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“I’ve never discussed my bedroom antics with you either,” he says easily, but something’s off. This man doesn’t seem sentimental enough to vow not to bring a woman into his bed because Grace once slept there. Luckily for him, I’m too drunk and exhausted to grill him about it.
Minutes later, I’m in a strange bed, his arms are wrapped around me, and his lips are in my hair, and my breathing is all calm.
“There, there,” he says. “Everything’ll be all right. Am I doing this okay?”
“You’re doing just fine.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
ARSÈNE
“I’m not in love.”
“I know this one. Who is10cc?” Riggs presses on an imaginary buzzer à laJeopardy!, then knocks back his drink.
My lips thin in annoyance. Christian slaps my shoulder, his shit-eating grin on full display. “Sorry, pal, but it kinda sounds like you are.”
“Because I let a random woman whom I’m conducting business with sleep in myguest room?” I sneer, abhorred.
Not that I made Winnifred’s stay at my place public knowledge. No, that was Riggs’s fault. True to his nomad ways, he showed himself into my apartment the morning after Bumpkin stayed over, bearing gifts in the form of coffee and bagels. Alfred let him in. I was up by then, showered, shaven, and after my tennis practice. Winnifred, however, wasn’t. And when she gingerly tiptoed out of the room, a shy smile on her face, Riggs jumped to conclusions like an Olympic athlete.
“No. Because you never let anyone into your apartment, ever, and she looked athome,” Riggs counters.
Christian waltzes over to the bar at the billiard room in the New Amsterdam. After lying low for a few weeks and letting Cory recover from his little meetup with Bumpkin, I’m finally able to be seen here again. Or at least, I was, until these two morons started ripping me a new one.
“She looked like a woman who’d just woken up and felt awkward being around two strange men,” I correct him. “There’s nothing going on between us. As I said before, her husband worked with Grace.”
Over my dead body am I going to admit to Riggs and Christian that they were right about my late fiancée all along. That she two-timed me. Which, unfortunately, makes Winnifred an unlikely, albeit important, ally. Even my sour ass needs someone to speak to.
“This is all very convincing, not to mention fascinating.” Riggs stands up, tucking his phone into his front pocket. “But I gotta run.Discovermagazine is doing a big editorial about historical shipwrecks, and I want to be commissioned. It’s a five-destination assignment. I have a meeting with their editor in chief.”
“Are these magazines even making money anymore?” I cross one leg over the other. Print is such an outdated industry.
He rolls his blue eyes at me. “Not everything’s about money.”
“All the important things are,” I counter.
Riggs smiles at me with pity. “This is why you’ve never been truly happy. You’re still trying to find the price tag on joy.”
“Okay, Dr.Phil.”
“Actually, I got that one from a fortune cookie at Panda Express.”
With that, he swaggers out of the room. Christian hands me a fresh drink before sitting down.
“Back to the conversation at hand.” He smooths his tie. “I believe Arya already mentioned she doesn’t want you anywhere near the Ashcroft girl.”
“And I believe I aptly mentioned toherthat I don’t take orders from people who don’t pay me a hefty percentage for my services.”
“Look.” He cuts to the chase. “Arya is not prone to dramatics. If she cares about someone, I’m inclined to believe they’re somewhat special. There are plenty of fish in the sea. If sex is what you’re after—”
“Sex is never about sex.” I stand up, buttoning my blazer. “It’s about power, pleasure, gratification, but never about just sex. Which means that no matter what I want from her—sex is not it.”
Not that it didn’t cross my mind to have Winnifred the night she stayed over. It did. A million times. But what would be the point? We’re going our separate ways in a few days, and there is no need to make things unnecessarily harder for her.
She is a good kid, even if a little too innocent and doe eyed for my taste.
She’s been through enough without throwing a salacious affair with another grade A bastard into the mix. “And I don’t owe you an explanation. What I do with Winnifred, to Winnifred, andforWinnifred is our business only. Not sure what authority you have to be the knight in shining armor. You almost ruined your wife’s life back when you two were ‘just having sex.’ Stay out of my lane, and I’ll stay out of yours.”
