“Of course,” she said quickly.
“I don’t like being caught up in something that’s a game, or a cheat. Been there, done that. I won’t go there again,” he said firmly, using his negotiation voice, as memories flashed by quickly of his ex. She was the reason he felt this way, and he needed Julia to know he didn’t want and wouldn’t tolerate a repeat. “I was involved with a woman named Sabrina for a few years. I thought I knew her well, but her whole life was a lie.”
“How so?”
“She was addicted to painkillers and denied it for the longest time. She started taking them for headaches, and she kept on taking them. And she became so wrapped up in it that her life was dictated by it. She missed work, she wrote fake prescriptions, she started doctor shopping. Selling her stuff to pay for more pills – jewelry, her iPhone, Coach purses. Anything that had value she sold off to buy more,” he said, stopping to gently wash off the soap from Julia’s legs. “I tried to help her too. Get her into rehab.”
“How did she react to that?”
Clay shrugged heavily, the defeat of those days with Sabrina rising back to the surface. It had been a while since he’d ended things with her for good, and there certainly weren’t any residual feelings or lingering love. Still, the memories had a way of wearing him down because that last year with her had been rough. Her furtive phone calls, the late-night texts to slimy dealers and doctors who started providing for her, and the slide into all those lies. He could still recall the unabated shock he felt when he woke up in the middle of the night to find her rooting around in his wallet and pocketing some bills to buy more drugs.
It wasn’t even about the money she took. He couldn’t care less about that money. It was the lies and the secrets, and how they both had wore away at him. That last year with her had been the worst year for his firm. The only year his revenues were down from the one before. Precipitously. He couldn’t concentrate on deals, couldn’t focus on clients. The way she’d toyed with him had nearly cost him the business he’d worked so hard to build. Flynn had landed a big client for them – the action film director – and in the span of those last few months with Sabrina, Clay had gone and lost that client for them.
If he were a ballplayer, he wouldn’t just have been benched. He’d have been called back down to the farm leagues for the way he’d messed up that deal.
“She was game for it on the surface. Did the whole contrite act. Said she had a problem and needed help. But she relapsed every time and kept going back for more,” he said, and while it hurt like hell at the time, it didn’t hurt anymore. She was the past, and he’d learned from it. He wasn’t going to repeat those mistakes again.
Julia laid a gentle hand on his arm, resting it against the strong, curved strokes of his tattoo. “I’m sorry, Clay. That sucks.”
“Yeah, it did,” he said. “It’s hard when someone you care about won’t change and won’t even try. I kept trying to help her and she kept promising to get help,” he said, drawing a circle in the air with his index finger. “But it never happened. And so on you go.”
“On you go indeed. And here you are,” she said, twisting around to lay a sweet kiss on his chest. Then his shoulder. Then up to his jawline.
“Here I am.”
“I’m glad you’re here with me,” she whispered, and it was so unlike her to let go of her hard edge, but he liked it when she did in moments like this. “I’m loving this weekend.”
Here he was, falling faster than he expected to.
Chapter Nine
That’s why he hated lies. Made sense. Made perfect sense. And, hell, she shouldn’t worry because she didn’t have a drug problem, like his ex. Not even close. She had a money problem, and it wasn’t her fault. But she also had a truth problem because she couldn’t tell a soul about all those dollars she owed Charlie. She certainly couldn’t tell Clay. He did well for himself, and she didn’t want Charlie to sink his teeth into her new man.
New man?
What the hell? It was one weekend. One moment. Nothing more, and she certainly couldn’t think of him as her man, no matter how much she enjoyed every single second of these days with him, from the way he touched her to the way he made her feel in her heart.
Like it could open again.
Like she could let him in and not be burned because there was something about him that simply meshed with her. Maybe it was the way he held her, or it could be the way she felt when she was with him. Free.
It was a feeling she’d longed for, and it thrilled and scared her.
She buried her nerves in a kiss. Julia pressed her lips to his jawline, then tangled her fingers in his wet hair, the contact temporarily distracting her from what she knew was coming. The moment when she’d have to tell him something about her past.
“What about you?” he asked, and there it was. Her turn to share.
“You want to know my skeletons?” she said, slipping her hand down his chest, drawing a line across his fabulously firm body in an effort to rattle his focus. His breathing quickened, and his dick rose up in the water. But he reached for her hand before she could touch him.
“Don’t distract me. We’re talking,” he said, in a tone that was playful but firm.
She pretended to pout. “But other things are more fun than talking.”
“We’ll get to other things, gorgeous. I promise you I have many things planned for you.”
“But I have to fess up about the nudist colony I used to belong to first?”
“Yeah,” he said with a grin, as he shifted her around so she lay against his body, her back to his front, his hard cock against her backside.
“And my days working in a high-class call ring with your lawyer friend?”
“Ha, that too.”
“Fine,” she said, ripping off the Band-Aid. “I have an ex named Donovan. We dated on and off for a few years. He was handsome and hung –
“–Hey now.”
“Well, not like you,” she said, wriggling her rear against that evidence of how very well hung Clay Nichols was. So well. So unbelievably endowed in the length and width department. She thanked her lucky stars for that.
“Not like I’m even worried about that at all. I just don’t want to hear about another man’s prowess.”
“Did I say he had prowess?”
“Julia,” he said with a sigh. “Has anyone ever told you you’re evasive?”
“Fine. How’s this for non-evasive? Donovan and his schlong are history. But there was this other guy Dillon. He was a photographer, and did some work shooting homes for realtors and contracted with some companies in the city, taking product shots,” she said, but didn’t add the type of products he captured – like Charlie’s Limos. Nor did she add that while Charlie really did own and lease a fleet of limos, his limo company was pretty much his only legit operation. His other businesses were more of the racketeering variety, she suspected, and she had a hunch Charlie’s Limos did some laundering too. Or so Dillon had told her. She operated on a “don’t ask” policy these days when it came to Charlie. She didn’t want to know about his business dealings; she already knew too much from the things Dillon had told her. It had all seemed playful at the time when he’d come home from a photo shoot of a new stretch limo and flash a wad of greenbacks. “He paid me in cash again. I think Charlie’s allergic to checks,” he’d say.
“What a terrible affliction.”
“They make him break out in hives.”
“Receipts probably do too,” she joked. Little did she know then that Dillon was onto something all right. He’d been dabbling with a most dangerous type of client.