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  “Yes!” Georgina yelled, stopping to point emphatically at him.

  “And do you have any idea how brilliant a person has to be to qualify for one? Do you?”

  Simon scratched his bare chest and frowned. “Are you mad at me because I’m smart?”

  “No, Simon. I am furious with you because you are brilliant and wasting it on Simon freaking Says.”

  Simon flopped back onto the bed. Throwing his hands in the air he groaned. “Christ, you sound just like Lillian and Sylvia and Julie and Mary and Maddie and …”

  “Spare me the roll-call of your former girlfriends, Simon,”

  Georgina growled.

  Simon lurched into a sitting position and hissed, “They aren’t my former anything. Lillian is my editor and the other four are my sisters-in-law.” Simon stopped, then said in a much calmer voice,

  “Well, Maddie isn’t technically my sister-in-law but she will be once Ian comes to his senses and…”

  Georgina wildly waved her hands at him. “Stop right there.

  Don’t you dare try to change the subject!”

  Simon leaned forward and said, in a cutting tone, “I hadn’t realized we had a subject going that was any of your business. What I choose to do with my degree is my business, not yours, so just lay off.”

  Georgina felt as if he had slapped her. She was scolding him about squandering his education, acting like she was someone whose opinion mattered to him when the truth was… the truth was…

  She was just another in a long line of women he had slept with.

  “You’re right,” Georgina said, smoothing her hands down her bare thighs, suddenly a little embarrassed to be standing before him naked. “What you choose to do with your education is most certainly none of my business.”

  Simon scooted toward the edge of the bed, his expression softening. “George, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean…”

  “Oh, please don’t apologize,” Georgina said as she oh-so-casually swiped Simon’s t-shirt off the back of the couch. After she pulled it on, she gave an airy wave of her hand and said, “I was just being silly. Ignore me.”

  Georgina dug a clean pair of underwear out of her bag then went to wash her face, brush her teeth and braid her hair. By the time she climbed back into bed, Simon was asleep and Georgina had managed to shove every single one of her inappropriately complicated emotions regarding Simon, his past and especially his future into the deepest, darkest corner of her mind where they belonged.

  Just remember, this ends on Monday.

  “As if I could forget,” Georgina whispered into the dark stillness of the attic.

  Simon Says: Chapter 6

  What’s the harm of a little light bondage between friends?

  —Abigail Scott

  Sunday

  Simon glanced over to where Georgina was curled up on the

  couch, slogging through the Sunday crossword puzzle and nibbling on a scone left over from breakfast. Her unruly curls were piled on top of her head, held in place by two chopsticks that stuck out from her head at weird angles and made her look as if she had had an unfortunate accident at a Chinese restaurant. She was wearing one of his rattiest t-shirts, a pair of faded black sweat pants and she had cotton balls shoved between her toes to keep her freshly painted toenails from getting smudged before they had a chance to dry.

  All in all, she looked like a woman that had about zero interest in the idea of impressing the man she was with.

  And Simon couldn’t have been happier. Sprawled out on his end of the couch, only half-listening to the end of a Dodger game on the radio, Simon felt as if he had stumbled into another man’s life.

  And the thing of it was, he liked it. A lot.

  If anyone had told him on Friday afternoon that he would be happily spending his Sunday afternoon helping a woman shelve books and paint her toenails (and, at the risk of sounding vain, Simon felt he had done a damn fine job on Georgina’s toenails, considering that stupid little brush he’d had to work with and the fact that Georgina’s feet were insanely ticklish) he would have called that person a liar.

  Not that he wasn’t chomping at the bit to pick up where they had left off last night. Far from it. But Simon felt as if he was walking a tightrope. Too much sex and he’d be reinforcing her assumption that he was just in it for the sex. Not enough and she’d think he had lost interest.

  Women. A man couldn’t win for losing with ‘em but Simon

  wasn’t about to let that stop him.

  Georgina belonged with him. All he had to do was convince her of that. He’d flirted with the idea of telling her about The Curse but had immediately nixed it as insufficient evidence. For her, it would be nothing but a bit of kooky family folklore.

  He needed to hand her proof that he wanted her to become a permanent part of his life. Unfortunately, he had blown a golden opportunity last night by shutting her down on the subject of his education and subsequent career choices.

  Defending himself by saying that what he did with his education was no one’s business but his own was a knee-jerk response he gave everyone that went after him for squandering his hard-won Harvard education. Simon wanted to think that, if she hadn’t sprung that conversation on him at two in the morning, he would have handled it better. He’d tried to reopen the subject a few times today but she’d acted as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

  He knew Simon Says was an enormous hurdle between him and happily-ever-after, especially with a woman that craved a façade of respectability. He’d spent half the night tossing and turning, trying to come up with a solution that would allow him to keep both his column and Georgina…

  No go. Simon Says had to die.

  This morning, with Georgina immersed in her initial attempt to solve the Sunday crossword, Simon had called his editor and told her that he was beyond open to the idea of broadening his horizons. Lillian had about jumped through the phone, telling him she would contact the proper authorities and have an answer for him by Thursday, Friday at the latest.

  “I need to know if this is going to happen by Monday morning,”

  Simon had replied, casting a furtive look towards where Georgina was chewing on the end of her pencil and glaring at the crossword.

  “Monday?! Simon, you’ve been dragging your feet on this for months and now you…”

  “Please, Lillian. I’m on my knees here.”

  That had gotten her. Without further comment, Lillian had

  promised that she would try.

  Simon wasn’t sure what he could offer Georgina as proof of his good intentions but the body of Simon Says seemed like an excellent place to start. Strangely enough, now that he had ordered the execution, Simon was actually looking forward to burying the little bastard.

  It had reminded him that Simon Says had started out as a joke, a composite sketch of the idiotic frat-boys he’d run across during his undergraduate years at Harvard. The fact that Simon Says had made his first appearance in The Harvard Lampoon should have tipped people off to the fact that the character had been a joke.

  Instead, Simon had received an offer to bring Simon Says to Los Angeles. Simon had just graduated, he’d been broke and looking for a job that would take him back home to the Southland. And so he had accepted, with the intent of using Simon Says as a stopgap measure between college and a real job.

  Unfortunately for that plan, the money had rolled in almost from the beginning and, to a young man used to pinching every penny until it screamed, living the high life had been more of a seduction than he could resist. The rest, unfortunately, was history.

  Eight years later, Simon finally admitted the awful truth. He had become that which he had initially set out to make fun of, a snide empty-headed playboy.

  “Well, that was stupid,” Simon muttered, rubbing his forehead.

  “What was stupid?” Georgina asked, looking up from her crossword.

  “Me,” Simon said. He would have told Georgina about his little epiphany but his cel
l phone rang. Simon reached over the back of the couch and snatched the phone off the desk. Seeing Lillian’s number on the display, he quickly excused himself and went out to the balcony.

  “Lillian?” he asked, gripping the phone.

  “Simon Says is officially dead and you owe me big.”

  “I know. I’ll do whatever you want, just name it.”

  “Invite me to your wedding.”

  “How did you…”

  “A woman knows these things. Vaya con Dios, you big dumbass and kiss her once for me.”

  Simon walked (floated would have been a better word but Simon refused to apply such a pansy-ass description to his actions) back into the attic at the exact same moment Georgina threw her pencil across the room and yelled, “What normal human being knows the name of Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor right off the top of their head?”

  “Brzezinski,” Simon replied.

  “Bless you.”

  “No, that’s the name of Carter’s National Security Advisor.

  Zbigniew Brzezinski.”

  “I’ll give you fifty bucks if you can spell that,” Georgina teased.

  Eager to show off the fact that he had a fully functioning brain, Simon did.

  ***

  Georgina quickly looked up Simon’s answer, making him spell

  the name twice before she conceded that he was right. Slamming the biography of Jimmy Carter closed, Georgina just stared at him.

  “What?” Simon asked.

  “And you talk about me,” she muttered, tossing the book onto the coffee table.

  “About you what?” Simon asked, stretching his arms over his head. He looked like nothing more than a beautiful, muscular bona-fide bad boy… that just happened to know the name of a man most Americans hadn’t even heard of.

  “You talk about me being a fraud,” Georgina said. “You’re just as bad as me, if not worse.”

  “How do you figure?” Simon asked, slouching down onto the

  couch.

  “List the member states of the European Union.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just do it.”

  And he did, throwing in the fact that Turkey was trying to become a member but their harsh legal system and dicey human rights record were holding them up.

  When he wound down, Georgina threw up her hands in disgust.

  How had she managed to so grossly underestimate him? If

  Simon Campbell was nothing but a spoiled, shallow playboy, then she was the freaking Queen of Sheba.

  Simon had been peeling off layers since the moment she had agreed to spend the weekend with him, revealing more and more of himself. After more than twenty-four hours of this, Georgina was in an almost constant state of panicked anticipation of what fascinating, wholly unexpected thing he was going to reveal next.

  “Do you like opera?” Georgina demanded.

  Simon jerked back as if she had slapped him. “Hell, no.”

  “Well, that’s too bad because I love it! I’ve seen every produc-tion the Los Angeles Opera has performed for the past six years.”

  Simon looked as if he was going to be sick.

  “I’m going to take a bath,” she said, mad at herself for child-ishly playing up one of the few differences between them. It wasn’t his fault. He couldn’t help who he was, just like she couldn’t seem to help liking him, not because he was her fantasy-man come to life but because he was just… well… him. Simon.

  “Uh, George?” Simon asked.

  “What?”

  “Are you mad?”

  “No, I’m not mad… I’m furious. But not with you.”

  After a long soak in the tub, Georgina got dressed then looked at herself in the mirror and tried to be objective.

  “I don’t look like too much of a slut,” she murmured, smoothing her hands over her bare stomach.

  The woman in the mirror did not agree. She thought she looked like a total slut and her expression showed her disgust.

  “What? I have to do this,” Georgina whispered to her reflection.

  “I have to get back on track here. Sweaty monkey sex is all I can afford. If I go back out there in my regular clothes, Simon and I might spend the rest of the evening getting to know each other even more, and I’ll be in love with him before dessert. I tried to put him off today but he didn’t seem to mind the ‘boring Sunday afternoon’ version of me. He actually seemed to like it… what’s that all about? Never mind. Doesn’t matter.

  Coward.

  “Damn straight I’m a coward,” Georgina hissed, piling her hair on top of her head in a loose, sexy up-do. Simon had said he liked her hair like this, so she shoved the chopsticks back into it then pulled a few curls down to rest against her neck.

  Perfect. If Simon wasn’t up for some mindless sex the second he laid eyes on her, well, she didn’t know what she was going to do.

  However, considering the fact she was wearing black silk stockings, a black lace thong and the short black silk robe Valerie had given her for Christmas three years ago, Georgina was thinking Simon wasn’t going to do anything but crawl all over her.

  How exactly these articles of clothing had ended up in the bottom of her suitcase was something Georgina was going to have to bring up with Valerie the next time she saw the meddling little brat, but for now Georgina was a woman with a mission.

  She had to protect her heart from her over-active imagination.

  Spinning fairy tales around Simon Campbell was a heartbreak waiting to happen. Simon had set the time-line for their affair and she had agreed to it. He’d given no indication that he wanted to extent their time together. This was sex just for the fun of it. Nothing more.

  You keep telling yourself that.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  ***

  When Georgina walked out of the bathroom, Simon knew

  something had changed. It wasn’t just her outfit, which was doing a really good job of short-circuiting his thought process. It was more the determined glint in her eye. He had seen that same glint in his mother’s eye when she geared up to clean out his father’s garage, a sort of ‘my-way-or-the-highway’ expression Simon wasn’t so sure should ever be worn by a woman in the bedroom.

  “I was just thinking,” she began, her clear, crisp voice startling in the quiet room. “We talked about my hang-ups but we never got around to yours.”

  Simon shrugged. “I don’t really have any, what you read is—”

  Georgina cut him off. “You honestly expect me to believe that whole what-you-read-is-what-you-get is business? Do I look like a fool?”

  Georgina’s robe had slipped open, revealing what she wasn’t wearing beneath it.

  “Holy God in heaven,” Simon whispered, the sight of her pale skin against all that sinful black clouding his mind. The edges of her robe were caught on her distended nipples, taunting him, daring him to get up and set them free.

  “I’ll be generous,” Georgina purred. “Just one little ol’ hang-up is all I’m asking for.” Noticing the direction of his gaze, she smoothed her fingers down the open edges of her robe, right over her nipples, arching her back a little, hitting him where he was most vulnerable… his obsession with getting her under him.

  “Hang-ups…” Simon mumbled, his tongue suddenly feeling too thick for his mouth.

  Georgina nodded, her smile of the come-hither variety.

  “Bondage,” Simon said, slowly getting to his feet.

  “Oh, so you don’t like to tie women up?”

  Was that relief he heard in her tone?

  “Nope, I like tying the ladies as much as the next guy. Hell, probably a little more if I’m being honest.”

  Georgina’s eyes widened as a flush spread up her chest to blos-som across her cheeks. “Well… uh… then I must assume that you don’t like being tied up.”

  “It’s just not something I feel comfortable letting someone do to me,” Simon said.

  Georgina considered him a moment and Simon cursed at the


  light that came into her eyes. Here it came. If she asked this of him, could he do it? Could he allow her that kind of control over him?

  Georgina pushed away from the desk and approached him,

  slowly, hips swaying, sloe-eyed and dangerously arousing.

  “What?” Simon asked, backing up a step. She kept walking and he kept backing up until the backs of his knees hit the edge of the bed.

  “I want you to let me tie you up,” she murmured, her lips barely moving as she spoke.

  Simon’s entire body broke out in a light sweat at her words. His knees sort of gave out. He sat down on the bed but he tried to make it look as if he had planned it by casually leaning back and bracing his weight on his arms.

  She kneeled down before him, placed her hands on his spread knees and practically purred, “I want to make you come.”

  Holy Christ!

  “Will you let me?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Simon breathed, the words escaping him before he could think through the consequences.

  Georgina smiled, a little grin that would have done the Mona Lisa proud.

  So this was love, doing things that scared you, handing yourself over to someone and trusting that they would take care of you.

  Forget handing her the body of Simon Says, he was going to give her his own.

  If this didn’t convince her that he was in this for more than just a weekend fling…

  ***

  A little light bondage was more than she had bargained for this evening, but since Simon was offering her something he had never offered anyone else, she wanted it.

  Maybe now he’ll remember me past Monday morning.

  “Undress,” Georgina said, rising to her feet in one graceful movement.

  With a nod, Simon got up and started to disrobe, his gaze never leaving hers, until he stood before her without a stitch on, hands at his sides, easy in his nudity rather than arrogant. Not that he didn’t have a lot to brag about. Tall and lean and tawny skinned, she knew every inch of him, had reveled in him. Even the black tracks of his tattoo had become familiar, but they had yet to lose their ability to intimidate. She knew that they were more than the result of youthful excess but she wasn’t about to ask. This was all about the present.