Free One Night With Her by Lauren Blakely Page B

that he slept
with another woman? Or that he slept with her someplace where you
did in the past? Or is it something else?”
    Shayla bit her lip and looked away, perhaps
not wanting to deal with the something else possibility that
had brought her here in the first place. Not that it was her fault
that her husband had a dick that needed to be locked up and sent
straight to jail for its one eye that wandered ALL. THE. TIME.
    Shayla faced a different set of challenges,
and that’s what Michelle needed to help her with. She gently
prodded her client, who sat frozen like a statue, her jaw set hard,
as if she needed to hold all her fears inside. “Or is it because
you think it’s your fault that he isn’t faithful?” Michelle asked
cautiously.
    “It is my fault,” Shayla squeaked out,
insistent. “I haven’t wanted to have sex ever since we had
kids.”
    “And you think that makes it your fault that
he’s cheating on you?”
    “Isn’t it?”
    Michelle shook her head. “Of course it’s
not. He’s responsible for his actions, and only you can decide if
you want to hold him accountable for them. But we also need to keep
getting at the root of the why for you. We spend a lot of
time focusing on him and his actions, but we need to dive into why
you don’t want to have sex with him. Because you lost interest well
before he started cheating on you,” she said. That’s why Shayla was
here, to focus on her own intimacy issues, since that was
Michelle’s specialty—helping patients work through relationship
challenges and fears of closeness. Shayla’s were compounded because
her husband was an ass. But first things first. There would be time
to deal with him later.
    “Let’s talk about why . . .”
    Forty-five minutes later, Michelle flashed a
small smile at Shayla, pleased that her client was making a modicum
of progress. Some days, progress was glacial, and sometimes it was
cheetah fast. All that mattered was that Shayla seemed to be moving
forward. Michelle said goodbye to her, then checked her schedule
for tomorrow on her laptop. It would be another full day, with a
new patient appointment, too. The evening ahead of her was packed
as well—she had a presentation to give at a sexuality conference,
sharing some of her findings with other psychotherapists on sex and
love addiction. She had experience in that area, having helped
guide several patients through the throes of addiction and into
recovery, and the president of the New York Chapter of the
Association of Intimate Relationship Psychologists had invited her.
Carla Kimberly had been a mentor to her over the years, and had
referred patients to Michelle, so it was a double honor to have
been asked to speak tonight.
    She smoothed a hand over her pencil skirt,
adjusted the collar on her crisp white blouse, and changed from
flats to her black pumps. She grabbed her work phone from the
clutter of papers on her desk, but the battery was almost
drained.
    Crap.
    Having two phones, an iPad and a laptop
turned into a juggling act when it came to keeping them all
charged. She forwarded the work phone to her personal cell in case
her service called. On the way out, she stopped in the office
bathroom to brush her teeth and touch up her lipstick.
    There. Now she was ready for a quickie
meeting at The Pierson.
    She laughed to herself. Quickie . Too
bad she wasn’t having a quickie of another kind. It had been a
while since she’d had one of those. She’d dated an actor for a few
weeks in late spring, and she replayed some of her dates with Liam
fondly. He’d been outgoing, gorgeous and quite capable with his
hands, so they’d done plenty, but nothing close to a quickie.
    The problem was even when she’d been pressed
up against Liam, she’d been thinking of Clay. Her very good friend
who also happened to be the man she’d been madly in love with for
ten years. Clay, the gorgeous, sexy, smart entertainment lawyer,
and best friend of her brother.
    Oh, but there was one