I nodded, smiling against her cheek. “I never would have guessed you’d be so good at this.”

Her laughter vibrated along my neck and beneath my skin. I’d never heard her make such a goofy, indelicate sound. Another one of her walls I’d penetrated. Victory surged warm and sharp in my chest, and for a brief pulse I wanted to yell out the window that she was letting me in.

She licked up the side of my neck, nibbled my lower lip. “You have the most perfect cock,” she told me. “You’re making me want you on a Tuesday.”

“Fuck,” I groaned. And as I came, jaw clenched, fists tight at my sides, I realized that Sara, too, had made me forget to act like a bloody arse about the whole thing and stop worrying about whether she was f**king with my head.

Sara reached into her bag, fished out a tissue, and wiped off her hand while it was still inside her purse, giving me a goofy grin and hiding the evidence from our cabbie. And then she leaned forward, and kissed me so sweetly it made me want to throw her down on the car seat and make her come against my tongue just to hear her little hoarse cries.

“Feeling better?” she asked quietly, eyes searching.

I learned something else about Sara in that expression: her first instinct—and the one she continually battled—was to please me.

But then we pulled up a block away from my apartment and she sat back, smiling pleasantly. “Is this where you’re getting out?”

I hesitated, wondering if she’d want to come with me. “I suppose, unless you’d like—”

Her voice was quiet, which I realized was her attempt at easing the harshness of her words: “I’ll see you Friday, Max.”

We were done. I was excused.

Nine

“Are we going to talk about it today?”

I turned from where I stood on the ladder and looked at Chloe. She held a paintbrush at her hip, and leveled her stare at me.

“About . . . ?”

She narrowed her eyes. “About the breakup. About your sudden move. About Andy and this mystery man you’re now f**king, and about how different your life is now from how it was only two months ago?”

I plastered a smile on my face. “Oh, that? What’s there to say?”

She laughed, but then wiped a delicate wrist across her forehead, leaving a faint smudge of paint. Bennett was out of town on business and Chloe was determined to get the entire interior of their massive apartment painted while he was unable to micromanage the operation. She looked exhausted.

“Why didn’t you just hire someone to do all of this?” I asked, looking around. “Lord knows you can afford it.”

“Because I’m a control freak,” she said. “And stop trying to change the subject. Look, I know how that relationship slowly dragged you down, but I feel weird that I don’t know more about the real him. Bennett knew Andy through city events, but I never knew him that well, and—”

“Because,” I said, interrupting her, “you would have seen right through him. Just like Bennett did.” The familiar pang ricocheted through my stomach at the mere thought of Andy.

Chloe started to say something but I held up my hand.

“Come on. I know Bennett was wary of Andy from day one, even if he didn’t think it was his place to interfere. And I think by the time I met you, even I suspected Andy was cheating. I didn’t want him to be around you, where you’d be able to see what I’d sunk to so blatantly.”

Her eyes turned down at the corners, and I realized before she even said it what she was going to say. “Sweetie, I didn’t need to know him personally to know he was a cheating dirtbag. No one did. The only thing that helped him look decent was you.”

I swallowed a few times, willing the tears back. “Do you think it says something about me, like I’m stupid or blind to have spent so many years with him?”

I thought back to our first anniversary dinner at Everest, and how he arrived a half hour late and smelled strongly of perfume. Such a cliché. When I’d asked him if he’d been with someone else he’d said, “Baby, when I’m not with you, I’m always with someone else. It’s just how my life is. But I’m here now.”

I’d assumed he meant he was always working when he was away from me. But in truth, it was probably the only time he’d been honest with me about other women.

“No,” Chloe said, shaking her head. “You were young; he must have seemed unreal to you when you met. He’s charming as hell, Sara, that was for sure. But it’s not healthy to change everything so fast and not talk about it. Are you really okay?”