At Rachel’s look of surprise, he quickly added, “But I ended it with her. It really wasn’t meant to be, and I told her so, but she’s been rather gormless about the whole thing and has had a rather difficult time coming to terms, as it were.”
“Oh,” Rachel said.
“More importantly, how do you find the tabouleh? I think it’s rather too tart, don’t you?” he asked, quickly changing the subject, and leaving Rachel feeling strangely unsettled.
The other thing Flynn was vague about was his work. This stood in stark contrast to her, of course, who went on like a Chatty Cathy with her many tales of temporary assignments—fish packing, receptionist, mailroom clerk, check-out girl at the strip club, of all things. But Flynn preferred not to speak of his work. “It’s frightfully boring, really,” he told her.
“But you work such long hours. There must be something interesting.”
“No, really,” he would insist, and silence any more questions from her with a kiss.
Rachel didn’t mind. She chalked it up to his obvious boredom with his job, and when he couldn’t answer some of her questions about her laptop, she figured he was trying to keep his work from their relationship.
So the only question Rachel was left with was the one that needed asking before she went any further, but the one question she couldn’t scrounge up the guts to ask: How long was he in America?
That question dogged her through endless hours of temp work—she was so torn between dying to know the answer and refusing to acknowledge the inevitable ending to the sweetest thing she’d ever known. She wanted there to be more to their relationship, to see it go on and on . . .
But she couldn’t possibly see how it would ever work.
First of all, there was her, Miss Fortune, an heiress who had been cut off from her fortune and couldn’t get a real job for love or money. Several applications for teaching positions had gone unanswered. As far as she knew, she’d be working temp jobs to pay the utility bill for the rest of her life, and Flynn was not the sort of guy to be attracted to that sort of poverty—she could tell by the cut of his clothes and his penchant for the finer things in life. He was a man who could have any woman he wanted—why would he saddle himself with someone who packed fish? Even if it was a temporary job.
And then there was the prospect of explaining Miss Fortune to him, and how she’d ended up like this. Every time she tried to think of how to say it, the words just sounded ridiculously stupid. “I’ve been cut off because I couldn’t seem to get out of school,” she could imagine saying, or “Honestly, my dad is a prick, and that’s why he cut me off to be mean and spiteful.” Or how about: “I lived off my dad for the first thirty years of my life, but I’ve turned over a new leaf I swear.”
Nevertheless, there was something between them that could not be denied, and if Rachel ever had any doubt of it, Flynn put that doubt to rest over and over again, and especially at night, when they would invariably end up in his little apartment, in his bed, making wild and passionate tantric love, complete with strangely shaped pillows and arousing creams, both fiercely determined to explore each and every chapter of the tantric sex book before she mailed it off to her sisters.
So it was, for the time being, anyway, her heaven on earth, and at the very least, a few moments in time she could cherish as long as she lived.
When it was over, she fully intended to write Cosmo and tell them that their research on the British men had been so far off base as to be laughable. Where did they think James Bond got his swagger?
Rachel wasn’t the only one caught up in their time together—it wasn’t something Flynn would bloody likely well forget, either. And, like Rachel, he couldn’t have been more surprised. Not because she wasn’t his type—surprisingly, she was more his type than any woman he’d ever met. But he’d never expected to get as caught up in this affair as he had. He’d expected to go back to Iris once the sting of her betrayal had left him, and naturally, he’d assumed the sting would leave him. Affairs among his crowd were not exactly news, as almost everyone seemed to have them now and again.
But Iris’s affair had not left him. In fact, the more he had thought of it in those days and weeks after it had happened, the angrier he became. What infuriated him was that Iris believed it to be something he should overlook. She was never sorry for it, not really, and that said more about her as a person than he’d ever really seen before. It was plainly evident that Flynn did not really know the woman he almost married.
Moreover, that circle of people who thought occasional affairs were quite all right was not a circle he’d ever aspired to. In truth, it was a circle that had annoyed him for far too long.
So here he was, caught up in a real love affair, one he was grateful to have found and experienced. And he would have been perfectly content to have gone on with it, but then reality would seep in.