Jaimie: Fire and Ice (The Wilde Sisters 2)

The first was that she couldn’t bring herself to lie.

The second was that nobody would have believed her.

One or maybe all of them would have turned up at her apartment, demanding to know what was going on. And Jaimie couldn’t tell them that because she wasn’t sure herself. She only knew that things were different since the night of The Big Blackout.

Not that that night had anything to do with the way things had changed in her life. It was just a convenient frame of reference. Lots of people used the event that way, as if it had been some kind of turning point on the calendar.

She was edgy. Out of sorts. She wasn’t sleeping well.

Well, it wasn’t a problem, it was just a temporary blip. There was so much going on in her life lately. Lots of appointments and showings. She’d picked up three exclusives, one in Georgetown, two in Silver Spring. She was busy, busy, busy…

OK.

Maybe it was more than that.

Maybe, she thought as she drove her rental car from the airport at Dallas to El Sueño, maybe the night of The Big Blackout had affected her.

Damn.

Jaimie blew out a breath.

Of course, it had affected her. Why lie to herself? Why call that October night The Big Blackout when what it had been was The Big Mistake?

She had slept with a stranger. A man she'd met, what, a couple of hours before she’d tumbled into his bed. A man she’d known she would never see again. No, she hadn’t consciously thought about it, but she’d known it anyway. Zacharias Castelianos was the exact opposite of the kind of men she dated.

Correction.

The kind of men she dated when she dated.

There wasn’t much time for a social life when you were chasing after listings and courting buyers, but when she did go out with someone, he was what Lissa called a Suit.

“Gag me with a spoon,” her California-transplant sister had said when she’d paid a visit last year and they’d done some late-night dishing about men. “Accountants. Attorneys. Economists. Financial analysts. Good grief, James, don’t you ever want to go out with somebody who’s pure testosterone? All brawn and no brains? A man who’ll just scoop you up, carry you off to bed, and make you come so many times you’ll be bowlegged the next morning?”

They’d both laughed.

Right—except Jaimie wasn’t laughing anymore.

A coyote shot across the dirt road just ahead. She stood on the brakes; the car swayed. She got it under control and took another long breath.

That was what The Big Mistake had been all about. Being scooped up by a man who’d taken her to bed and given her so many orgasms that she really had ached the next morning.

Ached with humiliation.

She wasn’t into hooking up. She never had been. That was fine if it was your thing—she wasn’t sitting in judgment on anybody—but it had never been hers. She’d always been a romantic about men. Dammit, even about boys.

How many times had some jerk broken her heart in high school because she’d thought forever was supposed to last more than a week?

Hooking up would have made sense in college. All the courses. The endless hours spent studying. Working to score As, to make the dean’s list, to make Phi Beta Kappa.

There’d been no time for relationships. But there’d been time for sex, had she wanted it.

Meet a guy, find him attractive, set things up so that when you were free and he was free, you got together for an hour. For a night. You hooked up. No strings, no commitment, no emotional baggage.

Lots of her friends had done it. Lissa, too—well, maybe not hooking up, not exactly, but her older sister certainly took a different approach to sex than she did.

“You want too much,” Lissa had said that same night they’d talked about men. “You want a guy with a measurable IQ to ride up on a white horse. You want bells to ring. Nope. Scratch that. You want John Williams to write a score for the big scene.”

Jaimie sat up straight and shifted into drive.