I cleared my throat. “It looks like we’re about to land. Are we?”
Owen turned to peek out his window. “Yep. Looks like it.”
“That was so quick.”
“Atlanta’s not that far away.”
As soon as he said it, his eyes snapped closed, and he winced. “Damn it.”
I laughed. “It’s all right. You couldn’t keep the destination a secret from me all night.”
“Is Atlanta all right?”
I rolled my eyes. “For dinner?” I sarcastically asked. “Oh, I suppose it’ll do. But if you’re taking me out for ice cream afterwards, it better be in Miami.”
Owen laughed, and I smiled back, some of the tension from a moment ago melting.
Would he really leave Crystal Brook? And just when I was starting to feel like we might get along…
Timing. It loved its sucker punches.
*
A car waited for us outside of Atlanta’s airport. Owen gave the driver an address but no name for where we were headed. Knowing the city we were in seemed information enough, so I sat back and didn’t ask any more questions, instead opting to just enjoy the sights going by the window.
By the time the car deposited us in front of a tall building that looked like it probably contained nothing other than offices, I was famished and ready to eat the first thing my eyes fell on.
Owen placed his hand lightly against my back, mimicking the action from months ago at the gala. Except this time the touch had so much more meaning than it had in May, thanks to everything that had taken place in the time since then.
I tried to suppress the tingle, but it was no good. It turned into a shudder, traveling down my body and, surely, into his palm.
He’s just being a gentleman, I reminded myself. Just because I was from a classless small town where men didn’t open doors or let women go first didn’t mean those kinds of things had died.
He led the way through the building’s front door, then across a demure looking lobby and into an elevator. I eyed him, biting back my questions but barely. If there was a restaurant anywhere upstairs, I would be thoroughly surprised.
I watched the floor numbers light up. They kept climbing and climbing, not stopping until they reached the top floor.
The elevator doors slid open, and we walked out into a large room with windows covering three walls. Beyond the windows sat the open rooftop, and, beyond that, the sparkling lights of surrounding towers.
The lighting in the glass room was low, most of it coming from candles. One table sat in the middle of the room, two place settings and an elaborate floral display on it.
A man in a black suit stepped forward.
“Good evening, Mr. Burke and Ms. Lawrence,” he smoothly said. “May I escort you to your table?”
I cocked an eyebrow at Owen, but he didn’t look at me, instead just walked to his seat.
Once we were both settled, with our host pulling out my chair for me, wine was served. The host assured us the appetizer would be out momentarily. With that he disappeared, going through a swinging door next to the elevator.
I swiveled my gaze on Owen, penetrating him with my eyes. “Dude.”
“What?”
I spread my hands out wide, gesturing at everything around us. “What do you mean ‘what?’ This. This whole thing! Now I know for sure you planned this.”
A dimple popped. “I already told you I called ahead for the jet yesterday.”
“But what about this… this private restaurant? Or whatever it is you would call it.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “It’s pretty cool, huh?”
I opened my mouth to agree, but he ducked his head and went on. “It’s a company that does it. I heard about it months ago, and I always wanted to try it. I called yesterday just on the chance that they would have an opening. It turned out someone had just canceled their appointment for tonight. Some guy booked it because he was going to propose to his girlfriend up here, but then she broke up with him.”
I laughed out loud. “I feel like I’m going to get proposed to up here.”
Owen blushed. Instantly, I wished I could take the words back. Trying to be friends was harder than I thought. It seemed every word needed to be watched, every touch monitored for appropriateness.
I cleared my throat. “Thank you, Owen. This is amazing. This is… wow. I don’t know what else to say.”
He peeked up at me. “You’re welcome. Thank you for coming with me.”
I shook my head. “There’s no way you should be this nice to me.”
“Stop saying that. Please.”
“I know we already talked about it…”
“And let’s put it behind us. You’re amazing, Claire. All right? You deserve all the best things in the world. Don’t question it when someone tries to give them to you.”
I stared back at him. He was breaking me. Damn it, the man was breaking me, and he probably wasn’t even trying. I was feeling things I hadn’t in months — warm, delicious things. More than lust. Sensations flowing through my veins like a warm stream.
I clenched my teeth together. No. I wouldn’t give in to those feelings. If I did, everything would end up just like it had before. We would both get hurt again.
“So,” I said, keeping my voice light. “What’s the menu for tonight?”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Owen
As soon as I saw her standing there in the grocery store, the same old wide brown eyes and soft lips, every other moment that had existed prior to that one slipped away.
No more anger. No more regrets. I saw a girl in front of me, and I wanted to make her happy.
Was that so wrong?
It couldn’t be. Despite the pain I went through after Claire disappeared from my house that one night, I couldn’t stop feeling certain things for her.
But maybe I could keep them in check. I could live with them, acknowledge their existence, but never act on them. The best and easiest thing I could do was just be there for her.
I could be her friend, someone to talk to, someone who could take her out and show her a good time so that she could cut loose every once in a while.
But the reality of it all was much more complicated. Watching her on that rooftop, her face shining in the candlelight, I knew it just wasn’t that simple. There’s no such thing as love at first sight. That’s what I’d tried to tell myself.
Well, I still didn’t believe it.
Dinner flew by too soon, full of small talk about the progress on my house and random wedding details. Before long, we were back in the jet, returning to Crystal Brook. It was past midnight, but it seemed as if we’d only just left home.
Claire sat across from me, her chin in her hand. “Thank you again,” she murmured.
“It was nothing.”
“No, it was. It was something really nice.”
I smiled at her. “You deserve it.”
Her grin grew, then flickered and all out died. A half second later and her eyes fell to the floor.
“This is hard,” she whispered.
My breath caught in my throat. “What?”
“This… this thing between us.” She sighed. “So much has happened. I thought that we probably couldn’t even be friends. And now here we are, doing it… and it’s still hard.”
“Because of our attraction to each other?”
She lifted her face towards mine. I was being too forward, but looking away seemed impossible.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Because of that.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to say, so I just nodded.
Claire’s hands pressed against the side of her legs, one of them pushing the hem of her skirt up the slightest bit.
I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Claire,” I said, a bit more forcefully than I meant to. “I would be there for you.”
Her eyes grew wide.
“I want you to know that,” I said, pushing the words out “I know you’re
in a fragile state, but I just want you to know that if we ever got together, I would try my hardest to never hurt you. I would take care of you. And if that never happens, I will still do my best to make you happy. I consider you my friend no matter what.”
Her lower lip trembled. “I could hurt you. There may be a day when you can’t call me your friend anymore.”
“Let me decide that for myself.”
She closed her eyes, her thin eyelids trembling.
“I’m sorry,” I said when she didn’t respond. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
She gasped, the sound filled with pain and opened her eyes. Their brown depths shone with captured tears. “It’s all right. I think about it too. You know, starting a relationship again. And I want to. I want to move on. But at the same time I don’t want to, you know?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
She licked her lips and blinked fast. “It’s hard being around you because it makes me want things… things I can’t have.”
I curled my fingers around my chair’s armrest, keeping myself in place so that I wouldn’t launch myself across the jet and onto her.
“I want to beg you to let yourself have those things,” I said through gritted teeth.
She smiled sadly. “I can’t be intimate. You should know that by now. I’m not ready for it.”
I remained frozen, not sure if I was picking up on the hidden context of that sentence correctly or not.
She looked right into my eyes. “We could… we could try just part of it. You know, we could…”
“What are you saying? That we could fuck?”
She cringed slightly. “Maybe.”
“Like friends with benefits?”
She blew out a breath. “I guess so, yeah.”
I pushed my tongue against the front of my teeth, thinking hard and fast. “What would that entail? You coming to my house to fuck me and then leaving? And how often? Would there be limits? Like we can only do it once a week so that we don’t get too close?”
Her shoulders sagged, and she looked down at her lap. “It sounds ridiculous when you put it that way.”
“But is that what you were thinking?”
“Maybe,” she whispered.
I sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m not as mad as I sound. I’m just… frustrated. Not at you, just at the whole situation. Have you ever done that? Had a relationship like that?”
She hesitated. “Yeah…”
“And how was it?”
She ran a hand over the top of her head. “Not very good.”
“Yeah, it wasn’t for me either.” I leaned back in my chair, letting my hands loosen from the arm rests. “I did things like that when I was younger. I want more than that now. I don’t want things to be that shallow with people.” I let out a guttural exhale. “As much as I would love to pull you on top of me right now and screw you senseless.”
I watched as her eyes dilated and she pressed her thighs together.
“I want to strip you naked, one piece of clothing at a time. Take your nipple in my mouth and suck. I want to trace my tongue down your belly and kiss the insides of your thighs…”
Her breathing was growing more shallow, her hands gripping the chair.
“Taste you, fuck you with my tongue, take your clit between my teeth. Make you come with my fingers, lap up the juices you can’t control.”
She squirmed and my cock grew harder, pressing painfully against my zipper.
“I want to watch your face when you climax, Claire, so I’ll have you ride me while I play with your breasts. Then I’ll take you again in the shower. When we’re back in my bed, I want to feel your lips around my cock, see how far you can take me in your throat.”
A sigh escaped her lips and her tongue darted out to lick them.
“Can you taste me? Can you feel the weight of me on your tongue?”
I waited and was rewarded with a nod.
“I can taste you too. So sweet. Your slick hot walls closing around my tongue. Then my fingers. Then my cock.”
Claire let out a whimper. “Don’t say things like that.”
My eyes flicked to her lips, then down to the breasts where two hard tips pressed against her shirt. Further down, to those thighs pressed so tightly together.
When I met her gaze again, I asked. “Do you really mean it?”
She shook her head, then nodded, then shook her head again. “I don’t know,” she finally admitted and tears sparkled in her eyes.
“All right.” I sighed, ending the game and adjusting the crotch of my pants. “This is tricky.”
“Tell me about it.” She pushed her hair away from her face and fanned her face with her hand. “Maybe… maybe we shouldn’t see each other at all. Maybe this was a bad idea.”
My chest burned so badly I couldn’t speak.
Claire was crying, thick tears spilling down her cheeks. “Maybe you should go to California. Or keep working on your house in Crystal Brook. Or, you know, do whatever it is you want to do. But maybe you should forget about me, Owen Burke. I’ll only hurt you more. Forget that you knocked on that door in April and met a woman who’s broken.” She shook her head violently. “It’ll be what’s best for you.”
“Claire,” I rasped, my heart breaking so much I couldn’t bear to hear another word of her awful plan. “You’re not seeing the whole picture. You don’t see what I see.”
“What do you see?” she asked through tears.
“I see a woman who is strong, loving. A woman who is funny and adventurous. She takes care of those around her and plows through life, no matter what it’s throwing at her.”
“I’m not strong,” she whispered. “Everything seems to hurt.”
“Of course it does. But you go forward anyway. You haven’t given up.”
She sniffed. The tears had stopped falling, but her eyes were still red. “How can you see all those things in me? I’ve been depressed since the day we met, Owen. Fuck, I ran away from you that first day! Twice.”
I laughed which hurt. “I know.”
“So where are you getting all of this information from?”
“I think I just sensed it. From the very beginning. On that first day, I could see a special light in you simply because it was there. It didn’t matter what had happened or how far down in a dark hole you were.”
She gazed past my shoulder, staring either at the wall or the dark window. “I wish you hadn’t seen that. You wouldn’t have had to become so disappointed.”
Did I tell her? Did I need to open up and let her know that from the day I met her I’d had a special feeling about her, something I couldn’t explain? Was it worth taking the chance? Would it change how she felt or just push her away further?
We’re meant to be together Claire. Someday. Somehow I know this.
The words circled in my head, begging to be let out. I couldn’t let them loose though. I didn’t possess the courage… or the stupidity.
So I just sat there and let her be. I let it all be.
We didn’t speak the rest of the flight. We didn’t speak on the walk to my car, and we didn’t speak as I drove it down the nearly empty stretch away from the airport and towards the interstate. The hours had escaped me. It could have been any time of the night for all I knew, but a small sense of me picked up that it had to be very late. Traffic was barely there, getting sparser and sparser the closer we got to Crystal Brook.
As we turned off the exit, Claire finally spoke. “I’m glad I met you.”
I looked at her. She was looking in my direction as well, though I couldn’t really see her face in the poor lighting.
She went on. “I’m sorry for hurting you.”
“Thank you,” I said with a thick tongue.
She sighed. “I guess we’ve said our fair share of apologies at this point.”
“Yeah. We have.”
She turned her face to the window. “So where do we go from here?”
Good question.
How I wante
d to take her home, to show her how much I cared and how much I was there for her no matter what was going on.
But that wasn’t the way you offered help. I knew it. You had to show up and give a person whatever it was they asked for, not what you thought they needed. That was true care. That was true love.
“What do you want?” I asked.
Her voice shook. “To understand things better.”
The speed limit dropped, and I hit the brake to meet it as we cruised closer to the heart of town.
“Yeah, that would be nice for me too,” I ruefully responded.
I drove even slower, but there was no way to prolong the end of the night. We took the turn onto my street, the headlights sweeping across the dark bushes.
My house loomed in the night, a black blob. It had never looked so sad, so lonely as it did then. Soon Claire would be getting in her own car and leaving me to walk into that too large house all on my own.
It was hard to not feel at least a little sorry for myself.
I pulled up to the end of the drive and killed the engine. Claire opened her door and dragged herself out, moving at the speed of a sloth.
I followed her to the car, almost glad for the darkness of the yard. It made things easier in a way. I didn’t know just what was about to happen, but there was a chance we would be saying goodbye for good. After everything we’d discussed and been through, it wouldn’t be surprising if seeing me ever again proved to be too much for Claire.
I held my breath as she pulled her keys from her bag. Please don’t let this be goodbye.
I couldn’t ask her what was going to happen next. Judging from our conversation, she knew about just as much as I did.
But I also couldn’t keep living this way. Stumbling around Crystal Brook, waiting for her to return, then managing to partially forget about her for a little bit, then repeating the cycle. Over and over. I was a slave to my feelings, a slave to that idea that had been born in me the day we met. I still believed our path had been written in the stars. I still believed that, no matter what happened between us, it was supposed to be that way. The pain, the struggles. They were all leading somewhere.
Crushed (Crystal Brook Billionaires) Page 19