Just then, Damon didn’t
feel
very lucky. Instead, he began to feel angry, unfairly judged ... and most of all, stuck on the chaise. With a groaning lurch, he managed to get upright.
Next, he made himself stand. The effort almost made him fall over. Pins and needles shot through his legs. For modesty’s sake, he cupped his groin—because his nougat covering didn’t feel super sturdy—then released a pained, involuntary groan.
Instantly, Natasha was at his side. Her brow furrowed.
“See?” he pointed out, gratified by her response. “You
do
care. You can’t be that upset. Besides, it’s not as though you haven’t seen me naked before. You have, just this morning. It’s not as though you haven’t bailed me out before. You have, plenty of times, and from worse situations than this.”
Not
much
worse, he knew, but still ...
“No.” Natasha clenched her fists. “This is different.”
“Why? Because I interrupted your ‘date’ with Scott?”
At that, Natasha shook her head. Tears still glimmered in her eyes—tears that left Damon awash in commiserative misery.
He’d
made her cry. He’d made his mother cry,
and
he’d made Natasha cry, both in the span of a single awful day. The two of them were the kindest, gentlest, most generous women he knew.
If he could hurt them ... what the hell would he do next?
All of a sudden, Damon didn’t really want to find out.
“It wasn’t that you were naked and called me to bail you out that upset me, you idiot,” Natasha said. “It was that you lied and said you loved me! I’m not one of your good-time girls, Damon. I’m
me
. I deserve better. For you, talk is cheap.” Sadly, she shook her head. “But for me,
I love you
means something.”
“It means something to me, too!” he insisted. “It means—”
It means I might get my way ... and make you stay
.
Just as he realized that ugly truth, Damon met Natasha’s gaze. She’d already known that about him, he understood as he looked into her eyes. She’d known, and she’d stayed anyway.
Until now. How many people would have done that for him?
“Oh.” Uncomfortably, Damon rubbed the back of his neck. He shifted his gaze away from hers. “I see what you mean.”
All at once, he felt embarrassed for Natasha to see him as he was. He was nearly naked. He was painted with multiple kinds of chocolate. All his enthusiasm for having a good time showed.
So did all his weakness when it came to being a good man.
“I guess I have to let you go, then,” Damon said quietly.
“I guess you do,” Natasha agreed. She touched his face, then gazed into his eyes one more time. “Take care of yourself.”
He
knew
he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t fathom why Natasha didn’t. He quirked his mouth. “I’ll try. You do the same, okay?”
“I will.” She inhaled, then let her hand drop to her side. At least she was no longer shaking. “Bye, Damon.”
He’d never thought he’d hear those words from her. The sound of them made him want to howl with grief. It was probably self-centered grief, Damon acknowledged, but still ... “Bye, Tasha.”
He’d never called her that before. Other people did, but not him. Doing so would have meant thinking of her as a woman, not his assistant, and Damon had needed the distance he’d gained from calling her Natasha.
Natasha
. That semi-formality between them had helped him not be tempted to seduce her into abandoning her marriage vows, the way he’d secretly wanted to do. But now ...
Well, now Damon didn’t need to create any false distance, because they’d have genuine distance between them. Forever.
Fifteen seconds after he realized that, Natasha was already gathering her things in the sitting area of his penthouse suite. Her high-heeled footsteps sounded. There was a final, lingering silence. Damon held his breath. Then, an instant later, came the muted thump of the suite’s door closing behind Natasha.
It had really happened. For the first time in years, Damon realized, he was truly on his own—and he had no freaking idea what came next.
Chapter 9
San Diego
As the days piled up since quitting her job at Torrance Chocolates, Natasha gradually realized that her impulsive decision had caused some sort of elemental shift in her world.
It had begun right away. When she had checked out of the hotel that had hosted the chocolate conference, the night after leaving Damon, the perky hotel employee at the front desk had informed Natasha that she was the hotel’s “mystery guest” of the week—and had won a week’s prepaid stay in the form of a special voucher, for use any time she wanted a getaway. It was the first thing Natasha had ever won. She could hardly believe it.
At first, she
hadn’t
believed it. It had occurred to her almost immediately that Damon might be behind her “comped” stay. It wouldn’t have been the first time he’d used his money and influence to try to make amends for something he’d done wrong.
But then, when she’d boarded her flight home and found herself seated next to a fascinating neurosurgeon—a man who had been obviously (and flatteringly) interested in getting to know
her
better—she’d begun to suspect something more inexplicable was afoot. Not even Damon Torrance could cajole a man like Lance, the neurosurgeon, into spending more than an hour talking with her ... and then inviting her to dinner after they landed.
By the time Natasha had agreed to that date, then retrieved her luggage—and her Civic from long-term airport parking—she’d fully expected fate to catch up with her. Surely the universe would teach her a lesson, right? She’d been
too
lucky so far.
She’d even spontaneously tried out a slot machine at McCarran International Airport—and been rewarded with a nearly thousand-dollar jackpot on the spot. There was no
way
Damon could have had anything to do with that. That was just good fortune.
It was, she figured, good fortune that she’d inevitably be made to pay for, one way or another. With that thought in mind, Natasha warily pulled onto the freeway. By accepting a free week’s hotel stay, gambling and winning, spending an enjoyable morning being flirted with, and making an actual date for the following week, she knew she must have already used up her meager share of good luck. Half expecting her car to pull its usual unreliable routine, she listened carefully to the engine as she merged into the whizzing San Diego traffic.
Oddly, her Civic practically purred along. No blowouts. No scary “check engine” lights. No weird noises. What’s more, other drivers graciously allowed her into their lanes. Once, when she accidentally cut off another driver, the man waved off her mistake with obvious goodwill.
That
made her do a double take.
Polite drivers. Huh. What in the world was going on here?
But the oddities had just kept coming after Natasha arrived home to her duplex apartment. She expected the yard to be overgrown with weeds and in dire need of a trim; as the head of her household, Natasha didn’t have the luxury of offloading yard work to a “honey-do list,” the way other women sometimes could. Instead, she saw as she wheeled her luggage up the walk, her green grass and borders of geraniums looked like something out of
House Beautiful
magazine. Puzzling over that, Natasha inhaled the welcome, briny scent of ocean air. This couldn’t be Carol’s work; her mother-in-law was wonderful in many ways, but she hated gardening and was too thrifty to pay to have it done.
“Oh, hey, Natasha.” Her neighbor, Kurt, lifted a pair of long-handled gardening shears in a welcoming gesture. He’d obviously been out working in his yard. “You’re home.”
“Yes, I just got back. I couldn’t wait to get here.”
“Your yard looks incredible,” Kurt said with obvious admiration. His own green thumb was legendary. “New gardeners?”
“I don’t know. Carol might have hired someone.”
It had seemed like a good guess. But later, Natasha had found out that her mother-in-law didn’t know who’d tidied and trimmed their yard, either. “I guess it was garden pixies.”
“‘Garden pixies’?” Natasha had repeated dubiously. But as her unlikely good fortune had continued to pile up, “garden pixies” had seemed as likely an explanation as anything else.
The next day, Natasha’s habitually hopeless weekly purchase of a “lucky” lottery scratch-off ticket had actually won almost fifty dollars. Her favorite boutique in La Jolla had called to say they had received a pair of shoes she’d ordered weeks earlier—and they were now on sale at forty percent off.
Her “good mornings” to her neighbors had been greeted with grins and chatty conversations. Her veterinarian had informed her that her dog, Finn, a golden retriever/bulldog mix, was in perfect health ... and she wanted to use Finn as a model for the adjacent pet store’s upcoming ad for training classes, too.
Finn, while undeniably lovable, was only seven months old. And a rascally mutt. He needed to be
in
a doggie training class; he in no way exemplified the ideal canine graduate. But Natasha had agreed anyway. Finn would be compensated for his work in the form of free veterinary checkups and dog treats, and maybe he’d pick up a few obedience tips while he was being photographed, too. It was sort of a win-win, even if it
was
unexpected.
Natasha’s date with the neurosurgeon, Lance, had gone without a hitch. Her suggestions to Carol regarding the duplex’s exterior repainting job were met with enthusiasm
and
agreement. When she went out, men smiled at her and turned flirty; when she saw her friends, they laughed at all her jokes and hugged her warmly and complimented her effusively on every outfit she wore.
Upon learning that Natasha had left Torrance Chocolates, headhunters called her with tantalizing offers of new employment. They wooed her with lavish expense-account meals and promised her unbelievable perks. Her page on LinkToMe, the online corporate networking site, practically brought down the server with constant activity from people trying to reach her.
“Wow.” Natasha gaped at her laptop’s screen, blinking at the dozens of requests for new associations. “I should have left Torrance Chocolates years ago. Who knew I’d be in so much demand? I was afraid to take that leap and risk giving up my income, but I could accept any one of these new jobs and start tomorrow—with my own office, more authority, and identical pay.”
“
I
knew you should have left,” Carol told her warmly. “You should have done it as soon as you met Demon Damon. You always deserved better than the crummy way that man treated you.”
Demon Damon
. Yes, he’d been that, at times. But he’d also been so much more, especially to her. Which only brought Natasha around to the one lingeringly painful truth: no matter how terrific things had seemed lately, she still missed Damon.
She missed feeling the energy crackling from him as he arrived in the office—usually running late after having had some adventure or other—and greeted her with his special smile. She missed hearing the good humor in his voice as he confided in her about some grandiose plan he was hatching. She missed seeing his winning smile, feeling his casual touch as he held doors open for her and escorted her through, and knowing he was only a phone call away at any moment. She missed
him
. Period.
“You didn’t know him,” Natasha said in her former boss’s defense. She raised her chin. “Damon wasn’t that bad.”
“Not ‘that bad’?” Her mother-in-law stared at her in disbelief. “He made you buy flowers for the women he broke up with. He made
you
come up with the cards. How many of those ‘sorry I broke your heart’ bouquets did you send, anyway?”
“Too many to count. But at least he sent them!”
Carol gave a dismissive snort. “Yes, he’s a real prince.”
“If you ever met him—”
“That will never happen,” Carol said, “and I’m glad.”
But Natasha wasn’t glad. Because despite her own recent good fortune, she couldn’t help wondering: If
she
was experiencing an unprecedented streak of good luck (and she was), what exactly was happening with Damon these days?
Standing in the middle of his formerly posh living room, Damon gazed with dismay at the wreckage before him. He stood calf deep in murky water. Sandy grit clung to his furniture, revealing the yellowed places where the water had risen during the flood that had made his oceanfront home uninhabitable.
Despairingly, he sloshed through the brackish water to the other side of the room. He retrieved a picture frame that had been floating in the floodwaters. He wiped its cracked glass front with his shirtsleeve, then peered at it. A ruined photo of Jimmy and Debbie Torrance stared reproachfully back at him.
It was almost like looking at his parents’ faces in real life. Since the debacle at his varietal chocolates workshop at the conference in Las Vegas—and the subsequent media shit storm—neither of them had forgiven him. There had been recriminations. There had been tears. There had been threats to “go in another direction” with the future of Torrance Chocolates.
In the end, Damon had skated by without being axed outright; he was grateful for that. But he knew it wasn’t blind luck that had saved him. He suspected Natasha had had a hand in Jimmy’s decision to offer a “cooling off” period instead. She’d always been his dad’s favorite; it wouldn’t have been the first time she’d given Damon a behind-the-scenes assist. But despite that reprieve, Damon hadn’t rested easy in the days since then.
Instead, he’d tried to set things right. He’d tried issuing penitent invitations to dinner, to brunch, to take trips together, to go shopping, to see a show, to attend the theater... .
His parents had refused every damn overture. Nothing had worked. Not without Natasha there to help him.
All at once, Damon had utterly lost his mojo. He only had to look at that photograph, search his short-term memory, and wade to the next soggy area of his home to realize it. He was in a seriously bad way. He had no idea where to go from here.