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“You asked me on a date so we could get to know each other. But then when you had an opportunity to really lay it all out, you didn’t. At least have the courtesy to be honest with me. You don’t like me being friendly with your mom because I’m just a good-time girl you had to marry because we got caught up in a scandal. I’m not good enough to be a real wife.”
He shut his eyes for a blink, as that barb arrowed through his gut nice and deep. He had no excuse for not having seen that coming. Obviously she was playing back things she’d heard from others, and he’d unwittingly stepped right in the center of the land mines.
Yep. Not marriage material. This was why he stuck to sex, which he was good at, and shied away from anything that smacked of intimacy, which he was not good at.
“Roz, look at me.” She did, her eyes barely discernible in the dark as he fumbled his way through. “Don’t let your father’s pigheadedness color your opinion of yourself. No one here is judging you for your sins. The reason I got testy is solely because I’m a jerk who doesn’t like to share. My mom has been mine alone for a long time. We’re a unit. I didn’t want to lose that, or have that diluted somehow if you... Wow, this sounds really bad out loud.”
She smiled with the faintest stirrings of tenderness. “No, it sounds honest. Which I like.”
“This is me being honest,” he agreed. If that was all she was looking for, maybe he didn’t have to botch this too badly. “So you have to believe me when I say earlier was a combination of you in that dress and me being territorial. And maybe a bit of foot-in-mouth disease.”
Her laugh washed through him, dissolving a lot of the tension, and he had to fight the muscles in his hand so that he didn’t reach for her. The reasons he wanted to were totally mixed up and he didn’t fully understand this urge to connect himself with that laugh in a way that had nothing to do with sex.
“Honesty is the best policy. So I’ll return the favor. I don’t remember my mom from when she was healthy. I just remember her sick and in a hospital bed, dying. Today a woman I admire invited me to lunch for the first time in my adult life. The fact that she’s your mother didn’t even factor into why it meant so much to me. Are you starting to see why I got a little bent out of shape about you getting bent out of shape?”
Her tone walloped him, dredging through his gut with razor-sharp teeth. He’d behaved like a jackass and stabbed at Roz’s wounds at the same time. This wasn’t a run-of-the-mill fight, like what normal couples might go through. They were surfacing enormously difficult emotions that he shouldn’t want any part of.
But he was still here.
“If I say I’m sorry, will that help?”
Her smile widened. “Maybe.”
Hell, why was he fighting this insanely strong urge to touch her? He skimmed his fingertips down her jaw and feathered a thumb across her lips. “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t even blink, just leaned until her lips hit his, and then treated him to the longest, sweetest kiss of his experience. Everything fell away except her and he froze, letting her drive this to whatever completion she wished because this was about feeling her out, learning who she was besides the woman he’d had hot, dirty sex with in Vegas.
God, he’d needed this, needed her in ways he wouldn’t have guessed. The anticipation of getting her into his arms just like this flavored it so heavily that kissing her was nearly mind-altering. And this wasn’t even close to the kind of kiss he’d envisioned jumping into all night. This was something else.
She pulled back and tilted her forehead to his until they touched. “I’m sorry, too. For being difficult. But not for kissing you. You needed the reminder that we’re a unit. Peanut butter and jelly.”
Yes. That’s what it was. A solidifying of their union. No longer was this a marriage favor he was doing for his mother. He and Roz were becoming something. What, he wasn’t sure yet, but it was so much more real than what he’d envisioned.
No. That wasn’t what was happening here. Something lodged in his chest and he couldn’t breathe all at once. He couldn’t care about Roz, not like they were a couple. Not like there was any possibility of something deeper than a surface connection that started and ended with sex.
She didn’t think there was something bigger than a marriage of convenience happening here. Did she? Had he messed up her expectations with all the talk of dates and getting to know each other? Had he screwed up his own expectations?
Surely not. Maybe some things had gotten a little out of whack, strictly due to the rules she’d laid down. The solution was to marry her and get to the place where he could block all that out with lots of hot sex, obviously. The lack of it was throwing them both off, that was all. He’d been forced into this pseudo-intimacy because of the scandal and now that he’d proven he wasn’t a sex addict, it was time to move on to the next level. Once things were on familiar ground, he could fix all their fights with orgasms and then no one had to apologize for anything.
“We’ve got to get a wedding date on the calendar and you in a dress,” he muttered.
The sooner the better.
Six
Somehow, Hendrix pulled off a miracle and got the wedding planned in record time, even down to the last place-setting. Roz wasn’t confused about his motivation. She’d thrown down a gauntlet that they couldn’t have sex until the wedding and had unwittingly created an environment that meant they’d be tense and irritable around each other.
Frankly, she was a little tired of it, too. They didn’t have anything in common other than blind lust and a desire to fix the scandal. She got that. Their one disastrous attempt at a date had ended with solid reminders that her skill set didn’t extend to forming connections with people, especially not with men—because she was good at having sex with them, but nothing else. Hendrix was no exception.
After her patient attempt to work through his unexpected freak-out over what should have been a simple announcement that she’d had lunch with Helene, his response? Let’s get you in a wedding dress so I can finally get what I came for.
Fine. They weren’t a real unit. Not like Hendrix and Helene, and the reminder had been brutal. Maybe she’d started to feel a little mushy about t
he idea of being part of something, but it had been nothing but a mirage.
They were getting married for reasons that had nothing to do with peanut butter and jelly and she’d agreed to that. It was smart. Not romantic, and that was a good thing. Less painful in the long run.
She liked orgasms as much as the next girl, so there was really no downside. Except for the niggling feeling that she and Hendrix had been on the verge of something special in the car and then it had vanished.
