Hot and Bothered(61)

                “Mark.”

                “Haven.” He crossed his arms to match hers.

                “We can’t keep doing this.”

                “Haven. We’re not doing ‘this.’ This—” he gestured, encompassing both of them, her apartment, the kitchen, breakfast “—is not a this. It’s us. It’s—”

                “It’s messy. It’s foolish. It’s dangerous for you and for your father.”

                He closed his eyes. “Haven, I like you. I like you way too much for games.”

                “I know,” she said. “I like you way too much for games, too. That’s why we can’t play this one. I want you to have what you need, and that means being—celibate, if you prefer—for the time being. Until the tour is well underway, or maybe even over.”

                “Couldn’t you drop me as a client? Couldn’t I work with someone else?”

                “Not now,” she said. “Seventeen different reporters know we’re working together. If you went to someone else, then everyone would want to know why.”

                “And we could explain. We could tell the truth.”

                The truth was evident in how she’d felt with him yesterday. In the dressing room, in the cab, in her bed.

                But truth wasn’t her job. Jimmy Jeffers had given her a task: clean Mark Webster up, make him ready for the tour. Even if Mark thought he didn’t want her to, she had to stick with the plan.

                And she had to find a way to make him understand.

                “Oh, hell,” he said, before she could speak. “You don’t want to. You want the tour. You’d rather give up what’s happening between us for your career, or whatever it represents to you.”

                “It’s not just about my career,” she said. “It’s about yours, too, and about your father. I can’t turn everything we’ve both worked for upside down for something that might just be a fantasy. I mean, here we are, and I’m your fairy godmother, right? You know, people write articles about this in image consulting–trade magazines. Don’t fall for your creation. It’s a huge danger, to make someone over to be exactly who you want them to be, and then when they’re how you want them—clean shaven and short-haired and well dressed and behaving like you’ve told them to, fall in—”

                She stopped before the word could pass her lips. His jaw tightened at the omission, and she wondered how he would have reacted if she’d said it out loud, that thing she wasn’t sure was true but also wasn’t sure wasn’t true.

                Maybe some people would have had a moment of revelation right then. Oh, my God, I’m in love with him! Or I might be, anyway! And they’d stop in their tracks and say, Love trumps everything, let’s throw caution to the wind and just go with the flow here. But that was only half the equation. Suspecting she might have fallen in love with him didn’t tell her anything about how he felt about her. And even if he believed himself to be in love with her—

                She cut off her own runaway thoughts. “When you make someone over, you can think they’re someone they’re not. And they can try too hard to be who you want them to be. That’s not good for either of you. You’re not my creation, you’re a real human being. So let’s give you the time to be that person before we complicate things any more.”

                Mark turned away, then back, his eyes dark. “Don’t say, ‘let’s’ like it’s a decision I agree to. I hate the idea. What I want is to go back to bed with you and stay there for another few days.”