The Dimple Strikes Back Read Online Free PDF

snoozing, trying to acclimate to the time change, but I figured I’d feel like crap one way or the other.
    The conversation I was having with myself, I should be discussing with him. We’d avoided it long enough, believing that love and great sex would carry us through a relationship model that looked like a tightrope walker balancing above a crocodile pit.
    “Hey—” said a sleepy voice.
    I started and stiffened in my armchair beside the bed. “Hey. You should go back to sleep,” I said.
    “I’ve been here for a week. I’m mostly adjusted.” He sat up, the sheets bunched around his waist and legs. His skin glowed in the morning light, and his hair flopped in a rumply, sexy mess over his forehead. “You should come here.” He patted beside him.
    I avoided his eyes and decided it was a great time to pick invisible dust off my robe.
    He sighed. “Okay. We have to talk about it.” My gaze stayed averted. The ball was so far in his court he was sitting in the line judge’s lap. “I have an idea about what’s going on.”
    “Please don’t tell me,” I burst out. The moment I said it, I understood it to be true. I couldn’t know. Knowing things would put me in even deeper boiling water than I already was. He’d destroyed my life one time, and I’d rebuilt it—better, stronger, faster. My new life was pure Bionic Woman , and damned if I’d give it up so easily.
    “I wasn’t going to tell you.” After this razor-edged reply, he shifted in the sheets and decided what to say, his mouth pursed and bitter. “Look, I know this is hard. I miss you.” His voice broke, just a bit, just enough to shatter my composure. “I miss you all the time. You’re like a tick on my skin.”
    Ah, the romance of a country boy from North Carolina.
    He continued his love poem, “And I understand that this situation is untenable. But I’ve spent quite a few years building a…lifestyle and a means of making money that wasn’t above-board. I can’t snap my fingers and make it stop. People know who I am. They know who you are, obviously.”
    I sucked in a gasp. “They followed me.”
    “Yeah, probably. Not your fault.”
    Of course it wasn’t, but my stomach twisted all the same.
    “I’m trying to get out. I’ve been a straight arrow since the Picasso debacle. Well”—he shrugged and sent the dimple into the fray—“I may have been forced to circumvent local statutes here and there in the interest of staying un-jailed, but—”
    His smile did not help. I felt betrayed by the dimple for the first time in ages. Lately, it had told me truths instead of lies. Truths like ‘I love your boobs in that sweater’, or ‘I enjoy giving you the last of my Tater Tots’.
    I bunched my hands in my nubby pink robe. “I can’t believe I’m going to say a sentence like this, but I have an image to protect now, Sam. What happened last night—it could have led down a road that destroys my career. I’m finally doing what I love. And I’m good at it! People seem to want to watch me doing it, which is bizarre, but fantastic.”
    “God, Samantha, you have to believe me when I say I don’t want to put any of that into jeopardy—”
    “But you will. You do. You can’t help it.” I turned to watch the street begin to wake up into the zip of morning traffic. “I knew this going in.”
    “Yes, you did.”
    His bitterness was palpable. I tasted its sour notes, with a finish of…being finished.
    I couldn’t say the words. How could I say it? I began to cry—the silent kind, where the tears just slip away, but still sting your eyes long after they’ve gone.
    How had an ill-advised lark got so out of control? How was it that I was a…B- or C-list movie star? What was my life?
    And what kind of stupid, moronic woman chooses the one man she can’t take to a public premiere unless she wants the FBI tip line to go nuts? I wiped the tears from my face with my robe in a pathetic effort to feel less pathetic.
    He slid to the end