I guess. As long as we’re not talking about seconds. They’re never as tasty as the first time.

Not seconds. Dessert.

Chapter 3

Caleb Marshall told himself not to be a heartless ass and to make the damn call.

It was already four, which meant it was after ten in Paris. Pretty soon, it would be too late to phone, and he knew he needed to get it over with today.

So he stopped procrastinating, hit send on an email, and reached over for his phone.

He’d known Wes since first grade, but he hadn’t talked to him in more than two years. He hated making calls like this.

“Fuck,” Wes said, answering on the second ring without any semblance of a greeting. “If even you are making a pity call, then I must be in really bad shape.”

Typical.

“Are you?”

“What do you think?”

“I have no idea. But I’m sorry about your mom.” Caleb said the words automatically, since they were the ones he’d called to say. They felt artificial, though, as if they weren’t what needed to be said.

“Yeah. How did you hear?”

“I ran into your dad the other day. What’s the prognosis?”

“Two or three months? They don’t really know. They’ve got nothing left to try.”

“We’ve got a couple of projects in the works, but they won’t be ready for clinical trials until next year.”

“Yeah. There’s nothing to hope for here.”

Caleb didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to say, and he didn’t like feeling that way. He was tempted to end the conversation quickly, but, if he had a friend in the world, it was Wes.

“Are you coming home any time soon?” he asked at last.

“I’m going to try to get over there in a couple of weeks.”

“Good. Give me a call when you’re in town.”

“Will do. Any new trauma with you?”

“I don’t do trauma.”

“I guess the one was enough for any lifetime.”

A brief cringe shuddered through Caleb at the words.

“It wasn’t a trauma.”

“Yeah, it was. It just lasted more than a year.”

Caleb sat in silence, his whole body tense for a moment before he made himself relax. This was why he hadn’t wanted to make this call, why he hadn’t touched base with Wes for so long.

His friend knew everything—his entire history—even things that didn’t need to be remembered.

Caleb wasn’t that helpless boy anymore. He’d constructed a life to ensure he wasn’t. And he didn’t like to be reminded of who he used to be.

“Well, maybe I can catch you when you’re in town,” he said at last.

“Still the same old Caleb. The minute it turns real, you’re out.” Wes sounded resigned, not annoyed. “But thanks for calling anyway.”

After saying good-bye, Caleb set down the phone and tried to focus again on his email. His father had died in his sixties and his mother a few years ago. There was no one left from childhood now. No one but Wes.

He brushed away the thought—and the memories it evoked—so he could work. He had other things to focus on now anyway.

And a date tonight he was really looking forward to.

Caleb had a long-standing habit of working in the office on Sunday afternoons.

He usually took Saturdays as a break, except for email and the occasional phone call, but by Sunday morning he was itching to get to all the work waiting to be done in the office. So years ago he’d given up on the pretense of a weekend and just started going in.

His staff technically had the weekend off, but a lot of them ended up coming in on Sunday afternoons anyway.

It made things easier for him, so he never tried to stop them.

He’d been in the office for five hours already, since eleven that morning, and he’d completed the project he’d wanted to get done today. He wasn’t meeting Kelly until seven that evening, though, so he’d started to go through some of his email before he’d called Wes.

His inbox was like a bottomless pit. Any time he got even close to clearing it out, it would pile up again in less than an hour. Even with Linda culling through it several times a day, they never seemed to make any progress.

Sometimes he was tempted to just delete his account and tell everyone to contact him by mail or phone. He was in charge here. What could they do? There were plenty of executives who demanded companies adapt to their eccentricities. Maybe refusal to use email would be his.

Even as he stared at the screen right now, at just after four on a Sunday afternoon, three more emails came in, and he felt the familiar tightening at the back of his skull at the thought of all of the email still waiting for him.

When he’d started working for Vendella as a young man, his biggest source of stress had been keeping up with email so no one thought he was lazy or incompetent.

One would think the last twenty years would have made more of a difference.

He was replying to one of the messages Linda had tagged as “priority” when she tapped on his office door and walked in. She was a plain, quiet woman in her fifties. She’d been his assistant for fifteen years, and she was always in the office when he was.

“Here’s the information you wanted on Miss Watson,” she murmured, placing a file in his inbox. “And are you available for a call from Richard Helms?”

Caleb made a face, but nodded his affirmation as he reached for the file Linda had just put together. “Give me fifteen minutes.”

When Linda left his office, he opened the file to find a picture of Kelly, standing with a friend of hers outside of a stone building. She wore jeans and a fitted T-shirt, and her hair was pulled into a long ponytail. She was smiling broadly, as if she’d been laughing.

She looked different in the casual clothes, but she had the same fresh beauty—glowing with a kind of innocence that was impossible to ignore. As if she weren’t jaded and corrupted by experience with the world.

She’d said that appearances could lie, and he knew it was true, but he still felt that pull of attraction and curiosity—as if she were a quest that must be undertaken.

He genuinely hadn’t known if she would agree to a second date with him. He’d believed her when she’d said she didn’t do seconds. He was actually a little disappointed that she’d given in so easily, but another round of sex like the first one they’d had would do a lot to ease that disappointment.

He glanced through the information on her that Linda had collected. Twenty-eight. Adopted by Mel and Irma Watson when she was eleven.

She’d gotten through high school without any honors and then had gone to an expensive art school. She’d started building her business as a pet artist immediately afterward, and nearly everything available online about her was connected to her work.

She’d never been married. Never been arrested. Never done anything particularly noteworthy.

There was no reason why she should be so fascinating to him. But the sex had been really good, and that was reason enough, as far as he was concerned.

Sex had been boring lately. He dated often enough, but never for very long. The women would start to whine or cling or demand he change his habits, which he wasn’t about to do. So he’d send them an expensive gift, and end it with as little mess and drama as possible.

More and more, he was just using women from a high-class escort service, since it was easier and cleaner. But that got old after a while too.

Kelly was the first woman to leave him wanting more in a really long time.

After reading the file, he slid it into his top drawer and tried to focus on work again. He had to talk to Richard Helms, who led Vendella’s marketing division. He was putting up a fight about Caleb’s directive to trim the marketing staff by ten percent, so now Caleb had to deal with the headache.