Page 20 of Sex, Lust & Lingerie

Jaime continued as if he had deaf ears. He was so damn deliberately irritating.

Tyrone joined in, swinging his head and hips rhythmically, as he did his finest impression of Gnarls Barkley. I blew out a loud puff of air. Men!

Inside the car, things calmed down. To my relief, Jaime behaved and sat his distance in the back seat.

“How long have you lived in LA?” he asked as the car turned onto the southbound 405 Freeway.

“Fifteen years.”

“What brought you here?”

“Work,” I lied. Desperation. Fear. Hope. Kevin and I had managed to escape New York just in time—before Boris Borofsky could track us down with his army of Russian mafia.

“Did you leave family behind?”

“Just one special woman.” The image of Madame Paulette filled my head. It still seemed unreal that she was gone. Her burial in Paris seemed so distant.

“Oh, your mother?”

I inwardly shuddered. I didn’t want to talk about my crack whore mother or my neglected, tormented childhood.

Jaime’s cell phone rang, sparing me from responding. He pulled the phone out of his jeans pocket and furrowed his brows when he viewed the caller ID screen. My eyes skimmed over it. It read “Caller Unknown.” It rang two times, stopped, and then rang again.

“Fuck. I’ve got to take this. It’s important. His jaw tensed when he hit answer. He put the phone to his ear and listened intently. The words that came out of his mouth were cryptic like… “yes”…“no”… “Shutters”…“can’t talk right now”… “will call you later”… “trust me.” He terminated the call and nervously tapped the phone on his muscular thigh.

Trust me?I clenched at the words. How many times had I heard them? Was that what he said to all his fucks? It was her. His other client—the one he called “babe.” He was definitely hiding something from me.

It was my turn to test him. I inhaled deeply. “Do you want to have dinner tonight? We can talk about the budget for the advertising campaign.”

Jaime’s jaw ticked. “I can’t. I may have another commitment.”

I knew he was lying because he couldn’t look me straight in the eyes. My heart sunk to my stomach. There was no doubt in my mind—the rogue was fucking someone else tonight. It was his “other” client or one of those flirty flight attendants; he called them “babe” too. I regretted that I’d boldly asked him out.

“No problem.” My voice wavered. “Maybe you can come by the office tomorrow at two. I’ll show you around.”

He checked his iPhone calendar. “Two-ish. That works.”

We spent the rest of the ride steeped in silence. His face remained tense. He was definitely covering something up. I diverted my attention by checking my emails and texts. There were over a dozen from Kevin. All of them said the same thing: URGENT! CALL ME ASAP.

It was unlike Kevin to use shouty caps. Something was definitely wrong. I was tempted to call Kevin right away, but I didn’t want to have a conversation with him in front of Jaime. I had a gut feeling it involved his assistant Ray, and the last thing I wanted to do is let Jaime know that there was—or had been—something going on between the two of them. My eyes flitted to Jaime, whose face remained impassive. He was gazing out the window, and from his furrowed brows, I could tell his mind was elsewhere. He was ignoring me as if I didn’t exist. As if the last few days didn’t exist. Like I was a stranger to him. I gazed down at the twinkling toi et moi ring and twisted it around my finger so that the diamonds didn’t glare in my face. Suddenly, I remembered that I had left something behind in Paris. My heart.

The early afternoon traffic on the 405 was fortunately moderate. I instructed Ty to make a stop at my place first before dropping Jaime off at Shutters. I needed to get away from him as quickly as possible. I was suffocating sharing the same air.

Ty pulled into the circular driveway of the majestic high-rise building I lived in. It was considered the swankiest building on the Wilshire Corridor, the condos going in the millions. Numerous celebrities lived in the building although I was the lucky one who inhabited the spacious penthouse apartment. Kevin lived one floor below me in an equally stunning apartment. Our current abodes were a far cry from the small two-bedroom apartment we shared in Hollywood when we first started out in LA. Unfortunately, Victor Holden lived here too. I wondered if Jaime knew.

Ty jumped out of the car and opened my passenger door. He then immediately began to unload my baggage from the trunk. I had one foot out the door when Jaime grabbed me by the elbow.

“Let go of me, please.” My voice was cold and clipped.

“Hey, aren’t you even going to say good-bye?”

Before I could say a word, he jerked me around and smacked a bruising kiss on my lips.

Oh God. What his lips could do to me! My temperature rose and my heart hammered, not knowing whether to give in to him or resist him. I called upon all the mind control I could muster and broke away.

I turned my head away from him, avoiding eye contact. “Please, I’ve got to go.”

Tightening his grip on my elbow, he fisted my long braid with his other hand, yanking hard on it until I was forced to face him. His intense blue eyes burned a hole in each of my mismatched ones.

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