I’m In No Mood For Love Read Free Page B

features. He had yet to set the stainless steel watch to reflectthe time zone change, and he pulled out the crown. As he moved the hands forward one hour, he thought back to the last time he’d seen Clare. She must have been ten or so, and had followed him to a pond not far from the carriage house where his father lived. He’d had a net to catch frogs and tadpoles, and she stood on the bank beneath a huge cotton tree while he waded in and got busy.
    “I know how babies are made,” she’d announced, looking down at him through thick glasses magnifying her light blue eyes. As always, her dark hair had been pulled into tight braids at the back of her head. “The dad kisses the mom and a baby gets into her stomach.”
    He had already lived through two stepfathers, as well as his mother’s boyfriends, and he knew exactly how babies got made. “Who told you that?”
    “My mother.”
    “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard,” he’d informed her, then proceeded to fill Clare in on what he knew. He told her in technical terms how the sperm and the egg got together in the woman’s body.
    Behind her glasses, Clare’s big eyes had filled with horror. “That’s not true!”
    “Yeah. It is.” Then he’d added his own observations. “Sex is loud and men and women do it a lot.”
    “No way!”
    “Yes way. They do it all the time. Even when they don’t want babies.”
    “Why?”
    He’d shrugged and netted a few tadpoles. “I guess it must feel good.”
    “Gross!”
    The year before, he’d thought it sounded pretty gross too. But since turning twelve the month before, he’d started to think differently about sex. More curious than disgusted.
    He recalled that when Mrs. Wingate had found out about his sex talk with Clare, shit had hit the fan. He’d been packed up and sent back to Washington early. His mother was so angered by his treatment, she refused to send him to Idaho anymore. From then on, his father had been forced to visit him in whichever city they happened to be living. But things between his mother and father deteriorated into full-blown rancor, and there were years in his life when his father had been absent. Large holes where he hadn’t seen Leo at all.
    These days, if he had to characterize his relationship with the old man, he would have said it was mostly nonexistent. There had been a time in his life when he’d blamed Clare for that situation.
    Sebastian snapped the watch on his wrist and looked around for his wallet. He saw it on the floorand bent to retrieve it. He should have left Clare on a bar stool last night, he told himself. She’d been sitting three stools down, and if he hadn’t overheard her tell the bartender her name, he wouldn’t have recognized her. As a kid, he’d always thought she looked like a cartoon, with big eyes and mouth. Last night she hadn’t been wearing big thick glasses, but once he looked into those light blue eyes, seen those full lips and all that dark hair, he realized it was her. The light and dark coloring that had been contrary and a little freaky in a child, had turned her into a stunning woman. The lips that had been too full on a child now made him wonder what she’d learned to do with that mouth as an adult. She’d grown into a beautiful woman, but the second he’d recognized her, he should have left her all weepy and sad and some other sucker’s problem. Screw it. He didn’t need the headache.
    “Just once, you try and do the right thing…” he muttered as he shoved his wallet into his back pocket. He’d walked her up to her hotel room to make sure she made it, and she invited him in. He’d stayed while she bawled some more, and when she passed out, he tucked her in bed. Like a freakin’ saint, he thought. And then he’d made a tactical error.
    It was around one-thirty in the morning, and as he’d pulled the sheet over Clare, he realized he’dknocked back a few too many Dos Equis and tequila chasers from her minibar. Instead of