Jenna’s attention skimmed across the bar to where Gage sat with his friends. Zack was leaning on the round tabletop, wearing a deep scowl and sending the occasional scathing glance in Grace’s direction.
Ronnie’s boyfriend, Dylan, looked much more pleasant, sipping his beer and staring openly at the woman he loved. His gaze wasn’t exactly scorching, but there was a definite heat there, and Jenna thought he was probably calculating how much longer he had to hang out with the guys and let Ronnie hang out with her girlfriends before he could pluck her out of the booth and drag her home for a long and thorough ravishment.
Truth be known, Jenna was thinking something along those lines herself. Gage’s confession that he hadn’t been with any other women since their divorce-and certainly not before, thank goodness-played through her mind. Even when he’d been free, even when he would have been well within his rights to date and sleep with other women, he hadn’t.
Her heart gave a little flip at that, and at the knowledge that he was probably one of the most trustworthy men on the planet.
Gage chose that moment to look up, and their eyes met. She expected him to smile, maybe wink, but instead his expression remained stoically blank.
So much for trying to figure out how soon she could make her excuses and drag him home for some good old-fashioned slap-and-tickle.
Turning back to her drink, she used the tiny swizzle straw leaning against the side of the slanted glass to toy with the yellow liquid.
“Okay, you are entirely too quiet tonight,” Grace remarked.
Jenna raised her head and gave her friends a crooked smile.
“Sorry, I was just…”-feeling guilty-“thinking.”
Grace stole a glance over her shoulder. “About Gage the Wonder Stud?”
Heat flared into Jenna’s cheeks.
“Oh, stop!” Grace chastised lightly, wrapping an arm around Jenna’s shoulders and giving her a sideways hug. “Just because my life is currently circling the toilet bowl doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be happy. Look at Ronnie, she’s positively giddy, and I only half want to strangle her.”
They both turned their gazes to Ronnie, who was wearing a wide smile and staring off across the room at Dylan.
“It’s sickening, isn’t it?” Grace asked in a soft aside.
Actually, Jenna thought it was kind of nice. She remembered that part of the courtship ritual and how great it was to be head-over-heels in love, to have the world and every breath revolve around another person.
“All right,” Grace said with a sigh, pulling her arm back and taking a long, strong suck of her quickly disappearing limoncello. “I can see I’m the only one having a down-with-men moment here.”
“I’m sorry,” Jenna told her, “I know you’re having a rough time right now. I don’t mean to be distracted.”
Grace shrugged a slim shoulder. “That’s okay. I’m getting kind of tired of talking about the cheating louse, anyway. It’s taking up too much of my time.”
She raised a hand to get their waitress’s attention and signaled for another round of drinks. “So tell us what’s been going on with you and Gage. And I sure as hell hope he has been a wonder stud instead of just some damn Shetland pony.”
Jenna’s face flushed with color once more. Not so much from Grace’s remark this time as the memories it invoked. Memories of exactly how wonder-studly Gage had been the past few days.
“Nothing… much has been going on.”
Grace and Ronnie exchanged a glance before sly grins slid over both their faces.
“Oh-ho,” Ronnie laughed. “That means a lot has been going on. Come on, Jenna, give us the scoop.”
Jenna covered her eyes with a hand and gave her head a little shake. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to share the details of recent events with her best friends, but since she wasn’t clear herself on exactly what was going on, she didn’t quite know what to say.
“When last we checked in on Jenna and Gage, dear viewers,” Grace murmured, bringing a curled hand to her mouth as though it held a microphone for her mocking narration, “they were shagging like howler monkeys and loving every minute of it. Let’s catch up, shall we?”
She thrust the invisible mike at Jenna, and Jenna laughed. “All right, all right. Well, at least until this afternoon, we were still shagging like…” She trailed off, not quite able to say it.
Grace, of course, had no such qualms. “Howler monkeys.”
“Yes.” Jenna licked her lips, eyes darting away for a moment in embarrassment. “I’m not sure why, since we both know it’s not going anywhere.”
“I know why,” Ronnie supplied, leaning back a couple of inches while the waitress placed a fresh drink in front of her. “It’s because Gage is a gorgeous hunk of man and you’ve never really gotten over him.”
“That’s not-” Jenna began. But, of course, it was true. She knew it, they knew it… heck, Gage probably knew it now that she’d jumped his bones six ways from Sunday.
Without the hope of getting pregnant, either, which had been her original goal and the whole point of molesting him to begin with. How telling was that?
“He insists we use a condom each and every time,” she confided, tucking her head and playing with the straw in her new cocktail, but not bothering to take a sip. “And first thing every morning, he makes me take one of those home pregnancy tests. They’ve all been negative, of course, but he doesn’t seem to believe me when I tell him it’s too soon to find out if I’m pregnant or not. He still insists I pee on those stupid sticks and wait for them not to turn blue.”
Ronnie made a hmmm sound low in her throat and both women’s brows rose.
“What?” Jenna looked from one to the other, confused by their responses. “Am I missing something?”
It was Ronnie’s turn to shrug. “I’m just wondering why a man who claims not to want kids is so obsessive about finding out whether or not you’re pregnant. I mean, if the thought of fathering a child is so repugnant to him, you’d think he’d have taken off like his tail was on fire the minute he woke up and realized you’d lured him into a little forced procreation.”
“Gage isn’t that kind of man,” she told them with a shake of her head. “I should have known better than to think he could just be a sperm donor. He would never abandon a child, even if its conception hadn’t been entirely mutual.”
“So what’s going to happen if you are pregnant?” Grace wanted to know. “Is he going to stick around and help you raise the child, or does he just want to know you’re pregnant before he takes off and leaves you to deal with it on your own?”
“I don’t know,” Jenna said. “We haven’t really discussed it. And I don’t see the point in worrying or making plans until we know there’s something to make plans for.”
A few brief seconds passed with only the sounds of the bar filling the silence-raised voices, clinking glasses, a baseball game playing on one television, mixed sports coverage playing on another.
Then Grace diplomatically put in, “All we’re saying is that you and Gage never truly wanted to split up in the first place, and neither of you have ever really gotten over each other. Even you’ve admitted that much.”
Jenna opened her mouth to protest, but once again her friends were speaking only the absolute truth, so what could she say that wouldn’t sound either ridiculous or like an out-and-out lie? Clamping her mouth shut, she waited quietly for them to continue.
“So maybe,” Ronnie said, taking over Grace’s point of view, “Gage is sticking around because he’s just as torn up over the divorce as you are.”
“And just as not over you as you are over him,” Grace added.
For several long moments, Jenna’s pulse pounded in her ears as she considered what her friends were saying. Personally, she thought they were a little off base.
Time and time again, Gage had made it perfectly, crystal, plate-glass clear that he did not want children. On top of that, he’d made no secret of the fact that he was thoroughly pissed that she’d tricked him into possibly getting her pregnant, and now that they were continuing to sleep together, he wasn’t taking any chances. If he could have wrapped them both in cellophane from head to foot and gotten the same tactile pleasure from the act, she suspected he would have done it.