The One In My Heart

“I’m just turned on by you.”


His words were almost a greater peril than his touches. I nudged a pumpkin gnocchi around on my plate. “You’re planning to use me to distract yourself from your disappointment. I don’t do consolation sex.”

I also didn’t want to experience any more of his vulnerability. That sigh on my shoulder just about killed me.

“It’s not consolation sex, just the straightforward, nasty sort,” he whispered in my ear, sending sizzles of electricity along my nerve endings.

He was clearly angling for sex and sex alone, viewing me as a stressed-out society matron might eye her bottle of Xanax. Why, then, did I so desperately want to say yes?

I put on my sternest voice. “If you want to get laid, hook up with somebody on Tinder, or order an escort off craigslist.”

“I’m morally opposed to paying for sex, and I don’t want to deal with any more strangers tonight.” He reached for a tomato tarte Tatin. “Guess I’ll eat myself into a stupor then. Where’s a gallon of cookie-dough ice cream when a man needs it?”

I got up and returned with an assortment of desserts. “Here, sex on a plate.”

He bit into something triple-tiered, but his eyes were on me, his hunger unmistakable.

I pushed a slice of almond dacquoise along the edge of the plate, too flustered to eat. “Something doesn’t compute about your situation,” I said, so that I wouldn’t stare back at him with the same intensity of lust. “Kids have screaming fights with their parents all the time and everybody says all kinds of mean things. And in the vast, vast, vast majority of the cases, by next Thanksgiving everybody is sitting down to dinner again. I don’t get why your estrangement with your parents should have lasted so long. Did you and Ms. Cougar break up just now?”

“No, when I was twenty-three.”

“Who holds a grudge for another decade?”

“I did mount a couple of real takeover attempts of the family holdings in my twenties.”

I stopped pushing around the almond dacquoise. “So you were a raging asshole.”

“That, I believe, is the technical term.”

This changed things. “Are you sure your dad will forgive you?”

He dug a spoon into a thimble-size cup of chocolate crémeux. “No, I’m not sure at all. Which is why I need you. And you…you have no sympathy for a man trapped between his pride and his past asshole-ism.”

He offered me the spoonful of crémeux, which was rich and bittersweet. “I have sympathy, just not enough to take off my clothes.”

“You can keep your clothes on,” he murmured.

The implication of his words…It was a wonder that the electricity sizzling along my nerves didn’t short-circuit all the lights in the ballroom.

Applause erupted, startling me: The bride and groom were leaving. Bennett and I stood up and joined in the clapping.

“We should probably go too, if your purpose here is done,” I said, once the newlyweds had exited.

“Are you going to jump into a taxi and head straight home?”

“Yes.”

“And what do I do with my sad and lonely self?”

“Get drunk, eat ice cream, and don’t operate on anyone.”

He put an arm around me. “You are heartless. Why do I want you so much as my fake girlfriend?”

Why don’t you want me as your real girlfriend, you jackass? “Because I seem—seem, mind you—to inhabit that sweet zone of obtainability: not so easy as to be worthless, and not so difficult that you’d give up all hope. Pretty basic evolutionary psychology.”

He gazed at me. “You really know how to put a man in his Cro-Magnon place, Eva.”

Pater had always insisted that nicknames were only for spouses and immediate family. He never referred to me in public except as Evangeline—and neither did Zelda, because he had been so adamant.

To hear Bennett call me Eva was a shock to the system, all the more so because I loved it.

Before I could reply, mournful, sensuous notes wafted across the ballroom.

A tango.

Damaris strode to the middle of the dance floor, struck a pose to a smattering of whistles and applause, and hooked her finger at Bennett.

He shook his head no.

“Come on,” she wheedled.

He shook his head again.

“Pretty please,” she pleaded.

Bennett hesitated. He turned to me, a gleam of calculation in his eyes. “Did you like Dirty Dancing? Did that movie turn you on?”

“Why do you want to know?” I asked cautiously.

“That’s a yes then.”

He shrugged out of his jacket and dropped it over the back of a chair. Then he pulled off his tie and extracted his cuff links. The music writhed and trembled. He approached Damaris slowly, almost casually, rolling up his sleeves as he did so. My heart stuttered at the sight of those beautiful forearms. The crowd was no less appreciative, the women cheering loudly.

All of a sudden he looped his arm about Damaris’s waist and yanked her to him.

Catcalls erupted.

He drew a hand up her bare arm, over her shoulder, and cupped her cheek.