The Love Experiment by Paton Ainslie

Author:Paton, Ainslie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Carina Press
Published: 2017-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

The thought of Jack making his bedroom presentable was an unaccountable thrill. It was just a man making his bed. It shouldn’t have made Derelie feel so effervescent, but she was the glass of soda she’d drunk at dinner, bubbling and fizzing and set to explode if shaken.

She wanted that shaking so badly.

“How do you do it, Martha? Hang out with such a sexy beast and keep your calm. I’m ridiculous. I just want to kiss him all over and never stop.” She laughed as Martha turned away from the closed bedroom door after head-butting it a few times. “Yeah, if I didn’t know he was coming back I’d do that too.”

The cat skirted by as if Derelie took up an unnecessarily large amount of space and Martha was offended by that, and jumped onto Jack’s considerably tidier desk. “Are you allowed on there?”

Martha picked her way over the pile of folders and wove between the two computer screens, then pushed some items around to make room to curl up. Two of those items she simply tipped off the desk, a box of tissues and a foldback clip holding a stack of business cards and notes.

“So that’s the way it is then.” Derelie picked up the tissues, but when she put her hand to the foldback clip she recoiled. The first card in the stack had a picture of a naked woman, tastefully silhouetted, on it, with a phone number and the words Jane F, available for no strings sex. The next card showed a woman in a red corset—her name was apparently Heidi, and she liked uncomplicated arrangements.

She dropped the clip to the ground. That woman in the market had handed Jack something he’d put in his pocket. Derelie had had his cap on, pulled down low and thought she’d mistaken it, but no, the other woman propositioned Jack, and so had the owner of every card or note in this stack. Why would he keep them? Why would she want to be part of the stack?

She was such an idiot. He’d never said why he was single other than being busy. This was how he’d been busy. She didn’t need her heart broken this way.

It took two seconds to collect her purse and her overnight bag and fling Jack’s front door open. Let him figure out what went wrong, he was the investigative reporter.

She’d have gotten away with her swift exit too, but Martha was a slick ninja and slipped out the door and bounded onto the landing before Derelie could react.

“No, Martha. Be a good girl and go back inside so I can avoid making a huge mistake. Big scary things live out here, like falling for the wrong men, like thinking you’re smarter than you really are, and trusting an experiment.”

Martha gave her paw a cursory lick and looked at Derelie. There was only the width of the corridor separating them. She could do this—grab Martha, shove her inside and take off. Derelie put her bag down.

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