Page 83 of Sleeping with Her Enemy (49th Floor 2)

“Amy’s busy right now,” he barked, enjoying the woman’s shocked response. Hell, she was lucky he didn’t stop in his tracks and proposition her daughter in front of the whole goddamned party.

Heading the opposite way from the main stairwell took them into the kitchen, which was populated with a small army of people preparing food and stacking used dishes. He kept going, ignoring their stares, until he found a door. He yanked it open. A pantry. Fine.

He pulled her in behind him, slammed the door shut, and kissed her.

“We can’t keep doing this,” she murmured. But she kissed him back, twining her arms around his neck.

“Yes, we can,” he growled. “We’re both adults. We’re both in the same headspace right now. So why the fuck can’t we?” He wanted to say more, to say that he had made a mistake by calling off their last trip to the “movies.” But to do that, he had to stop kissing her, and she was moaning now, soft and low, just for him.

But then, suddenly, just as he was about to deepen the kiss, she pulled away. “I can’t do this.” She waved her hands around in the space between them. “This isn’t enough. I wanted it to be, but it wasn’t.”

She moved to brush past him, and he moved to let her—what choice did he have? But they both moved the same direction, which in the small, enclosed space, caused a minor collision.

A pit opened in his stomach. He reared back. “What the hell is that?”

“What?” Her eyes widened.

He sniffed the air to make sure his nose hadn’t been deceiving him. “You’re wearing different perfume.” Some kind of perfumey perfume that didn’t seem like her at all.

Her hands flew to her neck. “Oh, yeah.” Her eyes darted around.

With a sickening thud in his gut, he understood why he suddenly wasn’t enough for her. “Why were you with Mason just now?”

“Mason gave me this perfume.”

He raised his eyebrows, trying to ignore the anger coursing through him. “That doesn’t answer the question.”

“He wants to get back together,” she whispered, so low he could barely hear her.

Yes. He’d known that was coming the second he smelled that bullshit perfume. Still, to hear it from her lips was a punch to the gut. “And you told him no.”

She didn’t say anything.

He couldn’t catch his breath. Rivulets of sweat were running down his back in the suddenly stifling pantry.

“What the hell do you care, anyway?”

It was a fair question. What was the matter with him? He had no jurisdiction over her—wouldn’t have even if she had agreed to his “hey, let’s start sleeping together again” plan.

When she finally spoke, her voice was low. “This had to stop, Dax. I finally understand. It’s been a hard lesson, but I get it now.”

“Get what?” What was she talking about?

“That a person can’t have it all.” She smiled, a little sadly. “I thought I could have everything. But I see now that I can’t.”

“Define ‘everything,’” he shot back. He wanted her to say it, to admit that she was going to pick white parties in Forest Hill with Mason.

She wasn’t going to pick him.

Then, inexplicably, he thought of his father saying, “It’s better with her around.”

He was drowning. He couldn’t think with that bullshit perfume filling his head. So he walked out through the still-buzzing kitchen, back into the throng of white, and out the front door. He wasn’t going to stop until he got to the island.

Chapter Eighteen

The feeling of drowning persisted until Dax was on the lake. The irony wasn’t lost on him that it was only once he was on the ferry, surrounded by water, his ears filled with lapping waves and screeching seagulls, that he could breathe again without feeling like an elephant had taken up residence on his chest.

The last time he’d felt like this was years ago, when he’d canoed out onto this very lake and let a radical idea, one that had been buried deep in his mind, swirl up through his consciousness: starting Cherry Beach Software Solutions. Back then, it was as if his body had forced a reckoning that day—seeking out the lake it knew would give him the space to breathe. To think. As he’d bobbed in the canoe that day, stewing about his miserable professional circumstances, he had realized he was at a proverbial T in the road. He could be a cubicle jockey, a cog in the Microsoft machine, for the rest of his life, or he could fucking man up and do something else.

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