dice. He’d been the one who his li’l Alice had a crush on. It was he who had first fallen for the li’l minx when she’d grown up to become a beautiful fashion model. It was Sterling who had discouraged Quentin from pursuing a relationship with her—since according to his brother she was like their younger sister—only to have him turn around and marry Alyssa himself.
“I wish you’d put something else on,” Q mumbled under his breath to his mirage.
“Like I have something to do with what I have on,” Alyssa said, throwing up her hands. “I’m not really here!”
“What was that, Quentin?” Dr. Turner asked, sitting across from him in a straight-backed chair.
“What? Nothing.” He shook his head at the doctor, who took great pains to hide her lush curves under large, unflattering clothes. The fact that she dressed so frumpy bothered him more than it should have. He didn’t understand why beautiful women did things like that. Didn’t they understand their power?
Alyssa smirked. “Are you really sitting there thinking about having sex with your psychiatrist?”
“Who said anything about having sex with my doctor?” Q snapped.
“Excuse me?” Dr. Turner said, looking up from her notepad.
“What? Nothing.” He glared at Alyssa, who shrugged her shoulders.
All right, yes. Quentin knew that it wasn’t exactly normal to be seeing and talking to someone who wasn’t there. But as far as he could tell, it was just a coping mechanism until he could work through his conflicting emotions. So far, it was better than getting drunk and being pulverized in bar fights—which had actually been his first line of defense.
Dr. Turner started scribbling in her yellow notepad. “You think today you’ll tell me who it is that you see and talk to?”
He hesitated as Alyssa raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he lied. “I’m here because…I want to understand…”
“Love?” the doctor suggested.
Quentin bobbed his head while Alyssa shook hers.
“That’s a tall order, Mr. Hinton,” Dr. Turner said, crossing her long, chocolate-brown legs, which continued to distract him. A connoisseur of women, Quentin had spent his entire adult life enjoying learning all there was to know about women—sexually, that is, he proudly boasted. He loved nothing more than to lose himself in the curve of a woman’s hip, the valleys between and around a pair of succulent breasts and, of course…other hidden treasures.
“Quentin?” Dr. Turner repeated, breaking his trance from her long limbs.
“I’m sorry. What?”
Alyssa huffed out a frustrated breath and plopped down in an empty chair across the room. “This is a complete waste of time. This isn’t about love. To you this is about winning and losing.”
Quentin frowned, but before he could ask Alyssa what the hell she meant by that, Dr. Turner cleared her throat. “I said that trying to understand love is a tall order. Many people spend their entire lives trying to figure it out, nurture it and even control it.”
“I’ll take control for two hundred, Alex,” Alyssa said, mimicking a Jeopardy! contestant.
“Humph.” A half smile curled Q’s lips.
“I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t add those who try to run away from love,” she said.
Once again, they had hit his category and the room fell silent.
“Have you given any more thought to calling your brother Sterling?”
I think about it all the time. “No.”
“Do you think that you’ll never be able to forgive him for the wrong you feel that he has done to you?” Dr. Turner asked.
Quentin held Alyssa’s gaze from across the room. “I’m not sure.”
“That’s different from the flat no last week,” the therapist gently reminded him.
He stopped and weighed his words carefully. “Trust…is still an issue.” He shifted in his chair and ignored the way his beautiful mirage frowned at him. “No matter what has happened in my life, the constant power struggle between me and my father or the insane messes I found myself in, I always thought that I could trust my brothers. Sterling…Jonas. We’re each different. Granted, they are megasuccessful and now happily married with children, and probably a dog and even a white-picket fence. I never questioned their loyalty or intentions. I believed that my brothers, more than anyone, always had my best interest at heart.”
Q shook his head. “How do you learn to trust someone again after they’ve poured gasoline on that bridge and blown it up?”
“Perhaps by reaching out?” Dr. Turner suggested.
“So it’s all on me?” The idea repulsed him. “I wasn’t the one with the gasoline.”
The statement hung in the air as Q struggled to swallow the huge boulder in his throat. He even blinked back a few tears. “It’s not that I don’t miss Sterling. I do. I just don’t know how to go about forgiving him. But then when I think about my cousin Xavier—”
“Xavier King?”
Quentin nodded. “I told you about him and his brothers the last time.”
“Yes, your coveted boys’ club.”
“I believe that boys’ club is your terminology—not mine.”
“But they were who you ran to as a substitute for your real brothers since Sterling and Jonas were no longer available bachelors for you to hang out with.”
“I never said that my cousins were substitutes.”
“Weren’t they?”
Quentin shifted in the chaise at the provocative question. “No, not consciously.”
Dr. Turner removed her black-rimmed glasses from her perky nose. “Do you mind if I disclose some observations that I’ve made about you?”
Quentin turned his tall frame onto his side to meet his doctor’s soft, steady, brown-eyed gaze. “You mean that I actually get to hear a little of what you spend hours jotting down on your little yellow notepad?”
She smiled reflexively as she crossed her arms over her lap. “You’re a creature of habit. You have a hard time adjusting to change. And when things don’t turn out like you expect them to—as eventually happens—you seek out those things that will give you a sense of familiarity.”
“Please.” He gave her a dismissive shake of his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? When your father cut you off financially, didn’t you rely on women to support you in a fashion that you were accustomed to instead of getting out there and making your own way?”
“Wait.
