LITMIR.BIZ

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the same thing. Damn. Again.

      “Yes,” she said. “I was hoping you and I could discuss this matter more reasonably than we did on Saturday. You could start by releasing me and giving me a little breathing space.”

      “What’s to discuss?” he asked. But he didn’t release her. Or give her any space. “You wrote a steaming pile of garbage that included a thinly veiled chapter about me that painted me in a very bad—not to mention false—light. Your book has significantly damaged both my professional and personal lives. And unless you come clean publicly and admit you were lying through your teeth, you’ll have to pay for it.”

      She inhaled a deep breath and released it slowly. Then she surprised him by admitting, “You’re right. That chapter is a pack of lies. In fact, every chapter in that book is a pack of lies. I admit it. None of what I said about any of the men in that book is true.”

      Gavin arched his eyebrows at that. She was already giving up? Evidently, his reputation had preceded him. But then, it always did. Maybe she really did know what she was up against here.

      Reluctantly, he loosened his grip on her wrist and released it. But he was only reluctant because that left her less vulnerable. It wasn’t because he’d actually kind of liked holding her wrist. Well, okay, he’d kind of liked holding her wrist. But only because it gave him the upper hand, that was all.

      “You’re admitting you made it all up?” he asked suspiciously.

      She nodded. “Every word.”

      Now Gavin’s eyebrows arrowed downward. She was saying exactly what he wanted to hear. So why wasn’t he enjoying this more? Oh, right. Because she hadn’t agreed to make her confession public. “And you’re willing to admit that publicly?” he asked.

      She nodded readily. “I am.”

      “You’ll inform both local and national media outlets? Tell everyone that nothing in the chapter entitled ‘Ethan’ is true?”

      “I will.”

      Okay, that was what he’d wanted to hear. But he still didn’t feel triumphant. Why was she giving up so easily? Why wasn’t she fighting him?

      More to the point, why was he so disappointed that she wasn’t?

      Still needing to hear her spell it out, he asked, “You’ll admit, in public, on national television and in the press, that you deliberately defamed me in your book?”

      Her gaze skittered away from his and she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Then she crossed her arms over her midsection in a way that could only be called defensive. “Well, um, no,” she hedged. “I won’t do that.”

      Ah-ha. That was why he’d been feeling disappointed. Because that last admission was the one he’d really wanted her to make. And now she wasn’t. He suddenly felt strangely happy that they were still sparring. What was that all about?

      “You’ll admit it’s all a pack of lies,” he said, “but you won’t admit it’s defamatory?”

      She smiled at him, and his confusion compounded. Because her smile was self-satisfied and somehow became her, and there was nothing becoming about a self-satisfied woman. Women were only supposed to be satisfied by the men in their lives, regardless of the nature of that satisfaction. Women satisfying themselves was—

      Well, okay, women satisfying themselves was actually pretty erotic, he had to admit. But only when that self-satisfaction was sexual in nature. Even if it was Raven French doing that, it would still be erotic. In fact, he thought as he homed in again on her ripe, red mouth, if it was Raven French doing it, it would be even more—

      Annoying, he immediately, adamantly, interrupted his own wayward musing. Unfortunately, like all men, once a sexual thought began to unravel in his mind, there was absolutely no way to stop it, and the next thing he knew, he had an image imprinted at the forefront of his brain of Raven French lying stark naked in the middle of his bed, one hand covering her breast, the other between her legs, stroking herself with measured, leisurely caresses and looking as if she were about to come apart at the seams.

      Damn. An image like that wasn’t going to go away anytime soon. And he had a busy afternoon ahead of him.

      “That’s right,” she said.

      For a single maddening moment, Gavin thought she was agreeing with his belief that women shouldn’t be satisfying themselves unless it was sexually. For another, even more maddening moment, he thought she was going to reach behind herself and lock the door, peel off every stitch of clothing, and gratify herself right there in his office in exactly the way he had imagined.

      Then he remembered that she was the enemy, that she had defamed and libeled him and turned him into a laughingstock at both work and play, and he reminded himself that, even if she did do that whole erotic self-satisfying thing right there in his office, it would be really bad form for him to enjoy watching her.

      Wait. What was the question?

      Oh, yeah. She’d been admitting she had flagrantly lied about him, but that flagrantly lying hadn’t defamed him.

      “Why plead guilty to the first, but not the second?” he asked.

      “Because my book is a pack of lies, but it is in no way defamatory.” He opened his mouth to object, but she hurried on. “It’s fiction, Mr. Mason. Fiction is, by definition, untrue, and therefore lies. Likewise, by being untrue, it cannot be defamatory.”

      He bit back a growl of irritation. “So we’re back to that again, are we? Your novel that everyone knows isn’t a novel at all, but a memoir about your sordid, tawdry life.”

      “We’re back to that because that’s what’s true. Not the part about my life being sordid and tawdry,” she rushed to clarify. “Since it’s neither of those things and never has been. Well, not too sordid,” she clarified further after a telling second. “And only a little bit tawdry. And only in the past, not now. And only if you define tawdry in the sense of shoddy and unsophisticated, not crude and gaudy. And if you define the sordidness more as callousness and unpleasantness and not poverty and squalor. Okay, maybe poverty wouldn’t be so out of place, but I did not come from squalor. Nor do I live in squalor now.”

      She spoke so rapid-fire and with such a roundabout delivery that Gavin’s brain was looped in knots by the time she finished—she was finished, wasn’t she?—with her. whatever it was she’d been talking about.

      “The book is fiction,” she continued before he had a chance to think any more about what she’d said. Not that he wanted to think any more about it, since that would probably make his brain explode. “There’s no way you can prove otherwise.”

      Due to the fog that had rolled in over his thinking, it took another moment for her statement to settle in. But when it did, just like that, the fogged cleared, and Gavin felt the upper hand slip back into his grasp. “I can’t, can I?”

      Something in his tone must have notched a chink in her determination, because her expression, which had begun to grow smug, suddenly went a bit slack. “Um, no?” she replied—in the inquisitive tense, not the demonstrative, which heartened him even more. “No, you can’t?”

      “Ms. French, I can not only argue that the book is nonfiction, I can prove it.”

      “That’s impossible?” she said. Asked. Whatever. “Because there’s no way to prove it? Because it’s all a figment of my imagination?”

      “Really?” Gavin said. Asked. Whatever. Dammit.

      This time, Raven French only nodded her reply. Evidently she, too, had realized that she was beginning to sound like an uncertain second-grader.

      He strode over to his desk and withdrew his copy of High Heels and Champagne and Sex, Oh, My! from the drawer into which he had crammed it over the weekend. As he thumbed through the pages, he made his way back to where Raven French

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