“Then,” Rowan said, “he asked to open our relationship.”

The statement was greeted by stunned silence…but only for a moment.

“What?” Kasey yelled. “How could he? What a douchebag!”

Rowan took another sip of wine. It was her third glass. The first two she’d drunk before she started the story, while the other women were all sharing their own tales from the past few weeks. She’d known that her own situation would bring the conversation to a halt, which was why she’d waited to tell them.

“He has some balls on him,” Carole said, shaking her head to show that, for once, she did not consider this a positive. “Some major in-your-face balls.”

Even Lauren, the lawyer in their group who usually reserved her judgments, was red-faced. And she didn’t even drink.

“What did you say, Ro?” Lauren asked once the other two women had quieted down to a discontented murmur.

Rowan blinked hard then took another swallow from her glass. Her three friends waited patiently while she stalled.

“I cried.”

They all spoke at once, each according to her temperament, filling Rowan’s apartment with their indignation.

“Oh, Ro!”

“Darling—”

“That bastard.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Rowan said, feeling defensive, although no one had said anything to make her feel that way. “It was such a shock. I mean, I knew that he was working later and sort of…drifting away. He barely seemed to listen to anything I said when he finally did come home.”

Lauren nodded sagely. “Classic signs of adultery.”

Rowan frowned. “We’re not even married, so it wouldn’t even be an ‘open marriage’. Still, it has to be better than cheating, right?”

Her friends exchanged glances.

“You’ve already told him yes?” Kasey asked, her words lilting up into a squeak.

“I told him I would think about it.”

“Think about what?” Carole’s voice rose to fill the combined living-dining room. “Asking for an open relationship probably means he’s already cheating. He’s got one foot out of the door already. He just wants to make it easier on himself by forcing you to hold the door open the rest of the way.”

Rowan dropped her gaze only to find that the contents of her wineglass were now suspiciously blurry.

“He’s not cheating,” she said. “He assured me he wasn’t. But there is this woman at his work…”

“Oh, Ro!” Lauren said again, as if Rowan was the saddest excuse for a human being she’d ever met.

Rowan looked up. “Isn’t it better this way?” she demanded. “At least now I’ll know where he is instead of wondering and suspecting. It’s making me crazy, the stories I come up with in my head. I can’t do it anymore. I have to say yes.”

“No, you don’t,” Carole insisted. “You can tell him to take his emotional blackmail and get lost.”

“And what am I going to do with myself?” Rowan asked. “Sit here and mildew? I’m almost forty. I’m older than all the rest of you. I’ve invested more than a year in Stewart.”

“And maybe it’s time to sell that investment,” said Carole. “Cut your losses. Take the tax credit. However you want to say it. Find someone else.”

Rowan’s fingers tightened around the glass stem. “Do you think it’s easy at my age?”

“It isn’t easy at any age,” Lauren said, “but that doesn’t mean you give up on yourself.”

“I’m not giving up on myself!”

She just wasn’t giving up on her and Stewart…yet.

Stewart’s suggestion had been more of an ultimatum. Let him see other women—the part where she got to see other men was more illusory since he knew she never would—or he would move out. In fact, maybe he should move out anyway. It would be awkward bringing women home if she was hanging around all the time.

Open the relationship and make yourself scarce was what Rowan had heard. And she didn’t think she had misunderstood the implication.

She took a shaky breath. “If he gets this out of his system now, maybe he’ll be more ready to settle down at the end of it.”

“Get what out of his system?” Carole wanted to know. “Cheating? Philanderers never do reach bottom, you know. Take it from me, there’s always another pussy out there they just have to tap.”

Rowan flinched. Maybe her friends were right. They certainly sounded convinced that they were. But it was still her life.

“I can’t take the chance,” she told them. “I love Stewart.”

The other three women groaned loudly.

“How can you love someone who treats you like shit?” Carole wanted to know.

Lauren made a face. “Love can be the worst motivation.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” said Kasey, shaking her head.

“I don’t!” Rowan said. “Isn’t that obvious?”

Kasey went around refilling their glasses from one of the vintage bottles they each kept stashed for ‘emergencies’.

“This certainly qualifies,” she defended when Lauren raised her eyebrows at the bottle’s appearance.

Rowan didn’t touch her new glass. She was already feeling buzzed, and now she was getting a little teary again.

It wasn’t Stewart. Not really. It was just the need to be with someone. She knew she could get over being alone and feeling like a failure. She’d done it before. But this time she was thirty-eight.

Carole was ten years younger than she was. She could afford to be strident about her independence. She had all the time in the world.

Lauren was happily divorced with a pair of six-year-old twins and an ex-husband she co-parented with on a friendly basis. Her divorce could be put in a textbook.

Kasey avoided the entire male minefield. She was a lesbian and in a committed relationship of four years.

None of them understood the position she was in.

“Well, I wish you luck, Rowan.” Lauren raised her glass to the group. “You’re strong. If there’s a woman alive who can make this work, you can.”

“Hear, hear,” Kasey muttered but her heart didn’t seem in the sentiment.

“If you want him killed—or at least crippled—I know a guy,” Carole offered.

They all laughed.

“Hear, hear,” Kasey repeated with renewed vigor.

Rowan took a sip of the wine, letting it coat her tongue with its heady richness. “I really hope it doesn’t come to that.”

* * * *

“I don’t know how you work for that woman,” Micah’s friend Jay said as they both watched the stunning black-haired beauty walk across the office floor. They were sitting in the little kitchenette where most of the employees took their morning break. Of course, department heads like the woman who’d just walked by were able to stroll into the office whenever they felt like it.

Micah didn’t glance up from his phone. He’d stopped looking at his boss a long time ago. Her appearance did something to his head. When she gave him that small nod of approval, he felt like it was filled with helium, and he floated around in a daze for hours afterward. When she frowned over a tiny mistake he’d made, his stomach gnawed at him for the entire day. It was like working on a rollercoaster.

“If I was in your department, I would never get any work done.” Jay nudged him in the side. “You don’t seem too bothered. Too much of a good thing, I guess, huh?”

“She’s gorgeous,” Ethan added, joining them at the round table in the middle of the room with his favorite ‘Wake Me Up When It’s the Weekend’ mug in hand, “but she’s also a twenty-four-carat bitch. Working for her as long as you have, Micah, I’m not surprised you don’t give a shit how hot she is. I only needed three months before I realized how badly the witchery trumped the fuckworthiness. I bet you didn’t need much more than that to figure it out, did you, big boy?”

“She is picky as hell,” Jay agreed, “but goddamn, that ass. Does she have to wear such tight skirts all the time? Every time she walks by, I lose my train of thought and end up fantasizing about taking her over my desk, ramming her like—”

“Jay.”

The single word was usually enough to shut his friend up, especially when Micah accompanied it with a sharp look. Today, though, neither seemed to work.

“Sorry, man,” Jay said, not sounding the least bit apologetic. “I know you get along with her. That’s why you’ve lasted more than the usual three months. At least I passed my probation before she told me I had to get out of her sight. By then I was able to get my place in Corporate Communications, which is where I wanted to be anyway.”

All three men possessed business degrees from good colleges, but in the current job market that meant next to nothing. At least their degrees allowed them to be flexible, fitting in within three different departments in the same large company.

“What sane person would want to stay in Accounts?” Ethan asked. “I mean, after you get over ogling La Lacy and filling your spank bank, what else is there to do? Stare at an Excel sheet and run a fucking calculator? That shit is mega boring.”

“You’re in Compensation,” Micah pointed out. “That’s all numbers, too.”

Ethan leaned back in his chair, cradling his mug to his chest. “Yeah, but my boss is Linda Phillips. I made the entire company’s paychecks two days late last year, and she didn’t even give me a warning letter. It’s like working for my fucking grandmother.”

“Well, Rowan’s not like that,” said Micah. He drained his coffee and set the empty cup on the table.

“No, La Lacy is not like that,” Ethan agreed. “She’s more like a hot aunt or a sexy older stepsister. She’s definitely the kind of older woman I would have wanted my first lay to be, instead of my parents’ next door neighbor Mrs. Clancy. I still can barely stand to visit them. Mrs. Clancy’s still divorced, but she’s nowhere near what she used to be—not that she was exactly a hot piece of ass to start with. But, hell, I was eighteen. What did I know?”

Hearing his boss being placed in the same category as the unknown Mrs. Clancy annoyed Micah, yet it was no more than the usual gym or Friday night bar conversation. He didn’t know why he felt so defensive over Rowan Lacy. It wasn’t as if she’d done him any favors the way he’d seen other bosses bend over backward to help their underlings. In fact, his winning the promotion to the new position he was stepping into at the end of the month had nothing to do with her. Her only reaction to hearing that he would be moving to another floor was to grumble that she’d have to start looking for his replacement—a chore she’d already offloaded on him.

“I’d better go,” he said, getting up. “I’ve got interviews all afternoon.”

“How’s that going?” Jay asked.

Micah stretched to try to loosen up the muscles he’d overworked that morning at the gym, but he stopped as soon as he caught a couple of passing women staring.

“It’s going,” he said.

Jay grinned wolfishly. “Any worthy candidates?”

“Oh, no,” Ethan immediately put in. “La Lacy won’t go for that. All her assistants are men…always.”

“I wonder why,” Jay mused out loud. “She doesn’t try to hit on them, as far as I know. At least she never tried to hook up with me.”

He sounded faintly aggrieved.

“Micah’s in a different category,” said Ethan. “What about it, Micah? Did La Lacy ever try to get into your skinny trousers?”

“You mean, on top of every other eligible female in the building and some not so eligible?” Jay stared at his friend for a moment. “Tell me your secret, Micah. It’s only fair. I do my hair like yours, but it doesn’t look as good with dark hair so I dye it and I end up looking like frigging Billy Idol. I wear skinny trousers, but it doesn’t look stylish on me. It looks like I just borrowed some of my sister’s clothes.”

“Go to the gym more,” Ethan suggested with a snide smile at Jay’s midsection. “Micah’s religious about it.”

“I’m all right,” Jay insisted. “We can’t all have six packs.”

Ethan was ready with another suggestion. “Get colored contacts.”

“Why do women go so crazy over blue eyes?” Jay moaned.

“My eyes are green,” Micah pointed out.

“Green, blue, gray. Anything but brown,” said Jay. “But contacts make me squint. It’s better to have brown eyes and no squint, right?”

“I’m just messing with you,” Ethan finally admitted. “No one can match our boy Micah, even if they were willing to go under the knife for it. For one thing, he’s taller than both of us. You know how well tall guys make out with the ladies. I have to lie and tell girls I’m six feet, when they always guess that he’s six-four!”

“I’m six foot one,” said Micah, trying hard not to laugh.

“We hate him,” Ethan said, grinning to show that he was joking. “Don’t we, Jay?”

“I don’t,” said Jay, refusing to play along. “Whenever we go to the bars, he might get all the attention, but I get the leftovers, and that’s not too bad.”

“Are there any leftovers?” Ethan asked. “I thought he took ’em two or three at a time.”

Micah snorted. “One’s enough for me. I’m out of here. See you two later.”

“Beer after work?” Jay called after him.

“You know it.”