Fantasies R Us, page 15
She closed the precious book and looked down on the man who’d spoken. He had shaggy blond hair brushing broad shoulders detailed by a close-fitting black tee…and sky-blue eyes that studied her back. Her heart skipped a beat. Michael?
But that was impossible. Michael was a Fantasies R Us cyborg. The Michael model had been taken out of service. Seeing him here in her library had to be wishful thinking. A hallucination. A closer look would reveal it wasn’t him.
Heart thundering, she descended several rungs. But she stopped abruptly a few rungs short of the floor, that solid, very real floor. She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the worn edge of a wooden step. She wasn’t so certain she wanted to get close enough to see that it wasn’t Michael.
Too late. She was already too close to him. She could smell the distinctive scent of him. She could feel his movement stir the air around her, feel his heat radiate against her legs, her backside, her hips. He was so close, when he spoke, his hot breath slipped into the slit up the side of her skirt and whispered against her exposed thigh.
“Jayne?”
Only one man had ever made her plain name sound that singularly beautiful. She opened her eyes and turned her head toward the voice. He gripped the ladder uprights to either side of her hips as though he needed to trap her there.
“Michael?”
His lips lifted an uncertain smile and he gave a little nod.
“B-but, how?” she sputtered, confused, angry, yet wanting him as much as she ever had. “I didn’t think cyborgs could leave Fantasies R Us.”
“They can’t,” he said.
She frowned at him, her confusion deepening. “But you… How?”
His knuckles went white around the uprights of the ladder and his smile faded to an uncertain line. “Fantasies R Us wasn’t completely honest with you.”
“That’s for sure,” she said, staring at him, still not sure she wasn’t imagining him being here. “They told me you’d been taken out of service.”
“I was.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Forgive me, Jayne. I wasn’t completely honest with you, either.”
A puzzling anger raised the hairs at the nape of her neck. “You weren’t honest? What does that mean?”
“I’m not a cyborg. I went to Fantasies R Us for a fantasy of my own and, unbeknownst to me as well as you, they combined our fantasies.”
“They combined our—” She cut herself short, every good, bad, and ugly syllable of what he’d just told her sinking into her brain. “You’re not a cyborg?”
“No. I didn’t begin to figure out what they’d done until that night in The Three Bears set.”
Her heart pounded as though she’d just run a mile. “You’re a real man?”
“I should have told you when we were reunited on the Tarzan set. But there you were waiting for me in that skimpy little hide dress without any panties.” Worry lines scored his brow. “I’m sorry, Jayne. It was selfish of me. I wanted you.”
“You wanted me?” she said, feeling like a thousand butterflies had just taken flight in her stomach.
“You see,” he continued, “I’ve played the playboy for a very long time, my prowess a matter of pride for me.”
The sorrow in his eyes all but made her melt.
“But in the early days, I was callous and thoughtless. I took without giving.”
The butterflies in her belly settled and her heartbeat stutter-stepped. Just what was he trying to tell her?
“I came to Fantasies R Us to make amends. I wanted to initiate a virgin properly into the joys of sex.”
Reality hit Jayne as surely as if Tennyson’s entire collection of poetry had just fallen off the shelf and onto her head. He wanted to make amends for the errors of his past. She’d been a means to his end. She hugged the Tennyson book to her chest above where her heart was breaking and responded, “And I was a virgin. Just what you needed.”
“That’s right. You were what I needed to make myself feel good. It was still about me. Forgive me, Jayne.”
She stepped down from the ladder and ducked out from between his arms, determined not to let him see how very much he’d really meant to her. “Forgive you for what, Michael?” Her voice came out so steady and level, she chanced facing him. She even looked him squarely in the eye. “You made your amends very well. You initiated me most thoroughly. You fulfilled my fantasy.”
He blinked at her. She’d have been proud of her ability to confound him were she not intimately familiar with how much pain a lie could cause.
“Excuse me. I have a book to deliver to a client in the private reading rooms,” she said, pivoting on her heal away from him.
“I’m the client that requested the Tennyson book,” he said.
She hugged the Tennyson volume over her fracturing heart and peered over her shoulder at him. “You? You requested this book? Why?”
“Because it was a favorite of yours.”
“Was,” she enunciated. “Not anymore.” She headed down the aisle between the stacked shelves. “This way to the reading rooms.”
“Forgive me for not confessing the truth as soon as I learned it,” he called after her. “You should have been given the choice.”
But she had been given the choice and she’d chosen him. Like his being real instead of a cyborg would have made a difference to plain-Jane Jayne Applegate.
But it would have. She’d wanted real. Had she known he was real, she wouldn’t have confessed her love…and made a fool of herself, the epitome of the pitiful, plain-Jane.
“Jayne?”
The sound of her name on his voice shot through her shattering heart. She wanted to turn and run to him. She wanted to admit to him how much she still wanted him…still loved him.
But she wasn’t the shy virgin she’d been the day she signed on for a Fantasies R Us fantasy. Hell, she wasn’t even the same woman she’d been the day she’d given him one last goodbye kiss.
She wheeled at him. “What’s the matter, Michael, your conscience still bothering you? Still trying to make amends for your indiscretions?”
He stood in the middle of the aisle, manly sex personified. But she was too angry to do anything more than feel a twinge of regret for what she was rejecting.
“Quit with the poor, repentant me routine, Michael,” she leveled at him. “We both got what we wanted.”
She started to turn once more toward the main aisle.
“Did we?” he said, the emptiness in his voice stopping her.
Torn between anger at this man who’d dared use her and sympathy for a fellow wounded soul, she looked back at him and asked with less harshness, “Didn’t you get what you wanted, Michael?”
He strode toward her, his fists clenched, his shoulders tight, his mouth a flat line. He stopped just beyond her reach.
“For three months, I’ve told myself you were better off without me,” he said, an ache to his voice that matched that of her splintering heart. Could it be possible he felt the same for her as she felt for him? These were the only terms on which she would—could—accept him.
But she hesitated, afraid what she was hearing was her own wishful thinking.
“For three months I’ve tried to stay away from you,” he continued, a familiar pain tugging at the corners of his beautiful eyes…tugging at her heart.
“You’ve been struggling to stay away from me?” she ventured, her pulse pounding in her throat.
“Forgive me for this, too, Jayne, but I went back to Fantasies R Us and threatened to expose their whole shoddy operation if they didn’t tell me how to find you. I made them break your confidence and tell me where you lived and worked.”
“Why?” she demanded, needing to hear the words.
“I had to take the chance.”
“Chance?” she asked, hope mortaring the cracks in her heart. “What chance?”
“That you might feel the same as me.”
“Which is?” she asked in a voice barely louder than a whisper.
“I love you, Jayne Applegate.”
All the holes, all the splinters and cracks in her heart came together, healed by his words.
“If you can forgive me,” he went on, “if you still desire me, would you consider letting me be your fantasy man forever?”
Strong and whole, her heart drummed a joyful beat and she howled, “If I still desire you?” She threw herself into his arms, the impact sending a puff of dust from the Tennyson book. “Of course I still desire you. You’ve ruined me for all mortal men.”
“But I am a mortal man.”
“How’s that for a fantasy come true?” she sang out, hanging back in his arms and smiling up at him. “I love you, too, Michael.”
Then she kissed him, kissed him hard and long. And he kissed her back. They made love on the floor of the literary stacks, the Tennyson poem with its foreboding lines about lost love forgotten by the two lovers who had learned it is better to have loved and kept loving.
The end
About the author
Roxi Romano welcomes mail from readers. You can write to her c/o Ellora’s Cave Publishing at 1337 Commerce Drive, #13, Stow, OH 44224.
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Roxi Romano, Fantasies R Us
