Honest and smart and with a sweet tenderness to her that cut him off at the knees, she pushed buttons he didn’t even know he had.

“Stop.” A breathless demand. “You’re the one who proposed a one-month stand.”

Turning, he stalked back to her doorway just as another door opened down the hall. “Molly?” said a heavyset man wearing black sweatpants and a navy tee. “You okay?”

Fox shifted instinctively to protect her from the view of the other man, her body clad only in that silly fluffy yellow robe that drove him crazy. She flushed and looked around his side. “Yes, I’m fine.”

The stranger gave Fox a long, suspicious look before saying, “Just yell if that changes,” and shutting his door.

Fox waited until Molly’s eyes were back on him to speak, his voice harsh and his arms braced on either side of the doorway. “I might have proposed a one-month stand,” he said, “but I didn’t expect to be used and shoved out as soon as I’d served my purpose.” It infuriated him. “Or should I say as soon as my cock had served its purpose?”

Molly flinched, but she didn’t back down. “What? You expect me to let you move in for the month?” Her words came out in a furious whisper, her hands clenched to bloodless tightness even as her cheeks flared with hot spots of color. “I never did anything to make you believe I’d be fine with that. There are boundaries.”

Gripping her jaw, he said, “You don’t get to treat me as disposable.”

Shock rippled through the anger in the dark brown of her eyes. “No, I—”

“You can’t use me for sex,” he interrupted, too pissed to hold back the words, “then put me away until the next time. I will not be your fucking dirty little secret.” Not when it was brutally clear their relationship had already crossed the line from sex to a far more demanding, far more passionate bond. “Decide, Molly.”

“I can’t.” The words were shaky, the anger draining away to leave her expression stark with pain. “I can’t become entangled in you.”

“You’d rather live half a life?” he asked without mercy, knowing he was pushing her too hard, too fast, but unable to stop himself, his response to her a violence inside him. “Always with one step backing away, ready to run to safety?” Sensing his temper was about to slip the leash totally, Fox pushed away from the doorjamb. “Make sure you can live with that choice.”

This time when Fox turned and walked away, Molly didn’t call him back. Closing the door with fingers that trembled, she slid down to sit with her back to it, the robe he’d teased her about bunched around her thighs and her eyes on the bench where Fox had kissed her until he melted her bones.

“You’d rather live half a life? Always with one step backing away, ready to run to safety?”

The knuckles of one clenched hand pressed against her mouth, Molly shook her head. That wasn’t what she was doing. She was living life on her terms—she supported herself, had a job she truly enjoyed, a best friend she loved, and a sister she’d embraced. More, she had a plan for her future and if that plan wasn’t bursting with excitement, that was exactly what she wanted.

You’re also twenty-four years old, another part of her whispered, and the only two relationships you’ve had, if you can even call those fiascos relationships, have been with men who were… comfortable. The first was married to his job, the other in love with his ex-girlfriend. Neither one tried to get anything more than a kiss. And you didn’t really care. You don’t think something might be wrong with that picture?

It was a pitiless indictment of the life she’d built out of nothing. A safe, careful, content life. Rather than a strong, purposeful plan, it suddenly sounded unutterably sad.

A tear trickled into her mouth, the taste of salt hot.

Knuckling it away, she got up and found the phone as well as the chocolate-fudge ice cream and took both back to the couch

Thea’s sleep-slurred voice came on the line two rings later. “Hello?”

“Thea, it’s me.” Normally, she’d have called Charlotte, but if her smart best friend had one area of total cluelessness, it was on the subject of men.

“What’s the matter?” Instant wakefulness.

Thea listened, not saying anything until Molly had poured it all out. “I guess it’s too late to warn you against getting involved with someone in the industry?” Not waiting for an answer, she continued. “Here’s the thing, Molly, Fox isn’t the type of guy you can be with and expect to hold the reins. That vibe he gives off? It’s not an illusion—he really is that intense.”

Sipping sounds, Thea drinking the herbal tea she’d made while Molly talked. “I’ve worked with him for over two years,” she continued, “and never once has he delegated control of any aspect of his private life to an assistant, manager, anyone. You have no idea how rare that is at his level of success.”

Molly swirled her spoon in the melted ice cream, emotion a rock in her throat. “It was meant to be one night.”

“You’re the only one who can decide if you want more,” Thea said, “but speaking professionally, if you had to pick a time and a place to have an affair with a man like Fox, this is about perfect. You can stay off the radar if you’re careful, and he’ll be gone in a month.”

The idea should’ve comforted her. It didn’t. It… hurt. It really hurt. “What if I can’t maintain the distance?” she said on the heels of that staggering realization, her eyes burning. “What if I fall for him?” The agony and humiliation of being in love with a man who didn’t love her was her worst nightmare.

She’d grown up watching her mother drink away her pain, Patrick Buchanan’s infidelities acid on her soul, until by the time Molly was seven, her mother was a stranger, an alcoholic so accustomed to the effects that she was permanently drunk yet appeared sober. Molly had always known the truth, had hated seeing the distant ghost of the mother who’d once read her bedtime stories and promised her Daddy would be home soon. Daddy, of course, had no doubt been banging his aide or another young staffer at the time.

“Molly,” Thea said, breaking into the agonizing slap of memory, “you said it yourself—that bastard who donated sperm to make us did a real number on you.” Blunt, unexpected words. “The real question is, do you want him to manipulate the direction of your life from the grave?”

Long after the conversation with Thea had ended, Molly sat staring at nothing. Was her sister right? Was her whole life not a life at all, but rather an anti-life, as she did everything in her power not to repeat the mistakes of either her father or her mother?

“You’d rather live half a life?”

Fox’s words circled in her brain, smashing and crashing into what Thea had said until she couldn’t think. So she did what she’d done since she was a child alone in a large air-conditioned mansion, the nanny new and unfamiliar again because her mother didn’t want her daughter to grow attached to another woman: she called Charlotte.

Her friend was up reading.

Too confused and upset to talk about Fox anymore, she just told Charlie of her conversation with Thea, of her sister’s final, piercing question.

“I don’t think,” Charlotte said softly, “Thea knows how strong you are, how brave. She never saw you handling the bullies when you were fifteen.”

“But she’s right, too, isn’t she, Charlie?” Abdomen tight and shoulders tense, Molly dropped her head against the sofa-back. “I make all my choices based on what happened back then.” The shock, the disbelief, the public degradation followed by a screaming loss that had left her numb for months.

“If you’re happy with your life,” Charlotte replied, sweet and intelligent and perceptive, “what does it matter how it came to be?” The slightest pause. “Are you happy?”

It took Molly a long time to answer, to be honest about it. “No,” she whispered. “Sometimes the rules I’ve made feel like a straitjacket.” Squeezing until she couldn’t breathe, her chest compressed by the weight of the expectations she’d placed on her life.