, I want to hear why you’re screwing me instead of your wife!”

His tight schedule. His one-night-a-week free. Two this week, lucky her. You wouldn’t leave a man in need, would you?

“It doesn’t work between us,” he said.

“What doesn’t work? Sex? You and me? What?” She’d never felt so mortified, so hurt, in her life. Which was saying a lot.

He tried to lead her to a quieter corner but Darcie dug in her heels. She thrust the zebra bag between them like a shield.

“Just say it here.” And if there was anyplace more absurd, more public, than the doll department of FAO Schwarz, she couldn’t think where. That didn’t matter now. Then he shocked her again.

“I love you, Darcie.”

“Oh. You bastard.” A first, she thought. It was a wonder he didn’t strangle.

“No, I mean it. It’s over between Jacqueline and me. She won’t even care.”

“Her name’s Jacqueline?” He nodded, looking at the floor, and Darcie’s mouth tightened like a prune. His wife had probably gone to Smith, like Annie.

He glanced up through a screen of thick lashes. “Do you hate me?”

“Right now, I’d say that’s a definite yes.”

For several moments neither of them spoke. Darcie clutched the zebra and listened to her own breathing. It seemed capable of overriding the noise around them. Roared like an oncoming subway train. She might drop dead right here on the floor. Attention, please. Emergency. Would Medic Barbie go to Aisle Four…

“When do you leave?” he said.

“I told you, tomorrow.”

“I can’t see you before then?”

“I don’t want to see you.”

He looked miserable. “How long will you be gone?”

“I don’t know. Days, weeks.” She’d already told him that, too. Didn’t he listen? “Whatever it takes to negotiate the space we want for the new store.” Whatever it took, not just in Sydney, to heal her broken heart. Forever.

Darcie tried not to focus on Merrick. When his beautiful child bolted from the nearby table straight into his arms, Darcie flinched at her sweet voice.

“Would you buy me this one, Daddy?”

She thrust a pink, plastic-windowed package in his face. International Barbie. Dolls of the World. It seemed just right to Darcie.

Holding Darcie’s gaze, Merrick grasped the box hard.

“Sure, kiddo.”

The little girl gave him a coy smile. “Do you want one, too?”

Merrick managed a small laugh. “Nice try. We’ll just buy this today.”

Darcie stared over his daughter’s head into Merrick’s dark-blue eyes. Then she tightened her grip on Buster the zebra—and marched toward the escalator.

“Darcie. Wait!”

She kept going. She didn’t look back. It was the upside escalator, of course, but Darcie only needed to escape. Suddenly the setting, the noise, the displays seemed absolutely fitting. For once, she had the last word.

“Daddy already bought himself a doll—or so he thought.”

Merrick didn’t know it, but he needed the Returns Department. As for herself…

Australian Barbie.

Merrick Lowell would never see her—a.k.a. Darcie Elizabeth Baxter—again.

“‘Waltzing Matilda,’” Darcie sang to herself. “‘Once a jolly swagman…’” Losing the lyrics again, she hummed a few bars. “‘Dum-de-dum…his billabong…’” For some reason her eyes filled.

Jet lag, she thought, and tipped her head back. She hadn’t thought it would be this bad. The new Westin Sydney, with its open expanse of chrome, glass and satiny wood led her gaze upward to a vast skylight showing a night-black canopy full of twinkling, but unidentifiable, stars. New to the southern hemisphere, Darcie sat in the hotel bar digesting the beef tenderloin en croute she’d eaten earlier in one of the trendy lower level restaurants with Walt, and nursing a glass of local Chardonnay to settle things.

Wearing her pinstripe suit, even alone she shouldn’t feel this out of place. In New York—ten thousand miles to the east, as her long, sleepless night on a Boeing 747 from San Francisco could attest—women wore black, too, particularly after five. With a good strand of pearls, her mother would advise. In most big cities of the world, you couldn’t go wrong in dark colors, but Darcie frowned into her glass. She wasn’t wearing pearls, and opals seemed the gem of choice in Australia, if she believed the many shop displays she’d passed on her way to the hotel tonight. And according to the group of what appeared to be thirtyish executives at the next table, beer had it over wine.

Idly, Darcie studied them.

She couldn’t concentrate. A continued low-down cramping had made her order the glass of wine she didn’t really want, or need.

“Thank God he didn’t get me pregnant,” she said of Merrick.

Bastard.

His being married wasn’t the issue. She might be naive at times but she was no brainless ingenue. As a woman of the new millennium, sexually free and unencumbered, she could handle his being married—even if that little fact rankled some deep down remnant of tradition in her own character. Thanks, Mom and Dad. But Merrick’s failure to reveal the truth? That still hurt.

Darcie hated lying. Liars, most of all.

Blinking, she straightened in her roomy club chair. Her glass clicked onto the marble tabletop. What if he carried some STD? That’s all she needed to remember Merrick Lowell—genital herpes or warts. As if she didn’t feel enough of a sexual outcast.

She pressed a hand to her suddenly thumping heart. But they had used protection. Every time. Remember, Merrick didn’t relish having kids. Darcie grimaced. Then why did he seem to have two of them? Maybe it was only her imagined children he didn’t want. Her middle-class genes.

With a sigh, she fell back into the deep chair again.

Twirling the stem of her glass, she gazed around the dimly lit room—and oh, as if a band had struck up the national anthem, “Advance Australia Fair,” would you look at that. Yummy. A lone man stood talking to the bartender, another Aussie male Darcie had noticed earlier. Now, she barely saw him. Eclipsing every other man in the room, this one had dark hair, unlike Merrick’s (a point in his favor) thicker, longer. Hair a woman could twine her fingers through, letting its sinuous silk send a message of desire straight to her achy loins.

His broad shoulders blocked out the bartender to his left, behind the bar. He lounged in three-quarter profile to her, an amazing profile if she bothered to linger on it. Better than Merrick’s. Busily, Darcie’s gaze swept like a huntress down his long frame, from those incredible shoulders and well-developed deltoids—bunched, and nicely rounded, under his chambray shirt—to his washboard belly, then his muscled, jeans-clad legs and, finally, his feet. Boots, she saw. Good ones, if she could judge from this distance. His fingers looked lean and graceful wrapped around the beer bottle in his hand, and when he lifted it for a long swallow, Darcie watched his Adam’s apple work in his strong, beautiful throat. It was true. Australian men were not to be believed.