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“You’re an idiot.You realize that, right?”
Daniel sighed and sank back into his leather sofa. “Yes, I realize that. I also realized that when you told me the same thing five minutes ago. This verbal abuse is well-deserved, Elle, but not particularly helpful.”
Eleanor stopped pacing the length of his living room rug and turned to face him.
“Can you at least explain to me why, at the most intensely vulnerable moment of Anya’s life, you decided to offer her money for her virginity? Can you do that for me, Daniel? I’m begging you to do that for me. If I woke up to find a crop circle in my bedroom, I would be less curious about the origin of that than I am about why the hell someone as intelligent as you would do something that mind-blowingly stupid. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I swear…”
Crossing herself dramatically, Eleanor collapsed and lay like a murder victim in the center of the floor. With one finger she started outlining her body, etching a makeshift chalk outline in the pile of the rug.
“I wasn’t thinking with my head at the time. Sorry. Anya’s in the auction to make money so she could get her brothers and sisters out from under her father’s thumb. I just wanted her to know that if she slept with me, she wouldn’t have to worry about the money. I would take care of her. She didn’t have to worry about anything—money or otherwise. That’s all I was trying to say.”
The corpse of Eleanor raised her head and stared at him.
“And you just couldn’t say it just like that? You couldn’t say, ‘Don’t worry about anything. I will take care of you’? Trust me, that’s hot. I’m speaking as a woman who is constantly broke and if a guy told me he’d take care of me, I’d appreciate it. Actually, I probably should have thought of that before falling in love with a man under a vow of poverty. If I fuck you again, will you pay off my student loans?”
Daniel glared at her.
She shrugged. “Worth a shot.”
Daniel rubbed his forehead as he re-imagined that moment with Anya on his bed:
Don’t worry about anything, Anya. I’ll take care of you…And maybe she’d ask him what he meant by that, and he could have said,I want you but not just in my bed and not just tonight. I want you in my life. And I want kids, lots of them, and you come with five of them. I’ll take them all because I have big empty house in the country that you and all your brothers and sisters are welcome to. If you want children of your own we can have them and if not, that’s fine. Let me own you, all of you, and you will never have to worry about anything ever again…
If he had said that, what he really meant, she would have stayed all night. And maybe even forever.
“Am I insane for thinking I could fall in love with her?” Daniel asked.
“No. But you are insane for fucking it up so badly.”
“I do that a lot.”
She gave him a look. Pursed lips. Pure disapproval.
“Stop with the self-pity,” she said. “You didn’t fuck anything up with me. I was already in love with someone else when we met. And you didn’t fuck anything up with Maggie, and you know she’d say the same thing.”
Daniel sighed again. “She would, yeah. She even…she left me a note telling me to get married again because I was such a good husband to her.”
“See?”
“And yet…I’m fucked.”
“Well and truly fucked, Danny Boy. Question is—how are we going to get you un-fucked?”
Daniel slid from the couch to the floor and lay down beside Eleanor. “I think I have an idea.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re going to buy her at the auction tonight.”
“I’m going to buy her at the auction tonight.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not? Bad idea?”
“Impossible idea. See?”
Eleanor rolled over and grabbed her bag. Digging through it she tossed out books and pens and notebooks, a small brown plush animal dinosaur, a map of Belgium, a package of birth control pills, a pair of handcuffs, a set of rosary beads, and finally some kind of folded card.
“Here.” She gave him the paper. “It’s the auction program for the night. Look under the submissive listings—they’re the ones on the left.”
