“Yes, dinner. We can go to that Japanese place you love. Come on, Jia, humor me. I haven’t seen you properly in three years, and the last time wasn’t exactly great.”

  It was at Todd’s funeral. He’d come to support me. That was why I still talked to him. It was his genuine care and desire to be there for me. Despite what he did to me, and how he treated our relationship.

  “Okay. Thank you.”

  I probably should eat. There was no harm in dinner and I needed my strength for tomorrow. Maybe a tasty Japanese banquet would be good for my memory too.

  ***

  Forget memory.

  Who needed memory when I had my dreams?

  Last night, I had a series of vivid erotic dreams of that damn Hunter.

  And when I say erotic, I mean of the R-rated variety.

  The thing was, I didn’t think they were dreams. I thought they were memory fragments. Pieces of my memories trying to break free and resurface.

  However, if what I dreamt was in truth what happened and he remembered everything and I couldn’t, I was in for one hell of a ride when I did remember.

  In my dream, he touched me everywhere. Literally everywhere, and I begged him to. There really was no error on his part. It was all me. I remembered whipped cream being squirted all over my breasts and him licking and sucking me clean.

  That was the first image that popped into my mind when I saw him this morning.

  Today, he wore his hair in a ponytail that made him look sexier. Loose tendrils hung about his ears, but the rest looked neat. He’d also trimmed his beard.

  A black silk button-down shirt clung to his powerful torso, and he’d left the top button undone so I could see more of the Celtic swirl on his chest and the Japanese character for love.

  He was in the middle of drawing something on the flip chart when I walked in and he regarded me. He made no effort to hide his obvious admiration of me and didn’t even flinch when I frowned at him. In fact, it encouraged him, and he made a show of taking his time to check me out.

  I’d decided to go for casual today and had thrown on a black romper. It may have showed off too much of my legs, but I was comfortable.

  “Good morning,” I said with emphasis, cutting into his show.

  He laughed. “Yes, it is good. You know you shouldn’t wear things like that if you aren’t trying to turn me on. Remember yet?”

  I held his gaze and decided I’d kind of had enough of being in the dark.

  “Not exactly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Bite the bullet and get it over and done with. “I remember whipped cream.” Heat rushed my cheeks. “Was there whipped cream?”

  He laughed. “There was whipped cream.”

  God. I winced, feeling my insides crumble.

  “Hunter.”

  “Yes, love.” His eyes twinkled with that spark that reached out to me.

  Time to get to the point. I should have just come out and asked him this days ago. “Where we careful? I know we were drunk, but can you remember if we were careful?”

  “I can assure you I handled you with care.” He took a few steps and stopped just before me.

  “That’s not what I mean. Did you use a condom?” Best to spell it out.

  “No. But don’t worry. I went to the doctor’s last month, and I’m as clean as a whistle. Before you, I hadn’t had sex in four months.” The corner of his sensual mouth lifted into a slow, easy smile.

  I would have taken the time to savor the picture of him if I didn’t seriously start to freak out and have palpitations.

  I brought my hand to my mouth and tried to keep the panic in, but it wasn’t working.

  “Hey, you look like you’re going to faint.”

  “God, I wonder why?”

  He had the audacity to laugh. It was that stupid laugh that infuriated me more.

  “Yes, God, why?”

  “Hunter.” I pulled in a deep breath. “I’m not on birth control.”

  A ragged breath escaped my lips.

  He pressed his lips together and actually looked like he was trying not to laugh.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be well taken care of when the baby comes. We’ll have to move to England though. I have a nice little cottage in the countryside. Pretty, and great to raise a family.”

  “What is the matter with you?”

  “Nothing. I’m just doing what’s right. Oh shit, sorry, I forgot the part about asking you to marry me first. Let’s start over. We get married before the baby comes and tell everyone we got pregnant on our honeymoon. Then we move to England and live happily ever after.”

  “You asshole.” I punched him as hard as I could in his chest, but I ended up hurting myself because I landed my fist into solid muscle. “Damn it.”

  He caught my hands when I lashed out at him again. He was laughing, laughing at me.

  “Jia, I’m joking.”

  To my surprise, a tear ran down my cheek. Not from what he said; it was all of it. Everything. It was all too much now.

  “Joking about what? Because if I’m pregnant and you’re saying you were joking about all that stuff, you’re evil.”

  “We didn’t sleep together,” he cut in.

  I narrowed my eyes and gave him an intense stare. “What do you mean? You said we did.”

  “I was just messing around.”

  “What!” I shook my head at him. “What kind of freak are you? Why would you allow me to believe we slept together when we didn’t? Do you know how worried I was?” I couldn’t believe he would do such a thing, and it was all too much. I needed a timeout.

  “I’m sorry. I know I should have come clean.”

  Feeling overwhelmed, I turned and walked away from him.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “Jia.” He caught my arm and tried to pull me back, but I wrenched my arm free of his grasp.

  “I mean it. Just leave me alone.”

  I was off my game. Clearly. And now I was starting to wonder if coming here for this job had been a mistake.

  Chapter 9

  Hunter

  ***

  I found her outside in the park sitting by the river with her legs hanging over the side. Her hair was down and flowed about her in the gentle breeze.

  I stopped when I saw her, wondering if I should indeed leave her alone.

  I was an asshole for taking that joke too far.

  It was only Thursday. I’d known this woman for a little over three days, and she’d gotten under my skin.

  But it wasn’t in a bad way. Maybe I liked the distraction from the reality. The part where my best friend betrayed me and still Emma hadn’t called to say anything.

  No sorry, no checking up on me to see how I was, no attempt.

  It said a lot about her, but me too. It said I made lousy choices in women.

  Well, present company excepted. She’d just kind of happened, and she wasn’t mine. I’d hurt her though.

  Gathering courage, I made my way over to her and sat next to her. She didn’t look at me like I thought she would; she continued to stare ahead at the gentle swish of the river as it flowed by.

  “Usually, when someone asks to be left alone, they mean they want to be by themselves,” she spoke, her voice frail against the wind.

  “I left you for an hour.”

  “That didn’t mean you needed to come after me.”

  “I did. I want to fill in the blanks. I went to the bar on Monday night. You were sitting there by yourself drinking, and I asked you if you wanted company. You said yes. We ordered some bottles of wine, and you definitely drank more than me. While we drank, we swapped stories. You told me how some asshole called Bane stole your savings and how hard life was for you, and I told you how I walked in on my best friend and girlfriend cheating on me.”

  Her head snapped toward me, and she gasped. “What? That happened to you?”

  “Yeah.” She didn’t remember, of course.

  “You told me?”

  “I told you.”

  “Hunter, I’m so sorry that happened to you. It must have been awful.”

  “It was.”

  She tensed, and her mouth twitched. “Was I supposed to be...”

  “What?”

  “The easiest lay you could find to get back at your girlfriend.”

  It was easy to think that, because that was exactly what me hooking up with her looked like.

  “No. I don’t need to get back at her.”

  “But she cheated on you with your best friend.”

  “Emma, that’s her name. She loves money. She loves stability. We’ve been on and off for a good two years. When we met, I was working at Patterson’s as a junior associate. We broke up after eight months because I suspected she was cheating on me with someone who had more money than me. Couldn’t prove it though. We got back together when I started working at Silvermans. Then she started acting weird when I told her my plans to leave and pursue art. I think you’d only want to get back at someone for cheating if you were in love with them in the first place, or if they deeply hurt you.”

  I loved that she was listening and looking at me with understanding eyes. “So, you weren’t hurt? Didn’t that drive you to the bar?”

  “What drove me to the bar was the betrayal I felt from my best friend.”

  “Oh...” She nodded. “I get it. I do.”

  “Any love I may have felt for Emma vanished the minute I saw them together, but who hurt me most was my friend.” And I still couldn’t get the image of them out of my mind.

  What mattered was the act, not whether or not I loved Emma. My friend did that to me, so he would have done the same thing to me if I’d been in love or not.

  “I’m sorry, and I’m sorry I didn’t remember.”

  I offered a small smile. “Want to hear the rest of what happened?”

  She nodded slowly and bit the inside of her lip.

  “We talked, and we drank. Then I took you home, and things got heated.”

  That soft rose color filled her cheeks. “So, the whipped cream part was true.”

  I bit back a smile. “Yeah, that was true, but that was kind of as hot as things got because you started feeling sick.”

  Her brows knitted together, and she looked down at the little patch of grass before us. She blinked, and then I watched something brighten in her eyes.

  “I was sick. I ran to the bathroom and, ugh, I threw up everything I’d ever eaten since birth. You came in there and took care of me, and after you cleaned me up, you allowed me to sleep on your chest because I wanted you to hold me.”

  “She remembers.” I clapped.

  She looked up and gazed straight into my eyes. “I was vomiting. It was gross.”

  Embarrassment washed over her face.

  I chuckled. “I don’t care about that. I was worried, so I stayed with you. You could have fallen over and hit your head or something, or faint and drift into a coma. Any of those are worse than vomit. Plus, the fact that you’re beautiful helped loads.”

  There it was, her smile. It started with her trying not to, but it came out, along with the soft rose color on her cheeks.

  “You think I’m beautiful?”

  “I think that’s kind of obvious.”

  “I’m sorry you had to see me that way. I’m not normally like that.” She looked away and back out to the cluster of trees on the other side of the river.

  “I’d love to see what you’re normally like.”

  “I can’t remember.” She spoke barely above a whisper like she was saying that more to herself than to me.

  “What can’t you remember now?”

  “Myself. But that’s oversharing, and I shouldn’t be telling you that. Don’t want you trying to guess my weaknesses and using them against me.”

  I chuckled. “I don’t think I could do that.”

  “If you want something badly enough, you can. Like this job. Are you going to tell me you don’t want this job badly? If you say yes, I know it’s a lie. You gave up being a lawyer, and not just any old lawyer either. My friend’s a lawyer too, so I know how big Silvermans is.”

  “I want the job badly, Jia. I think we both do. But I’m not the kind of guy to step on people to get what I want.” I wasn’t big-headed, but I was fortunate in life in the sense that I was naturally good at whatever I did. When I was studying and doing my legal training, I excelled without having to do too much. But it was perhaps down to the fact that I had my own ways of understanding things. Everything was art to me. Pictures in my mind that had their own stories.

  I’d never had to push myself too much because my world was filled with art, and I never had to be that guy who brownnosed, or whatever you did in a competition.

  Sure, I didn’t like this whole idea of us competing for something I wanted, but as for trying to basically sabotage her chances of getting through... nope, that wasn’t me.

  That wasn’t winning.

  “Everyone else does that.” Her voice broke my thoughts.

  “Do you?”

  “No.” She pulled in a breath and knitted her fingers together.

  “Jia, are you worried I’m going to sabotage you in any way?”

  “I wish that were the only thing I was worried about.”

  I leaned closer. “If it helps, I promise you I won’t do that. So, I have an idea.”

  “What?”

  “I never met you at Impasso. That was just a weird life coincidence. I met you at the bar. What if we start over and forget about the job for a moment? We could just be two people in a park sitting by the river talking.”

  She looked like she was considering it.

  “If we’re not talking about work, then what are we talking about?”

  “Ourselves. You could start, seeing as how you just said you can’t remember yourself. What made you feel like that?”

  “Everything.”

  “Like what?”

  In the handful of days that I’d known her, I’d guessed two things about her. The first was that she was the kind of woman who had fire and sass. The second thing was that she looked like she’d been through a lot. Like the years hadn’t been kind to her.

  Of course, I didn’t know the full details, but it wasn’t hard to see. It was in her eyes.

  “Life. I worked so hard to get to this point, but the truth is, I don’t know if I have the mental strength to be here.”

  I wouldn’t pry, but it made me wonder what had happened to her. “But you’re here.”

  “It just feels like there’s always something to set me back and make me work a hundred times harder than I have to. I’m tired of it.”

  I didn’t have to do that. I guess my hindrance was down to wanting to please my family. That was it. For her, it seemed and felt like more had got in her way.

  “Maybe this is the last thing.”

  She smirked. “You do realize that if I get the job, it means you didn’t.”

  “Yes, it would sadly mean that, but job aside, I think we both know that John must respect you a lot and love your work to want you here.”

  “He respects you too.”

  “Thanks. What’s your work like?” I noticed that she hadn’t exactly spoken about art yet. I’d talked for the both of us, but she’d barely said anything.

  “My work?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well.” She straightened. I liked the glint in her honey-colored eyes. It was the first time I’d seen it. “I didn’t have a style until I went to college. It was then that I came across your grandfather’s work. My work is inspired by his... um, methods.”

  That was interesting since my work was too.

  “So, you like abstract art?”

  “I do, but my style is abstract dark fantasy.”

  Okay... she’d got my attention before, but now she had it in a completely different way. I loved dark fantasy. It wasn’t my style but I had a very deep appreciation for it. I could do a few pieces if someone gave me a topic or theme, but most dark fantasy abstract artists came up with their own themes and topic. Pretty much like what I did in my own work.

  “Wow. Tell me more.”

  She smiled and pointed over to the river where it dipped down a set of rocks, so there was a ripple. “Over there. It looks like something’s in the water. It’s flowing, but the rocks are creating a wave as it ripples by. In my head, as the ripples swirl and splash, it looks like a person rising out of the water and reaching up to the sky.”

  As I looked, I saw what she meant. It was the way the water bounced and splashed.

  “It looks like a woman.” I smiled. Her full lips parted, and she smiled wide.

  “You see it?”

  “Yeah, a little like the lady of the lake, but the image of her is water and she’s reaching up to the sky. That little splash above her head looks like a... star.”

  I pointed. When I looked back to her, she was already looking at me. Surprise suffused her fine features.

  “You’re the first person to do that, to know and see what I mean just from my description.”

  “Well, does that get me into your good books and possibly gain some forgiveness for being an ass?”

  “Yeah, it kind of does.”

  I smiled and looked out to our little water fantasy. As I did, an idea came to my mind.

  “Jia, I have another idea.”

  “What is it?”

  “The woman in the water...”

  “What about her?” She giggled.

  “She looks like you. We should do that.” I could see it now. It was all coming to fruition in my mind.

  “What?” Her eyes widened.

  “The project. There.” I pointed again. “We should do that. Imagine it, a beautiful woman in water surrounded by stars. It’s perfect and in line with the theme of Juliana’s show.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yeah, wow.” That was something that would definitely stop the crowd and steal the show in a massive way.

  It was a great idea, and I loved how we’d come by it.

  But should I be worried that I was more excited to see Jia smile and her beautiful eyes sparkle than about the killer idea itself?

  Chapter 10

 

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