by L. D. Davis
“You wrecked me every time,” Leo said in just above a whisper. “From the very first time you denied me, you wrecked me.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered as tears once again prickled at my eyes.
Leo pulled away slightly and cupped my face in his hands. “I don’t want you to be sorry, Tabs. I want you to stop.”
I nodded as much as I could with his hands trapping me. “You have me forever, Leo. I promise.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Leo went with me to my signing the following afternoon. Most of the readers thought he was a muse, a male book cover model. He loved every second of their attention. When he took his shirt off to show off the hard curves and lines of his chest, he sent the women into a frenzy. I gave him the most disgusted look I could muster, but secretly, I was ecstatic that the man those women were falling over was mine.
He flew home to Miami on Monday, and I flew to Boston, and then D.C. When I returned to New Jersey, I had a little less than two weeks before I had to fly to London. I bought some boxes from a moving company and made arrangements to have my apartment packed up and shipped to Miami at the end of the summer. I wanted to be able to oversee what was going on and I couldn’t do that until I was finished running around the globe. In the meantime, I was going to send a few of my necessities and keepsakes to my new home so that it would be there when I returned from abroad.
My new home. I was actually doing it. I was going to move to Miami and live in sin with Leo Pesciano. I wasn’t afraid anymore, well not the way I was afraid before. There was a nervous excitement building within me. I felt like one of my characters on her way to her happily ever after. I didn’t know if I actually believed in true love in the sense that Leo had described that night in the hotel in Chicago. I didn’t think I actually believed in soul mates and fate, but once he said it, I knew it was true. Even when I hated the guy, I couldn’t deny the power that charged and sparked between us. It was right. It may not have been right before, but it was right then.
I gave up on Leslie. I called her once more when I was in Boston and she still had not returned my phone calls. Not a text, not an email, nothing. Her last Facebook update was so old that when I went to her page, it was covered in cobwebs and tumbleweeds rolled across the screen. For all I knew, Leslie had dropped off of the face of the earth, and until she was willing to contact me again, I had to move on with my life, even if it was with someone she recently loved. There were so many variables involved with that damn girl code, and the biggest one was the state of my relationship with Leslie. It was pretty much nonexistent. How valid is the code if the other party doesn’t even acknowledge me? I’m not making excuses for what I’d done in the past, but we were adults now. Thirty was around the corner. It wasn’t a teenage crush or puppy love. What I had with Leo was the real thing, solid and true. I would deal with Leslie if and when the time arose.
One of the first things I did when I returned to New Jersey was meet the girls for lunch. It was a Thursday, so I had to fetch Mayson from her office first.
“Why are you smiling like that?” she asked, narrowing her eyes with suspicion as I glided into her office.
“Hello to you, too, May,” I said and then embraced her. As I mentioned before, Mayson never really like to be touched. The long embrace I got in Chicago was probably the last one of its kind for a very long time. She hugged me back, but only for about two seconds before she started shrugging me off.
“Okay, get off of me already,” she snapped.
I pulled back, grinning at her as she shook my invisible cooties from her red button up shirt and black slacks. She looked really good; nothing like the disaster she was even five years ago. She continued to eye me skeptically.
“Your stupid smile should be illegal.”
I only gave a one-shoulder shrug in return and continued to smile. Mayson picked her purse up off of the floor and began to rummage through it.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.
“Nothing is wrong,” I said cheerfully. “Everything is great.”
She fished out a stick of lip gloss. As she applied it, she looked at me thoughtfully. “I haven’t spoken to you much since the party. I was really surprised to see you there with Leo. What’s going on with you two? You’ve been hush-hush since we talked when you were still in Miami.”
“I will tell you what is going on with Leo over lunch so I won’t have to repeat the tale. Are you ready yet?” I looked at my watch. “Sandy is probably almost there and she has to get back to work, and Donya is uncomfortably pregnant and would probably rather be at home nesting or something.”
Mayson’s nose scrunched up as we began to walk out of the room. “She’s not happy, you know. She’s pretending she is. I know she’s pretending, because, well…” she shrugged and sighed as she threw her bag over her shoulder. I didn’t think she was going to say any more as she grabbed her sunglasses off of the desk, but then she looked at me and said, “I saw her with Emmet at Lucas’s party. I wasn’t really around when they were dating years ago, I was drugged out of my mind, but I always thought they were…real, like…fairytale kind of shit.” She shook her head. “I don’t think it was supposed to be like this, and I think she’s realizing that now.”
That fight Leo and I had witnessed on the boardwalk all of those years ago was a part of the beginning stages of a blooming romance between Emmet and Donya. It was all kinds of scandalous at the time because the Graynes always viewed Donya as a daughter and sister, and Emmet had almost three years on her. I didn’t see them much, either, when they were together, but I agreed with Mayson, it seemed right. They looked like they belonged together, but they broke up. Donya eventually married someone else, and Emmet followed soon thereafter.
“Well, what can we do?” I asked. “Unless she comes out and says it, who are we to make assumptions to her like that? My friendship with her is still so new.”
“Yeah,” Mayson shrugged. “Just makes me doubt true love.”
“Well, don’t doubt it so quickly,” I said with a secretive smile.
She cocked an eyebrow. “I can’t wait to hear this.”
The elevator doors slid open and Mayson immediately scowled at the man that was standing inside, scowling at her. Amused, I stepped into the cab.
“Grayne,” the man tightly acknowledged.
“Asshole,” Mayson acknowledged with a tight smile.
“Yikes,” I muttered, feeling the chill emanating from the man.
“Is this another incompetent new hire?” he asked, not even bothering to look away from the glowing numbers at the top.
My mouth fell open in surprise, but Mayson didn’t even blink. She looked at her nails with disinterest.
“No, this is my cousin Tabitha and I would never hire her to work for you.”
I didn’t know whether to feel insulted or relieved.
The man’s dark eyes slowly slid to mine. He looked me over, head to toe before coming back to my face where he lingered for too long, as if he saw something in me he recognized before silently turning away.
“We need to discuss any possible candidates before they show up at my office with that lost mutt expression on their faces,” the man said. “No more inferior new hires.”
“Don’t,” Mayson said, pointing a finger at him, “tell me how to do my job. I will gut you with a pencil and feed your innards to the back alley rats.”
The elevator doors slid open and the man stepped out without another word or glance, as if he had never heard Mayson’s threat.
“Who the hell and what the hell was that?” I asked as we walked through the lobby. I dropped my pass with security without even pausing in my steps.
“That was Kyle Sterling, and that, that was just our usual office banter.” She smiled brightly. “He used to be Emmy’s boss.”
“What a dick,” I muttered as I followed her out the door.
At lunch, I told everyone about me and Leo, starting with the reunion. Many other details
came to light also, like what he did to Rico, that first kiss in my bedroom while my brother warred with my parents on the first floor, and what happened when I saw him in college. When Mayson asked me about the tangible tension that was between Leo and me at the party, I reluctantly told them about Leslie. The reactions around the table were mixed. Sandy said to let it go. Mayson told me to confront Leslie with an ass kicking for being a sucky friend. Donya was notably silent on that topic.
Sandy had to get back to the studio to prepare for the evening news. Mayson stormed out of the restaurant after receiving a text message from Kyle. Only Donya and I remained, unhurried, sipping hot tea and picking at a shared slice of cake. She looked at me thoughtfully and seemed to come to a decision as she sighed and leaned forward a little bit.
“Do you know why Emmet and I are not married?” she asked, looking at me intently.
“Umm, because you’re both married to other people?” I asked, surprised by the question. Donya and I never spoke about very serious matters. Really, the details I had just shared with her about Leo were more than we’d ever shared about our personal lives. It took me a while to get over the fact that just because she was Emmy’s best friend, that she wasn’t actually Emmy.
“Do you know why that is?” she asked quietly.
My brow furrowed in confusion. “No.”
She took a breath, bit her bottom lip, and absently ran a hand over her basketball-sized belly.
“I made a lot of bad choices.” She nodded and spoke in such a low voice; I could barely hear her. She sighed and looked at me dead on, her eyes intense. “A little more than an hour before I was supposed to walk down the aisle to marry Jerry, I took off. I was overwhelmed and it was my wedding day and I wasn’t happy. I told myself I just needed a few minutes to myself and everything would be fine. I had a limo driver take me to the pond, you remember the pond?”
I nodded, acknowledging that I remembered the pond near the Grayne’s main family home in Louisiana. I didn’t want to speak, fearing that Donya would stop talking, and I had the feeling she was going to tell me something of importance.
“I have a lot of memories of that pond,” she said with a faint smile. “I used to spend a lot of time there with Fred and the boys fishing, and later that’s where Emmet first proposed to me. I was only sixteen years old.”
God, it looked like she was going to cry. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know what to say. I had no idea what happened between them.
“So, I went to the pond,” she continued, poking at the cake on the plate between us. “And Emmet was there, but I knew he was there before I saw his car. I know it’s going to sound like magical fairy dust bullshit, but it’s not. I knew he was there because I could feel him there. There has always been this unbreakable…cord between us. I could have made the driver turn around so I wouldn’t have to deal with seeing my ex on my wedding day, but now looking back on it, I think I knew. I knew what I was subconsciously hoping for. I was hoping that Emmet would ask me not to marry Jerry, that he would ask me to run away with him, and god, Tabitha—” She smiled sadly and happily all at once as tears brimmed in her eyes. “—I would have gone. I would have left all of those damn people waiting for me to walk that aisle; I would have left Jerry at the altar, and fuck the consequences.”
My mouth opened and shut a few times. I was speechless, struck dumb.
“Emmet did beg me,” she said, nodding. “But…he also dropped a bomb on me. He told me that Casey was pregnant, and I know….I know, I know he was scared and I know that he didn’t want to have a baby with her, but he’s Emmet, you know? He was going to do whatever he had to do for his child, but he was ready to do it with me. He said we could have figured it out together, and he begged and begged for me not to marry Jerry, but I was so angry and hurt, and spiteful. Very spiteful, because I left him there, defeated and low, I left him, and I went and married Jerry anyway.”
My heartbeat fell to a sad tempo as it hurt for Donya and Emmet. I wiped at my damp eyes but still said nothing as I waited for her to continue. She wasn’t crying, though. It was like she was using all the strength she had in her not to cry, and I wondered if she had always been that way.
“I am glad that you chose to be with Leo despite what happened between him and Leslie. It’s not over, you know, the conflict. She’s going to pop up when you least expect it, and she’s going to be mad as hell, and hurt, and if Leo is this good guy like you say he is, he is going to try to do right by her. I’m not saying he’s going to be with her, but he will try to do right by her and fix her. You’ll have to take a stand. You’ll have to be understanding of her and sympathetic to what she’s going through, but you’ll have to also let her know that he is yours, you are his. If this is true love, Tabitha, if this is really, really true and you and Leo have any kind of connection that is as strong as my connection with Emmet, don’t let anything or anyone tear you apart. It’s hard to fight for the one you love while you’re with him, but it will be so much harder without him.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Leo’s hand traveled down my side and over the curve of my hip before slipping under my shirt and resting on my waist. His hand was warm and still made my skin tingle.
We were lying in bed in Miami. The sun was going down, making most of the room fall into shadows. We were supposed to be getting ready to go to Gil’s and Leah’s to have dinner with the newlyweds, Christina, Gale, and a couple of other people I had yet to meet. Rohanna wasn’t one of the guests, thank goodness, because the Jersey girl in me wanted to claw her face off.
“You’re not going to leave me for some French speaking asshole, are you?” Leo asked me.
I giggled. “No, of course not. But I may leave you for a hot, tanned Aussie that calls me Sheila,” I said with my best Australian accent. “He can put his joey in my pouch, you know what I mean?”
Leo groaned at my idiocy as I laughed.
“You know what, baby?” he said, rubbing his nose against mine. “Keep talking like that and I won’t have to worry about anyone trying to put their little shrimp on your barbie.”
“Ohhh!” I cried out. “That was worse than mine!”
“Well, it’s a good thing that my good looks and charm would still reel in the women.”
My eyebrows rose. “So, you’re saying I don’t have good looks and charm to reel in the blokes?”
“No, dolcezza. You are a goddess,” Leo said before lightly kissing my lips. “I’m just hoping every other guy in the world is blind and deaf to your beauty.”
I laced my fingers through his hair and kissed him slowly and teasingly. I’d pull back a little, make his lips chase mine, stroke his tongue with mine, and then retreat. Leo groaned and pulled me closer to his body, pressing his growing erection against my thigh.
“As much as I’d love to stay in this bed with you and kiss you and do naughty things to you, we have to get up,” I said, even as his hand cupped my breast.
“We don’t have to do a damn thing we don’t want to do,” Leo growled before engulfing me in another kiss that singed my lips. I moaned and kissed him back, pulling on his dark hair and arching my back to push my breast harder into his hand. When his thumb swiped over the nipple and made me groan into his mouth, I knew if we didn’t stop, we would never make the dinner.
“Okay, that’s enough,” I said, pushing at his chest.
“Mmm mmm,” Leo disagreed as he moved forward and kissed the skin above my cleavage. “I’ll never get enough of you.”
I moaned softly as his tongue swept between my boobs, but then I pushed him away again.
“Get up!”
Leo made a sound of exasperation before grabbing his hardness and saying “I am up!”
I laughed as I smacked his arm. “Don’t be so juvenile.”
I scooted out of bed before he could grab me and pin me down and do dirty things to me.
“You’re such a tease,” he complained as I walked over to the walk-in closet. I only had
a few things in there, and lucky for Leo, I wasn’t a huge shopper, so my things would never encroach onto his side of the closet.
“I forget, is this semi-formal? Casual? Flip flops and shorts or what?”
“They want to use their new china, so I guess it’s semi-casual.”
“Damn, I need a chart,” I muttered. “Or to call Donya.”
Leo moved in behind me, reached around me and pulled down a long white maxi dress. “Wear this.”
I held the dress and looked at Leo, who had moved to his side to pick out a shirt.
“You’re not going to start dressing me, are you?” I asked, eyeing him with suspicion. “I’ve read a lot of books about dominant men that give their women no choice in anything, not even when and what to eat. You’re not some secret dom, are you?”
He chuckled. “No. You can wear whatever you want. I just like the way you look in that dress. You look like Venus, curvy, dazzling, and awe-inspiring.”
I would have laughed, except he was serious. I was still getting used to the way he looked at me as a woman.
“The white dress it is then,” I said, smiling.
“Oh, and can you wear those silver strappy sandals with it, too?” he asked, looking hopeful. “I like it when they’re the last thing I take off of your body.” He bit his bottom lip as he looked me up and down.
If I didn’t get the hell out of that closet, we’d be screwing on the floor.
We made it to Gil’s and Leah’s only a few minutes late, and that was after I had to convince Leo to let me out of the bedroom after I was dressed. Besides the wedding, it was my first at spending time with his friends. I didn’t know what to expect, or how they would view me after having spent time with Leslie, but no one treated me any differently than how they were treating each other. They were funny and boisterous at times, especially when Leo or Gil were the center of attention, which was often, but they were fully capable of having adult conversation, too. They were also a diverse group with different ethnic backgrounds, various levels of education and employment. Gale worked overnights in a grocery store, but Judy, one of the other guests, was a doctor at one of Miami’s private hospitals that catered to the rich. Everyone was laid back and kind, and they made me feel like I already belonged. I knew I was going to like spending time with them in the future.