Incredulous at his response, she raised onto one elbow and stared down at him. “What?”
“It happens after mind-numbing sex. When you’re spent and not thinking clearly.”
“Has it happened to you?”
“No.”
She sat up and held the sheet to her breasts. “Let me see if I have this straight.” She paused for a moment to get her thoughts together because she didn’t want to misunderstand him. Just in case he wasn’t saying what it sounded like he was saying. “You think I said I love you because I’m suffering some sort of mind-numbing afterglow from your superb lovemaking?”
He sat also and looked at her a bit warily, as if he feared she could go off on him at any second. “I think that might have something to do with it,” he said as if he’d been here before.
“Does this happen to you a lot?”
“What?”
“Women falling in love with you because… because…” She paused and pointed toward his middle. “Because you stun them with your wonder dick?” He was so delusional, and it was her curse that she loved him more than ever. It would be so much easier if she didn’t.
He hadn’t told her he loved her. Obsessed with her, yes. Loved her, no. Knowing how he truly felt angered her almost as much as it hurt. “You know,” she said, and threw the covers aside, “you’re extremely insulting. I tell you I love you, and you say I’m confused. Like I’m stupid and don’t know the difference between love and sex. I’m thirty years old; I know the difference, Max.” She moved to his closet and threw open the doors. She flipped on the light and told herself she wouldn’t cry. She felt raw and her chest ached, but to her vast relief, she discovered she was too angry to cry. And feeling extremely foolish for having blurted out her feelings.
“The least you can do is say thank you,” she continued as she rifled through his things. “That’s what I’ve always done when I’ve been in your situation. When someone makes a fool of himself and tells me he loves me and I don’t love him back.” She pulled a black silk robe from the hanger and threaded her arms through it. Lola had suffered a broken heart before, but never like this.
“And for your information,” she said as she turned around and tied the belt around her waist, “I fell in love with you before your performance here tonight. I fell in love with you for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with sex.”
He was sitting up in bed with his elbows on his raised knees, holding his head in his hands. “I don’t think you’re stupid or a fool, Lola,” he said in a voice gone so low she almost didn’t hear him.
“Forget it.” She turned to the closed door of the bathroom. “Forget I said anything. I take it back.” Just as she pulled the door open, he was behind her, slamming it shut.
With one hand planted in front of her face, Max said next to her ear, “You can’t take it back now.”
“Yes, I can.”
“No.” He leaned his big body into her and shoved her up against the door. “I heard you.” His hot breath brushed her temple. “You love me, Lola. I won’t let you take it back. You can’t ever take it back.”
Something in his voice cooled her anger. A deep yearning. An unspoken plea. It was in the depths, if not his words. It was in the hand caressing her hip and sliding around to her stomach.
“Don’t leave.” He leaned his forehead against the door next to hers. “I’m a real bastard, I know, but don’t leave, Lola.”
“I wasn’t going anywhere. I was just going to get my suitcase.”
“Oh.” He eased away from her and she turned and looked up at him.
“Funny, though. When you thought I was leaving, you sure jumped off the bed fast.”
“Charley horse.”
“Sure. I think you care about me more than you want to admit. I think it scares the heck out of you. I know it scares the heck out of me.”
“What scares you?”
She looked into his eyes and said, “That I have fallen in love with you, and there is no future for us. That you burst into my life suddenly only a short time ago. That it’s too fast, too soon, and you will leave the same way you came into my life. I’ll turn around one day and you’ll be gone.”
He shook his head and inhaled deeply through his nose. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the day after or next week. I only know that when I’m not with you, I think about you. I’ve never wanted a woman the way I want you. And it’s not just physical.” He placed his hands on the sides of her face. “I love the smell of your skin and the tangle of your hair around my fingers. I love your courage and your tenacity.” He pressed his forehead into hers. “I love being with you, and we’re good together. And I think we’re only going to get better.”
Yes, but for how long? she wanted to ask. The thought of him alone somewhere, getting beaten and shot at, ate a little hole in her heart, but what could she do about it? She couldn’t stop him any more than she could stop loving him.
“I don’t want to let you go,” he said just above a whisper. “I’ve tried and I can’t. The thought of it twists me in a knot.”
“So, don’t let me go.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“I know.” Then she spoke her biggest fear out loud. “I’ve fallen in love with a man who puts himself at risk as if his life is meaningless. But your life means something to me, Max, and I don’t know how long my heart can stand it.”
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply through his nose. When he opened them again, his gaze was filled with passion, and he lowered his mouth and kissed her because there was nothing left to say. He was a man who didn’t make promises he didn’t intend to keep. He tore at the black robe and seemed to touch her all over at once. He worshiped her with his hands and mouth and carried her back to his bed. He made love to her again. This time more desperate than the last, almost frantic, as though, if he kept her in bed, he could keep the world away.
And it worked. Within his arms, and tangled in the sheets that smelled of him, nothing else existed. By the sheer force of his will, he kept reality at bay.
But for how long?
Chapter 16
Two days after Lola and Max broke into Sam’s house, they were questioned separately by the Baltimore police. She’d been back home for less than twenty-four hours when she’d had to place a call to her lawyer and make plans to meet him at the police station in Durham. Max and his attorney had answered the same questions in Alexandria, and since there was no evidence tying either of them to the crime, both had been cleared.
Her problems with Sam were finally over. Taken care of just as Max had predicted. He was her hero, but loving Max was both the best and worst thing that had ever happened to her. And each day that passed, she fell more in love with him. They spent every weekend together, and each hour she lost herself a little more in the pleasure of being with him. The pleasure of his hot mouth and strong hands. The solid wall of his chest against her breasts. Wrapped up in the warmth of Max, she felt safe and protected, as if nothing terrible could ever happen as long as they were together. Each time Max kissed her goodbye, his arms held her a bit tighter than the time before. Closer, as if he were trying to absorb as much of her as possible.
He hadn’t told her he loved her. Not yet. It had only been three weeks since she’d blurted out that she loved him, but she was fairly sure that he did love her. No man could look at a woman, and touch her the way Max did, and not be in love. Still, she longed to hear the actual words from his lips.
During the weekdays when they couldn’t be together, he telephoned her every night and during the day while she was at work. Sometimes just to ask if she was designing edible underwear.
“Are you hungry, Max?” she would ask.
“Yes,” he always answered. “I’m hungry for you.”