Free The Insiders by Rosemary Rogers Page A

asking for you."
    "You rat! You knew how that would get to me. I shouldn't even be talking to you…"
    In the end, though, as they both knew she would, she agreed to meet him right after the location shots she was doing that afternoon.
    "Just give me enough time to take my makeup off and change," she warned him. She remembered he didn't like her to wear makeup when she was with him and they weren't going out anywhere in particular.
    After he'd hung up, David wondered again why he had called her. Sheer instinct, sheer—what? Was it weakness? He had sworn, both to her and to himself, that he was through with her. But he wasn't—that was the hell of it. He still needed her—that much was true. Contrasted with Gloria or any of the other women he'd been seeing recently, Eve was all woman. Loving and giving, soft and yielding. And not asking for his soul in return for a fuck. Gloria was a ballbreaker and too damned possessive. Let her see that he could still have Eve. It was something that he needed to find out, too.
    Thinking about Eve and seeing her again tonight gave him an erection. Gloria was a tease, and Eve wasn't. In bed, Eve gave all of herself—she was warm and wild and wonderful, and she'd made him think it was all for him, that she'd never been this way with anyone else. That was why seeing her in bed with that grinning, fatuous-faced playboy had been such a shock.
    He'd been thinking about that, too, having second thoughts. Frowning, David walked over to the small stove his kitchenette boasted and poured himself his fourth cup of coffee for the morning. Now that he knew Gloria better, he wouldn't put it past her to have engineered the whole thing, just to get him in the sack with her. And perhaps Eve's stammering, almost incoherent attempts to explain and excuse had been genuine, and it had been a misunderstanding after all.
    "I love you, David," she had wept. "Doesn't that mean anything to you, anything at all? Do you think I'd be crawling to you now, without pride, if I were really as cheap and as easy to make as you think?"
    He hadn't listened. At that point he hadn't wanted to listen, much less have to look at her again. Later, through the window of Gloria's room, he had watched Eve drive away with the man she'd been in bed with, and had been certain then that she'd been lying to him. She was hke any other predatory, lying cunt, he'd thought then. Pretending to be something special so she could trap him into marriage; playing around on the side.
    And now—he wasn't certain at all. Except of the fact that he wanted her. God, how he still wanted her! Eve, naked, in bed with him. Beads of perspiration standing out on her skin like the drops of water in that damned photograph. Crying out to him as she made it, calling his name, telling him she loved him. She made him feel good, and their loving never left a bad taste in his mouth —the kind of feeling he had after screwing Gloria. Well, the hell with Gloria. Tonight he'd have Eve. Again. And again, and again.
    There was nothing David derived more enjoyment from than making love—except, perhaps, preparing a brief that he knew was perfect and without any flaws or loopholes. He often considered that in many ways it was a good thing his parents had brought him up to believe that the mind should control the emotions, not the other way around. The emotions were there, yes, but to be practical was much more important.
    He had been taught from his youth, during all those early years of being his parents' only child, their son, to be strong and in control of himself; that emotions were there, yes, but to control them and to be practical was much more important. A man is rational; he can control the physical side of himself and those dangerous emotions that could carry him away. He was taught to be dispassionate rather than passionate, to think rather than react blindly and unreasoningly.
    Ambition, too, was one of the legacies that his parents had left him. That, and a