by Piper Lawson
I feel her attention on me, the shocked stare. I don’t know why I’m telling her except that I haven’t fucking told anyone in a long time, and today of all days, I can think of little else.
Rae shifts toward me, the moonlight catching the highlights in her hair.
“Ash was at boarding school when it happened,” I go on. “I vowed I would clear their name and rebuild what they’d lost—in my own way. So, when you say I only care about making money… you’re wrong. I care about restoring their legacy. Putting right what should have been. All of which takes money, and I won’t apologize for that.”
The tightness in my throat, in my chest, won’t release. After all these years, I should’ve stopped fighting it.
“This was my mother’s favorite beach. We came every year for her birthday.” I lean forward, brace my elbows on my knees. “I still do.”
“That’s what today is,” she says softly, and I nod.
Her presence shouldn’t feel comforting, but it does. I’m less wound up than I was even an hour ago.
Strange how the same woman can bring me madness and peace.
“But… why would you bring me?”
I lace my fingers together as I listen to the waves crash against the shore, watch the lights of the city reflected in the distance. “It’s a place to escape your demons. Or entertain them. You seem like a person who does both.”
Rae shifts off the car, taking the bottle from my hand. She tugs off her shoes and tosses them back at me. I grab them out of the air so they don’t land on the hood of my car.
I follow her out onto the sand. “Give me the whisky.”
“Come get it.”
There’s only one other couple within sight on the beach, locked in a heated embrace. Her gaze lingers on them, and I take advantage, catching up and taking the bottle, then rewarding myself with a long drink.
“This is known as a romantic place,” I inform her.
Rae rolls up her trousers and steps up to the edge of the ocean, her teeth flashing white in the dark. “So, you didn’t bring me here to kill me. You brought me here to fuck me.”
I chuckle. “You’re a porcupine, and it’s not only your hair. I wouldn’t stick my cock anywhere near you for fear it would come back covered in quills.”
Her low laugh ripples across the sound of the waves.
What I don’t say is that I’m starting to think it would be worth it.
I wonder who I’d find when I stripped away her clothes.
The woman she is on stage, or the one in a T-shirt and jeans with a bottle of anxiety pills to keep her company?
Perhaps both.
I reach for the buttons on my shirt, undoing one after another. Then I toss the shirt at her head.
She catches the fabric, looking up in surprise.
I’m already working on my trousers, unfastening and unzipping them before shoving them down.
Her gaze lingers on my body.
I’m nostalgic and buzzed, and the way she’s looking at me helps both.
The cool water licks my feet and ankles as I stop in front of her. “Admit you want me,” I challenge. “I won’t tell a soul.”
She pries the alcohol from my grip. “I told you—the only way you’ll ever get me naked is to sue the clothes off me.”
My hands close over hers on the bottle. She doesn’t let go.
I back into the surf, and her grip means she’s forced to follow. “That could still be arranged.”
Rae’s lips curve in the dark as the water rises up her body.
It soaks her trousers. Her stomach. I don’t stop until water reaches my abs and her chest, and I feel the tug of the undercurrent.
The exhilaration on her face is interrupted by shock when she notices the marks on my chest.
“What is this?” She nods to my pec, the mass of white lines there.
“Prison tattoo.”
She looks up in alarm, realizing I’m joking when she sees my expression.
“It’s a scar from boarding school,” I amend.
Her brows tug together. “You let another person do this to you?”
“’Let’ is a strong word. Boys can be cruel.”
“Anyone can be cruel.”
The water is up to her ribs, high enough it licks at her breasts when a wave rolls through, leaves her top stained and her nipples hard against the fabric when it recedes.
I want to trace the path with a finger.
Maybe my tongue.
“I didn’t mean it.”
Her words have me jerking my gaze up to meet hers.
“About your ex-fiancée and that you deserved for her to leave you.”
I pull the bottle toward me and take a drink. “I thought I was in love. She was a spoiled princess. We wanted different things.”
She takes the bottle back but not to drink it. It bobs in the water at her side, her grip on its neck assuring it doesn’t drift away.
I reach a hand out experimentally to touch one of the spikes in her hair.
It’s sharp.
“Your brother said you dated her because you thought she was what you deserved.”
Her voice is low, but the words land in my chest as my hand falls away.
She’s young.
Too fucking young to ask questions like that.
To prod at pieces of me she can’t possibly understand.
My attention drifts down her body exposed by the water. Her lips, full and parted. Her shoulders, dripping with the sea.
It’s all there on her face. The vulnerability I swore was in her, that she hides under sarcasm and barbs.
I want to scare her off.
Almost as much as I want to drag her closer, to see how far I can push this truce.
“On stage when you play, you’re generous,” I murmur. “Are you generous when you fuck?”
Rae’s eyes widen as she holds my gaze for a heartbeat. Two.
What I’m feeling is attraction, but it’s more than that. Something reckless. A need no amount of money can solve, a question no woman but this one can answer.
She backs slowly out of the water, and my gaze sticks to her body even as she reaches the shore.
“What are you doing?” I rasp.
Rae bends toward the sand, every curve hugged by her wet clothes. When she straightens, something glinting in her hand, her slow smile catches me off guard.
“I need your keys, King. Because you’re drunk and I’m driving.”
9
Rae
The car is built for speed, but I’m more aware of the man in the passenger seat than the roar of the engine. He’s still distractingly naked from the waist up, his arm resting on the windowsill.
“Turn right,” he says.
“I know.”
“You’re an insolent chauffeur.”
“I’d be more pleasant if you rode in the back.” I spare a glance for the impossibly cramped rear seat of the Ferrari.
My companion’s grin is quick and surprised, but my gaze falls to the scars on his chest once more. Evidence of something I never entertained…
Harrison King is human.
I don’t know what to do with that information, except wish I could forget it.
But I can’t.
His parents died, suddenly and horrifically, and took everything he knew of life with them. He started over from nothing with only a vision of what might have been to keep him company.
I know how lonely it is to rebuild your world once it’s shattered. I’ve felt the grief that comes with losing not only your security, but yourself.
We make it back to the house and park in front of the villa.
He reaches over me and hits a button on the car’s dash, opening the trunk. I shift out of the car as he retrieves his bottle of liquor from the trunk, then I follow him up the steps to the front door.
At night, the villa is breathtaking. This entire place feels like a magical escape.
Harrison turns to me on the landing and hold
s out a hand. I place the keys in his open palm, and he closes his fingers so fast I jump.
“What are you thinking?” he murmurs.
“I’m wondering if you always keep a bottle of liquor in your car.”
His eyes crinkle at the corners. “Only today.”
We head inside, finding Barney waiting in the low nightlights of the kitchen. Harrison leans down to pat the eager pet before grabbing a lowball glass from the kitchen shelf and starting toward the stairs, glass in one hand and bottle in the other.
I don’t think it’s a good idea for him to drink more, or alone, given what this day means to him. “I want a sandwich,” I blurt.
It’ll keep him from drinking, plus put real food in his stomach in case he continues.
“You’re asking the wrong man.” But he pauses on the first step long enough that I try something crazy.
“Please?”
With a wary look, as if he’s guessing what I’m playing at, Harrison relents and crosses to the fridge.
The dog makes a hopeful noise as the door opens.
“Natalia keeps the good stuff in here,” he murmurs, pulling on a drawer.
“She hides it from you?”
“Used to when we were kids. I ate anything in sight for a few years.”
He uses the fresh bread on the counter and serrano and hard cheese from the fridge to make two sandwiches.
Claiming seats on opposite sides of the table, we eat in silence.
I wonder if it occurs to him that this is the longest we’ve gone without sparring.
“Enjoying the view?” He catches me checking him out, and I swallow my bite and nearly my tongue along with it.
“Your brother’s hotter,” I say when I recover.
Harrison lifts a brow.
“What? He’s my age.” I shift in my seat. “Unlike you.”
Blue eyes cool on mine. “Don’t let me stand in your way.”
The comment shouldn’t disappoint me. It does.
Tonight, I swear he looked at me like I was more than means to an end.
It was unexpected, but more than that, it was thrilling.
We finish our snacks, and Harrison offers the last piece of meat to Barney, who spins in a delighted circle.
“You don’t strike me as the dog type.”
“My brother bought him for me after Eva left.” Harrison takes our plates and sets them on the counter.
“Said he was to keep me company,” he goes on, “but I think he wanted to soften me.”
We start for the stairs, Harrison gesturing for me to go first.
He’s behind me, so close that if I turned, we’d be touching. His strong chest and arms, those unearthly blue eyes, his vile, gorgeous mouth.
“Did it work?” I ask over a shoulder.
The house is quiet except for Barney’s soft whining from the floor below. As if he feels the tension from his spot on the rug by the door.
“You tell me.”
When we get to the top, I pause and turn.
He’s right there. Beautiful and messed up and filling my senses.
When I lift my chin to meet Harrison’s gaze, we’re breathing the same air. His mouth is inches away, his bare chest too. All that power carefully restrained.
“As a boy, I wondered if the people who are softest on the inside are hardest on the outside.”
“Why is that?” I manage.
His eyes are deep as the ocean, guarded emotions swirling beneath the surface like rogue currents.
“Because they have to be.”
I never claimed to be in exceptional shape, but as I pull up at the end of my run on Friday, I’m breathing heavily while Barney barely pants.
“I’m sending you some money,” I tell Callie as I ruffle the fur on the dog’s head.
I’ve played three shows in Ibiza and been paid for the first two. True to his word, Harrison cut me in—though the door was nowhere near enough to make a dent in the twenty thousand, which means I need to haul ass to fill the place the rest of the time I’m here.
“I would never have asked you if it wasn’t—”
“I know,” I say. “It’s important to both of us. How is work?”
Her voice is instantly more enthusiastic as she talks about the young women she’s met during the past week at an event she ran.
The past few days, I’ve been feeling better too. Working on social media, on my sets, and even meeting up with Leni to get ideas for how to draw more people to Debajo.
I’m more comfortable now that I have my belongings back.
Minus the pills. I still find myself looking over to the nightstand for them at least once a day.
“So, how are the guys?” Callie’s voice drags me back. “Any hot locals or all tourists?”
I can’t tell if it’s the steep hill leading up to the villa or the memory of swimming with Harrison King that has my heart hammering.
The man who kept my mind whirring long after I crawled into bed Monday night, body still tingling from the sea and his presence and driving his car, isn’t a tourist or a local. He’s a globe-trotting billionaire who hides himself behind his thirst for conquering.
Are you generous when you fuck?
Under the half moon, far from the lights of Ibiza Town, the question floored me.
Not because of his hard body or physical intensity, but because he showed me a piece of his soul, then leaned in.
What he told me about his parents’ deaths, how everything he does is devoted to building what they could’ve had…
I can’t help looking at him through a new lens.
Which hardly matters because since that night, he’s been avoiding me.
I’m sure if I pinned him down, he’d say he’s been occupied with work and dinners out.
But Thursday morning, I was up earlier than usual and tripped into the hallway in my pajamas to use the bathroom only to run into him emerging in his towel, clean and unshaven.
He caught the fabric before it slipped too far, but I could see the trail of light hair from his navel downward.
If I thought the night in the ocean was dangerous, this was indecent.
He looked startled to see me awake, muttering about his showerhead being replaced in the ensuite while I tried not to choke on my own tongue.
When he didn’t attend my show that night, I was disappointed.
The door inched up as a result of video streamed from the previous performance. I should’ve been relieved there was no moody owner to keep me from talking with fans and helping ensure next week’s gig would be even bigger.
I wasn’t.
Since the richest man I’ve ever met made me sandwiches half-naked in his kitchen, he’s been dodging me like a high school quarterback who’s dealing with one too many irritating crushes.
“Rae, you’re not responding. That means there’s a guy.”
“He’s not my type,” I say as I reach the door of the villa and push it open, going for the dog’s leash before my shoes. Lesson learned on that front.
“I’m everyone’s type,” a familiar voice calls from the living room.
“I know you took a hit to your career by standing up to King,” she goes on, “but it speaks to the kind of person you are. You deserve a hot summer fling.”
Guilt gnaws at my stomach.
Maybe I could stand to get laid. But I roll with guys more likely to sell their belongings for a ticket to an indie music festival than count the money from their international conquests.
Even if my body thinks the man would make a beautiful distraction, it’s wrong. I’m here to do this job.
Not to fuck him.
After saying goodbye to my cousin, I hang up and cross to where Ash is stretched out along the couch watching sports.
“What is this place, the headquarters of the British Billionaires Club?” I mutter.
“Charming. But I’m a future member, not a current one.”
His smile is contagious as he gestures to the couch
next to him. I drop into the spot, still sweaty from my run.
“I told you you’d stay,” he gloats. “I trust my brother charmed you into it?”
“Not quite. We came to a new agreement that worked for everyone. Why are you here? Don’t you have a hotel?”
“I’m staying at a villa with guys from my club. Though once you spend an entire season with a bunch of pricks, you’ve had enough of them by the end.”
“Then why did you come to Ibiza with them?”
Ash frowns. “One of the veterans is trying to turn the club against me. I had a reputation for being perfectionistic when I was drafted. It served me fine my entire life, but apparently teammates don’t like my standards applied to them. It’s like fucking secondary school all over again.”
“This is why I never made friends in high school.” When Ash starts to rise from the couch, I tug him back down. “People decide what they want from you. You have to show them they’re wrong.”
He holds out his coffee. “Try this. Natalia got it.”
“Natalia didn’t get it. I did.”
Ash cocks his head. “Brilliant American girl.”
Harrison walks in, looking between us. The tension on his face deepens. “You two are lying around all day?”
Ash puts his hands behind his head. “Just waiting for you to come and judge us.”
His brother shoots him a look that could freeze an active volcano before glancing my way.
No sign of a thaw.
He’s gone the next instant.
“It’s not you,” Ash says. “There’s a charity gala event tomorrow night and major players Harrison needs to show face with.”
Curiosity has me leaning in. “And he doesn’t want to?”
“Only because his business rival might be there.”
“The man your parents used to work for.”
Ash shifts back to one end of the couch, surveying me with new surprise.
“He told me he wants to build an empire to atone for what happened to your parents. What he thinks happened to them.”
Ash nods, still looking impressed by my knowledge. “Our parents worked for the Ivanov family. Now their son has taken over the business.”
“Harrison thinks they had a hand in your parents’ deaths.”