He picked up his plate and held it—almost like a shield. “So you read it.”
“Half of it.” Pause. “Are you going to hand me that plate or are you determined to snap it in half?”
He looked at the plate in his hands as though he’d never seen it before and then passed it to her. “I didn’t think you were going to read it,” he said.
“I wasn’t so sure myself,” she said, and started piling chili onto his plate. “But I make it a rule never to work on Sunday and since you were holed up in the second bedroom all day, I figured I may as well relax with a good book. Except ‘relax’ isn’t really the right word is it?”
“What is the right word?”
She handed his plate back to him. “Instructive—which is exactly what you said it would be. I’ve definitely been instructed.” She smiled thinly. “Who knew you saw me as New York Barbie?”
“I don’t.”
“At least I come with all the accessories. The house, the pool, the convertible. Camper van, pony, a Jet Ski! Even caviar and champagne. I wonder if a 1952 Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle will turn up—I mean, somewhere other than in our garage in Kentucky, where the one I bought you currently resides.”
“No, it won’t. The motorcycle isn’t in the book.”
“Hey, you’re supposed to say ‘spoiler alert’ before you give those details!”
“You asked.”
“Heard of the word ‘rhetorical’? Well, I’m sure there’ll be an allegorical motorcycle in there somewhere.”
“Julie’s not... She’s not... Mierda.”
“Not shit? Because she seems a shit kind of person to me,” she said. “But I guess that’s what happens when you load up your character with only bad traits.”
“I mean she’s not you. Not...really.”
“How can you say that after I dressed the part for you?” She looked down at herself, then across at him. “This is something Julie would wear, isn’t it? She seems so desperate to have as much sex as she can before she’s forced into that dreary life in a New York penthouse apartment with Niles the banker!”
He must have recognized the martial light of challenge in her eyes, because his whole demeanor changed, like he’d suddenly picked up a flung gauntlet. “Julie wouldn’t wear a maid’s outfit—if that’s what you’d call what you’re wearing!”
“Only because that’s what her maid would wear I presume?”
He inclined his head—his only answer.
“You don’t like her much, do you?”
“All I have to do is understand her. It’s Eric who loves her.”
“Oh, Eric!” she said, and pulled a face.
His jaw moved, like he was grinding his teeth. “What’s wrong with Eric?”
“Eric doesn’t have the balls to be with a woman who doesn’t need him to survive. If she’s not barefoot, pregnant and broke, he runs.”
“He doesn’t have the balls because she’s cutting them off! ‘Eat caviar, Eric. Drink champagne, Eric. Let me pay for dinner, buy you an Armani suit, get you a better cell phone, a new computer, Eric’!” He half rose from his seat, hands on the table, glaring across at her. “She was paying for him like he was a fucking male escort! What the hell was he supposed to do?”
She matched him stand for stand, stance for stance. “Stay, that’s what! Stay, fight with her about it—fight for her! Find the courage to not give her up, since he said he loved her so fucking much!”
Long, searing moment and then his face shuttered. He sat back down. “Yeah, well, when you get to the end of the book you’ll see Eric’s days of having his balls handed to him on a plate are over the day she—” He cut himself off, shook his head. Not going there.
“She what? What happens to Julie?”
He watched her, narrow-eyed. “No spoilers, right? So I’ll just say she gets the life she always wanted.” Long moment of stillness, and then he took a slow breath and started spooning sour cream, pineapple and carrot onto his plate indiscriminately. “How about we talk about something less bloodthirsty, like serial killers? Tori’s book—is it the Murder Eight series? She won an Edgar for the last one, didn’t she?”
Subject effectively changed. And they kept changing subjects every time a barb flew.
A brooding kind of tension brewed between them until it felt as though they’d set a metronome on the table, ticking away the seconds and building an almost palpable dome of lust around them as eight o’clock crept closer.
At the twenty-minutes-to-go mark, the conversation dried up completely.
Seventeen minutes, and the air was crackling with electric anticipation, expectation robbing the space around them of oxygen.
Thirteen minutes—clear the barely touched plates of chili.
Nine—serve the chocolate mousse.
When there were only eight minutes left, Rafael put a condom beside his plate and Veronica started to tremble as her excitement level rocketed up.
Seven minutes.
He was examining his mousse as though it were a plate of dirt, without making any attempt to pick up a spoon to eat it. His hands rested on the table on either side of his bowl. The long, elegant fingers of his left hand drummed insistently on the tabletop. Those on his right were curled up tight into his palm.
“I told you I wasn’t in Romy’s league,” Veronica said with a failure of a laugh—just something, anything, to break the tension.
“Huh?” was his unhelpful response.
“You barely ate any of the chili, and you don’t seem interested in the mousse. I know it’s kind of lumpy. There’s something about the temperature of the eggs or the chocolate having a seizure or...or something that I always get wrong, but I can never remember what it is.”
He made an impatient chopping movement with his left hand—it seemed he was no longer capable of conversing—and then curled those fingers in to match the right fist that was all but vibrating against the tabletop.
Two minutes.
And then he lifted both fists a few inches and brought them down on the table in a controlled thump.
He pushed his chair back. “It’s almost eight o’clock. And given I’ve been staring at your nipples—exactly as you planned—for an hour, and I’m horny as fucking hell, I think we’d better decide on a safe word.”
“A what?”
“A safe word. Something you say that will stop me before I hurt you.”
“You won’t hurt me.”
“Humor me on this, because just at this moment...” He raised a hand as though to protect himself, then dropped it. “Humor me, okay?”
And just like that, her anger flared. Humor him? Why the fuck should she? “How about ‘Niles’ for the inoffensive banker in Catch, Tag, Release? Or...or Piers? Not that Piers is an investment banker but—”
“Believe me, you saying Niles or Piers is more likely to spur me on than stop me.”
She threw her napkin on the table. “Then how about Liar, Liar?”
“Good choice,” he growled. “Excellent choice!” He glanced at his wristwatch. “And just in time.”
She stood.
“Stay where you are,” he barked at her.
“But—”
“Stay in that chair, I want to show you how much I love chocolate mousse.”
“Now you want to eat dessert?” she said, but she sat because she knew this wasn’t about mousse.
“Yes, now I want to eat dessert. So reach into that bowl in front of you and scoop up some mousse. I want you to coat your nipples with it. Do it.”
She couldn’t repress the wild tremor that shook her—didn’t want to. This felt like a showdown. A physical continuation of the conversation about Catch, Tag, Release they clearly weren’t prepared to explore to the bitter end. Working out boundaries—what each of them could and could not accept.
&nb
sp; “Should I take off my dress?” she asked—a test, an offer for what they were about to do to be his call.
“No.”
“Okay,” she said, dipping her fingers into the lumpy mousse, “but the chocolate will ruin the lace, so if you want to see this dress again—”
“I don’t want to see the dress again—and I’m going to ruin the lace, Veronica.”
“That’s not like you,” she said, and placed a dollop of mousse on each nipple. “You’ve always been so fastidious.”
“College was a long time ago, remember? Now shut up and rub that mousse in—no, roll it in the way you like it when it’s me doing it.”
She gasped as she obeyed him, then moaned. She was squirming on her chair, remembering what he’d said this morning about dragging her over and unzipping his jeans and impaling her on his cock, wishing he’d do it now.
“Tell me how they feel,” he said.
“Hard. Ready. Aching. Needy.”
His hands disappeared below the table. She heard the zip of his jeans go down. “Hard, ready, aching, needy,” he repeated, and reached for the condom, tore open the packet. His hands disappeared beneath the table again, presumably to slide the condom on. “Just like my cock.”
She moaned again and this time it galvanized him so that he was on his feet.
“Hands off,” he said, “my turn.”
And he came around to her side of the table, his jeans gaping open, and positioned himself behind her. He scooped up more mousse, dabbed it on her, then his fingers delved into the narrow band of lace, forking around her nipples just hard enough to squeeze without impeding his hands from sliding up and down. “Jesus,” he groaned, and as though he couldn’t wait one more minute, he dragged her up out of her chair, spun her to face him, head lowering, mouth diving to lick then suck the mousse off her right nipple until she cried out.
“You know the safe word,” he said and then sucked again. “If I’m too hard, say it, stop me.”
“I’m not saying it. I want it exactly like this,” she said, and his fingers fumbled for her other nipple, clumsy in their haste to touch her so that the lace she’d sewn on tore free of the dress, exactly as he’d predicted.
He pulled back, breathing hard, and when she looked down to see what he’d done she had to admit she’d never looked so ready to be fucked in her life. Torn lace on one side exposing her nipple completely, the other side with a chocolate-stained frill and reddened nipple peeping through. She looked like the personification of sexual excess.
“Is it the same?” he asked. “Am I the same? Do you still think I don’t have the balls for you?”
“Why does what I think matter?”
“Because it fucking does!” he said, and spun her to face the island, pushed her toward it, crowded in behind her. She felt the back of his hands against her bottom, knew he was shoving his jeans and underwear out of the way, and then his fingers returned to her nipples, rolling them tight and hard. “Safe word. Now.”
“No.”
He shoved a knee between her legs, kicked her feet apart. “Trust fund, finishing school, Manhattan penthouse, Kentucky horses, society parties...the perfect life...yet you don’t even make me lift your dress to get to you,” he breathed against her ear and shoved his cock between her thighs, rubbing it against her clit.
She pushed her bottom back, egging him on. “Two bestselling books, movie in the works, TV-star date, looking like a god, you could have anyone...yet I’m still the one you want to fuck,” she shot back at him. “Now put up or shut—Ahhhhh.” As his dick went deep into her.
“I’m not moving until you tell me who you think I am. That it’s me you want, me you see, me you feel. Only me. Me as you see me now.”
“All right, okay, it’s you! It is!” she cried, and it was a sob of need as much as an answer. “You, Rafael.” Another sob—surrender. “You.”
“¡No me llames Rafael!”
“Wh-what? But that’s your name.”
“Dime Rafa como siempre lo hacias.”
“Rafa,” she said. “Rafa, all right, Rafa, Rafa.”
Another string of Spanish words as he pulled all the way out of her and then thrust all the way back in, and her hips hit the counter.
She cried out from the force of it.
More Spanish as he instantly pulled out of her, too fast for her to translate. He turned her into his arms. He kissed her, gentle now. “Ah, perdón, perdón, mi amor,” he said.
“No, no! It’s okay, you didn’t hurt me.”
“I don’t want to do it this way,” he said, taking her face between his hands.
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not.”
Breathing hard into the silence. Both of them poised as though on a precipice. Lust and fear and need and something else. Something from the past, like a sort of sorrow.
“The book,” he said. “Those two...Julie and Eric, they existed in my head, a punishment, but they’re not real.”
“I don’t want to talk about the book.”
“Just...let me say this. I wrote it angry.”
“Yeah, that much I could tell,” she said, her voice thick.
“I lost sight of you in my anger. I did it to hurt you.”
“I know—so the least I could have done was read it when I was supposed to, right? I’d be over it by now!”
He laughed softly and then bit his lip and smiled down at her at the same time—a rueful expression so at odds with the harsh way he’d seemed intent on taking her. “So let me not hurt you in the kitchen, hmm? We won’t do it like this.”
She wanted to bury her face against his chest and pretend she hadn’t seen that look on his face, block her ears and pretend she hadn’t heard the gentleness in his voice. Because it was loneliness she was seeing and hearing. Loneliness and longing, and sweetness and an aching sadness. And something else. Something that was a lot like love. And it was too late for love. Way too late. She couldn’t risk love, wouldn’t believe in this time, couldn’t survive it going wrong again.
“Come, upstairs,” he said. “It’s safer in bed.”
“I don’t want to be safe,” she whispered—but the words were suddenly just words because the safety he was offering would make what they were doing something other than dirty, dare-you, raw sex. And that was more dangerous than shoving her against a kitchen island. Bruises you could see were safer than ones you couldn’t.
That look again, making her heart stumble. “Don’t you, mi vida?”
No. No! She didn’t want him to understand her or to comfort her. So she undulated against him, urging him on, and when all he did was kiss her too damn gently, she lifted her leg against his hip, then undulated again.
“Veronica!” he said—a caution in it that she would not hear!
“No!” she snapped and with a hoarse cry lifted herself so he instinctively supported her weight as she wrapped both legs around him, and when he ground out something in Spanish, something that told her she was everything he wanted, she pushed herself onto him so that his cock sank all the way inside her. It was his undoing—no holding back now.
The madness built, the desperation to take, the jerking of hips and slap of flesh. A gasp, a long, low moan, and she screamed as the orgasm came for her, slumped as he followed her a split second later. His face was buried against her neck as he said over and over, “Mi vida, mi vida, mi vida.”
She screwed her eyes shut. “Don’t say that,” she whispered. “Don’t.”
He pulled her in closer, hugged her tight. “What do you want me to say? Tell me, I’ll say it. I will.”
She unclamped her legs from around him, let them slide down until her feet were on the floor and she was standing in the circle of his arms. “Tell me you want to fuck me, that’s all. That’s all I need.”
He kissed the side of her ne
ck. “Tú me perteneces,” he said.
“No I don’t,” she cried. “I don’t belong to you. I never did. You’re not like me, you don’t lose things that belong to you. If I belonged to you, you would never have let yourself lose me. You’d never have left me.”
He said nothing, just held her. She could have pulled free; instead she opted to drive the point home with a little voodoo-style viciousness using her teeth as pins. But when she turned her face into his shoulder, intending to bite through his T-shirt like a savage, something in her brain went haywire so that she kissed him there instead.
“Come to bed, mi amor,” he said.
Don’t call me that, she screamed—but only in her head because he was kissing any words she might have said away.
And then he lifted her in his arms and she knew she was in trouble because she wanted him to call her that again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
HE KEPT COMING back to that fucking death scene!
Rafael paced around the second bedroom—as much as he could pace now a desk had been delivered from Tremenhill Hall for his temporary use, and all his worldly possessions had been relocated by Veronica from the main bedroom while he’d been out for his run this morning.
He’d laughed when he’d seen his suitcase. When he’d opened the wardrobe and found his shirt. Not that it was entirely unexpected since at 4:00 a.m., as he’d leaned in to kiss her, she’d reminded him she was off the clock and in “recovery mode,” so he should probably take himself off to the second bedroom to sleep if he couldn’t keep his body parts to himself.
He’d duly gotten out of bed, picked up the jeans and T-shirt he’d left on the armchair, and taken himself to bed in here...where he’d tossed and turned all night thinking about the way he’d portrayed himself in Catch, Tag, Release: Eric, the cast-aside lover too willing to accept his fate but who turns cruel by the end—not a pretty picture.
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