Page 33 of The Beat Match

“Do I?” She glanced around at the passing cars. Traffic lights flipped from red to green. The air was still. She felt wired and exhausted. “The Weston Aldrich I knew was the heir of Aldrich Pharma, not a late-night DJ who kissed women while wearing a mask. Do you do that often? I missed your early shows. Did you use your mysterious charm to lure women onstage and…” She gasped. She thought back to that night, the timing of it. “You kissed me when you had a girlfriend.”

“I did not.” His reply was sharp, vehement, but he looked a tad green around the gills. “We weren’t exclusive.”

She reviewed the timeline. She’d found pictures of him and that Rosanna beauty together before the performance in question. Before the kiss. They’d been holding hands in the online photo, on their way to a bar or dinner. Definitely a date. The image didn’t mean they’d been exclusive, but everything about that kiss felt wrong: how into it she’d been, whimpering into his mouth, rocking against him. He’d had her panting for more, and it had been a setup. A ruse to get her away from Duncan. She hadn’t even known who she was kissing, and she’d been willing to go home with him. Although the familiarity of his eyes sure made sense now.

Her throat closed. Saliva pooled in her mouth. However upset she’d been when Wes had basically admitted she was his charity case, this was miles worse. And here she was, reliving that kiss again. The heat. The wanting. The…

Whoa.

She looked Wes hard in the face, searched the ribbons of blue in his eyes.

More than their mouths had been involved in that kiss. If Wes had wanted her away from Duncan, he could have just given her the note. A chaste kiss would have sufficed. But he’d dug in and had kissed her with passion, his whole body worked up, evidence of his arousal hot and hard against her belly. A distraction kiss, my ass.

There was more going on with Wes than he was admitting. Not that it mattered. He’d said “weren’t” not “aren’t.” We weren’t exclusive. Past tense implied there’d been a change in his and Rosanna’s coupledom, and that kiss was the tip of this nonsensical iceberg. “Why didn’t you tell me you were a DJ?”

“Why didn’t you tell me you’d decided to do the same?”

She slapped her thigh and cackled, the sharp sound carrying into the night. She abruptly clamped her mouth shut. “Let’s be clear about something, Herbert.”

“Who’s Herbert?”

“You are, old man. I’m doing the asking, and you’re doing the answering. You owe me that and then some. Capiche?”

He twitched his nose, looking more like Felix the rabbit-squirrel every day. “Let’s walk while we talk.” He shrugged his backpack higher and started toward the city.

She gawked at his back. “You’re not seriously planning to walk to your condo. Or do you have a Bat Cave nearby?”

He turned slowly, impatience in the exaggerated move. “I have a Falcon Cave, not a Bat Cave. It’s in my condo. And I need air, which is why I asked my driver to let me out.”

“Do you have a Falconmobile, too?”

He smirked. “Wouldn’t work. I’d need a car designed for homogenization.”

“Designed for milk? Would it shrink into a freeze-dried powder that gets mixed into drinks to make you so annoying people around you drop dead, because that would actually make sense as your superpower.”

He laughed.

She glared. “What did I say about the laughing, Weston?”

He dragged his hand down his face and sighed. “Homogenization. Not homogenized milk. It would have to blend in. And I wasn’t planning on walking all the way to my condo. I needed air. Figured I’d walk a bit then hop in a cab when I got tired.”

“Then let’s walk. I have an inquisition to unleash.”

He scrubbed his shoe over the sidewalk. The sound grated her ears. “I’m sure you have a thousand questions. I have a number of my own. But it’s late, and neither of us is in the right headspace. Let’s grab a cab. We’ll both go home and get some sleep. We can meet tomorrow night for a proper interrogation.”

How convenient for him. “I want answers now.”

“I’m too tired to give them to you.”

Her tongue prickled with the urge to lash out, but the skin under Wes’s eyes looked bruised, sunken. It could be the darkness, the late hour. According to Duncan, there was another source. She and Duncan had texted periodically since their date. He was actually pretty funny, last week’s bout of texting banter amusing enough to have her cackling.

Duncan: Are you sure you don’t want to add benefits to our friend status? All the cool kids are doing it.

Annie: I don’t give into peer pressure.

Duncan: That must be a typo. You mean you want peer pleasure, right?

She’d replied with laughing emojis, and he’d replied by asking about Wes, wondering if his boss and friend was okay. He’d mentioned that Wes had been exhausted at work, grumpier than usual. Instead of calling Wes and checking up on him, all Annie had done was avoid him while chasing Falcon. With tonight’s revelation, it was clear Wes was burning the candle at both ends. Tonight, in this blue-gray light, he looked haggard.