One Night Stand Bride

“Say what?” But she’d heard him and the concept filtered through all the angst and fear and found a small snippet of reason, latching onto it with teeth. “You mean with makeup and everything?”

“Sure.” He shrugged. “Maybe you haven’t been able to fix your fear because you’re too far away. You can’t just get near your fears. You need to be inside them, ripping the things to shreds, blasting them apart internally.”

“Oh, sure, because that’s what you do?”

The sarcasm didn’t even faze him. He cocked his head and stared straight down into her soul. “Married you, didn’t I?”

Before she could get the first of many questions out around the lump in her throat, one of Helene’s staffers interrupted them, shattering the intensely intimate moment. Good. They’d gotten way too deep when what she should be doing is creating distance. The last thing she wanted to hear was how freaked he’d been to lose his independence and how great it was that he had an imminent divorce to keep his fears of commitment at bay. It wasn’t hard to imagine a player like Hendrix Harris with a little calendar in his head where he ticked off the days until he could shed his marriage.

It was very hard, however, to imagine how she’d handle it when that day came. Because losing him was a given and the longer this dragged on, the harder it was going to be to keep pretending she wasn’t falling for him—which meant she should do herself a favor and cauterize the wound now.

Ten

Hendrix didn’t get a chance to finish his conversation with Roz. Helene’s stint as a clown ended faster than anyone would have liked when one of the patients took a scary turn for the worse. Hospital personnel cleared the area and a calm but firm nurse assured Helene that someone would update her on the little boy’s status as soon as they knew something.

A somber note to end the day. Hendrix couldn’t stop thinking about how short life was, the revelations Roz had made about her childhood and how to pick up their conversation without seeming insensitive. But his own fears that he’d mentioned were as relevant now as they had been before he’d agreed to this marriage.

Even so, he wanted to take a chance. With Roz. And he wanted to talk about how rejection wasn’t something he handled well, air his fears the same way she had. But she insisted that he go back to the office with his mom so she could take her car to Clown-Around’s tiny storefront and finish some paperwork. He wasn’t dense. He’d given her a lot to think about and she wanted to be alone. What kind of potential start to a real marriage would it give them if he pushed her into a discussion before she was ready?

Distracted, he went back to work but he couldn’t concentrate, so he drove home early. The expressway was a mess. Bumper-to-bumper traffic greeted him with nothing but red taillights. Of course. Probably because he wasn’t supposed to go home.

It didn’t matter anyway. By the time he got there, Roz wasn’t home yet. He prowled around at loose ends, wondering when the hell his house had turned into such a mausoleum that he couldn’t be there by himself. He’d lived here alone for years and years. In fact, it was extremely rare for him to bring a woman home in the first place. Roz had been unique in more ways than one.

By the time Roz finally graced him with her presence, he’d eaten a bowl of cereal standing up in the kitchen, chewed the head off of his housekeeper because she’d dared suggest that he should sit at the empty dining room table, and rearranged the furniture in the living room that he’d used one time in the past year—at his engagement party.

In other words, nothing constructive. He had it bad and he wasn’t happy about it.

Her key rattled in the lock and he pounced, swinging the door wide before she could get it open herself. Cleary startled, she stood on the doorstep clutching the key, hand still extended.

“I was waiting for you,” he explained. Likely she’d figured that out given his obvious eagerness. “You didn’t say you’d be late.”

A wariness snapped over her expression that wasn’t typically part of her demeanor. “Was I supposed to?”

“No. I mean, we don’t have that kind of deal, where you have to check in.” Frustrated all at once for no reason, he stepped back to let her into the house. “You weren’t late because of me, were you?”

She shook her head. “You mean because of our earlier conversation? No. You gave me advice that I appreciated. I appreciate a lot of things about you.”

Well, if that didn’t sound like a good segue, he didn’t know what would. “I appreciate a lot of things about you, too. On that note, my mother told me earlier today that things are looking really good for her campaign. She thinks the marriage did exactly what it was supposed to.”

Roz swept past him to head for the stairs, scarcely even pausing as she called over her shoulder, “That’s great.”

A prickle of unease moved down his spine as he followed her, even though he probably shouldn’t. She’d come home late and didn’t seem to be in a chatty mood. He needed to back off, but he couldn’t help himself. This conversation was too important to wait.

“It is. It means that everything we hoped this marriage would do is happening. Has happened. Her donations are pouring in. She helped your charity, and while I guess we don’t know the results of that yet—”

“It was amazing,” she said flatly and blew through the door of the bedroom to sink onto the bed, where she removed her shoes with a completely blank ex

pression on her face. “I had calls from three different hospitals looking to form long-term partnerships. Helene’s already agreed to do a couple more go-rounds for me.”

“Wow, that sounds...good?” Her tone had all the inflection of a wet noodle, so he was flying blind.

“Yeah, it’s good.” She shut her eyes for a beat, pointedly not looking at him. “Things are going well for her. She told me that too when I called her. So we should probably talk about our exit strategy. It may be a little premature, but it’s coming faster than I’d assumed and I’d really like to get started on it.”

Exit strategy? “You mean the divorce?”

The word tasted nasty in his mouth as he spit it out. It reverberated through his chest, and he didn’t like the feeling of emptiness that it caused. A divorce was not what he wanted. Not yet. Not before he’d figured out how to step through the minefield his marriage had become. He couldn’t fathom giving up Roz but neither did he want to come right out and say that. For a lot of reasons.

The pact being first and foremost. It weighed so heavy on his mind that it was a wonder his brain wasn’t sliding out through his nose.