Scandal. Julie Kistler
was sure if they’d bothered to get married at all—and they were crazy, unconventional and high maintenance in all the ways she wasn’t and Daniel certainly wasn’t. But still…Moving to New Jersey and dealing with his parents and—
A wedding? Was he insane?
“I don’t mind postponing a honeymoon till later, do you?” Daniel rolled on. “I put that down as item twelve, if you want to look ahead on the schedule.”
She frowned. “Daniel, I need you to stop. This is…impossible! I can’t do it.”
He didn’t look pleased, but he did pause at least. Finally, he asked, “Which parts?”
“All of it!”
“Why?”
“Because…” She leaned forward to push her stomach into her drawer, just to make sure it clicked shut with Nick’s pictures inside. “Because I’m not ready. I’m teaching a class this semester. And I’m not finished with my thesis. You know all of that. I’m not at a place where I can leave Chicago, let alone think about weddings.”
He sent a pointed glance at the jumble of notebooks and folders on her desk. “Maybe it’s past time you cut your losses and moved on.”
“Cut my losses?”
“Maybe you should find another dissertation topic,” he said coolly.
“Dump my dissertation? Are you kidding?” First he blindsided her with this marriage stuff, and then he went totally off the deep end. “I’ve worked my butt off to get this far. And what I have is really good material. I’m not going to abandon it.”
He shook his head. “You still don’t have an ending, do you?”
No, she didn’t have an ending, which he very well knew. But that didn’t mean she was going to give up.
After a long pause, Daniel added, “I’ve been as patient as I can. But we had a plan, an agreement. I’m on schedule. You’re not.”
Jordan already knew the rest of it. If you don’t finish your dissertation, we can’t move on to the next step of the life we’ve so carefully planned…. Remember, full professor by forty…
It was the mantra he lived by, not just for himself, but for the two of them. Daniel wanted them to be the perfect faculty couple, brilliant in their own fields, moving toward the top of the academic ladder faster than anybody else. She’d thought that was what she wanted, too.
At some point, however, the whole idea had become suffocating. She thought of the scandalous women she’d studied and taught about. They would’ve laughed at a “full professor by forty” decree.
“Maybe I’m sick to death of living my life by a schedule,” she began, thinking things through as she spoke. It was a radical idea for her, not to have a plan set down, but this whole freedom and spontaneity thing was starting to sound really good.
Daniel just regarded her balefully.
“Maybe it’s time to rip up the schedules and throw away the rulebook,” Jordan said with more conviction than she felt. “Maybe it’s time for me to do what I want to do.”
“When have you ever done anything else?” Daniel scoffed. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, Jordan. Really, I don’t. I didn’t want to say anything, but, well, you’ve been acting strange for months. I’ve been trying to plan ahead for this new phase of my life, all the while wondering why my fiancée is dragging her heels.”
“I’m not dragging my heels. I’m just…” What? What could she possibly say to explain why she didn’t want to marry him now? And maybe not later. Because there was clearly something wrong with their relationship if the sex was way hotter with her dream lover than with her real one? “I have to point out that I’m not technically your fiancée. We agreed that we wouldn’t talk about marriage again until I was done.”
“But you may never be done.”
“I will finish, Daniel. You know I will.” She stopped, not sure what to say. “I love this project. Is it so wrong to hold out for the perfect ending?”
“I don’t think this has anything to do with the ending,” Daniel retorted. He turned away, muttering, “That’s a symptom, not a cause.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that yes, you’re a perfectionist. So am I. But…” He spun back to face her, pinning her with his gaze. “You know as well as I do that there are a million ways to finish the damn thing whether or not you know where the twit disappeared to. Hypothesize that she fell off a cliff or ran away to Mexico or her family got tired of her acting out and stuck her in a loony bin or sent her to a nunnery. Go with one, argue it and be done with it. See? Problem solved.”
“I can’t even believe you’re saying this!” She stood up, pacing back and forth in the small area behind her desk. Who did he think he was, ordering her around? And calling Isabella a twit? The two of them prided themselves on never arguing, but this seemed like a perfect time to start. “Actually, I do believe it. You never did respect anything except your own field. As if economics is next to godliness. Ha! Heaven forbid anybody else care about their own work.”
He looked shocked. He wasn’t used to being insulted. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself.
“Numbers aren’t everything, you know,” she said angrily. “I happen to think that Isabella and her arch say something very important about women and sexuality. I argue in my thesis that she was the first mainstream female artist to give women orgasms. Did you know that? Huh?”
His sneer was very unattractive. “And you really think that’s an appropriate topic for a real scholar?”
“Absolutely. Just because you’re not interested in whether Victorian women were completely repressed sexually and even denied the right to their own orgasms—”
“Oh, please!” he interrupted. “We both know the reason you’re not finished has nothing to do with Isabella or her pornographic arch or the repressed orgasms of Victorian women.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means…” His eyes narrowed. “It means that you’ll never find the right ending. Because you don’t want to.”
“Why? Why would I not want to?”
“Because that would mean being done with him .”
The word him hung there in the air between them for a long moment. Jordan started, stopped, and started again. Finally, she hedged with, “Him who?”
“You know who! The brother. You’re obsessed with the brother.”
She backed away from her desk, shaking her head. Did he know? About her dreams? No, he couldn’t. Keeping her dignity, she declared, “My only interest in him is because he’s important to the project and hopefully to finishing the project.”
“Why?” he snapped. “Do you think he had something to do with her disappearance? What’d he do, kill her?”
“Are you kidding? Of course he didn’t kill her. Nick would never have murdered his sister!” But she broke off when she saw Daniel’s triumphant expression.
“You are completely obsessed,” he declared. He came around her desk, grabbed her laptop and spun it toward both of them. “See? You can’t deny it. He’s your freaking screensaver!”
There it was, Nick’s face, photoshopped from the picture with the car. Smiling, full of life, absolutely gorgeous…She gazed down at him. Nick…
“Jordan!”
She jerked back to real life. “Okay, yes, of course that’s him, but—”
“Don’t bother,” he said flatly. “You’ve