Sugar (20 page)

She’d expected him to continue to push to change her mind, but instead he said, “Look, I’ve gotta run to a meeting. We’ll talk again soon.”

“Martin, about that press release announcing my retire—”

“Ciao, baby.”

He clicked off, or perhaps they’d lost the connection. Sarah set down the cell with a sigh, feeling as if her business in LA wasn’t quite finished. If worse came to worse, she would write the damned press announcement herself and post it on her website. Whatever she decided, it would have to wait until after her lunch with Peter.

Ordinarily Cole wasn’t big on business lunches. He considered them to be a waste of money and time—especially his. Usually he had his assistant call in a carryout order to be delivered to his desk. But when an existing top-level donor such as Mrs. E. L. Elmhurst was considering making the Canning Foundation the beneficiary of her considerable estate, she had the right to expect some courting. Prior to ceding her position to him, his mother had conducted her fund-raising socializing exclusively at the nearby 21 Club. A devoted regular, she still received the Club’s selective silk scarf at Christmastime, duly numbered and decorated with the insignia and signature Jockey logo. But the classic New York venue, with its unapologetically old-school menu of Creamy Chicken Hash and Mixed Grill of Game, was too blandly conservative for Cole’s bolder palate. Union Square Café struck the respectful balance of elegant ambiance and fine food without coming off as decadent or flashy. It was one of his go-to venues for work-related wooing.

Moving along Union Square West at a slow stroll to accommodate Mrs. Elmhurst’s advanced age and high heels, Cole battled back his impatience. Owing to the previous hot night with Sarah, he’d gotten a later-than-usual start to the day and no breakfast—at least not of the caloric kind. He only hoped the blue hair beside him was too deaf to catch his stomach’s uncouth growling. His reservation was for one thirty, later than he would have liked but the best his assistant had been able to do at the last minute. Still, given the money he regularly unloaded, they’d better give him the requested window table, or he was going to be seriously pissed.

“Colvin, I’m so pleased you’ve come back to us in one piece,” Mrs. Elmhurst remarked, not for the first time since they’d met up at his office.

Unlike so many of his buddies, he’d come home with his body intact, but his mind and soul were far from whole. Though he’d begun sleeping better since he’d started seeing Sarah, nightmares filled with spewing guts, flying limbs, and, above all, the terrible screaming still haunted him.

Fortunately Mrs. Elmhurst didn’t seem to require a response, likely another reason she and his mother were friends and had been since dinosaurs roamed. “Your poor mother was beside herself those two years you were in Iraq. Remind me again what it was you did . . . over there.”

“Explosive ordnance disposal.” Taking her arm, he turned them onto 16
^th
Street.

She screwed up her face. “That sounds so very . . . risky.”

“It was. It
is
,” he added, thinking of those still fighting the War on Terror in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

Rich men made wars and then sent poor men to fight them. Enlisting during the Surge had been his contribution to evening the odds, or so he’d told himself at the time. Predictably, the move had galled his parents, but the youthful rebellion had boomeranged in his face.

“Well, it’s not every day I lunch with a war hero,” she simpered, her ring-covered hand squeezing his forearm.

The sobriquet set his teeth on edge, but if ever there was a time to grin and bear it, now was it. Six and a quarter million dollars would allow him to help a hell of a lot of kids dealing with stymied dreams and sick parents. Still, her inquisitiveness had him seriously craving a cigarette—and a cocktail. Since he’d started seeing Sarah, both vices had been substantially reduced.

Ahead, the restaurant door opened. A hot blonde wearing sunglasses and a broad-brimmed sunhat stepped out onto the sidewalk. A buff, well-dressed man with shoulder-length blond hair and a carefully clipped goatee followed her out. The woman seemed familiar. Curious, he checked her out. Laughing, she turned and reached up to straighten her date’s tie. Cole blinked, wishing he’d remembered his sunglasses. The bright light must have been playing tricks on his eyes, because he could swear the hot blonde was Sarah. She
was
Sarah! Seeing her link arms with the guy, Cole felt a growl building.

Seeing her and “Fabio” begin to backtrack toward Fourth, he sped up, ferrying Mrs. Elmsworth forward. “Sarah!” he exclaimed, planting them in her path.

She slipped her arm free from her companion’s. “Uh, hi.” Behind the screen of dark lenses, her gaze flickered from him to his companion.

“Sarah, aren’t you going to introduce us?” her date inquired, his gaze stroking over Cole.

She looked between them. “Sorry, where are my manners? Peter, this is Cole Canning. Cole, meet my friend, Peter.” She sent a significant glance over to Mrs. Elmhurst, still huffing and puffing.

Recovering from the lapse of etiquette, Cole turned to his lunch date. “Mrs. Elmhurst, I’d like you to meet—”

“Elaine Elmhurst though everyone calls me EL.” She offered a gnarled if perfectly manicured hand, shaking Sarah and . . . Peter’s hands in turn. Her gaze settled on Sarah. “I don’t believe I caught your surname.”

Sarah swallowed hard. Cole tracked the ripple as it traveled the column of her slender throat, the same throat he’d planned to bless with bites and kisses when he next saw her. Even though he’d been the one to say he was too swamped to manage a second mid-week meet up, suddenly Friday felt too far away.

“Halliday,” she answered, looking as though she wished the sidewalk might swallow her. Cole knew the feeling.

“Halliday,” Mrs. Elmhurst intoned, appearing to consider. “Are you any relation to the Hallidays of Bridgehampton?”

“I er . . . don’t believe so,” Sarah said, casting Cole a look as if to say,
what the hell were you thinking?

Ignoring it, he said, “We’re about to have lunch at Union Square Cafe. I saw you just came from there. Any recommendations,” he asked, as if he didn’t know the menu by heart.

Peter answered instead. “Oh, it was all fabulous, but the duck breast is to die for.”

Cole ignored him.

“I do love a good duck breast,” Mrs. Elmhurst chimed in.

“Well, don’t let us keep you from your lunch,” Sarah said, grabbing her “friend’s” arm and tugging him toward Fifth, the opposite direction from earlier. “It was a pleasure meeting you, EL.”

“What the fuck was that about?” Sarah demanded when Cole showed up unannounced at her door later that night.

She wore a white terry-cloth robe, a bath towel wrapped around her head, and absolutely no makeup. Doing his best to ignore how good she looked and smelled—who knew fruit-scented bath gel could be so erotic—he shouldered his way inside.

Bypassing her, he set down the wine he’d brought, a 2001 pinot grigio that the clerk at Union Square Wines had sworn was worthy of its
Wine Spectator
high marks. Now that they were into June, it was getting too warm for reds.

“Where do you keep your opener?” he asked, stepping inside the postage-stamp-size kitchen.

Green gaze flaring, she followed him in, making him regret leaving the bottle, highly breakable and fairly expensive, within such easy throwing reach. “Fuck my corkscrew. Stopping me in Union Square of all places, what were you thinking?”

He hadn’t been thinking at all. His brain had been too fogged for that, a cesspool of jealousy and other confusing, conflicting emotions.

Rifling through kitchen drawers and slamming them shut, he demanded, “Would you have rather I passed you by? Stared straight through you? Jesus, Sarah, what do you want from me?” When she didn’t immediately answer, he raked a hand through his hair. “What were you doing there any way? It’s not exactly the best place for flying under the radar.” The area was a huge tourist hub as well as part of NYU’s city campus.

She drew back, fiddling with her robe front, drawing it demurely closed. “That’s . . . none of your business.”

She was right. According to their no-strings rule, it wasn’t. Only Cole was past caring what might or might not be his business. When it came to sex, they’d blown past just about every boundary he could come up with, but emotionally Sarah still held him at arm’s length, throwing up walls left and right whenever he ventured too close for comfort—hers.

“This guy . . . Peter is he . . . someone you see regularly?”

He’d expected her to deny it. Instead she admitted, “He is . . . one of them, anyway, but usually just on Monday nights.”

“One of them!” Cole scraped both hands through his hair, mostly to keep from reaching for the knives. That explained why she always had “plans” on Monday night. “Jesus, Sarah, how many are there?”

For a moment she looked confused, and then suddenly her eyes cleared, and a smile broke over her face. “Three . . . well, four counting Liz.”

Three . . . four! She was fucking her friend, too! Jesus Christ, what kind of a sick bitch was she? “Should she even be doing . . .
that
in her condition?”

She burst out laughing.

“What’s so goddamned funny?” he demanded, folding his arms over his chest as she doubled over.

Bracing her arms around her apparently splitting sides, she sputtered, “Y-you are. You’re s-such a . . . jerk.”

“And why is that? Because I’m not thrilled that you’ve exposed me to God knows what, maybe even HIV?”

Straightening, she dashed a hand across watery eyes, shaking her head. “I haven’t exposed you to shit. We agreed on exclusivity for the duration of our arrangement, and I, at least, have kept my end of the bargain.”

“Are you saying I haven’t?”

She shrugged. “You tell me.”

Somehow in the midst of his tirade, she’d managed to turn the tables on him. He swallowed a gulp of air and admitted, “I haven’t so much as kissed anyone else since we met.”

Sarah stared back at him, her expression unreadable. “Really?”

Holding her gaze, he nodded. “Really.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“You’re welcome, but what about Fabio?”

She grimaced at the comparison. “Peter is exactly what I introduced him as: a friend. We met in the group Liz hosts.”

“You’re in group?” he asked, wondering if whatever support she sought had something to do with why she’d left LA. Had he been so caught up in waging war against his own demons that he’d blinded himself to hers?

She hesitated. “It’s a meet up for former adult entertainers, anyone from videographers to executive escorts to . . . me. We get together on Monday nights and talk about . . . whatever’s on our minds.”

“So it is a support group?” The one PTSD group he’d sat in on had seemed like a bunch of sad sacks sitting in a circle, but maybe he hadn’t really given the experience a fair chance?

“I guess you could say that.”

Curious he asked, “So what was Peter’s . . . line of work?”

Her face became fierce. “That’s none of your damned business.”

Holding up his hands in surrender, he closed the last of the open drawers with his hip. “Sorry, you’re right. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“The hell you didn’t,” she said, though her expression eased. “What I will say is he went back to school to finish his degree in interior design. He’s spent the past year working for Ralph Lauren.”

“No shit?”

Her gaze sharpened again. “Just because we’ve been in AE doesn’t mean we don’t have brains.”

“Thanks for the clarification, but I’m aware.” He reached out and made a show of brushing off her shoulder, partly to ease the tension but mainly because he just really wanted—needed—to touch her. “Don’t mind me,” he said by way of joking. “Just helping knock off that chip. For a minute there, it looked like it was back.”

A furrow appeared above her eyes. “I don’t expect you to understand.”

Cole forced a shrug. “If that’s true, then why not consider this as an opportunity to educate me?” When he put it that way, how could she resist?

She sighed hugely. “Once you’ve been in AE, retired or not, the industry is always part of you. Moving into the mainstream isn’t easy. The choices you’ve made aren’t ones that most people can relate to. And there are soooo many misconceptions.”