He grinned down at her. “What about Dustin Ramsey?”
“He can wait a few more hours.” She grabbed a fistful of Ryan’s shirt. “Did I ever tell you that the smell of toothpaste gets me hot?”
1
Dear Erica,
My boyfriend loves it when I give him oral sex, but he’s stingy about returning the favor. Should I keep him or dump him?
Sincerely, Sugarlips
ERICA DRUMMED her fingers on the edge of the keyboard while she contemplated her answer. Then her clock chimed the half hour, reminding her that Dustin Ramsey would show up in thirty minutes, and her stomach began to churn.
She needed to make use of this time before he arrived. Her newsletter was due at the printers by noon tomorrow. If she’d had any backbone whatsoever, she’d have told Dustin this wasn’t a good time for him to make the trip from Midland. The first of next week would have been better.
But no, she’d been too dumbstruck by the call, too eager to see him after all this time. Too awed by the great Dustin Ramsey, just as she had been at eighteen. Now she was so nervous about the meeting that she couldn’t concentrate on her work. Her New Age mother would tell her to “live in the moment” and stop obsessing, but Erica hadn’t perfected that yet.
With a sigh, she rolled her chair away from the battered desk. Then she stood and wandered around her small living room, adjusting the cushions on her flea-market rattan furniture. She also should have suggested meeting him at some neutral location instead of going along with his too-intimate suggestion of coming to her apartment. She couldn’t imagine that soon he’d be standing on her sisal rug. Once she’d left Midland ten years ago, she’d never expected to see him again.
Never wanted to see him again, either. In her view, if you had embarrassingly bad sex with a guy there were only two options—hang in there and try to get it right, or avoid each other forever. She would have voted for Option A if she’d had an ounce of sexual confidence. Instead she’d allowed Dustin to dictate what happened next, and he’d chosen Option B. She could hardly blame him. Virginal and fumbling, she’d been more of a liability than an asset in the back seat of his Mustang on that warm April night.
Years later she’d realized that a more experienced woman could have changed the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am into a night of ecstasy for both of them. She could have taken charge of the situation by teasing him, petting him, suggesting varied positions, moving the action outside, even performing a striptease. Instead she’d simply spread her thighs. No doubt a savvy guy like Dustin had been bored, so bored that by now he’d forgotten the whole incident. Unfortunately, she believed him when he said he’d looked her up to discuss a business proposition, something to do with her newsletter for singles.
She could have told him that she’d started Dateline: Dallas on a dare and that she planned to abandon it the minute she landed a juicy hard-news slot on a major daily. But then he might have changed his mind about discussing this business proposition, and she couldn’t resist the possibility of spending a little time with Dustin. She’d never been able to resist that prospect.
Ten years, and she hadn’t progressed an inch when it came to that guy. Damn it. She forced herself to return to the computer. Sugarlips was the only one who could save her.
When she eventually gave up the newsletter, she’d miss writing replies to the letters column. She’d miss the free food from the restaurants she reviewed, the complimentary movie tickets, and the free drinks handed out by West End nightclubs hoping for a mention. She’d had fun this year making lemonade out of her inability to land the job she really wanted, but she had to agree with her parents that Dateline: Dallas was on the superficial side and a waste of trees.
As she typed, she smiled at the writer’s self-description.
Dear Sugarlips,
Your guy is loafing on the lead, girlfriend! You might try enticing him with flavored oils, but my gut feeling is that you’re dealing with a sexually selfish dude. I’d give him one more chance, but only one. If he fails that test, it’s Dumpsville, baby. Good luck.
Erica
Saving both letter and reply to a new file, she moved on to the next letter.
Dear Erica,
My boyfriend has no staying power, and I’m left unsatisfied. He says I should be able to come sooner, and I say he should be able to last longer. Who’s right?
Sincerely, Frustrated Franny
Erica began typing with more enthusiasm. On this particular subject, she was a certified expert.
DUSTIN RAMSEY STOOD outside a three-story brick apartment complex on McKinney Avenue, the results of Jennifer Madison’s investigation tucked into his briefcase. The sweat trickling down his backbone had little to do with the August heat and a lot to do with anxiety. Because of the ninety-five-degree temperature he’d left off the tie, but a business deal required a jacket as a bare minimum, and he’d also worn his best snakeskin boots.
He might feel like a fraud on the inside, but on the outside he would look like the professional businessman he should be, given his heritage. People in Dallas paid attention to clothes. He’d left Midland at dawn, and the knot of tension in his gut had tightened with every mile.
No doubt about it, he was in deep shit. If he’d asked to be involved in the family business instead of screwing around on the amateur auto racing circuit, he’d have known that his dad was flushing the family fortune down the toilet. It was a common story in West Texas—oil barons unable to compete with the cheap crude coming out of the Middle East.
As if that wasn’t disaster enough, Clayton Ramsey had used precious money to buy two weekly newspapers, one in San Antonio and one in Houston. Apparently Dustin’s father had always longed to be a newspaperman. Dustin had been oblivious to everything until eight months ago, when a stroke had left his father unable to talk.
Thrust into power, Dustin had considered auctioning the land to developers, selling both newspapers, setting his parents up in a town home and calling it good. But the tears in his mother’s eyes and the hopeless droop of his father’s shoulders changed his mind. He’d use the land as collateral to rebuild Ramsey Enterprises and hang on to his father’s newspapers. Somehow.
The notice for his ten-year high-school reunion had come about that time, which had started him thinking about Erica. He’d goofed off in every class, barely passing, until the semester he took chemistry and ended up as Erica’s lab partner. She’d challenged him to do better, and by God, he had. It was his lone A in a crowd of C’s.
He must have had some dumb idea that his performance in that chemistry class would transfer to his seduction of Erica in the back of the Mustang. She’d been blond, leggy, slightly drunk and unbelievable sensuous. He’d been…a virgin. A bumbling, eager, too-quick-to-come virgin. While all his jock buddies had managed to get laid in some form or fashion by the time they were juniors, Dustin hadn’t.
Naturally he’d let everyone assume otherwise, shy about revealing the romantic streak that had made him want to wait until the moment felt exactly right. That moment hadn’t arrived until April of his senior year during a keg party at Jeremy’s house. Jeremy threw a party every time his parents left town, and usually the guests were limited to football players and cheerleaders.
But in honor of his senior year, Jeremy had invited the whole damn school, including brainiacs like Erica. A couple hours into the party, Dustin had come up with the brilliant idea of asking her to take a drive into the country, and they’d ended up in the back seat together.
He still winced every time he thought about his abysmal performance that night. What a total disappointment he must have been for a knowledgeable girl like Erica. What a deep disappointment he’d been to himself. To think that the homecoming king, star running back and most eligible bachelor in school was a lousy lover.