Lisa was walking so quickly Amy was struggling to keep up. In more ways than one.
“Okay, clearly I’m very thick, but I still don’t get it,” she said.
“One of the guys we studied with is at the Securities Commission,” Lisa said. She shot Amy a loaded look.
Finally the pieces fell into place. “Quinn asked him to do a favor, and his friend turned up the heat on Ulrich,” Amy guessed.
“That’s right.” Lisa’s lips were thin.
A terrible thought occurred to Amy. She stopped in her tracks and grabbed Lisa’s arm, forcing her to stop, too.
“What Quinn did…it’s not going to get him into any trouble, is it?”
Why else would Lisa look so worried?
“I’m not going to lie to you. He’s an officer of the court, Amy. If Ulrich makes a complaint saying that Quinn coerced him with the threat of reprisals, he could be disbarred for unethical behavior.”
Which explained why Lisa was looking so grim.
“Oh, God.”
What had Quinn been thinking? What kind of super-strength crazy pills had he been on to risk his entire career for her?
“Don’t freak just yet, Ames. From what I saw back there, Ulrich’s got too much to hide to risk putting in a complaint. Quinn’s probably in the clear.”
“But he should never have even thought about risking himself like that. I can’t believe he would be so
stupid.
”
“Yeah, well, there is that,” Lisa said tightly. “If I thought he’d listen to me, I’d kick his ass from here to Melbourne and back for being such a cowboy.”
Amy started walking again, head high, stride long. Lisa might hesitate to kick Quinn’s ass, but she had no such compunction.
None at all.
Beneath her anger was a knee-knocking fear over what he might have brought on himself in her name.
“What are you going to do, Ames?” Lisa asked warily.
She was the one puffing to keep up now.
“I’m going to kill him,” Amy said between gritted teeth. “Then I’m going to resuscitate him and do it all over again.”
He blinked at her, vaguely aware that Lisa had followed her into the space.
“Listen, Justine, I’m going to have to call you back,” he said into his phone. He ended the call and Amy took a threatening step toward him again, her index finger aimed at his chest now.
“How dare you take such a risk! How dare you do that in my name and not even consult me about it!” She punctuated each word with a painful stab of her finger into his sternum.
He grabbed her hand and held it immobilized between them.
“Will you calm down for a minute, you psycho chicken, and tell me what the hell is going on?”
Amy used her free hand to draw an envelope from her back pocket and slap it against his chest.
“
This
is what’s going on. I cannot believe you did this and didn’t even tell me about it.”
Quinn saw the Ulrich Construction logo across the front of the envelope and went very still.
“What happened? What’s he done now?”
“It’s not what he’s done, it’s what you’ve done. He’s withdrawn the suit. But you, you big bloody idiot, have risked your career to make it happen,” Amy said, her voice strident with emotion.
The muscles in his belly and chest relaxed. “Thank Christ. You had me scared for a moment there.”
“Don’t you dare stand there and smile about it. Do you have any idea how furious I am with you right now?”
He caught Amy’s other hand as she made a fist and aimed it at his chest. Any second now she was going to try to kick him in the shins.
His gaze found Lisa’s over Amy’s shoulder. He’d forgotten she was there.
“Would you mind giving us a bit of privacy?”
Lisa looked startled, as though she’d momentarily forgotten she no longer had front row seats to the big events in his life.
“Of course. Actually, Ames, I’ve got some calls I need to make…”
“No problem. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Amy said, even as she tried to jerk her arms free. “Will you let me go, please?”
Quinn waited until Lisa was gone. “If I let you go are you going to hit me again?”
“What do you think?”
“Then I’m not going to let you go.”
She tugged on her arms one last time then gave up, glaring at him instead.
“I’m so angry with you. You have no idea. Why on earth would you risk all those years of study—your partnership, for Pete’s sake—for something so stupid?”
“The Grand isn’t stupid. It’s your dream.”
“
My
dream, not yours. Where do you get off putting your life on the line for mine?”
He could hear the fear trembling beneath the indignation in her voice and he drew her closer.
“Ames. You’re freaking over nothing. Ulrich’s withdrawn the suit. Whatever worst-case-scenario you’re imagining is not going to happen. It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. You shouldn’t have done that without talking to me first. No way would I have ever asked you to take that kind of risk for me. You could have been disbarred!”
“Is that what Lisa told you? She’s exaggerating.”
“Look me in the eye and tell me it couldn’t have happened.”
He took a moment to compose his answer and she shook her head.
“Don’t bother. I already know you’re about to lie. You’re the worst liar I ever met. It’s a wonder you ever made it as a lawyer.”
“I don’t do a lot of trial work,” he said, aiming for a humble, penitent tone. “Cuts down on the lying requirement.”
“Don’t try to weasel out of this by being cute. You think you did good, don’t you? You think you’re the champion of the hour.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. But you’ve got to admit, Ulrich dropping the suit is pretty good news.”
“It’s amazing news. But I’d rather lose the Grand altogether than have you get in trouble. You worked so hard to get that partnership. What were you thinking?”
“It’s fine. I took a tiny risk, but it paid off. It’s okay.”
She stared at him for a long moment, then looked away.
“You could have at least told me what you were going to do. I should have had a vote on whether you threw away your law career for me or not.”
“Next time. I promise,” he said.
“There isn’t going to be a next time. I’m never speaking to you again after this.”
But she was smiling.
“Don’t ever do something like that again, okay?” she said. “I want you to promise me.”
Half her hair had escaped from her pigtails to bounce around her face. She looked incredibly pretty and fierce and dear to him as she waited for him to comply with her demand.
“I’m not going to lie to you, Ames. You’ll only call me on it. If I had to do it again, I probably would.”
A frown wrinkled her forehead as she gazed into his face. He reached out and rubbed his thumb along her cheekbone. Her skin was so soft.
“I’d do anything for you, Ames. You know that.”
Something flared in her eyes, hot and needy, then she looked down. A muscle flickered in her jaw. When she looked up again the heat was gone, replaced with a wry expression.
“I should probably get that in writing. Could come in handy someday.”
He frowned. Two days ago, he wouldn’t have understood what had just happened. Wouldn’t have had a clue that that little duck of her head had been about anything other than her ducking her head. But he knew how she felt now, what she wanted, and he knew he’d just witnessed her pushing all of her most private, passionate, secret emotions into a closet and kicking the door closed.
How many years had she been doing that? How many times had she swallowed the words she really wanted to say and replaced them with something funny and smart and completely not what was in her heart?
Too many.
Suddenly he saw the future stretching out in front of them, full of moments like this. Amy hiding her feelings, him pretending he hadn’t noticed. Playing it safe. Hurting her because he was too scared of losing her.
It wasn’t going to work. No way was it going to work. They couldn’t pretend none of this had occurred. He couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with her and not want to touch her—he’d proved as much in the past five minutes. They’d let the genie out of the bottle, and there was no way to stuff it back in. And as much as it scared the hell out of him, he didn’t want to.
“Don’t do that, Ames,” he said quietly. “Don’t hide from me like that. I can’t stand it.”
Her eyes were wide, startled. “Wh-what?”
He closed the distance between them and reached for her face, cupping her jaw in both his hands. He stared into her eyes, brushing his thumbs across her cheekbones. Then he lowered his mouth to hers.
For a long, hot second her lips softened and opened under his. He tasted her sweetness and had to fight the primitive, carnal urge to drag her to the floor. Then she tensed in his arms, arching her upper body away from him, pulling her face from his grasp.
“Quinn. Stop. What are you doing?”
“Kissing you. What does it look like?” He tried to kiss her again but she held him off.
“I thought we weren’t doing this. I thought we’d decided it was a mistake.”
“I know. For two smart people we can be pretty dumb sometimes.”
He didn’t give her a chance to say any more, simply lowered his head and kissed her. After a tense second her body softened and she made a small, helpless sound as her mouth opened beneath his.
Desire ripped through him. She felt so good. So right in his arms. Madness to think he would ever have been able to resist doing this again. Sheer madness.
Her hands clenched into his shoulder muscles and her whole body trembled as she strained closer. She wrapped a leg around his hip and rubbed herself shamelessly against his hard-on.
He wanted to push her against the wall and take her standing up. He wanted to tear her T-shirt off and lick and suck her breasts until she screamed for him to stop. He wanted to fulfill every one of the dirty, horny fantasies he’d forged in the darkened quiet of his bedroom when he was fourteen years old.
“Yoo-hoo! Anybody home?”
The sound of Mrs. Parker’s voice echoed all the way up the staircase and across the upper foyer. Quinn closed his eyes and swore.
“You have got to be kidding. What the hell is with your mother and the drop-in visits?” he said.
Footsteps echoed in the main theatre as Mrs. Parker went on the hunt for them. He figured he had about sixty seconds before she came charging up here at exactly the wrong moment all over again.
He looked into Amy’s face. “We need to talk.”
She nodded. Then she licked her lips, a nervous little dart of her tongue that made him want to drag her to a cave.
“I’ll come over tonight, okay?” he said.
She nodded again. The dazed look had left her face and caution was creeping in to take its place. He kissed her again, hard.
“Don’t worry.”
He told himself it was a good thing that Mrs. P. had arrived as he walked away. If she hadn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to stop. And Amy deserved better than the cold, hard floor of the balcony section.
If they were going to do this, they were going to do it right. And if they weren’t…well, that was a conversation for tonight, as well.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Oh my God.”
Her mother’s footsteps sounded across the upper foyer and she made an effort to compose herself. If she kept standing here gaping like a stunned mullet her mother would take one look at her and know, same as last time. And there was no way Amy wanted to talk about Quinn right now. Not while she was still trying to come to terms with his kiss and what it meant.
She turned and picked up a paint roller and started ripping the protective plastic sleeve off it.
“Mom. Hey,” she said supercasually as her mother walked beneath the archway a few seconds later.
“There you are. I came to tell you that your father got you a good deal on two-pack polyurethane for the floors. He wanted to know how much you thought you’d need so he can put it aside.”
“Yeah? That’s fantastic. What sort of discount are we talking?”
It took an effort to put her business cap on, but Amy managed it. She talked sensibly and rationally for twenty minutes. She nodded and commented in all the appropriate places. Then she locked the door behind her mother and it hit her all over again.
Quinn.
The kiss.
Him coming over tonight.
Her knees turned to jelly thinking about it. After sixteen years, was it possible that he was going to…? That they were going to…? That this was real?
She closed her eyes, sending up a little prayer to whoever oversaw these kinds of situations.
Please, please, please let me not have the wrong end of the stick. Please let this be what I think it is.
Then she broke into a run as she headed for the rear exit. She hadn’t shaved her legs for weeks. As for her bikini line…Suffice to say, it had been a while. Then there was her bedroom, a mess of abandoned clothes and tangled sheets and breeding dust bunnies.
She checked her watch as she slid into her car. It was nearly five. Quinn had said he’d come over
tonight.
Did that mean six, or seven? Maybe it meant eight? If it was six, she was screwed. Utterly. And she was wasting valuable leg-shaving time staring out her windshield. She slammed the key into the ignition and started the car.
It wasn’t until she was tearing the sheets off her bed that she remembered Lisa. Which went to show how far gone she was.
She sank onto the bed.
The last thing she wanted to do was hurt Lisa. Yes, her friend had made some ill-judged, self-destructive decisions, but that did not make her any less Amy’s friend. If something happened with Quinn tonight, if he came over and they talked and…whatever…Lisa was going to be upset. She’d feel as though Amy had simply been hovering in the wings all these years, waiting to take Lisa’s place by Quinn’s side.
And, in a way, she’d be right.
But she’d also be wrong, because Amy would never have tried to oust Lisa. She might have stood with envy in her heart at Quinn and Lisa’s wedding, but she’d celebrated, too. She’d been happy for them, even as she’d longed for things she’d thought she could never have.
If Lisa were still with Quinn, none of this would be happening. With a certainty. Quinn would never have betrayed Lisa, and Amy would never have tried to seduce him away from her friend.
But Quinn and Lisa were getting a divorce. And Quinn had kissed Amy. He wanted her. She allowed herself to believe it, remembering the way he’d held her. She didn’t know how deep his feelings ran, if it was simply attraction or much more, but she very badly wanted to find out. God, how she wanted to find out.
She put her head in her hands. If she pursued her heart’s desire, there was a very real chance she would lose her friendship with Lisa. Was that a price she was prepared to pay?
She thought about all the memories she and Lisa shared. And she thought about Quinn, about her enduring, bone-deep love for him. She thought about the future, about babies and houses and growing old beside the man she loved.
Maybe it made her selfish, maybe she was buying herself bad karma to last several lifetimes, but she loved Quinn. She was going to grab on to this chance for happiness with both hands and hang on. Lisa had had her chance and she’d made her choices. She would have to live with them, as Amy would have to live with hers.
Standing, she bundled the dirty sheets together. She needed to find her good underwear.