“I’m right here,” I call, hurrying down the two stairs, my back to our tiny dining area as I face Jamie in the kitchen.

She looks at me oddly, probably because I’m still laughing. She holds up the handle of my Dallas Cowboys mug. The rest of the shattered blue ceramic is scattered on the tile at her feet. “Sorry,” she says.

“It’s okay.” I’m still laughing. I don’t know why. Relief, I guess.

“It was a ridiculous favorite, anyway,” she says, as if I’m giving her grief about the mug. “You don’t even like football.”

“It was big,” I said. “It could hold hot chocolate and marshmallows without the chocolate dribbling over the side when you stick a spoon in.”

“Yeah, but what’s the point of drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows if you’re going to be all prissy about it?”

I can’t argue with that, so I don’t. Instead I shove my feet into a pair of flip-flops that are by the stairs, then step gingerly into the kitchen to get the small broom and dustpan I put under the sink after I moved in.

“Thanks,” she says, then rolls her eyes when I hand the broom to her. “Okay.” She sighs. “Fine.”

As she squats down, much better dressed for the job in jeans than I am in my towel, I ask where she’s been. “I was worried,” I admit. “Did you sleep somewhere else?”

“Shit no.” She brushes the last of the mug splinters into the dustpan, then tilts her head to aim a cat-ate-the-canary grin up at me. “I may have stayed out all night, but I didn’t sleep.” Her dreamy grin fades and she peers hard at me. “And you? Because it seems to me your bed’s not getting all that much action lately. Pretty soon you’re going to have to sign the poor thing up for therapy. Loneliness can lead to depression, you know.”

“I’ll get right on that,” I say dryly. “And as a matter of fact, no. I wasn’t here, either.”

“Uh-huh.”

I hold my hands up in surrender. “I didn’t say a word,” I point out. “But if I were going to say something, it would only be that when I stay out all night it’s with the same guy. You have so many different men you should start a Facebook page just to keep track of them.”

“Not a bad plan, actually. Except that I think this guy might be something special.”

I gape. “Seriously?”

“Totally. He’s not as fuckalicious as Damien-king-of-the-world-Stark, but I wouldn’t run screaming from a repeat performance. Or even a triple play, for that matter.”

This is as close as I’ve ever heard Jamie get to discussing a relationship. To say I’m bowled over would be an understatement. “You can’t just drop a bomb like that on me when I’m running late. So come on. We can talk while I get dressed.”

She follows me into my bedroom and perches at my desk in front of my laptop. It’s open, and the screensaver is a slideshow of pictures of Damien that I took in Santa Barbara. Damien with so much light and humor in his eyes that I can’t ever look at those photos without smiling. Between that screensaver and the exquisite, original Monet painting Damien gave me that now hangs between my desk and my dresser, I cannot enter this room without feeling cherished. It’s a nice feeling, and one that I am not used to. In college, my apartment was simply a place to live. With my mother, my room was the place I wanted to escape. But here, there is Jamie and my newfound freedom. There is excitement. There is potential.

Most of all, there is Damien.

This room is proof that I really have moved on, and that where I am going is where I want to be.

At my desk, Jamie is typing away. “Raine,” she finally says.

I’m standing by my closet, debating between a blue skirt and a gray one, and it takes me a moment to realize she’s not talking about precipitation.

“Bryan Raine,” she says, when I turn to face her, as if that will make me understand. Since my face apparently continues to register complete cluelessness, she shakes her head in mock exasperation, and taps the laptop screen. “My guy is Bryan Raine.”

Despite my rush, I’m curious enough to forgo my wardrobe analysis to see what she’s doing, and when I reach my desk, I see that she’s pulled up a series of images. They’re all of the same man. Gorgeous, mostly shirtless, with a well-fucked quality and the kind of eyes and facial structure and that dirty blond hair a camera loves. Most of the images, in fact, are from advertisements. Cars, men’s cologne. Jeans. I have to confess that the man could definitely sell a pair of jeans.

“That’s him,” Jamie says proudly.

“That’s the guy you were out with last night?”

“Yup.” She grins mischievously. “Though we stayed in most of the time. Pretty hot, huh?”

“He’s incredible,” I say as I move to my dresser and rummage for panties and a bra. For a moment, I hesitate. In the game I’ve been playing with Damien, I’ve had to follow his rules. And for the last two weeks, I’ve worn neither bra nor panties. It was odd at first, but undeniably sexy, especially when I was with him, knowing that at any moment he could slip a hand under my skirt. That he could touch me, tease me, even fingerfuck me.

There’s something desperately erotic about being naked beneath your clothes, and even when Damien wasn’t around, my body was keyed up, and I was aware of every brush of material over my rear and every whisper of a breeze that stroked my sex.

But this isn’t a game, it’s the first day of a new job and the Elizabeth Fairchild Rules for Living are too ingrained in my life. I might have spent my entire life trying to escape from my mother, but she has still soaked in through the cracks. And in my mother’s world, the thrill of sexual freedom doesn’t override the necessity of panties at work.

I slip on my underwear, sigh, and return to the closet to continue debating my outfit.

I glance at Jamie to see if she has an opinion, but she’s still gazing dreamily at the screen. “Don’t get drool on my keyboard,” I chide. “So how did you meet him?”

“He’s my co-star,” she says, referring to the commercial she’s about to start shooting. “He mostly models, but he’s also done a few television guest appearances and he was even one of the bad guys in the last James Bond movie.”

“He was?” I’d actually seen that movie, and I don’t remember him.

“Well, he stood around with a gun and looked hot,” she amends. “But he was on the bad guy team.”

“But you guys haven’t started to shoot yet,” I say, because I’m still confused. “So why did you go out with him? Which one?” I add, holding up the two skirts I’m considering.

“The blue. And he called me. He said that since the commercial’s basically a love story in thirty seconds, we ought to go out and suss out our chemistry.”

“I take it the chemistry is good?”

“Sizzling,” Jamie agrees, and although I’m still not thrilled about the ease with which Jamie bounces from bed to bed, I can’t deny that this morning my roommate looks good. Sparkly, fizzy good, and I figure that the new job and the new guy have a lot to do with that. I feel a surge of protectiveness mixed with relief and tinged with a tiny bit of worry. Jamie’s never confided in me about it, but I’m pretty sure that before I moved in she often chose her men based not on attraction but on their willingness to help her make the mortgage. If a real relationship develops between Jamie and Bryan Raine, no one will be happier than me. But if he ends up breaking her heart, I have a feeling that my strong, self-sufficient roommate will shatter.