The Misconception (10 page)

“Hello, Rhea,” he drawled, putting emphasis on the alias Marietta just now realized also had four letters. “Remember me?”

Chapter 7

Marietta felt her already ghostly face go whiter and would have sunk to the floor in a horrified heap if Jax hadn’t been holding her up.

The eyes she remembered looking at her with melting warmth were as cold as a chocolate popsicle. He was gazing at her as though he had something to be upset about. As though he were perfectly within his rights, with thousands of her dollars stuffing his pockets, to bulldoze his way into her world and disrupt her life.

Those thoughts gave her the courage to pull herself up to her full height, which was about the level of his chin. She glared right back at him.

“What are you doing here, Harold?” She deliberately used his given name instead of the nickname he preferred, making her voice as cold as a blast from an open freezer. He still held her by the upper arms, and her frostiness contrasted vividly with the warmth that had gathered under his hands. Irritated at her epidermis sensitivity, she shrugged away from him.

“You have to ask that question?” He let out a short bark of what sounded like disbelief, and Marietta had a premonition of doom. His eyes were narrowed, his mouth unsmiling, his jaw hard. He didn’t look like a man who took the money and ran. He didn’t look like he intended to go anywhere. “And the name, as I told you before, isn’t Harold. It’s Jax.”

“I don’t care if you want to be called Ishmael. You and I have nothing to discuss.”

“I hired a private investigator to find you because I think we have plenty to discuss.” His eyes dropped to her abdomen before they raised to meet her eyes. “I believe you have something that belongs to me.”

“Belongs to you?” She affected the bravado that had always carried her through the sticky situations in life, but she felt faint, which simply wouldn’t do. She needed to heed the words of the FOC heading her fan club.
Stand fast against male oppression
. She couldn’t let herself be bullied by a man who had signed a contract relinquishing the very thing he was trying to claim. “Nothing of mine belongs to you. You have absolutely no right to come here and harass me like this.”

He laughed, but the sound held a bitter undertone. “You don’t want to get into an argument with me about rights, Marietta,” he said, emphasizing her name, “because you’ll lose.”

“Dr. Dalrymple? Is this man bothering you?” The voice of salvation came out of Vicky Valenzuela’s mouth. The FOC president, with panache befitting her position, walked straight up to Jax. She came so close that Marietta’s near-blind eyes could make out the girl’s features as she leaned back her head and looked way, way up at Jax. Her lips parted, and her eyes widened. Her brain, unfortunately, seemed to go stone dead.

“As a matter of fact, he is bothering me,” Marietta answered, but Vicky wasn’t listening. She wasn’t doing anything but staring spellbound at Jax, who was dressed in another of those beautifully tailored suits that were no doubt made for him. This one was chocolate-brown, like his eyes.

“Of course I’m not bothering her.” Jax switched on the charm, smiling down at Vicky. “Marietta and I are old friends. In fact, you could strip her bare and there’s not a man alive who knows more about her than I do.”

“Really?” Vicky said breathlessly, telling Marietta she hadn’t processed a word he said. Her lips formed a silent word that even Marietta could make out. It was “wow.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. What kind of feminist are you?” Marietta exclaimed, even though she understood the effect Jax was having on the young woman. It was no more intense than the effect Jax had on Marietta. Vicky was not only reacting to his symmetrical features, but the evolutionary truth that conditioned women to seek out men emitting signs of power and strength. With his great height and incredible physique, Jax had an unfair advantage.

Still, she’d expected more of the head of the FOCs. Vicky must know that men had a strong biological urge to spread their genetic material around. Jax, and every other man Marietta had ever come across, merely had to look at an attractive young woman to want to make love to her. Which is why you couldn’t trust any of them.

“Snap out of it, Vicky,” Marietta said. “Remember how you said I was your role model. Well, you’re ogling the man who was heckling your role model.”

“Heckling,” Vicky repeated, but she still wasn’t operating on all cylinders. Whatever bolts kept her brain in place had seriously loosened.

“I wasn’t heckling you.” Jax looked taken aback. He transferred his attention from Vicky’s starry eyes to Marietta’s nearsighted ones. “I was disagreeing with you, which I wouldn’t have done in the first place if you hadn’t said such ridiculous things.”

The insult cut into Marietta, taking precedence, for the moment, over her questions as to why he was here at Kennedy College making ridiculous insinuations about rights he should well know were legally nonexistent. This was her profession he was insulting, her passion. She balanced a hand on her hip. “I suppose this means you think you’re in love with someone?”

Confusion crossed his good-looking face, and Marietta knew in that instant that she had him. A corner of his mouth twitched, as though he didn’t want to admit the inevitable.

“Well, no, actually I’m not in love.” He quickly added a qualifier before Marietta could smile in triumph. “But I could be.”

The ray of hope that crossed Vicky’s face was so dazzling even Marietta couldn’t miss it.

“I mean, I will be,” Jax said. “One day.”

“I assume,” Marietta continued in her most scholarly tone, “that means you’ve never been in love?”

“If you’re talking about romantic love,” Jax said, “I’d have to say that’s true.”

“The sexual encounters you have had, then, weren’t motivated by love. In fact, I maintain they had nothing to do with love.”

“You’re twisting—”

“So that proves my point,” Marietta finished triumphantly. “Sex is what makes the world go ’round. Not love.”

“Professor Dalrymple.” Vicky, it seemed, had at long last found her voice. “Don’t you think you’re being too hard on him?”

“Hah!” The idea was so laughable that Marietta actually laughed, right in Jax’s handsome face. “I couldn’t possibly be too hard on someone so mercenary he’d sell his soul if he could find a way to extract it from his body.”

“Now, wait just a minute. You don’t know anything about me.” A red flush peeked through Jax’s olive complexion, and Marietta was perversely glad. After what he’d done, he ought to be ashamed of himself. He certainly didn’t have the right to take the moral high ground, and she wasn’t going to let him.

“I know that you took thousands of dollars of my money for something priceless. That’s all I need to know, buster.”

“Oh, come on.” The words were laced with disgust. “I’ll say this in professor lingo, so you’ll understand. You’ve reached a faulty conclusion. I don’t want your money. I never did.”

Reaching into his suit jacket, Jax withdrew two envelopes from an inner pocket. He tried to hand them to her, but she backed up, rendering him so blurry she could no longer make out his expression.

“What’s going on?” Vicky asked, but Marietta ignored her. As did Jax.

“Oh, no,” Marietta said. “I am not taking that money back. I am not going to let you renege on our deal.”

“If you’d listen to me for one minute, you’d realize we don’t have a deal.”

Marietta shook her head so vigorously some of her hair loosened from her bun and swung into her face. She swiped it back. Great. She was having a bad-hair day in the midst of a crisis of staggering proportions.

“A deal’s a deal, and I’ve got the documentation in my office to prove it.” She turned on the low heel of her sensible shoe and walked away from him, squinting to give herself a better view of the surroundings. It didn’t help. She misjudged the aisle and bumped into the edge of the first row of seats. Then she forgot about the descending single step that led to the door connecting the lecture hall to the outside hallway. She tripped, righting herself inelegantly on the door frame before she could fall.

“What is wrong with that woman?” Jax asked under his breath. The anger he was trying hard to hold simmered just beneath the surface of his skin, making his blood bubble.

“She can’t see,” Vicky answered.

“You’re right about that. I’ve never met anyone so stubborn about seeing another person’s side of an issue.”

“That’s not what I meant. She can’t see, literally. I stepped on her contact lens in the ladies’ room, and she didn’t have her glasses with her.”

That was just great, Jax thought. The woman carrying his baby was navigating Kennedy College as though she were a bumper car come to life. Hell, yes, he had rights. And the most pressing one involved the right to assure that she didn’t smash his baby before it was born. He took off in the direction Marietta had gone.

“Wait,” Vicky called after him. He didn’t stop moving, but glanced backward over his shoulder. “I find you very attractive.”

“Uh, that’s nice.” Jax noticed her appearance for the first time. She was petite with classic features and dramatic coloring, the kind of woman who probably commanded a lot of male attention. He wasn’t interested, but that didn’t mean he had to hurt her feelings. “You’re very attractive yourself.”

“Wait,” she called again. He was already at the door, but he paused once again when all he wanted to do was talk sense into Marietta. Darn his mother for drilling good manners into him. “Are you in favor of equal rights?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Good. It’s been a wonderful boon for us dating feminists who like to do the asking out. Dinner and dancing would be fine with me. So would sex. Sex would be very fine.”

Jax felt as though he were lost in the Land of the Romantically Impaired. Wasn’t there anybody at Kennedy College who believed that taking the time to develop a certain affection for each other, even if it didn’t amount to love, should be a prerequisite for sex?

“Sorry,” he said, “but I can’t go out with you, or do any of the other things you mentioned. I’m involved with your professor.”

The tiny feminist’s brows rose. “Does
she
know this?”

“She will soon,” Jax said under his breath and gave chase. Marietta had thirty yards on him, and she was walking in the dead center of the hall. The better, he thought, not to crash into anything. Her hair was mussed, and she was wearing another one of those amorphous tent dresses, this one in dreary shades of black and gray. On top of it, she’d thrown on an unstructured black jacket. From behind, she looked like a walking sack.

“Hey, wait a minute,” he yelled, running to catch up with her. The bottoms of his fine leather shoes echoed in the hallway, and she walked even faster. He’d almost caught her when she took an abrupt turn and rammed into the side of an office door.

“Oof.”

“Careful,” Jax said, noting that the name on the door was her own. Ignoring him, she threw it open and bumped into the edge of a shining mahogany desk on the way to her file cabinet. Rubbing her leg with one hand, she rummaged through some file folders with the other. After a few moments, she drew out one and handed it to him.

“There,” she said, sounding as though she’d just won a battle. “You can’t argue with that.”

Jax read the heading of the file folder in his hands: “Coolidge Effect on male sexual behavior.” Because he couldn’t help himself, he flipped open the folder.

The first page contained an anecdote about President Calvin Coolidge and his wife being given separate tours of a government chicken farm. When Mrs. Coolidge witnessed a rooster copulating with a hen, she asked the attendant how often the rooster engaged in such behavior. “Dozens of times each day,” the attendant answered. She requested that he please tell that to the president. The president, after hearing about the randy rooster, asked the attendant if the rooster always copulated with the same hen. “Oh, no,” replied the attendant, “always a different one.” The president reportedly quipped, “Please mention that fact to Mrs. Coolidge.”

Jax laughed.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” Marietta said.

“Do you think President Coolidge actually said that or is it an apocryphal tale?”

“What?” Marietta came across the room, uneventfully this time, and snatched the folder from his hands. She took out the top paper and held it inches from her eyes. “I obviously gave you the wrong folder.”

“You didn’t answer my question. Do you think he said that?”

“Of course he said it.” She moved back to the file cabinet. “The Coolidge Effect is an accepted scientific term.”

“Meaning?”

“It means that males have a tendency to lose interest in their current sexual partners whereas they can be stimulated indefinitely by a variety of partners.”

Jax could just make out the shape of her delectable rear as she bent over the cabinet. If they hadn’t had more important matters to discuss, he would have disputed the Coolidge Effect. Having sex with her hadn’t diminished his interest in the slightest. Despite what she’d done.