Taking the Boss to Bed

“Yet you still hopped into bed with that horse’s ass.”

“I did not sleep with Clive!” Jaci shouted.

Sure, you didn’t, he mentally scoffed. Ryan started the engine of the car. He stared at the gearshift before jamming it into Reverse. He backed up quickly and pushed the button to take down the window of the passenger door. On the other side of the car stood Jaci, tears running down her face. He couldn’t let her desperate, confused, emotional expression affect him. He wouldn’t let anything affect him again...not when it came to her, or any other woman, either.

He didn’t trust those tears, didn’t trust her devastated expression. He didn’t trust her. At all. “Thanks for screwing up my life, honey. I owe you one.”

* * *

“Have you been fired?” Shona asked, perching her bottom on the corner of the desk Jaci was emptying.

It was Wednesday. Jaci’d been back in New York for two days and she’d sent Ryan two emails and left three voice mails asking him to talk to her and hadn’t received a reply. Ryan, she concluded, was ignoring her.

She’d reached out five times and he’d ignored her five times. Yeah, she got the message.

“Resigned. I’m saving them the hassle of letting me go,” Jaci said, tossing her thesaurus into her tote bag. “Without funding, Blown Away is dead in the water and I’m not needed.”

Shona tapped her fingernails on her desk in a rat-a-tat-tat that set Jaci’s teeth on edge. “I hear that Jax has been in meetings from daybreak to midnight trying to get other funding.”

Jaci wasn’t one to put any stock in office rumors. No, Ryan had moved on. It was that simple.

Thanks for screwing up my life, honey...

Moron man! How dare he think that she’d slept with Clive? Yes, she told Clive about Leroy, but only because a part of her wanted him to see that she was happy and content without him, that she had other men in her life and that she wasn’t pining for him. But she’d forgotten that Clive hated to share and that he still, despite everything, considered her his. Under those genial smiles was a man who had still been hell-bent on punishing her; payback for the fact that she’d had the temerity to move on to Ryan from him. But while she knew that Clive could be petty, she’d never thought that he’d be so vengeful, so malicious as to call up a tabloid reporter and cause so much trouble for her and Ryan.

Oh, she was so mad. How dare Ryan have so little faith in her? How could he think that she would sleep with someone else, and just after they’d shared something so deep, as important as they had earlier that night? She might have a loose mouth and trust people too easily and believe that they were better than they were, but she wouldn’t cheat. She’d been cheated on, so had he, and they both knew how awful it made the other person feel. How could he believe that she was capable of inflicting such pain?

She got it, she did. She understood how much it had to have hurt to be so betrayed by Ben and Kelly and she understood why he shied away from any feelings of intimacy. She understood his reluctance to trust her, but it still slayed her that Ryan didn’t seem to know her at all. How could he believe that she would do that, that she would hurt him that way after everything they’d both experienced? Didn’t he have the faintest inkling that she loved him? How could he be so blind?

“I’m so sorry, Jaci,” Shona said and Jaci blinked at her friend’s statement. She’d totally forgotten that she was there. “Are you going back to London?”

Jaci lifted her shoulders in a slow shrug. “I’m not sure.”

“Sorry again.” Shona squeezed her shoulder before walking back to her desk.

So was she, Jaci thought. But she couldn’t make someone love her. Her feelings were her own and she couldn’t project them onto Ryan. She could, maybe, forgive his verbal attack in the driveway of Lyon House, but by ignoring her he’d shown her that he regretted sharing his past with her, that he didn’t trust her and, clearly, that he did not want to pursue a relationship with her. It hurt like open-heart surgery but she could deal with it, she would deal with it. She was never going to be the person who loved too much, who demanded too much, who gave too much, again.

When she loved again, if she ever loved again, it would be on her terms. She would never settle for anything less than amazing again. She wanted to be someone’s sanctuary, her lover’s soft place to fall. She wanted to be the keeper of his secrets and, harder, the person he confided his fears to. She wanted to be someone’s everything.