“Most of the crew went to dinner in town. Everyone else from our cruise is a pussy.” He laughed. “But not you!” He rattled the ice in his empty glass and called out to the invisible bartender. “Another! And one for this gorgeous lady.”
So he was feeling agreeable, apparently. A bartender materialized from around the side of the bar and poured a heavy shot of Scotch into his glass. “What can I get you?” he asked me.
I glanced at Cole, unsure. I wasn’t supposed to be drinking, and he was technically my boss. “Come on, I won’t tell. Anyway, we all know you’re not really sober.” He poked me in the belly. “You were passed out on the boat like a frat boy after a kegger.”
I shot him a dirty look. “I wasn’t drunk. I was tired from the week.” I shifted my gaze to the bartender. “Spiced rum with a splash of pineapple, please.”
“You are a gorgeous lady, you know.”
Seductive Cole, the most dangerous of all.
“Thank you.” I smoothed my hair.
“Really.” He locked eyes with me and placed his hand on my thigh. Could it be that this was the reason he’d wanted me on the film? I hadn’t thought it possible, after everything that had transpired between us. But that was all years ago. We were different people then. I could tell from the softness of his gaze that he was somewhat drunk, but that wasn’t exactly rare for him, and alcohol always brought out the truth. Maybe this was his truth. My horoscope this morning had said that cycles from the past that were left unfinished would be coming full circle.
“Cole,” I warned, cutting my eyes to the bartender. But I didn’t stop his hand.
“Oh, he won’t breathe a word, or he’ll be fired,” Cole whispered into my hair.
The bartender slid my drink in front of me.
Cole threw him a smile. “Thank you, Darian. We’d like the room.”
Darian disappeared through a door that led to the kitchen. I took a long draw of my drink and considered Cole. He was as irresistible as he’d ever been, and I’d be lying if I said that his kisses earlier in the week hadn’t turned me on. He slid his hand farther up beneath my skirt, and I took a fortifying swig of my rum, remembering what Felicity had said, that a relationship with him would be good for my image. But it wasn’t just about that. It felt good to be wanted, if I was honest. And not by any man, but by Cole Power.
“Where were we?” He fingered the lace of my panties.
My heart beat faster. After everything, how was it possible I was still attracted to him? He brushed the spaghetti straps of my dress from my shoulders. He was just so good-looking. “Cole,” I protested. “Someone could come in. Some guys are right out there playing Ping-Pong.”
“Even better.” He pushed aside my panties and inserted a finger in me. I gasped. “There’s my dirty girl.”
He jerked down the front of my dress and covered one of my nipples with his mouth, his stubble rough against my skin. Feeling my body respond to his, I became suddenly panicked. This raw lust was how it had started before between us, and look how that had ended. I couldn’t go there again. “Cole.” I stopped him, lifting his face in my hands. “Not here.”
He groaned. “You used to be fun.”
“I am fun,” I protested, stalling for time as my mind seesawed. “Just not in the middle of a restaurant in a resort you own, where we know literally everyone.”
He pulled his finger out of me and drained his drink. “Got it. Never mind.”
My resolution wavered. It had been so long since I’d been touched, and we were more mature now. This time would be different. “So let’s go somewhere else,” I suggested.
He leaned against the bar, considering me with those baby blues. I allowed myself to enjoy the attention, finally beginning to feel the effect of my extra pill mingling with the rum. “We can revisit old times,” I insinuated.
“I heard”—he reached over the bar and grabbed a bottle of Scotch—“you’re writing a book about old times.” He raised a single eyebrow.
“Where’d you hear that?” I asked, taken aback. Though of course I’d said it in an interview, so it wasn’t like it was a secret.
“But I knew it couldn’t be true,” he went on, tracing my jaw gently with his fingers. “I thought, Stella’s not that stupid. She knows any secrets she might spill would implicate her as much as they would me.”
“I wasn’t—”
“And she knows how the press can be. She’d never in a million years give them an entire book’s worth of confessions to prey upon.” He held my chin for a moment before running his thumb down my throat, ending in the soft hole between my collarbones. “Would you, darling?”
Without a backward glance, he strode out of the restaurant and down the hallway that led to the lobby, leaving me alone at the bar. I took a gulp of my cocktail, considering his words. Was that why he’d asked me here? To ensure I wouldn’t say anything in the book to damage his image? He had always been so protective of his image. I thought of what I’d written the other night about the beginning of our relationship. The bit about Bar’s warning would definitely have to be edited out, but I knew that when I wrote it.
My intention with the memoir had only been to set the record straight (and hopefully make a buck); there was plenty to dish about without implicating anyone. My mother pushed me into acting and then stole all my money; my best friend sold my heart-wrenching miscarriage to the press as an abortion; my representation dropped me while I wrestled with depression; a reality television producer convinced me to put my life savings into a spiritual center that he had every intention of bankrupting for ratings, and then I lost my suit against him. I’d been victimized at every turn; my life story was a cautionary tale if ever I heard one—a tale I hoped would have a happy ending once the public understood what I’d wrestled with over the years and once again embraced me. At any rate, I never would have spilled the real secrets, the ones Cole was worried about. Those secrets didn’t exactly cast me in the best light either.
Maybe it was the fault of the rum, but after a moment I decided to follow him and tell him all of this. The hallway was dark and empty, as was the lobby beyond. “Cole?” I called.
“Down here!”
I followed the sound of his voice down a stairwell that descended into the dark depths of the building, where I found him in a short cement-walled hall lined with movie posters of his films, standing before a giant steel door. “Bad Boy,” I commented, studying twenty-four-year-old Cole on the poster. It was remarkable how much Jackson favored him. “What was your famous line? Wait, don’t tell me. I’m finished taking orders?”
He shook his head. “I’m through taking stock.” He smoldered, exactly like he’d done in the movie half his lifetime ago. “Because my father had given me stock in his company as a bribe to keep quiet about a hit-and-run he was involved in.”
“Right! I love a good double entendre,” I enthused.
He slid a latch the size of a two-by-four and pulled open the heavy door. The room beyond was perhaps eight by twelve feet, with a flagstone floor and walls lined with bottles of wine lit by an eerie bluish light. I followed him inside, remembering what I’d come down here for. “Cole, about the book—I want you to know—”
“Shhhh…” He put his finger to my lips, turned me so my back was against the countertop beneath the rows of bottles, and pressed his hips to mine. My body tingled with anticipation as he kissed me deeply, cupping my ass in his hands. “Some things are best kept between us.”
“I know.”
He reached for a bottle above my head, pulled it down, and unscrewed the cap. “Fucking screw caps,” he said. “Ruin the whole experience.”
“But much more convenient,” I pointed out, wrapping my arms around myself to control my shivering. “It’s freezing in here!”
“Fifty-five degrees.” He leaned against the granite-topped island in the middle of the room and poured us each a glass of red. “Temperature controlled. Flood proof. Safest wine room south of Miami. This ent
ire building is made of concrete block designed to withstand two-hundred-mile-per-hour winds. Though there hasn’t been a hurricane since I built it. And check this out.” He pulled the door to the room shut and lifted an enormous latch identical to the one on the outside into place. “It works as a safe room as well, just in case.”
“Gotta keep that wine safe,” I teased.
“It’s expensive wine,” he said defensively. “And I keep other stuff down here too.” He slid open a panel in the wall, revealing a row of antique handguns. “This collection is worth more than a hundred grand.” He took a six-shooter out of the compartment and pointed it at the opposite wall. “This is the actual gun my character Bad Billy in The Lone Shooter carried in real life. He killed Wildman Sam with it in 1877.”
I controlled my instinct to recoil like it was a snake. “Beautiful gun,” I managed.
“Know how he killed him?”
I shook my head, but he’d gone to that place in his brain where he stored all his characters and was no longer paying any attention to me. I hadn’t thought of it in so long, but I now remembered how he used to do that when we were married too. I’d think I was going to a nice dinner with my husband and end up dining with a vigilante cop or a rumrunner from the prohibition era. It was maddening.
“He didn’t shoot him,” Cole said, turning the gun over in his hands as though it were made of precious stones. “They’d been partners, Bad Billy and Wildman Sam.” Cole’s voice took on a gravelly Western drawl as he transformed into Bad Billy. “But I found out that Sam had double-crossed me and was working with the long arm of the law to bring me down, so I knew I had to kill him.
“A duel was too much of an honor for a man that snitched on his best friend. So I tricked Sam. Invited him to have a drink with me at the saloon we frequented. As Sam settled with his whiskey into his favorite chair before the fire, I confronted him—asked him point-blank what he had done, gave him a chance to come clean. Because that’s what a gentleman does. But Sam didn’t come clean. No, he looked me in the eye and he lied. So I took this gun.” Cole gripped the gun in his palm and raised it. I flinched, but he was so lost in his story he didn’t notice. “And I brought it down on Sam’s temple.”
I stepped aside as Cole brought the gun down hard on an invisible Sam, disconcertingly close to where I stood. “Beat him with it until the blood oozed from his ears. And then I tossed his carcass on the street so that everyone in Westboro would know Sam was a man who wasn’t worthy of a duel.”
“Wow,” I breathed. “That’s crazy.”
“Anyway.” He tossed the gun in with the others, his normal speaking voice restored. “Gotta keep the humidity under control down here so the metal doesn’t oxidize. So.” He laid a heavy hand on my hip. “You wanted to revisit old times.”
It wasn’t a question, but again I wavered. There was so much water under the bridge. Yet I knew he was giving me a chance to come in from the cold, and I was more than tempted. I called to mind the good times: how hot we’d been for each other at first, the warm glow of the spotlight, the insulation of a thick blanket of money. Perhaps it was synchronicity that the man who’d been my undoing could provide me with a second chance.
I widened my eyes and bit my lip, the signature sex kitten look that had hooked him all those years ago. He pulled my pelvis to his and breathed into my ear, his scruff coarse against my cheek. “You always were a little whore, weren’t you?”
Oh. But it was just role play; he didn’t mean it. He flipped me around and hiked my skirt up around my waist, yanked my panties to the side and thrust himself into me. I cried out in surprise and braced myself against the island, my mind racing to keep up with my body.
This was my passport to a better life. I wasn’t a whore; he was my ex-husband, and he was gorgeous. I wanted this. I just wished it felt more pleasurable. I knew I should ask for a condom, but somehow the words didn’t come. I was on the pill anyway. And who knew whether I was even capable of bearing children; I’d only ever been pregnant the once, and it had failed.
But God only knew where his dick had been.
“We should grab a condom,” I managed breathlessly.
He didn’t seem to hear, hammering away like a carpenter on a deadline. A stack of framed movie posters leaning against the wall clattered to the floor. “Cole…”
“Shhhh…” He placed a hand on the back of my head, pushing my cheek into the smooth, cold granite.
I suddenly remembered that after the first rush of heady infatuation had worn off, I’d never truly enjoyed sex with him, even when I was in love with him. It was always about his needs, never about mine. My life in and out of the bedroom had been ruled by his mercurial moods, which had nothing and yet everything to do with me. He was jealous and philandering, clingy and cold. I was always walking on eggshells trying to guess which version of me he might need next, continually trying unsuccessfully to relight the fire of our beginning.
The personal shit storm I’d been through since our breakup had cast a rosy light over everything that came before, including our romance. But I realized as he pounded away that it hadn’t been great even before the things that came between us eventually drove us apart. There was a reason I’d had an affair—not just had an affair, but fallen in love—with someone else while we were married.
Even so, my life with him had been far better than what it had become after. I pictured my empty pool, the sagging garage roof. And if I were to be with him now, it would be different. I wouldn’t care so much. I wouldn’t be in love with him. I wouldn’t let him hurt me. And it wouldn’t be forever—just for a little while, until I got back on my feet. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to be back on the arm of Hollywood’s Sexiest Man. Sometimes the right thing wasn’t the easiest thing.
Maybe I was a whore.
He was pumping furiously toward ecstasy now. Pill or not, I didn’t want his sperm inside me.
No time to think. “Pull out to come,” I said. He didn’t stop. “Come on my ass,” I instructed, trying to sound sexy. Nothing. “Cole! Don’t come inside me!”
He jerked his dick out and finished himself off, covering my ass and the hem of my dress in warm ooze. I used a stack of cocktail napkins to wipe myself off while he pulled up his pants. “You’re on birth control, aren’t you?” he asked. “Or are you too old now?”
“I’m only forty,” I snapped. “And yeah, I’m on birth control, just being cautious.”
I looked around for a garbage can to dispose of the soiled napkins. “You can leave them on the bar. The staff’ll take care of it,” he said.
Gross. I wrapped the napkins inside more clean napkins to dispose of upstairs.
“I’m gonna hit the sack.” He yawned, opening the door.
“I’m pretty tired too.” I followed him up the stairs and into the restaurant, where even the bar was now dark.
I grabbed my purse from the barstool where I’d left it. “That was fun,” I fibbed. I leaned in to kiss him as he reached for his phone, landing the kiss on his cheek. “See you tomorrow.”
I cast a flirtatious glance over my shoulder as I sauntered away, but he didn’t look up from his phone. When I reached the door, he finally called out, “Stella.”
“Yes?” I turned.
His eyes were in shadow, but a smile played around his lips. “If you ever did decide to spill things, it wouldn’t turn out well for you.”
My heart skipped a beat. Was he threatening me? I dropped my gaze to the floor for a moment as I tried to figure out how to respond. When I looked up, he was gone, the door to the kitchen swinging in his wake. My stomach felt suddenly unsettled.
Outside, the rain had stopped and the night creatures were singing. The luminous sea lapped at the shore, and the palm trees rustled in the wind as I scurried around the deserted pool, down the stairs, and across the torchlit pier toward my bungalow. I was already sore from the rough encounter. It had been so long since I’d bedded anyone that I’d lost track, and I�
��d always needed more foreplay for proper lubrication to begin with.
I entered the bungalow to find the ocean side completely open to the salty night air and some kind of chill trance music playing on the stereo. Through the rectangles of glass in the wood floor, submerged lights illuminated the water, sending liquid reflections dancing around the dimly lit room.
I dropped my purse next to the incense burning on the coffee table and grabbed my smokes, calling out, “Felicity?”
“Out here!”
I followed the sound of her voice to the glowing dive pool on the moonlit deck, where I found her floating naked in the tantalizing indigo water. She smiled, our earlier scuffle forgotten.
“Where were you?” she asked.
I sank into a cushioned lounger at the edge of the pool and lit a cigarette, inhaling deeply. “With Cole,” I admitted as I exhaled.
She swam to the edge of the pool, resting her chin on her hands. “And?”
“We…rekindled.”
She laughed. “I knew it! Tell me everything.”
“I ran into him at the bar.” I leaned back, staring up at the twinkling stars. It was truly amazing how many stars were visible out here in the middle of the ocean. So many, I couldn’t even make out the constellations. “We had a drink and he confessed he never stopped loving me all these years—he’d always wanted to give it another go, but he knew he wasn’t in a good place, you know. He’s different now.”
“What kind of person was he before?”
“Oh, I don’t know…” I searched for the words. “He wasn’t ready for a relationship.”
“And he is now?”
“We’ll see.” The smoke from my cigarette hung heavy in the thick night air. “I told him he’d have to prove he’s worth my time, of course.”
The Siren Page 15