Not That Kind of Guy Page 12

  “I’m sorry.” Her mother’s voice was thin, less than the authoritative tone she usually used. “I’m trying to be better now, but I can’t change the past.

  “Do you remember how I used to make breakfast for the boys with you?” her mother asked. “I hated getting up early.”

  “I loved spending that time with you.”

  “We could have spent more time together, but I was always so busy trying to be the perfect mother—the perfect wife—I didn’t have time or energy to really connect with anyone. Not myself. Not your father. None of you.” Her mother took a deep breath. “I was a shitty mother, and I wish I could go back in time and take it all back . . . Actually, no. I don’t want to take back who I am. I just wish I could have done it without hurting you.”

  “So, you wish you’d never had kids.” Bridget wasn’t ready to give up her ire. Sean’s temper in her belly wasn’t about to let her back down. “Is that it?”

  “Is that why you didn’t want to have a baby with Chris?”

  Bridget didn’t have to answer to anyone about this, and she was really done talking about it. It happened, and it needed to happen. The whole truth was that she didn’t know if she had it in her to be a mother or if she’d run off at the first opportunity. And Chris Dooley wasn’t nearly the man that Sean Nolan was. Their kid would have been screwed. “Imagine Chris Dooley with an infant, getting up for midnight feedings and diaper changes.”

  Her mother shook her head. “I can’t.”

  Her mother acknowledging that she’d probably made the right decision somehow dissipated the anger that had kept her going through the conversation. “I couldn’t, either.”

  They played in silence for a few moments, but her mother wasn’t going to let the whole thing pass in peace. “I like Matt.”

  “So what?” Bridget shrugged. “I like him, too. But I don’t know him well enough to marry him.”

  “Maybe you don’t know him well enough to know that you don’t want to be married to him.” Her mother narrowed her gaze at her. “And maybe if you tried, you’d see that it’s not as easy as you seem to think it is.”

  “Oh, come on.” She winced because she’d just lost another twenty dollars. “I’m not like you. I don’t run off when things get tough.”

  “I’m not saying that, Bridget.” Her mother held up her hands in surrender. “I’m just speaking from experience. Marriage is hard. You should give it a try before you accuse me of ruining your life by saving mine.”

  “You’ve always been so melodramatic.” Bridget probably sounded sarcastic, but it was the truth. Her parents actually seemed to be happy together. Her dad seemed to like the melodrama now. And that was something she’d never seen growing up. That was the only reason that Bridget was even still trying a little bit with her mother—she seemed to make her father happy.

  And making sure she wasn’t a source of pain for her father wasn’t something Bridget took lightly. It was the motivation behind her perfect test scores and perfect grades, the reason she hadn’t gotten into trouble with boys until she was a full-grown adult, willing to take on the consequences. Because when Molly had left him, her father had been a broken man.

  But he hadn’t complained about the fact that he was a single parent to two feral boys and one moody preteen. He just did the job. And Bridget wanted to be like her father. She was. Take the pain; do the job. Rely on dark humor and hard work to get through.

  “He’s too young to be married. And he’s, like, American royalty.” She knew she was just making excuses for why it couldn’t work. Deep down, she thought her mother was probably right. She’d sworn off long-term relationships after breaking up with Chris for precisely that reason—she wasn’t cut out for it. But now, hearing her mother say it out loud made her want to make things work with Matt, just to prove a point.

  “Oh, I know,” her mother said. “His parents donated from their personal collection to replace the items that the Chapins had seized.”

  Bridget smirked. After Jack had broken a political corruption story last year, Senator Alexander Chapin had had his art collection, much of which was on loan to the Museum of Contemporary Art, seized. Her mother’s consternation about that amused Bridget. It wasn’t mature, but it was true.

  “You want me to stay married to him to give you access,” Bridget said.

  Molly rolled her eyes and shook her head. “I want you to be happy, and he looks at you as though he wants to make you happy.”

  “Bullshit.” Bridget pushed away from the table. “You want to prove a point and see me fail at this.”

  Her mother sighed. “You’re just as stubborn as he is.”

  “I’d much rather be like Sean Nolan than like you.”

  She stood up and walked away, leaving her mother to lose money alone.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE SOUND OF HIS ringtone wasn’t more ominous than usual before he picked it up. He didn’t know that shit was going to hit the fan, that something that should have been a story he told at cocktail parties when he really felt like scandalizing people was going to turn into a real issue that would fuck with his life.

  He had three missed calls from Naomi, but the name on the display had him wishing it was her again.

  “Matt,” his father said on a sigh. His dad wasn’t a big phone talker. He was busy, and text was easier to ignore.

  “You got married?” Oh shit. His mom was on the phone, too? He took a beat, trying to come up with a way to respond that wouldn’t give anyone an immediate heart attack. His mother took that opportunity to wind up the level of the conversation. “There are pictures online. You look drunk. Were you drunk?”

  “First, how are there pictures?” Not that he would have been able to clock and avoid paparazzi, but they usually ignored his family. It wasn’t like they were the Kardashians. Old money didn’t have to court publicity like that. In fact, it was very much frowned upon. “Were you having me followed?”

  “No. Some model you dated at some point was at the same club, and she was being followed.” That was news to him. His mother sighed. “Your credit card also showed a charge at a wedding chapel.”

  “When you took the plane, we were a little worried,” his father explained, as though monitoring his credit card charges was just a totally cool thing to do.

  “You never take the plane,” his mother added.

  It was true that he was reticent to take advantage of his family’s wealth. He hadn’t done anything to earn it, and it made him look like an asshole. And it gave his parents the idea that they had sway over what he did with his life. “Trust me, I’m never taking the plane again. I can promise you that.”

  “But you got married to some redheaded floozy?”

  “Mom, no one calls anyone a floozy, and Bridget is not a floozy.”

  “I’m assuming you didn’t have a prenup drawn up while you were doing shots.” His father was always straight to the point.

  “You would guess right.”

  “That means that she can try to get half of your trust fund if you get divorced,” his mother said, sounding concerned. He could hear her mind turning over the phone. Could almost see her chewing her thumbnail—something she only did when she was deeply stressed.

  “Bridget would never—”

  His mother cut him off. “You don’t really know her, do you?”

  “I know enough.”

  “Our lawyer has already drawn up annulment papers.” Of course one of his father’s buddies—one of the ones who probably wanted Matt to come work for them until he let himself get pulled into one of the family businesses—had already drawn up papers to get this little mistake behind him. “We’re sending them over right now. All you have to do is sign them. Both of you.”

  “What makes you think that I want to get the marriage annulled?” He tried to let his parents’ gas
ps of horror roll right over him. He didn’t really want to stay married, but it was actually kind of delicious to ruffle his normally unflappable parents. To take a stand that they wouldn’t be able to protect him from.

  He liked his parents, respected them. But he didn’t want to be them. They were woven into an establishment that he wasn’t sure he believed in anymore. They saw things for him that he couldn’t quite envision for himself. Wasn’t sure he wanted to.

  His parents would hate the fact that he was married to someone like Bridget—who didn’t come from the right kind of family, hadn’t gone to the right kind of schools, wouldn’t do anything to enhance the family fortune.

  They would sign the papers as soon as Bridget got back to the room. They weren’t going to stay married. That would be nuts. His parents were right—they did barely know anything about each other. But he liked the idea of his parents freaking out for a few days. They could spy on him and demand he be accountable to them for all his choices, but he could make them suffer a little bit.

  It wasn’t mature or particularly kind, but he was in the mood to be a little bit of a shit.

  Instead of telling them to shove it, he said, “We’ll talk about this when I get back to Chicago.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  LATER, BRIDGET WOULD BLAME the long ride up on the elevator for what happened when she walked into the hotel room and saw Matt with the top two buttons of his crisp, white shirt undone, and his hair mussed from running his hands through it.

  If they’d been on a lower floor, she wouldn’t have had the time to think about how Chris had insinuated that she was a coldhearted bitch, unsuited for relationships, which was really annoying because he was essentially just agreeing with the mean, shitty things she thought about herself.

  And then she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother, who wanted her to try things out with Matt because it would be good for the museum.

  Both of those inputs—from people she wouldn’t and couldn’t trust—must have gummed up the gears in her brain pretty well.

  That was the only explanation for what happened when the doors of the elevator to the penthouse opened up.

  Later, she would tell herself that she’d gone temporarily insane—a defense that almost never worked in front of a jury, the elements of that affirmative defense were nigh on impossible to meet—when she grabbed her former intern and now husband by the placket of his shirt and pulled his mouth to hers before he even got out a word.

  Nothing but a shocked sound and a groan before he pulled her by the hips flush with his body and set her on fire with his lips and tongue. And then she let go of his shirt and ran her fingers through his hair, scraping his scalp and the nape of his neck with her short fingernails. The sound he made into her mouth turning everything below her waist to Jell-O.

  She didn’t know if she was wife material, but she wasn’t cold. Not with Matt.

  And, like the unicorn that he was, he just rolled with it—grabbed her ass, picked her up, and lowered her to the floor as though he was a professional at seductions in a foyer.

  For all she knew, he was. Maybe this was how one seduced multiple models in a weekend—unlimited funds and saving time by screwing on the floor at the entrance to a hotel room. But Bridget didn’t want to think about other women right now. She wanted to think about Matt’s sculpted body under the shirt he still wore. She wanted to think about his strong arms and the way his forearms flexed as he pulled off her shirt and levered her body up so he could divest her of her bra.

  “What are we doing?” he asked. If she stopped long enough to think about what they were doing, this would all stop. And she didn’t want it to stop. And she didn’t have a good answer for him anyway.

  “I just think we should stick with the original plan and have our weekend fling. But with the added bonus of it being blessed in the eyes of God and Elvis.”

  He leaned down so his mouth was really close to hers. He grunted in apparent surprise when she took his bottom lip between her teeth for a brief moment before wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him.

  And he dove in again and kissed her in a way that made it completely impossible to think or do anything but feel.

  Apparently, her God-and-Elvis argument was a winner. Or maybe it just gave her the excuse.

  This was good. At least if they had sex with each other, they would have a fond memory to look back on rather than a stupid mistake. That was the last logical thought she had before he pulled her head back by her hair and licked her neck. His hands found her ass and he rolled them over so that his back was against the marble floor.

  She wanted all of his skin against hers. She wanted him to count every freckle on her body with his tongue. She wanted to taste every last inch of him and make him lose control and turn her inside out.

  Instead, he stopped her. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “I think we’re both sure, Matt.” She rolled her hips against his groin. “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve been sure for a while, Muffin.”

  She smiled and said, “Don’t call me that,” before kissing him again. This time, he took her face between his hands and controlled the kiss. She knew he was methodical, but at work he was also fast. This wasn’t a fast kiss. It was extremely slow and thorough and made all of the tension melt out of her body. She loved every second of it.

  Without warning, he put his hands behind her thighs and stood up from the floor with her in his arms. Aside from the one time that Chris had to fireman carry her several city blocks after the St. Patrick’s Day parade, she’d never been picked up by a dude.

  She didn’t like that she liked it, but she was going to set it aside. They were alone in this hotel room, and no one had to know that she liked a little bit of consensual caveman shit. He carried her back to his bedroom and tossed her on the bed.

  He looked down at her with a grin on his face and an expression that said he very much liked what he saw. Then he did that thing where he grabbed the back of his mostly unbuttoned shirt and dragged it off over his head.

  She hadn’t taken time to really look at him before getting sick in his bathroom that morning, and he was a revelation. All smooth skin and abs—he was perfect. The little shit knew it, too, because he just stood there letting her inspect him.

  “Are you just going to stand there looking like that?” she said in her most accusatory tone.

  “You seem to like what you see.” God, she loved his cocky smirk. She wanted to poke at him just to see more of it, but there was a different kind of poking that she also had an immediate interest in.

  To that end, she shimmied out of her pants and pulled off her panties. That wiped any bit of a smirk off of his face. He looked at her with something that approached wonder. It was a heady thing, especially since she’d grown accustomed to being looked at as though she was a piece of the furniture.

  He dropped his pants and crawled over her on the bed before she could properly admire his thighs. But while he trailed kisses over her neck and other bits of skin that his mouth wanted to explore, she got to touch him all over.

  He smiled up at her. “I feel like I’m living out a very-hot-for-teacher fantasy right now.”

  “You need to shut up and keep kissing if you don’t want all this to stop and for all of my clothes to go back on.”

  “Of course, Muffin.”

  She shook her head and kissed him again, urging him to put more of his weight on her. And then she sighed in relief when he did. She didn’t know she could feel so much lust and get so much comfort at the same time. It might be dangerous to feel too much for her soon-to-be ex-husband, but she couldn’t stop herself from wanting more and more of him in the moment.

  Eventually, she wanted his underwear gone, too. He must have sensed her getting anxious because he paused. “What do you want?”

  Everything. For this to b
e the actual start of something and not the end of it. “I want you to fuck me, Matt. And here I thought you were a genius.”

  “As you wish, Buttercup.”

  “That’s not any better, Matt.”

  Matt’s hands shook as he pulled a condom out of his pants pocket and rolled it on, betraying his nervousness. It made it all the more endearing that he was nervous about this, too. He must have brought them out of hope that this would happen. Maybe not the wedding, but definitely this.

  That word “wife” rang out in her head right before he was inside her. In the dim room, his dark eyes were glossy and shining at her like a beacon. She didn’t want this to be the last time as well as the first time.

  It felt right in a way that she didn’t want to examine too much at the moment.

  She pushed those thoughts away when he finally sank down inside her. She wrapped her legs around his hips and her arms around his neck.

  “More.” Now that they were doing this after what felt like an eon of waiting, she wanted more.

  “Always demanding,” he said.

  “You love it.”

  He laughed but didn’t respond. Which she totally understood. Right then, all she could do was feel him inside her, revel in being wrapped in the smell of his freshly showered skin, penthouse-fine sheets scrubbing against her back as they moved together. She felt like she was floating and falling all at once. She felt like she wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t allow herself to do that.

  “I need you to get there.”

  She snaked her hand between them to touch herself, and he moved in and out of her. After that, they didn’t need words. They just moved together for what could have been seconds or minutes or hours.

  When she came around him, her teeth digging into the tendon between his shoulder and neck, he moaned and let himself come. After it was over and they lay together like a sweaty mess, she knew that she was changed.