She found she loved the sound of his voice. Deep, velvety, strong. Everything about Reese Bendenetti fairly shouted “protector.” A woman could feel safe with him. Safe, but walking on the edge at the same time. Because the moment his lips met hers, the second his arms closed around her, the illusion of safety disappeared.
The man tasted of danger, of things dark and mysterious. And she loved it.
As long as she knew she could get away when the time came.
Later.
Rachel Bendenetti smiled at the young woman sitting on her living room sofa, the young woman who seemed to brighten the very air that surrounded her.
When Reese had called to say he was coming over and bringing London with him, Rachel had braced herself. Having spent a good deal of her life on the wrong side of the tracks, she knew how the very rich reacted to people who had worked all their lives just to survive.
Prepared to be charitable, Rachel discovered that there was no need to overlook thoughtless remarks and demeaning glances. There were none. London Merriweather, born with a golden spoon in her mouth, was bright, vivacious and honestly charming. Rachel could easily see what it was that appealed to her son.
She was surprised that he had been the one to suggest bringing the young woman who had slipped into his life and his conversation to dinner on Sunday. It was a first.
With all her heart, Rachel hoped it was a sign of things to come.
“It’s really lovely to finally meet you, London.”
Reese slanted a warning look toward his mother. “There’s no finally, Mother.”
He had a point, London thought. After all, they’d only been seeing one another for—what was it now?—a little less than a month. She tried to pretend that she didn’t know the exact number of days, but she did. Twenty-seven.
Still, she laughed. “Don’t tell me that Reese had said so much about me. I won’t believe you.”
She smiled with her eyes, Rachel thought. That was a good sign.
“He has mentioned you,” Rachel allowed. “And it’s what he didn’t say, more than what he said that caught my attention.”
That, London thought, left a great deal of room for speculation. In and of itself it shouldn’t have picked up the tempo of her heartbeat. But it did.
She caught the look that passed between mother and son. She could almost visualize what life had been like for them. A struggle, with very little money, but with so much love, it didn’t matter. Very little mattered when you had love, London thought.
She’d had opulence in her life, never wanted for anything material, but she found herself envying them. There was an easy communication between them, a communication without words. The kind that she had once enjoyed with her own mother.
London suddenly missed her mother a great deal.
“I can see where Reese gets his mysterious way of phrasing things.”
“We just pay attention to things more than some people. And we have our own shorthand.” Aware of how that might be taken, Rachel didn’t want the young woman feeling shut out and quickly added, “I suppose it comes from having to depend on each other for so long.”
Sitting on London’s left side, Reese realized that he felt a little tense about this meeting. He wasn’t really sure why he had brought London here today. He supposed that part of him felt she needed to meet someone like his mother. That was probably presumptuous of him, but he was a doctor and honor bound to prescribe what he felt his patient needed. London wasn’t his patient anymore, but she needed someone in her life like his mother, if only for a few hours. His mother had an uncanny gift for making people around her feel good.
Setting down the tray of refreshments she’d prepared on the coffee table, Rachel went to draw the curtain against the intense afternoon sun. As she took hold of the cord, she looked out and saw a beige car parked across the street from her house. There was a man sitting behind the wheel.
Reese had mentioned that London was being stalked. That was part of the reason for this visit. To put London in touch with a more tranquil way of life.
Rachel turned from the window. “Are you aware that there’s a man in a beige sedan across the street?” she asked Reese. “He’s watching the house.”
London nodded. She picked up the wine cooler Reese’s mother had poured for her. “That’s my bodyguard, Wallace.”
Rachel relaxed, then took a longer look at the man in the vehicle. A man shouldn’t have to sit out there all afternoon, roasting in a car.
“Ask him in,” Rachel urged. “There’s more than enough room at the table and I made plenty.”
Wallace did not care to socialize. He’d told London it took the edge off what he did. “Thank you, but no,” London declined on Wallace’s behalf. “He feels he has a better vantage point if he stays outside, watching the house. Besides,” she looked toward Reese—it was impossible not to feel safe when he was around, “I don’t think anything’ll happen to me here.”
Rachel smiled and mouthed “lovely” to her son over London’s head. Seeing her reflection in the mirror on the opposite wall, London smiled to herself.
Dinner was almost ready. Rachel paused a moment and perched on the arm of the sofa, looking at her guest. “Reese tells me that you hold fund-raisers for charities.”
Instantly alerted by her innocent tone, Reese knew where this was going. “Mother.”
Both women heard the warning note in Reese’s voice. Rachel waved a dismissive hand in his direction as London raised an inquiring eyebrow, waiting to have the mystery cleared up.
Rachel did the honors. She leaned forward and confided to the other woman, “He’s afraid I’m going to ask you to do a fund-raiser for Hayley’s House.”
“Hayley’s House?” London echoed. She looked from mother to son and then back again. “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that one—”
“There’s really no reason why you should be,” Rachel said. But she was hoping to change that. The more people aware of the small facility, the better the chance that it would receive donations and funding to keep it going. “It’s just a small place,” Rachel confided. “An orphanage, although they have euphemisms for that sort of thing now. Bluntly, it’s a shelter for abandoned babies and deserted children found in hotel rooms, bus stations, alleys, etcetera, thrown away by parents too addicted to some substance or other to realize what they’ve done—”
Reese watched London’s face, attempting to read her reaction. He hadn’t brought her here to hear a pitch. He knew how much of her waking hours his mother donated to the facility, but this wasn’t the time to draw London in.
“As you can see, my mother’s very passionate on the subject,” Reese told her. “Once you get her going, there’s no stopping her.”
London wondered if he was embarrassed, then decided that he cared too much about the older woman to be embarrassed by her. She rather liked that. He wasn’t afraid of what someone else might think.
“That’s all right,” she told him, “people should be passionate on the subject of charities and helping children.”
Rachel prided herself on being able to spot a lie a mile away. There were no lies here. She grinned as she looked at her son.
“I like this girl, Reese.”
His mother, he knew, liked everyone. But he had to admit it was nice to hear the approval in her voice, even though he was no longer a child but a grown man who didn’t need his mother’s approval of the woman he chose to spend time with. Still, it was nice to have. God knew he’d gone through his rebellious period. There was a time when he’d given his mother more than her share of grief, although she never complained. She always said that she’d had faith he would come around, even when he hadn’t felt that way himself.
“Maybe you’d like to come with me to Hayley’s House sometime and look around the place,” Rachel coaxed, firmly believing that if you were going for an inch, you might as well try for a mile, or at least a few more inches. “Once you’ve had a chance to see it, I promise y
ou you’ll carry the image around with you for the rest of your life.”
All right, she was laying it on a little thick. Reese didn’t want London thinking that he’d brought her here with an ulterior motive. “Mother,” he warned again.
This time it was London who waved for him to be silent. “I’d like that.”
The funny thing was, Reese had to admit she sounded sincere.
And maybe she was, at that.
Rachel beamed at her, ready to accept London into the fold there and then. “Tell me, how do you feel about pot roast?”
London thought of Malone’s, the first restaurant Reese had taken her to. A meat-and-potatoes kind of place. Like son, like mother. She grinned. “I don’t get it nearly enough.”
“Well then, you’re in luck.” Nodding her head in approval, Rachel rose from the arm of the sofa and went to put dinner on the table.
Conversation for the next few hours was interrupted only long enough to allow one or the other to chew before answering. Otherwise, it went on nonstop over the meal. After dinner, when they were relaxing in the living room, Rachel almost drove Reese from the room by bringing out her beloved album.
The flowers imprinted on the cover had long since faded with age and endless hours of paging through the book. The album featured highlights of her son’s life frozen forever in time thanks to the camera she always kept primed and ready. Rachel Bendenetti reasoned that you never knew when the next good picture was coming. Bought the week before Reese was born, it had always been kept within easy reach just in case an important moment came up.
Reese confided that his mother thought almost all moments were important. Rachel made no attempt to deny it.
After spending time giving an informative narrative with every photograph, Rachel retrieved the camera that had made them all possible.
She stood just far enough from the couple to frame them from the waist up.
“Now if you’ll just smile for me,” she coaxed, the viewfinder against her eye. Lowering it, she peered at the two young people on the sofa. “And scoot together.” She motioned with her hand to emphasize her point. “This isn’t a wide-angle lens, you know.”
Reese looked at London, expecting to hear her demur. She had spent most of her life in front of the camera’s eye. He could only guess how she felt about having yet another lens pointed at her.
But to his surprise he saw London move in closer to him. The next moment she leaned her head against his shoulder.
“How’s this?” she asked, smiling brightly.
“Perfect.” Rachel snapped two photographs in rapid succession. “The second one’s for insurance.” She never left anything to chance.
And then it was time to go. London found herself feeling reluctant to leave this safe haven, this small, cozy place where there seemed to be only warmth and joy.
“Now, don’t be a stranger,” Rachel told her, accompanying them to the front door. Looking at London, she nodded toward her son. “You don’t have to wait for Reese to bring you. Just give me a call to make sure I’m home and come on over.” She winked. “We can have a little girl talk next time.”
The wink reminded her so much of Reese, it momentarily took London’s breath away.
“Deal,” she promised, a beat before she found herself swallowed up in the other woman’s embrace. Rachel was used to being greeted and sent off with hugs that were a matter of custom rather than feeling. Rachel’s embrace was so genuine, London was touched.
“You know,” she said to Reese as they walked away from the quaint one-story Tudor home, her arm threaded through his, “that’s probably the first time anyone’s mother sat me down to look at their son’s life in pictures.”
He’d tried to ascertain whether she was bored or not. He had to admit she had looked as though she was interested. “Sorry about that.”
The apology took her by surprise. “No, don’t be. I liked it. Liked feeling normal…” She hunted for the right word. “Average.”
He laughed as he opened his car door for her. “There’s nothing in the world that would make you average, London.”
She looked up at him before sliding into her seat. “Why Dr. Bendenetti, are you flirting with me?”
He laughed. “Trying my damnedest.”
She waited until he had rounded the hood and gotten in behind the driver’s seat. The last thing on her mind was the bodyguard sitting across the street. “Why don’t we take this back to my place and see how far you’re willing to flirt?”
He looked at her for a long moment. Each time he made love with her, he found himself hungering for the next time, wondering when that feeling was going to end. So far it only grew more intense.
“Be careful what you wish for.”
All she was wishing for, she insisted silently, was a passionate evening with a very exciting man. Beyond that she refused to think. There were still no strings, nor would there be any.
Because if there were no strings, there was no risk that they would be broken.
London leaned toward him. “For tonight,” she said, her mouth inches from his, “let’s not be careful.”
Reese had no quarrel with that.
Chapter 13
Control had always been an important part of Reese’s life. Control over his body, his thoughts and especially his emotions.
Control had been what had seen him through the days when he’d felt like an outcast because his father had left his mother, because they did without and everyone knew.
But being with London had changed all that. It was as if he’d been freed, unshackled, allowed to finally be himself. An utterly different self he’d never even known existed.
The edginess that had slipped into his vehicle along with them accompanied them all the way to London’s apartment building, continuing to grow as each moment went by.
By the time he’d parked the car and they got into the elevator, he felt the last of his shaky restraint about to snap like a brittle twig.
Reese was vaguely aware that London’s bodyguard had made the journey with them in the vehicle that followed in their wake. The man would undoubtedly sense that something was happening the moment he saw them emerge from the car. Reese was sure the tension and electricity that crackled between them was evident to the world at large, but right now, he didn’t care what Wallace Grant, or anyone else for that matter, thought.
All he cared about was being with her. In every sense of the word.
She felt it, too, he thought. He could see it in her eyes, in her body language. With each floor that went by, the anticipation heightened.
The moment Reese closed the door to her apartment, shutting out the rest of the world, the explosion rocked them both. Her lips found his. Fingers flew, undoing buttons, unbuckling belts, tugging out shirt-tails and pulling down zippers.
Doing away with cloth barriers that kept them from one another.
What Reese was most aware of was the intoxicating need he had.
The need that had him.
Not for sex, not for a woman, but for her. For London.
He needed all of her. Her mouth, her eyes, her hair, her thoughts. Every single shred that went into that special magic that was London Merriweather.
Reese was like a man completely consumed with unquenchable desire.
There was always a time, a moment, when in the midst of the tempest that surrounded her, London could suddenly step back, look on like a spectator and revel in being desired, in being needed. She would feel confident in her ability to enjoy and then retreat with no regrets, no scars.
But someone had burned the back stairs and there was no retreat for her, no way out, no out-of-body experience that separated her from the man she was with. She was right there, in the thick of everything, unable to separate her thoughts from her feelings, unable to retreat.
This was all so foreign to her that she felt like a woman possessed.
She felt an overwhelming desire not to be adored, but to give back the pleasu
re she was receiving, to have and to share. To be completely unlike anything she had ever been before. To feel something unlike anything she had ever felt before.
Each time he brought her up to a higher plateau of sensation, all she wanted to do, even as she reveled in it, was to somehow make sure that Reese would feel that same sensation. That he would be trapped in this fiery inferno of whirling sensations and emotions just as she was.
So she touched, caressed, stimulated, provoked, matching movement for movement. And all the while sinking deeper into the world she was trying to trap him in. Not to exercise her power over him, but so that she would not take this new journey alone.
He took her right there, in the very place he had initially been afraid he couldn’t get past the first time they had made love together. Her foyer. Now he was just glad he’d been able to close the door in time. With the cool marble floor beneath her and a chandelier glistening above her, he made London his again, just as she branded him.
It could have been a dirt field for all he cared. All that was important was that she was the one he took with him on the journey to ecstasy.
Eyes intent on her face, trying to memorize every nuance, every expression, he entered her. And was taken by her. It was a partnership, with each silently depending on the other. And glad of it.
He wanted to tell her then, as peaceful contentment slipped over him, over them. Wanted to tell her the word that was throbbing in his throat, begging for release.
Wanted to tell her that he loved her.
But the word remained where it was. Silent. Inside of him.
Loved.
Whether he kept quiet because of instinct, or fear, he didn’t know. But the word remained unsaid as he gathered London against him. And prayed for many other nights like this.
“Floor’s cold,” London murmured, her words rippling along his naked chest as she curled her body even closer to his.
He laughed softly, toying with a lock of her hair, marveling at how very soft it felt. How very soft she felt. “I’m surprised it hasn’t melted into a puddle beneath us.”
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