parent ever. “I’m sorry. My phone was off. I thought you’d be so busy having fun you’d forget all about me.” And he’d completely failed to consider that maybe she’d want to talk to him about her day or her progress with swimming. Or that maybe she’d need reassurance or praise or an encouraging word from her father, him, the worst parent ever.
“If something...happens to...you,” she said between hiccupping breaths, “where do I go next?”
Next? “Jessie, nothing is going to happen to me.”
“That’s what my mom thought, too,” she cried.
His chest burned in response to her sobs.
“I want to have a say where I go,” Jessie said.
Because she was so unhappy with where she’d wound up, so unhappy with him?
“I want to go to Scarlet.”
At her mention, he remembered the current topic of their conversation was standing in his bedroom doorway, listening.
Only when he turned to see if Scarlet had overheard Jessie’s demand, he saw no sign of her. Relieved, he walked over to close the door. “As much as you like Scarlet,” he said quietly. “She’s not family.” And according to his revised will, on the off chance something did happen to him, Jessie would go to live with his sister.
“She feels like family to me,” Jessie insisted. “Please ask her, Dad. Promise me you’ll ask her.”
Lewis sat down on the bed. “Okay,” he agreed. What else could he say to his hysterical daughter who was hours away? “I promise.”
After a few moments of silence, in a voice barely louder than a whisper, Jessie shared, “I went out on the boat.”
“I’m so proud of you,’ Lewis said. Slowly Jessie calmed down and they had a nice conversation. At the end he had to promise to keep his cell phone charged, turned on, and with him at all times, before she’d hang up.
With Jessie taken care of Lewis pulled on a pair of briefs and jeans and left the room to find Scarlet.
“Stop with the guilt trip,” she said into her cell phone, her back and shapely butt to him. “I had to do a favor for a friend uptown. It’ll take me forever to get down to the South Street Seaport now. You all eat without me. I’ll see you next time.”
She’d changed her Friday night plans for him and Jessie.
“Right,” she said sarcastically. “You have me all figured out. I’m ditching you for a night of wild sex with a hot guy, because it is so like me to do something like that. As a matter of fact he’s naked and waiting for me in his bedroom as we speak.”
He wasn’t, but he could be in two seconds.
She listened to the person on the other end of the call then said, “It hasn’t been that long.”
How long?
“Well,” she said. “I’ll finally have something to talk about the next time we get together for girls night out, then. That is if he hasn’t fallen asleep while I’m wasting quality sex time talking to you.”
Quality sex time. Lewis wanted some quality sex time. He needed quality sex time. And this conversation was seriously weakening his resolve to stay away from Scarlet.
She paused then laughed. “In a closet.”
A closet? Okay with him.
“Only if he asks real nice,” she said.
Lewis could do real nice.
“I’m always good,” she said.
Of that Lewis had no doubt.
She laughed again. The sound filled him with joy.
“Okay.” He heard the smile in her voice. “Tonight I’ll be bad.”
Oh yeah. He liked the sound of that.
She stiffened.
Idiot. Had he actually said the ‘oh yeah’ out loud?
Scarlet turned her head slowly. Their eyes met. “Gotta go,” she said into the phone and ended the call. “So much for giving me a little privacy like I gave you when you were on the phone,” she said to him.
Without conscious thought his feet walked toward her, taking the rest of him with them.
“Whoa.” She held up both hands. “Apparently you are under the mistaken impression I am here for more than a wellness check.”
“I did hear mention of wild sex with a hot guy,” he pointed out. “Thank you for the compliment, by the way.”
She stepped back. “Well you obviously didn’t listen close enough to the inflection in my tone to detect my sarcasm.”
“Let’s not waste anymore quality sex time with talking,” he half-teased, reaching for her.
“Touch me and lose a finger,” she threatened.
He stopped with his hands mid-air, mere inches from her shoulders, and waited.
She looked up at him with those beautiful eyes. “I’m serious.”
He smiled. “I know. But I think I need a stronger deterrent because even though you are the absolute last woman I should be lusting after, I want to put my hands on you so bad right now I’m willing to sacrifice my phalanges to do it.” Actually, he was prepared to sacrifice a lot more.
Scarlet, obviously the smarter of the two of them, turned and walked away. And he let her. “The absolute last woman you should be lusting after?” She moved a used glass from the counter to the sink. “As in you’d rather lust after Hilda from the endoscopy department before you’d lust after me?”
Lewis shivered, and not in a good way. Hilda was big and mean and she had kinky gray hairs sprouting on her chin.
“Or Morgan in Administration?” she went on.
That woman was the skinniest, coldest, stiffest female he had ever met.
“Or Gretchen from Food Service?”
Renowned for her hairnet and tan stretch pants that clung to every single pouch of cellulite as much as for her shiny gold tooth.
Scarlet looked at him from the corners of her eyes. “I’m not sure if I’m relieved or insulted.”
Lewis pulled out a stool, sat down and set his elbows on the island counter in the center of his kitchen. “The absolute last woman as in your friendship with my daughter makes things...complicated.”
“Yeah,” Scarlet agreed. “That it does.” She walked to the side of the island directly opposite him and asked, “What if I wasn’t friends with Jess? If you saw me in a bar, would you try to get me to go home with you?”
In
