“I NEVER PRETENDED to be a computer whiz,” Romy said, bringing Teague’s fourth cup of coffee over to him.
“Neither did I,” Teague said, “so say a prayer that between us we haven’t lost everything while you open that damn door! With any luck it’ll be Matt, come to save us.”
She checked, but only for an instant, at hearing Matt’s name. “It won’t be him.” She plonked Teague’s coffee on the dining table beside her laptop, within reach of his hand. “So keep going. And remember, you can lose anything you like as long as you find the—”
“Romy—the door—I beg you.”
“—Lennie_SanFrancisco file,” she finished, before heading for the door, calling out an en route “Keep your shirt on!” to whoever was outside.
She swung the door open...and her mouth snap-froze in a gape.
Her heart jolted, then hammered, as Matt—it really, astoundingly, unbelievably, was Matt!—lowered the clenched fist he’d raised as though preparing to pound a hole through the wood.
When had she sent her email? She counted back, lightning fast. Less than twenty-four hours ago. If her email was responsible for rocketing Matt across the Atlantic, was that a positive, negative or neutral development? She didn’t know, couldn’t work it out because her thoughts were flying past each other, refusing to land.
“Keep my shirt on?” Matt asked, sounding oddly breathless, and when one corner of his mouth quirked up in a rueful smile, her thoughts stopped flying and stuttered to a halt. “You sure about that?”
Shirt. On. Here. London. Matt! Gorgeous.
Her brain was too mangled to form actual sentences and her mouth was too dry to say them. She was reduced to stepping back and vaguely beckoning with her hand, a mute version of Come in.
Matt stepped over the threshold, and ever-careless of his possessions, ignored the coat stand to drop his overcoat on the floor along with his duffel bag. For a hopeful moment, Romy thought he was going to pull her into his arms, but a sound behind her—Teague’s chair scraping against the floor—distracted him.
“Yay! The hero arrives!” Teague said.
Shock sparked in Matt’s eyes as he looked past her, but when Romy turned to uncover the problem all she found was Teague looking at them over the top of her laptop screen.
“Uh-oh,” Teague said.
Uh-oh? Romy’s eyes went from Teague to a now-expressionless Matt.
“Just to be clear, Matt,” Teague said, “all I was doing was reinstalling Windows for her.”
“I’ll finish it,” Matt said.
“It’s finished. But by all means check what I did.”
Romy looked from Matt to Teague this time. Something was wrong.
Teague closed her laptop and made his way over to them.
“But...are you leaving?” she asked him as he retrieved his overcoat from the stand.
“Yes, Romy, I am.”
“Where are you going?”
Shrugging into his coat. “Back to my hotel.”
“Why?”
Grabbing his scarf. “Because dinner appears to be canceled.”
“It’s not canceled!” Romy said, and turned to Matt. “Tell him to stay.” Getting nothing from that quarter, she tennis-balled back to Teague. “Teague!”
Teague laugh-winced. “Are you trying to get me killed, Romes?”
“What? No! I mean—What?”
Teague’s response was to look squarely at Matt as he draped his scarf around his neck. “Just one thing,” he said. “Prove to her I’ve recovered the Lennie_SanFrancisco file or you’ll have a meltdown on your hands. She’s got a meeting with him tomorrow.”
“Fuck Lennie!” Matt said with extreme loathing.
Teague grinned. “He wishes she would, anyway!” He knotted his scarf. “But it’s your job to rescue her if Lennie steps out of line, isn’t it?”
Matt’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’ll swoop in to save Romy’s day, as usual.”
In the hanging moment that followed, Romy found herself holding her breath. She could feel tension rolling off Matt in thick waves, but his voice was calm when he asked, “Do you want the job, Teague?” Almost too calm.
“Oh, I can’t do that job,” Teague said. “Lennie’s not scared of me.”
“What makes you think he’s scared of me?”
Teague kept his gaze steady on Matt. “Intuition.”
Matt made an infinitesimal adjustment to his stance. “Are you scared of me, Teague?”
“No,” Teague said. “Because I know you know I’m not a threat.”
On the verge of passing out from oxygen deprivation, Romy took in a tiny breath, then held it again when Matt made a sound like a cut-off growl as Teague pulled her into his arms for a hug.
“Call me if you need me, Romes, okay?” Teague said in a stage whisper, before letting her go. “But now, if you’ll excuse me...”
“Wait!” Romy cried, and caught Teague’s hand. “You don’t have to leave!”
Teague squeezed then released her fingers. “Yes, Romy, I do.”
“Then...then at least let me walk with you to the train station and...and explain,” she urged—even though she didn’t know what the explanation was.
Teague touched her cheek briefly. “I don’t need an explanation. And I’d prefer it if you stayed to soothe the savage beast.” He flashed her a whiter-than-snow smile. “For all our sakes, hmm?”
And then he clapped a hand briefly on Matt’s shoulder, said, “Play nice with my girl,” and left.
Romy stared at the door after it clicked shut behind Teague, trying to figure out what had just happened.
She sensed Matt moving, heard him settling into Teague’s chair at the dining table. Play nice with my girl, Teague had adjured him. But Matt didn’t appear to be in a “nice” mood.
Or maybe...thinking back to Matt’s smile as she’d opened the door...maybe seeing Teague had changed Matt’s mood. It had certainly upped the testosterone quotient. But that would mean Matt was jealous, wouldn’t it? And he was never jealous. He didn’t care enough to be jealous. Or maybe...maybe he did...?
She turned, intrigued by that notion, to find Matt tapping away at her computer, and cleared her throat to get his attention.
Matt ignored her. And that was interesting, because he’d never ignored her before and she was p-r-e-t-t-y sure he hadn’t flown all the way from San Francisco just to do so now.
So why was he here? Question of the day.
She took two steps, and cleared her throat again. “Are you going to tell me why you’re here, Matt?”
He stilled, eyes on her keyboard. “Are you going to tell me why Teague was here?” And then he raised his eyes, pinning her in place. “Because fixing your computer is my job, isn’t it?”
Okay, that definitely smacked of some kind of jealousy, and it made her heart flutter like a leaf in a storm. “You were in San Francisco.”
“I’ve installed updates on your computer remotely before.”
“It’s just...he was here.”
“So I noticed.”
“For dinner.”
“So I gathered.”
“He’s working on a big corporate merger, and one of the parties is British so he’s here for a couple of weeks and he called me and I offered to cook—just like I do for you when you’re here. And when he arrived, I mentioned my computer problems, and...” She stopped, threw up her hands. “Why am I explaining this? I’ve done nothing wrong.”
“Why are you explaining, if you’ve done nothing wrong?”
“Probably because you’re glaring at me, making me think I’ve done something wrong. He came—he saw—he fixed. The end. Unless you want to know the dinner menu, in which case it was supposed to be steak and ale pie.”
Matt leaned back in his chair. “Let me ask a different question. When did he arrive in London? Could it possibly have been yesterday?”
“Yes, so what?”
“So that gives me some context for that ‘closer to home’ reference in your email.”
“You mean...? No, you can’t mean—! Teague? Teague lives in Manhattan. How’s that close to London?”
“He’s here now. Ergo, close.”
“As are you—so what?”
“So it finally makes sense why you took so long to contact me.”
“You mean...?” But she shook her head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I hear nothing from you for a month, but then Teague arrives and—wham!—notice to terminate my services comes flying through cyberspace.”
She stared at him while that sifted through her foggy brain. And then, “Oh. My God!” she said. “You cannot be serious.”
“And yet I am.”
She came storming over to the table as four weeks of pent-up emotion ruptured. “You dare to tick me off for not contacting you? You didn’t send me one text! One email! I didn’t get a phone call, a Facebook message, nothing! I had to fill the void by overthinking every damn thing that had happened in San Francisco until I thought I’d go crazy!”
“I’ve been hanging on the edge of my fucking seat waiting for two fucking words from you—not pregnant. A few seconds is all it would have taken!”
“Oh! Oh! You were not hanging on the edge of your seat! You made it crystal clear you’d lost interest in the whole thing even before I left your house! I saw your face, Matt, when it hit you—it hit you like a ton of bricks—what you’d let yourself in for, that maybe, just maybe, that boring paperwork I wanted to go through with you was worth reading after all!”
“I tore up that paperwork!”
“You—you—”
“Bastard is the word I think we agreed on in San Francisco.”
“You bastard!” she rapped out.
He set his jaw. “Which doesn’t change the fact that you were supposed to contact me, goddammit!”
“And I did!”
He banged his hand on the table. “Two weeks late!”
“Well, excuse me for not being buoyed with optimism by your last words to me. ‘Let’s go for broke this time’! It took me the whole month to get over that!”
He pushed his chair back from the table, jumped to his feet. “I told you to stop me if you didn’t like what I did!”
“It wasn’t that I didn’t like it, it was that you didn’t. That last time was a performance—a bravura performance but definitely a performance, even if you didn’t really want to give it.”
“That wasn’t a performance, Romy, that was me. What I am. What I like.”
“You didn’t like anything after you realized I might be pregnant. You couldn’t even muster up a goodbye when I left!”
“You didn’t give me time to say goodbye. You ran out on me like your ass was on fire.”
“You could have stopped me!”
“I don’t stop women from leaving me, remember? You want to leave, you leave!”
“If you believe that, why are you here?”
Split second while he stared at her. And then, “Good question!” he snarled, and strode for the door.
She hurried after him. “What are you doing?”
“Figure it out,” he said, and reefed his overcoat up off the floor, one-handed.
“Matt!”
Up came his bag. Flung over his shoulder.
She grabbed his arm. “You’re not leaving until we talk this through.”
He jerked away from her. “Read your own fucking email. You talked it through for both of us.”
“What is the problem? If you want to try again, we’ll just...try again!”
“No, Romy, we won’t. It’s too dangerous. I’m too dangerous.” And he turned to the door again.
“No!” she cried, and dragged his overcoat from him, threw it back on the floor. “What are you talking about?”
“I saw the bruises, okay?”
“They were nothing!” Romy cried.
He reached for his coat again—she blocked him. “If that’s really what’s bothering you—a few love bites—I’ll put some on you right now and we’ll be even.”
“That’s not funny.”
“No, it’s not funny, if you think I’m some delicate flower who can’t handle some enthusiastic sex! So read my lips: You. Didn’t. Hurt me. You didn’t. And you’re not going to leave me like this after keeping me hanging for a month.”
“You left me, Romy,” he said to her.
“Only because you wanted me to go.”
“Bullshit. I asked you to stay the night.”
“That was before.”
“Before what? Before you moved the goalposts? Before you replaced ten years with one night on a fucking whim? Plan B! Jesus! What made you think that was going to work with someone like me?”
“Someone like you? What does that even mean?”
“It means your email hit the nail on the head—I’m not the man for the job. I don’t want the job. So...so sign Teague up! I don’t care.”
“What is it about Teague tonight? It’s just Teague—same old Teague! But it’s like you’re suddenly jealous of him!”
He recoiled. “I’m not jealous of Teague.”
“Then what was all that about when you arrived?”
“Not jealousy. Not...what you think.”
She rolled her eyes. “Okay.”
“I mean it!”
“Okay!”
“I mean it, Romy! I’m the opposite of jealous! I want him to have you. I always wanted him to have you. That’s why I introduced him to you in the first place. He’s a fucking saint! There’s no one better for you.”
She blinked at him—once, twice, slowly—and she finally understood why Matt called it the blink of insanity when she did that: because she was blinking at a stark, staring madman. “Oh my God,” she said. “You want him to have me? What am I? A reward for good behavior?”
“You’ve got it ass-end around, Romy, I want you to have him.”
“And what about what I want for myself?”
“We’re talking about what you want—a clean-cut, solid-gold hero.”
“No, Matt. If we were talking about what I want, we’d be talking about you.”
“Romy, you only think—”
“Don’t tell me what I think! If I wanted to have sex with Teague I’d have done it when we were dating!”
“But this is about more than sex. It’s about sharing a baby, raising a baby, providing the best for a baby.”
“And if I’d wanted to have a baby with Teague, I’d have turned down your offer and called him straight up to ask him!”
“So ask him! Go on! You know it’ll be better with him.”
“And if I asked him, what do you think he’d say?”
“He’d say yes.” He tore his hands through his hair. “Ah Jesus, he’d say yes.”
“He’d say Let’s wait, Romy, that’s what he’d say. He’d say Let’s think it through. Let’s do the math. Let’s get the fucking paperwork in order. And meanwhile, Romy, why don’t you get your own lawyer to look into precedents, even though I’m a lawyer myself, because two lawyers are better than one, and maybe go back to the doctor for some stronger painkillers and bleed your goddamn life out while I think it through, and then when you’re sure you’re sure and I’m sure, we’ll get married and then we’ll start trying.”
“And that’s what you wanted—due process.”
“No! No! I don’t want another version of myself! I want what you did! What you offered is what I want. Fast and brave and unthinking and...and fuck-it-all, let’s just do it. That’s what I want. And you! I wanted you! I want you still.”
“Stop, Romy!”
“No, I won’t stop. You turn up here, all but scare Teague out of the flat for what reason I have no fucking idea since you’re not fucking jealous, and then you tell me I’m supposed to fall into Teague’s arms because you think that’ll work better for me? Well, the answer is no! I’m not doing it. I remember very well that you got me and Teague together in college. I also remember you never asked why we split up.”
“Because it didn’t matter why.”
“Of course it mattered! But I think you knew why we split up. And I think you didn’t want to face it. Well, I want you to face it. So in case you don’t know, I’m going to tell you—it’s because I couldn’t love him. And the reason I couldn’t love him is because I already loved—”
“No!” he said, cutting her off.
“Why not?”
“Because it’ll be the end. Don’t. Say it. Don’t, Romy.”
“Not saying it out loud won’t change the truth.”
He grabbed her right hand, lifted it. “Wanna know about love? It’s this. He gave you his dead sister’s ring even though you’d been broken up for two and a half years. What does that tell you?”
“That he knew I’d cherish it.”
“The way he cherishes you.”
“No!” she said.
“Not saying it out loud won’t change the truth,” he said, throwing her own words back at her. “You want love—he’ll give it to you. I won’t.”
“We’re friends. Teague and I are friends.”
“What do you think you and I are?”
“I don’t... I want... I don’t know anymore.”
“Having sex didn’t make us more than friends, Romy—all it made us is friends with benefits. Benefits that were supposed to accrue to you. And who knows? If you’d stayed the night those benefits may have had more of a chance to accrue. Well, spilt milk, water under the bridge, whatever—you cut things short. So stand by that decision, because your instinct was right—I’m not the best man for this. And if the friend dynamic is what’s bothering you about Teague, let me tell you that I’ve had sex with friends before and I will again. So I suggest you accept that you can have sex with friends, take another look at Teague and the next time he gives you a ring it’ll have a whopping big diamond in it.”
“I don’t want a diamond.”
“Yeah, well, even without the diamond, compare his platinum ring to what I gave you for your twenty-first birthday. A computer game. I mean, seriously! There’s the difference between him and me right there on your finger.”
“You gave me shares, Matt, not a computer game. Shares in Artie’s start-up gaming company. Shares he wanted to be yours, not mine.”
“They were worthless.”
“And now they’re not.”
“Yeah, well, as I’ve said before, money’s an easy thing for me to give.”
“Those shares weren’t money to you. They came from that soul you say you don’t have.”
He flung her hand away. “Oh, for fuck’s sake! Don’t worry about my soul, Romy—protect your own. Or I may yet give in to my baser urgings and steal it.”
“Oh, Matt, can’t you see? You don’t have to steal my soul. I’ll give it to you willingly. I’ll gift wrap it for you. I’ll change it to suit you, twist into any shape you want, paint it any color you like.”
He grabbed her by the upper arms and pulled her in close, looking down at her with such an intense mix of fury and fuck me, a sliver of almost-pleasurable fear shimmied down her spine. “Make it pitch-black and we might have a deal,” he said.
“I said any color—I meant it.”
“I’ve told you before, Romy, be careful what you say. What you open the door to. There are wolves out there—wolves like me.”
“Then teach me to be a wolf.”
“A kitten can’t become a wolf.”
“What can I do to convince you?”
“Nothing.”
“What about if I...if I bite you?”
He laughed.
“I mean it. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Bite a man through the skin until I draw blood. There. That’s my deepest, darkest fantasy. What do you think about that?”
He released her, stepped back, tilted his head to one side and dragged at his sweater, the T-shirt beneath, to expose his neck to her. “Go ahead, Vampira.”
She swallowed. “I...”
He laughed again. Released his sweater. “You’re not. My. Speed.”
Her eyes flickered downward, to the front of his jeans. “I don’t believe you.”
“As you said—that’s always there.”
“As you said—you wouldn’t be able to function like a human if it was.”
“I’m not much of a human. And my services are no longer required, remember?”
“And yet, knowing that...here you are.”
“I came because we had unfinished business.”
“Then finish it!”
“It was finished the minute I walked in the door and saw him.”
“Prove it’s finished. Kiss me.”
“No.”
“Then don’t kiss me. Fuck me.”