Working Stiff(58)
“Yeah.” Moonlight touched her hair, drifting tendrils around her face in the night sea breeze.
He said, “I apologize for the unspeakable things that did happen.”
“Cash, nothing happened. It was just a little slip.”
“Your husband travels a lot. We’re together a great deal.”
“That’s true.”
He gripped the deck’s safety rail. “I have a question. Please don’t take offense. I haven’t.”
“Man, Cash. That sounds ominous.” Her light voice sounded like she was joking.
His hands tensed on the thick wood railing. “Are you trying to create a reason to divorce him? Women have used me for this before. An affair is a perfect excuse to divorce someone whom you desperately want to.”
Her sharp gasp shamed him. “No! Good Lord, I would never do something like that.”
He hadn’t thought that she would, and yet, something was tangibly different between them. “We’ve been friends for a long time, three years. We’ve never ‘slipped’ before.”
“We’ve never been cooped up together like this before.”
“We travel together all the time. This is different.”
Rox fidgeted, shifting from one foot to the other and scratching at the wood on the rail.
She said, “I’m not married.”
A blast of cold, night air shoved him backward, and he straightened, holding onto the rail in case his knees failed him.
He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t see or feel the rail under his hands.
He didn’t care if she was lying now.
Carefully, in case he had misheard and to keep his voice from shaking, he asked, “I beg your pardon?”
CHANGE OF HEART
Rox stared at the cubic zirconia and plastic rings on her hand, seeing just a pale glitter in the dark night. The clear crystal caught a scattering of the moon’s rays. The rest of the night was dark around them except for a few dim lights shining out of the French doors from inside the house.
Cash had turned toward her.
It actually felt good to get it off her chest. She wasn’t a cheater. She didn’t like that Cash must have thought she was cheating on her fictional husband.
She said, “I’m not married. Never been married. I bought these at a department store for twenty bucks the first day I was hired at the law firm.”
“You’re not married?” he asked.
“Nope.”
“Then who is Grant?”
She pulled out her cell phone and squinted against the sudden glare, flipping through her links until she found the one for her friend’s talent agency. She held it out to Cash, who had stepped back and away from her, away from the light shining from the screen. “A figment of my imagination and some headshots. I think his name is Lorenzo something.” Lancaster Knox, actually. It was written on the bottom of his headshot. She might have googled him once or twice. And found the gossip sites that talked about whom he was really dating and maybe followed him on Twitter, where he posted mostly naked selfies daily.
Cash stared at her phone. The light glared off the underside of his face in the night, and he angled his body and face away from her. He must be hiding that bandage again. “He’s a model.”
“Yeah. If you’re going to be fake-married, you might as well be fake-married to someone hot.”
“And the pictures of the two of you on vacation?
“Photoshop. Took ten minutes.”
“Are you poking fun at me?”
“Nope.” She dragged the rings off her finger and threw them into the surf far below. “Just cheap fakes.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Not for about ten months.”
“Then why?” His voice rose.
“So that we could work together. So that you wouldn’t bump and dump me like all the others. Because then I’d crawl off into a hole somewhere.”
“And you did all that because you wanted to prevent any possibility of a relationship with me.”
“It doesn’t really matter, anyway. You’re a heartbreaker, not a chubby chaser.”
“A what?” His voice actually cracked that time.
“A chubby chaser. You can have any girl you want, and you certainly have every girl that you want. But you don’t have to feel guilty or ashamed about what happened between us. It was just once, it doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with me, and it wasn’t cheating because I’m not married. But don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone. I’ll tell people that you were a perfect gentleman the whole time I was here.”
She saw Cash moving out of the corner of her eye before he grabbed her arm and spun her toward him.