JENNIFER LABRECQUE - Red-Hot Nights - Daring in the Dark

“If our paths won’t cross again, what could it possibly matter?” he said. The flickering light played tricks on her. For a brief second she could’ve sworn dismay flashed in his eyes.

“Because it’ll bother me until I have an answer. My nickname growing up was Bulldog because I can’t let things go. Why you disliked me will niggle at the back of my mind and worry me—unfinished business—until ten years from now I have to track you down and demand an answer so I can take myself off Prozac.”

Simon frowned in confusion. “You’re on an anti-depressant?”

Tawny smiled at him. It was sort of weird trying to charm a man into telling you why he disliked you. But nothing about the feelings Simon stirred in her was normal or comfortable. Between Simon and Elliott, her journey of self-discovery had taken an abrupt turn. “No. But if you don’t give me an answer, it’ll drive me crazy and I’ll have to start taking it. So go ahead and exonerate yourself up front.”

He shook his head but seemed to relax, stretching his arm along the couch back. He had nice arms. Just the right amount of muscle and a smattering of dark hair. Who was she kidding? Everything about him registered on her sexy meter. And—woohoo—she didn’t have to feel guilty about it anymore. She could lust up front and outright without even a twinge of conscience.

“Does everyone in your family communicate this way?” he asked.

“No.” She laughed and tossed the ball right back at him. “Does everyone in your family try to dodge the issue by introducing another topic?”

He grinned and a healthy dose of that guilt-free lust slammed her. “No. They simply don’t talk.”

It was the most he’d ever said about his family and she was curious to know more. “The British stiff upper lip?”

“Something like that. And their heads are full of ancient artifacts and civilizations.” Per Elliott, his father was a museum curator and his mother was an archaeology—or maybe it was anthropology—professor. “They find the modern world something of an inconvenience.”

It took a nanosecond for her to feel the loneliness of a little boy who had always hovered on the periphery of his parents’ attention. Tawny knew as surely as she knew her name that Simon had been something of an inconvenience, as well. She related. “I wasn’t an inconvenience, but I’ve always been a disappointment.”

“I never said I was an inconvenience.”

“You didn’t have to say it.”

He tilted his head to one side. “How could your parents possibly find you a disappointment?”

Okay. So he was probably just looking to shift the conversation from himself, but he seemed genuinely puzzled that she might disappoint Dr. and Mrs. Carlton Jonathan Edwards III.

“It’s been all too easy. I’m not exactly the overachiever my sister Sylvia is—magna cum laude from Yale and a rising member of the Savannah bar.” Out of nervous habit she started to twist her ring on her finger and realized it was no longer there. Her nail scraped her bare finger. “Betsy, my younger sister, married one of daddy’s partner’s sons. She and Tad have a beautiful home on Wilmington Island in a prestigious gated community. Me? I’m not as smart as Sylvia and I’m not as refined and gracious as Betsy. I talk too much, I’m too assertive, I have a master’s degree in business but I plan parties for a living. I committed the ultimate sin of leaving Savannah, Georgia. When I came home with Elliott, they were pleased, although he wasn’t a Southerner. Now it turns out he’s gay.”

She was batting a thousand here. And while she was hauling all of her shortcomings out for examination … “Oh, yeah, and Sylvia and Betsy take after my parents who are tall and thin. Thanks to recessive genes, I take after Grandmother Burdette, short with a big butt.” And add talking too much and saying the wrong thing to that list. Why the heck had she mentioned her big ass?

Simon crossed his arms over his chest, restrained strength in lean, sinewy muscle. He leveled an uncompromising look at her from his end. “Are you sure you want the truth, here in the dark?”

Uh-oh. Something in his tone reminded her of Nicholson in A Few Good Men , assuring them they couldn’t handle the truth. She’d asked for it, but now she wasn’t so certain she wanted it. But she’d never run away from things or buried her head in the sand, and she wouldn’t start now. “Absolutely.”

“If that’s really how your parents feel, all of you need to get over it. Lose the pity party and look at things the way they really are. You say you’re a party planner as if it’s some lesser accomplishment. You’re an event planner for a law firm with a hundred and fifty practicing attorneys. According to Elliott, you do an incredible job planning and executing a multitude of functions. That requires tremendous organizational and negotiation skills.”

She opened her mouth to point out she had an assistant, but he forestalled her with a raised hand.

“Let me finish and then the floor’s yours. I think you came to New York to get away from your parents’ censure, but you might as well pack up and go home if you’re going to continue to see yourself through their eyes and judge yourself against some mythical standard.” Ouch . His tone softened. “You’ll never be free to be you until you accept and like who you are. I don’t know what your sisters look like and I don’t care. Your body would drop most men to their knees. Any man with half a dose of testosterone would tell you that you have the perfect behind. I’d like to think men aren’t quite so shallow as to fall in love with your behind and overlook all of your other obvious attributes and qualities, but certainly any man would love your derriere. It could drive a man to madness.”

Well. It was her turn to talk and she didn’t know what to say. He’d certainly taken her at her word and said a lot. And perhaps he was right. She’d ostensibly moved to the Big Apple to shake off the confines and constraints of Savannah aristocracy, but was she still measuring herself against their standards? And how much of her attraction to Elliott and her subsequent engagement was due to the need for their elusive approval? And she’d think about all of that. Later. Now her fragile, wounded, her-fiancé-succumbed-to-the-charms-of-a-man ego latched on to the part about her body dropping a man to his knees and her ass driving him to madness. “Really? Madness?”

He quirked an eyebrow at her as if to say he knew where she was coming from and then he smiled at her, the first smile she’d ever received from him that actually reached his eyes. Her breath caught in her throat. Even now this smile didn’t totally encompass him. She always had a sense of part of him being closed off, as if he held a jealously guarded secret. “At the least, distraction.”

In the span of a very brief time her self-perception was changing drastically. The way she saw herself was beginning to unravel. Perhaps it had begun with her dreams about Simon and her reaction to him tonight, the way she saw herself since she’d discovered Elliott’s unfaithfulness, the way Simon portrayed her in relation to her parents. In a very short time frame her world had shifted and changed and left her floundering. Perhaps the last year in New York had just been a warm-up, and the closest she’d come to discovering her true self had been in the last few minutes.

And she and Simon were getting real. She’d had a glimpse of the real Simon when he’d photographed her for Elliott. What would she see in herself now, were he to photograph her again? She didn’t want him to retreat again. She didn’t want to dream about him tonight. Tonight she wanted the flesh-and-blood man in her bed.