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He’d forgotten to tell her how much he liked her generosity. “I don’t remember the last time I cried, Derelie. But that’s because I fight instead. By that logic, the last time I cried was two nights ago after I’d humiliated you. I did it in front of a man I’d never met whose name was Alvarez. He cried too. Different reasons, but we both were pissed off with ourselves and wanted to do better.”
She came up on her knees. “I don’t like the fighting thing, Jack. It scares me, even though I know it’s not directed at me.”
“Sometimes it scares me too, but I promise you the setup is safe and the man running the show knows what he’s doing. He almost didn’t let me fight.”
She knee-walked a little closer. “What’s next?”
Jack looked at the page. The questions ran together. There was one about dying and last regrets,
another about what you’d save after people and pets if your house was on fire, and a whole question devoted to sharing a problem. He picked that one as the last question he was going to honor. “We’re supposed to share a problem we’ve got and give advice. Do you want to start?”
She looked away, played with a corner of the blanket. In the quiet, he could hear kids yelling about a kite, and in the distance the hum that was the city.
“I want a promotion. I want more money. I want more job security. I’m not sure how to get them. It’s not merit alone. That’s how I might’ve gone about it before, but that’s my hometown girl naivety. You need to be more than good at your job to do well at the Courier. But it’s not like I’m gonna sleep with Phil to get ahead.”
His heart dodged that punch, but it collected him anyway. “You can’t sleep with me to get ahead either.” He’d had those veiled offers. Trading sex for favors wasn’t on his to-do list.
“That’s the problem. That’s what people will think, won’t they?”
“Let’s take a step back and break it down.” He was almost out of apple. He could be detached and clinical about this. “You want better conditions at work and you want to sleep with me.”
“I want dirty, filthy, depraved sex with you.”
He shouldn’t like those words out of her plush lips so much, like how they feathered over his body and made his skin goose-bump. “And the two things could be seen as linked. Easy to unlink them.”
“Not so easy for me, not after thirty-six questions, not now.”
“I walk away. We finish this story and we’re done. Phil gets what he wants. You get to shine.” He was a liar, a cheat and a hypocrite.
She pouted. “That’s win-lose. I want win-win.”
“Greedy.” Gorgeously so.
“Why not? The whole reason I’m in the city is greed. Greed for more in my life, more everything.” She shot him a heated look. “More you.”
His detachment was down to apple core. “How do you think you’re going to solve the problem?”
“I thought you were supposed to advise me.”
“I’m the problem.”
“I thought we could finish the story, give Phil what he wants and have this thing as well.”
“What’s this thing mean to you?” They were starting a new page—he needed it to be one they agreed on.
“Sex, Jack. Rip-roaring, sheet-soaking, mind-bending, ankles-behind-heads sex.”
That was a page in a whole new book of erotic delights. “We can keep it quiet, but do you want to sneak around? The whole Madden-Potter thing is supposed to be secret, but it’s common knowledge.”
“I hate that, all the gossip, and it makes it look like Shona gets favors.”
“Madden is harder on her than anyone.”
“But I don’t work for you, so it’s not the same.”
“To summarize, you want a scorching fling with me.”
“Fling,” she laughed. “I want whatever comes after all these questions. I want what comes of this physical tug between us, and I don’t know that we need to name it anything except good while it lasts.”
