Snapdragon (Love Conquers None Book 1) Read online

  She watched him attentively, wondering whether he would make the connection to Frank Christensen like so many others did, whether he would ask about her father, about what it was like to be a controversial senator’s daughter.

  “Are you a friend of the bride or the groom?” he inquired instead.

  “Benji and I went to boarding school together. I’ve known him since the sixth grade.”

  Recognition dawned on Michael’s face, and he stopped walking to turn toward her.

  “Wait, was there another Darby in your class, or are you the Darby?”

  His question was a formality—Darby wasn’t a common name.

  “I’m guessing I’m the Darby.”

  Michael took a sip of champagne, the narrow flute doing little to hide his knowing smile.

  “I take it Ben’s mentioned me before?” she asked.

  “Once or twice.” He said it in a way that guaranteed he was understating the truth. “All good things.”

  Darby shook her head.

  “Uh-uh. You gotta give me more than that.”

  His smile hadn’t disappeared, only softened.

  “I was his roommate all four years at Tufts.”

  “Wait, you’re Mickey Blue Eyes?”

  Memories flooded back to her as he let out a short laugh.

  “I forgot anyone ever called me that.”

  Darby wasn’t about to let him off the hook so easily. “He always talked about how women fell all over you. I remember stories about girls leaving their underwear on your door and getting into catfights over you.”

  “That’s an exaggeration.” But his protest sounded weak.

  “Girls breaking into your room to wait for you, naked, in bed was an exaggeration?”

  He cast his shaking head down, smiling a bit at that.

  “That only happened twice.”

  She laughed openly.

  “Some of them were Ben’s admirers,” Michael insisted charitably.

  “Uh-huh.” Darby found his modesty endearing.

  “I always thought he sounded a little jealous of you…” she mused aloud. And now I can see why, she thought to herself.

  “I don’t know about that.” Michael said, still being quite modest. “Besides, he was too busy pining over you to be jealous of me. You have to know it took him a long time to get over you. Like, years.”

  Darby’s respondent smile was bittersweet.

  “He was my first love,” she admitted, “the first boy I ever kissed, the first boy I ever…”

  Michael smiled kindly. By then they’d reached the water’s edge. He freed one hand to place it on the small of her back, and guided her to the left, his small gesture saving her from having to say any more. He walked them along the shoreline, all the way down the beach. The moon shone brightly above them.

  “My first time was with a professor…” he volunteered, perhaps compelled to disclose something personal about himself. “It was junior year of college—”

  “But I thought—”

  “That’s exactly what I wanted them to think. I put on a good show of confidence back then, but I was actually pretty shy.”

  “So who was the professor?”

  “She taught French Lit. Her name was Genevieve, but I called her Gigi.”

  She liked the wistfulness she heard in his voice as he recounted the tale.

  “She asked me to be her TA the semester after I’d taken her class. We were grading midterms one holiday weekend—at her house, of course. The campus buildings were closed, and we had thirty term papers spread out all over her dining room table. We were debating the significance of one of the final lines of Candide, which roughly translates to ‘we must cultivate our own garden’—”

  “Il faut cultiver notre jardin,” Darby translated. Her well-honed accent earned her a smile.

  “The debate got heated—in a good way—and the next thing I knew, I was spread out all over her dining room table.”

  “Sounds hot.” She shifted her gaze to him.

  The moon was bright enough to see his face clearly, and his eyes masked nothing.

  “It was.”

  “So how long did it last?”

  He looked out at the water for a second before swinging his gaze back to her. When he stopped walking, she did the same.

  “Long enough for her to give me the education every inexperienced teenage boy wants from a very experienced woman.”

  DARBY AND MICHAEL SETTLED INTO a secluded cabana nestled in a grove of palm trees set far back from the water. From where they reclined, angled toward one-another on terry-topped cushions, they had a view of the moonlit water and clear night skies. Conversation was easy, as if they’d known each other for years instead of merely knowing about each other for years.

  As they meandered from topic to topic, the things that Ben had told her about him came back to mind. Michael had rowed crew. He was a math prodigy. He had received some sort of important service award from The White House. As he opened up about his life, the things he said corroborated her resurfacing memories. Talking about their lives in Chicago also revealed new things. He was deeply involved in charitable work and tried to attend as many of the city’s summer food and music festivals as he could.

  He also ran along the same stretch of Lake Shore Drive that she did when the weather was nice. Darby could envision the run along the lakefront path clearly. She imagined his exact running wardrobe, right down to the Asics sneakers on his feet to the pristine white ear buds attached to his phone. She became somewhat distracted thinking about what he would look like wearing nothing but his Under Armour, his torso twisting to and fro as his leg muscles worked to propel him forward, his upper body bare and his shirt tucked into his shorts, revealing a sheen of sweat.

  “So, no girlfriend, huh?”

  He shook his head. “No girlfriend, no wife, no ex-wife. No boyfriend.”

  Given her current aversion to dating, it shouldn’t have mattered to her whether Michael had a girlfriend. But Darby felt relieved. She didn’t like to keep dubious company. And just because he wasn’t wearing a ring didn’t mean he was available.

  “The seventy-hour work week’s pretty much killed my chance at a normal love life,” he admitted a moment later.

  “Amen to that.” His words rang so true that she could have been the one saying them. She shot him an empathetic look. “So what do you do…for company?”

  It was the first time she saw him hesitate. She lifted her hands in a peaceful gesture. “I don’t mean to pry. Really, I’m asking because I could use some advice myself.”

  “Me counseling you would be like the blind leading the blind. You could probably give me some pointers.”

  She nearly snorted. “Don’t take advice from me. I’m days away from paying for it.”

  “And here I thought you were a nice girl,” he kidded.

  “Come on, Michael, we both know nice girls finish last.”

  He cocked his head to the left and narrowed his eyes in disbelief.

  “You mean to tell me the good doctor doesn’t get what she wants? Somehow I find that hard to believe.”

  “I can assure you, the woman-of-fortune-and–fame fantasy is much sexier than the reality.”

  “So’s the one about the most eligible bachelor.”

  “Touché.” She reached to smooth her hair, which the quickening breeze had blown across her face. “So what do you want that you can’t have?”

  “Companionship.” He said it simply, as if it the answer was quite obvious.

  Something in the way he said it made her quell her temptation to dismiss the sentiment, however improbable it sounded.

  “I’ll bet you could find that if you wanted it. You recruited me easily enough.”

  “You want the truth?”

  “I always want the truth.”

  Trepidation crossed his face. He took a breath before he spoke again.

  “The truth is, I like you. I think you’re the kind of girl I’d like to h
ave dinner with and take to social functions. I think we’d have more good conversation, some fun times, and sizzling hot sex.”

  He paused long enough to measure her reaction. In the dark, he wouldn’t have been able to see the goosebumps that prickled her flesh.

  “But I don’t need to start something with you to know how it’ll end. Experience has taught me that women are biologically incapable of having unattached relationships. Since I’m too busy for the kind of commitment they want, I go without. I’d rather do that than lead them on.”

  Darby let out a measured breath. “Wow, that was…” presumptuous, she wanted to say. Though he delivered them gently, his words still cut.

  “I know my share of women who are obsessed with getting a man to commit,” she returned in the same tone. “And I respect you for not being the guy that leads that kind of woman on.”

  “But?” he smiled, sensing an unfavorable reaction.

  “But your broad categorization of women is short-sighted.” And borderline sexist. She bit her tongue again.

  “If you think there aren’t plenty of single women who want to stay that way, you are mistaken. My parents’ marriage was a disaster, and the idea of emulating that repulses me. Despite all you’ve heard about biological clocks and maternal instincts, not all women have them. I have a career I love that has me working just as many hours as you do, probably more. The last thing I need is to come home after a hard day to somebody who is biologically incapable of not needing his ego stroked.”

  She didn’t let on how much she was enjoying watching the widening of his eyes, the subtle slacking of his jaw. “And because I can’t find a man who wants nothing more than to give me four toe curling orgasms twice a week and then get the hell out of my house…”

  She saw the bob of his Adam’s apple and was dying to know what other reactions she may have caused.

  “Do you honestly expect me to believe that you can’t find a guy who only wants to have sex with you? Because I don’t believe that.”

  His voice was so low that it wiped out any doubt that the attraction was mutual.

  “I expect you to believe girls like me have only two options: one-night stands and Romeos. I don’t do one-night stands because the world is full of psychopaths who like doing bad things to pretty girls. And I stay away from Romeos because I find it insulting to watch someone go through the pomp and circumstance of ”dating” me because he thinks that’s what it’ll take for me to sleep with him.”

  By the time she finished, she noted a change in his expression and she wondered whether her words had triggered something. Men could be fragile, especially the better looking ones.

  “So, paint me a picture of someone who’s different.”

  Her body hummed with the awareness of how quickly their conversation was leaving the realm of the hypothetical. The ocean breeze was light but the air between them was heavy.

  “How would that someone come into your life?” he implored.

  “It’s complicated.”

  And it was. For Darby, there could be no innocent flirtations, no absent minded affairs, no tawdry trysts. Her father was a public figure, and she had her own respectable career to protect. She wasn’t like every other woman her age who could take to Tinder every time she wanted a good time.

  “I like complex things.”

  His breath near her ear made her tingle, and she had to concentrate to calm her voice lest it betray her emotions.

  “He couldn’t be a complete stranger. I’d have to meet him someplace safe and know that I could trust him.” Saying it felt strange. As if she were creating a different persona. As if she were pretending some alternative could exist. “And there’d have to be a real attraction,” she added.

  “What else?”

  “He’d respect me enough to be honest about our arrangement and respect himself enough to be mature, conscientious, and discreet about the whole thing.” She took a shaky breath. “And I, uh…wasn’t kidding about the orgasms, either. They need to be toe-curling and there’d need to be at least four, every time we…”

  He closed his eyes for a moment too long for it to be a blink. Darby wondered what he was imagining.

  “What about you?” she said finally. “If you could find a woman who was different, how would things be?”

  He took his time to answer, his eyes focused toward the water. Before he did, he turned back to her with a look of halting intensity. She sensed that he wanted to be completely honest though his deep blue eyes reserved an ocean of secrets. It only made him more intriguing. As a psychiatrist it was her job to read people, but she couldn’t read him fully.

  “I want a woman who doesn’t confuse me loving her company with me being in love with her. She has to know that whatever we have today may not be there tomorrow, not because I’m heartless or distant or incapable of intimacy—but because right now, I choose my career, and my love isn’t in play—only my companionship.”

  “I need a woman who’s prepared for the fact that what we share won’t feel transactional. It will feel intimate and intense, because I only spend time with women I genuinely like and because I take pride in doing things well. She needs to know that me showing her respect and treating her like a lady and making her feel worshipped has nothing to do with her being more special to me than a good friend and everything to do with my idea of how a woman deserves to be treated.”

  He put down his empty champagne flute, placing it absently on the cushion next to him so that he could turn his body toward her.

  “She’d have to understand that it’s never more than meets the eye—and that each of us is responsible to the other to break things off the second things get too complicated. And she has to be prepared for what’s inevitable. Because the end will come, Darby. Even if it doesn’t get complicated, I’ll make partner one day, or get transferred halfway around the world, or maybe even go to work for another firm. And my job comes first. It just…does.”

  She gazed over at him, her face mostly neutral as she listened without judgment. She could never help vacillating between regular-girl Darby and Dr. Darby, clinically-trained psychiatrist, de-constructor of everyone’s problems. That line, no matter how often she tried to draw it, was made of disappearing ink.

  “I think I understand.”

  He still looked cautious.

  “You’re honest with the women you date, but they don’t act on what you say—they act on how you make them feel. You said that being with you feels intimate and intense. A woman who believes that a man has intense feelings for her has been programmed to believe that he’ll initially resist commitment but that commitment is inevitable if the feelings are real. For them, the feelings and the commitment are mutually exclusive. But for you…”

  “They’re not.”

  “Which makes you the love ‘em and leave ’em jerk who breaks their heart.”

  “Pretty much,” he let out a humorless laugh.

  She looked out at the ocean pensively but sensed him looking at her. It was another minute before she spoke.

  “There was this guy, Dave,” she began, still looking out toward the horizon. “We hung out one summer when I was interning in Manhattan. He was a real party guy—could get you into the VIP room at any club, or into the hottest parties in the Hamptons, could get you any drug. He was like the king of New York, and he made me feel like the queen.”

  “It started to feel like a relationship. He took me everywhere with him, showed me off to his friends…I even spent a bunch of time at his parents’ place. They had this great house in Bergen County, and whenever he’d throw parties there, I’d crash. His mom even served me bagels for breakfast every morning. I took it as my cue to consider something serious.”

  “Were you in love with him?” Michael asked. She shook her head.

  “He was a lot of fun. And the sex was good…like, really good,” she said candidly. “I knew dating him for real would have been a disaster. But I still pursued him. It didn’t matter that I
was smart and independent and didn’t subscribe to all the gender role bullshit—not consciously at least. I hated myself for chasing a guy I didn’t even really want, but that backwards idea that getting a guy to commit is the ultimate goal was just too ingrained.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I ruined it. By trying to turn it into something it wasn’t. I ruined something really good.”

  “So you’re not that kind of girl anymore?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I kind of hate that girl now,” she admitted. “That ‘first comes love, then comes marriage mentality’ is toxic. The best relationships define themselves.”

  Michael was quick to echo her thoughts.

  “You can’t have it all. That’s the biggest lie we tell ourselves. We act like it’s achievable to have a great career, a happy family, and to find a soul mate who fulfills your every need. But that’s the exception, not the rule. I can’t be a dedicated architect, a doting partner, a loving father, a great brother, and a great uncle…so I’ve decided what I want, and what I can be good at, and I’ll let the other chips fall where they may.”

  They held hands all the way back up the beach, feet sinking into the sand as the foamy surf lapped at their ankles. Words seemed unnecessary—perhaps enough had been said that night—but she was still disappointed to see the evening come to an end. The look he had given her when he had taken her hand hadn’t been gentlemanly. His small touches and glances were magnetic, and she thought about what it would be like to see him again.

  When they separated at the steps to brush off sandy feet and put their shoes back on, Darby almost spoke, convinced she should say something before she lost her nerve. Instead, his arm came around her shoulders, the other sweeping her up behind her knees. She drew a breath as she felt him start to carry her up the steps.

  “You didn’t think I was going to let you walk up a hundred steps in four-inch heels, did you?”

  She felt the words vibrate as they formed in his chest, felt the solidity of his body beneath her. With her nose so close to his neck she could smell his skin, could easily inhale more of him. His fragrance was as complex as everything else about him. She wrapped her own arms around him, and leaned her head against his shoulder. Strong arms hadn’t held her in a very long time.