Dance of Seduction by Elle Kennedy Page A

douse themselves with. Viv’s scent was more subtle, lemony, intoxicating, the kind of perfume a mature woman wore.
    He inhaled deeply, branded the sexy smell into memory, and clicked on the first image. A pig-tailed nine-year-old Ellie beamed out at them, clad in a pink tutu and white ballet slippers. “This was Ellie’s first major recital,” he explained. “It fell on the same weekend my entire junior class went to Los Angeles for the year-end trip. I didn’t go.”
    He moved to the next photo before Vivian could comment. “This is my high school graduation.” He cringed at the out-of-focus shot of him accepting a diploma. “Don’t mind the blurriness, Ellie’s camera-challenged, but see all those students standing there with me?”
    Vivian nodded. “Yeah.”
    “To this day I don’t know any of their names. I graduated with them a year early instead of with my friends. I was sixteen.”
    “Josh, what’s the point of all this?”
    He moved the mouse. “Okay, me graduating from college, blurry again thanks to my sister. I was twenty.” He paused. “You know I never went to a single party in college?”
    “Why not?” she murmured, her face fixed on the monitor.
    “I spent days attending classes and nights helping Ellie with her homework. Weekends I’d drive her to ballet.” He chuckled. “I don’t think my aunt even knew Ellie and I were living in her house. She was out day and night, doing God knows what. She was living off my uncle’s life insurance, so she didn’t have a job or any discernible responsibilities to take care of. She certainly didn’t take care of us.”
    He absently skipped a few of the images, mostly Ellie at recitals, and clicked on one of himself and a pretty redhead. “Me and Cynthia, my first serious girlfriend. This was taken at a bed and breakfast we went to for one night while Ellie stayed at a friend’s.”
    “You look exhausted.” Vivian touched his face in the photograph and ran her index finger over the dark circles under his eyes.
    “I was. I’d stayed up the night before cramming for the LSATs, then spent the morning taking Ellie to the dentist, ballet practice and then to her friend’s house.” He offered a wry grin that Vivian didn’t see with her back turned to him. “Can you believe I fell asleep right in the middle of sex? Needless to say, Cynthia dumped me the next day.”
    Josh went through the pictures one by one, explaining each one calmly and with a little bit of self-deprecation. Damn, he really had led a boring life, hadn’t he? Once he felt he’d hammered his point home, he logged off the Internet and switched off the computer, waiting for Vivian to say something.
    When she didn’t move, he firmly grasped the back of her chair and swiveled it around. “So?” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. He pinned her down with an expectant stare.
    She stayed silent, making him want to reach out and shake her. Christ, hadn’t those pictures been the proof she needed? To him, the images made everything pretty damn obvious. The moment his parents had died, any immaturity on his part had died with them. He’d spent his teenage years parenting his sister. He’d studied for law school instead of partying. He’d forsaken relationships so that he could build a stable career for himself, so that his little sister would be taken care of for the rest of her life. He’d never once dropped any of his burdens or responsibilities on someone else, and anyone who knew him now could argue that he was the oldest thirty-year-old on the goddamn planet.
    So why the hell didn’t Vivian Kendrick see it?
    “I’m not a kid,” he said, slightly startled by the menace in his tone. He quickly softened it. “I’m a man, sweetheart. I worked my ass off to become a lawyer, and like you, I spent most of my life taking care of someone else.” His jaw tightened when Vivian still didn’t answer. “If you can’t see that, Viv, maybe I really am wasting my