Indecent Proposal (23 page)

“She wasn’t happy?”

“Nora might be physically incapable of happy.”

“I’m sorry. I know you had hoped …”

“She told me I could go home.”

“Really?” Oh, he sounded so happy for her. How novel to have someone happy on her behalf for once.

She waved her hand, as if dispersing that happiness like a swarm of little bugs. As if it didn’t matter, as if it didn’t sit on her heart hard enough to leave marks.

“What about you?” she asked. “Are you happy to go see your sister?”

He nodded, his face different … calm, relaxed. Sweet.

“Tell me about her.”

His smile was fond and it made her chest squeeze with envy.

“Ashley’s … better than the rest of us. She sees the best in people. Works hard on behalf of people who most of the world forgets. She can be brave and headstrong and trouble … lots of trouble.”

“I think I would like her.”

“You probably would. Are you missing yours?”

“Every—” Her voice cracked. “Every day.”

Harrison shifted on the edge of the bed so he faced her more fully, and she wanted to touch him and be touched by him. She wanted to feel good and wanted. To make someone else feel that way.

She wanted what they’d had in the hotel room.

“Will you tell her about me?” she asked, wanting to matter. To someone. “Your sister?”

“I’m guessing she knows already. The news.”

“Right,” she said, embarrassed. “Of course.”

For some reason, in this hushed room with both of
them wearing so little, she found it hard to hold on to her defenses. They rolled off her fingers like marbles. Hard and real, but irrelevant.

“That night,” she whispered, “at the hotel, it wasn’t a lie. Not for me. I didn’t know who you were. I wanted … I wanted you for you.”

“I know.”

“Now you know? What’s made you change your mind?”

“You.” His hand was an inch from hers. Less than an inch. If she moved her finger she’d touch it, and what kind of domino effect would that have? If she touched his hand, would he touch hers? Would he touch her face, her neck, her breasts? The sudden ache between her legs? “You can put on a show, but I don’t think you’d lie.”

“Was it a lie for you?” she asked him.

He lifted his hand and it stalled halfway between them.

Do it
, she thought, please.
Touch me
.

And then he did. With a tender hand he stroked back the hair on her forehead, tucking it behind her ear. She swallowed a gasp, like some still and silent thing just waiting in the deep for a spark to bring her back to life.

And his touch was that spark.

“No. It wasn’t a lie. I wanted you and that night, I think I would have done anything to have you. But I’m not that man,” he told her. “I’m not … Harry.”

“Are you sure?”

His smile gave her that familiar gut punch of happy. “You’ve met my family.”

“You’re not your family.” That came out a bit more fierce than she’d expected. She could blame Nora for that. And for this painful compulsion in her body, that in the dark landscape of the last few months was too bright.

“I’m not?” His thumb traced the side of her face, touched, just briefly, the corner of her lip. “I’m sure most of the time that is all I am.”

Her breath shuddered in her lungs and she felt brave, of all things.

“Don’t you wish—”

“I was someone else? No. Not really,” he said, cutting her off. His blue eyes the color at the center of a flame.

She thought he might kiss her and she thought she might let him.

But then he stood. His touch gone. The moment over.

“But I was a different man that night, and it was nice,” he said at the door, his hand against the door frame.

She knew better, she did, but somehow Ryan wasn’t totally convinced.

Saturday, September 7

It seemed like her appetite returned just as a small silver bowl of peach cobbler was set down in front of her at the League of Women Voters Annual Community Luncheon. She’d picked her way through the crab cakes and a wedge salad, but not even sitting next to Patty could kill her sudden hunger for the cinnamon ice cream on top of peaches that literally melted in her mouth.

“Perhaps smaller bites?” Patty murmured out of the side of her mouth.

“You gonna eat yours?” she asked back, pointing at Patty’s cobbler with her spoon.

The luncheon had been actually quite nice. It was held in a ballroom at the Hilton filled with pink and white lilies and chandeliers and more blond hair than could be naturally possible. Patty, in front of a room
full of other people, had been subdued. Chatty, even. And as much as it pained Ryan to admit it, Patty in her natural habitat (which seemed to be a ballroom filled with rich women) was pretty impressive. She knew everyone and was gracious to everyone, particularly the women who looked like they would have happily ignored her.

There was a steady stream of women waiting to talk to her, ask her questions. Ask for help and advice. Noelle, beside her, took steady notes, and accepted business cards from women who wanted appointments.

Patty remembered everyone’s name! It was miraculous.

Patty was kind of the Queen Bee.

And Ryan was a little in awe.

Ryan had her own lineup of women who wanted to talk to her. Most of them just wanted to coo over her ring and ask backhanded questions about Harrison and how they met. She sensed a few astonished and sour grapes and imagined that many of the beautiful and accomplished women in this room had believed themselves perfect for Harrison.

And they would be.

Too bad, ladies!
she thought, entertained by the idea that Ryan Kaminski from northeast Philly, with her own potent mix of hot sympathy sex and a defective condom, beat out all these rich women with their pedigrees and diplomas for the most eligible bachelor in Atlanta.

The ballroom was emptying out, and staff in white shirts and black vests came out with the big trays to take away the dishes left on the tables. Luckily, they were starting on the other side of the room, leaving her plenty of time alone with the desserts at the table.

“Can I sit down?”

It was Noelle behind her. Noelle with her terrifying efficiency and her blond hair pulled back in the tightest bun ever conceived outside of the Russian Ballet.

“Are you talking to me?” she asked through a mouthful of ice cream.

Noelle glanced around the mostly empty ballroom. “Yes, Ryan. To you. Can I sit down?”

“Sure,” she said with a shrug. “Hand me that one, would you?” She pointed toward one of the uneaten cobblers on the other side of the table.

“Are you kidding? That’s someone else’s food.”

“She didn’t even look at it.”

Noelle grabbed the silver dish and set it down in front of Ryan with a thump.

“You can have some if you want,” Ryan said, hoping she wouldn’t want any. “It’s really good.”

Noelle put down a stack of files and didn’t so much sit as kind of collapse into her chair.

“Do you have a plan for when this is over?” Noelle asked.

“I’m going to take a cab back to the condo—”

“No, I mean, when this …” Noelle twirled her hand around the ballroom. “When this charade you’re a part of is over.”

“Why?” Noelle, surrounded by the wilting flower arrangements and empty tables, seemed like a sorority sister at the end of a bad night. Ryan put down the silver bowl. “You okay?”

“Like you care?”

She shook her head, marginally entertained at the sudden venom from the quiet girl. At least it was something she understood. All these backhanded women with their double-edged compliments left her off balance.

“Would it be easier for you if I didn’t care?” she asked.

“Why in the world would you care about me?”

“Why wouldn’t I? You haven’t done anything to me.”

“My boss wants to annihilate you.”

“Well, I didn’t say I cared about your boss. As far as I can tell, you are not the same person.”

“Oh, God, there are days I’m not sure if we are.” Noelle put her head in her hands as if her skull were just so damn heavy. “I started working for Patty ten years ago, right out of college, and I thought I was so lucky to get the job, to get the chance to work with the Montgomery family. I thought I would be
doing
something. Something real.”

“You don’t think you are?”

Noelle laughed. Like really laughed. It was very strange. “I’m helping a vindictive and paranoid woman strangle her family. And lie over and over again to the voters of this state.”

“Noelle, maybe this isn’t the best place for this conversation,” she breathed, looking around to see if any of those backhanded women were lurking behind flower arrangements. Was this a mental breakdown? She’d witnessed more than her share of women losing it in public places, but never someone as locked down and together as Noelle. She was blinking a lot, but that could be the bun. Ryan patted Noelle’s fist beside her files. But at first contact, Noelle jerked her hand away.

“No. Don’t. Oh, God, the last thing I need is you pitying me. I’ve made my own decisions. But you need to have a plan.”

“I’ll be okay, Noelle, don’t worry about me. But what are—”

“Patty has asked me to find your ex-husband.”

The ice cream she’d eaten congealed in her throat and she choked. “Paul?”

“I can put her off, but she’ll find him.” Noelle took a
deep breath and picked up her stack of files. “You seem like a nice woman. I admire the way you’re not backing down and frankly, I think the best thing for Harrison would be getting away from this family, but it won’t happen. Get a plan. Get one now. And get out.”

Chapter 18

It was late when Harrison got home from Arkansas three days after he’d left. It was late and he was a mess. He was a black hole; he was antimatter.

And so, when he got into the condo he went right to the liquor cabinet. Because what black holes needed was to get blind drunk.

“Harrison?”

He barely managed not to do a spit take.

“Ryan,” he said, turning to find her on the couch, an unfamiliar red blanket over her legs. “I thought you’d be in bed.”

“What time is it?” She sat up and he saw that she had her laptop wedged next to her body. She was sleepy and rumpled and … here. She was here in his lonely apartment. His lonely life. And for one acidic and strange moment he was so damn glad. Glad that he wasn’t alone. And that it was her on that couch, rubbing her eyes, feisty and wrong in every obvious way, but somehow right in ways that he couldn’t quite capture.

“Two … maybe three.”

“In the morning?”

He smiled into his drink. “Yes.”

“How was Arkansas?” she asked. Harrison finished off what was left in the glass before pouring himself some more. “Not good, I take it?”

“Fine,” he said, before shooting that drink back, too. He said fine because that was what he was used to saying.
Because that was the answer his mother told him to make when asked anything.

Fine. Everything is just fine
.

And because he didn’t know how to put into words all of the ways that things were exactly
not
fine. And because … he didn’t know where he stood with Ryan. For a second the other day in her bedroom when he’d handed her the key, he’d nearly kissed her. And she would have let him; she all but spelled out her welcome in those languid lines of her body.

But he couldn’t. And now he was glad he hadn’t.

He’d realized the last few days in Bishop that the reason his night with Ryan had been so amazing was that they had come together as equals. On every level. And that happened only because he’d lied.

“What happened to no lies between us?” she whispered.

He poured himself one more drink and then went to sit on the opposite side of the couch. She set down the computer and curled her legs under her, making sure the red blanket covered her toes. Perversely he wanted to fling back that blanket, reveal her toes. Her long legs. Her beautiful self.

“My sister is in love.”

“That’s bad?”

“She’s in love with a bodyguard, that man Brody who got her out of Somalia. But he has worked for some very bad people in the past. In particular, a dirty former senator who was selling arms to even dirtier people overseas.”

“Oh my God,” she breathed.

“Well, it gets worse. Because that senator was murdered in Cairo this morning, the security company Brody was working for is now under investigation. He will undoubtedly get subpoenaed, and in order to try to keep the blowback from hurting my sister, I made it
clear that Brody wasn’t good enough and he had to break it off with her.”

Somehow the words did nothing to convey what happened in that back alley behind a bar in Bishop, Arkansas. The way he saw another man’s heart break wide open and all his self-loathing and despair come pouring out.

Brody had been in ruins and Harrison made it worse—he used it to his own end. He took all that self-loathing and turned it into a tool to drive the man away from his sister.

He moaned, in his throat, staring blindly out the window at the night.

“What I did,” he whispered, “was exactly what my mother would have done. Exactly. Protect the family, no matter who it hurts.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah,” he laughed humorlessly, remembering Brody’s resigned, dead eyes. Ashley’s livid, tear-filled ones. “Ouch. But he was already there; he knew they had to break up. If it was any other situation maybe it could have worked, but he was protecting really bad guys. He’s on his way back to Washington, D.C., to face the whole shit storm.”

“I meant ouch for you,” she said.

Oh don’t
, he wanted to say.
You’ll kill me with your sympathy and I don’t deserve it
. “I doubt Ashley sees it that way. I’m pretty sure she hates me right now.”

“Well, she’s a grown woman. And her own person, so she can make her own decisions. It’s not fun having your brother interfere in your love life.” She ducked her head, catching his eye and smiling. “As I well know.”

Right. Wes
. He remembered with sudden clarity that night in New York, how her faith in Harrison’s ability to save his sister stemmed from her faith in her own brother.