“I introduced a woman to…someone and she became obsessed. Then this person started to stalk the other person. She went a little crazy and…” He sounded like an idiot.
Sara’s expression said she thought so too. “And?”
He hesitated. He’d been there and he had a hard time believing what had happened. This was going to sound ridiculous. But it had been real. Very real. “The crazy stalker one showed up one night with a gun and tried to kidnap the other one.”
Sara watched him for several seconds. When he didn’t continue she said, “And?” again.
“Right after she set my apartment on fire.”
A couple more seconds passed. Then she said, “One of them set your apartment on fire and tried to kidnap someone at gunpoint.”
“Right.”
“Holy crap, Mac!” She smacked him on the upper arm. “You can’t stop talking there!” She was right. She would definitely ask Sam now if he did.
The worst part was she knew him well enough to know if he was lying. Or holding back.
Mac sighed, took Sara’s hand and led her to one of the tables on the patio of the drive-in. She boosted herself up to sit on the top of the table, her feet on the bench. He stood in front of her, his hands in his pockets.
“I’ve never been with a woman that
I
didn’t break things off with, Sara. I’m not bragging,” he said as she started to speak. “I’m not proud of it at all. The truth is, I’ve never been satisfied completely.” She didn’t say anything to that, just raised an eyebrow.
“Usually, when I tell a woman I want to break up, she cries and stops talking to me. Or gets mad and stops talking to me. Or says okay—and stops talking to me. But there were three who wanted to try harder.
The first one was Heather. She was a virgin. We started out just dating, but I was a teenage boy, so of course I kept pushing things physically and she kept saying yes. Even then I knew she didn’t want to have sex, but I also knew she wanted to be with me enough that she’d eventually give in. She did, to keep me from breaking things off, then hated me after.”
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Just My Type
“You were that guy, huh?” Sara asked.
“Yep.” The guy who only cared about getting his. He’d definitely been that guy. He paced to the end of the patio, ran his hand over the top of his head and then turned back. The memories were more than a decade old, but he could still hear Bruce Springsteen on the stereo.
“And girl number two?” Sara asked.
He stayed where he was across the cement. “Danielle.”
“Uh-huh.” Sara leaned her elbows on to her knees, watching him intently.
“We were in college. Danielle was crazy about me. She was sweet, had only had a couple of boyfriends before me. She was fine with the sex.” Very fine, as he remembered it.
“But there was a problem?”
“I always pushed. That’s what I do. She said she’d do anything for me, so naturally I wanted to see what that meant.”
“Sexually?” Sara guessed.
“Everything. But yeah, sexually too.”
“And you said—”
“Great.” He gave Sara a wry smile. “I got her to go skinny-dipping. And got her to go without panties.
We went out and bought some toys. Which was good for a while. Then it was time to spice things up again.
We did some role-playing, which was also fun for a while. Then it needed spicing up too.”
“How do you keep topping yourself?”
“Exactly.”
“What did you do?”
“Kept asking.”
“Until you got to her limit.”
“Right.”
“Which was?”
“Blow jobs.”
“Ah.”
He crossed the patio to stand in front of Sara again. She didn’t look shook up. Yet.
The big story was yet to come.
“It’s a big jump from oral sex to guns and arson,” Sara commented calmly.
“There were a few years in between. I stuck with girls who knew their limits and who weren’t shy about letting me know. I didn’t want any more sweet young things that I had to encourage and then feel guilty about. For a solid year, I dated only women older than me.”
“But girl number three still came along.”
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Erin Nicholas
“Yeah. Jenna. She fell in love with me at about the time I was wondering if maybe I was a little out of control.”
“She was a virgin?”
“No. I had sworn off virgins in high school. She wasn’t real experienced, but she kept up with me, no problem. She was willing to try anything and enjoyed it. And it was fun for me. Stuff was new to her, unlike most of the women I’d been dating. I also didn’t have to talk her into anything. She was a novice, but willing.”
Like Sara in so many ways. He stuck his hands in his back pockets and rocked back on his heels. That was a lot of his problem. Sara was more confident, more bossy about what she liked—and he was sure that would spill over into the bedroom—and more willing to initiate things. With Jenna he had
always
been the instigator. Still, Sara shared the innocence combined with curiosity.
“Eventually something happened to ruin the perfection, I’m guessing.” Sara’s tone held more than a hint of jealously.
Mac smiled. “You could say that.”
“Go on.” She motioned for him to continue.
“I got totally wrapped up in my fantasies. I took her to Omaha, to a couple of clubs where I used to hang out. We met some women and Jenna danced with them, even let one of them kiss her and touch her.
Then they took her into a back room. She didn’t come out running and screaming, but she was…flustered.”
“Wow, she…”
“I’m not sure. She didn’t tell me and shut me down when I tried to ask. She did ask me once if I’d ever been with two women.”
“Which you had.”
She didn’t seem surprised or upset by it. Just matter-of-fact.
“Yes.”
“And she was willing to be one of those women?”
“They’d apparently discussed it, but she never asked me to do it.”
“Then what happened?” Sara also didn’t look scandalized by the story.
“I didn’t know it at the time, but Jenna went back to the club on her own to meet the women. Then, I guess she told them she just wanted one wild night. Which they had.” Sara’s eyes got bigger but she stayed silent and still.
“After that, one started calling her. I didn’t know about it. She just ignored it. Then, a couple of weeks later, the woman showed up at my apartment.”
Mac still couldn’t believe Jenna had done the things she’d done and that she’d hidden it all from him.
But he remembered how embarrassed and scared she’d looked when the woman showed up at the door.
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Just My Type
“Jenna tried to pretend she didn’t know her, but I could tell right away she was lying. The girl, Lexie, showed up every day. She called. She’d send letters, packages. It got crazy. She claimed she was in love with Jenna.”
“So she got a gun and some matches.”
He nodded. His gut knotted as he talked but it wasn’t the horrible nausea he usually experienced.
“When Jenna told Lexie she was in love with me, Lexie turned jealous. Set the apartment on fire, then went after Jenna with the gun planning to take her away from me. Jenna wouldn’t go, of course. I showed up in time to see Lexie pull the gun. I got in the way of the first bullet.” Sara was watching with wide, interested eyes. “The
first
bullet?” The gut knot got a little tighter. He swallowed. “Yeah. The second one hit Jenna. It went through and damaged a kidney. She could have died. As it is, she has some permanent medical issues.”
“Lexie went to jail?”
“Yeah.” He sighed, feeling heavy and tired suddenly. “Two lives permanently changed all because I was…unsatisfied, or unwilling to be satisfied. Or something.” Sara looked at him, her head tipped to one side. “You feel guilty?” He gave a short laugh. “Um, yeah. My grandma even thought it was my fault.” Mac thought he should have been far past letting that bother him so much. He was a grown man. It had been years since everything happened. And he knew, deep down, his grandmother did love him. She’d been disappointed. Not to mention scandalized and embarrassed.
“She found out somehow and told me ‘you better just leave nice girls alone’.”
“Ouch.”
That was it. Just a sympathetic acknowledgment.
Mac stood looking down at her. She was so amazing. She wasn’t shocked or disgusted.
She stood up on the bench of the table so she could look at him more directly. “And you blame yourself for all of this?”
“Of course.”
“Mac, you didn’t mean for all of that to happen. You didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt.”
“I should have known better than to introduce her to that stuff.”
“She didn’t have to say yes.”
“She thought she did.”
Sara shrugged. “Well, that was her fault.”
“What?”
“Come on, Mac. It was her choice to go along with it, to not tell you no.”
“I would have broken up with her.”
Sara shrugged. “Then she shouldn’t have wanted to be with you.”
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Erin Nicholas
He wasn’t sure what to say to that. He’d known he and Jenna weren’t going to have a happily ever after. He was pretty sure Jenna knew it too, all along.
“Besides, she didn’t have to go back. Without you. To have a lesbian threesome.” He opened his mouth. Then shut it. Sara had a point.
“And you should know I’m not willing to try to be something I’m not just to be with you.”
“Good.”
“Because you love me just as I am. And that’s how it should be.” He stared at her. The fact that she was right wasn’t the problem. The fact that she knew she was right was the problem.
“So do you want me to go to that club with you?”
He stared at her. The club? Did he want to take Sara there? “You looking for a lesbian threesome?” She laughed. “Not especially. And I’m not going to do anything I don’t want to do. But I am willing to be adventurous in other ways. Not because of you…
with
you.”
“
No
.”
Now she looked surprised. “Why not? You like adventurous women and, whether you’ve realized it or not, or admitted it or not, I want to be adventurous with you.”
“No. Not…that.” Not other people touching her and pleasuring her. No way.
“Why not?” She crossed her arms and looked at him expectantly.
“Because…” She didn’t belong there. Not that Jenna had. And Sara was far more sexual than Jenna had ever been. Still he knew without a doubt he did not want to take Sara there. It was his job to protect her, more now than ever. Taking her to a club like that would be the opposite of protecting her. “That was a long time ago.”
“So you don’t find the idea of two women together exciting anymore?” Well, he wouldn’t go
that
far. He was like many—or most—men. Sure, two women together, with him, had always been a turn-on.
Just not Sara.
“No. I don’t.” It wasn’t a total lie. Looking down at her, he had no desire for anyone, or anything else.
“You’re still trying to protect me,” she chided softly, laying a hand on his chest. “You don’t need to.” Yeah, he did. That was exactly what he had to do. Even if it was from him.
For a few years after the incident with Jenna and Lexie, he’d purposefully chosen women who wanted that kind of thing, reveling in the pleasure and not having to worry about the woman—or women—or emotions, or expectations, or anything else.
Now here he was with Sara. The one woman whose emotions and expectations mattered more to him than anyone’s. How had he let it go even this far?
But one look into that face and he had the answer.
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Just My Type
All she had to do to get his heart pounding and him wanting her more than he wanted his next breath was touch him and look up at him with those eyes. It was the trust. He knew it. He was no psychologist, but it wasn’t hard to figure out he was responding to her unconditional faith in him—faith that he would take care of her, that he loved her and that he would do the right thing. He hadn’t felt that trust in a long, long time. And he craved it.
Sure, his crew trusted him, his patients trusted him, the hospital staff and the cops and the firefighters he worked with trusted his judgment, his skills and his intelligence. But no one, in longer than he could remember, trusted him like Sara did. Completely, in all ways, with everything she had.
Women had either been disillusioned and hurt by him emotionally or they’d withheld their emotions.
He preferred the latter. The women he dated now were in it for the sex and the good time. No one had even come close to falling in love with him in a very long time.
So he was not going to let Sara down. He was not going to let her regret trusting him. Which was exactly why he should be concentrating on what else he could do to drive her away before he made her sorry she’d ever met him.
Sara put her hand against his cheek, making him look into her eyes. “I’m not going to do anything I don’t want to do just because you want me to, Mac. I mean, anything I
really
don’t want to do or can’t live with, okay?”
He really wanted to believe that. “You’ve already bought a boxful of toys you didn’t want.” She frowned. “Who says I didn’t want them?”
“You wouldn’t have even looked at that catalog if you didn’t think I liked that stuff.”
“And I would have been missing out. I
love
this body powder.” He must have looked as disbelieving as he felt, because she shook her head.
“Mac, because of you I watched
Lost
for the first time. I got hooked on it, because I loved it. I tried it because of you, but I kept doing it because I wanted to. And if not for you I would have missed out.” She smiled mischievously. “Nipple clamps could be the same way.” Heat surged through him even as his mind vehemently rejected the idea. He really wanted to see Sara in nipple clamps. Which meant that there was no way in hell he was ever going to.
In fact, that seemed like a great plan: he was going to do the opposite of whatever he
really
wanted to do.