If the Shoe Fits (18 page)

After taking off the rest of her clothes, Sarah slipped on her favorite stretched-out gray T-shirt and black yoga pants (or whatever the right word was for baggy black pants in which one never did yoga), then went into the bathroom and scrubbed her face and brushed her teeth. She felt like it was four in the morning and was amused to see it was only shortly after midnight according to the gold clock on the mantle, yet another reminder of her mother.

And now Devon. Because that clock had marked the passage of those wonderful hours with him in her bed.

Sarah took a deep breath and walked downstairs to see if the two of them could have a rational conversation and maybe just not be so intense. Maybe they could be friends.

She smiled at the rapidity with which she was turning into a poster child for every possible romantic cliché. He’s royal! He’s fabulous in bed! He’s insanely jealous! He’s my new best friend!

Ugh.

“I made some tea,” Devon said.

Sarah looked at her kitchen counter, where he’d set up a sweet little tray of cream and sugar and an actual teapot.

“Thanks. That’s nice.”

He kept staring at her and Sarah reached up to touch her forehead. “Do I have something on my face?”

“No. Just… so freshly scrubbed. You look ravishing. Pure as driven snow.”

“Don’t talk like that… please.”

His eyebrows pulled together as he looked away from her pleading gaze and down at the teapot. He lifted the little top to see if it had steeped enough, then poured them each a cup. “How do you take it?”

Not
well, I’m afraid
, she wanted to answer, but smiled instead and said, “Lots of cream, very little sugar.”

He smiled and made it the way she asked.

“Let’s sit here in the kitchen. It feels appropriate for a postmortem, don’t you think?” She gestured toward the white marble countertops and the round white tulip table tucked in the corner. “All very easy to wipe down.”

He smiled wider and brought the tea tray over to the small table.

“Thanks,” she said, taking her cup and a grateful sip.

He took a sip of his, never taking his eyes from hers across the rim of his cup.

“So,” Sarah began. “I’m afraid I’m going to resort to a kind of corporate version of myself, but I don’t know how else to… talk about… to address what happened before. I just…”

She looked up and tried to appreciate him in the most objective way. He was so beautiful. Couldn’t she just maybe enjoy him…
Yessssss! Yessss!
her body cheered. No. She couldn’t. She knew she couldn’t. Bronte was the one who was all on about no strings attached and transitional men and look where that had landed her. Knocked up.

Plus, Sarah didn’t know what kind of boring sex Bronte was used to having, but there was
no
way
Sarah could ever have sex again with Devon Heyworth without getting very,
very
deeply attached. Her body was already like an addict, for goodness’ sake. Best to nip that part right in the bud.

He was waiting patiently for her to finish. Why couldn’t he have exercised similar restraint when she’d come home from dinner? Why did he have to fly off the handle? She sighed.

“Just tell me. I can take it.”

She looked back into his eyes and was relieved that the misery and grief she’d seen there before was now gone. Sarah hoped she had imagined it in the first place.

“I just can’t possibly sleep with you anymore.”
Nooooooooo!
“It would be too… fraught. And I like you—”

He smiled as if it were a nail in the coffin, but she smiled back wider.

“What? I do like you. But if we went on to have some torrid, sexy affair… I mean, I just don’t see that working for either of us.”

He didn’t say anything, but he narrowed his eyes and looked like he was sorting out some kind of mathematical equation. Maybe he was developing a statistical equation to calculate the odds of ever getting her back into bed.

“I think I could see a torrid, sexy affair working for me,” he said in a low, provocative whisper.

Sarah met his stare and upped the ante. “Even if I go to Milan to stay with another man next weekend?”

His face clouded immediately.

“Or when I am in Singapore with my friend Christophe?”

He looked downright stormy, then his expression suddenly lifted. “You’re just trying to bait me. You were a revirgin, remember? You don’t fly around sleeping with guys.”

Sarah shrugged. “Look,” she interrupted, “that’s neither here nor there. The basic thing is that you totally freaked out and I’m just embarking on my life”—she didn’t think she needed to actually say the stupid phrase
sex
life
, since even Mr. Self-Absorbed seemed to finally get the hint—“and I don’t want all of this drama. I have enough drama in my life. I sell drama, for goodness’ sake.”

Devon Heyworth was momentarily stunned to realize
he
was the one getting a lecture on being overly dramatic. He almost burst out laughing but was too dumbfounded to do much of anything. He had fucked this up so completely, there was no elegant exit strategy.

“Devon?”

He looked up again. “Sorry. Right. No more sex.”

She laughed. “Yeah. In three words or less, I guess that’s the deal. No more sex for us.” She sighed despite herself. “Seems a shame, doesn’t it?”

“Crying shame!” Devon agreed, hoping she’d have a change of heart. He could be an unemotional tosser if that’s what she was after. And then he had the sickening realization that for the first time in his life, he wasn’t absolutely sure he
could
be an unemotional tosser after all. Not with Sarah James. Not in the way she was talking about. He could be a possessive, demanding, freakishly jealous tosser. No problem. But a blasé, we’re-free-to-see-other-people tosser? No. Fucking. Way.

“But that’s how it goes.” Sarah shrugged again. “I can’t afford you… the emotional price tag would be too high, don’t you think?”

Devon smiled and reached out for her hand. She almost withheld it, then let him bring it to his lips for a courtly kiss. She pulled it away quickly and rubbed the spot where his lips had touched hers.
Wiping
me
off
, he thought miserably.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Sarah said softly.

Devon stared at Sarah and realized he had been running all the wrong programs in his mind when it came to seducing her. Because when he saw that tenderness in her eyes, the repressed longing in her heart, he no longer wanted to seduce her. He wanted to marry her.

And that was just
wrong
. He never wanted to marry anyone.
Ever
.

She caught the change in his expression. “You just realized I was right, didn’t you? That we’re just all wrong for each other?”

He shook his head, speechless.
Right? Wrong? Run!
his bachelor brain cried. “I… I don’t know what to think anymore, Sarah. I think I’m a mess. And you’re probably right. I don’t think… I think…”

She smiled and patted the back of his hand. “It just shouldn’t be this hard this soon. Let’s just be glad we were mature enough to bow out before things got too messy. Right?”

“Right.” He answered because it would have been rude to sit there like a statue, but the truth of that matter was that Devon Heyworth had never felt more removed from the shores of right and wrong in his entire life.

“Okay, whew.” Sarah stood up and took the tea tray to the sink. “That wasn’t so bad. You think?” She was rinsing the dishes and putting them in the stainless steel drying rack next to the sink. “It would be silly for you to go back to a hotel at two in the morning. Just sleep on the daybed in the boudoir, okay?”

“Okay.” He was so far out of his depth, and he was the supposed high-ranking official in the field of seduction.

She dried off her hands, then came back to where he was sitting. “Let’s shake on it, like we should have done last weekend when I left Amberley.” She held her hand out to him.

He stared at it then up into her eyes. Something deep and beautiful flashed in those gray eyes, and Sarah’s breasts tensed and throbbed in a split second of being in that gaze. She let her hand drop.

“Maybe too soon for a handshake,” she muttered. “Sleep well, Devon.”

“Thanks, Sarah. You too.”

She was already scooting out of the kitchen like a terrified rabbit, taking the stairs two at a time to get as far away from Devon Heyworth as quickly as possible.

She went into her bedroom and curled up in the bed. Of course, he had been in it the entire night before, so the hint of Devon’s scent filled the pillows and upholstery. She put her face down and closed her eyes. The smell of Devon made her feel safe.

How
was
that?
she wondered sarcastically. The man had very nearly attacked her in the middle of her living room floor and the thought of him made her feel
safe
?

Who was the psycho in that equation? Duh. She was.

Well, that was already history. And if there was one thing Sarah was perfectly capable of doing, it was moving on. She had only known the guy for a week, for goodness’ sake. He was Bronte’s brother-in-law. It was a fling, nothing more.

She was only twenty-five-years old—soon to be twenty-six, but still—she was a babe in the woods. This was the very beginning. She was a successful, independent, attractive (Devon had said beautiful, but he was obviously playing with a partial deck), resourceful young woman. She was just embarking on her romantic life. So the first episode had been somewhat… accelerated. And doomed.

She could adjust. Maybe she should call Eliot Cranbrook and see if he still wanted to meet up for lunch—

Ugh.

That was so
not
the solution to her present circumstances.

She tried to sleep and was almost there when she heard the creak of Devon’s weight on the tread of the second-to-last step. He turned away from her bedroom and she heard him settle into the boudoir, then all was silent again.

After another few hours of tossing and turning, she finally fell asleep near dawn. When she woke up Sunday morning, it was nearly noon.

And Devon was gone.

Sarah spent all afternoon Sunday and well into the evening going over all of her presentation materials for the board meeting. The financial reports for the past year, the negotiations report documenting the ongoing discussions with the new Italian leather supplier, the distribution channels in the United States, and the possibility of opening in London. She had left everything neatly piled on the kitchen counter Friday afternoon when she came up from work. Almost immediately after settling in at her kitchen table with her business documents and a large latte, she felt restored.

Sure, it was all intense and passionate and life-altering (she had to face it, she was no longer a virgin and that was that), but really, nothing had changed. She thought of her father’s secretary, Wendy, and one of her favorite expressions, “You need to put on your Teflon raincoat and walk out into the shit storm.” Wendy wasn’t much for swearing (she called it verbal lassitude), but in certain cases, she used it to great effect.

And Devon Heyworth was a shit storm if there ever was one. A week ago, it was all flowers and uncontrollable laughter, and a few days later, it was
The
French
Lieutenant’s Woman
… the subplot that ended badly. Sarah smiled at the idea of Jeremy Irons or Meryl Streep ever having to beg for anything and decided that what she really needed was a powerful dose of Letitia Vorstadt Pennington Fournier. It was past supper in Paris, and her grandmother was most likely stretched out on a chaise with a large Marie Brizard and the
International
Herald
Tribune
.

The atonal French ring came across the phone line as Sarah waited for the call to go through.

“
Allo?
”

“
Cendrine? C’est Sarah. Je voudrais parler avec ma grand-mere. Est-elle la?
”

The sweet maid, who had lived with Letitia for as long as Sarah could remember, said something kind and doting about how much she missed Sarah and brought the phone to Letitia. Over the years, Cendrine had metamorphosed into a member of the family. Sarah frequently came upon Letitia and Cendrine sitting companionably at the kitchen table in Cap Ferrat, drinking coffee in happy silence, trading sections of the newspaper or commenting on a story in
Paris
Match
or
Hello!
magazine. Letitia insisted that Cendrine always be dressed as a “proper maid” (pale blue dress with white apron in the south, black dress with white apron in Paris), but that was the extent of her responsibilities, other than bossing around the battalion of other minions who actually did all the work. “
Au
revoir, ma petite. Ta grand-mere est ici
.”

Letitia took the phone from Cendrine, after pretending to chastise her for her deplorable lack of decorum when it came to phone etiquette, then greeted Sarah with a four-syllable version of the word
da-ahr-li-ing
. Her grandmother launched into a week-by-week breakdown of her upcoming winter travel plans and where it would be best for Sarah to meet up with her next.

“Fiesole would be ideal. We should be there and settled by early November, really only a few weeks from now. I think we’ll stay for a bit longer this year, maybe even through Christmas. But it gets a bit too damp by the end of December, so I was thinking of St. Barts. Doesn’t that sound divine? My friend Leonore has a lovely villa there and said it is just sitting empty, but I think she’s angling for an invitation to France next summer and I just don’t think I can bear her under the same roof for any length of time, and she tends to stay far too long, so perhaps we could stay at a plain old hotel… but that sounds so
pedestrian
, don’t you think, darling? Or maybe a yacht?” Letitia paused, uncharacteristically. “Sarah?”

“Yes?”

“What are you doing, dear? Did you want to
chat
or did you want to
talk
? I am not in the mood to be chastised if that’s why you’re calling.”