After the Kiss (Sex, Love & Stiletto 1)

Mitchell let out a small laugh. “No, I mean what about you and ex-boyfriends on weekends? What did you do? Not running, I take it.”

“Definitely not,” she said. “I actually haven’t spent much time with ex-boyfriends on weekend days. Saturdays and Sundays are my time, ya know? Laundry, girlfriends, yoga …”

Mitchell shifted on the bench to face her. “Come on, you never do weekend activities with a guy? Never? What about the more serious boyfriends?”

She tilted her head up at the sun. “Never really had one, not like that. Not anyone I’d want to go darting around the park getting all sweaty with.”

He was watching her with an unreadable expression. “But you’ve been in love?”

“Oh, yes,” Julie said with a smile. “It’s a gift of mine, falling in love fast. Just so long as they leave me alone on my weekends.”

She felt him studying her again, but she didn’t care. She knew what he was thinking. That it hadn’t ever been real love. That love couldn’t happen after a couple of dates and subsist only on Friday and Saturday nights. But it could. Maybe not the forever kind of love, but certainly the quick and easy kind. It was still love. At least she was pretty sure it was.

“There was one guy,” Julie found herself confiding. “Long time ago, right after I first moved to the city. Adrian. He lived next door, and he and I would sometimes spend all Sunday drinking mimosas and listening to indie music.”

“Sounds nice,” he murmured.

She cut him a glance. “Please. You don’t think it sounds nice at all. You’d rather be yachting or reading Shakespeare.”

He made a face. “You have me all wrong. When I said I liked to read and run, I didn’t mean that’s all I liked to do. I can relax and veg out with the best of them.”

“Yah, okay, Wall Street. Twenty bucks says you don’t own any piece of clothing more than two years old to ‘lounge around in,’ and I bet you don’t watch movies that didn’t debut at the Cannes Film Festival.”

Mitchell ignored her. “So what happened with Adrian? Did you realize that cheap champagne and crappy music did not true love make?”

“He moved away. I was sad for about two days. Then I met Alessandro.” She frowned. “You know, I’d forgotten all about those two guys until just now.”

“I bet they didn’t forget you so easily.”

Julie raised an eyebrow in his direction. “Are you flirting, Forbes?”

He smiled. “What can I say? Sweat-soaked women with hot-dog breath really do it for me.”

“Yeah,” she said, stretching her arms above her head, displaying all her mussed, sweaty glory. “I get that a lot.”

Julie caught Mitchell looking at her boobs. Apparently he didn’t mind the sweat. She hid a grin.

“So no serious relationships,” he said, dragging his eyes back to hers. “Just a string of casual nobodies. Who was the most recent?”

Julie screwed up her face as she tried to remember. There had been David, but that barely counted. And before that, Aaron … Crap. There was really nobody worth remembering.

“Nothing serious for a while,” she replied. “Just dating here and there.”

“What about sex?”

Julie froze. “That’s personal.”

“Oh, come on. Surely you’ve covered this in your articles. You’ve never written about your personal life?”

Julie’s instincts went on high alert. This was dangerous territory. The last thing she needed was him trying to determine how much of her personal life went into a story.

He definitely wouldn’t like the answer.

“Well, sure,” she said cautiously. “But writing about personal stuff is different from talking about it. It keeps it at a distance.”

“So let’s bring it in close,” he said with a charming smile. “How long since you’ve had sex?”

Too long, she thought.