Beautiful Stranger (Beautiful Bastard 2)

A cab screeched to the curb, scaring the ever-loving shit out of me as the back door flew open. A smooth, bare arm reached out, the hand frantically waving me in before Sara leaned forward, grinning. “Get in already!”

It took several seconds for my brain to connect to my mouth, and my legs. “Shit. Yeah. Brilliant.”

Ducking in the cab, I shoved my briefcase on the floor and looked over at her.

“Hey, Max. You looked a little . . . stalked.”

“You spotted that pretty well,” I said, eyeing her.

She shrugged, giving me her strange, elusive smile.

“Fucking paps,” I grumbled.

Sara crossed her legs and gave me a tiny shrug. “Poor baby. Need a cuddle?”

She had a fire in her eyes I hadn’t seen since the night at the club when she dragged me down the hall.

You’re in trouble, mate.

She wore a short red wrap dress and it had come undone a bit at the top. I understood the feeling. I gazed down at her left breast, the black lace of her bra peeking out.

“Nice to see you,” I told her cle**age. “I’ve had a day. Can I bury my face in you?”

“No sex in my cab!” the cabbie barked. “Where are we going now?”

I looked to Sara for guidance but she only raised her eyebrows and smiled.

“Up toward the park,” I muttered. “Not sure yet.”

He shrugged, turning the wheel away from traffic and muttering something under his breath.

“You look beautiful,” I told Sara, leaning to kiss her.

“You always say that.”

I shrugged, and licked her neck. Fuck. She tasted like sweet tea and oranges. “Come home with me.”

She shook her head, laughing. “No. I have tickets to a show at eight.”

“With whom?”

“Myself,” she said, straightening and looking out the window. I reached for her hand, slipped my fingers between hers.

“It’ll play another night. Which means you should come home with me and ride my c**k instead.”

Sara’s eyes widened as she glanced at the cabbie. He glared at us in the rearview but said nothing.

“No,” she whispered, eyes searching mine. She tried to pull her hand out of mine, but I didn’t let her. “But can I ask you something?”

With her hair tucked behind her ears and looking so small on the seat beside me, I felt a completely foreign panic: was this all wrong for her? In her bare, unguarded moments she looked so naïve.

“Anything,” I told her.

“I’ve been thinking about it. Why are you so famous around here? Yes, you’re gorgeous and successful. But New York breeds gorgeous and successful. Why do photographers stalk you on a random Tuesday?”

Ah. I smiled, realizing that although she had looked me up online, she hadn’t looked very far back. “I thought you did your homework.”

“I got bored after going through three pages of pictures of you in a tux with your arm around all of the women.”

I laughed. “I assure you, that isn’t why they follow me.” Pausing, I wondered why I was talking about this now, after being so tight-lipped about it for so long.

“I moved here a little over six years ago,” I began. She nodded, clearly familiar with that part. “And about a month after I arrived, I met a woman named Cecily Abel.”

Her brow furrowed. “I know that name . . . Do I know who that is?”

I shrugged. “You may know her, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t. She was very big on Broadway but, as is often the case in the New York theater world, her fame didn’t extend very far into middle America.”

“What do you mean she ‘was’ big on Broadway?”

I looked at her fingers woven between mine. “I believe Cecily—and her dramatic departure from the theater scene—is the reason I’m noticed at all. She left New York quite abruptly, after mailing a letter she wrote that was printed in the Post. It detailed all of her gripes with this city, including,” I quoted, “ ‘directors who couldn’t keep their hands to themselves, whoring politicians, and investment hounds who didn’t know a good thing when they had it.’ ”

“She loved you?”

“Yes. And, as is often the case in life, it was unrequited.”

Sara’s eyes grew a bit dark, her red mouth curved into a frown. “That sounds pretty flippant.”

“Believe me, I am anything but flippant about Cecily. She’s fine now. Happily married in California. But for a time, she was under a doctor’s care.” Before she could say more, I added, “She was a good friend, and her decision to leave everything here showed me she wasn’t very . . . stable. Really there were many reasons she left the city and I was just the most recent disappointment. I simply didn’t love her the way she loved me.”

Sara blinked up at the ceiling and seemed to consider this. “It’s better you were honest with her.”

“Of course,” I assured her. “Her mental state was, ultimately, not about whether or not I loved her. She was troubled regardless . . . but that doesn’t make very good newspaper copy, now does it?”

Sara looked back at me and her eyes softened, her smile returned. “So people became interested in who this man was, the man who broke the local star’s heart and drove her mad.”

“And thus I was made into a mystery. The press loves a good roguish playboy, and her letter was quite dramatic. Their portrayal is true, and it’s also not. I do love women, and I do love sex. But my life’s rarely as interesting as the tabloids hope. I’ve learned to not care much one way or another what people are saying.”

Our cabbie swerved to miss hitting a kid on a bike, and laid heavily on the horn. In the jostling, Sara’s breast pressed against my arm and I pressed back, grinning, as her eyebrow rose in mock exasperation. “There are a lot of pictures of you online.”

“Some of those women were lovers, some weren’t.” I ran my thumb across the swell of her breast, and she looked down to watch, eyes hooded. “I’m not abnormally averse to commitment; I just haven’t made one in a very long time.”

Her head snapped up and I could see with perfect clarity how her pupils dilated, her lips twitched in a smile.

“Yes,” I admitted, laughing. “I suppose our arrangement is a commitment of sorts. It just doesn’t count when you refuse to ever go on an actual date with me.”