“You’ve never told me you like anything about me,” he returned dryly, a smile on his face and an eyebrow crinkling.
She rolled her eyes. “Seriously.”
“No, you’ve never mentioned that.”
“Well, I do. It’s not like any accent I’ve ever heard before.”
He shrugged. “It’s what happens when you have no true home. My voice has no nation.”
She shook her head. “No, it’s all your own. Like you’re your own country or something. I love it. There’s nobody like you.”
He pulled back from her and squinted, his gaze bouncing between her eyes. “You are feeling very affectionate tonight.”
“It was a good thing you did, Moreau. The family day idea.”
He shrugged and she was deeply charmed to see him looking a little bit sheepish. “Just because I have no family does not mean I don’t understand the value.”
She eyed him for a long time and decided that he was merely speaking the truth. He wasn’t fishing for sympathy. “I don’t really have family either.”
He mirrored her pose, his head resting on one hand and their feet tangled under the covers. “Your parents…?”
Geo played with a loose thread on her blanket. “My mom split when I was a kid. She had bipolar. Has. I don’t know. It wasn’t the first time she’d left, and I think my dad always thought she was gonna come back some day. But she… just…never did.”
Moreau absorbed her words with the attention of someone who knew how to listen without making a grand show of it. “How old were you?”
“Third grade. So, eight or so?”
“Did you miss her?”
Geo quirked her mouth to one side. It was such a simple question, and one that many people would have thought was obvious. But either Moreau knew her better than she thought or he was just really good at scenting out a story. “Not exactly. She was kind of scary. She’d go through periods of time where she was crazy affectionate but she didn’t really know me. I knew I was just a prop. She would have showered that much love on any kid who happened to be around her. She’d spend all sorts of money on crap we didn’t need or want, she’d sell things we needed. And then she’d go into a depression and that was even worse. I know a lot of people lead perfectly normal lives with bipolar, but she wasn’t getting the right treatment, or she had it really bad. I don’t know. I remember being sad and worried, but also a tiny bit relieved when she was gone. I missed her, but… I guess I kind of missed the idea of her more than anything. Other kids had moms. I thought that might be cool, and I didn’t understand why I didn’t get to have one.”
He brushed hair off her shoulder. “You deserved to have one. One who loved you and paid attention to you. Who knew you.”
She pressed her lips together to keep from saying something dumb. Something soft and vulnerable that she couldn’t afford to say.
“And your father?” he asked after a minute.
“My dad lives up in Queens.”
“Will he be visiting you on family day?”
“That would be a no.”
“Why?”
She was starting to feel silly, like she was on an interview show or something. She’d given him that information on her mother willingly, but she was wondering if it wasn’t too much too fast. She felt stripped a little raw, like when she’d accidentally cut her fingernails too close to the quick. It was the right idea but she’d gone a little too far.
So she shrugged, deflected. “He lives in a center where he’s not allowed to leave unless I check him out. I’ll do that another day. What about your dad? I know about your mom but not your dad.”
“Ah. Yes. Well… his name is Henri. And he is a—what do you call those bugs that get on your skin and suck your blood?”
“A tick?”
“No, that’s not it. They live in lakes and—”
“Oh. A leech.”
“Yes. My father is a leech.”
“He uses you for your money?” Funny. A month ago she would have said that she and Moreau Davy had absolutely nothing in common. But they both knew how it felt to get used as a piggy bank by someone who was supposed to be taking care of you.
Moreau nodded. “He resurfaced in my early twenties. A few years before my mother died. He and my mother were never married. I’d never really met him before he showed up at a signing I was doing in London. But my mother knew him, of course. She was… very disturbed by seeing him again and I did the only thing I could think to get him to leave.”
“You gave him money.”
“Yes. I didn’t realize then that I was signing up for a lifetime of funding his lifestyle.” Moreau eyed her for a long moment. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that I should tell him to fuck off, just like my agent and manager and publicist?”
“No,” she shook her head solemnly. “I know what it’s like to make those sorts of decisions around family. You can’t always tell family to fuck off. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Maybe it was her tone of voice, or the words themselves, but Moreau didn’t press her. He kept brushing her hair back. She shifted against him and he froze.
“Are you…” he trailed off, lifting the blankets. “Jesus god. You are wearing shorts.”
She laughed as he threw the covers over his head and dove down the bed.
“I must investigate this,” he said in a muffled voice that made her laugh even harder.
But her laughter turned into a gasp when she felt his teeth at her ankle bone, his lips behind her knee. He shocked her by gripping her foot and forcing her into a good, hard calf stretch before he kissed his way up her shin. She planted her hands as he grabbed her thighs and flipped her from her side to her back, firmly spreading her thighs. She watched the shape of him move under her covers, not quite believing what she was seeing.
There was a movie star in her bed. The most famous man in the world was between her legs right at that moment.
She felt his hot breath at the inside of her knee. Do it, she silently begged. She so badly wanted his mouth on her, his hands. She wanted him so badly.
He’d gone very still underneath the covers and she wondered what was going through his head. Was he warring with himself? Attempting to keep a lid on his desire for sex? Would he throw in the towel and have sex with her? Declare her the winner of their battle?
But the even bigger, badder question: once they had sex, would she be able to deny him what he wanted? Would she finally agree to let him into her life?
“Savannah,” he said in a low, threatening tone. He whipped the blankets off his head, his hair staticky and disheveled, his black eyes narrowed, his gorgeous face shadowed and perfect. “These are a man’s underwear you are wearing. Not shorts.”
“They’re boxers.” She peered down at him.
“Yes,” he nodded curtly. “You are wearing another man’s underwear?”
She laughed and rolled her eyes at him. “I bought these for myself. They were not pre-owned.”
His stormy expression cleared. “Ah. I see. You like to wear men’s underwear?”
“At night, yeah.”
“Then I have some very nice ones you can have.”
She rolled her eyes again. “You can keep your undies, Davy. I’m not that hard up.”
“I’ll have you know that I could auction off my underwear and make a very pretty penny. Many women would love to have my underwear.”
“Have I offended you?” she asked innocently, batting her eyelashes.
She bit her lips to keep from laughing as he crawled up her body, planting a hand on either side of her head and holding his weight up off of her.
“Savannah,” he murmured, his eyes on her lips and his voice gruff. “I cannot wait for the day that we are officially together and I can punish you for your insolence in a way that makes us both forget our own names.”
She rolled her eyes, because it was better than melting into a lusty puddle, ripping her clothes off and b-e-g-g-i-n-g him to pleas
e make love to her. “You’re going to be waiting an awfully long time, Davy.”
He dropped his hips then, giving her his weight and settling in at the apex of her thighs. “I am happy to wait, my love. I will wait as long as you wish.”
She was about to say something back, something annoying and rude and designed to get his back up, but all words and thoughts were immediately and roughly expelled from her when he rolled his hips into her.
He pressed against her abruptly, almost sharply, as if he were confidently knocking at a door he already owned.
He dropped his forehead onto the pillow beside her and did it again. A sharp thrust that, were he inside of her, would have seated him to the hilt.
“Jee-zusss,” she groaned and couldn’t help but wrap her legs around his waist.
She could feel his smile against her neck, her cheek, her ear. “Do you like that? It could be yours. Let me give it to you, Savannah.”
Thank god he’d called her Savannah. Because her irritation at him using her first name was the only thing anchoring her to this planet. She might have completely folded under the weight of his unbelievable sexiness if not for that. Instead, she was just barely able to keep her wits about her. “My heart’s not for sale, Davy. But you are more than welcome to give me that body of yours.”
He froze, and after a fraught second, rolled away from her. She, breathing as hard as he, allowed herself the pleasure of watching Moreau Davy reach into his basketball shorts and rearrange his junk.
He scowled at her. “You are making this very difficult.”
“I would argue that you’re making this very difficult.”
He stared at her for a long minute, his eyes bouncing all over her face. “Be my girlfriend.”
“No.” She tilted her head to one side. “Be my fuck buddy.”
“No.” He flopped back and stared at the ceiling. “If you are scared of the fame, we’ll keep it a secret for as long and as well as we can. Plenty of famous people do this.”
“Moreau…”
“You desire me, yes?”
“Yes.”
“I know you like me.”
She pursed her lips. “That’s a recent enough development you’ll excuse me for needing some time to get used to it.”
He laughed and dragged a hand down his face. “Only you can give me a compliment and make me feel deeply insulted.”
She laughed with him, but she had to admit that it didn’t feel right to leave things on that burn. It was true to her personality, but it was decidedly untrue to the well of feeling that she was just starting to acknowledge. She slid forward and buried her face in the space between his neck and shoulder. “I like you, Davy. I do.”
“Then I will wait. And allow the battle to rage on.”
She looked up at him and grinned. “Agreed.”
***
A few days later, family day rolled around. Moreau wasn’t quite prepared for just how lonely it would make him feel to see love on full blast like that.
It started with Naomi sprinting through the kitchen doors around 8 am.
Sequence, still in full chef mode, merely had time to toss aside his spatula before his arms were full of his wife. “Fancy!” he’d muttered against her lips. “I thought I had half an hour before you got here.”
“We couldn’t wait.” Naomi, her red hair shimmering down her back and her legs around her husband’s waist, had been positively glimmering with happiness.
“Is Bex with—?” Atlas had started to call from the breakfast table, but he cut off when his girlfriend came peeking in to the kitchen with his niece in her arms.
Atlas, Sequence, Naomi, and Bex all lived in the same building and the women and baby had obviously come all at once.
Moreau had been very surprised when Bex had shoved the very heavy toddler into his arms and sprinted across the room to Atlas. Bex was thin and built like a little elf. She had chin length, chocolate-colored hair and long legs and Atlas sat straight down with her in his lap.
Moreau, who’d only come into the kitchen for a bowl of cereal, found himself with a giant, squirming toddler in his arms and a front row seat to two barely decent make-out sessions.
“Yikes,” Geo had said as she’d come through the swinging kitchen door. “If the girls are here, then I guess I’m on duty a half an hour early.”
She’d turned and saw the baby in Moreau’s arms and made a straight beeline. Moreau was treated to nearly having his eyes burned out by the ecstatic beauty of watching Geo play with Brookie. She tossed the laughing, blonde-haired kid into the air, stuffed her full of French toast, cleaned her up, and then passed her off to her father, who couldn’t wait another second for his kiddo.
Moreau and Geo had cleared out after that, giving the couples some privacy.
“I wonder when Elena will show up,” Moreau had said to Geo as they walked through the hallway toward his quarters.
Geo’s eyes widened into faux-shocked half dollars as they passed the door to Cedric’s room. A rhythmic thumping, whispered words, and extremely impassioned noises filtered out through the closed door.
“I’m pretty sure Elena’s already here,” Geo whispered as the two of them tiptoed down the hall.
They got to Moreau’s room and he grabbed his phone and a hoodie, which was what they’d come up for. She’d already explained that she was going to be shadowing him today, as she was the only member of the team officially on duty. They had plans to spend the day in the game room and TV room, because if they spent it in either of their bedrooms, things were going to get messy and Geo was gonna get canned.
Geo and Moreau were halfway through a bloodbath of a chess game when the door to the game room swung open and a young teenager came walking through.
“Ricky!” Geo called and jogged over to swing the girl around in a circle.
The girl laughed and hugged Geo viciously. She straightened her clothes the second that Geo set her down and peered up at Moreau.
Uh oh. He recognized that look. There was a blush on her cheeks and a sort of deer-in-the-headlights thing going on. He might have himself a superfan on his hands. The same thing had happened when Moreau had met Naomi for the first time. She’d barely been able to string together two words. He knew, at this point, that the best thing to do was just wait it out.
“You must be Rook’s daughter, yes?” he asked, rising up from his seat and walking toward her with his hand out for a shake.
She nodded, her cheeks even pinker now, and gave him a surprisingly firm handshake. She looked like Rook. With her dark hair and dark eyes, but her features were round and romantic like her mother. “I’m Ricky.”
“Nice to meet you, Ricky. I’m Moreau.”
“Yeah. I, uh, know.” To her credit, the girl cleared her throat, seemed to pull her shoulders back a bit, and turned to Geo. “Dad’s on the phone with somebody for a minute, so I wanted to challenge you to a rematch.”
Geo groaned. “I don’t think my pride can take it, Rick.”
“Rematch in what?” Moreau asked.
“Ping pong,” Ricky answered. “I’m kind of a big deal when it comes to ping pong.”
Moreau and Geo laughed.
“Hi, loves,” a very beautiful woman called from the door of the game room.
“May!” Moreau was surprised to see her. He hadn’t imagined that Rook’s ex-wife would attend family day. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“I’m not here,” May replied, waving her hand through the air. “I’m just dropping Ricky off and I wanted to say hi to my friends.”
May strode across the room and gave Geo a fierce hug and then kissed both of Moreau’s cheeks. She leaned in and spoke to him in rapid high-school level French that was as terrible as it was charming. Within seconds, as was always the case with May, she had him laughing.
Geo and Ricky started their battle royale in ping pong and Moreau dragged May over to the couches. “Don’t leave yet,” he told her. “Stay and chat with me. My only co
mpany is getting destroyed by a teenager in ping pong.”
May looked slightly uncomfortable. “I’ll stay for a minute, but I really don’t want to crash the whole family day thing.”
“But you’re family, no?”
She lowered her voice. “Moreau, you know as well as I do that the ex-wife at family day is awkward as hell.”
“And you know as well as I do that you’re the only one here who simply views you as the ex-wife.” He pinned her with a look that she deftly shrugged off.
May sniffed and brushed non-existent wrinkles out of the skirt of her dress. “Whether or not he thinks of me that way, it’s the truth of the matter, Moreau. I am his ex-wife.”
Moreau eyed her for a moment. They were certainly divorced. But he’d never met another pair of people who had to so frequently remind themselves that they were divorced. He’d never met two divorced people who seemed constantly in danger of tumbling straight back into marriage again.
“Yes. You are his ex-wife who has done her hair and makeup and put on a brand new dress to see her ex-husband.”
The look she gave him could have medusa-ed him straight into stone. But after a moment, it melted into a wry, self-deprecating smile. “That obvious, huh?”
Moreau leaned forward and yanked the tag off the collar of her dress. “Now, it is less obvious.”
“I’m so sorry, Ricks!” Rook practically skidded through the door of the game room. “A month and a half of not seeing you and I’m on the phone when you finally get here.”
He ran to his daughter and hefted her in the air, spinning her as Geo had and then dropping her back to the ground and tucking her firmly under his arm.
“That’s okay, Dad. I know you’re busy.”
“Blame it on that guy,” Rook said, tossing his thumb over his shoulder toward Moreau. He did an almost comical double-take when he saw May sitting on the couch next to Moreau.
“May. Hi. I didn’t think you—”
“I’m not staying. I just wanted to say hello.” She rose up and Moreau had to admire the way her dress swished around her legs, the perfectly styled wave of her hair down her back. She’d nailed this look.
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