Page 18 of Dirty Love

“Well, I didn’t today.” I stand up and walk to the kitchenette, grabbing a robe from one of bar stools on my way. “Can you call the concierge and arrange for a massage therapist in an hour? I’m feeling tense.”

He doesn’t answer right away.

I yank open the fridge and grab a pre-made kale and pineapple smoothie. Mmm. Lunch. Fuck my life. “Okay, fine. I’ll call myself. Or just watch porn and masturbate like regular people do.”

“You don’t need to be like that. I’m just wondering if it’s wise—”

Fuck. He thinks I’m going to hit on the RMT they send up. He has no clue that the last person I fucked alone was him, ten years ago. I’ll never make that mistake again. “Tell you what. I’ll keep my hands to myself, okay?” An easy promise to make, seeing as how I never planned to violate the poor person in the first place.

He sighs, and for a second, I see the guy who discovered me. Who cared, a little too much and a lot too inappropriately, but he did care.

Now? Now we’re tied together for life and it all rides on my ability to not fall apart. So I need a fucking massage, and he knows he needs to make that happen.

When he leaves again, I slump back against the kitchen counter and feel the almost-tears burning in the back of my eyes. They never fall.

I cried all the tears when I gave birth to my stillborn son, my baby, when I was fifteen.

Since then I’ve been on a slow-burning self-destruct sequence, and nothing will change that.

No well-meaning investigators from God knows where.

No massage.

No fucking kale and pineapple smoothie.

Not even a crowd of thousands of fans, all cheering my name as I belt out blistering song after blistering song about the cruelty of love.

If only they knew.

—nine—

Wilson

Jason pulls out his phone as soon as we’re back in our suite.

“What are you going to tell them?” If it hadn’t been trained out of me, I’d be breathing hard right now. Inside, my pulse is racing and my mind is swirling with the imagined scent of her and the coppery taste of regret that I have to make something up, that she didn’t get close enough for me to know.

“Not about the wood you popped at the thought of me getting a blow job from that nut, if that’s your fear.” He rolls his eyes. “I’m actually going to change my flight. This is a dead end.”

He’s exaggerating about the hard-on. No way did he see that—he wouldn’t stare at my junk long enough to. But we both know that I lost my distance from Tabitha in that interview.

I fucked it up.

Or maybe he doesn’t know how much I fucked it up if he thinks this was a dead end. I bite back a retort that she’s not a nut—hard to argue after that display, anyway—and pull out my computer as he talks to Ellie back in our office. Ignoring the pop-up for the hotel Wi-Fi, I grab a cable from my messenger bag and plug into the Ethernet port on the wall. Easier to hack into the system from within.

It doesn’t take long to get into the reservations system and change our hotel room to non-refundable. Poor Ellie’s gonna bear the brunt of that, but Jason’s cheap and I’m not leaving Los Angeles.

Not yet.

Ms. Leyton and I need to have another talk, one without a chaperone.

Plus I need to fuck her out of my system, and since I can’t actuallyfuckher, I’m going to hire the most expensive redhead call girl in the greater L.A. area and make her call me Daddy.

From the other side of the room, Jason swears. “What do you mean you can’t cancel the hotel reservation?”

I glance up. “You head back if you want. I’ve got some work I can do here. Maybe get Ellie to pull a couple of the cold-call inquiries and I can take some client interviews over the next day or two.”

He scowls, then barks the new plan into the phone.

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