Page 11 of Shopping for an Heir
I was afraid I’d do even worse.
The thought slammed through him like a word weapon, cutting to the quick, slicing through layers of scar tissue built around his soul.
“Walking away was wrong,” he admitted. Ten years. He’d had ten years to prepare for this moment, to know what to say, except he’d never envisioned this. Not once. He’d assumed he would never see her again. That it was for the best.
Or so he’d assumed.
“Wrong? Wrong? You use these words, Gerald, like they have meaning. Do you have any idea how pathetic wrong sounds? How about walking away like that was inhumane? How about soul-crushing? How about—”
She jerked as if electrocuted, her breath a jagged series of gasps, her anger a shockwave that caught him in its path. As if gravity weighed it down, the clip in her hair dislodged, dragging the thick abundance of her blonde waves down, giving her a Greek goddess look, one curl spilling over a shoulder, the rest of her hair full around her face, eyes standing out, painted to stand out.
“No. I won’t do this. Just no. You have your papers, you can process the inheritance, and I’m done. I’ll assign a junior associate whether my boss likes it or not.” She turned to leave.
In a fit of desperation he grabbed her, the kiss unreal, less about passion and more about the unrelenting fear that he’d never, ever see her again if he didn’t try. She went with it, kissing him back with a violence that made his mouth fill with copper, the taste of her wrath the penance he had to pay. Their mouths slanted, lips softened, the kiss less a surprise and now a pleading, one they felt their way through.
“God, I’ve missed you,” he confessed, then let her go, walking away, giving her the space she wanted.
Because to stay would have been wrong, too.
Chapter 6
“Let me tell you about my crazy day,” Suzanne’s friend Kari announced as they settled on Suzanne’s couch in sweats, munching their way through a bag of chips. Blonde like Suzanne, Kari had honey-brown eyes with thick, short lashes and a permanently curious expression on her face.
Smoochy, Suzanne’s bichon frise, wriggled a spot between them, staring at her with begging eyes.
“Sorry, Smoochy,” Kari said with great affect. “Your mommy won’t let me give you a potato chip.”
Getting a dog had been Suzanne’s latest move in her ongoing attempt to pretend to have a real life. Smoochy was a rescue, a seven-year-old whose owner had been moved into a nursing home down in Florida about eight months ago. Once a month, Suzanne dutifully sent printed pictures of Smoochy to Elizabeth, her old owner, who was slipping further into Alzheimer’s. But then once a month, so far, Smoochy received a letter from Elizabeth, which Suzanne read aloud to the dog.
Smoochy blinked and looked at Kari, giving her a tiny plea. The whining sound was so cute that Kari relented. Smoochy munched on the tiny piece like it was a feast.
“Your crazy day? Pfft. Bet mine beats yours.” Suzanne shoved her paw into the chip bag and halted. Potato chips and her low carb diet didn’t mix, damn it. Reluctantly, she left snack nirvana to Kari and walked to the kitchen, rummaging in the fridge.
“Did you have to pretend to have IBS so you could schedule a colonoscopy and inspect the cleanliness of a probe while avoiding being caught?” Kari asked pointedly. Smoochy shivered suddenly, her whole body doing a shimmy, as if she were emotionally reacting to Kari’s words.
“I would trade doing that for what I actually went through.” An anal probe vs. Steve Raleigh? No contest.
“That was a crazy date. I give you credit. But an asshole versus a guy who looks at assholes all day for a living? C’mon.”
“I saw Gerald for the first time in ten years,” Suzanne said, as if holding her place in the lineup of horrors to be shared.
Kari and Suzanne had met back in college, at freshman orientation, when Kari was a student and Suzanne the instructor. They’d been fast friends since, though their paths had diverged radically. Suzanne’s ROTC scholarship led her off to war the week after she’d graduated at twenty-one, while Kari had gone into fashion design, then merchandising, and finally mystery shopping management. She managed a big division for Fokused Shop-rite, one of the biggest mystery shopping and consumer optimization companies in the country.
Right now, though, she was using her breasts to catch broken potato chips, so...
“No way! Way to bury the lede, Suzanne. What happened?”
“I saw Declan McCormick naked, served Gerald with inheritance paperwork that might be worth nine figures, and went on a date with a blowhard who makes Donald Trump look like Mother Teresa.”
Kari stared at her, mouth open, like Dory the fish.
Smoochy walked out of the room, curled into a ball in her dog bed, and covered her eyes with her paws.
“I know. It’s a lot,” Suzanne said with a laugh, grabbing her bag of carrot sticks, dipping them in sour cream and crunching away.
“You saw Declan McCormick naked?” Kari gasped. “Is he as hot in the flesh as he is in a suit?”
Suzanne’s cheeks went pink. The taste of Gerald, the brush of his lips, the sweep of his tongue in her mouth and those hands, oh those hands on her back, so masterful and yearning, had completely driven the vision of Declan McCormick’s nude body out of her mind.
Okay. Mostly driven the vision of Declan McCormick’s nude body out of her mind.
There might be a tiny remnant of memory remaining.
Or not so tiny.
“Suz!” Kari whapped her arm. “Get out of your drool! Spill! Share details!”
“About Gerald’s kiss?”
Kari inhaled sharply, hands on her chest, her palms beginning to flap in overeager excitement. “He kissed you! Was this while Declan McCormick was naked?” Her eyes flew wide open. “Was this a threesome? Omigod, you had a threesome with Declan Mc—wait. He’s married. I know Shannon. We’ve worked together on an account. She’s going to be devastated!” Kari alternated between glaring at Suzanne as if she’d actually had a threesome with Declan McCormick, and processing her disappointment if Suzanne hadn’t.
“I did not have a threesome with Declan and Gerald.”
Kari’s face fell. Disappointment won.
“Well, at least I don’t have to be the bearer of bad news for Shannon,” Kari muttered, staring at the carrot in Suzanne’s hand. “And yum! When did you start eating that combination?”
“Desperation. This no-sugar, no-grains diet is making me try damn near anything.”
“Combined with your lack of sex, your desperation meter is about as high as can be.”
Suzanne pulled out her fiercest naval recruit stare.
“That—that doesn’t work—on me. Oh, damn.” Kari shielded her eyes. “You could play Nurse Ratched if they ever do a remake of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
Suzanne snorted. “She was an amateur.”
“Or Dolores Umbridge.”
Better.
“He broke your heart all those years ago.” Kari gave her a sympathetic side-eye. “You finally stopped talking about him a few years ago.”
“I know.” Suzanne shut herself up with a carrot.
“And stopped going to therapy.”
Smoochy made an adorable snoring sound from her little bed.
“Right,” she sighed, the food turning tasteless.
“Are you okay?”
“No,” Suzanne answered honestly. “He kissed me. Twice. But no explanation. No offer to talk. Just kissing.”
“That’s more action than you’ve gotten in a while.”
Suzanne opened her mouth to protest, then shut it. Kari wasn’t wrong.
Letting out a shaky sigh, she closed her eyes. “Seeing him was brutal.” Her throat tightened. Suzanne wasn’t a crier. When she got emotional, she became angry.
Sadness washed over her, making her hungry.
“Want to go on an ice cream run?” She asked Kari on impulse.
Kari’s eyebrow arched. “Run? As in, running? Because the last time you broke your low carb diet, you ran three miles to justify the sugar. Last time I ran three miles was, um, never. Does never work?”
Suzanne gave her a pitying pout. “C’mon! I’ll run, you Uber. Let’s go out for a big, fat sundae.”
“Only if you promise to tell me exactly what happened tonight. And listen to how I got asked for my phone number by a hot proctologist.”
“Kari, ‘hot’ and ‘proctologist’ don’t go together.”
“Neither do running and ice cream.” Kari gave her a hard stare.
Laughing, Suzanne went to her bedroom, quickly threw on running clothes, and began stretching at the front door. “Toscanini’s?” Suzanne lived in Charlestown. The Cambridge ice cream-slash-coffee shop was exactly 2.9 miles away. Yes, she’d clocked it.
More than a few times.
“Fine. I think you’re insane, but I’m not turning down ice cream and your story.”
“If you won’t turn down a proctologist, why would you turn down anything?”
“Hey. If you had seen this guy...” Kari began fanning herself.
“He looks up people’s buttholes for a living.”
Kari shrugged. “I don’t judge.” She got a dreamy look on her face. “Maybe he knows his way around that part of the body better than—”
