Girl Gear 4: Striptease (18 page)

“I said I have something to say to you, not that I’ve come here for sex. This may be hard for you to believe, but I really do have a mind for something other than getting you into bed.”

In the dimly surreal light, he watched as she pressed her lips together in that way she did when she wasn’t sure what he was thinking. He didn’t want her to know. Not right now. Mostly because he wasn’t sure where she was coming from, and that meant he didn’t know how to react.

So he leaned to one side instead of into her body, bracing his weight on the hand he placed above her shoulder, flat on the door. The movement brought him close enough to kiss her, to catch a hint of her subtly smoky perfume, to see her eyes hidden as they were behind the armor of her glasses.

He wanted to reach his fingers down and play with her wonderfully soft hair. But instead he brought his other hand up to touch her lips. “Can’t say much of anything with your mouth all smashed up like that.”

And she obviously wasn’t going to say anything at all until he moved his hand away. So he did, only to have her turn her face from him, as well.

Clutching her purse tightly in front of her, she stared toward the editing console. “I don’t want you showing the video tonight. I don’t want my friends hurt.”

He frowned. “Mel, I think they all know it’s not a finished project. Knowledge being power, and all that, I’m pretty sure no one is going to get hurt by seeing what’s been done.”

“I’ve seen what’s been done.” Still, she didn’t look at him. “And I beg to differ.”

“Wait a minute.” He shook his head, feeling as if he needed to shake off some sort of fog. “What are you talking about? When did you see any of the footage? Do you mean what you saw on the DVD I brought to the cookout?”

Her head whipped back in his direction so fast he marveled they both didn’t suffer from whiplash. “No. I mean what I saw last night.”

“Last night?” When would she have seen anything last night? Where had he been last night? He thought, thought, remembered. He and Asa in the office, working through the kinks that had to be cut. The office was the only place he’d run the tape. How had Melanie…

“The Webcam.” He slammed his hand against the door.

Melanie jumped. “It wasn’t a perfect screening, but I saw enough to know I’m not going to let you show that garbage to my friends.”

Jacob shoved away from the door and headed for the windows on the opposite wall—as far away from Melanie as he could get. It wasn’t garbage. Goddammit, it wasn’t garbage. What she’d seen were outtakes he wasn’t going to use. He’d run the lot of them by Asa first, making sure the other man shared his intuition.

But none of it was garbage. It was an honest look at the hardest working, sexiest bunch of women he’d even had the pleasure to know. And the fact that they blew off steam the way they did and with the men they loved, made him jealous as hell of their partners.
He’d been thinking he wanted the same with Melanie, but if she didn’t trust him…

This time he slammed his hand against the supporting column. How the hell could she think that what she’d seen was what he intended to show today? Even knowing the documentary was far from being finished, she couldn’t possibly believe what she’d seen would be anything he’d include in the final product.

So much for respect and humanity. His heart twisting, he hung his head and sighed. Headlights cut through the gaps in the miniblinds, sharply slicing his black T-shirt and his hand at his hip into what might as well be prison stripes.

Finally, he turned around and faced her across the immense expanse of the average-size room. “I’m not going to show garbage to anyone.”

“This isn’t your call to make,” she said priggishly.

“Yeah, it is. It’s my show. My call.”

“Wrong, Faulkner. I may have been out of line the day of Lauren’s wedding, getting in your face and not letting you do your job. But this isn’t a wedding.” She paused; he could hear her pull in a huge breath. “This is about my best friends and their reputations. It has nothing to do with me being a control freak or your artistic integrity. This is about you being wrong. And about me being right.”

“No, sweetheart. It has to do with a lot more than that.” He started his long walk across the room, wondering if she had any idea how absolutely furious he was. “It has to do with trust.”

“Trust?”

“Trust.” He drew even closer, one step, another, watching the widening white of her eyes. “I could tell you that I’m not going to show you and your friends
the footage you saw me going over with Asa. But I’m not going to tell you anything except that it’s time for you to get your sweet little butt into the screening room. The show is about to go on.”

W
HEN SHE WALKED INTO
her living room at the ridiculously late-for-her weeknight hour of 1:00 a.m., Melanie kicked off her shoes, sending them flying in the direction of her entryway table. Her keys and tote followed. She’d never been the party-girl type, needing instead a decent seven hours of sleep to recharge for the following day.

But tonight she just hadn’t been able to face going home alone. Not after her confrontation with Jacob and the exorbitant amount of emotion involved. So she’d gone out with her girlfriends, who all wanted to celebrate, each of them drinking way too much while at Paddington’s Ford. Nolan Ford had actually been in the bar, and had picked up the tab after hearing Sydney rave about the documentary success.

Melanie hadn’t raved at all. She’d wanted to crawl under the table and die.

Success hardly covered the excellence of what Jacob had shown. And she’d had to sit there in the bar and listen to each of her partners wax enthusiastic while the voices she heard in her head were those of her and Jacob arguing. No. Not arguing. She had accused, and Jacob had neither defended nor denied. He’d simply told her to mind her own business.

She’d thought that was what she’d been doing. Minding the business of gIRL-gEAR. But from first frame to last, his documentary proved that she’d had no need. That she’d been borrowing trouble instead of
giving Jacob the only thing he’d ever asked her to give.

Trust. The stuff on which true relationships were built, of which she’d shown a pitiable lack. She’d reacted on what she had seen rather than on what she should’ve known. Jacob’s integrity would never have allowed him to cast his subjects in such a cruel light.

Instead of the bimbos she thought she would witness on screen, she’d seen Jacob’s portrayal of the partners as competent businesswomen who were also unabashedly female. Yes, Sydney sat at the conference room table poring over bridal magazines, but it was all part of a clip showing a gIRL-gEAR feature on weddings.

Yes, Lauren doodled while chatting on the phone, but the doodles were graphic design ideas for new Web site pages. Yes, Chloe dug into pots of lip color and eye shadow like a little girl at her mother’s dressing table, but on the other side of her desk sat a group of girls from the mentoring program intent on learning makeup techniques.

Everything Melanie had seen via the Webcam had been the truth, yet she’d accused Jacob of putting together a lie. She’d shown him nothing resembling trust, believing her eyes instead of her heart, which knew him so much better. She’d sat there in the darkened minitheater, listening to her partners giggle and chuckle and laugh until they cried.

She’d cried along with them, but for reasons that had nothing to do with being tickled by seeing herself on the big screen. She’d cried for all she’d ruined because she’d lost sight of what mattered—believing in the man she’d come to love so very much. And she’d
never had the chance to tell him. Not even when she’d told him goodbye.

She’d been the last one to walk out the door. It had been so hard to hold her head as high as she had, knowing what she was walking away from. Jacob had stood there in the hallway outside of the screening room. He hadn’t said “I told you so” as she’d expected him to. He’d simply looked determined to let her stew, to figure things out for herself.

The one thing that had made her departure even more brutal was that he hadn’t let her go until she’d taken the videotape he’d forced into her hand. Outtakes from the documentary that he’d put together just for her, he’d said, his voice quiet when she’d expected a storm.

The calm had nearly killed her, and she couldn’t bear the thought of going home alone to her condo, which seemed so empty when he wasn’t there. She’d gotten used to having him around. So instead, she’d gone back to the office, where she could’ve easily watched the tape in private. Except she hadn’t been sure she wanted to see it.

Though the minute she’d arrived home, having exited the city bus on the corner where she lived, she’d shoved the tape into the VCR, she still wasn’t sure she wanted to watch. Why subject herself to further torture, except that maybe seeing this final kiss-off would at least finish breaking her heart? She would much rather completely kill her emotions and rise up again from the ashes. A phoenix and all that.

Except she doubted any man would ever again make her fly.

Melanie sighed. So she’d fly on her own. And she’d do it by making gIRL-gEAR the best it could be.
Stronger and better than the documentary had depicted. Come tomorrow morning she’d be in the office kicking ass and taking names. No more man-mooning and lunch hour quickies. It was time for this ship to shape up.

She wondered if anyone would listen.

She wondered if she’d ever sounded so arrogant.

She wondered when she’d finally get it through her head that the changes to the company had done nothing but make it stronger—exactly what Jacob’s work had so brilliantly revealed. gIRL-gEAR and the partners were exactly the sort of role models for young women they’d always strived to be.

And she had screwed everything up by being so ridiculously obsessive over work instead of trusting the man she loved.

Sitting in total darkness, she reached for the remote control on her side table and hit Play. No more than three minutes into the tape, she pulled her legs onto the sofa and hugged her knees to her chest. She tucked her chin down, as well, hoping if she curled up into a tight enough ball she could contain the threatening sobs.

If Jacob’s outtakes were meant to teach her a lesson, it was a lesson in the ways that he loved her. The clips were of her doing the things that captured his attention, that caused him to do a double-take, that caught him by the throat and wouldn’t let him go. And she knew this because he was telling her. There on the tape.

He talked about no other woman being able to turn black into his favorite color, about how when she finally let herself go and laughed as she’d never laughed before, he heard the music of her voice for days to
follow. He talked about loving her eyes even behind her glasses, loving her body even underneath her clothes.

And then he talked about seeing her at work, about how her aspirations to be her very best gave him the push he’d been needing to make a difference. Finally, with tears trickling down her cheeks and her nose a runny mess and her heart aching so fiercely that she had trouble drawing one even breath, he talked about making her a permanent part of his future because he couldn’t imagine a day without having her in his life.

The video came to an end and she hit Rewind and watched it again. The third time she stopped it in the middle, shutting off both the VCR and the TV because she couldn’t take another second of the miserable feeling that she’d messed up in ways she’d never be able to fix.

She let the darkness consume her, let herself grieve, because it had to be done. Going back to work tomorrow seemed an impossible feat. She couldn’t imagine not having Jacob in the office, appearing out of nowhere as if he knew she’d been thinking about him.

Her head lolled back against the sofa cushions and she closed her eyes and breathed. God, was there any way to fix what had gone so horribly wrong? The silence of the condo wrapped around her coldly; she shivered and pulled her nana’s afghan from the corner of the sofa around her shoulders, deciding this was where she was going to sleep. Moving required more strength than she’d ever have again.

Seconds later, her mind drifting, she heard the music begin to play. Her file of dance numbers, the one she’d stripped to that first time for Jacob, the one
they’d made love to that amazing afternoon in his loft. Her heart raced when she finally realized the sound wasn’t in her head but coming from the back of her condo.

With the afghan still around her shoulders, she made her way silently down the hall, treading softly in stocking feet. The rear was as dark as the front, the only lights shining those of clock LCD displays and bathroom night-lights and the PC monitor in her workout room.

She found Jacob there in the oddly lit darkness, sitting on the floor with his back to the pole, his legs pulled up, his wrists draped over his knees. His dark eyes flashed hotly when she moved into the doorway, as if he’d been waiting for her a very long time.

“What are you doing here?” She didn’t care how he’d got in; he knew exactly where she kept her emergency key. “How long have you been here?”

“Which question do you want me to answer first?” he asked, his voice low and throaty, a gruff sort of bark that made her wary of his bite.

There was only one question to which she truly needed an answer. She wrapped the afghan tighter as she moved into the room. “Why the tape? Why didn’t you tell me that what I’d seen was all wrong? Why did you let me think what I was thinking about you?”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “That’s three questions.”

“I can’t count.” She came even closer, feeling stirrings of hope she’d never expected to feel. Tentative feelings, but tentative was better than nothing when minutes ago what she’d felt had been despair. When his silence continued, she offered, “I can narrow them down to one.”

He shook his head. “What were you thinking about me?”

“Thinking about you?”

He nodded, keeping eye contact while pushing himself up to his feet. The music continued to thrum in low sultry tones. Jacob’s voice remained low, as well. “You asked why I’d let you think what you were thinking. I want to know what it was.”