Free Emily: Sex and Sensibility by Sandra Marton

had kept him awake most of the night, the woman he’d hoped he’d never see again.
    Emily Madison.
     
     
     

     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
     
     
    Emily’s day had got off to a truly hideous start.
    Well, why wouldn’t it? Her night had certainly been a mess.
    She still couldn’t believe what she’d done. Losing her temper, losing her job…
    Nola wasn’t home. She had a boyfriend, an actor, and she often stayed at his place. That was fine with Emily but last night; she’d have given anything to have Nola there so she’d have had someone to talk to. She’d have told her about the disaster at the Tune-In. And she’d have broken the news that she wasn’t going to come up with her half of this month’s rent.
    The sooner she got that over with, the better.
    And then there was what had happened with that man. Marco Santini.
    That kiss.
    Exhausted as she was, Emily still hadn’t been able to fall asleep. She’d gotten up, made a cup of tea, paced the tiny apartment, turned the TV on, stared at it blankly and then paced some more.
    At five, she’d crawled into bed, dragged the blanket over her head and decided she just wasn’t going to think about any of it. If she just got an hour’s sleep…
    Which was why she’d pretended not to hear Nola come in and climb into her bed on the other side of the curtain they’d hung between the two beds in the pathetic pretense that they each had more than four feet of privacy.
    Within minutes, she’d heard Nola’s breathing turn slow and even.
    If only hers would do the same, but then, she had weighty things on her mind. No money. No job.
    Marco Santini.
    And wasn’t that ridiculous?
    He had kissed her. So what? She wasn’t a child. She’d been kissed before.
    But not like that.
    Or maybe the truth was that no kiss had ever affected her that way. She liked kissing. Liked sex. Even though she’d always thought it was a little overrated.
    Lissa and Jaimie sometimes teased her about her attitude.
    Or her lack of one.
    Always gently, of course, because they were her best friends, but she had never been the one to come home after a date flushed from what had gone on in the back seat of somebody’s Chevy.
    On the other hand, she had never been the one to sob from the pain of a broken heart.
    “Why would any woman in her right mind get involved with a man?” Jaimie had demanded in a tight voice during a three-way Skype session a couple of weeks ago.
    “A damned good question,” Lissa had said.
    Emily had looked at her computer monitor, from one sister’s face to the other’s.
    “Uh, you guys want to talk about it?’ she’d finally asked.
    The answers had been no and no , and when the call ended, Emily had shaken her head the same way she had in the past and wondered how her bright, beautiful, talented sisters could be such fools when it came to men.
    Right.
    And now, after—what?—one kiss from a stranger, she was suddenly an expert on what men and sex were all about?
    “Ridiculous,” she muttered. And flinched. Because ridiculous wasn’t even close to describing what had happened last night.
    She had humiliated herself.
    He’d kissed her. OK. People kissed all the time. She could have stood still and let it happen. She could have turned her face away. She could have said, with Victorian indignation, that driving her home did not entitle him to take liberties.
    Instead, she’d—she’d wrapped herself around him like an octopus. He’d had to peel her off. Then he’d mumbled something polite and escaped as fast as was humanly possible.
    Humiliating didn’t come close to describing it.
    Emily groaned and burrowed deeper under the blankets.
    “Stop it,” she whispered. “Just—just put it out of your mind. You’ll never see him again so why keep thinking about what an absolute fool you made of yourself?”
    What she needed was sleep. A couple of hours, anyway. The day looming before her was going to be tough enough to handle without adding in a brain