Pride After Her Fall

Something about this wasn’t familiar. None of this was familiar. This. Her.

No, he hadn’t done this before...

Damn.

‘I’m ringing to cancel,’ he said bluntly.

There was a silence.

‘It wasn’t a good idea to begin with. I’ve got a lot of work on and I can’t give you the time you deserve.’ He knew these lines by heart. ‘I apologise if I’ve messed up your evening’s plans.’

He waited for the explosion. In his experience a woman on the make rarely remained neutral.

‘You didn’t know this earlier today?’

She didn’t sound angry, she sounded genuinely at a loss, her voice almost uncertain, and for a moment it loosened his grip on all that life experience. He hesitated, because right now he was remembering he’d seen a lot of other things in Lorelei St James beneath the glossy exterior. Things he couldn’t think about now or they’d undermine what was the right decision. The only decision.

‘I did, but you’re a beautiful girl, Lorelei. I let that distract me.’ He paused to let it sink in. ‘But, like I said, it’s a busy time.’

‘I distracted you?’ Her tone had cooled to match his. ‘Do you ask women to dinner who don’t distract you, Nash?’

He released some of the tension in his chest. ‘Okay, I’ll lay it out for you.’ He made his voice harder, grittier. ‘The reality is you’ve got a media profile, Lori, and that’s not going to work for me.’

There was a flat, astonished silence.

‘Let me see if I understand this,’ she said slowly. ‘You no longer want to take me to dinner because you’ve read something about me in the newspaper?’

‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘I don’t want to take you to dinner because I don’t want to read about me in the newspaper.’

He knew she’d taken his meaning because there was a pregnant pause.

‘I’m sure that gets old for you quite fast,’ she said, in a stiff little voice he didn’t quite recognise as hers.

She paused but only to catch her breath.

‘Is this about my father?’

He heard a note of that desperation she’d displayed on the street with her car, felt the give of his tightly leashed control and the threatened spill of emotions and desires he refused to give in to. Something about the way she kept going, revealing herself so openly, reminding him how unable to protect herself she had seemed this afternoon, made this intensely personal—and it was working against his usual detachment.

He focused on pulling it back. He was good at this. Reining it in. Being single-minded. He reminded himself it had been a long day, and this woman had contributed to some of that length with her theatrics.

‘No, sweetheart, it’s about you and your lack of visible support and me being flesh and blood. I made a mistake.’

He put finality in those four words. The conversation needed to end.

There was a sudden flash of silence.

His words echoed back at him, the harshness of the message he was giving her making him flinch even as he knew he’d given women the brush-off before. Blunt always worked, and the only casualty of this would probably be her ego.

‘Mais, oui, you’re a busy man.’

This time the heat in her voice was unmistakable and he relaxed a fraction. Angry was good. He could put an angry, indignant woman behind him.

‘How inconvenient of me to distract you from what’s important,’ she bit out. ‘Here was I, thinking you were a gentleman, but you’re just a man, aren’t you? Like all the rest.’

He heard the catch in her voice.

‘And not a very nice one.’

The phone went dead.

He dumped the cell, frustrated. For a moment he felt her in his arms again, the warmth of her, the delicacy, saw the way her tilted eyes grew round when she was uncertain. It was that uncertainty he’d heard threaded through her voice just now, and for a moment he knew he’d hurt more than her ego. For a moment he considered the alternative that she might have been genuine. That the witty, surprisingly refreshing woman he’d talked to in her kitchen this afternoon was the genuine article.

Then he dismissed it.

She was right. He wasn’t a very nice man and that had brought him a long way.