Michael groaned and closed his eyes. “We’re really going to do this, aren’t we? We are going to use this opportunity to psychoanalyze me. Good torture technique, Juan Carlo. I give—let’s just cut to the chase, okay?”
“I am a man who has had many relationships,” Juan Carlo calmly explained. “Perhaps I can help you.”
“Go ahead and put a bullet in me. I prefer that to any advice from you.”
“But it’s true,” Leah said, because it was true. “You’ve never been entirely honest with me. In New York you weren’t honest, and then in L.A. you haven’t been completely honest. He’s right—I haven’t sold any arms to terrorists, so why can’t you be honest with me?”
“He cannot,” Juan Carlo opined. “He is not able to be honest. It is what we call a defect in the . . .” He gestured toward his torso.
“Character,” Leah suggested, her fingers aching from working the knot.
“Character,” Juan Carlo agreed.
“No, seriously. Just shoot me,” Michael said, and fell on his side, looking entirely frustrated.
Great, Leah thought. When the going got tough, Mikey folded like a house of cards.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
MICHAEL hadn’t folded, but he’d definitely had enough. He didn’t know if Leah was stringing Juan Carlo along, but he really was in no mood to examine their relationship with that asshole in the room, and when she said, “Excuse me, but I thought I deserved a little honesty in my final hour,” he lost it.
“Excuse me, Leah,” Michael said, struggling to sit up again, “but I was painfully honest when I saw you in L.A. I told you I’d made a huge mistake. I begged you to take me back. I laid it all out for you, bared my soul, and you couldn’t handle it. You couldn’t handle the fact that I had a past.”
“Which past are we talking about, Michael? The past that earned you the name of the Extreme Bachelor? Or the past you failed to mention that involved guys like Adolfo, Juan Carlo, whatever his name is!”
“It is Juan Carlo,” Juan Carlo, informed her. “Regrettably, also I am not a completely honest man.”
Leah glared at him, and then glared at Michael, who all but had his tie undone. It was a shame, really. Juan Carlo was the son of a fisherman and should have been able to tie a better knot than this.
“You told me you weren’t seeing anyone when you were,” Leah was saying, ticking off all his sins. “You told me you pushed papers around when you were in the CIA, when you were obviously sleeping with other men’s wives, and you made promises you couldn’t keep!”
Promises? Granted, he’d made his mistakes, but he hadn’t broken any promises. “What promises?” he insisted. “I keep my promises. I have kept every promise to you. You are the one who keeps dredging up the past, because you are suspicious and jealous and insecure. How can you not see all that I am trying to prove to you is real?”
“But that is your mistake, Michael Raney. You are trying to make her see this too hard,” Juan Carlo calmly offered.
That certainly gave Michael pause—he looked at Juan Carlo curiously. “What? How do you know?”
“Leah has told me everything,” he said cheerfully.
When they got out of here, he and Leah were definitely going to have a little chat. “Great,” he drawled, turning a murderous look to her. “Thanks, Leah.”
“Hey, I didn’t know he was your enemy. You failed to mention that important piece of info, remember?”
“Why can’t you just believe me?” he demanded. “Why can’t you just accept that I love you and no one else?”
“I have tried to believe you,” Leah protested, looking dangerously close to tears all of a sudden. “But every time I do believe you, another woman shows up out of the clear blue, or I see you flirting with several of them, or a guy like Juan Carlo wants to kill me because you slept with his wife, and then there is Nicole Redding, who acts like she practically owns you—”
“She is this way,” Juan Carlo said sagely.
“Wait . . . what?” Leah demanded.
Juan Carlo shrugged and held out his hand to study his cuticles. “I see it in the Star magazine. It has all of the informations about the movie stars. She is what you would call a slut.”
Michael actually laughed at that as he worked the ties at his back.
“It doesn’t matter,” Leah snapped. “What I am trying to say is that I want to trust you, but you won’t tell me everything, so how can I trust you?”