“But I didn’t know it was you. You didn’t know it was me . . . did you?” he asked, then the possibility dawned on him. Had she known who he was? His brain was spinning now, and it wasn’t making pretty kaleidoscopic images. Maybe she’d been the one scoping him out clandestinely.
“No!” She jammed her hands in her hair, and whatever she’d been keeping under the surface bubbled up. Her voice rose. “I never would have done that. Jack, I don’t even know a thing about you, except you sell toys. I don’t even know what kind of toys you sell. Do you sell Legos? Weeble Wobbles? Dolls?” She raised her eyebrows in question as she fired off options. “Do you run a toy store or something?”
He didn’t even bother to contain the grin as he shook his head, laughing deeply. “I sell sex toys.”
Her jaw went slack. She blinked several times, then swallowed. She sank down onto the couch, dropped her head between her legs and breathed out hard. For a second he thought she was having an anxiety attack, but she popped back up, grabbed his elbow, opened the door and escorted him out of the office. “You need to see someone else,” she said, marching him down the hall to the stairs, and two flights down, then into another hallway. She walked him into another psychology practice, then mouthed thank God when she spotted a door open.
She tapped twice, then stepped inside. “Kana, hello. I think Friday at two is one of your free hours, right?”
“Yes,” said the woman named Kana. Her long black hair was sleek and looped in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. She wore a long hippie skirt, a red shirt, and bangles on her arms. She looked young, perhaps late twenties.
“Is there any chance you could take my two p.m.? I have a conflict,” Michelle said, then turned to him. “Jack, this is Kana Miyoshi. She works in another practice. I’ve referred other patients to her. She’s excellent and you will be in good hands.”
“Wait a second. Who said I just wanted to switch?” he asked, digging in his heels. His mental health wasn’t a game of hot potato. This was his fucking messed-up life, and he wasn’t some assignment to be passed around.
“Kana is great,” Michelle said, in a too-professional tone. All the sexiness, all the teasing, and all the shock was gone, replaced only by a cool business-like demeanor.
“But Casey made the appointment to see you,” Jack said pointedly.
“I assure you, Kana is one of the best in the field. She knows her stuff.”
And he didn’t care. He was masterful at shutting down. Hell, he’d been in the army for six years—he knew how to keep his thoughts locked up, with the key thrown away. If this was what therapy came down to—getting jerked around—he was ready to say goodbye.
He threw his hands up. “Hell, I’m more than happy to just leave and not do this at all. So thank you very much. Have a good day.”
Michelle’s grip on his arm tightened, and she met his gaze straight on. Her eyes softened. “Please,” she whispered, and something about that one word on her lips said like a true plea, as if she couldn’t have wanted anything more in this moment, or ever, than for him to relent, had him doing just that. She repeated it, her voice even lower this time, and that word worked its way into his heart. He wasn’t sure why this was important to her, and he certainly wasn’t sure why she was important to him after only one night. But he understood this much—it mattered deeply to her that she not harm her job. He got that. He respected that. If sitting down with Kana for fifty minutes would help Michelle in some way, he could do that much.
Thank you, she mouthed just to him, her sexy lips wrapping around those silent words.
She turned to her associate. “Jack is a friend. I didn’t realize it was him when we set the appointment, and I don’t want to leave him hanging. I know he’ll be in good hands with you.”
“Absolutely,” said the other woman. “I’ve learned so much from Michelle, it’ll almost be as if I’m channeling her.”
Channeling her. The only way he wanted to channel Michelle was in the bedroom.
And there went his mind again. As he sat down on the couch, Michelle Milo turning on her heels, he feared it was going to be a painfully long fifty minutes.
* * *
She wasn’t in the habit of Googling patients before their appointments. Nor was she in the habit of Googling them while she treated them. The Internet offered too much information, and her job was not based on hunting for details from Facebook profiles or corporate web sites. Her job was to talk to people, to help them understand and to overcome challenges in their lives.
The answers to those questions were never found on the Web.
But Jack was no longer a patient. She’d sliced off that possibility immediately so that it could never bite her in the ass. Getting involved with a patient sexually was grounds for losing her license, and Michelle’s job was her world. She would never do anything to sacrifice her livelihood, nor would she ever willingly compromise the hearts and minds of her patients.
However, researching a lover was an entirely different matter. She’d known nothing about Jack the night before, and she’d relished the Just Jack mystery, the intrigue behind the toy salesman persona.
She scoffed to herself.
“Toy salesman, my ass,” she muttered as she plugged his name into Google, and up popped a website for Joy Delivered.
Oh, my.
The man was the CEO of Joy Delivered? A thrill ran down her spine, electric and hot. She knew Joy Delivered, and it had delivered for her night after night. She had a drawer full of Joy Delivered goodies, and they were the Christian Louboutins of the sex toy world, as she and her friend Sutton liked to say. Everything else was Payless, and everything else paled in comparison. “Once you’ve gone Joy Delivered, you’ll never leave your bedroom,” Sutton had once said in her pretty British voice when the two of them had popped into Eden, a sex toy shop on the Upper East Side. Michelle vastly preferred the comfort of online shopping—you never knew in New York when you might run into a colleague, a patient, or a researcher you were submitting a paper to. But Sutton had insisted, and Michelle had gone along, acquiring one of many battery-operated boyfriends.