One More Kiss (Affair Without End Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

aren’t you dressed to go? Garret is on his way up.”
    I sink down on the arm on the sofa.  “I’m not coming tonight, Jack.”
    His penetrating eyes rapidly search my face. “Why not? You’ve never seen me perform. I want you there, Linda. I don’t want to be a minute without you that I don’t have to.”
    I run my fingers through my hair and meet his stare steadily. “I’m not going, Jack. Not here. Not in LA. Don’t ask me to, and don’t expect me to.”
    He lights another cigarette and studies me through the smoke. “What does us being in LA have to do with anything?”
    My eyes round. “I know too many people here. There’s no way I can go with you tonight and not run into someone I know. I don’t want that, Jack. I don’t want my past all mixed up with what we have.”
    He sighs heavily and studies me for a moment. “Do you think I care if you run into a guy from the old days? Whatever you did before me, doesn’t matter. Not to me. I don’t care if people know we’re a couple.”
    When he talks like that it’s so believable I want to melt and be everything he wants me to be. But you can’t run away from who you are, who you’ve been, even if Jack is so temptingly trying to make you believe that you can. It makes me feel so dirty when I think back to those days, and somehow it touches Jack not at all. He’s too good, in a strange way naïve, to think my past doesn’t matter because it doesn’t matter to him. How my life feels to me is so alien to him, he can’t even imagine it.
    Groupie is just another term for whore. A whore a musician doesn’t have to pay. That’s what I’ve been, whether he wants to acknowledge that or not, whether he realizes that’s what is buried underneath his suspicions of me tonight. I suddenly understand what’s been wrong with us of late. It’s the subtext of who I am, always in the room with us, and it’s starting to be a subtext making Jack doubt my love for him and doubt my motivation to keep coming to him.
    Hurt shoots upward from my center, making me instantly defensive and blurt without thinking, “We’re not a couple, Jack. We’re a cliché.”
    I’ve kicked up his anger. I can see it in the subtle tensing of the flesh across his cheekbones. “The only thing cliché in this room is how you think. I don’t know where you get these ideas you have, but don’t you ever think they apply to me!”
    He crosses the room in angry strides and stomps out his cigarette.
    That was said meanly. I stare at him in wide-eyed shock. I’ve never pushed Jack far enough to be mean to me and I don’t like it. I lift my chin. “Oh, nothing applies to you, because you don’t live in the real world, Jack, and you never have,” I counter with more ire than I intend.
    His gaze locks on me, burning. “My world is as real as anyone’s, Linda. Don’t insult me by suggesting it’s not.”
    My cheeks flood with a fiery burn. He’s right. In some ways, his world is more real and cruel than mine has ever been. My comment was completely an unfair thing to say to a man who lost both his wife and son tragically, and is trying to cope with a daughter messed up by growing up in a house of death. That last part makes my stomach turn. God, I wish I hadn’t phrased it that way in my head.
    I say, “I’m talking about you and me. We don’t exist in the real world. We exist in this neat little bubble of hotel rooms and isolated hours. Just you, me, and the good parts of being together, Jack. We don’t ever have to deal with the crappy parts of who I am and of being a couple. We just have the good times and that’s fine by me. But don’t pretend that if we try to make more out of us, the real parts won’t change what we have now.”
    “There is nothing more real in my life than being with you, Linda,” he says half-exasperated and almost half-growling. “The only thing that makes sense to me right now is me and you.”
    My eyes round as I study his face. What else is