“Take your time. We only get three meals a day. We might as well enjoy them, right?”
I nodded. “Absolutely.” I made a point to slow down. “So what are your afternoon plans?”
“I’ve got a little bit of work to do, and I’d like to work on my table some more.”
“Did your mom ask for it?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s a gift. She doesn’t know.”
“That’s sweet of you,” I said, thinking about that old saying that if a man knew how to treat his mother right, he’d treat his woman right.
He shrugged modestly. “What time are you meeting Quinn?” he asked, ever the expert at deflecting the attention from himself.
“Three o’clock,” I said, and he glanced at the clock. “I have a question for you.”
He looked up at me with curiosity.
“Your note this morning said that you think you have a solution to my problem. I assume you meant my Richard problem.”
He smiled and nodded. “I think I might.”
His cell phone started ringing, and his eyes darkened as he listened to a ring tone that wasn’t his usual tone. Something in his eyes told me that this was not a call he was expecting. He scrambled to quickly pull his phone out of his pocket, and then he stole a quick glance at the screen.
“Sorry,” he said to me, and then he answered his call.
“Hey,” he said, his voice soft and gentle. I wondered if he talked to all of his women in that tone. It was tender and sensual and something about his deep voice and that tone sent a shot of lust through every nerve in my body. “Everything okay?”
He listened, his brow furrowing. “It’s okay, Carly.”
Carly? First Allison, and now Carly? How many more were there?
I mentally chided myself. He could talk to whoever he wanted to. My little (okay, enormous) crush on him didn’t give me proprietary rights over him, and I certainly knew that he had a life before I started crashing at his place.
“Carly, baby, I’m on my way. Just stay right where you are, okay?”
What the fuck?
His voice was soft and soothing, and I suddenly wanted it to be me who he was comforting.
So we were back to the womanizing Jesse. Just when I thought that I’d read him all wrong, reality hit me square in the face.
“Hold on, okay, Carly?”
He listened for a moment, and then he pulled the phone from his ear and sighed deeply. “I’m sorry, V, but I’ve gotta run. Have fun with Quinn and I’ll see you tonight, okay?”
No. It wasn’t okay. But I didn’t have a choice. I had no hold over him other than my ridiculous attraction to him, and he was free to go see whatever girl he wanted to go see.
So I nodded, and he shoved one last bite of salad in his mouth and then grabbed his plate and threw it in the sink. “I’ll take care of that when I get back,” he said, picking up his keys and heading toward the door. “Catch ya later,” he called over his shoulder.
“Catch ya later,” I echoed, but he was already out the door.
I finished eating, realizing that for the very first time, I was alone in Jesse Drake’s house. I wished that made me feel more excited than it actually did, but thinking about how Jesse just ran out the door after some other girl made me feel a little queasy and a lot jealous.
Despite the tipsy moment we’d shared the night before, his mind was obviously on other girls. And I had to admit that I knew virtually nothing about Jesse. Every time I started digging for information about him, he somehow turned our conversation around so that I was the one doing the talking again. I wasn’t sure how he managed to constantly do that, but he had a real knack for it.
I cleaned up our dishes despite Jesse’s protest that he’d be back to clean his stuff up later, and I put all of the salad ingredients back into the fridge, hoping I was placing everything where he wanted it since he appeared to be very particular about the organizational pattern of his refrigerator.
As I put everything away, the thought entered my mind that I could, technically, snoop around. It would be a complete and total invasion of his privacy, but I was so curious to know more about Jesse Drake. I would never do it, but that didn’t stop me from wanting to. I would wait for him to reveal the things I wanted to know. And then the terrible thought entered my mind that maybe he never would tell me those things. Maybe “we” would never happen. Even though I felt a definite attraction between us, maybe we’d never be anything more than friends.
For some reason, that thought sent a pang of despair through my heart.
I fired up my laptop and typed some parent emails to send the next day. I worked each task trying to forget about him, but my heart was sad as the thought of Jesse leaving me during our lunch together to go see another woman weighed heavy on my mind.