Truly (New York Trilogy #1)

by Ruthie Knox

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You want me to go?”

  “No.” She reached for his waist. “I want you to distract me.”

  He kissed her then, and he didn’t fuss around. He gave her the deep plunge of his tongue and his fingers speared in her hair, holding her in place as he insinuated himself between her legs. He gave her his directness, his heat, driving away all her fear and replacing it with certainty.

  Her house didn’t matter. She could ignore the mess in her head, in her heart and her life, for a little longer.

  Only the slide of his hands underneath her shirt mattered.

  Only Ben.

  “Nice place,” he said to her cleavage.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  He chuckled and thumbed her nipple through her bra. She dropped her hand between his legs and did her best to drive him crazy.

  They stole one more evening together, a gift they unwrapped slowly and scattered all over her house.

  His T-shirt across the back of the living room couch.

  Her top and bra in the kitchen, where they stopped for water and got distracted when he lifted her up on the countertop and kissed his way down her throat to her breasts.

  Her jeans on the floor in the hallway and all the rest of their clothes in the bathroom, which she insisted was part of the tour.

  He insisted on a long, hot shower, a great deal of which he spent on his knees, teaching her what it felt like to be rendered boneless as a jellyfish.

  She stayed out of her own way, allowing herself to be who she wanted to be, feel what she needed to feel, grab him and grip him and cling to him the way she had to.

  He clung back, kissing her until her lips stung. Thrusting inside her until she couldn’t remember a time when this hadn’t been at the core of who they were together, this hot, heavy invasion and retreat, stringing her tight and pulling her apart.

  “I like your bed,” he said. “This is a great bed.”

  “Oh my God,” she said, because it was the only thing she could say.

  He held her as their breathing settled, and she must have slept, because he woke her in the dark with slick fingers sliding over her clit. He moved inside her from behind as soon as he knew she was with him.

  He pinned her down in softness, her hips high, her face in the pillow, and brought her to climax in a frenzied rush of heat and breath, a dream-orgasm that lasted as long as he kept saying her name, mumbling May into the space behind her ear.

  It was almost unreal, their frenzy when they were alone together. Something like a fantasy. But she kept a list of its mundanities—his elbow getting caught in her hair, pinning her to the bed; the stinging pain of overtaxed tissue when he pushed into her at dawn; the used condoms piling up in the trash can by her bed like ugly sea creatures drying in the sun. She lay awake as the room began to brighten with the first light of the day he would leave her, and she ticked through her mental list, because she needed to remember that he was real. They were real. However much pain came to her after he left, at least she’d had this.

  She could tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

  If life ever gave her another opportunity to make the choice, she knew which one she would choose.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  May had been awake for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling and deliberately not thinking about anything, when she heard the car pull into the driveway.

  She immediately rolled out from under Ben’s arm and looked around for pants. Any pants.

  The doorbell rang just as her eyes landed on the clock: 9:45.

  Bad. Very bad.

  Nine forty-five was deep into the morning by her mother’s standards, which meant that it could very well be her mother at the door, and here May was—two different kinds of pantsless, with a naked man in her bed.

  Robe.

  She headed for the bathroom, ignoring the rustling sounds of Ben waking up.

  But her robe wasn’t on its hook, because it was in New Jersey. At Dan’s house.

  She found her underwear on the shaggy bathroom rug. Balanced precariously on one foot, then the other, she yanked them on. If she’d tried this maneuver in Ben’s bathroom in New York, she’d have hit her heel on the toilet or whacked a hip against the edge of the sink.

  So there was the bright side to the situation: even though she’d never see him after this morning and she was about to introduce him to her mother with sex hair, at least there was plenty of space for panty-yanking maneuvers in her capacious bathroom.

  The doorbell rang again, DING-dong DING-dong DING-dong.

  Allie. Thank God. Their mother would never ring like that.

  May’s relief lasted for three whole seconds, until she remembered that Allie still had a key to the doorknob lock, and she wouldn’t be shy about using it.

  The thought sped her up, and she raced through the house, carrying all their clothes along with her. Ben came into the kitchen, bare-ass naked, just as she was doing a shimmy-wiggle-hop to get her jeans on. Her bra did nothing to restrain her boobs. He didn’t even pretend not to be watching.

  “Can you erase that image from your mind?”

  He gave her a cheeky grin. “What image?”

  She pushed his clothes toward him. “Put pants on,” she pleaded. “You’re about to meet Allie.”

  He diverted the clothes to one side and snaked his free arm behind her back to draw her close and kiss her, sleepy and slow. He was still warm from the bed, and his bare stomach pressed against hers. Her heart flung itself against her ribs. She pushed him away, trying to be stern, but smiling instead, because she couldn’t help smiling at naked Ben. “Pants,” she insisted.

  “I like you frantic. It’s a good look for you.”

  He put them on. She wiggled into a long-sleeved shirt and sprinted for the door.

  May’s sister stood on the other side, feeding what looked like cold sausage to a little dog tucked under her arm. “I told her not to come,” Allie said.

  She wasn’t even pretending to look at May. She’d already risen on her toes to peer over her sister’s shoulder, and when that didn’t work, she dropped back down and leaned to the side to see around her.

  “Hi,” Ben said from the living room. “You’re Allie.”

  May’s sister turned the last of the sausage over to the dog and gave Ben a little wave. “You’re Ben.”

  Where Ben couldn’t see her, she made surprise-eyes at May and whispered, “Holy shit.”

  What? May mouthed back. She turned around, wondering what he’d done, but it was just Ben. Shirtless. Barefoot. His hair wasn’t long enough to be sticking up, quite, but it certainly looked as though he’d taken a shower, gone straight to bed, and spent half the night fucking someone.

  Her hand rose to her own hair. There was really no question who he’d spent half the night fucking.

  “Better than the picture,” Allie whispered.

  Ben came right up behind May and shook Allie’s hand. He seemed not to mind about the dog, which was good, because Allie almost always had a dog somewhere on or around her person.

  “I thought you might be gone by now,” Allie said. “I’m glad you’re not. I wanted to meet you.”

  Ben flattened his hand against the doorjamb, his chest pressing into May’s back. “Here I am.”

  A car approached slowly, and May noticed the blinker before it fully registered that she recognized the car. “No,” she said. “Oh fuck, no.”

  “I told you, I tried to stop her,” Allie repeated. “I told her not to come. But she just kept saying, ‘Why isn’t May over here yet? I need her help with the macaroni salad.’ Then I said I would come and see on my way to the grocery store, but she was all—”

  “Why didn’t you warn me?”

  “I tried! That’s why I’m here! It took you forever to come to the door.”

  May whirled around and ran into Ben’s chest. She made a strangled sort of aaaah noise
and tried not to notice that even in the midst of panic, she sort of wanted to bite him. In the sexy way.

  “Your mother, I presume?”

  “Get dressed, okay? This is going to be …”

  What?

  She actually had no idea. But it would definitely go better if Ben had a shirt on.

  “Interesting,” Allie said, pushing past them both into the house and dropping the little dog onto the carpet. She whipped the throw blanket off the back of May’s couch and arranged it in a long, rumpled pile on the cushions. “Get a pillow from the bedroom,” she said to May. “Now.”

  As May rushed from the room, the dog began to bark, and she heard Allie repeat, “This is going to be so interesting.”

  “Why?” May called. “What did you do?”

  Because Allie’s “interesting” was, so often, May’s doom.

  “You know how you said I had to think of something to tell Mom?”

  “I didn’t say that.” May took a pillow from the bed into the hallway and yanked the door closed behind her. The dog darted between her ankles, nearly tripping her.

  “More or less, you did,” Allie said. “You didn’t want me to tell Mom you were staying with some guy you picked up at a bar.”

  “Not in exactly those words, no, but—”

  “So I told her that you were staying with Dan’s agent’s PA.”

  “Andy doesn’t have a personal assistant.”

  “Yeah, but Mom doesn’t know that.”

  The doorbell rang, and the little dog went absolutely apeshit, yipping crazily and jumping three feet off the floor, over and over again.

  “He hates doorbells,” Allie said. She scooped up the dog, making shushing sounds, and May looked at Ben.

  He scratched his chest, on which no shirt had yet materialized. Chest hair. God, Mom was going to see Ben’s chest hair. It wasn’t right. His eyebrows were all worried.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said.

  “Lie to your mom?”

  “Um, yes. Any of it. I mean, if you want to take off, I guess—”

  Allie interrupted her. “Do you have dog treats?”

  “I think you left some. They’d be in the cabinet.”

  “Good. He can’t take off. It’s too late. He can take off later. Right now, he’s a PA. Right?”

  “So that’s a secretary? I’m a sports agent’s secretary?”

  On a scale of one to ten, with three being his normal level of jadedness and ten being a full-scale Ben meltdown, he sounded like he was around a five. Maybe a six.

  “Apparently.” May wanted to groan. Or die. “Please?”

  Allie had a mad glint in her eyes. Ben had chevron eyebrows. He was going to get all yell-ish again, and then she’d have to explain, and—

  He nodded decisively at Allie. “Okay. If that’s what May needs me to be, that’s what I am.”

  “I like him already,” Allie said.

  “This wasn’t my idea,” May clarified.

  The doorbell rang again, and she wove past her sister, bracing herself for disaster.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Ben had never seen a mother and daughter as alike as Allie and Nancy Fredericks. They were both tiny, with brown hair and bright blue eyes. They both talked with their hands and tilted their heads like birds, moving with an abrupt, hopping intensity.

  They both wore dark green, May’s mother in a Packers sweatshirt, her sister in a jersey like May’s, but tailored to fit and worn over jeans with a brown leather belt.

  After Nancy Fredericks glanced at the couch—where May and Allie had tossed the pillow at the last possible second, creating a tableau that made it appear as though Ben had slept in the living room—she tilted her head and turned her attention on him.

  Ben felt like a worm about to get eaten.

  “So you’re Ben!” she said. “It’s good to meet you.” She reached out a hand, and Ben shook it, wishing he were wearing a shirt. “I didn’t think I would get to, which would have been a shame, because then I couldn’t thank you for taking such good care of May.”

  Ben tried to look humble and deserving as she pumped his arm up and down.

  “You have to come over for lunch. It’s the least we can do before you get back on the road.”

  He attempted to catch May’s eyes, but she was looking at the carpet and chewing on her lip. He was on his own.

  “That would be nice,” he said tentatively, “but—”

  “That’s settled, then,” Nancy replied. “Do you have coffee on, May? I need caffeine to get through the rest of this day.” She started walking toward the kitchen, and May trailed behind her as if connected by an invisible rope. “I had no idea we’d left so many last-minute wedding things to do until I got my list out this morning and realized that most of the tasks involved about a hundred little subtasks, and when I wrote all of those out, oh my goodness. I’m so glad you’re home to help. And you need to tell me what you’ve been up to, because I know Allie said it wasn’t your fault that you couldn’t make it, and of course there’s no phone service at the cabin, but I’ve been going crazy not hearing from you!”

  “I know,” May said sheepishly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” Nancy said. “Just tell me there’s coffee.”

  “In the freezer,” she answered. Ben heard the freezer door open.

  Allie grabbed his arm and tugged him toward the bedroom. “Where’s your shirt?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” he whispered back.

  She rolled her eyes and ducked into the bedroom, then the bathroom. She emerged with a wrinkled blob that looked familiar. “Put it on.”

  “I thought I’d take a shower.” Anything to absent himself from this family drama.

  “I need you in the kitchen.”

  He tugged the shirt over his head. “What is my role here, exactly?”

  “I guess we’re about to find out.”

  Then she led him to the kitchen table, pushed him down into a chair, and left him alone with Nancy while she “helped” May make the coffee. The sisters bent their heads over the machine, exchanging fierce whispers and behaving for all the world as though coffee-making were a complex activity that required the full attention of two grown women.

  Nancy folded her arms on the table and leaned forward with an expectant smile on her face.

  Her hair was impressively large. She wore a black headband to smooth it back from her forehead, but behind the band it kind of went crazy, a fluffy hair explosion that was almost as wide as her narrow shoulders and ended just beneath her chin.

  Her eyes were nearly as startling—a bright, too vivid blue that would have looked Photoshopped if he’d seen it in a magazine—and they combined with the sharpness of her long, narrow nose and the tilting thing she did with her head to give him the impression of a heron.

  A heron clothed in a Packers sweatshirt and black dress pants.

  “Did you have a nice drive?”

  “Not bad,” he said slowly. He tried to think of something else to say about it. Something normal and inoffensive. “We got through Chicago without hitting any traffic.”

  “That’s good. Did you drive straight through?”

  “We stopped overnight.” And shared a hotel room. And a bed.

  Man, he really needed to escape this kitchen. He stood. “Hey, May, you need me to run out for cream, or—”

  Allie lifted a container of powdered creamer from the counter. “We’ve got it covered, Ace.”

  May made a helpless face.

  He sat back down.

  “That’s a long drive for you,” Nancy said. “And you must be missing work today.”

  “It’s kind of a mobile job, actually,” Ben improvised. “I can take his calls anywhere, answer email, schedule appointments. These days, it’s all in the cloud.”

  Nancy smiled uncertainly. “So were you and May friendly before, or …”

  “Sure, we’ve been friends for a while.”


  Six days was a while.

  “But she’s only been in New York a few weeks.”

  “A month and a half, Mom,” May said.

  Nancy tilted her head. “That long?”

  “That long,” May affirmed.

  “I’d met her a bunch of times before,” Ben said, “when she came to visit Thor. Dan. I mean, we all hang out. Dan and … and …” Shit, what was the agent’s name? Something with a y on the end. Slinky? Alfie? “Skippy and me and May.”

  “Andy?” Nancy asked.

  “Yeah, Andy. We call him Skippy. It riles him up. We go out for wings at this restaurant near the stadium all the time, the four of us.” Allie shot him a quelling look, but he ignored her. “And I’ve been shopping with May a few times at the antiques places to help her find furniture for her and Dan’s place.”

  “Oh, you like to go antiquing?”

  “Absolutely.” Ben tried to think of something else to say about the imaginary antiquing he’d been doing with May. “She’s got a great eye for accent pieces, but she’s no good at haggling. I’m in charge of arguing.”

  “She’s lucky to have you to help her.” Nancy looked past him to her daughters in the kitchen. “I was worried about her after that business with Dan.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “But now that I see her, I think it will be okay. She’s always been the sensible one. I’m sure as soon as she sees Dan again, she’ll come around.”

  “You think?”

  “I’ll admit, that proposal did throw me for a bit of a loop. Why couldn’t the boy have written the words down on cards or something, if he was going to botch it so badly? But we all know Dan and May are meant for each other. She’s always seemed so settled with him, you know?”

  Settled. The last thing May needed was settled. Her house looked like it had been decorated by a committee of people who hated one another.

  Oh, you want the blue couch?