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I don’t want it.
“Why did you change your mind, Ryder?” she asks.
I shrug. “You sounded upset in your message and there are only so many apologies I can take.”
I’m playing with fire. I know that. But as she accepts the drink I give her, the story unspools. How she was coerced into the story.
“Shit, Lacey. You caused me a world of problems.”
She looks down, and then up at me. “I didn’t lie about the marriage. We’re not together. It’s a publicity thing and when you looked at me I was gone. No one’s looked at me like that in a long time. Like they see me.”
All the things Elliot said about me come back. “I didn’t. Not in the way you want. But I saw someone I liked the look of. It’s water under the bridge.”
“I can release a statement about—”
“Lacey, whatever you do, promise you’ll leave my name out of it.”
I’m not naïve. I know this could backfire. But this is in private.
“I’m just alone, you know.”
“Yeah.”
I’m not going to bond with her, that’s not smart and, well…neither is she. But she’s nice and she’s gorgeous and she can make a man forget his troubles.
“Can I use the bathroom?”
I point her in the direction, it’s hard to miss as the place is small.
Slowly, I sit on the sofa and lean back closing my eyes. What the fuck am I doing? I don’t really want to talk to her and I don’t know if anything can make me forget my trouble. This place doesn’t have enough whiskey for that.
Thing is, I wanted Elliot to tell me not to leave, to tell me she believed in me. Even if I hadn’t done anything to make her say that, wasn’t that something relationships had? Belief?
I go completely still. I want her to believe in me and want me enough.
Me. I’ve never in my life been unsure like I have been through all this. And it’s Elliot. It’s all her fault. She makes the ground shift beneath my feet. She unnerves and excites me and makes everything different.
And…she doesn’t think I’m good enough for her.
She’s right.
But if I’m being shut out of her life, punished, I might well do the crime. After all, Elliot believes all I want is to fuck women and there’s one here. One who’d be more than happy to fuck me again.
I open my eyes and pull my phone out of my pocket, unlocking it. There’s a text I set up to go out if I needed the SOS right at the beginning of all this and—
“Ryder.”
“Yeah?” I look up, and I press the key on the screen without thinking.
Oh. Holy fucking shit.
Lacey Fox is naked. And she’s waxed and buffed and spent even more money to make her perfection shine.
She sashays over to me and climbs on my lap and this is why Elliot doesn’t want me.
It comes with horrible clarity as I put my hands on her hips, dropping my phone.
Why the fuck would a woman like Elliot believe in me, want me when women do this? Some women, I amend. The kind of woman I usually screw about with. The ones who want sex and aren’t overly fussed with more, or if they are, don’t say it.
