: Chapter 22

“So, how is your sex life?” Sapphire asks, her dazzling blue eyes twinkling at me over the table. “Still tying up strangers and calling it art?”

“Fuck you, you hag. Still seducing married women at the tennis club and calling it fun?”

“Ouch,” she says. “I’d call that deuce.”

“I’d say more like love–all. Especially with us two.”

She shrugs, and the movement makes her shiny curtain of dark hair shimmer on her bare shoulders. Amelia’s hair shimmers like that. But fuck it, I’m not here with Amelia; I’m here with Sapphire Huntington. We had a long-standing date to meet for the premiere of a new Broadway show she wanted to see; I bagged the tickets, and she bagged the aftershow. Now we’re sitting here in this pretentious showbiz basement bar, sipping cocktails and rubbing shoulders with the stars. Not the kind of thing that impresses either of us.

Sapphire went to college with Nathan and is from Chicago. For both reasons, she’s become a friend of mine too.

“No,” she says, pretending to be heartbroken. “We are deeply unlovable people. But also”—she shrugs—“deeply fuckable too. It’s a conundrum. Anyway, here’s to us.”

She raises her glass, and I clink mine against it. It’s great to see her, even if it meant I had to duck out of the team-building event early. Actually, scratch that—it was probably for the best that I had to duck out of the team-building event early.

Things were getting away from me, and I was starting to build way too much team with one particular member of the staff. I probably should have told Amelia I was leaving, but then again, she snuck off early too, and we didn’t make any plans. I could have found out which room she was in, but it wouldn’t have looked good—the boss lurking outside his assistant’s hotel room. There was also a high risk that I would have ended up fucking her brains out.

“I suspect,” Sapphire says, twining a strand of hair around her fingers, “that I might see more of you now that you live in New York than I did when we lived in the same city. Do I sense a weakening of your type-A-for-asshole workaholic nature?”

“How dare you.” I slap a hand to my chest, feigning offense. “I’m insulted. I’ll be a type-A-for-asshole workaholic until the day I die.”

“Fair enough, my handsome friend, fair enough. I am much the same myself, although I do find a lot more time for dating than you do. Isn’t it a crying shame that we can’t do each other?”

She raises her eyebrows at me outrageously, and I shake my head and grin. “Is this the part where you tell me you went through an experimental stage in college and kissed a few boys?”

“Eeeeuw, gross. Boys? No way—they stink. But I’d possibly make an exception for you, Drake.” She bats her eyelashes in an exaggerated manner and pretends to swoon. “You have such pretty lips.”

I scoop an olive out of my martini and ping it at her. It lands amusingly in her cleavage, and she levels me with a look. “It truly is a shock that a gentleman such as yourself is spending his Friday night with his lesbian bestie.” The sharpness of her words is dulled completely when she picks the olive out from between her breasts, shrugs, and pops it in her mouth. “But seriously, no action on the romantic front?”

“There is someone … It’s a complicated situation, and it only happened once. It was basically over before it began. It’s a bad idea for both of us, but …”

“You can’t quite kick the habit?”

That about sums it up. I was right to apologize to Amelia for the way I behaved and to try to build a sturdier bridge between us. But was I right to feel her up in a storage closet and hold her hand in the garden? Or to stare deep into her eyes and see her bare her beautiful soul to me? Probably not. I saw the look on her face when I caught her after that stupid leap of faith she accidentally took. The way she gazed up at me with trust and wonder. She sees something in me that nobody else does—certainly not something I see. Now, instead of simply apologizing to her, I’ve opened all kinds of doors that should remain firmly shut. For both our sakes.

“Wow,” Sapphire says. “You’ve got it bad. You’re a junkie.”

I pull at the collar of my shirt, feeling hot all of a sudden. Sapphire rests her hand on my arm. “You want to get out of this place? I mean, I like watching these guys sing and dance on stage, but in reality, they’re all way too short, and their egos are sucking all the oxygen from the room.” She laughs, and I’m grateful that she knows me well enough that she can see I’m starting to spiral, but she’s far too diplomatic to point it out.

“Yeah. Okay. One drink, though, and then I need to hit the sack. I’m⁠—”

“Let me guess, you’re working tomorrow, even though it’s Saturday?”

“You know me so well,” I reply, standing up and offering her my arm.

We stride out onto the red carpet that’s been set up outside the venue. There are several paparazzi around, which makes sense as the aftershow was packed with celebrities and professionally beautiful people. Sapphire pauses, draws me into an embrace, and gives the photographer a cheeky wink over her shoulder.

“There,” she says as we walk away. “Now you can be my beard. Nobody will ever know I’m gay now.”

“Apart from those seven million women you’ve fucked.”

“Apart from them, yes. Shall we get that last drink at your hotel, and then I can hit the clubs and find a playmate for the evening? Assuming you’re still living at the hotel.”

“I am,” I confirm, hailing a cab to take us there since I sent Constantine home to his family for the night. “The contracts on my loft are taking forever.”

“So you say. I reckon you just like living in a hotel. You’re so much of a commitment-phobe that you don’t even want to tie yourself down to owning a property.”

“I don’t see any ring on your finger either, Sapphire.”

Our banter continues in a similar vein for the next hour or so. One drink turns to two, but after that I draw a line under the night. I’m tired, I do have to work tomorrow, and I’m distracted. I need to get up to my room so I can indulge in my guilty secret and cyber-stalk my secretary. Because no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop thinking about Amelia Ryder, and it physically hurts when I’m away from her. But none of that matters. I don’t own the woman, and I never will. As Sapphire pointed out tonight, commitment isn’t my style, and Amelia is a woman who deserves it all.