Smoke and Sin (The Perfect Gentlemen 4)

“Zack, I think you should go to bed. Liz is right about that woman you’re seeing tomorrow. She’s really young. You’re going to need stamina to keep up with her,” Connor said.

“I don’t need fucking stamina and you know it. I’m not touching that girl. Cancel the whole thing.” Zack started out the door, Connor hard on his heels explaining why that plan wouldn’t work.

“Darcy will be super sad if you cancel,” Gus pointed out. “You wouldn’t want to disappoint that sweet little thing.”

He wasn’t taking the bait. “Since that party tomorrow night is meant to welcome us to England, you know we can’t cancel. So let’s skip that subject and get to something worth discussing. What kind of stunt were you up to tonight, sneaking away?”

“Why is Zack acting like a massive ass? You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.” She tossed him a saucy glance over her shoulder as she approached the bar.

Roman gaped. “Are you kidding me? Connor just dragged you out of one bar and here you are pouring yourself another drink?”

“Is it hard to be that sanctimonious?” Gus mused as she filled her glass with two fingers of Scotch. “Do you have to shove the two by four up your ass all by yourself or do you have an aide do it for you?”

“I’m not joking, Gus.”

“I can leave, if you’d rather. I won’t be near a bar then.”

“Stop being such a smart ass. Why did you and Liz pull that disappearing act tonight?”

“What are you worried about, Roman? Two single women painting the town without—gasp—male escorts. I mean, our female minds could have gotten us into all kinds of trouble…”

“That’s not what I meant. Don’t play coy or stupid. And don’t pretend you’re innocent.”

She stood there, crystal glass in hand, all those gorgeous curves barely encased by the silk of her cocktail dress. “Of course I’m not. We both know what you think of me. I might as well wear a scarlet A on my chest. And if I keep this scandalous behavior up, I’ll ruin poor virginal Elizabeth.”

Why did she have to take everything he said or did and twist it in the darkest way? “I didn’t say that. That’s certainly not what I meant. And I’m sorry for what you overheard when you walked into the room. I simply don’t want all our personal issues aired in the press. I hate that.”

“You’re embarrassed to have slept with me. I know. You made yourself plain years ago.”

“Damn it, Gus, that is not what I said or what I’m trying to convey. I only insisted that I don’t want someone drafting a chart with lines drawn to show whom we’ve all slept with. If that makes me some kind of prude, then so be it. Hell, the last few years I have been a damn prude.” He needed to get back to the point. “But you can’t take Liz out like that.”

“Why?”

“It’s not safe,” he hedged.

She shook her head, her expression telling him she found his assertion terrifically stupid. “We were two blocks away, talking to Secret Service agents. We had a couple of drinks and some dinner with them. Apparently most of the time we had Connor watching over us, as well. How exactly were we not safe?”

“Did it occur to you at all that you’re a high-value target?” He had to try something. He couldn’t spend the entire visit running after her to make sure she wasn’t getting into trouble…or Matthew Kemp’s bed.

She snorted. “No. That did not occur to me. What’s smacking me between the eyes right now, however, is your paranoia. Again, we were with Secret Service agents.”

He couldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t a part of Zack’s inner circle. If this conspiracy had been going on for as long as he suspected, the Russians would most assuredly have a sleeper agent inside the president’s detail.

“Is that why you went out, to get close to those boys? Gus, please don’t make me fire them.”

“Why would you do that? As far as I can tell, they’re perfectly competent.”

“Yes, but I swear to god if I catch one of them looking at you twice, I will strip his credentials and march his ass out in a heartbeat.”

Gus slammed down her glass. It clattered against the bar. “Nice. You don’t want me but you damn sure don’t want anyone else to have me, either.”

That was where she was wrong. “Who said I didn’t want you? I wish I could stop wanting you. I want you every minute of every day, and I have since the moment I laid eyes on you.”

She shook her head at him. “So I’m like heroin? You know I’m bad for you but sometimes you just need a fix?”

“I didn’t say that, either, Gus.” He was so tired. Why did they always fight?

Roman sank down to the seat Zack had vacated and wished he could tell her everything. He’d give almost anything to stop keeping secrets that put him on one side of the fence and her squarely on the other. But he couldn’t do that without risking her safety. The more she knew, the more the Russians might see her as a target. Hell, he’d even settle for telling her that one of the reasons he’d convinced Zack to hire her three years ago had been simply because he missed her so fucking much after all these years. If he did, the way things were now between them, Gus would never believe it. Or she’d laugh in his face. Or maybe they’d fall into bed.

He wasn’t sure which outcome to fear most.

Even as he’d fallen in love with Joy, some part of him had ached for Gus. Sometimes he was sure he’d convinced himself he was in love with Joy because she was Gus’s opposite, and if his heart belonged to Joy then he couldn’t possibly still be hung up on his sexy, sassy Louisiana beauty. Because Joy had never once made him angry. She’d never challenged him. He had never yelled at her because she’d never given him a reason to. Joy certainly had never made him want to rip his own heart out so he didn’t have to feel so fucking much for her.

He was a coward.

“Go to bed, Roman. You’re tired. You can yell at me again in the morning,” Gus said with a sigh.

“I don’t want to yell at you.” He debated the wisdom of his words, then realized he couldn’t help himself. “I want us to be friends again.”

She sank down on the sofa beside him, leaving plenty of space between them. “I don’t know that we were ever friends. I think we were lovers, and I thought we could be something more at one time. But that’s long over. Now, we need to try to be good coworkers.”

Bland. Boring. He didn’t want to be her coworker. He wanted the right to touch her, make love to her, call her his. So dangerous… “And when we’re not working together?”

“Then we see each other at weddings and birthdays. We wish one another well.” She shrugged. “We send Christmas cards if we ever find the time to and think about that crazy year we spent together with fondness.”

“Is that how you remember us? Do you feel any affection at all?”

A wistful smile crept across her lips before it fell away. “Sometimes, but not often. I usually recall it as a cautionary tale.”

He didn’t like the sound of that. “I never meant to hurt you.”

“And yet you did it so well. I think what you truly mean is you never thought I could be hurt at all.”

“I thought I was one of your many boy toys,” he admitted because they were finally talking about the past. Even more surprising, no one was yelling. “There was a part of me that worried you viewed our year together as nothing more than my turn with you.”

She stared at him, rearing back for an instant. He felt the heavy weight of her judgment. “Of course. Because I’m something to be passed around, like a joint at a party. All your friends get a hit, right?”

“I didn’t mean it that way.” How could he make her understand? Everything between them was fucked up. He knew that, just like he knew he probably couldn’t change it. But that was also a year of his life he wouldn’t take back. “I knew you’d been with Mad. I heard the rumor you’d been with Zack, too. I rather thought you were working your way through us all. I know that sounds like I’m some misogynistic prick, but by t

hat time there were women trying their damnedest to do it. Women who viewed us as trophies.”

“Oh, believe me. I knew some of them. Not a one of you argued with them or protested their ill treatment of you.”

Because they’d been young and stupid, and he’d never imagined the consequences. “You’re right. Back in those days, they were lovely, and we really only thought about fun while we plotted our futures. I admit I happily sent a few of those women right down the line. But not you. Never you. That should tell you something.”

“Yes, it tells me you didn’t want to upset Dax by shoving his sister in the same lot with the good-time girls.”

There it was, the frustration. Why couldn’t they have a straightforward conversation? She never listened to him. She always told him what he must be feeling—and she usually made it some insult he’d never intended at all. This was how their fights started, damn it. Roman was tired of the pattern.

“No. Listen to the truth instead of inventing your own. I was jealous. Brutally, blindingly jealous that Mad had you first, and when I heard about Zack, I wanted to kill him. My best friend.”

Her eyes softened and so did the tone of her voice. “You know, I spread those rumors about Zack to save a friend, right? She was a preacher’s daughter, and he would have been very upset to find out the scooter he’d gifted her with on her sixteenth birthday had been used as a prop in the first sexual encounter of the future president of the United States. When the whispers started and everything nearly went to hell, she called me and I saved both their asses.”