She pivoted for the door, but Garrett’s voice stopped her.
“That little toad is my brother. Of course I love him. We merely feel responsible to protect you.”
She grabbed the knob and turned. “If I need protecting from anything, I will tell you, but the last person on this earth I need protecting from is Julian.” She yanked the door open and then added, “And if you love your brother so much, then I suggest you try to make things work around here before he leaves the Daily for good—Lord knows I would! Who the hell can even work in peace with this sort of constant criticism? I’m glad he’s ready to move on!”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me!” she shot back.
She gave Kate a look that said don’t do this to me again, and with that, she stormed outside.
“Molly!” Garrett followed her, stopping her a couple of feet from where his secretary was busily tapping her computer keypad. “Where’s my brother going? Is he leaving the Daily?”
“I want to go now, Garrett,” she grumbled, trying to pull her arm free.
He drew her closer. “He’s leaving the Daily, isn’t he?”
Hating herself for having spoken so rashly, Molly dropped her face. “I think you misunderstood,” she hedged.
“No, I didn’t. I know he’s not happy here, Molly. I’ve been suspecting for a time now. But if you aren’t telling me when he’s leaving or where, then at least answer me this. Do you love him?” he asked.
Molly stared up at the man she’d once thought she loved and wondered why her throat closed up in a tight little ball. Why she wanted to wail her heart out to him over that question alone.
Because of course the answer was yes, a thousand times yes.
She loved Julian in so many ways, she hadn’t even begun to discover them all. And she feared that loving him as a friend was only one of them.
* * *
Halting just a few feet from his own office door, Julian saw them. Molly and the “love of her life,” together at last.
He saw them say goodbye. Saw his brother pat her back. Saw her take a little sob and drop her face into his jacket. Saw him put his arm around her.
His blood simmered. His heart caved in on itself. And suddenly red-hot anger coursed through his veins and his eyes blurred with the force of his fury. Maybe this was what Molly had wanted all along. She had practiced with Julian last night so she could get out here and make Garrett jealous, make him see her as the lovely, sexy, grown woman that she was.
Perhaps Julian should’ve stepped back and let his best friend be coddled by the man she wanted to be coddled by.
He should laugh it off, not care. But it mattered very much. Too much.
Body shaking, he was amazed he could speak so calmly, so softly, as he walked up to them. “I hate to break up your tête-à-tête, but if you don’t take your hands off Molly, I’m going to beat your face until our own mother won’t recognize you.”
Garrett stiffened, but his arms instantly dropped as his head whipped toward his. “What the hell is wrong with you, Jules?”
Julian gritted his teeth as Molly swung around in surprise. Ignoring Garrett, he stretched out his hand to her, palm up, and gazed intently into her red-rimmed eyes. She’d been crying, or about to cry. Dammit, why? He pursed his lips in anger. At her, at himself, at this entire mess he’d gotten himself into.
He’d wanted time to let things unfold naturally.
He didn’t want to pull all the stops he used with other women and seduce the hell out of her. Because this was the only girl who knew him, respected him, admired him—he was real with her. He wanted it to be perfectly natural with her. No bull. And it just wasn’t happening that way, dammit. “What day is today, Molly?”
She sniffled, then wiped the corner of her eye with one fingertip. “Um?”
“What day is it?”
She told him the date, and he nodded gravely and bent to whisper in her ear so that nobody would hear his words but Molly. “Exactly. You’re still my girl. Aren’t you? We said a month. Didn’t we?”
She blinked as he drew back to survey her reaction, and when her gaze strayed to Garrett, Julian’s chest tightened with rage.
Garrett, his brother.
Whom he suddenly, profoundly abhorred.
Her tear-streaked blue eyes came back to him, and she nodded and mumbled, “Of course. Take me home, all right?” And to Garrett, she said almost placatingly, “Thanks for the chat. Think about what I told you before I…stepped out, okay?”
Garrett nodded before Julian led Molly by the elbow toward his assistant’s desk. He barked a dozen orders, then led Molly with him to the elevators.
Neither spoke on the drive home.
“So tell me,” Julian finally said as they entered his apartment, his emotions having fermented during the drive. He was close to exploding now. “Tell me what he did to make you cry like this.”
Molly stared at him with wide, shining eyes that made him want to wrap her up in his arms and keep the world from so much as looking at her, she looked so damn lost and so damn vulnerable. Her voice was a soft, puzzled whisper. “What’s wrong with you today?”
He drew a deep breath, then let it all out. “He doesn’t deserve you, Molly! I know a guy who’s so crazy about you, he would do anything to be with you—anything. He’d lie for you, cheat for you, steal for you—”
She scoffed, everything sounding more ludicrous to her by the second. “Are you getting high on my paint supply? Who are you talking about? Who would do such a thing?”
“Take a wild guess, Molls.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about!”
“I could kill him for making you cry like this.” Julian sat down on the living room sofa and threw his shoes off with a bang. “This obsession with my brother just pisses me the hell off, Molly. Like nothing in my life has ever pissed me off before.”
She crossed her arms, suddenly glaring. He might have been pissed off, but he had no idea what was wrong with her. That she cried because she realized the entire masquerade night had been a stupid illusion in the first place. That the man she’d thought she loved…just wasn’t the Garrett she knew. And like all the other men she’d ever met in her life, he would end up paling to Julian in every possible way she could imagine.
But how could she admit to this man, whose respect she craved and wanted above all others, that she just might have screwed it all up and was not really in love with Garrett? That the man she wanted was…unattainable. And that his brother and her sister had been warning her away from him because he would hurt her?
Oh, how she’d wanted to tear their eyes out when she heard them! Even if they might be right.
She gnawed on her lower lip and said nothing, focusing instead on getting ready to vent her frustrations on the only person she could vent with.
Julian.
“Just tell me what you see in him all of a sudden that you find so irresistible. Tell me why you’d go cry on his shoulder and not with me.”
Oh, God, what was happening to her?
Her legs went flaccid with a mere look into those stormy green eyes. He was so handsome, his jaw square and rigid, his eyebrows two sharp, bleak slashes. He was more enraged than she’d ever seen him before. She could even think he was jealous, and the thought summoned a deep, dark stirring in her that she’d been feeling more and more frequently lately—at the most inconvenient times. A powerful little ache in her body that craved for him to wrap his arms around her and… She didn’t know what she wanted him to do.
She ached for closeness with him, almost trembled with the need. She wanted to smell his scent all around her and to feel his hands everywhere and enjoy the hardness of those big, big biceps bulge as he held her imprisoned against his body. She wanted him so close, closer, closest. A
s if mere friendship was no longer enough with him. As if revealing every intimate detail of her life to him, her fears, her desires…
Was. Not. Enough.
Anymore.
“Are you planning to answer me, Molly?”
Molly’s throat seemed to be working extra hard to get the words out. She didn’t know why her nipples were beaded under her cotton turquoise sundress, why the way Jules was shooting fire at her with his eyes made her breathless and shaky and strange. She fought against the sensations, struggling to focus on his question.
She threw her hands up in the air in frustration. “I don’t know, Jules! All right? Maybe I hated when he was overly protective of us, the way he took it upon himself to chaperone you and me. He never let us have fun together, like we were doing something wrong, and we weren’t. You may be hot for anything that walks but he never realized that we were always just friends. But I truly don’t think he was being deliberately mean. Maybe he was just trying to do the noble thing out of caring and respect for me and out of respect for my father, who protected him.” She softened her voice as she tried to save the last remains of her hope.
Julian’s glare could have melted all the ice in Alaska. “Garrett pulled you away from me because he knew that— He knew I—” His face darkened, and Molly’s nipples pricked with wanting as she watched his fingers curl into fists at his sides. An image of those fingers clutching her breasts when he’d whispered sexy confessions into her ear returned to her, and she swallowed. This was so not the time to get worked up about that.
Jumping to his feet, he plunged a frustrated hand through his hair and thoroughly ruffled it. “And what about him and Kate? Hell, Molls, have you not seen the way your sister looks at him? You’re both pining away for the same man.”
Molly blinked in stupefaction, her eyebrows pulling low when she registered what he’d said. “You’re lying. You—you can’t mean that— Kate doesn’t feel that way about him.”
“Kate is like a sister to me. I know lust when I see it, Molls.”
Horrified, Molly gaped at the thought of her sister loving Garrett. So quietly? And for how long? It couldn’t be.
Fiddling with one enormous hoop earring, she shook her head several times. “Jules—you don’t understand. Garrett and I have done things. We kissed one night and it was…magical, like it was meant to be.”
Freezing in place as though she’d said something monumental, Julian openly gawked at her until his expression emptied into such a blank look that it might have been comical if she didn’t find it thoroughly alarming. “He kissed you?”
Molly offered him an embarrassed little nod, then groaned in self-pity and buried her face in her hands. “I’ve never felt such a connection in my life except with you. What I felt that night seemed so real, it was like we recognized each other, like we knew we were soul mates…”
But it was all an illusion, and I can’t understand it and I’m so confused.
Julian stalked a short distance away as though he didn’t know what do with himself, and then he returned, his jaw muscles working restlessly. “You’re kidding me, Molly. Say it now, Molls. Right. Now. Tell me you’re kidding me, Moo.”
She could only imagine how it looked to him, the guy she had been devouring with her lips yesterday, that she’d let his brother do that, too. What was wrong with her? Why had she felt nothing when she’d looked at Garrett today?
But it had happened.
Hadn’t it?
“I’m not even sure it was real anymore,” she admitted as she fell on the couch and covered her face with her hands. “It all happened at that loathsome masquerade, when I was wearing that stupid wench costume you dared me to wear! He…he was wearing all black. I was outside and thought it was you, and then he kissed me, and we did some intimate things, and I noticed the ring he was wearing as he held me, and I knew that it must be him.”
The deafening, tomblike silence that followed stretched so long and taut, she sat up in confusion and studied Julian in growing alarm.
Suddenly, he stormed down the hallway like a man possessed, and Molly sighed and rubbed her temples to ward off a headache. She just hoped he hadn’t gone to fetch a gun or something, for what was she going to do now? She was usually the impulsive one and always counted on Jules being the one with a cool head.
She considered following him, talking some reason into him, explaining that it was just a kiss and all that, but then he returned less than a minute later and produced something shiny from his pants pocket.
He sounded livid now. Livid.
“You mean this ring, Molly?”
Seven
As Molly stared at the ring he was holding between his two fingers, a horrific sensation crawled up her stomach like a tarantula.
She blinked several times, and her jaw fell open. “Wh-what are you doing with that?”
Garrett used to wear it all day, every day. The platinum was scratched and dented with age, for it had been in the family for generations, boasting at its center a rare blue diamond that was supposed to be worth millions.
“It’s my ring. Mine. I won it from him. Over a month ago. He bet me that it was worth more than my autographed Mark McGwire seventieth-home-run baseball when he was really freaking drunk. He was off by several hundred thousand and lost the bet.” Julian smiled at her, a sharp, angry smile that cut through her skin like the clean, expert slice of a dagger. “I just wear the ring to piss him off sometimes when I know I’ll be seeing him.”
All the color drained from her face, as though all the blood in her body was going straight to her heart, which was racing in her breast like a mad thing. If her ears were hearing correctly and her dazed brain processing correctly, it seemed that he was basically admitting to owning that ring on the night of the masquerade. The night that a stranger had kissed her ever-loving heart out.
Oh. My. God.
The conclusion she’d come up with terrified her. Julian…had been the one wearing that ring? Julian had whispered…those sexy words in his raspy voice while his big, long-fingered hands had touched her so provocatively…?
Julian. Her hero. Her protector. Her best friend. Her young crush. Her lifetime love.
It had been Julian who’d kissed her and made her have an orgasm while he’d fondled her? How he must have laughed! Laughed at her naïveté, at her stupidity, at her…
“I can’t believe,” he breathed softly, his eyes glowing like golden moons, “that you wouldn’t know that I was the one who kissed you that night.”
Grief and unexpected humiliation cut through her like a thousand knives. Julian had known all this time.
Her chest constricted so tightly she thought she would break apart, but she still stubbornly shook her head from side to side. “I don’t understand.”
His kisses. Oh, dear, his kisses. Three total. Each one so different. One, passionate and drunk. The next, cocky and trying to show off in front of Kate. And the last one, in a dark room, where it was just him and her, supposedly playing a game….
Please no, I can’t be that stupid.
“I don’t understand,” she repeated, more frantic now.
In three steps, he closed the distance between them, and when his fingers curled around her arm, Molly could feel the leashed power in his hold, see how he visibly fought for control. “I think I do. You thought I was Garrett that night—when I kissed you hard enough to make your mouth swell under mine. You let me put my hands between your legs, touch your breasts, maul you like a—”
“Stop it, Julian. Stop it!”
She leaped away and backed off, hardly able to look into those fiercely jealous green eyes, which were only reminding her that he—he who was her everything—had done all that. Every bit of what he’d said, and more.
Julian had kissed her, had turned her life upside down with
his touch. He’d made her shatter in his arms, and then he’d acted as if it had meant nothing. Nothing.
He was her best friend, and yet he’d kept her in the dark all this time. He’d been intimate with her, had made her feel as if he wanted her, cherished her, but instead he’d been happily helping her seduce his own brother!
“How dare you!” she exploded at that. “How dare you do that to me and then say nothing!”
His eyes flashed, and he threw his arms up in the air. “What did you want me to say? That it was a mistake? That I got carried away by your pretty blue eyes and the way you looked in that scrap of a dress?” he shot back. “You told me not to mention it, and since I was drunk and clearly screwed up, I thought it was a damned good idea. You pretended nothing happened the next day, and I went with it. At least it gave me time to get it right.”
“Get what right, you idiot? You just shot our friendship to hell!” She pushed him aside and stormed away to her bedroom, adding as she went, “Now excuse me if I go pack, you…you jerk! How could you even agree to help me seduce Garrett after you touched me like you did, you… Oh! I can’t even think of a word for you!”
She slammed the door with a bang.
Her lungs burning for air, she fell back weakly against the door and stared at the bed with blurry eyes. She glanced at the walk-in closet, tempted to leave this very second. She would leave. Of course she would. But she needed him to drive her, or Kate to come get her, and she’d die before she made that request of either of them right now.
A desolate sensation weighed heavy on her chest as she thought of the mural waiting upstairs, a safe haven for her to get lost in a sea of color. She had never left a work unfinished and she was not going to start now because of that…that douche!
She would finish it tonight, or at least try to, and then she’d leave tomorrow.
She still couldn’t believe it. He had known…all along, all this time. The bastard had already kissed her, fondled her, known how easy it was to make her explode.