“The man who watched her wasn’t even hired for that in the beginning. He was one of my uncle’s guys, and he got her coke now and then. I didn’t find out until later that it was a lot more than now and then, but that’s not the point.”
One of his uncle’s guys. Was Michelis his uncle, then? He was older than Reeve by nearly twenty years. Was that how Vilanakis had gotten involved?
“What had you hired him for originally?”
He exhaled before answering. “Let’s just say that Amber did like to be shared.”
“Oh.” Then Vilanakis’s guy had been hired as a sex toy. Having her lover watch her with another man had always been a favorite of Amber’s. And Reeve had been okay with that. With sharing her, but he wasn’t okay with sharing me.
Huh.
Christ, Emily, this is not the time to be finding comfort in anything he says. But it wasn’t just comfort. It was pride. And I’d needed something to bolster me after he’d said he tried to marry her.
I pressed two fingers to my forehead and forced myself to focus on Amber. “You said you threatened her. What with?”
Reeve surveyed his lap. “By this time, by the end of our relationship, she was an addict with no money. It was easy enough to threaten to cut her off from both.” He leveled my stare. “But I considered telling her I’d kill her.”
I gasped, my surprise throwing me backward, and I would have fallen off the bed if Reeve hadn’t reached out to catch me.
When I was balanced again, he continued to hold on to me. “Emily,” he said, but I couldn’t meet his eyes. “Emily. Look at me.” Always the pleaser, I did. “I told you it was the worst thing. The absolute worst. But I only considered it. I never would have told her that. I never would have done that. I loved her. I was desperate and irrational, and, honestly, cutting her off from drugs was a much worse threat to her than death would have been.”
I nodded, wishing he’d let go of me so I could think.
“Emily, I’m telling you the truth. I’m not leaving anything out even though it’s ugly. I’m the same man I’ve always been. You know me.”
I nodded again but said, “Let me go, Reeve.” Because I didn’t know him. Not really. And there was still the end of the story to tell.
He held on a second longer. Then he dropped my hands.
I scurried off the bed and paced the room in long, slow figure eights. Almost the way Reeve had paced the ground when I’d told him my story earlier. He was right – it was ugly. It was hard to hear. But men had done much worse to me. And he didn’t actually say it to her. If I believed him, he didn’t.
It was enough rationalization for me to stay in the room. “What happened next?”
“Nothing,” he said. “After six weeks or so, I came to my senses and realized that taking away her freedom was not the way to win her back.”
“Yeah, no shit.” I crossed my arms over my chest, tracing the same path on the carpet. “So then what?”
“I gave her the keys to my car. Could you stop pacing now?”
I ignored him. “Go on.”
“She took it and her bodyguard and left. Emily, come sit with me.”
“No.” I needed the end. Needed to hear the worst part. The part where he changed his mind and asked his uncle, or his uncle’s guy, to end her life. “She took your car and left and then what?”
“And I haven’t seen her since.” He flew up from the bed and stepped in front of me, halting me by gently placing his hands on my elbows.
I balled my fists and looked up at him sharply. He immediately took a step back, raising his hands in the air in a surrender position.
“I let her go,” he said again, “and I haven’t seen her since.”
We considered each other. I didn’t see someone who wanted to hurt me. Well, not someone who wanted to damage me, anyway. I also didn’t see someone who would lie about a horrible thing he’d done. If he’d ordered her death, though, would he have told me that?
As if he’d tell me the truth – as if I’d believe it – I asked, “You didn’t have her killed afterward?”
“No. I did not. I would never have killed her, Emily. Never.”
But Amber was still dead. There had to be a reason. “Weren’t you afraid she’d go to the police after?”
He let out a short laugh. “Amber’s a drug addict. And not a big rule follower. She’s not fond of the police.”
“You weren’t afraid that she’d go anyway?”
“No, Emily. I wasn’t. This is a shitty, shitty thing to say, but even if she ever did, nothing would come of it. You said it yourself – she has a history, and I have money. It’s fucked up, I know. But it’s how things work.”
His expression turned grave. “If you’re wanting me to be punished for my crime, let me tell you that I have been. First when she left me. It destroyed me. Though, to be honest, we destroyed each other long before she drove away. When I met her, she was a casual drug user. In the end, she was a high-strung junkie. When I met her, I was a man who liked being in control. In the end, I was an abuser of power.”
He took a step toward me. “We were bad for each other, but it was hell when she left. I’m being punished again now seeing you look at me like that.”
My defenses slid ever so slightly.
“What are you thinking, Emily? Please tell me.”
I shook my head, at a loss. I wasn’t even sure he’d told the whole story. Though, wasn’t it possible he was telling the truth? Probable, even? I’d already known it hadn’t been Reeve who’d actually killed her. Was there reason to still believe he’d had anything at all to do with her death?
“Emily?”
“I don’t know. It’s a lot to process.” The suspicious part had been that she’d gone with Vilanakis, someone who was connected to Reeve. But if Amber had left Reeve on her own, where would she have gone? To someone else who could take care of her. And if her bodyguard worked for Reeve’s uncle, then it made complete sense that she’d go to him.
Reeve took another step toward me, but didn’t try to touch me again. “Talk through it with me. We can process it together.”
“There’s nothing to talk through.” Then why would Vilanakis have emailed Reeve about her afterward?
“Emily —”
“Reeve, I just need some time to let it settle. Please.”
His jaw set. “Fine. Let it process on your own. Or settle. There’s a lot of things I need to process myself, but I’m going to sleep.” He flipped off the overhead, leaving the blaze of the fire as the only light in the room.
“You can join me when you’re done.” His voice was hard. Hurt. “Or not. I’m not going to tell you what you want to do this time.” He climbed into the bed, pulled the covers over himself, and turned his back to me.
I stood where I was for at least a full minute before I left his room and headed down the hall for mine.
CHAPTER 28
My room was still in disarray with my suitcase on the bed and my clothes half-packed. It looked like what was going on in my head – chaos, confusion, indecision. My mind was half-set like my bag was half-packed, torn between staying and leaving.
I sat on the chair at the vanity and tried to process. And settle. Tried not to cry, too. Which was silly because I’d been the one who had pushed Reeve away. He had every right to get huffy and go to sleep without me.
I wasn’t even sure if that was the source of my tearfulness. It was more likely a combination of things. What Reeve had done to Amber was horrible. Thinking about it too hard – thinking of Amber bullied into staying with a man she didn’t want to be with – made my stomach ache.
But if I was honest with myself, it really wasn’t the worst thing. Not compared to the things I’d put up with from men. Not even compared to some of the things she’d put up with from men. There was even a little part of me – a small part, but a part nonetheless – that thought maybe she deserved a little bit of discomfort. Because she could get uppity and pretentious and full o
f herself and it wasn’t hard to picture her driving someone to want to throttle her.
When I looked at her from Reeve’s point of view, she seemed almost obnoxious, or at the very least, a bad match. I wasn’t thinking of just the things he’d said, but also the things I knew about her and pairing it with the things I’d learned about him. Of course their sexual preferences differed, but also their tastes in other things. Reeve was comfortable in jeans on the back of a horse. Amber barely tolerated animals. Reeve swam for exercise. Amber swam to cool off before lying out again in the sun. Reeve liked to plan and dictate. And so did Amber.
None of that condones imprisonment.
No, it didn’t. But if she hadn’t been so addicted to drugs and money, she could have left at any time. And Reeve had admitted it was a mistake. Didn’t he deserve then to be forgiven? If not by her, then by me? Didn’t everyone deserve a chance to change?
He’d said that in reference to me earlier. When I’d said that Amber hadn’t believed me about Bridge, he’d defended me. I got why now. Because he understood what it was like to do something horrible and have to live with it. And he hated himself enough for it that he wanted desperately to believe that he could change. That people could change.
I didn’t think people could change. Not that much. But I also didn’t think Reeve would have gotten to the point that he had if he hadn’t been trying so impossibly to be the man that Amber had wanted.
It really was impossible for people like us – people like he and I – to be the kind of people Amber wanted. Comparing my situation to Reeve’s, I could see my life with more perspective, and I was more than a little irritated that she’d tried so hard to change me. Yes, she’d rescued me. But instead of helping me figure out how to protect myself, she’d forced me to hide.
In fact, I wasn’t just irritated. I was mad. Mad that she’d wanted me to be someone that I wasn’t. Mad that she hadn’t believed me when her boyfriend had raped me and ended my pregnancy. Mad that she’d kicked me to the curb. Mad that she’d been hooked on drugs for much of our friendship. Mad that she’d dragged me into her petty domestic dispute with Reeve. Mad that she’d tried to make him into a princess-pleaser. Mad that she’d gone and died.
Mad, now, that she was coming between me and a man who might actually be good for me. A man I might actually be able to love.
I was so mad, in fact, that I didn’t feel guilty about it like I would have expected to.
But even through my rage, I could see it for what it was and what it wasn’t. It wasn’t the kind of anger that made me love her any less. It was the kind of anger that made me wish more than ever that she were still around to work things out. The kind of anger that pinched with regret. The kind of anger that made it just a little easier to let go of some of the blame I’d been carrying around.
Wouldn’t Reeve be happy to hear that?
God, Reeve…
He was a much more complicated puzzle piece to deal with. Because he was alive, and things between us could still alter and change. He swore that he wouldn’t have tried to have Amber killed. He swore it ended at keeping her captive and then letting her go. Either I believed him, or I didn’t. He’d answered the questions that had sent me looking for her without knowing I was even asking them. If there was any other version of the story, she was the only one who knew it. But she was gone and couldn’t tell it to me.
Except, I still had Reeve’s keys. And he was asleep. And the surveillance room couldn’t see what happened in his office. This was my chance to sneak in and watch his recordings from the previous summer.
I jumped up and went to the closet where I’d dumped my clothes after the stables. I rummaged through the bundle until I found the key ring. Cloaking them in my hand, I slipped out of my room, and headed for answers.
I made it down four stairs then stopped short.
If you need to see what’s on those recordings to believe him, then you shouldn’t stay with him anyway.
It was that voice in my head, the one that sounded a lot like Amber, the one I half-believed was Amber. And half-believed was me going crazy.
Crazy or not, the voice had a point. It was one thing when I wanted to see the surveillance data so that I could find out what had driven Amber to call me. But in the course of the evening, my motives had changed. Now I’d been told what had happened. Watching the recordings wouldn’t give me any more insight into her death. Possibly it could verify Reeve’s versions of events, but from the way he’d told it, I probably wouldn’t even be able to tell she was being held against her wishes. The only way they would clear things up for me at this point was if they showed something terrible happening to her that Reeve hadn’t told me about. And wasn’t that a long shot?
So it came down to the same thing it had before – either I believed him, or I didn’t. If I didn’t, if I had to watch to be put at ease, then I didn’t belong with him any more than Amber did.
When I thought about it in those terms my choice was simple. I didn’t even have to decide that I trusted him. I just had to know that I belonged to him. And I did know that.
Without any further thought, I headed back upstairs and into Reeve’s room. In the closet, I found the jacket he’d worn on our ride. I tucked the keys in the pocket and went out to join him in bed.
He was asleep already, but I wanted to wake him up. I needed to tell him —
Actually, I wasn’t sure what I needed to tell him. I’d just made a big decision, though, and I needed to let him know I’d chosen him. Chosen us. Eventually I’d have to come clean about everything. Come clean about how I’d come into his life and what I’d thought he’d done and it would be hard and maybe he wouldn’t forgive me. But whether he did or didn’t, I’d meant it when I said I wouldn’t run.
Maybe he meant it when he said he wanted to keep me.
I slipped out of my robe and climbed in under the covers next to him. My trust would come later, but I did have something I could give him now. He shifted, turning toward me, as if even in his sleep he sensed me.
I cupped my hand on his cheek. “Reeve.”
He opened his eyes. Looked straight into mine.
“I don’t want to take things from you anymore,” I said. “I don’t want value for value. I don’t want to be with you because you give me cars or take me on trips. I just want you. I just want to belong to you.”
It only took him a second to react. His mouth seized mine, his hands threaded in my hair, and he kissed the hell out of me. Kissed me hard and soft and everything in between. He was still kissing me when I climbed on top of him. I broke away to move down his body, down to where his crown peeked out over the waistband of his boxer briefs. I pulled them down just far enough to free his cock. He was throbbing steel. Thick and bulging.
My cunt was wet and wanting, but so was my mouth. I fisted him with one hand and licked up his shaft. Then I swirled my tongue across the tip, and I swear he got harder. When I parted my lips and sucked him inside, he moaned, and damn, that turned me on. Turned me on that I could please him. Made my chest swell that he kept his hands tucked under the pillow and let me play with him the way I wanted instead of taking over as director.
It wasn’t always what I wanted with him, but he seemed to understand this was conversation. This was me telling him things I couldn’t begin to say.
I licked him and sucked him until his breathing started to become ragged. When it seemed he was about to come, I straddled him and lined my entrance with his cock. With a groan, I slid down onto him, sheathing him with my pussy. He fit so well inside me, fit just right. Had I noticed that before? I wasn’t sure. It felt like a new discovery and yet it felt like something I’d always known. Felt like home. I would have been happy just sitting with him inside me, just enjoying the tightness of my cunt as he stretched me and pulsed against my walls.
But Reeve liked it hard and fast. So I worked my hips, grinding on him, riding him like he’d ridden me so many times before. It didn’t take long before the ti
ghtening began deep inside and my nerves began to sing.
“Does it feel good?” I asked, my voice thin and breathy.
“You do. You feel good.” He sat up suddenly and yanked a handful of my hair, grinning at my yelp. He bit my lower lip then said, “It’s cute, too, that you think your seduction tactics alone will give either of us what we need.”
“I don’t know. It seems my seduction tactics got us here, didn’t they?”
“Yes. I suppose they did.” The look in his eyes told me he knew that here meant more than just where we were at that moment, me on top of him, his cock between my thighs.
He kissed me, placing his hand between us to massage my clit. Making me dizzy from two angles at once. It wasn’t even a minute before I was coming apart in his arms, milking his cock, tumbling with my orgasm. When it finished, I collapsed onto his shoulder.
Reeve’s chest shook as he chuckled. “Oh, no, you don’t. No passing out on me. You had your fun. Now it’s time for mine.”
He pulled out of me and flipped us around with ease, pushing me to my stomach. I turned my face toward the fire that was now barely smoldering. Reeve placed a hand on my lower back, then, from the shift of weight on the bed, it felt like he was reaching for something behind us.
Before I heard the drawer open and close, before I heard the snap of the bottle lid, I knew. I knew without a doubt. The familiar conflicting feelings of excitement and terror gripped me. My throat tightened like my body was preparing to cry, but also I wanted to laugh. This man – this fucking asshole – everything always had to be on his terms. No matter what the circumstances. Even when it looked like he was giving me the director’s chair, it would always be temporary. It would always be him who called the shots.
It was just the way I liked him. The way we both needed him.
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