by Amelia Wilde
She bites her lip, then looks me straight in the eye. “I told Carolyn that we…that we went on a date.”
I burst out laughing. It feels good to release some of the tension that was forcing my muscles to clench. “I bet she loved that.”
“She did,” Quinn says in a tentative tone, a little smile forming on her face. “And I—I mentioned that I thought I hit a nerve by asking about your tattoo. She told me about Elijah, and then I saw his name again in your file.”
I sigh and straighten my spine, though I want to sink back into the chair and cover my eyes with my hand. I can’t let her see how much talking about this scares the shit out of me, and I’m not going to start breaking down now, after ten years. Christian Pierce isn’t some shrinking sissy who falls apart at the mention of his deceased brother. “It’s all right, Quinn.” I force all the thoughts about Eli out of my mind and concentrate hard on the memory of Quinn’s creamy skin pressed up against the length of my body, let the memory put a smile on my face. “Can I be honest about something?”
“Anything.”
I stand up out of the chair and lean across to whisper into her ear. “I want to bend you over this desk and fuck you until you can’t possibly orgasm even one more time.”
Then I sit back in my seat and watch her.
Heat rises to Quinn’s cheeks, turning her face a deep shade of red, and her lips part just slightly. I can only imagine how slick her folds must be right now underneath the sharp black dress she’s wearing today, the sleeveless cut showing off her toned arms. Her fingers curl into her palms as she stares into my eyes, the gold flecks in her green irises glinting in the afternoon sun pouring through her office windows. I only see the rise of her breasts because I’m looking for it. My cock twitches despite the fact that my heart is still pounding from how close, how close she was to seeing something that could have fucked everything up permanently…
She looks down at the papers in front of her, blinks, then takes one of them into her hands.
“The second opportunity will be two weeks from next Tuesday, and this is one that I’ve set up to be on behalf of Pierce Industries to show your commitment there. I haven’t arranged photography, but as soon as you approve this, we can move forward with—”
She’s trying so goddamn hard, so determined to do this job well despite what’s between us, and I fucking love that about her.
Emotion surges in my pounding heart.
I try to stop it, but I can’t—I’m falling in love with her.
Chapter 21
Quinn
At the Bowery Mission on Friday, we make up a small group: me, Christian, and a single photographer. The photographer and I tuck ourselves into various corners of the kitchen and linger near the serving line for just as long as it takes to get several photographs that will circulate online and in various press outlets.
I can’t take my eyes off of him.
He’s so cocky, so self-assured, so self-centered. He uses women and then discards them seemingly by the week. He buys whatever he wants and never thinks twice about whether he deserves it. His money is all that matters to him.
At least, that’s the image he projects most of the time. He lights up the goddamn room at the Purple Swan, charms his dates, tells dirty jokes—he’s at the center of everything.
But at the Bowery, he’s someone else.
The charm is still there, but it’s warmer, softer, not so in-your-face. He speaks quietly to the people who move through the serving line, politely, in a welcoming tone. Everyone smiles at him as he dishes out portion after portion of steamed vegetables onto the waiting plates.
Even the way he moves is different, restrained somehow, as if he’s fully aware of the power his body carries over people and is reining it in. He is graceful. Considerate. Humble.
He doesn’t spare a look over at us, doesn’t play up to the camera, not even once.
Christian is a natural.
The transformation is incredible to witness.
Even though he doesn’t look at me, my eyes stay locked on him. I take the opportunity to study him without the laser focus of his eyes on mine—the cut of his jaw, the fullness of his lips, the sandy color of his hair.
He’s mine.
The thought comes unbidden to my mind and it feels right. It feels good.
I dismiss it, like I know I have to—he’s not mine, and he may never be. A night of incredible sex does not a couple make, no matter how goddamn much I wish it was true when I lie in my bed without him by my side at night.
I watch him dishing up meals to people who need them, and something breaks open in my heart. It’s a tiny shift, like a pebble falling down a mountain face, but for the first time since I found out about what Derek did, I glimpse a future where not every decision about men is a knee-jerk reaction based on his disgusting betrayal.
This is also the first time I’ve ever seen Christian’s gentlemanly side. In front of my eyes, he is literally becoming a gentle man.
Not that I want a shy man. No. Not at all. The way we wrestle together in bed, the way he dominates me, it’s something I’ve been craving for years without knowing it.
That’s his real self, too.
I instinctively know it’s true. In bed together on Tuesday, there was no need to posture. God knows I didn’t. God knows I couldn’t even stop myself from begging to be fucked. That was raw. And the way he took me, again and again—that was absolutely him, down to the core.
Now I’m just wondering which side of him—the party-obsessed playboy who views women as accessories or the quiet man in front of me—is the real Christian.
Maybe it’s a pointless thing to think about. I’m not exactly the same in every situation. He doesn’t have to be either. And when I think of his arrogance the day we first met—the way he practically commanded me to ride home with him—a shiver of pleasure runs down my spine. I can’t get enough of him. I want all of him.
I nudge the photographer with my elbow. “Let’s go.”
“You don’t want more shots?”
“Do you have three good ones?”
He glances at the screen on the back of his camera and gives me a confident nod.
“We’re good. We’ll meet him outside.”
The photographer and I circle the block, and soon enough we’re back outside the Mission with two reporters who are here to cover an announcement from Christian. I prepped him earlier this afternoon. I’ve engineered this entire event to look like it’s rather spontaneous—you’d be surprised how little it matters if you call in the press—and like it comes straight from Christian’s heart.
How he was acting inside, though, has me convinced that it really is a cause that he finds important.
There is more to Christian than meets the eye.
When I picture his face as he interacted with each person in the line, how he spoke to them as if they were of the same social class, acquaintances he was happy to see, the way his muscles worked and flexed as he served the food, my heart aches and warms at the same time.
Then it pounds.
It’s way too fucking early for this. I haven’t even been able to completely disengage myself from that goddamn house in Colorado. I have the contractors texting me updates every day, and for one reason or another, things are being delayed.
I’d sell it for a loss if I had more savings, but I don’t. Derek liked to travel, so we took the risk while we were still young and free.
Turns out that he was much freer than I was. What a dick.
I swallow the rage that’s boiled up and shake my head to clear the negative thoughts. The point is, I can’t be falling for Christian.
He comes out the entrance of the Bowery and I move toward him, feeling instantly calmer now that he’s here in front of me.
It’s absurd, but I feel it.
“You were great in there,” I say with a smile, my voice low.
Christian smiles back. “It was good.”
“It was like you w
ere a different person,” I tease, as we walk toward the photographer, toward the reporters.
Something in Christian’s face shifts abruptly. He’s still smiling, but it doesn’t look quite so real anymore. Am I imagining it, or is he shifting away from me, just slightly?
What the fuck did I say?
I reach out for his arm, arrange my face as if I’ve remembered something important at the last moment. He turns toward me, his back to the press.
“Are you all right?” I keep my voice low.
“Yes,” he says, his smile back. “I’m good.”
“Did I say something wrong?” I can’t let this thing between us affect my job, but if I don’t fix whatever this is, I don’t know how I can help him.
“Of course not,” he says, but I don’t believe him.
“I just meant that it was amazing to watch you with those people. That’s all I meant.”
His face softens, relaxes, and my heart rate slows.
“I know that’s what you meant,” he says, softly, gently, and I know that if we weren’t on the job, if there was no one around, he would lean down and kiss my cheek right now, cocky persona or not.
As he turns back toward the press, confusion zings through me. Is there something he’s not telling me?
It doesn’t matter. It can’t destroy the way my heart sings when I look at him.
The emotion is deafening.
Chapter 22
Christian
My heart thunders in my chest as I turn away from Quinn and go to greet the press, and it continues to pound as I shake hands with the photographer and ask him about his gear. Then I chat with the reporters and mention casually that I’m making more time in my schedule to volunteer. I tell them that my mother did a lot of work while she was alive to try and lift people out of homelessness, and I want to honor her memory. At the last moment, I tack on that I’m making a rather large donation to the Bowery Mission.
The whole thing goes off without a hitch. A guy like me—like Christian Pierce—doesn’t let one moment of awkwardness throw him off his game.
But something nags at me.
I’m beginning to notice a pattern in myself that I don’t like.
The things Quinn says are innocent. She doesn’t know my secret. Intellectually, I know that, but every time she says something that brushes up against those boundaries, I react in a way that’s impossible to hide.
Well, it’s possible to hide it from other people, maybe. But I can’t hide it from her.
How does she know how to read me so well?
We just met each other last week, and already she can read me like we were born to be together. She even picks up on the subtle things that most of my other friends—even the closest ones—have never noticed, or if they did, they gave no goddamn indication of it.
I have to clear my head.
I’m falling so hard for her that I feel off-balance, out of control. I love it and hate it at the same time. I love that a woman has finally made me feel this way, but I hate that there’s something inside me that will bring it all crashing to the ground.
Jesus Christ, I have to get out of this.
It’s a half-hearted thought. I’m barely in it yet.
As Quinn and I walk back to my Town Car, I feel like I’m being torn in two.
Half of me wants to grab her right now and kiss her on the sidewalk, for all the world to see.
The other half of me wants to run in the opposite direction as fast and hard as I can and put Quinn Campbell far behind me.
She’s a threat. There’s no two ways about it. The way she reads me, the way she sees me, the way she is—it makes me want to be around her. Be with her. Be hers. Have her be mine.
And if that happens, I can’t keep secrets from her.
Not the kind of secret that I’ve been keeping.
I just can’t.
Why not?
The little voice in my head wants to play devil’s advocate again.
Why not? Why can’t I just have her, experience the greatest happiness I could ever experience in my life, and put the past behind me?
The answer comes immediately: because it will eat me alive.
When you feel this way about someone, you can’t lie to her for the rest of your life. That kind of guilt would rot me from the inside out. And now, knowing what I know about Derek—knowing what I know about Quinn and the way she always demands honesty, even from herself—how could I do that to her?
We get into the Town Car, and as soon as I’ve closed the door behind me, Louis steers the car away from the curb.
“That was really excellent,” Quinn says lightly, looking down at her phone. “I’m not going to do a big push on this one because it will look too heavy-handed, but we’ll get the photos circulating by tomorrow morning. You’re bound to get a couple of low profile mentions, which is perfect for our purposes.” She looks up at me and smiles, and I feel a little jolt of surprise. There’s something in her eyes that wasn’t there this morning. Part of it is confusion—after I got all fucking weird out there, she knows something’s up but she doesn’t know what—but part of it goes much deeper than that. She’s practically glowing with it.
I smile back at her, because fuck, she’s gorgeous, and despite all of it, I like her to be close to me.
Even if it is a recipe for disaster.
“I’m looking forward to the next one,” I tell her, both of us acting like it’s important to maintain the facade in front of Louis.
For about twenty seconds.
That’s as long as I last before I slide across the seat toward Quinn, wrap my arm around her, and pull her in for a hard, deep kiss.
“Wow,” she says softly when I pull back to look into her eyes. “What did I do to deserve that?”
“Isn’t it enough that I wanted it?”
“Wanted it?”
“Want you.”
“I want you, too,” she whispers in my ear.
“Come home with me.”
“I can’t.”
I laugh out loud. That’s Quinn Campbell—give her a direct order and she’ll refuse.
Just wait until I have her back in bed again.
“You can.”
“I can’t. I promised Carolyn I’d go for drinks with her as soon as this was over.”
This is probably some kind of sign that I should take a minute—a day, even—and get my mind right about this situation before I fuck up my entire life. “Okay.”
Disappointment flickers across her eyes, but then she gives me a sultry smile. “Tomorrow, maybe?”
“We need to drop Quinn off at her place, Louis,” I say. He gives me a jaunty salute in the rearview mirror and takes the next left.
Two hours later, I’m eating alone at the Purple Swan.
It’s something I rarely allow myself to do. I’m already off-script for a Friday night. Instead of hosting a table full of loud assholes and gorgeous women in the main room, I’m seated in the smaller, more formal private dining room at a table for one.
All I can think about is Quinn.
All I can think about is how this ends.
All I can think about is how to get around having to end it, but there’s no way to avoid it.
“Chris!” a voice booms behind me, and I turn to see my best friend in the city, Jax Hunter. He’s been a busy guy lately now that he’s married, and we haven’t seen each other in a while. His wife, Cate, is on his arm. They’re both beaming.
“Buddy!” I say, standing up and clapping him on the back. “How’ve you been? Where the hell are you these days?”
He and Cate share a conspiratorial look.
I don’t get it at first, and then Jax gives Cate’s still-flat belly a pointed look and raises his eyebrows at me.
“Are you kidding me?” I say with a big smile. Jax shakes his head. “Oh, my God—that’s fucking incredible news.” I reach around Jax and give Cate a hug.
“What about you? You got that promotion, I see! Nice wor
k.”
“Oh, it was nothing,” I joke. I’d love to sit down with Jax and tell him about Quinn, but he’s already moving on.
“We’ll see you around the club. Maybe not quite so often, though!” he tells me, and then I’m looking at their backs as they make their way to a round table next to the picture window at the back of the room.
My heart twists with jealousy.
Then at least one thing seems crystal clear: I could have what they have, and I could have it with Quinn.
I just have to figure out how.
Chapter 23
Quinn
Something changes between us. It’s like Christian is trying to make up his mind about something, but I don’t know what it is.
Maybe it’s me.
After the Bowery appearance, Christian starts texting me—and not quick and dirty notes to plan our next rendezvous. In fact, he doesn’t ask me to come to his apartment, not on Saturday, not even on Sunday.
At first, when the messages start coming in, I’m not sure what the hell is going on at all.
Tell me about you. How many siblings do you have?
None!
Only child?
Only child.
Must have been lonely.
When you’re an only, your birthday budget is huge :)
You want a big birthday budget? ;)
I want a lot of things…I’m greedy.
The tone always turns flirty, with a strong undercurrent of desire, but he makes no indication that he wants me to come over. Sunday night goes by, and Monday, and Tuesday. Carolyn tells me he’s at the Swan most nights, but she can’t tell if he’s taking a date with him or not. The woman I met that first time, Melody, is in some photos with him in the tabloids, but they’re never touching—Christian walks ahead of her like he doesn’t even see her.
Well, he’s a grown man. He can do whatever the fuck he wants, as much as it stings.
Meanwhile, the messages keep coming.
Where are your parents from?
Michigan
Is that where you grew up?
Yeah, right in the middle.