Twisted Arrangement 4 (8 page)

She didn’t respond, though her breath sighed softly out. Her silence made him uneasy. Josh shifted on the cool sheets, a cold hand wrapping around his heart. Had he completely botched this whole arrangement beyond repair?

“Ben thinks I’m trying to get revenge on you for stealing from me. Is that what you think?”

Her hands curled over the edge of the blanket, her nails scratching the fabric softly. She stared up at the ceiling. “The thought had occurred to me,” she finally said. Her tone was hesitant, wary.

“Well, I’m not. I don’t want revenge. I wasn’t lying when I said I understand why you did what you did. Your family is important to you. I get that, believe me. I may not have siblings but my mother and father mean the world to me and I’d do anything within my power to protect them too.” There was something about the total darkness of the room that made this feel a bit like a confessional.

Not that Josh was religious, but he’d gone to church with one of his friends in junior high and had sat in the small, dark box and felt a strange, hushed sense of ease. He’d understood, in that moment, how people were able to tell an unseen person their secrets. There was something not quite real about it. Or, perhaps that wasn’t it exactly. It was just a feeling of being safely ensconced somewhere, knowing someone was listening but couldn’t see your face.

Emma sighed in the dark. It was a forlorn sound and made Josh want to reach out and touch her, but he remembered her words and fisted his hand on his hip.

“You’re never going to trust me, are you?” Her words were so quiet he almost didn’t catch them.

“Emma...” Josh threw himself onto his back again, scrubbing his hands over his face. “Before all of this craziness happened – the watch and this thing with Ransler – I thought I was getting to know
you
. But you were playing me from the beginning. I may understand why you did it, but I can’t forget that everything you said was just a lie to get to the watch. How am I supposed to trust you? I don’t even know you!”

She plucked at the comforter. “You know me just as well now as you did then. Better, even.”

Josh rolled his head to the side, quirking a brow at her even though he knew she couldn’t see it. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Not even a little.”

“I’ve lost count of all the different versions of you I’ve met! Shy but focused party planner Emma who commands her team with a... what’s the saying? An iron fist in a velvet glove?” He held his hand above his face and ticked a finger. “Brash and sexy Madame Butterfly who lures men in with bawdy promises and then robs them?” Another finger. “Then there’s the Emma who insisted a puppy couldn’t go without a name and pulled me out into the pouring rain laughing. That girl wasn’t timid. She looked me in the eye and fished for information to see if I’d caught onto her crime.”

“Josh...”

“Let’s see,” he continued, voice still low and hushed. “Emma the attentive fiancé, can’t forget her. She stood up to William Ransler
and
Lolly Tate for me. Hell, you almost had
me
believing you really love me.” He heard Emma suck in a breath, but he couldn’t stop. The words were all there now, crowding on his tongue as if they’d been just waiting for this moment to get out. “You say I know you?
Which
you?”

“There’s only me, Josh. You’ve only ever met me. Maybe I don’t fit into a neat little box, like you apparently wish I did, but that doesn’t make me a liar. In fact...” She rolled toward him now, and he could feel her eyes on him in the dark. “I’ve never lied to you.”

Josh shook his head swiftly, a snort bursting out of his chest. “How can you even say that with a straight face?”

“How can you accuse me of lying? Name one thing I’ve
ever
said to you that was untrue.”

“You’re splitting hairs. You hid your identity.”

He swore he could hear the quirked brow in her voice. “It was a masquerade ball, Josh. I didn’t do anything the rest of your guests weren’t doing. You knew Madame Butterfly wasn’t my name.”

Josh opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of a suitable argument for that. He moved on to another point. “You pretended you were going to sleep with me when you admitted yourself you never had any intention of doing so.” He cringed inwardly. Not really the greatest tactic. He wished he hadn’t spoken. Emma replied softly.

“I never promised you anything.”

She hadn’t. And he knew she desired him, so she hadn’t lied about that, at least. Josh supposed he’d be more angry about that particular aspect if he believed that the only reason she’d come on to him was to get to the watch. But he didn’t. Emma was attracted to him. Watch or no watch, they would have most likely ended up in bed together somehow, some way. It had been inevitable.

But there was still one more thing.

“You told me I wouldn’t mind,” Josh murmured into the dark.

His eyes had finally adjusted enough to see her face. He thought he saw Emma frown. “What?”

“The night of the ball, when you sent me for the champagne. I told you not to move. And you said ‘I’m going to move, but I promise, you won’t mind.’ I minded a hell of a lot, Emma, for
several
different reasons.”

She was silent, staring at him. Josh stared back. Long minutes ticked by and neither of them spoke.

Maybe, Josh thought, maybe they were both in the wrong. He was willing to concede that perhaps Emma had not been constantly deceiving him. But she had to admit that she had deceived him
sometimes
.

“You’re right,” she said softly, as if answering his thoughts. She reached across the expanse of comforter and touched his wrist lightly. “I’m sorry. I am, Josh.” She sighed. “If I promised that nothing I say to you from here on out will be a lie, unless we’re in public and it’s required, will you believe me?”

Josh studied her shadowed form. Could he? He wanted to, despite everything. He liked Emma. They worked well together. They did
everything
well together, truthfully. If they called a truce, wouldn’t it make this whole fake marriage thing a lot easier?

Well, apart from her no sex rule. But maybe... No, he’d better not even go there. Still, perhaps they could be... friends?

“I can try.”

Emma released a slow breath, her shoulders relaxing. “Good. Thank you.”  She rolled onto her back. Josh stayed where he was, head propped on his hand. He waited another minute to see if she was going to fall immediately to sleep. When her breathing was still light and even, he smiled.

“So... now that you’re starting this new honesty policy...”

“Yes?”

“Will you tell me about the radio station?”

***

The laughter surprised Emma, bubbling up from her stomach, vibrating in her throat. She’d been hellishly tense as she and Josh talked in the dark, finally addressing things that had obviously been festering between them. They’d never really discussed the night of the ball or the Madame Butterfly thing. But now that they had, at least to some extent, she felt... relieved. As if it had been a pocket of infection, their initial angry words had pierced it and the subsequent argument had drained it.

She relaxed back against the soft mattress, her muscles full of the pleased, heavy exhaustion that follows a strenuous day, but her blood fizzing with happiness at the dissipated tension between her and Josh. She felt so good that she actually answered him. Or maybe it was because it was dark, and he wouldn’t be able to see her face.

“It’s really embarrassing.” She turned her head, gazing into his shadowed face. “It involved a guy. Are you sure you want to hear this?” She really hoped he’d say ‘no’. Even though they were just pretending to be a couple, he could hardly want to hear about her exes, right?

“I’m sure.”

Emma smoothed the covers over her stomach. “Fine. So, I was dating this guy... Tim. He was from Texas. Not the brightest tool in the shed, but attractive. Honestly, our entire relationship was based on his Southern drawl. And the cowboy hat. Anyway, long story short I caught Tim cheating. I called him a lot of not nice names. He had a lot of very rude things to say about... er... my sexual performance.”

“What?”

Emma was rather gratified to hear the shock in Josh’s voice at that. Not that she was about to admit it. She barreled on with the story, heat stinging her cheeks. Thank god for darkness.

“He was only the second guy I’d ever been with. Some of his criticisms were no doubt valid. At the time, however, I was not disposed to be magnanimous about it.” She’d only been 19 and mortified that he’d found her lacking. Part of her had wondered if he was right and if a bit of the blame for his cheating lay at her feet. The self-doubt had made her even angrier.

Josh chuckled. “No, I imagine you weren’t.”

“So, after a lengthy and loud public argument about just whose fault our lousy sex life was, I decided to prove an, equally public, point. I was friends with one of the guys who ran the campus radio station, so I’d been there a few times. I stormed in and Terry, my friend, must have seen something of what I was planning on my face, because he just handed me his headphones and got out of the way.” Emma smiled, remembering her college friend’s twinkling blue eyes as he’d slipped out of the sound booth and closed the door behind him, after pointing out the lock on the inside.

Beside her, Josh shifted. “Where did you get a recording of an orgasm?”

Heat crept up Emma’s neck and down into her belly. “I preempted KALX’s punk rock block to announce that Tim Schenkman didn’t know the first thing about how to turn a woman on, and that I’d faked every orgasm I’d ‘had’ for the entire 8 months of our relationship. And then I said, ‘For future reference, Tim,
this
is what an orgasm really sounds like’ and then... well...” She shrugged, staring up at the ceiling.

“Wait. Are you saying... it wasn’t a recording?” His voice was an awed hush.

“Well, I let the dean think it was. But... no, it wasn’t a recording. I rather went to town. And it got quite a response on campus.”

“I’m sure!”

Emma’s flush grew deeper, her belly trembling with remembered heat. A good deal of it was embarrassment that she’d done that – pleasured herself for all those people to hear. But she’d be lying if she said it was
all
embarrassment. She’d been fired up about Tim, angry and wanting very badly to prove to him that she wasn’t the ‘boring lay’ he’d called her.

“People, mostly guys but some women too, swarmed the station and began pounding on the doors. Terry had thought to lock the exterior ones when he realized what was going on, thank goodness. There was some damage to the front doors and some of the surrounding quad, benches knocked over, garbage cans tossed. Campus police showed up and I was hauled to the dean’s office. Luckily, Professor Burling came to my defense and convinced him it was some sort of social experiment, or I would most likely have been expelled.”

Josh gave a low whistle. “How did Ben not find out about this when he did your background check?”

“The hearing was sealed, and the college made sure the recordings from the station were edited. I’d never given my name on the broadcast, only Tim’s. Apparently, Tim did quite a bit of cheating so there was a lot of speculation as to which one of us was behind it. Other girls took credit; even ones who’d never dated him. Aside from faculty, me, and Terry... and now you... I don’t know that there’s anyone else that even knows for sure it was me.”

“Wow. Wait... what about Todd?”

Emma snorted. “Not exactly the kind of story you tell your kid brother, Josh.”

He laughed softly in reply. “Yeah, I guess not. I just thought you guys told each other everything.”

She thought of her brother’s quiet words on the patio before the wedding. Carla Fiorentino. “No, we don’t tell each other everything,” she said softly.