Anyone but You

Chapter 7

Alex seemed hesitant. "I'm glad you're here. I thought maybe you weren't talking to me because I'd, uh, kissed you."

Okay, this was it. If she wanted him, this was it. She was going to have to do it.

Nina took off her coat and dropped it on the floor, and stood there with nothing but red lace between her and Alex.

Alex blinked. "On the other hand, talking isn't everything. Is that the Incredibra Fred brought me?"

Nina nodded.

He exhaled slowly and walked toward her. "It's very nice. Take it off."

Nina felt dizzy as he reached for her, and then she went into his arms, wrapping herself around him, almost crying out because he felt so good and she needed him so much. "I need you to make love to me," she said in his ear, and her voice came out thick with lust. "I need you now. I don't care about anything else. I just-"

His mouth closed over hers, and she moaned into him, tasting him with her tongue as his fingers dug into her back and then her rear end, pulling her tight against him even while she arched into him and bit his lip.

"Bedroom," he gasped when they came up for air. "We move now, or I take you on the floor."

Nina let him pull her toward the bedroom, dazed with wanting him, crazy to feel him inside her, but when they were in his room, and he stripped off his shirt and said, "Really nice bra. Take it off," Nina came crashing back to reality.

"No," she said, crossing her arms over her breasts.

"Nina-" he began, moving toward her.

"Turn off the lights." She took a step back until she was up against the bed.

"Sure." He reached back and flipped the light switch and then reached for her again. "Take it off."

"Alex, you don't understand," she said, and he stopped. She swallowed, trying to explain. "Everything's lower than it used to be."

"Nina, you don't understand," Alex said. "I don't care if it's on the floor. I want you naked now."

"Alex-" But then he was kissing her, hooking his foot around her ankle and tripping her back onto the bed until she fell, bouncing under him as his body moved over hers, his mouth hot on her neck.

"Alex," she tried again, holding on to sanity as his hands made her weak with heat, and then he looked down into her eyes, and she was stunned by the passion she saw there.

"I want you," he said. "I want you and I need you now. Do you want me?" He slid his hand down her side and pulled her hips closer to his, and she clenched her teeth as she felt him hard through his shorts.

"Oh, God, yes." Nina moved under him, crazy at his touch. "I can't stand it anymore. Yes."

"Then you're losing the bra." Alex unhooked the center clasp with one hand and pulled the lace away from her body, and before she could wince, his mouth was hot on her throat and then on her breast, sucking hard, and she arched under him, mindless in the blast of pure pleasure his lips and tongue sent through her, any qualms she had forgotten, any fear gone. She raked her fingers through his hair and moaned as he licked and sucked at her swollen breasts, and then Fred barked at her.

He was sitting beside the bed.

Nina gasped and blinked, pushing halfheartedly at Alex's head while she tried to remember her name.

Alex stopped and looked down at Fred. "Where did you come from?" he asked, and then shook his head. "I don't care. Go back.''

"I left the window open," Nina said around ragged breaths as she struggled to sit up. "I'll put him back. I'll-"

"No, you won't." Alex pressed her back down with his body, and she shuddered under him, loving the slide of her breasts against the fur of his chest and the pressure of his body between her legs as he bore down on her. "You're not getting out of this bed," he told her.

"No." Nina ran her hands down his body and watched him close his eyes in pleasure. "No, I'm not. I'm not getting out of this bed." She rocked her hips against his and shuddered at how good he felt.

"Do things to me."

Alex looked down at her, and his eyes were black with lust. "I intend to do things to you." He looked at Fred. "Pay attention. You may pick up some pointers here."

Nina moved against the pillow. "He's just a child. He shouldn't be watching."

Alex pressed her hips harder into the mattress, letting his hand trail down her shoulder to cup her breast, his thumb teasing her nipple. Nina moaned, and Fred whined, and Alex frowned down at him, his hand still driving Nina into mindlessness. "Think of this as cable TV," she heard him tell Fred. "Not your mom and dad finally having great sex." Then he leaned down and licked her nipple, and Nina rolled her head to the side, drunk with pleasure, and saw Fred yawn and lick his lips.

"Go away, Fred," she said, but Alex said, "Good idea," and began to kiss his way between Nina's breasts and down the slope of her stomach, tickling her and making her shudder, sliding the red lace of her underpants down as he moved his body across her thighs.

"Oh, God, yes," Nina said through clenched teeth, and then he reached her hips and licked inside her, and Nina lost all power of speech. Her body went liquid under his hands and his mouth and all she knew was flooding heat and pressure and a tightening deep inside her that Alex was making tighter and tighter. She twisted under him and arched, and he held her still, his fingers biting into her hips while he stroked his tongue inside her over and over again, and the combination of his tongue and his hands and the knowledge that she was with Alex, finally with Alex, and that she was going to have all of him pushed her over the edge, and the heat broke inside her, and the spasms shook her body, moving her against his mouth as she came and came. Then he was kissing his way across her stomach, sucking on her breasts, biting at the hollow of her neck while she wrapped herself around him and rocked away the last of her orgasm.

She lay with her head back, trying to breathe, trying to hold on to the glow, vaguely aware that he was reaching across her to open the drawer beside the bed, feeling his hip against hers as he stripped off his shorts, and then hearing foil tear. Thank God; a condom meant he'd be inside her soon. She rolled against him and breathed, "Hurry," in his ear, and he laughed a little, low and lazy, and then pulled her on top of him.

"That's the last thing I'm going to do," he told her, and she put her hands on his chest and pushed up enough so that she could see into his eyes. "This is going to take all night," he promised her. "I'm going to watch you come over and over again. You're going to come seeing the dawn, I swear it."

She shivered, and his hand slid up her neck, and his thumb moved across her lips, and she licked at him and then bit him as he moved underneath her. He eased his hand down her side and between her legs and slid his finger into her, stroking her until she moaned against his chest, and then she felt him move hard against her stomach. She dug her fingernails into his shoulders, crazy with anticipation. He pulled her up to him and she helped, moving against him, wanting him between her thighs, filling the emptiness there, and then he was inside her, hard inside her, and she jerked against him as his fingers pressed into her flesh, pulling her against him. She was slick and hot, and she moaned at the slide and the friction and the pressure and the shudder in her blood as he moved inside her.

"Oh, Nina," he said, and pulled her face back down to his, his mouth on hers, licking into her mouth as he rocked up into her body, and after that, there was nothing for the rest of the night but Alex and Alex's hands and Alex's mouth, and Alex's body over hers, under hers, inside hers, making her mindless with need and speechless with release over and over again.

They stopped once for Oreos-"I've never eaten Oreos naked before," she told him when he brought the package and two mugs of milk back to bed, and he said, "From now on, we eat all our Oreos naked"-and they showered together at three in the morning, almost too exhausted to stand but too crazed with need for each other to stop. Then they fell asleep, wrapped around each other, but a few hours later Alex stirred against her and said, "I've wanted you too long not to have you again," and his hands pulled her closer, and groggy with sleep and desire she said, "I've wanted you, too, so much."

Then she kissed his shoulder and then his nipple, moving down his body this time, feeling his fingers clutch her shoulders and then wind into hair when she found him and took him hard in her mouth, loving the way he moaned when she did and the way he felt, smooth and hard against her tongue. And when he pulled her back up to him, he kissed her roughly, bruising her mouth and making her crazier for him than ever. He made love to her again then, taking her high and hard this time so that her climax crashed over her and left her shuddering and gasping against him as he came, too.

And the last thing Nina saw, while she was still trembling from the aftershocks of her climax, just before she fell asleep with Alex's arms wrapped around her, was his bedroom window turning light with the dawn.

"You look like hell," Max said to Alex when he ran into him at the hospital the next day.

"That's funny, I feel great." Alex yawned and shook his head to stay awake. "I just told Dad I'd take the cardiology spot. I am now the number-one son. Sorry about that."

"Be my guest." Max frowned at him. "I don't get this. You want to be a cardiologist about as much as I do. What the hell are you doing?"

"You want to know the truth?" Alex said. "I'm not sure about cardiology, but I'll be an ax murderer if that's what it takes to keep Nina."

"To keep Nina?" Max raised an eyebrow. "Which means you think you have Nina."

Alex thought of Nina, warm and naked and loving in the dark the night before. "I have Nina," he said soberly. "Now I have to make sure I keep her. She was married to Guy Adams. She's used to money and parties and real houses, not apartments in chopped-up old Victorians. She's used to real life."

"Sounds boring," Max said.

"Maybe to us, but not to her." Alex drew a deep breath. "She still thinks I'm a kid, and she's right. I stay in the ER because I like it, not because it's a good career move. I've never given a thought to the future because I thought the future was going to be like yesterday. I've been acting like a kid, living like a kid, and Nina's not going to want to live that way." He thought of Nina again, but this time it was the old Nina, the one who'd treated him like a younger brother, platonic and loving. Last night, he'd demolished the brother problem. Now all he had to do was prove to her that he was mature, that he could keep her safe, the way Guy had. The memory of Guy in Nina's apartment flashed back to him, Guy sneering and saying, "So this is what an up-and-coming young doctor wears these days, is it?"

Back off, buddy, Alex snarled in his thoughts, but he could see why Nina had married the creep. Big, handsome, rich, successful. He set his jaw. It was time he stopped being up-and-coming and came.

That made him think of Nina again. He couldn't lose her. "It's time I got my act together," he told Max. "Started a secure life. Nina deserves it."

"Have you discussed this with her?" Max said. "She may not give a damn about the money."

Alex set his jaw. "I give a damn. She's going to have everything she had before." He clapped Max on the shoulder. "Thanks for the advice, by the way. You were right."

"I'm always right," Max said. "Which advice?" When Alex laughed and began to walk away, Max added, "Well, here's some more. I think you should talk to Nina about this cardiology thing. You know, she left the guy with the money the last time."

"I know what I'm doing, Max," Alex said over his shoulder. "She's going to have everything."

"Whether she wants it or not?" Max called after him, and Alex ignored him.

He had enough qualms about what he was doing. He didn't need Max adding more.

"Late night?" Jessica said brightly when Nina staggered into the office two hours late.

Nina nodded. "I was, uh, up with a friend."

"Lucky you," Jessica said, and Nina started, not quite sure she'd heard such a non-beige comment from her boss. "How's Charity's book coming along?" Jessica added, and Nina caught an underlying note of tension in her voice.

"She's in rewrite," Nina said. "I should have it edited within a couple of weeks." She swallowed. "I can show it to you then. There are a few things-"

"No." Jessica held up her hand. "You don't need to discuss it with me. I trust you. In fact, I don't even need to read it at all."

Nina gaped at her. Jessica read everything that went out from Howard Press, not because she didn't trust her editors but because she loved the Press and its books. Something was wrong here.

"You did say you thought it was going to be popular, didn't you?" Jessica asked, and this time her intensity was unmistakable.

The wolf must be at the door. And judging from her intense interest, Jessica must be hoping that she could throw Charity's book at it and scare it away.

"I think it's going to be very popular," Nina said.

Jessica nodded. "Well, then. Not that popularity matters, of course."

Nina nodded. "Of course not."

When Jessica had gone back to her office, Nina collapsed into her chair and thought about the situation.

Jessica knew there were going to be things in Charity's book that she wasn't going to like.

Jessica needed a bestseller.

So Jessica was going to ignore the book until it was published, and then tell people, "Well, I hadn't actually seen the book before it went to press so I was surprised, of course, but it's doing very well for us, so…"

But Jessica didn't know that the book had turned into fiction. Howard Press didn't print fiction.

Nina thought about the problem from all the angles. What it came down to was that Jessica had stuck her head in the sand, so it was Nina's decision. And Nina's decision was that it was time for Howard Press to print fiction.

She took a deep breath and called Charity. "When can you have that book done?"

"The end of the week," Charity said. "It's going like wildfire now that it's fiction."

"Shhhhhh!" Nina hissed. "Good. Get it to me this weekend. This is going to be the fastest edit any book ever had. We want this out fast."

"Why?"

"Because you're going to save our butts, babe," Nina told her. "Write good."

"I am," Charity said. "What's wrong with you? You sound like you're on speed."

"My life has been very exciting lately," Nina said.

"It'd be a lot more exciting if you'd go downstairs and jump Alex," Charity said.

"I did."

"What? Oh, for joy, for joy, for joy!" The phone bumped and Nina pictured Charity doing a modified bunny hop around the boutique, Charity's time-honored method of showing happiness beyond expression. Charity came back on the line. "This is so great! This is beyond great!" Then her voice grew cautious. "It was great, wasn't it?"

"The earth moved, the stars wept and the sun turned cartwheels 'cross the sky," Nina said. "The greatest sex since time began."

Charity moaned. "Oh, terrific, now I'm jealous."

"He has a brother," Nina suggested. "Looks just like him except with dark hair."

Charity snorted. "Max. Him I've met. No thanks."

"Well, you can't have Alex," Nina said. "He's mine." Then she realized what she'd just said and stopped.

"Oh," Charity said. "Like that, is it?"

"Probably not," Nina said, but when Alex came home that night, it was exactly like that.

"This is not just a two-night stand," he told her sternly when they were lying exhausted on her hall floor, having made love inside her door because they couldn't wait to get to her bedroom. "We have a future."

"A future," Nina echoed, still trying to regroup her senses after orgasm. "Futures are good."

"You, me and Fred," Alex said. "Forever. Except from now on we find something softer to do this on or my knees will be shot."

"Okay," Nina said. "A future, huh?"

"I know what you're thinking." Alex sat up, and Nina watched the muscles in his back flex and thought, If you knew what I was thinking, you 'd be back down here with me.

"You're thinking I'm not responsible enough for you," Alex went on. "That I can't give you the life Guy gave you."

Nina sat up. "I don't want-"

Alex put his hand over her mouth. "I know you'd never say anything about the money, but it's important to me. I want you to have everything.''

Nina peeled his hand away. "I have everything."

Alex ignored her. "So I told Dad I'd take the cardiology position."

Nina blinked. "I thought you didn't want it. I thought you wanted the ER. I thought-"

"This is what I want," Alex said, and Nina shut up.

Great. He was going to be a cardiologist. A lifetime of cocktail parties and conventions stretched before her. Fund-raising for the cardiac unit. Opening nights. All the garbage she thought she'd escaped when she left Guy. All starting all over again.

And that was the worst part. It was starting all over again. She'd helped Guy build a career, and now she got to build another one. If she'd stayed with Guy, at least she wouldn't have had to do this garbage all over again.

Then she looked at Alex and felt terrible. It wasn't his fault she was a retread. If she'd been in her twenties instead of her forties, she'd be champing at the bit to help him out. If this was the price she had to pay for loving Alex, it was worth it. Alex was worth anything.

Even wearing that damn Incredibra for the rest of her life.

"Great," she told him. "This is great."

"Charity, this book is really great," she said two weeks later when she and Charity were sitting on the living-room floor drinking Amaretto milk shakes, celebrating this time. "I had to do practically no editing. It's wonderful. It's tight and it flows and it's funny and the sex scenes are incredible. I read one to Alex last night, and he jumped me."

"You could read the phone book to Alex and he'd jump you," Charity told her.

"Not necessarily," Nina said, and Charity stopped with her milk shake halfway to her mouth.

"Uh-oh," she said. "Trouble in paradise?"

"He's working with his father," Nina said. "Getting ready for this cardiology thing. Long hours. He's a little tired." Actually, he'd fallen asleep in front of the TV before Harrison Ford had found the Holy Grail. She'd tried to be understanding, but it was definitely a bad sign.

Charity nodded. "Kenneth."

Nina closed her eyes and groaned. "Don't say that. I want this to work."

"It will." Charity slurped some of her milk shake. "That's what I found out writing this book. I gave up on him too fast. We might have made it work. I mean, he was a great guy, he was just trying to start a big career."

Nina thought about Alex. "I'm sure you're right." Then she realized what Charity had said. "Are you sorry you divorced Kenneth?"

Charity shook her head. "Nope. That was years ago now. I'm going forward. But I've learned from it. The next guy I hook up with is going to be my last. My Raoul."

Nina's thoughts went back to Alex. "It's not just the sleeping. He's drinking too much."

"Alex? He doesn't seem like the drunk type."

"He's not." Nina bit her lip. "His brother shows up four or five nights a week with a six-pack and they split it. And then they both look at the empty cans the way Fred looks at an empty Oreo wrapper."

Charity scowled. "Well, there's your explanation. It's his brother."

Nina shook her head. "No, it's not. Max is a good guy. In fact, Max is a great guy. The rest of Alex's family is sort of cold, but Max has been great from the start."

"Sort of cold? You didn't tell me you met his family."

"We had dinner." Nina's face twisted as she remembered. "His father looked at me and said, 'We were hoping Alex would have children.'"

Charity winced. "Ouch. What did Alex say?"

"He said, 'No, we weren't,' and Max said, 'Can I get you a drink, Nina?' and Max's mom did something to his dad and he sort of flinched and shut up. But it was ugly. And then there was the dinner with my family."

"Oh, boy. How is your mother? Still flash-frozen?"

"She was very polite to Alex," Nina said. "And then after dessert, she pulled me to one side and said, 'What are you going to do when he leaves you for a younger woman?'"

Charity rolled her eyes and picked up her milk shake to finish it off. "So I guess you and Alex won't be spending the holidays with the families."

Nina laughed shortly. "Just with Max. I like him a lot. We'll make our own family with you and Max and Fred."

"Well, if you're planning on marrying me off, I'll take Fred before I take Max." Charity stood up. "Listen, I've got to go. Thanks for the milk shake."

"Wait a minute." Nina scrambled to her feet. "Don't you want to talk about the book?"

"No. The book is finished. I wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it and now I want to forget it for a while. Do I need to rewrite it again?"

"No," Nina said. "I'll do the final edit and send it to you to check over, and then we'll send it to the printer. Jessica put a hurry-up on it, so we should have bound ARCs in a month."

Charity stopped stretching. "ARCs?"

"Advance Reader Copies. They go out to reviewers so we can get some good review quotes for the jacket."

Charity's arms dropped to her sides. "Lots of reviewers?"

"For your book, yes." Nina bent to pick up their milk shake glasses. "I'm sending this one to every reviewer on the planet. It's going to be great."

"I hope so." Charity's voice sounded hollow. "I really want this to be good, Neen. I've never done anything with my brains before."

Nina blinked at her. "Of course you have. You run that store beautifully.''

Charity swallowed. "I mean creative brains. I already have an idea for another book. I really want this to work."

Nina hugged Charity, wrapping her arms around her so that the glasses in her hands clanked as she clutched her. "It's going to work," she promised her, while she said a silent, fervent prayer that it would, not only for Charity's sake, but for her own and Jessica's, too.

"So hows it going with Nina?" Max asked Alex at lunch the next week in the hospital cafeteria.

"Nina's great." Alex tried to sound happy but a yawn overwhelmed him. "Life's great."

Max raised an eyebrow at him. "Well, don't let the enthusiasm make you lose your grip."

"No." Alex shook his head and then regretted it. It felt as if his brains were rattling in his skull like mushy marbles. "I mean it. She's great."

Max leaned back. "And how's cardiology?"

Alex tried to focus on him. "Cardiology? Cardiology sucks."

Max shook his head. "Why don't you knock this off and go back to the ER and make everybody happy?"

Alex glared at him. "People are happy I'm in cardiology. Dad's ecstatic."

Max looked at him with disbelief. "How can you tell?"

Alex ignored him. "And Nina's going to be happy once I get this work schedule ironed out. Pretty soon I'll be out of the ER, and then-"

"And then you will be miserable," Max finished. "I can't believe you're doing this to yourself. And for what? Nina will love you no matter what you do. She's great, the best thing that ever happened to you. And you're missing it because you have some dumb idea that she needs to be rich."

"I'll tell you what's a dumb idea," Alex told him. "The Incredibra. That's a dumb idea."

Max nodded. "Yes, I can see how we got from cardiology to bras. Makes perfect sense. A word of advice-get some sleep before you kill a patient."

"I may kill myself first," Alex said, and then blinked. "Forget I said that. I don't know what I'm saying."

"You're saying you're unhappy." Max stood up and shoved his chair back, and the screech it made on the floor made Alex wince. "Stop this, Alex. You're going to end up like Dad. And me."

Alex blinked up at him. "You? What's wrong with you?"

Max looked down at him, and for the first time, Alex saw his brother as an older man, not just a guy to pal around with. "I'm thirty-six, I've poured my whole life into my career, I'm burned-out and I'm alone," Max said, and his voice was like lead. "I'm tired, and I've got nowhere to go. And no one to go to. You have Nina. Hell, if I had Nina, I'd grab her and go to a beach somewhere and just watch the sun come up and go down forever. You've got it all, and you're throwing it away. Don't screw this up, Alex."

Alex swallowed. "You're exaggerating."

Max nodded, defeated. "Probably. I'll be by with a six-pack tonight, and we can forget I said that together.''

"Good," Alex said. "Make it a twelve-pack. I've got some other stuff to forget, too."

"Some of the advance reviews are back, Charity," Nina said to her a month later on the office phone while she stared at the letters before her. "We're just getting them."

"Well, how are they?" Charity demanded.

"They're good," Nina said. "They're really good. They're just not what I expected.''

"Like what?" Charity said. "Nina, you're killing me here!"

"Like 'funniest sex farce in years,'" Nina read to her. She picked up another review. "Like 'Moll Flanders meets Odysseus.' Like 'Jane Errs will do for boutique owners what Jane Eyre did for governesses.' Like 'Read Jane Errs and find out all the things your mother never taught you about sex.'"

"That's good, right," Charity said dubiously.

"Well, it's going to sell books," Nina said.

"Didn't they notice the other stuff?" Charity said. "How she changed? What she learned? Didn't they notice the important stuff?"

Nina flipped back through the reviews. "They seem to be concentrating on the sex, but that's probably because they weren't expecting it. Howard Press doesn't usually publish a book like yours."

Or as one of the reviews put it: "This book blows a hole in the side of stuffy old Howard Press and lets the light of the twentieth century in. The surprise is that it's the bedroom light."

Jessica was going to have heart failure when she showed her the reviews.

But what Jessica did instead was fire her.

"It's fiction?" she screeched to Nina when Nina gave her the reviews.

"It started out as a memoir." Nina clasped her hands in front of her. "It truly did, but in the last rewrite, Charity changed it to fiction, and it was better that way, and the reviews are good-"

Jessica waved a review at her, apoplectic with rage. "Listen to this review! 'Jane Errs makes the rest of the Howard Press output look like a bad blind date.' That's what you call a good review?"

Nina gave up. "Well, yes. I call that a good review."

Jessica stopped waving paper around and leaned on her desk. "You're fired."

Nina stepped back. "I'm what?"

"You're fired. You're out. And you take this book with you because I'm not releasing it. Not now, not ever. Howard Press will never print trash."

Nina regrouped. "Okay, fine, fire me, but release Charity's book. It's not trash. You haven't even read it yet, how can you say it's trash? That's intellectually dishonest. For heaven's sake, Jessica, it's already in production. You can't-"

Jessica leveled a look at her that stopped her cold. "I can do anything to save the reputation of my father's press. And I will. Now get out."

That night, Alex tried to comfort her. "It's all right, you don't have to work, anyway. I can support you. That's what I wanted to do, anyway. It'll be just like when you were married to Guy.''

"That's a great comfort to me," Nina said. "And I'm sure it will be a great comfort to Charity, too."

Then she went to Charity's apartment to tell her in person.

Charity's face went blank with shock as she sank onto her wicker couch. "She's not going to release it? It's printed. Why won't she release it? I'm not going to have a book, after all?"

Nina sat beside her. "Let me think. I'll fix this."

"Why didn't you tell her it was fiction?" Charity asked.

"I thought it was better that she didn't know," Nina said. "She didn't want to know. I thought she'd just have to accept it."

"You thought wrong," Charity said, her voice dead.

Nina jerked her head up. "Listen to me, I'm going to fix this."

Charity shook her head, defeated. "How? It's over."

"The hell it is." Nina stood up. "There are other presses and this is a great book. It even has advance reviews. Well just buy it back from Jessica and sell it somewhere else."

Charity nodded but her heart wasn't in it. "Sure, Neen. Whatever."

"I'll fix this," Nina said.

"I'm not sure I can fix this," Nina told Max the next night at dinner.

It was his father's birthday and the family had gathered for cake and booze. "It's a Moore tradition," Max had told her, filling her glass. "By the time the candles are lit, so are we." His mother and his sister had toasted his father briefly and coolly and then left the room, and now it was just Nina and the three Moore men, who were looking more and more alike: tall, good-looking, strained and unhappy.

Max was looking particularly miserable.

"Are you all right?" Nina had asked him, searching his eyes.

"No," Max said. "But thanks for asking." He smiled at her, a small smile but a genuine one. "I hope to hell Alex talks you into marrying him soon. It's about time we got a human being in this family."

"I don't think marriage is a good idea," Nina said.

Max snorted. "Why, because you want to give him an out in case he grows up and changes his mind?"

Nina set her jaw. "It could happen."

Max shook his head. "Not if he has any brains. And notwithstanding his performance lately, he has brains."

"I don't," Nina said. "I just lost my job because I'm stupid."

"Tell daddy," Max had said, and Nina had dumped it all in his lap.

"I'm sorry to bore you with this," she said when she was finished, "but Alex tells me not to worry about it since he'll be supporting me, anyway." She looked across the living room where Alex was discussing something somber and cardiac with his father. "So I told Fred. It was a help, but not like telling you."

"Forget the book," Max said. "Save Alex. Hell, save me."

Nina watched Alex across the room, nodding at something his father said, and he looked so much like his father that she felt cold. "He doesn't laugh anymore. We've been together for almost two months now, and he doesn't laugh anymore. We don't watch movies or jog because he's too tired. Even Fred knows something's wrong. He whines until Alex pays attention to him. It's like he knows Alex has to be reminded to live life."

"Send Fred to my house," Max said. "Do you want another drink?"

"No," Nina said. "I didn't want this first one." She turned to Max. "And neither did you. If you're so unhappy, do something about it. Stop anesthetizing it with alcohol."

Max blinked at her anger. "Hey, don't take it out on me because Alex is turning into the old man. I told him not to do it, but he wanted to give you the rich life."

Nina stopped. "What are you talking about? Are you telling me he doesn't want cardiology for himself?"

Max snorted. "Of course not. He loves the ER. He's doing it for you."

Nina gritted her teeth. It was Guy all over again. Doing it for her when she didn't want it. Alex and his father came to join them and she glared at them with such passion that Max patted her hand, but they didn't seem to notice.

"Alex and I have worked out a wedding present for you, my dear," his father said.

The hell you have. Nina smiled tightly. "We're not getting married."

His father smiled back at her, oblivious. "Now, now, Nina, there's no need to feel guilty because you're past childbearing age. As Alex has pointed out, it isn't that important. Max isn't married yet."

Alex winced, and Max looked at her and said, "I'll flip you for the right to say something nasty here."

"So we bought you a house," his father finished, and Nina rose straight out of her chair like a banshee.

"You did what?"

"We bought a house," Alex said, blinking at her. "Dad gave us the down payment. It's on Lehigh Terrace."

Nina gritted her teeth. "I used to live on Lehigh Terrace."

"I know," Alex said. "That's why we bought there. So it'll be just like when you were married to Guy."

Nina gritted her teeth harder, so hard she thought her gums were going to shove through her cheeks. "I left Guy. Why are you turning into him?"

His father intervened. "Really, Nina, I hardly think-"

"Yeah, we know," Max said. "That's why you drink. That's why we all drink, so we don't have to think about anything but work and booze. You know, we have a problem here."

His father scowled at him. "What are you talking about?"

Max scowled back. "You're an alcoholic workaholic, and you raised the Drunk Brothers in your own image." He looked at Alex. "Turn back now, boy, or you're going to lose everything."

Alex glared at him. "I don't see why I'm the bad guy because I want Nina to have it all."

"This isn't about me. You don't care about me," Nina said. "If you cared about me, you'd listen to me. All you can hear is your own ego shrieking, 'If I don't give her everything Guy gave her, she'll leave me.'" She grabbed her purse from the table. "I love you, you jerk, but I'm not going to live that damn life again, not even for you. I like the apartment, and I like my dog, and I liked my job, and I just screwed up my best friend's life, but I don't have to screw up my own." She shook her head at him, close to tears, so angry she wanted to kill him. "I hope you and your father are very happy in your house and your career. I wouldn't have any of it as a gift, or you, either, for that matter. I was right. You're too young for me. You're so caught up in your own insecurities that you can't even see me standing in front of you."

Alex put his drink down. "I can see you. And you're wearing that damn Incredibra. You think I don't listen to you? You don't listen to me! How about-"

"Good night," Nina said. "I'll find my own way home."

Max stood up, too. "Nah, I'll take you. I'm not going to be popular here, anyway. And since I'm giving up the sauce, I doubt I'll be invited back."

Nina headed for the door, but she heard Max tell his father, "Retire and dry out. It's the only thing that'll save you." When she turned back, he was looking at Alex. "God knows what's going to save you," he told him.

"Wait a minute," Alex said, but Max was heading for the door, taking Nina's arm. "Let's go, kid."

"Will you wait a minute?" Alex roared, but Nina walked out into the night, grateful she had Max to lean on, already wishing he was Alex instead.