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“You’re so callous about everything.”
“You wanted me to be devastated for you?” He stands up to follow me across his apartment.
Yes, yes I did.
I stop at the door, turn around, and fling out my arms. “I wanted you to comfort me!”
He stares at me, a little confused.
“Why’re you looking at me like that? What’s so bad about wanting to be comforted? Have you never consoled anyone in your life?”
We’re still for a moment before he speaks. “No.”
His voice is quiet, forlorn. “Never,” he admits. “I’m not sure where to start.”
Vacillating between scolding him and teaching him, I decide to go for the latter. After all, I know what his childhood was like. Distant father, no mother, and a stepmother who banished him from his home.
“There are a few ways.” I munch on my lower lip. “My favorite is just to cuddle and sleep in each other’s arms. My momma always used to hug me to sleep when I had a bad day. Even when I was a teenager. Cuddling is a great destresser.”
He squares his shoulders. “Cuddle. Right. I can do that.”
“Why, though?” I stare at him with a mixture of disbelief and suspicion. “Why humor me?”
He throws me a sarcastic smirk. “Because you haven’t fulfilled your part of the bargain yet, why else?”
I’m not sure I believe him—I don’t want to believe him—but I still trudge my way to his open arms like a moth to a flame. I plaster my cheek over his chest, hoping to feel his heart racing the way mine does.
“If we cuddle in your bed, I want no funny business.” I speak into the rich fabric of his shirt.
“I . . . no, you can’t go into my bedroom.” He places his hand on the small of my back, ushering me to a small guest room down the hallway with a queen-size bed.
“Why?”
He looks around himself, as if looking for an excuse. “I don’t let people in my bed.”
“You’ve never mentioned it before.” I frown.
“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 is 10cc?” Riggs presses on an imaginary buzzer à la Jeopardy!, 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 my guest 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 at home,” 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. Discover magazine 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.”
