Extreme Bachelor by Julia London

Leah
couldn’t help but smile a little. “Pretty flashy, huh?”
    “Very.”
    She smiled a little more.
    “It’s great to see you smile. Have I told
you how great you look?” he asked, touching the small of her
back.
    He might as well have burned her—it was an
old, familiar gesture, one that used to make her feel so safe and
wanted. She had a memory of it raining in New York one night, and
Michael hailing a cab. When one pulled up, he put his hand on the
small of her back, firmly but gently ushering her into the cab so
that she wouldn’t get wet, and him getting soaked in the
process.
    Now, she moved a little to her right, so
that there was some distance between them and looked straight
ahead. “I hope they have tuna.”
    I hope they have
tuna . Sometimes, Leah wondered what
alternate universe she was passing through. God, this was a dumb
idea. She was already reliving everything in her mind, and they
hadn’t even begun to talk. He seemed to sense her reluctance—he had
always had a strange way of being able to read what was going on
with her—because he said, “I just wanted the chance to explain a
couple of things.”
    “There’s nothing to explain,” she said
instantly. “It was a long time ago. Like I said, water under the
bridge. We’ve both moved on, and there really isn’t any point in
going back to it now, is there?”
    “But there is a point,” he said. “The point
is, for better or worse, you don’t know the whole truth about me.
You never have.”
    Oh, great, here came the
grand confession. I was doing an Austrian
woman while I was doing you , or, a real
gut-kicker, I was going to leave my wife,
but she got pregnant . Right, like she
hadn’t thought of those possibilities a million times over. Why
were men so dumb? “Really, Michael, I don’t need to know the
truth,” she said as they reached the commissary.
    “But I need to tell you.”
    “Okay,” Leah said, sighing. “But I’ve
probably surmised more than you think, and I already know the
truth, but I really don’t feel the need to know any more,” she
said, as Michael got them trays and put one in front of her. She
could feel his body at her back. It felt familiar. And so good. And
she hated him for it.
    He leaned into her, close
enough she could smell his cologne and said, “But you don’t know the truth.
You couldn’t possibly know the truth.” They moved in line behind an
actor dressed like a street bum, and Michael straightened up. “What
are you having?”
    Oh, right, like she could eat now. She chose
a tuna sandwich, but had no appetite for it. What did he think she
could possibly not know? She’d known where he worked, what he did
for a living. What else was there?
    “There’s a table over there,” Michael said,
nodding toward the back of the tent. He led the way, as far away
from the other soccer moms and actors and everyone else as he could
get. He put his tray down and held out a chair for her. “You don’t
have to do that,” she said, but put her tray down, taking the seat
he offered, sliding past him, her body brushing against his clothes
and feeling that odd jolt of awareness.
    He sat across from her, poured some salad
dressing on the salad he’d picked up, and forked a mouthful.
    Leah, on the other hand, could only sit
there looking at him, gripping her sandwich in two hands. After a
moment of watching him eat, she put the sandwich down. “Okay, the
suspense is killing me,” she said, trying to make light of it.
“Tell me what I don’t know. No, wait,” she said, holding up a hand.
“Let me start. What I know is that you were not ready to commit. So
I guess the only question is why you didn’t want to commit to me,
and I think we both know it was another woman, but hey, whatever.
It’s over and done with.”
    He looked up from his plate, his brown eyes
wide. “What?” he asked, incredulous. “You think there was another
woman?”
    Leah snorted. “Well, it’s
better than another man,” she