“Please, listen tome.”
“What for? Morelies?”
“No! Shari, I love you.” Okay, so it wasn’t said tenderly on bended knee, while tears of joy filled his beloved’s eyes. It was said while tears threatened to fill his own eyes—from the pain in his foot where she was pushing all her body weight and the door against it. If he’d had any idea he’d be in this situation, he’d have worn steel-toed boots instead of well-usedsneakers.
“Will you please stop trying to break myfoot?”
“Will you please goaway?”
“I only want to talk to you. Just for aminute.”
She was a bright woman—he’d always liked that about her, and she must be able to work out for herself that he wasn’t going anywhere until she let him explainhimself.
She undid the chain, let go of the door and turned back into her apartment so fast that he almost fell flat on his face when the tug-of-warended.
The roses hadn’t retained any more dignity than he had from all the pushing and shoving. He stuck them in her general direction, anyway. “I brought youthese.”
She crossed her arms across her chest and remained where she was, three feet away from the door, glaring athim.
Awkwardly, he placed the flowers in her umbrella stand, hoping she’d rescue them once he left. It seemed a shame for innocent roses to be sacrificed because she wasangry.
“What do youwant?”
“You!” It wasn’t suave, and it wasn’t smooth. It wasn’t even well thought out. But it was the raw, bare truth, and he needed her to believe it so much it hurt. “I need you.” He shoved a hand through his hair and tried to pull his thoughts together into some coherence, but like the curls he’d detested since he was a kid, they insisted on tossing themselves wherever theypleased.
From her unmoving stance it was clear she wasn’t buying hisargument.
“I owe you an apology. I should have told you I wrote that book. But, at first, all I wanted to do was to find out whether it would work. I wrote it in the first place because it was good money, but I didn’t believe a book could teach a person how to be a betterlover.”
“You made a fool of me.” She said it as though the words were ripped from her throat against herwill.
“No.” He stared at her in complete disbelief. How could she believe that? “I would never do that toyou.”
“‘How do you like to be touched, Shari? Do you like this? Does that work for you?’” She mimicked him cruelly, and only then did he see her pain. She really believed he’d been toying withher.
“Please. Please don’t believe that. Not of me, and certainly not of yourself. I thought you’d figured it out just the way I did. It wasn’t the book that taught us to be great together. We taught each other. We fell in love and that’s what made the sexspecial.”
She made a gagging noise when he got to the love part. And that started a coughing attack, which had her hunting in his robe pocket for a tissue.Hisrobe, which filled him with hope. She had a perfectly good housecoat of her own, but she’d chosen to bundle herself up in his robe when she wasn’t feeling well. That had to begood.
He glanced from the robe to her flushed face, heavy, sad eyes and red nose. She needed looking after, not emotionaltrauma.
But he couldn’t let her go if she was thinking those awful things about him. He leaned his back against her front door and tried to explain how he’d ended up in thismess.
“Remember the day you brought me that envelope and the book fellout?”
“Vividly.” He wished her hoarse voice didn’t sound so sexy. It was turning him on something awful. Which was the last distraction he needed when he was practically fighting for his lifehere.
“That was the first time I’d seen the book in print. I was horrified that you thought I’d sent for it, and almost told you then that I’d written the damnedthing.”
“And you didn’t because?”she asked with falsesweetness.
“I didn’t because I was embarrassed, frankly. I’d written it basically for the money. I mean, I still did the best job I could, but that’s what it was. A job.” He shifted his weight and dropped his suit bag at his feet so he didn’t feel so weighted down. “I didn’t believe a book could teach a person how to be a good lover. I pretty much figured the only way to learn was to get out there and have lots of practice. Likesports.”
Her lips narrowed alarmingly, and it occurred to him that a sports analogy probably wasn’t going to win him brownie points with a woman who had just accused him of playing with heremotions.
“In my arrogance—” he grinned at his own conceit and found his companion didn’t share his amusement, so he stashed the grin “—I thought no one would believe I needed a book like that. So it was a bit of a shock when it was pretty obvious you did believeit.
“And that’s when it hit me. The best way to prove to myself whether the book was worth the paper it was printed on was to give it a trialrun.”
