Jaimie: Fire And Ice Part 15

The woman he'd been with last night was not a wh.o.r.e.

She was a liar.

An actress.

She'd played the scene well, convinced him she'd been overcome by pa.s.sion, pa.s.sion for him, for him...

"f.u.c.k," he snarled, and shot to his feet.

The bed smelled of s.e.x. Of her. Of a man made to look like a fool.

Zach grabbed the pillows. Stripped off the cases. Threw them on the floor. Tore off the blanket. The sheets. Bundled everything together and carried them down the stairs to the laundry room just off the kitchen.

Mrs. Halverson looked at him in surprise.

"Here, sir," she said. "I'll take care of-"

He motioned her aside, tossed everything in the washer, slapped open cupboard doors until he found the detergent, poured some into the machine and turned it on.

Then he went back upstairs, showered and scrubbed until his skin felt raw.

And told himself, as he pulled on clean clothes, that he was an a.s.shole for letting something like this bother him.

The other guy, Young, was the one who'd been made a fool of, not him.

h.e.l.l, when you came down to it, he'd had a great night. A terrific night. Fantastic s.e.x, not once, not twice, but three times.

Nothing about this should bother him.

Except, it did.

He tucked his wallet into his jeans. Scooped up his keys. Headed down the stairs. Called the garage, told them to have his the Porsche ready.

"Sir," Mrs. Halverson said, as he headed for the elevator. She had a small, cream-colored card in her outstretched hand. "I found this business card in the-"

"Toss it," Zach said, and stepped into the elevator.

Five minutes later, a kid who looked no more than fifteen delivered the car. Zach handed him a fifty, climbed behind the wheel and took off.

Three hours and a couple of hundred miles later, he headed back to the city across the George Washington Bridge.

He was calm. Collected. Cool. Why wouldn't he be? Jaimie Something Or Other was nothing but a memory.

Or she would be, Zach thought, as he took out his iPhone and clicked through his contact list. The day was still young-and women were as plentiful as the autumn leaves falling from the trees in Central Park, especially when you were a rich, powerful bachelor with the entire city as your canvas.

There was only one problem.

Almost a month later, Zach had gone through nearly a dozen women listed in his cell phone, gone through them in the sense that he'd taken them to dinner, to the theater, to the dull-as-dishwater openings of art gallery showings in Soho and uptown museum exhibits.

The women were bright. Beautiful. And, ultimately, completely bewildered when he took them to their doors, politely refused coffee or brandy, dropped chaste kisses on their expectant faces...

And went home.

He was living a life as celibate as a monk's.

Except in the middle of the night when he lay in his bed, alone, and dreamed of the hours he'd spent with a stranger named Jaimie in his arms.

CHAPTER SEVEN.

Indian summer gave way, inevitably, to fall.

Jaimie had always been what her sisters teasingly called a Fall Fan, but it was true. Even as a kid, she'd loved autumn. The brilliance of the falling leaves, the crisp mornings and clear, star-shot nights-it was, she'd always thought, the most perfect time of year, culminating in that most American of holidays, Thanksgiving.

It was an extra special event for the Wilde family.

Charlotte Wilde, the sisters' mother, had always insisted that the holiday season started with Thanksgiving, moved on to Christmas, and ended with New Year's Eve.

When they were children, they'd all gathered around her the night before Thanksgiving and she'd read them that wonderful old poem, "The Night Before Christmas."

After a while, they knew it by heart, but that didn't lessen the joy of sharing it.

Things changed.

Charlotte died.

The loss was indescribable. Her daughters and stepsons, who had already suffered the loss of their own mother years ago, had adored her.

Jacob, Caleb and Travis, older by several years than Emily, Jaimie and Lissa, had gotten them through that first empty Thanksgiving. After that, the holiday had become more meaningful than ever.

Except for the times one of the Wilde brothers was away serving his country, none of the Wildes ever missed it. Well, none of them except for their father. Four-star generals couldn't always make it home for the holidays.

As a kid, Jaimie had sometimes wondered if he'd even tried.

After a while, it hadn't mattered. Thanksgiving was for the Wilde brothers and sisters. Not one of them would deliberately stay away.

Now, for the first time, Jaimie had considered the possibility.

Coming up with an excuse would have been easy: the press of work, the importance of networking at the several holiday parties to which she'd been invited.

There were only two problems.

The first was that she couldn't bring herself to lie.

The second was that n.o.body would have believed her.

One or maybe all of them would have turned up at her apartment, demanding to know what was going on. And Jaimie couldn't tell them that because she wasn't sure herself. She only knew that things were different since the night of The Big Blackout.

Not that that night had anything to do with the way things had changed in her life. It was just a convenient frame of reference. Lots of people used the event that way, as if it had been some kind of turning point on the calendar.

She was edgy. Out of sorts. She wasn't sleeping well.

Well, it wasn't a problem, it was just a temporary blip. There was so much going on in her life lately. Lots of appointments and showings. She'd picked up three exclusives, one in Georgetown, two in Silver Spring. She was busy, busy, busy...

OK.

Maybe it was more than that.

Maybe, she thought as she drove her rental car from the airport at Dallas to El Sueno, maybe the night of The Big Blackout had affected her.

d.a.m.n.

Jaimie blew out a breath.

Of course, it had affected her. Why lie to herself? Why call that October night The Big Blackout when what it had been was The Big Mistake?

She had slept with a stranger. A man she'd met, what, a couple of hours before she'd tumbled into his bed. A man she'd known she would never see again. No, she hadn't consciously thought about it, but she'd known it anyway. Zacharias Castelianos was the exact opposite of the kind of men she dated.

Correction.

The kind of men she dated when she dated.

There wasn't much time for a social life when you were chasing after listings and courting buyers, but when she did go out with someone, he was what Lissa called a Suit.

"Gag me with a spoon," her California-transplant sister had said when she'd paid a visit last year and they'd done some late-night dishing about men. "Accountants. Attorneys. Economists. Financial a.n.a.lysts. Good grief, James, don't you ever want to go out with somebody who's pure testosterone? All brawn and no brains? A man who'll just scoop you up, carry you off to bed, and make you come so many times you'll be bowlegged the next morning?"

They'd both laughed.

Right-except Jaimie wasn't laughing anymore.

A coyote shot across the dirt road just ahead. She stood on the brakes; the car swayed. She got it under control and took another long breath.

That was what The Big Mistake had been all about. Being scooped up by a man who'd taken her to bed and given her so many o.r.g.a.s.ms that she really had ached the next morning.

Ached with humiliation.

She wasn't into hooking up. She never had been. That was fine if it was your thing-she wasn't sitting in judgment on anybody-but it had never been hers. She'd always been a romantic about men. Dammit, even about boys.

How many times had some jerk broken her heart in high school because she'd thought forever was supposed to last more than a week?

Hooking up would have made sense in college. All the courses. The endless hours spent studying. Working to score As, to make the dean's list, to make Phi Beta Kappa.

There'd been no time for relationships. But there'd been time for s.e.x, had she wanted it.

Meet a guy, find him attractive, set things up so that when you were free and he was free, you got together for an hour. For a night. You hooked up. No strings, no commitment, no emotional baggage.

Lots of her friends had done it. Lissa, too-well, maybe not hooking up, not exactly, but her older sister certainly took a different approach to s.e.x than she did.

"You want too much," Lissa had said that same night they'd talked about men. "You want a guy with a measurable IQ to ride up on a white horse. You want bells to ring. Nope. Scratch that. You want John Williams to write a score for the big scene."

Jaimie sat up straight and shifted into drive.

They'd both laughed-except, there was a nugget of truth to what Lissa had said.

She did want bells to ring.

So far, they hadn't.

Except for that night with Zacharias Castelianos, which was ridiculous because he was nothing she'd ever wanted. He was the all-brawn-no-brains type.

Wasn't he?

She thought about how he'd taken care of her. Made her laugh and forget her fears...

"Oh, for G.o.d's sake," she said aloud, "it was s.e.x. S-E-X, and why can't you admit it? It was s.e.x and it was good."

Good? Amazing, was closer to the truth, and wasn't that the problem? That it had been mind-blowing s.e.x and she couldn't accept that she'd done something so-so basic, so raw, so far out of the realm of reality that when she'd awakened in the early hours of the morning with light just creeping into the sky and the sound of electrical appliances coming to life, she'd been horrified.

There she was. In a stranger's bed. Both of them naked. His arm draped possessively around her, his hand cupping her breast. Oh my G.o.d, she'd thought, oh my G.o.d!

And then he'd stirred, just a little, and his hand had curved more closely around her breast, and she'd felt her body quicken, felt the ache of wanting him, and she'd almost turned in his arms, touched his hard, gorgeous face, his hard, gorgeous body until he woke and whispered her name and took her again and again and again...

"Dammit!"

She wrenched the wheel, pulled to the shoulder of the road in a burst of dirt and gravel.

Pathetic. That she should still be thinking about something that had happened weeks ago...

That even though he had her business card, he had never called her or sent her flowers or done anything to make what had happened more than a down-and-dirty one night stand.

Why waste time on the past when the present was what mattered? The excellent progress she was making at work, especially after she'd come back from New York without the Castelianos deal. Her boss hadn't been happy, but he'd said he was sure she'd do better the next time there was a hot client to land. She'd learn, he'd said, and she had. Just look at those three new listings.

If she had any problem at all, it was Steven.

He had changed since she'd returned from New York. His attention had gone from over-the-top to certifiably impossible. He was always, always there, lurking, waiting, falling in step beside her as she walked down the street, turning up everywhere she was. At her office. At her apartment.

I was in the neighborhood, he'd say, and I figured you'd like a fresh croissant from that little bakery. Or he'd be at the door with the Sunday papers. A book. A box of chocolates.

She'd gone from being polite-Thank you, but no-to being direct-I don't want you to bring me things, Steven-to being downright rude-Steven. I want you to stay out of my life. I'm not interested. You have to accept that.

Things had come to a head two days ago.