Julie Leto – Brazen & Burning (страница 7)

“Sometime before midnight, because that’s when the cops had a call about a body on the side of the road.”

A body? Jogging? Sydney searched her memory, trying to pinpoint what time she’d left Adam’s condominium, trying to figure out how the accident could have happened without her hearing about it, but she’d started shaking so hard, she could hardly breathe.

A body? Adam? God, he could have died. He could have been killed that night and buried and she never would have known. Something in her chest tore, and a hot wave of regret flooded her body. She glanced around, looking for a place to sit. The tire swing still looked gooey and black and forbidding, so she simply dropped down on the grass, knees first.

She’d barely settled onto her heels on the prickly lawn when Adam knelt beside her, wincing at the sudden downward movement.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“Me?” She swallowed the lump of disbelief blocking her airway. He’d nearly died on the side of the road. That was why she couldn’t find him when she’d returned from her trip. That was why he didn’t remember her. “What happened to you?”

He looked down, causing a thick lock of hair to fall haphazardly over his eyes. He combed his fingers through the chestnut strands and Sydney’s heart pounded faster. Such a simple, sexy act. Such a simple, sexy man. And he’d almost died.

“Not sure. The police report and doctors concurred that I was hit from behind. I didn’t wake up from the coma for over a month, and when I did, I’d lost all memory of that night, as well as everything for about five years before.”

She forced a grin, managing to quirk only half her mouth. “So I shouldn’t take it personally that you don’t know who I am.”

He reached up and touched her cheek. The gesture might have cracked Sydney’s heart another inch wider, but she realized he was only swiping away a bug.

“It took a few days before I even remembered Renée.”

“But you remember her now,” Sydney asked hopefully.

He shrugged again. “She’s my sister. She’s been around longer than five years.”

Or six months.

“She’s really protective of you,” Sydney said, not wanting to dwell on the fact that despite his injury, it still hurt that he didn’t remember her.

“She’s the only person who thought I’d survive.”

“I would have thought so! I would have…if I’d known.”

Adam’s mouth curved into a frown. “Why didn’t you know? Why didn’t Renée know about you? What were these rules you talked about?”

Sydney smirked. She supposed she should feel embarrassed or remorseful at this point—and she did. But not about the rules they’d—rather, she’d—laid out at the start of their affair. Her dictates had kept things neat, clean and had allowed her the illusion of organization in her dating chaos. The only thing that truly cued her normally inactive mechanism for regret was that her rules had kept her from finding out about Adam’s accident. She’d created the rules to protect her heart from the distraction and inherent selflessness of love. She hadn’t meant them to cut her off from providing help or solace to a friend.

“We had an agreement to keep things between us. Only between us,” she answered.

“Why? Are you married?”

Sydney snorted.

His gaze widened. “Was I married?”

She rolled her eyes and smiled, amazed at his ability to kid about something so damned serious. While Sydney embraced a wide-open attitude toward casual sex, she drew the line at boinking another woman’s husband. Best he knew that right up front. “The Adam Brody I knew was one-hundred-percent bachelor.”

He shook his head. “Renée checked with my friends, all my employees in my office. No one mentioned you. Not even a hint that I had a lover.”

Sydney stood up and swiped dry blades of brown grass off her knees. “When we agreed to keep things private, we did. It wasn’t so hard since we lived in the same condo complex.”

“You didn’t see my sister sell the place? Move my stuff?”

“I left the next morning for Scotland and New England. I was gone two months. When I got back, your condo had been sold, your business was gone…oh, God, your business! That’s why we’d gotten together that night! To celebrate some big deal. Jeez, what happened to the blueprints? The building?”

She watched his Adam’s apple bob. At first, his lips tightened, then relaxed into a devil-may-care smile that didn’t reach his eyes. Sydney tamped down a curse, her mind flying back to the night she’d left him—the night he couldn’t remember. He’d been nearly giddy. Psyched. Like the quarterback of a football team who’d just thrown the winning pass and was simply waiting for his receiver to snatch the pigskin out of the air. No blockers. An open end zone. If Adam had been the dancing type, they might have waltzed all over his condominium to the sweet music of success.

Instead, they’d made love on the living-room carpet.

Hot moisture prickled between her legs as the memory rushed back. The minute the door had closed behind the courier who’d picked up the plans that would make Adam a multimillionaire, he’d ripped off her clothes and licked her skin from top to bottom. She’d laughed and screamed in shocked delight, allowing him his fun and her the pleasure, giving him complete control over the sex that night—never guessing their tryst would be the last.

He’d kissed every inch of her body, not slowly and teasingly like he normally did, but with hot, desperate need. The memory of his mouth on her made her nipples pucker, her skin flush. Her thighs clenched, recalling the way he’d thrust inside her and made her come.

“Maybe we should go inside,” Adam suggested, snapping Sydney’s eyes to his. “You suddenly look like you could use some of Renée’s lemonade.”

Sydney glanced down, wondering exactly how she looked. Thirsty? Horny? Hot? Maybe a finely mixed combination of all three. “Will she spike it with vodka?”

“If you ask nicely.”

Most likely she’d spike the drink with Drano. But Sydney decided to keep her mouth shut and take whatever his sister offered. She had so much to process. And she couldn’t think clearly while her libido overrode her brain.

With an almost inaudible grunt, Adam stood, helping Sydney with a hand on her elbow. She followed quietly, her shoes still dangling from her fingers, her mind swimming with questions and recriminations and sexual memories she hadn’t realized she missed until she’d confronted the man who’d created them. He’d been unconscious for a month? Why did she feel she should have been there beside him, holding his hand? Whispering words of encouragement instead of traipsing all over the highlands with the private tour guide she’d seduced on her last night on the moors?

Why was a damned good question. Sex buddies didn’t do the bedside thing. Sex buddies sent flowers, maybe a naughty card. And she and Adam had only been sex buddies—adult lovers with no other commitment to each beyond sexual exploration and pleasure. Yeah, he’d suggested they take their relationship to a deeper level, but she’d bolted, so certain that allowing herself to lose her heart would somehow destroy the life she’d worked so hard to build.

Then she’d finally realized, with the recent nudge from Cassie, that her life, ideal in some ways, sorely lacked in others. She’d initiated her search for Adam to try this relationship again. To give a good thing a real chance. Now she was a stranger to him. In fact, when she really thought about it, she’d been little more than a stranger for the six months they’d been lovers. And she only had herself to blame.

“Careful of that bottom step,” Adam warned. “I need to refinish the wood.”

Mindlessly, Sydney avoided the step he indicated, then promptly yelped as a sliver protruding from the next step slid into the ball of her foot. “Ow! Ow!”

“Aw, hell.” Adam scooped her into his arms before she could protest and kicked on the screen door with his boot. “Renée, open up!”

His sister came running, her face a pale mask. “What? Adam, put her down! You shouldn’t be carrying anyone so heavy!”

Amid the pain, Sydney grimaced at the insinuation. “I’m not exactly Shamu the whale, sister.”

“Adam shouldn’t be lifting anything heavier than live bait,” Renée chastised, then turned her glare on Sydney. “You don’t look like bait.”

“Should have seen me when I was sixteen,” Sydney shot back, trying to rationalize that though the pain throbbing in her foot made it feel as though she had a two-by-four shoved in the tender arch of her foot, it was likely only a good-size sliver. Besides, there was no way Adam could carry both her, slim though she was, and a plank of wood.

“Back off, Renée. Stop being a bitch. Sydney is hurt. Go get the tweezers and the first-aid kit.”

He deposited Sydney on a comfortable—although worn—striped couch and knelt down beside her to take a better look at her injury.

Sydney swallowed a scream when Adam brushed his finger over the protruding splinter, sending a renewed wave of pain up her leg. She wasn’t good with pain. She was a certifiable wimp, with a pathetically low threshold for discomfort.

Sydney protested when Adam brushed his fingernail over the splinter again. “Ow! Ow! Ow! Stop doing that! It hurts!”