Masquerade (Swept Away #2.5)(2)

“You always have work to do.” She pouted her full, bright red lips and let the sheet drop down so that her naked breasts were exposed. “I thought you’d stay over tonight.” She batted her eyelashes but couldn’t hide the annoyance in her blue eyes. I grabbed my pants from the floor and pulled them on quickly.

“You thought wrong.” I zipped my pants up. “Have a good night.” I nodded at her with a quick smile, not wanting to appear too callous.

“That’s it, Jakob?” She frowned and shook her head. “You’re really just going to leave?”

“I didn’t realize that casual sex required me to stay over.” I shrugged and did my belt up. “We had fun, but now I have work to do.” I held in an annoyed sigh. I was getting fed up with this conversation with women.

“We didn’t even have sex yet, I didn’t even get to come,” she whined as her fingers worked down her body. “I want you to pleasure me as well.”

“Not tonight, I’m afraid. I have to go.”

“You’re an *, Jakob Bradley.” She tossed her hair and lay back down. “You’re going to regret treating me like this. One day, you’re going to wish you’d treated me better. I’m not going to just wait around for you.”

“Okay.” I headed to her bedroom door as fast as I could. I hated this moment the most. I didn’t know why women took a couple of hookups as a sign of something serious. We’d had sex three times and she was acting like she was my long-suffering girlfriend.

“Don’t call me!” she shouted after me. “I don’t know who screwed you up so badly, but I don’t want anything to do with you again.” Her voice was shrill and I hurried out of her apartment, shaking my head. I wasn’t sure how I always seemed to find the psychos. It wasn’t like I didn’t have it together myself. I was a successful businessman. I was a king in New York. I was handsome as sin, as many women had called me. And I was smart—admittedly, modesty wasn’t one of my virtues.

I opened the front door and hurried down the stairs of her fourth-floor walk-up. I wouldn’t miss it or her. I had bigger fish to fry. Other women to meet, to seduce, to have my wicked way with. Brittney or Maggie or whatever her name was had no reason to worry, I wasn’t going to see her again. I didn’t have time for women who wanted more than I could give.

*

I drove to my apartment in silence, not wanting music or talk radio to distract me from my thoughts. My ringing phone interrupted me momentarily and I sighed as I saw the name flash on the screen.

“Brittney, not Maggie,” I chided myself as I turned the radio on. Not that it mattered now, of course. I wouldn’t be answering and I wouldn’t be calling back. The fact that she had called at all told me how desperate she was to be with me, and that was a turnoff. I hated it when women barely knew me, yet wanted to be with me right away. I knew then that they had an ulterior motive. My mom had taught me well. I could still remember her words clearly:

“Concentrate on your studies, Jakob.” My mother looked at me seriously as she ate some salad.

“I am, Momma.” I took a bite of lasagna and swallowed eagerly. I loved lasagna and garlic bread. It was one of my favorite meals and I knew that my mother cooked it when she wanted me to be happy.

“Don’t let girls fill your head and distract you.” She placed another piece of garlic bread on my plate.

“I don’t like girls.” I made a face and bit into the garlic bread and chewed happily. “They’re annoying.”

“Good.” She smiled at me and sipped her water. “Love is for fools, and you’re not a fool.”

“I love you, though, Momma.”

“And I love you, too.” She gazed at me with rays of happiness and love. “You will always be my number-one love.”

“And you will always be mine, Momma.” I grinned at her. I was ten years old and the words slipped out of my mouth easily.

That conversation had been repeated several times during my childhood and teenage years. There were different variations, but the meaning was always the same. When I was five or seven or ten, I hadn’t really comprehended what she was saying to me, and by the time I was sixteen and old enough to understand, I was already hardened toward love. Women and relationships weren’t to be trusted. Love existed, but it was hard to find, and the only person I could rely on was my mother.

That didn’t stop me from having relationships, of course. And it hadn’t stopped me from believing in love. Maybe it was because my mother loved me so much. And maybe it was because she herself had also loved. I hadn’t become jaded from believing in love, but I had become jaded in trusting myself to fall in love and find the right person. She had ingrained in me a love of work before relationships, and I lived my life trying to honor her existence as best as I could. I sighed as I turned onto the freeway. Sometimes I wondered what my life would have been like if my mother hadn’t had her heart broken. What would she have told me about love if it had all worked for her? I didn’t think about it often. Maybe because I was a guy, or just that I had other, more important matters to worry about. Though I’d let my guard down once. I’d let love carry me away to a land far away for three solid months as a teenager.

I broke my mother’s heart when I was sixteen. That was the year I got a girlfriend and fell in love. Josie was her name, and she was a free spirit of seventeen. She loved art and classical music and wanted to live her life traveling the globe. I was dazzled by her beauty and impressed by her knowledge of the world. I loved that her thoughts were big and bountiful, and she made me feel like I could do anything I wanted. A part of me felt that she was my soul mate. I’d never met someone as into Bach and Wagner as I was. We would talk for hours on end about movies, artists, books, and love, and at the end of each phone call, I felt that we were closer and closer.