Intoxicated (10 page)

“I can’t find my panties.” They were La Perla, her favorite pair, and expensive. She spun in a circle, squinting in the dying daylight. After a few minutes she gave up. The man was a panty magician. She found her skirt and yanked it on under cover of the blanket. “So what happens now? We just walk away now? Like nothing happened?”

“Is that what you want?” A muscle twitched in his cheek, but his face remained impassive. She knew what she didn’t want; she didn’t want this night to be over and she didn’t want him to think she was a pathetic groupie like all the rest.

“Sure…I guess…Yes.” Was that a flicker of hurt in his eyes or did she imagine it? With a shrug she went back to putting on her skirt, amused at her own stupidity. That was a ridiculous idea fueled by naïve girlish fantasies. Jack had an ego the size of Texas. Of course he wasn’t hurt. She was just another notch in his bedpost. “I don’t think I’m capable of having feelings for anyone right now. I mean, it’s only been a few weeks since Brian. And you are
so
not my type. I’d be an idiot to fall for you just because we had some great sex.” The words were hollow, meaningless, but she said them anyway to fill up the empty space between them and because that’s what he wanted to hear. “This was just what I needed. A little cheap and meaningless sex to take the edge off and set my head straight. And we both got what we wanted, right?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” The hard edge to his voice caught her off guard.
 

“I mean, we both know the last thing you want is another girl hanging on your jock. And the last thing I want is a relationship with someone like you.” The verbal diarrhea just kept pouring out of her mouth and she seemed powerless to stop it.
 

“Someone like me?” He threw the blouse at her. It hit her in the chest and slid to the ground. “God, you are the most frustrating woman I have ever met!”
 

“I don’t understand. Are you mad at me?” She dropped the blanket, shoved her arms into the blouse, and began to button up the front. “Why are you mad?”

Jack strode over to the crumpled heap of his clothing. He yanked on his jeans and t-shirt with short angry jerks, muttering to himself about mules and crazy women. When she was dressed again, she attempted to run her fingers through the snarls in her hair and risked a glance at him. He threw the food and empty wine bottle into a sack, stashed the cooler behind a tree, and shoved the blanket into the saddle bag of the motorcycle. By the scowl on his face, he was pissed –
really
pissed. He hopped on the motorcycle and started it up, revving the motor to the red line. Birds exploded from the trees. The angry sound split the silence and rumbled over the lake like thunder. After a few seconds, he shut the motorcycle off and dismounted. He crossed the distance between them in two paces, chest heaving. With trembling hands, he ruffled his hair and scrubbed at his face. She’d never seen him so angry before. He took another step toward her. Confused, she backed away. When at last he spoke, his voice shook with emotion.

“Just so you know… as a general rule I don’t do this.” He shoved his hands through his hair again.
 

“What do you mean?” She shrank back another step.

“This!” With his right hand, he drew a circle in the air between them. “I don’t do
this.
Whatever just happened between us…I don’t want that.” She stared at him, feeling foolish but unsure how to remedy the situation. “You made me feel something that I don’t want to feel.”Ally wanted to believe him. Jack the Ripper didn’t say things like that unless he meant it. But she had her own walls to break down, and her heart wouldn’t allow her to believe it. She could do nothing but stare back at him, wordless as a garden statue. After a minute, he shrugged, got back on the bike, and started it up.

“Get on the bike, Ally,” he said his tone cold and harsh.
 

“No. Not until you explain this to me.” By this time she was close to tears and too stubborn to admit that she might have been wrong about him. He had gone to a lot of trouble to set up this night and it had been perfect until she had messed everything up. Contrite and humiliated, all she wanted was to get as far away from him as she could. They were miles from the city and it was well past midnight. She would have to go back with him. The idea of sitting behind him on the motorcycle – pressed against him after the intimacy they had shared – knowing that she had insulted him was too much.

“Get on the goddamn bike. Now.” A cloud passed over the moon and left them in darkness. He turned the motorcycle around and came up beside her. “I’m not going to say it again.”
 

It was a long cold ride back to the city. When he dropped her at the entrance to the parking garage, she hesitated before dismounting the motorcycle. “I’m sorry.” The words tumbled out of her mouth. Apologies came hard for her, but she swallowed her pride and did it anyway. “I didn’t mean what I said. I don’t know why I said all those things.”

“Forget it,” he said. “It was just sex, Ally. No big deal.” His cold casual dismissal made her heart sink. She watched him ride off into the darkness until he turned the corner and disappeared.
 

CHAPTER SEVEN

A week later, Ally still felt the sting of Jack’s parting words so strongly that she could barely concentrate on her work.
It was just sex, Ally
.
No big deal
. Maybe it was no big deal to him, but it was to her. He was the second man she’d ever had sex with and she’d certainly never had sex like that. Sex with Brian had always been quick, routine, and impersonal, like some dreaded task that had to be completed. By comparison, her tryst with Jack had stirred up emotions that she didn’t want to feel. She had expected to walk away afterward and feel nothing but physical satisfaction. Instead, he had inspired a hunger for him that grew more ravenous with every passing day.
 

Stay with me, Ally…I’ve got you.

The echo of his words brought gooseflesh to her arms and a dampness between her thighs that a dozen cold showers and two hours on the treadmill couldn’t shake. He had her alright; one sexual encounter with him had driven her from schoolgirl crush straight into a full-blown obsession. Even in the middle of a meeting with Alessandro Reyes and the other board members, her mind couldn’t stop its endless contemplations of Jack; Jack with his shirt off, Jack’s lazy smile, Jack’s brown eyes as he made love to her. The memory of him brought heat to her cheeks despite the air conditioned office and made her hands tremble so badly that she could hardly sign her name to the proposals.
 

“Are you feeling okay, Miss Taylor? Do you need a moment?” Alessandro, sleek-haired and immaculate as always, interrupted the meeting, his slight Latin accent unable to hide his irritation. “You seem distracted.”

One of the most intense men in the business world, Alessandro Reyes had no patience for distraction. He demanded one hundred and ten percent from all of his employees, even more from her because she was a woman. His gold eyes rested on her with a laser focus that made her squirm in her chair.

“I’m fine,” she said, embarrassed by the attention. “I’m just a little lightheaded. I didn’t have time for lunch today.”

Alessandro swept an impersonal gaze from her head to her feet, his gaze disapproving. “Why don’t you take these proposals to the print shop and have Penny get you a bagel or something. Take a few minutes to regroup. I need your head in the game, Ms. Taylor.”

Suitably chastised, Ally fled to the ladies room where she splashed cold water on her wrists and applied fresh lipstick. Her cheeks were flushed and her eyes glowed with unnatural brightness. She looked like a dog in heat.
This is ridiculous
. Now Jack was affecting her work and not in a good way. She needed to talk to him, to explain or at least get some kind of resolution, but her pride and fear of embarrassment stopped her. What if she went to Felony and some new girl waited in the Seat of Shame? Of course, there was a new girl; she’d be foolish to expect otherwise. That’s what Jack did – he devoured women like a vampire, sucking the self-respect right out of them, to leave behind their desiccated and broken carcasses. Why should she be the exception? He had seemed different with her though. He had been tender and passionate and romantic, three things she hadn’t expected from a man with his reputation.
 

Speculation was a waste of time that she didn’t have. The only way to get answers for her questions was to ask Jack, a proposition that made her palms sweat. With a shrug of resignation, she took one last look into the mirror and gathered up the proposals, preparing to make the journey downstairs to the print shop.

Penny stopped her in the hallway before she made it to the elevator and spoke in a confidential whisper. “Miss Taylor, I’m afraid there’s been an incident while you were in the meeting. You have a visitor.”

“A visitor?” Ally’s heart leaped into her throat. Was it Jack? It was late afternoon, too late for another lunch surprise. Her hands began to shake again with anticipation. “Who is it?”

“She said she’s your mother.”

Ally cringed. Anticipation dissipated, replaced by sheer panic.
Her mother?
The last time she saw her mother, the woman had wandered into her high school chemistry class, demanded to see her daughter, then vomited all over Mr. Gibson’s lab table. The humiliation of that moment still haunted her years later. If her mother was in town, trouble lurked around the corner.

“It couldn’t be my mother,” Ally said, keeping her tone emotionless. “My mother’s dead.”

***

Jack signed the last vendor payment check, shoved it into an envelope and threw his pen down onto the desk with a groan. The stack of invoices on the office desk at Jameson’s Pub was just as large if not larger than the one at Felony. Both establishments were hemorrhaging money in a way that meant certain death if he didn’t do something soon. His uncle, David Jameson, had entrusted Jack with the care of both businesses while David finished out a short
vacation
. That was the sanitized expression that his family used to describe David’s two year sentence to a minimum security prison in upstate New York.

He shoved his hand back through his hair and pushed back from the desk. It wasn’t his fault that Jameson’s and Felony were in such dire straits. Both places had taken a financial hit when the inflow of David’s bookmaking funds came to an abrupt halt. God only knew what other types of illegal businesses David had been running out of the back rooms. The idea infuriated Jack to the point that his vision turned red around the edges. If David had put half as much effort into running a straight business as he had put into skirting the edges of the law, Jameson’s and Felony would be viable, profitable enterprises.
 

All of this was old news. Most of his unreasonable anger stemmed from his encounter by the lake with Ally and had been channeled at David as a distraction. He just couldn’t get over the way things had ended with Ally. What had been planned as a meaningless sexual romp had left him empty and bitter. No one was more surprised than him to learn that he wanted more than just a roll in the hay with her, but he had no idea how to go about establishing a deeper relationship with her. A dozen times each day, he had dialed her number then hung up before the first ring. His cowardice pissed him off.

He scrubbed his face again and stood from the desk, paced back and forth a few times before donning the black dress pants, crisp white shirt, and red bow tie that made up Jameson’s uniform. The itchy two-day stubble on his chin begged for a shave, but he didn’t have the time or the motivation. Why did he torture himself over a girl who wasn’t interested in
someone like him
? Her words echoed in his every waking thought.
You are
so
not my type
. What exactly was her type anyway? A tight-assed, douche bag like Brian? He snorted with contempt for himself and bony-assed Brian. Maybe she needed a new type. Maybe he needed to convince her that he could be exactly what she needed.

***

Penny’s look of sympathy made Ally wither with embarrassment. “I told the woman that you were in a meeting, but she insisted that she see you right away.” Penny’s voice lowered to a confidential whisper. “She seemed…uhhhhm...
unwell
. I asked her to wait in your office but she became very upset and caused quite a scene. Someone called security and they escorted her out. She’s downstairs with them now.”
 

“Oh. Okay.”
Great.
Unwell was always code for drunk, crazy, or just generally messed up. “Did she say what she wanted?”

“No. She just said it was important that she get in contact with you.” Penny frowned and wrung her hands. “I tried to keep her quiet, but…”
 

“It’s okay, Penny.” Ally rubbed the strain between her eyebrows with two fingers and drew in a long shaking breath.
 

“I wanted to tell you before someone else did. Mr. Reyes would freak if he knew about it. You know how he hates a scene.”

“Thanks, Penny. I appreciate your discretion.” Ally squeezed the woman’s hand before the elevator doors opened and she stepped inside.
 

With the distraction of her mother’s appearance and Jack weighing heavily on her mind, Ally managed to make it to the print shop and endure the rest of the meeting. When she finally returned to her office, the phone rang the minute she stepped inside the door. She hesitated at the threshold, torn between making a run for it or taking another phone call which would no doubt result in another couple hours of work when it was already well past quitting time. Work ethic won out and she lifted the receiver with a sigh.