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I dug the heel of my hand into my forehead. I prided myself on never being like my father. Yet here I was, somehow repeating patterns I didn’t even realize.
Clearly I wasn’t fit for any sort of relationship. I’d told Clint that, but of course he hadn’t listened.
So I had to make him hear me.
He was definitely better off not dealing with my baggage. He was a great guy. A vet with an obvious streak of goodness inside his very pretty package.
Ahem, not talking about that package. Not thinking about it either. Nope. Just meant his gorgeous exterior.
He’d even been a model, for pity’s sake. Which he felt he needed to hide for some reason.
But I hid that I edited romance, so who was I to judge?
Hey, maybe we could end up friends. We’d already had sex, so that could just…be off the table. That made sense.
Above all else, Katherine Armitage always valued cold logic. I used to, anyway. It was time I close the door on these last couple weeks of weirdness before Clint realized I was just not what he wanted.
I mean, how had I ever considered I could go as some normal girlfriend stand-in to meet his family?
I wasn’t normal and I didn’t want to create friction between him and the people he loved. I needed to put a stop to this now before things got needlessly messy.
And before I lost my only friend—even if I had no clue why.
As for Princess and Lucky, well, maybe that wasn’t meant to be either. Somehow my cat rental project had fallen apart in my pursuit of hot sex.
Maybe I should start editing sci-fi again. Obviously the constant aroused state of my loins due to my editing was a road to perdition I could not sustain.
“Kate?” my dad repeated a couple times before my brain fully clicked into gear.
“Yeah.”
His breath whooshed out. “Oh, good. I thought you were giving me the silent treatment.”
“Tried it for years. Didn’t change much, did it?” Before he could reply, I rushed ahead. “You’re a man, right?”
“Far as I know, yes.”
“Let me run something by you. If you gave a friend a…personal gift, and then another friend borrowed that personal gift and you told your friend he had taken it, and your friend became irrationally angry, what does it mean?” I was aware I’d left off stuff, but I could not tell this story in full to my father.
Even if he was sort of a swinger. But maybe he would understand Mag’s reaction because I so did not.
I had no one else to ask. Except Clint, and even I knew he was not the one.
Plus I was about to tell Clint I was done with sex, no offense, since none of this stuff made any logical sense to me so he probably wouldn’t agree to be my Dear Abby in any case.
“So one person is female and one is male.” My dad coughed and I imagined him puffing on his cigar while he mulled over my issue. “That’s your problem right there. Men and women can’t be friends. Feelings always get messy. Not to mention, you add in the possibility of sex and it screws up everything.”
“Well, you know women have sex with women now too, right? And men have sex with men. So literally no one can be friends then without sex rearing its head in some way?”
“I never thought of it that way, but you’ve always been the brainiac in the family, baby girl, so you’re probably spot on.” He paused. “You have a male friend? Other than Magnus? And he’s more of a collaborator in business than…oh.” He cleared his throat. “Oh. That’s sticky.”
“Tell me about it.” I swallowed hard. “But it can’t be about sex with him. I just know it can’t.”
Though hehadgiven me a sex toy. Dear God, I was a freaking dolt.
Mostly because I trusted him to level with me. I assumed he’d given it to me for the reason he’d stated—work research. Why would I assume he’d lie about that when he’d always been honest about everything else? At least that I knew.
Because men lie.
