by Lily Menon
Raucous laughter echoed behind her. She didn’t want to shove her way back through the crowds to go back to the living room, so on an impulse, she reached for the doorknob of the door closest to her and turned it. The heavy door swung silently inward. With a quick glance over her shoulder to make sure no one was about to stop her or accuse her of being a thief, Annika stepped into the dark, cool, quiet room and shut the door behind her.
Ah. Blissful quiet.
She turned the light on, dimmed it, and looked around. It was an enormous bedroom, with a minimalist bed on a raised platform. The bed was fitted with taupe and black sheets and several overstuffed pillows. Three of the bedroom’s walls were glass; they looked out over the city and its breathtaking assortment of roads and skyscrapers and the red glow of brake lights, like a string of rubies on a necklace. Annika noticed more sculptures on the nightstand and dresser as well, which were smaller and more brightly colored than the one in the hallway, but similarly languid in style. They were mounted on wooden stands.
Annika walked forward, her heels sinking into the plush carpet, her eyes running along the painting at the head of the bed. It looked like the Himalayas, but she wasn’t sure. This bedroom was an oasis, she realized, for an artistic, sensitive soul.
She threw her purse on the floor and flopped backward on the bed, throwing her arms out to the sides. In the quiet, she took a deep breath and turned her head to stare out at the twinkling lights of the city. It smelled good in here, like faint ocean-scented cologne and something else—something fresh and cottony, like soap and clean pajamas.
She knew she couldn’t stay here for the rest of the night, in some random stranger’s private bedroom, but this felt good. Like a little enclave, suspended in a castle. A private bubble, where no one could find her and where she didn’t have to pretend to be a grown-up with enough self-confidence to walk among snooty celebrities who didn’t want her around.
The door clicked open.
Annika scrambled up to a sitting position. The man in the doorway was dressed in straight jeans and a simple white button-down that accentuated his tanned skin and green eyes, ridges and planes hinting at the stellar anatomy underneath the fabric.
Hudson Craft.
He narrowed his eyes at her, the silence ticking on. “Oh. Um, hi,” she said finally, because it was clear he wasn’t going to speak at all. Weirdo. “What … are you doing here?” But of course, he was probably BFFs with the gazillionaire host of this party. He was Hudson fucking Craft.
“Well,” he said, closing the heavy door behind him and turning back around, a faint smile playing at his lips. “Anything I want, I guess. Seeing as how this is my bedroom.”
* * *
Annika’s eyebrows shot up to her hairline. She scrambled to get off the bed, her cheeks flaming. “This … this is your place? What are you, a multimillionaire?”
Hudson leaned against the door, hands in his pockets, and chuckled. “Just bought it a month ago. And no, just a millionaire. Though I am working on the ‘multi’ part.” He gave her a boyish grin.
“Oh.” Annika stood there awkwardly. The reminder of his millionaire status drove home the feeling of failure the eviction letter had brought with it. She pushed the thought from her mind. “I swear I’m not barging in. June invited me, and she was invited by her friend Lucy, who was invited by her friend Katie—”
Hudson waved her explanation off, his eyes holding hers steadily. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Did he mean here in his house or here alone with him in his bedroom? In his plain-but-very-stylish clothes, he belonged in this room completely, with its clean lines and expensive but understated décor. Annika suddenly had a vision of him, shirtless and dressed only in plaid pajama bottoms, reclining in his bed, his hair damp and his chest and abs covered in droplets of water. And another vision of herself, startlingly similar to a memory she had of Vegas, kneeling beside him and licking each of those droplets off.
Her skin began to pulse with desire. Really, she should leave. Hudson Craft was still Hudson Craft; nothing had changed. They weren’t compatible. Couldn’t be compatible. She should just stride past him, open the door, and be gone.
But she didn’t want to. She wanted to stay here, to get a glimpse behind the curtain, to see who Hudson really was. And that was a problem.
Abruptly choosing to ignore the tiny voice of reason that was getting smaller with every breath she took, Annika turned to look out the glass wall again, then sat on the black leather bench at the foot of his bed, her mind carefully skirting all the reasons she shouldn’t. “Your view is killer.”
Hudson pulled a standing swing chair over and sat, too, facing the glass wall across from them. “I like it. In fact, I think it was this view that sold me on the house.”
Annika gave him a look.
“What?”
“Nothing.” She shook her head and ran her fingernail along the stitching on the leather. “My dad said the same thing about his house and my mom. She wanted to buy it just based on the view from the deck.”
“Smart lady,” Hudson said. “I haven’t regretted waking up to this so far. How does your mom like her view?”
Annika paused. There was never a good time to lay this on people; they always got really awkward and strange when she did. “My mom died a long time ago, when I was a newborn. Cancer.”
Hudson turned to look at her. “I’m sorry,” he said simply. “That must’ve been really hard, growing up without a mom—never knowing her, always wondering what could’ve been.”
Huh. No one had ever said that to Annika, apart from the therapist she saw briefly as a teenager, for what her dad called her “unprocessed abandonment issues”—by which he meant he was mad that Annika had started having sex and didn’t know what else to do about it. Everyone else always assumed that just because her mom had died when she was a newborn, she must not have too many feelings about it. “Thanks. It was. But my dad definitely made up for it. I never felt alone.” Shut up, Annika. He doesn’t care. Why was she sharing all of this with him?
But if he noticed her blathering, he didn’t say anything about it. In fact, Annika thought, he was … different tonight. That hard edge she’d noticed before wasn’t present now, though she had no idea what had changed.
Hudson pushed back with his legs so he swung slowly in the chair. “Nice. I have two parents and a brother and I can’t say the same.”
Annika turned sharply to look at him. There was that disorienting feeling again, the same one she got when she swam in the ocean, the feeling that there was an entire universe beneath her that she had no idea about. It was both terrifying and thrilling. “You were lonely growing up?”
His expression didn’t even flicker. He shrugged. “My point is, you’re lucky to have the dad you do.”
Annika hesitated. “I am.”
He studied her, his eyes probing. “But?”
She shook her head and traced the stitching a little faster. “Nothing. I really am lucky. I just … I wish my dad and I saw eye to eye on my career, that’s all.”
“He doesn’t agree with the choices you’ve made?”
“More like he isn’t very enthusiastic about them. He’s still holding his breath, hoping I’ll go to medical school.”
Hudson scoffed. “Medical school? You?”
Annika glared at him, her fingernail digging into the leather. “What? You don’t think I’m smart enough to be a doctor?”
He looked at her steadily. “You’re definitely smart enough, you know that. I just can’t see you doing something so mechanical, so … routine. You’re too creative for a job like that.”
Annika looked down at her shoes, her stomach feeling weird and swoopy. “Doctors can be creative,” she mumbled. Why was she getting all tongue-tied? Why was she letting him get under her skin again? This was the problem: Being attracted to Hudson was like being attracted to two completely different people, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Snide. He flirted with her just to see her blu
sh, teased her mercilessly, and also owned a horrible, soul-sucking business like Break Up, which was flourishing while her own lovingly nurtured business was wilting. But he also did nice things that made her heart melt.
She, Annika Dev, could never go out with someone like Hudson Craft—evil millionaire who was in the professional heartbreaking business. It didn’t matter if she was going to die alone. She could never live with herself if she dated someone like him, who put out so much negative energy, so many dark, sad vibes into the universe. Plus, how would she feel if, against all odds, she really did have to close down Make Up in a few weeks? How could she continue to go out with him without it making her sick to her stomach? What she was going to do, like the mature, responsible person she was, was get up and let herself out of this room. And possibly out of this party, which happened to be his party, because of course it was.
Instead, Annika found herself getting up and walking to the sculpture on his sleek, otherwise empty nightstand. Come on, Annika. Just leave. But she couldn’t. It was like Hudson had his own gravitational field, and he’d pulled her, a tiny, helpless star, into it. Escape was impossible. “I like all of these sculptures. What’s the story behind this guy?”
Hudson walked to where she stood, all tall and delicious-smelling. She made a point of not letting her breath waver. “I made that in college.”
Annika turned to him. “You made that?” He’d mentioned visual arts in Vegas, but never specifically sculpting.
He huffed a breath and put a dramatic fist on his hip. “What? You don’t think I’m creative enough to be a sculptor?”
Annika crossed her arms. “To be honest? No.”
He laughed easily. “Ouch. Quick and painful.”
“Sorry,” she said, feeling a little bad. She turned back to the teal-and-gold sculpture, tracing her finger along the liquid curves and voluptuously rounded edges. Everything about it was soft and vulnerable, so different from the Hudson Craft she knew. So Mr. Merciless-Forbes-Millionaire-Businessman had an artistic side. There was that disorientation again. She couldn’t keep up with his two halves.
“It’s fine. I don’t really talk about it much. I actually used to want to be a sculptor, but then I realized I wouldn’t make any money that way. And that wouldn’t be of any help to my parents.”
“Oh. They owned that convenience store in rural Ohio, right? And you wanted to help them retire?”
Hudson looked taken aback. “How do you know that? I don’t remember that being in any articles.”
“It wasn’t. I remembered you telling me in Vegas.”
They studied each other for a beat, his eyes softening. “Vegas. Right.”
Annika went back to studying the sculpture, a little unsettled. What was he thinking? Why could she never tell with him?
After a beat, he added, “Well, they’re retired now and their house is paid off. But I still send money home to them every month to keep them comfortable.”
“They must be really proud of you.”
Hudson only shrugged.
Annika remembered how intense he’d been at the tech forum, talking about how success was a way to give back to the people who’d helped him become who he was. Was that what he meant? She didn’t know how to ask. It was a deeply personal question.
Clearing her throat, she said, “So what do you like about sculpting?” She just couldn’t picture him in a sculptor’s studio, his hands all messy with clay. She half wondered if he was just bullshitting her.
But Hudson didn’t smirk or laugh. He ran his index finger gently over the sculpture she’d been admiring, his touch tender and soft and … respectful, somehow. “I like that I’m completely at the mercy of the clay, of the form trying to emerge. There’s no rushing the process. Sculpting’s a labor of love—painfully slow, surprisingly emotional. You have to be okay with failure.” He traced his finger over a tiny divot at the top of the statue that Annika hadn’t noticed before. “You have to learn to live with the imperfections and the flaws in each piece, maybe even come to love them.”
As Annika listened to him, she realized that everything he loved about sculpting was exactly the opposite of Break Up. Break Up was about faster, higher, more. It was quick and brutal and savage and cold, with no room for softness or emotion. She found herself shaking her head slowly.
He caught her eye, and his misty, soft expression cleared. “What?”
She stood there, her upper thigh pressed against the nightstand, acutely aware that Hudson was just a step away. Faint laughter drifted in from the hallway. She breathed, “Why do you act the way you do?” instead of the million and one more appropriate things she could’ve said.
Looking confused, he pushed a hand through his hair. His blond hair flopped onto his forehead. “What do you mean?”
Shit. The moment stretched on, Annika’s mouth opening and closing futilely. Well, it was too late to backtrack now. Just rip off the Band-Aid, Annika. “You … you’re all over the place. You commandeer my first date with a perfectly nice guy and you ruin it for me. You’re completely fine with breaking people’s hearts and being some kind of hero to douchetruffles like Hedge Fund Harry. You tell me you think about Vegas and yet you act like I have a communicable disease when I try to kiss you. You’re constantly in my space and you’re constantly in my head and I don’t know what to do with all that.” She stopped, aghast. She should never have brought up the kiss, or told him he was in her head. Never, never, never. “You know what? Never mind.”
He considered her for a long moment and then rubbed his jaw, looking away. “Annika, I’m not trying to be confusing.”
She waited for more, her heart thumping. So they were back to this again? She should tell him it didn’t matter, that she shouldn’t have brought it up. She should leave. Being in a room alone with Hudson Craft, even when she hadn’t been drinking, was a heady experience—one in which she didn’t trust herself. When he was silent, she said, “Right. That’s just your natural state, then. Confusing as hell.”
His eyes burned into hers. “Maybe I can make things a bit clearer.” He stepped forward, so they were just a breath apart. Placing a big hand on her arm, he said, his voice a rumble, “I meant what I said at the fountain. I haven’t stopped thinking about you since you quoted Florence Nightingale to me in a dim bar in Vegas: ‘Happiness is the gradual realization of a worthy ideal or goal.’”
Annika’s heart thudded in her chest. Walk away, she instructed herself firmly. Nothing good will come of this. Even though she wanted to hear what exactly he’d been thinking about her, and even though she was dying with curiosity about how he was going to make things “clearer,” she was definitely going to walk away. She was going to turn right around and go find June—
Hudson closed the gap between them, the hard lines of his body molding to her soft ones. She tipped her head back and stared into his green, green eyes, her breathing coming in shorter, quicker pants. There was a smile on his face—just one corner of his lips tipped up. She placed her hands against the firm muscles of his chest, intending to push him away, to wipe that smirk right off his face, to tell him she was no Hudson Craft groupie.
But he took her touch as an invitation. The smirk disappeared as he cupped her cheek in one enormous hot hand, the other at her waist, tugging her even closer, impatient, demanding. And then his lips covered hers.
Annika’s body responded before her brain could yell its outrage. She was enveloped by his clean smell and brilliant, radiating warmth, like a surfer being swallowed by a wave. Her cheeks burned where his stubble scraped against them, just the right amount of rough, sandpaper against silk. His mouth claimed hers, equal parts firm and soft. He kissed the way he did everything else—sure and self-assured. He nibbled her bottom lip, no tongue, smiling against her mouth, teasing her even now, in this moment. She nipped at his lip in response, hard, and he laughed gently before opening his mouth wider, giving her what she really wanted.
When his tongue caressed hers, Annika
moaned softly, and he kissed her deeper in response, the hand on her cheek slipping to tangle in her hair, as if he couldn’t get close enough. She ran her hands down his pecs to his stomach, feeling the taut muscles, her bones going soft, melting so she was nothing but a puddle of hot desire.
Her fingertips hit the button on his jeans and she heard the sharp intake of his breath. He was hard, pressing against her, and she was so wet, so open, so ready to take this further.
And then reality slammed into her. This wasn’t just some guy she was hooking up with in some random bedroom. This wasn’t a date with someone she cared about and trusted and saw a future with. This was Hudson fucking Craft. And Hudson Craft—keeper of Break Up—was anathema to her soul.
She pulled back suddenly, pressing one hand against his chest again. But this time, the message was clear: Stop. His eyes were wide, his dark pupils dilated against the green. Annika took some pleasure at the way he was breathing, hard and ragged, his cheeks flushed.
“Hudson … it’s—this is not a good idea.”
“I beg to differ,” he murmured, trying to close the gap between their mouths again. Annika wanted to let him; desire was making her toes literally curl in her shoes. Any gap between them felt criminal in this moment, utterly unthinkable. She wanted to feel his hands everywhere. She wanted to feel every part of him under her palms.
But she forced herself to take a step back. “I mean it,” she forced herself to say, even though her voice shook and her body was screaming, No, you don’t, you moron!
Hudson rubbed a hand across his swollen lips as he realized she was serious. He frowned. “Did I … do something wrong?”
“No, I … you didn’t. I just … I don’t see this going anywhere, Hudson. You’re you, and I’m me.”
He looked confused. “Yes, we’re the people we are.”
Annika sighed. Of course he wouldn’t understand. He’d made a million dollars with his app. He was considered a visionary, a genius. He didn’t have an eviction letter in his drawer at work, in spite of how hard he’d tried to do something good in the world. “Don’t you get it? We’re like if a tree and a forest fire wanted to go out. It just doesn’t make sense.” She walked to the leather bench to get her purse as Hudson watched in silence, one hand rubbing his jaw. “It would make more sense if we shared the same values, if we were even friends first. You and I … we have so little in common.”