Edie Higgins.
A woman with a four-hour repertoire of dirty jokes, and a body that had never been under a scalpel. The body in question had sultry curves and a rosebud tattoo that rode high on her left breast—regrettably a little too high. Yes, he was feeling shallow and a bit debauched, but in his own defense, he also acknowledged her curiously appealing joie de vivre.
The club’s whiskey was overpriced and probably watered down, but it didn’t matter. He hadn’t touched his glass, and already he could feel himself loosening up. Her smile was infectious—in the manner of avian flu or staphylococcus, he added as an afterthought. Dr. Tyler Hart was ready to take this woman every way, any way, she’d let him.
Edie slipped an orange slice into her mouth, the juice dribbling down one side of her lip. She had luscious lips. Not collagen-f, not schoolmarm-thin. Juicy, he thought with a stupid grin, his mind wondering what her mouth tasted like. He was allergic to citrus, but was anaphylactic shock so bad? He hadn’t been tested for allergies in years, and people outgrew them all the time, so theoretically, he had probably outgrown his. Tyler leaned closer, taking a deep whiff of orange and Edie, which promptly sent him into the first throes of sexual dysphoria.
“What was her name?” she asked, and he had to blink twice in order to focus on the words.
Words.
Slowly his mind formed a suitable answer. “Cynthia.” At the name, some of the sexual dysphoria evaporated.
“Cynthia,” she repeated in a snotty voice and then giggled.
It made him want to smile, or maybe it was the way her eyes tracked his face, as if he were the most fascinating man ever. His med school roommate, Ryan, had called him an alcoholic lightweight. Because of that, Tyler was usually careful when it came to drinking. Tyler lifted his full glass and took a hesitant sip.
“Was Cynthia blonde?”
“You’re blonde,” he pointed out, but then worried that he had a type. What if he was fatally attracted to toxic blondes? Quickly he slammed the last of his whiskey.
“I’m not a natural blonde.”
“Neither was Cynthia,” he volunteered in unchilvarious fashion.
Edie giggled again. This time, Tyler smiled back.
“I could buy you a lap dance,” she offered, sounding so sympathetic it should have touched his heart.
You could give me a lap dance,
he thought, and decided he wouldn’t drink anymore. Someone needed to stay in charge. God forbid that it was her.
“Do you know why she dumped you?”
“She didn’t dump me,” he protested, although why he was lying he didn’t know. Cynthia had dumped him. Rejected him. Humiliated him. And if he were smarter, he’d be milking this for all the sympathy points that he could get. As a specialist in coronary bypass, Tyler understood how easily the heart could be manipulated.
He lowered his head, the very picture of dejection. “You’re right.”
At his words, Edie put a comforting arm around his shoulders, and Tyler shamelessly moved in closer, drawn to her warmth, her generous nature, the feel of her warm and generous breasts brushing against him. Unsurprisingly, some of the sting of rejection disappeared.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and once again he heard the tenderness in her voice. He was a virtual stranger, and an unchivalarous stranger at that. Before meeting Edie, he had thought that New Yorkers were hard-hearted and cynical, unmoved by the pathos of human suffering…
Except for this one.
He met her eyes. “Thank you,” he told her, feeling sincere, grateful and yes, still painfully aroused.
“Do you want to meet paradise?”
“I’d love to,” he agreed, his mind already transported to a lurid paradise where there was no dirt, no naked gyrating dancers…unless it was Edie. He’d let her dance. As long as she was naked. Paradise sounded perfect.
However, instead of taking his hand and leading him away from this chaos, she stood and waved her hand, gesturing wildly to one of the dancers.
Enlightenment shouldn’t hurt so much.
“Is that paradise?” he guessed, as the buxom redhead bounced and buoyed her way toward him. Painful enlightenment rolled in his gut.
“What do you think?” asked Edie, looking extraordinarily pleased with herself as she started on the introductions.
“Tyler, meet Paradise, aka Anita.”
Anita held out her hand, and politely Tyler shook it, not wanting to stare at what had to be 42 Double D, but somehow he knew that laws of nature and gravity had both been violated in the altering of her breasts.
“You have to be nice to Ty. I put him through crap tonight. Girlfriend dumped him, then I had a flat, which he changed in the rain by the way, and didn’t even complain. Not once. He let me drive into Brooklyn, and didn’t bitch about it, even though I knew he knew we weren’t in Manhattan. And he’s a visiting Gemini from Houston.”
Her words were tribute to a man who was swimming upstream in a tide of lascivious spawn, and whose very life now depended on getting Edie Higgins out of her clothes. Not wanting to disappoint her, Tyler adopted the humble aspect of a man who could do no wrong.
“You poor man,” Anita cooed, as Edie wandered over to the bar.
The dancer moved in closer, eyelashes aflutter, and began stroking his arm.
Tyler tried to focus on her face, rather than her bare breasts, and happily noted the absence of forehead wrinkles that indicated either skin injections or a curious lack of stress in her life. He scanned the room, noted the glistening skin, the sultry dips and shakes, and knew it had to be BOTOX. If he spent every night in this place, he’d be ready for BOTOX, too.
“How do you know Edie?” he asked, finding a square of ceiling tile to concentrate on.
“We met at NYU.”
“You’re a student?” he asked, proudly not jumping when a dancer gyrated dangerously close to him. “Economics.”
“Of course,” he answered absently, searching out Edie at the bar.
“She’s a peach.”
“I noticed.”
“You like her?” she asked, looking at him with naked curiosity.
Tyler protested quickly. Apparently too quickly because Anita smiled with blatant sympathy. “It’s okay. You don’t have to feel bad. All the guys love Edie.”
“Really?” he asked, noting where Edie was, leaning against the long, silver bar.
Loving Edie was bad. She was too chipper, too needy, had a well-shaped nose for trouble…
and a great ass,
he thought, leering at her skin-tight jeans.
Hastily he swallowed air.
“See the bartender?” Anita pointed toward the hulking creature with a chain tattooed around his neck, and Tyler dragged his bleary eyes away from Edie.
“I see him.”
“They had a thing a few years ago, but she dumped him.”
“Who’d she fix him up with?”
Anita laughed, chucking him on the arm. “You’re brighter than most.”
“Thanks. So, who was the next victim?” he asked, even though he already knew. Anita was watching the chain-painted bruiser with sappy eyes. After only a few hours in the city, Tyler was now convinced that the stereotype of the hardened New York heart was flat-out wrong.
“The next victim was me.” She sighed, confirming his hypothesis.
Saps. All of them.
A happy patron walked past and curved a hand over Anita’s naked thigh, and she only smiled. The bartender didn’t blink.
Tyler shook his head, surprised. “That’s very uh, open of both of you that he doesn’t get jealous.”
“I’m putting him through acting school. It eases the pain.”
“Yes, I get that.” His eyes again found the bar, drawn to Edie immediately. In a naked sea of female perfection, the bartender was ogling the one female who was completely clothed. And Dr. Tyler Hart completely understood.
As if she sensed his weakness, Edie turned, met his eyes and smiled from across the room.
“She’s not into relationships,” warned Anita.
“Me, neither.” Tyler watched as Edie came toward him, carrying four shot glasses. Just then the music volume increased, and a gravel-throated singer moaned about the Highway to Hell.
And tonight Dr. Tyler Hart was riding her for all he was worth.
After Edie ordered for them, she continued on her current mission. Trying to take the loneliness out of his eyes.
“You know, there’s nothing wrong with reaching out to someone, forming a connection, even if it’s temporary,” she told him. Tonight she’d introduced him to Paradise, Passion, Lulu and Honey and it disappointed her that he’d turned them all down.
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it,” he insisted.
“Well, you didn’t find anybody at the club,” she argued, pointing out the obvious discrepancy between what he said, and what he didn’t do.
“Do I look like the stripper type?” he protested, and she rolled her eyes, surprised at his cluelessness.
“Every man is the stripper type. You’ve just got it buried deeper than most. All that emotional repression takes time to undo.”
His brows drew together. “I’m not repressed.”
“You’re an emotional brick, but don’t feel bad. It comes from being loved by a woman named Cynthia. What did you love about her?” she asked, curious about what would attract him, since it wasn’t the allure of topless females.
Carefully he arranged his silverware, silently laying out the utensils until he lifted his head and gave her a curious look. “Why do you think I loved her?”
His answer was a total dodge. She knew it. “Why were you with her, if you didn’t love her?”
“Cynthia is beautiful, good company, intelligent and very fond of literature.”
Oh, yawn, Edie thought to herself, so what was the source of attraction? Ha. There could be only one.
“A wildcat between the sheets,” she surmised. She’d seen it before. Her old roommate, Scott had been dumped fourteen times by his girlfriend, but kept crawling back because she blew his mind—in the allegorical sense. Edie looked at Tyler sympathetically, genuinely sad that he was caught in such a web of sexual slavery. Men could be such dogs.
“I’d prefer not to discuss my sex life,” he insisted, a flush rising on his cheeks.
“Sorry,” she apologized. He was a cute blusher. All buttoned up and trying so very hard to be polite. Having known her share of uncouth males, the old-fashioned gallantry was new, fun…
sexy
. “Okay, we won’t dwell on the painful past of your sex life. Instead, let’s concentrate on the new and exciting future. There’s a lot of women out there. Like that one, for instance.”
The waitress Edie pointed to was nearly thirty, heir to the Petrovich fortune, and always enjoyed meeting new fab people. “That’s Olga,” Edie explained, and started to wave her over, but Tyler grabbed her hand, holding it painfully tight.
“It’s okay,” he said, still holding her hand, but the tension there became something new, nice…
warm
.
Not liking this friendlier line of thinking, Edie started on her selling job. “Olga’s great. She’s so easy to talk to, and she has this great sense of humor. Ask her to do her Joan Rivers impression. She’ll have you rolling.”
“I’m sure she would, but I don’t need you to take care of me.” He looked down at their entwined fingers, smiled, and then let her hand go. And no, she didn’t miss the contact. Not at all.
“Don’t take it personally,” said Edie, laughing it off. “I like taking care of people. And you’re new to the city, and you’ve had this miserable night, and it’s completely my fault. I’d feel ten times better if you let me do something else for you.”
“I don’t want you to owe me,” he insisted.
“But I do,” she insisted, too.
“No, you don’t. Couldn’t we be…friends, just because we actually get along?”
Get along? Trench coats and tattoos? Ties and toe-socks? It sounded…
impossible
.
Or not?
“Maybe,” she answered, then shifted uncomfortably in the vinyl booth. “But I still feel responsible.”
“You can buy breakfast. We’ll call it even. Unless you can’t afford it.”
Edie grinned, grateful for her own financially viable position, none of which was her own doing. Dad called her a shameless loafer. Mom called it ADD. Edie merely considered herself smart. “Dad’s a doc. Money is not a problem.”
“What sort of doc?”
“The ‘I’m bigger than God’ sort of doc.”
“That’s no answer. They’re all like that,” he said seriously, and she laughed, because he seemed to understand.
“People don’t understand why I don’t think he’s the best father ever. He’s charming and funny, and his patients adore him. There are four buildings named after him because apparently three wasn’t enough and—”
“Why don’t you like him?”
Even though her mother understood Edie’s jealousy about the time and attention he gave his patients, she never complained about his long absences from their lives. No, Clarice Higgins was a saint. Unlike Edie, who believed that saints got what they deserved. Usually an early death.
She dismissed her jealous feelings, easy squeezy. “Men don’t get it. It shouldn’t be so hard to do the little things. The human things. The fatherly things that fathers are supposed to do.”
“But what about the good that he does? Doesn’t that make up for it?”
Yes, the eternal justification for endless work hours, skipping out on birthdays, anniversaries, spoken like someone who didn’t have a doc in the family. “Very few people are going to understand because they aren’t the ones shut out. I don’t like being shut out.” She balanced her chin on her palm, needing to change the subject. “What do you do?”
“I’m taking a class.”
“Where?”
“At Columbia.”
She nodded. She could definitely see that, the square-jawed face with the scholarly vibe. “I love to learn. What sort of class?”
“Roman artifacts.”
“Oh, that sounds so cool! Who’s teaching it?”
He frowned, as if trying to pull the name out of his head. Eventually he blurted out, “Dr. Lowenbrow,” looking proud of himself for remembering.
Lowenbrow?
Edie checked her encyclopedic memory banks. “I don’t think I know him.”
“It’s a big school.”
“But I’ve taken a lot of classes,” she told him, not wanting to say exactly how many.
“Haven’t found one subject that sticks with you?” he asked, as if she couldn’t be the egghead-student type, which was probably true.
Edie paused, not sure how much she wanted to say. She glanced at his hands, newly washed, almost back to pre-Edie status, and decided that, while she could fool him with her pseudo-intelligentsia facade, it was too early in the morning, and she’d pushed him enough. The truth seemed more appropriate. “I get bored easily.”
“You just haven’t found your passion yet,” he said, nicely defending her as if his current opinion of her wasn’t so awful. She frowned, bothered by the idea that his opinion of her might be awful, and then bothered because she was bothered.
“Life is my passion. If more people cared about people, the world wouldn’t suck quite so much.”
“It takes more than passion to fix things.”
“It helps.”
They talked over breakfast and then she ordered him a strawberry smoothie because Ira, the diner’s cook, made the best smoothies in the world. And no, strawberries wouldn’t make up for what she’d put him through tonight, but he did seem to like the drink.
She noticed as they talked that he was cagey, not prone to personal disclosures unless she specifically asked—which, of course, she did. Tyler Hart was a museum curator, specializing in antiquities. He had one younger brother, Austen, who he wasn’t sure he knew as well as he should. Their mother was technically “missing,” but Tyler assumed that she was dead, but he didn’t know for sure, and he pretended he didn’t care. In her absence, the two boys had been raised in West Texas by their father, who was a mean son of a bitch, and Tyler had been on only two continents, North America and Europe, although he wanted to go to Africa someday.
Edie explained the ins and outs of African safaris, making him chuckle. She watched his eyes crinkle at the corners, noticing the hypnotic swirls of brown and gold, and was that a hint of green? Yes, she thought so. A less self-focused individual would feel guilty about the shadows under said sepia eyes. Or beaten themselves up because there was a slight bloodshot tinge to them. After all, Edie was responsible for the lot, but then he smiled at her, a quick twitch of his mouth, and the last qualms disappeared. Tyler Hart was different from the norm. He was too honorable. He didn’t want to talk about me, me, me. And best of all, he made her feel…well, not quite so much alone. As it was four in the morning that was something of a miracle for Edie.
After Olga had cleared the plates and Edie had signed for the tab, she knew she had to drive him to the Belvedere, and that was when the doldrums descended.
Edie navigated the streets carefully, since he’d already had the full New York Cab Ride From Hell. After she double-parked the cab in front of the hotel, she popped the trunk. At first Edie tried to yank out his suitcase, but the rat wouldn’t let her, and Edie, being somewhat of a closet diva, stood back and allowed him to assert his manliness.
Without thinking, she followed him a couple of steps, watching the easy confidence of his walk. Not tired, she noted, still cruising on cylinders that Edie had long burned out. Yes, he’d had eggs and she’d had pancakes, which only partially explained why a museum curator should be fully functioning after thirty-six hours of no sleep. Frankly it boggled her already-boggled mind, but then he stopped in his tracks. He wanted to pay for the cab ride from hell, which Edie politely declined. Even for Edie, taking a fare for that ride would have been way out of line.
The front of the hotel featured ornately carved gothic wood doors. If you looked closely, you would notice the various mythological creatures in
Kama Sutra
positions. Tyler seemed to be looking closely, but he didn’t look quite as afraid as she would have expected. Although his museum probably had tons of porn. Those Renaissance types liked their women running naked and free—much like modern man.
She struggled to align museum curator, who saw nudity on a daily professional basis, with the buttoned-up stripper-rejecter that she had dragged around all night. Not that she needed to worry about it much. She wouldn’t see him again because…
Because,
she told herself firmly, and then left it at that.
His Windsor knot was now completely loose and he didn’t look nearly so arrogant, nor so lonely, either, she thought, mentally patting herself on the back. Yes, there were grease stains on his shirt, but shirts could be replaced. In fact she’d buy him a new shirt and have it delivered. Something in white. “You’ll be okay?”
“I’ll be okay,” he assured her, pulling his gaze from the door, his trench coat hanging competently over his arm.
Dawn was close, but not close enough. The night was still clinging, and Edie was hesitant to leave. “If you need anything, you can call. If you want to know the best place to get a slice, or which clubs are overpriced, or a quiet place to study.”
His smile was tired, but sincere. “Tell Barnaby thanks. He needs to buy a flashlight, and there’s a hole in the backseat that should be fixed.”
They were goodbye words. Two strangers who would be going their own way. Being something of an expert in these words, Edie knew them when she heard them. Nervously she met his eyes, although she didn’t know why she was nervous. She was never nervous, never without a smartass reply, never unable to breathe.
Tyler frowned at her, not so nervous, not so breathless, and yes, there were smartass tendencies within him as well, but they were disgustingly repressed. As such, she had no right to feel the sense of loss inside her.
“Edie?”
“Yes?”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Go back to the apartment.”
He cocked his head, studying her intently. “You’re not going to pick up some guy, are you?”
She couldn’t help but laugh because he took everything so seriously.
“Nah. I was just kidding….” she started to explain, but her voice trailed off when she noticed the very real question in his eyes. Suddenly she wasn’t feeling so non-serious anymore. In fact, the pitch in her stomach was downright serious.
A car drove by, honking at her poor parking job, but the sound was foggy and far away. Her whole world seemed foggy and far away because of the sudden pornification of her previously PG-rated brain. Now she only had thoughts of naked flesh and Windsor knots tied in untraditional locations.
Her nerves began to itch and heat in untraditional locations, as well.
“You’ll be okay?” she repeated stupidly, needing to stick with easy words, and not the intricate visuals that were spinning in her head. Two bodies. Joined. Entwined. Not alone.
Tyler looked at her, disappointed. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
No, she wasn’t worrying about him, she was
wondering
about him. Right now, she wondered about how his mouth would feel against hers. She wondered about the feel of his body shuddering above her, inside her. It was an intense sort of wonder, a liquid sort of wonder. Impulsively Edie pushed aside her goodbye words and found hello words instead. It was easier than she had expected.