Improper English (22 page)

The ladderback chair creaked as Alex slumped back. I plugged in my coffee grinder and started grinding up a fresh batch of espresso bean coffee, trying not to be obvious in my quick glances at him. There were deep lines around his mouth that hadn’t been there the day before. Guilt rippled through me at the sight of them. Even if yesterday’s betrayal meant the destruction of our relationship, I couldn’t make myself believe he’d been on a day’s frolic out in the countryside; his air of subdued despair belied that. It made me want to comfort him all the more, to wrap my arms around him, to press his
adorable head to my chest and kiss his troubles away.…I shook the image from my mind. What was I doing? I wanted to comfort
him
? He was the man who’d rejected
me
most cruelly when I needed him!

Alex leaned forward and moved my list aside. He pulled a tiny bit of blue paper out of a pile, holding it carefully in his hand. “You’ve been cutting out paper dolls?”

I glanced at what he held in his hand and blushed. “Maybe.”

He looked at the blue object. “This looks like a…erm…”

I poured boiling water into the French press and fixed the plunger. “It is.”

“Why are you cutting out minuscule blue paper penises?”

I shrugged. “It just seemed like the thing to do.”

Alex didn’t say anything to that. He poked in the pile of paper again, then lifted up one of the paper Alex voodoo dolls.

“This one has my name on it.”

I busied myself pouring cream into a black and white cow-shaped creamer. “Does it? How very interesting.”

“Someone has drawn a great hairy wart on the chin of this paper Alex. And heavy glasses. And it would appear there are horns sprouting from his head.”

I pursed my lips and whistled a little innocent whistle.

“If the angle at which the legs have been severed and taped back on is any indication, I would also say it has suffered compound fractures.” He looked closer at the doll. “It has also been, for lack of a better word,
castrated.”

“What do you know about that?” I asked, placing the coffee, cream, and a mug on the table.

He leveled a look at me that was impossible to read, and accepted the mug of coffee.

“So,” I said conversationally as I refreshed my cup. “How’s tricks?”

He put his mug down. “What did you ask?”

“Tricks. How are they?”

“Tricks? How are my tricks—is that what you’re asking?”

I nodded. If he weren’t so tired, if I weren’t so heart sore, I would have found the look of disbelief that crossed his face comical. As it was, I hardened my heart and remembered my many grievances, but even that didn’t do me much good.

“Alix, I’ve been up twenty-eight hours straight. I have spent the night crouching in a patch of blackberry bushes in case my suspect released the woman—his wife of fourteen years—whom he was holding hostage, only to have him kill himself five hours ago by drinking a common household cleaner. I spent the next three hours explaining to my superior at the Yard what went wrong with what should have been a simple raid. In addition to which, I have seen the results of a case I’ve been working on for the last four months end not in an arrest of a child pornographer, but in a messy, unnecessary death that will generate at least a five-meter-high stack of paperwork. During the past twenty-four hours I have fielded innumerable calls from individuals residing in this house who were concerned that you and I had some sort of falling out, leaving you in a desperate state of mind. I have been worried out of my head because you were reported to be home and yet refused to answer my numerous calls to you. I am tired. I am covered in scratches. I itch. I suspect several insects have taken refuge on various
locations of my body. How are tricks? Tricks are bloody awful, thank you for asking!”

I bristled at his tone. “Don’t you take that tone of voice with me! I asked a civil question, I expect a civil answer. If you’re so frigging unhappy with me, you can just take your bugs and leave!”

He rubbed a hand over his weary eyes. “Christ, Alix, I don’t want to argue with you.”

But
I
wanted to argue with him. Anger was the only thing that was going to keep me from throwing myself on him, becoming a doormat with an invitation to walk all over me stamped on my forehead.

“Fine.” I said. “Don’t argue with me, then. Drink your coffee and go to bed.”

A wistful look passed over his face, but he set his jaw and shook his head. “You said you needed to talk to me. Here I am. I assume this is regarding what Daniel said about your story?”

Oh, the inner struggle! Part of me wanted to pour it all out to him, to sob out how Daniel’s evaluation had destroyed my creative spirit, to cry over the pain of my agent divorcing me; but another part of me, the survivor part, said no. I had thought Alex was different from the other men in my past, but he had proven he wasn’t, and I knew from hard experience that if I gave in now, I would be lost for good. He would never respect me, never treat me like I mattered to him. There was no future with Alex, I knew that now, but I could still end things with dignity.

“No, that doesn’t matter anymore.” I pointed to where my manuscript was currently residing in the wastebasket before I hauled it down to the trash bin. “I’ve scrapped that story. I’m going to write a new one, a medieval this
time, about a knight and his blind horse. It’s going to be very poignant. I see Rupert Everett in the role.”

“As the blind horse?”

I thinned my lips at him, but he was too busy frowning at the wastebasket to appreciate my gimlet-eyed glare.

“Why are you throwing away your story? Daniel said it needed work, but it had promise.”

“He said it needed a complete rewrite. Forget about it, Alex, it’s trash. I’m starting over, starting fresh with a bigger and better story. I may only have a month to get it written before my time runs out on the flat, but I can write a book in a month. And if I have to punch up a bit of it once I return home, that’s no problem.” I hoped he noticed my reference to returning home at the end of the month. I wanted it clear to him that our relationship was over, and that we had no future together other than perhaps the occasional tumble into bed. Anything else, anything of a more permanent nature, anything involving emotions and feelings outside of the genital region, were off. Impossible. Wasn’t going to happen. Not again, anyway.

He ignored my hint and clamped down like a terrier on a bone to the subject of my failure. “Daniel said he offered to help you restructure your story. Why are you giving up on it so easily?”

I gritted my teeth and rose. “Have you had breakfast?”

He shook his head and took another sip of coffee, his lovely bruised eyes watching me closely. I went into the kitchen and pulled out a bag of almond croissants I had purchased earlier.

“Knock yourself out,” I said as I placed the croissants before him, then turned my back on him to water my cute little spiky plant.

“Alix—”

I whirled around. “God! You’re just as bad as Isabella! Nag, nag, nag—is that all you people do around here? Find visiting Americans and nag them to death?”

He looked startled by my outburst. “I was just going to ask if I could have more coffee.”

Oh. Coffee. He wanted more coffee. Poor man, he looked so tired, so wounded-hero…I gave myself a mental shake and fetched the French press for him.

He thanked me. I mumbled a response. We stared at each other, Alex peering at me over the rim of his mug, me standing next to the window with my arms crossed over my boobs in what I knew was a “hands off” body stance. The silence was profound and pregnant with unspoken queries.

“All right, all right, I’ll answer your bloody questions! I can’t stand this constant badgering! What do they do, give you detectives a class in administering the third degree?” I stomped over to the table, ignoring the surprised look on his handsome, tired face, and sat down. “I’m starting a new story because the first one would take too much work to finish. Even”—I raised my hand to forestall his objection—“with Daniel’s help, it would still mean I have to rewrite the story, and I don’t want to do that. I’m sick to death of Rowena and Raoul. So instead I’m going to start a new story, a better one, one that won’t be so much trouble to write. I’m going to plot it all out in advance, so I know exactly where it’s going and who’s going to do what and say what and just how the blind horse is going to regain his sight at the end of the book.”

Alex set down his mug and leaned back in the chair, the thumb of one hand rubbing along his whiskery jawline
. “Let me make sure I understand this—you’re going to give up on the project you’ve put so much time and work into in order to start a new story, just because you’re tired of the first one?”

I nodded, pleased he understood the importance of cutting your losses and starting over. Lord knows that had been one of the first life lessons I had learned. “You got it in one.
Ravening Raptures
isn’t worth the trouble it would take to fix it.”

He stilled. “And what about us?”

I froze as well, my eyes caught in his dark emerald gaze.

His words were as quiet as they were soft. “Is our relationship worth the trouble to fix it?”

Yes! Yes, it is!
a voice shrieked in my head. The joy of being with him was worth any amount of trouble, any sacrifice! I loved the man; wasn’t love all about martyring yourself for the happiness of your loved one? To hell with my ego. To hell with my broken soul, my crushed feelings, the pain and suffering he had dealt me, would
continue
to give me because I wasn’t first in his heart as he was in mine. All that mattered was that he was happy, right? I took a deep breath.

“No, it’s not worth the trouble.”

The voice inside my head keeled over in a dead faint. I knew just how she felt. I would have given good money to be able to faint just then. I would have given my soul—shattered as it was—not to have seen the flicker of pain in Alex’s eyes. The pain
I
had caused. I swallowed hard and plunged onward. It would be a cleaner cut to get the worst over with quickly.

“I’m sorry Alex, there’s just no nice way to say this.” I knew the words, knew them well, but I had never been
the one to say them. Odd how with each word spoken, a bit of me died inside. “What we had was nice, but…” I shrugged. “Well, these things happen.”

He wasn’t breathing. He didn’t move. He was a statue, sculpted from some incredibly lifelike substance, fashioned in the image of the better parts of several Greek gods. Beautiful to look at, but without the breath of life.

“What things?”

I swear his lips didn’t even move. I had the worst urge to hold a mirror to his mouth to see if he was breathing, but figured that I’d better stay out of grabbing range just in case he was alive and was going to take it harder than I anticipated he would.

“Oh, you know…” I shrugged again. “Just things. Us. Our relationship. Our future, or rather, the lack thereof.
Things.”

His shoulders slumped in defeat, and I bled a little more inside at the sight of his head bowing with anguish. How could I do this to him? How could I willingly hurt the man whose existence lit up my life? How could I?
Survival
, the little voice in my head whispered.
It’s him or you.

“I’m sorry, Alex, but it’s clear that although you’re a raging stallion in bed, outside of sex we don’t have a whole lot going for us. You are a workaholic, and I’m—”

“—an insecure woman riddled with self-doubt who has no concept of her own worth.” Alex’s head snapped up with his words, his eyes glittering with heat and fury and something I had never seen before. “And I’m too tired to play your games right now, so if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to bed. You’re welcome to join me, although I make no promises as to how good a ride my stallion will be this morning.”

I shook my head, swallowing back misery. “Thank you, but no. Take your stallion for a ride by yourself.”

One lovely glossy chestnut eyebrow rose. I blushed a blush of pure idiocy.

“I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I just meant that you can go to bed by yourself.”

He pinned me back with that fiery green gaze for a few seconds, then released me and tiredly rose from the table. “We’re not finished talking about this.”

“Yes, we are. It’s over, Alex. It’s better this way, honest. I’ll be going home in a month and will be out of your life. You can find yourself some other woman.” I closed my eyes at the pain that thought brought with it. “Someone who has all the qualities you like, someone who fits in with your life, someone you really want and need.”

The doorknob rattled as he opened the door. I kept my eyes closed and leaned against the kitchen wall, hoping my knees would hold out until after he left.

“I have the woman I want and need.”

Delivered by a velvet-soft voice, his words cut through my flesh and made unerringly for my shattered heart. The door clicked shut just as my knees gave way and I slid down to the floor, my arms wrapped around myself to keep the shaking to a minimum.

Twenty minutes later a note was slipped under my door. I crawled over to it and held it for a few minutes before I blinked away enough tears to read it. It was a printout of an e-mail, sent to me at an e-mail account Alex had opened for me so I could correspond with my mother. On the back of it Alex had written
We can talk about it over dinner. 6 p.m. Stella’s
. I shook my head at the note and turned it over to read the message from my mother.

It was a threat to turn my novel—sent to her a few days before—over to the attorney general as indecent literature. I had no idea my mother knew so many words for “smut.” She must have found a thesaurus somewhere, because I just couldn’t imagine her using words like
prurient
and
salacious
in everyday conversation. The tirade about my novel transitioned seamlessly into an evaluation of my writing style, my character, and my life in general, ending with a demand that I return home immediately and stop wasting her money.
If you insist on writing pornography
, she wrote,
you can do so from Grandma’s trailer. That’s where this sort of trash belongs!