Just Like a Man (45 page)

"Yeah, I can take you home, Hannah," he said softly, seriously. He met her gaze levelly, as if he were searching her face for the answer to a very important question. "I just want to make sure you want me to take you home for the right reasons, that's all."

She swallowed with some difficulty, worried about his concern. "What do you mean?" she asked.

He inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly. "I mean if you're just feeling stoked right now because of a dangerous situation and you need to get your ya-yas out by steaming up the sheets with me, then I don't want any part of whatever you have planned."

"Well, aren't we sure of ourselves?" Hannah said, biting back a grin. She couldn't help it. He was just so cute when his manhood was threatened.

His face fell at her remark. "No, I didn't mean… I mean, I'm not… not
at all…
I'd never assume… Hannah, that wasn't what I…"

She started shaking her head before he even finished speaking—mostly because she feared he would never finish speaking. "No, that isn't it," she assured him. And it hadn't been that the first time, either, she realized now. "Right now," she told him, "the last thing I want to do is have sex with you."

His brows arrowed downward with even more concern. "I'm not sure I like the sound of that, either."

"I want you to take me home so we can talk, Michael," she said. "About everything that's happened. About us. About what might happen in the future. And then…"

"And then… ?" he prodded.

"And then," she said, smiling tentatively, feeling tentative, too, "if you say all the right things, and if you and I both want it, I thought maybe we could…"

"What?"

She lifted a hand to his face, cupping his jaw in her palm. And very softly, she said, "Maybe we could make love."

He, too, lifted a hand toward her face, but he hesitated for just a moment before moving it to her hair and smoothing it over the crown of her head. "Is that what it would be?" he asked her. "Making love?"

She nodded. "If everything goes right, and we can both understand, then yes. It would be making love."

"I know that's what it would be for me, Hannah," he continued. "Because I love you. But is that what it would be for you?"

She smiled, feeling encouraged, but she wasn't ready to reveal herself just yet. "Take me home," she said. "We'll talk and see what happens."

They reached for each other at the same time, each leaning into the kiss. They joined briefly, uncertainly, affectionately, because there were others standing so close. But they were left looking at each other with the knowledge that they were by no means finished.

Then, "Come on, Hannah," Michael said softly. "Let's go home."

Selby begged a friend of hers, another teacher, to substitute for her in her returning ed class the week following her discovery of who Thomas Brown really was. She knew there was no way she could face him just yet. Truth be told, she didn't know if she would ever be able to face him again. She had no idea how she could finish teaching the seminar with him sitting out there staring back at her every time she looked up, knowing how he'd deliberately misrepresented himself to her, and knowing how easily she'd fallen for it. Knowing how much she'd come to love him, and how she'd given him something she'd never offered any other man. Knowing how he would haunt her forever because of that.

And where before, his steamy gazes had bothered her because she could only imagine what it would be like to be with him, now she knew. And the knowing was so much more than the imagining had ever been. She'd had no idea how it could be between a man and a woman. Not just physically, but emotionally, too. Because as much of her body as she'd given to Thomas that day, she'd given a thousand times more of herself.

She was at home on a Sunday afternoon, mulling over her dilemma, wondering if she could afford it, financially, to give up her night class entirely, when someone knocked at her front door. And she realized immediately that her problem was a lot more pressing than she thought. She'd figured she had another thirty-six hours to prepare herself before she had to face Thomas again. But who else could it be knocking on her front door? Her friends weren't the kind to drop in for an impromptu visit.

Belting the sash of her short, flowered kimono over the baggy boxer shorts and T-shirt she'd slept in—she didn't care if it was two o'clock in the afternoon, she didn't have to get dressed if she didn't want to—Selby shuffled to the front door and peered through the peephole to verify her suspicion. Then, after only a small hesitation, she unlocked the deadbolt and opened the door. But it wasn't Thomas, after all, she saw when she got a fuller view of him. No, it must have been that other guy instead. The one with the initials TPB—the one who had nineteen-point-six billion, to be exact, not all of it liquid, though, natch. Because Thomas had always looked arrogant and full of himself, and this guy looked anything but. And where Thomas's uniform was ripped jeans and oily T-shirts and leather jackets, this guy was dressed in khaki Dockers and a brown tweedy sweater.

T. Paxton Brown, she knew now. She'd done some checking on him over the past week. She probably should have realized right off who he was, since the guy was a local, even international, celebrity of sorts. And she had recognized his name, once she knew what it was. More than that, she remembered having filled and shipped orders for him during her weekend shifts at Mathilda's. The local billionaire, one of the other salesclerks had told her, went through women like most men went through six-packs. And he always sent them something sexy and expensive from Mathilda's at some point during his wooing—or whatever it was men like him did with the women they set their sights on.

Of course, he'd never sent Selby anything from Mathil-da's, she d reminded herself at the recollection. And she d hated it when she realized how much that bothered her.

"Can we talk?" he said now by way of a greeting.

She lifted one shoulder and let it drop, but the action was jerky and nervous. "Sure. I can talk. I've been able to talk since before I was a year old. Sounds like you can talk, too, if you can articulate a question like that. So I'd have to go with, yeah. We can both talk. In fact, I'll say one more word to prove it. Good-bye."

She began to close the front door, but he shot out a hand to flatten it against the door, and shoved it back open instead, with enough force to send it slamming against the inside wall. Selby gasped and took a step backward in response, her heart leaping into her throat, her stomach plummeting to her toes.

"I didn't get my turn yet," he said coolly as he took a step forward, over the threshold. And just like that, he was Thomas again. The Thomas she'd met that first night of class, confident, swift, assured. The Thomas who had both frightened and intrigued her. The Thomas she had ultimately found so irresistible.

"You're not being fair," he added, his voice dripping now with sarcasm.

That last, she could tell, had been said to get a rise out of her. But she wasn't going to rise. Not for him. She'd fallen too far for that.

She swallowed with some difficulty and screwed up her nerve. He'd surprised her with his vehemence, but she was confident he wouldn't hurt her. Not any more than he already had anyway. "I don't want to talk to you," she told him certainly. "Not ever again."

"Well, that's going to be a little tough, since we've still got more than four months' worth of classes to get through," he pointed out.

Oh, like she needed that reminder. "Then I'll talk in class, and you can take notes," she told him. "That was how it was supposed to work anyway. Had we stuck to the plan, this never would have happened."

He shook his head. "No, that wasn't how it was supposed to work, Selby. And believe me, I did stick to the plan." His expression and voice both softened as he added, "For as long as I could, anyway. Until it blew up in my face."

Oh, no, she thought. She did
not
want him softening. Because soft Thomas had been
really
irresistible. Soft Thomas had been wonderful. And he wasn't soft Thomas, she reminded herself. He was T. Paxton Brown, billionaire playboy, ruthless and careless and loveless.

"I don't know what you're talking about," she told him honestly.

He expelled a long, weary sigh, and suddenly looked exhausted, as if he hadn't slept for a week. He looked empty, too, she noted. Hopeless. Helpless. She knew the look well, after all, since she'd seen it every day in her own mirror.

"How it was supposed to work, Selby," he said, "was that, after meeting you, I was supposed to charm you and mislead you and seduce you and overwhelm you. Then I was supposed to use you sexually until I got tired of you. Then I was supposed to dump you and break your heart and hope you never got over me. That was how it was supposed to work. That was the plan. At least, that was the way I intended for the plan to work that first night I walked into class and saw you sitting there."

A dark hole had opened up in her belly as he'd spoken, and it had filled with something cold and unpleasant with every new word he spoke. "Well, then," she said quietly, "sounds like you got exactly what you wanted. Sounds like your plan worked just fine."

He shook his head, his eyes flinty now and never leaving hers. "Not quite," he said, the two words coming out clipped and cold.

She nodded, then made a production of smacking her open palm against her forehead. "Oh, that's right. I guess I messed it up by finding out who you are before you finished using me sexually. Because screwing a virgin one time couldn't possibly be satisfying. You'd have to screw me a lot more, get me all broken in, before you got any enjoyment out of it. Sorry about that."

He eyed her in silence for a moment, his teeth clamped tight, a single muscle twitching in his jaw. "I didn't screw you," he said softly.

"The hell you didn't," she said.

"And I'm the one who messed it up," he added, ignoring her remark.

"Yeah, you got that right."

"But it wasn't because I didn't get a chance to get tired of you, Selby," he told her. "It was because I fell in love with you."

Oh, no, she thought. Not that again. She wasn't about to listen to that.

"Don't you dare say that word to me," she told him, her voice edged with her fury. Her grip on the doorknob tightened, and it was through no small effort that she didn't slam the door in his face as hard as she could, regardless of where he stood. "You don't even know what it means to love someone."

He dipped his head forward, closing his eyes briefly, as if he were agreeing with her. When he opened them again, though, he fixed his gaze relentlessly on hers. "There was a time when I would have said you're right about that," he told her. "Because there was a time when I didn't—couldn't—love anyone. But that changed, Selby."

"The day you met me, right?" she asked bitterly.

"No," he said, surprising her. "It happened the night I met your friend Deedee."

Okay, now Selby was really confused. "Deedee?" she repeated, recalling that night at Trino's. "For one thing, Deedee's not my friend. And for another thing, what the hell does she have to do with anything? How do you even know her? And how did you know I know her?"