Surrender Your Love(3)

Dropping the umbrella into a brass holder and my handbag and coat on the old coffee table in the hall, I kicked my shoes off and headed for the kitchen to pour myself a much-earned glass of wine. I was halfway through my second glass when the key turned in the lock and Sylvie’s blonde head popped into my line of vision.

“What a surprise!” I sat up and pointed at my glass. “Want one?”

“You better have a bottle.” She slumped onto the couch next to me and put her long legs up. I scanned from her striped skirt that rode just above her knee up to her face and damp, blonde hair. Something was different. Her mascara was smudged. The skin beneath her blue eyes was swollen and red as though she had been crying, which was impossible. Sylvie wasn’t the crying kind. In all the six years we had been best friends, I never once saw her shed a tear. She never looked anything less than perfect and happy.

I sat up, instantly feeling something was wrong. “What happened?”

“I got the boot.”

“What?”

She took the glass out of my hands and drained it in one big gulp. “They kicked me out. Said something about not needing another intern. Blah blah.” She rolled her eyes. “Whatever.”

“Oh, crap.” I shook my head in disbelief. “But you worked so hard.”

“I know, right? But you know what? I am okay. C’est la vie. Time to move on.” She jumped up, and a smile spread across her lips. “Let’s get plastered.”

I narrowed my gaze. There was something in the way she avoided looking at me that raised my suspicion. “Wait!” I grabbed her arm and pulled her back down on the sofa. “You’re not telling me everything.”

She rolled her eyes again.

“Spill it,” I said.

She pressed her mouth into a tight line.

“Sylvie,” I prompted.

“Fine. I slept with the boss.”

My jaw dropped. “No.”

She nodded. “I did. His personal assistant, who’s best buddies with his wife, started to suspect. So the bastard got the jitters and decided to get rid of me.”

“Is that even legal?”

Was it?

Sylvie shrugged. “Probably not, but it’s a small world, and I need this reference if I ever want to land another banking job.”

“The bastard,” I mirrored her words. Sylvie was the brightest person I knew. She had graduated in the top of her class, and any firm would have been happy to have her. “You’ll find something else in no time.” I had no doubt about that.

She smirked. “Yeah, only next time remind me not to screw the boss, no matter how hot he is. You’re so lucky you have Sean. At least he’s not married and lying to you about not having slept in the same bed with the wife for the last two years. Talk about cliché.”

My arms wrapped around Sylvie, and she leaned her head against my shoulder the way she always did when a relationship turned sour. They always did, whether we wanted it or not.

“Sean’s not perfect, you know. And I don’t want commitment,” I said.

“At least he’s honest. That’s more than you can say about the majority of guys out there.”

Call me a romantic, but I didn’t agree with Sylvie on that one. Surely not all men were liars or commitment-phobes. I rolled my eyes as I thought of the guy everyone seemed to think was a catch. Sean—the boyfriend who wasn’t ready to commit, and neither was I, for my own reasons. He was good-looking, successful, and the guy I had been hanging onto for almost a year even though I knew it was a dead end relationship that might be over any minute. If you’d call his ‘let’s hook up every now and then’ a relationship, then that was about all we had: a sort of friends-with-benefits thing.

Less of a friend, more of a sex buddy.

We met when Sylvie left her handbag in a bar on a drunken night out. Sean found it,and when he turned up at our doorstep she should have been the one to thank him for not stealing her money and tossing her ID card in the nearest dumpster. However, Sylvie had been puking in the bathroom for nearly an hour...so Sean met me instead. We hit it off instantly, and I really thought he might be long-term material. As it turned out, even planning a weekend break was too much commitment for him. I couldn’t remember the last time we went on a romantic date. In fact, I couldn’t remember ever planning any sort of event that didn’t involve a drunken night out with our friends.

Right from the beginning, Sean had made it clear we weren’t exclusive, and I was fine with that because he made me feel comfortable. Around him, I felt as though I could be myself. When we talked time seemed to fly, and we’d end up talking the night away. Okay, so I wasn’t in toe-curling, belly-warming, butterfly-feeling love, but then again does that even exist outside of Barbara Cartland’s novels?