He pulled into a small clearing and parked as quickly as possible. They were still a good ways from their favorite spring, but he was far too shaken to keep driving.
“What happened back there?” Zoe asked as she took off her helmet.
“Come here.” He dragged her off the bike and into his arms.
“You scared me when you veered off the road.”
“I was distracted,” he said. His heart was beating double-time with his new revelation. He didn’t want to think about his family anymore, or about the legacy that had torn his family apart. He just wanted to live in the moment with Zoe, where it was safe.
“You were distracted? By what?”
“You.” He reached around, pulled the clip from the back of her head, and tossed it aside. Sliding his fingers into her long locks, he gripped the back of her head and pulled her down to his lips, cutting off her next question.
The kiss was hot and sexy, everything he wanted a kiss to be. She groaned and wiggled against him, making his hard cock ache with longing. Keeping one hand at her head, he feasted on her lips as he slid his fingers under her skirt. It wasn’t long before he was touching her bare skin, something that created a sense of urgency in his core.
“I need to be inside of you,” he whispered when they broke for air. “I need to feel you.” More importantly, he needed her to not ask questions about what happened. He didn’t want to think about his past. He didn’t want to think at all.
She gasped and tilted her head back as he massaged her breast. “I don’t have a condom—do you?”
He didn’t, damn it. “I’m free of disease.” He curled his fingers in her hair and pulled, forcing her head back farther. “I’ve been tested.”
“Me, too.” She groaned as he nipped her neck. “And I’m on the pill.”
“Perfect.” Tilting his head, he kissed her again, invading her mouth and drowning in her taste.
“Take off your panties,” he said when they finally came up for air. As she stopped to remove her clothes, he unzipped his pants and freed his aching cock. Stroking himself slowly from root to tip, he watched her kick her underwear aside.
“Good. Now pull up your skirt and bend over the motorcycle.”
She moved to do as he asked. “Like this?”
“Yes.” God, yes. He moistened his lips as he watched her spread her legs, exposing her glistening folds. “Just like that.”
He groaned as he positioned himself at her opening. She had never felt so hot, so wet…
“Tate, oh God…”
He grasped her hips and thrust forward, pushing her up onto her toes. The sensation felt overwhelming, as if he was floating on air. Curling his body around hers, he rested his forehead along her back and took a moment to collect himself.
He didn’t know how she did it, but driving into Zoe’s sweet body felt like coming home. Tate knew that he’d never get tired of being with her. She accepted him for who he was, not for what his family name or money could provide. It was a rare gift, and one Tate knew that he would treasure for the rest of his life.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“It’s more than okay,” he said as he straightened and grabbed her hips. “You feel amazing.”
He began to thrust, slowly at first, then when she met him halfway with more force and vigor. The sounds of their bodies coming together filled the air, and the crisp, primal sound made him feel powerful and animalistic.
Mine, his head screamed at him. She’s mine.
“I’m close,” Zoe said as she spread her legs wider apart. He was close, too, but he didn’t want to let himself go until she found her release.
Reaching down, he slid his hand around her hips and rubbed her clit. The movement caused her muscles to tighten around his shaft, and he steeled his jaw as desire surged through his bloodstream.
“Yes, oh God.” Zoe came hard, calling out his name as her body shook from the force of her orgasm. Straightening, Tate grabbed her hips and lost himself in the moment, loving how hard her inner muscles gripped his shaft. He quickened the pace as his sense of urgency grew. It wasn’t long before his world erupted as well, and he groaned her name as pleasure spread through his core. For a long moment, all that existed was this woman, this moment, and the beautiful connection they shared.
When the last ribbons of joy faded away, Tate retreated and cleaned himself up. Zoe did the same, and when she finally straightened, he tugged her close and kissed her with all of the love and emotion he felt.
“That was amazing,” he said as he helped her put her hair back into a clip.
“You’re amazing.” She kissed his cheek.
He chuckled and slid his arm around her waist. The ride back to the resort was smooth. Thanks to Zoe’s help, he had chased his demons away. He had even managed to avoid answering questions about his past. Perhaps she had forgotten about what happened with Sadie that morning. With a little luck, maybe they could avoid the topic of his family all together.
“Tate,” she said once they parked at the resort. “We need to talk.”
He avoided her eyes as he took the helmet from her and set it aside. “Sure. What do you want to talk about?”
“Tate, there you are,” Alex, his second-in-command, said as he spied them in the parking lot. “We need your input on something at the site.”
Thank God. While he knew that he couldn’t avoid the topic of his family forever, he was glad to get to sidestep the difficult conversation for a little while longer. He didn’t know how Zoe would take the news about his family’s wealth, or how he had dipped into his trust fund to help her. She’d probably try to give him back his money, and he would refuse the gesture. It would make things awkward between them, and he wasn’t ready to deal with that just yet.
“Sure thing. I’ll be right there.” He turned to Zoe. “I have to go. Maybe we can pick up where we left off tonight?”
Her smile seemed a tad forced. “I’ve got a few things I need to do for Sadie tonight. Why don’t we make it tomorrow morning, say at ten?”
“Sure.” Tate frowned as she walked away. Zoe never skipped out on their evening meetings. He wondered if he pushed her too hard in the clearing, or if she had already figured things out and was starting to pull away.
“Tate, you coming?”
“Yes, of course.” Tate followed Alex back to the construction site and tried to stay focused on his job. It was difficult, however. Zoe was never far from his thoughts, and he wondered just what questions she would have for him tomorrow morning.
Chapter Twelve
As soon as Zoe got back to her room, she opened her laptop. If Tate wasn’t going to talk to her, then she was going to have to find out some answers on her own.
While what happened with Sadie was troubling, what happened after troubled her even more. Tate had seemed so intense when he caught up to her in the resort parking lot. Then he almost got them into an accident. Instead of explaining what happened, he had swept her up in a whirlwind of emotion. It was only afterward, on the ride back to the resort, that she realized he’d used the strong sexual connection between them to distract her from asking questions.
“What aren’t you telling me, Mr. Carrington,” she said as she typed his name into a search engine. What came up surprised her even more than her conversation with Sadie’s assistant that morning.
The first hit was the website for Carrington Oil. Zoe clicked on that and learned all about how Tate’s grandfather had started the family business, and how Tate’s father had carried on the family tradition. The company was huge, large enough to employ thousands of workers, and the oil they produced had been sold to some of the top distributors all over the world.
Zoe glanced through the company announcements and stockholder reports, her mind going numb from all of the enormous numbers. Her money problems must have seemed rather silly to Tate, she realized. His family’s company dealt with ten times that much money on a daily basis.
Shaking her head, s
he went back to the search engine and clicked on the next hit, then the next. Slowly she learned about how his grandfather was a hard, uncompromising man in the board room. Through several mergers and alliances, he had positioned his small oil company to rival some of the top names in the business in only a handful of years. His tough personality was kept at his office, however. In the small Texas town where he lived, the man was hailed as a saint. His charitable causes and philanthropy were hailed at his funeral and for several years after his death.
It seemed as if Tate’s dad had picked up where his grandfather left off, driving the company to even higher profits while making even bigger donations to the community. He did all this while marrying his high school sweetheart and raising two very energetic boys.
“Seems like the model family,” Zoe muttered to herself. Tate had grown up with a silver spoon in his mouth, and the more she read about his family, the more certain she became that he was the anonymous benefactor who had helped her out with her expenses. The Carringtons were known for their philanthropy, and the thought of Tate seeing her as some charity case set Zoe’s teeth on edge. He probably pitied her, just like he had pitied those homeless people in the article she read ten minutes ago. The Carringtons seemed to think that throwing their money around was a surefire way to get people to like them. It certainly seemed to help with the local girls in town. Everyone seemed to praise the Carrington boys’ good looks and charm as much as their charity efforts.
If Tate thought he could throw money at her to get her to fall for him, then he was in for a rude awakening. Zoe’s love could never be bought. Sure, her life had been rough, but she had made it this far on her own. She wasn’t some charity case that needed to be fixed. She had never felt so duped in her life.
She read about how he had been put in charge of building the new corporate headquarters ten years ago, and how everyone in town had believed the building was nothing short of architectural genius. Then she read about how he would be taking time off from the company to pursue his love of building, and everything started to make a lot more sense.
“When Tate first came to me with the idea, I thought he was crazy. Creating a building is far different from creating a company,” his father had been quoted as saying. “Then I thought ‘why not?’ It would be good practice for him. He’ll get a lot of practice doing small jobs here and there and be that much stronger when he comes back and takes over Carrington Oil.”
“Small jobs,” Zoe muttered. This wedding, the event that she needed the commission from to pay for her mother’s health care, meant nothing to Tate. Whether he hit his deadlines or not didn’t matter, because at the end of the day he’d go back to his mansion and his money and his high-society life. This all meant nothing to him.
She scanned the rest of the article, where his father talked about everything Tate would get upon his return. Corporate jets, fancy cars, a staff willing to do whatever he wanted…and a lovely fiancée named Claudia, whose family seemed to be just as high society as Tate’s.
“Claudia and her brothers, Gavin and Max, had been constant companions to Tate and Rob since they were little boys. It seemed only natural that these two should fall in love. Their marriage will unite two of the strongest families in the community…” Blah, blah, blah.
“Gavin’s sister.” Tate was going to marry Gavin’s sister. Tears filled Zoe’s eyes as she realized that Tate hadn’t been the only one lying to her. Gavin also had a lot to answer for, but for some reason his betrayal didn’t hurt nearly as much as Tate’s.
He has a fiancée. Zoe shut off her laptop in disgust and flopped on her bed. Finally, everything made sense. This job was little more than a hobby. It was a chance to make his mistakes and sow his wild oats before going back home to carry on the family legacy.
God, she had been such a fool. Zoe had thought that this job had meant something to him—that she meant something to him. To find out that she was nothing more than a pleasant distraction from his real life made her want to smack him in his face.
In fact, she just might do that when she met with him tomorrow morning. Then she would kick him off the project and find someone else to finish the chapel. She refused to be a Carrington charity case any longer. As far as she was concerned, she and Tate were through.
…
The next morning, Tate arrived at the conference room early. He had wanted to go to Zoe last night but knew that after everything that had happened, she needed space and time to think. So he stayed in his trailer, awake half the night, wondering what on earth he was going to say to her so she wouldn’t freak out on him and break things off. In the end, he decided on telling her the truth. Chances were pretty good that she had already gone on the internet or talked to Gavin and found out about his family. He only hoped that the truth didn’t send her running.
What happened yesterday had also strengthened his resolve to go back home to Texas. While he knew that he had to confront his father, the revelation yesterday gave him a new sense of urgency. He had to tell his father that he could never be a part of his world. He loved Zoe and his life as head of a construction company, even if that company was just a start-up that was struggling to make ends meet. He wanted to stay and make that work, not go home and play a part in his father’s corporate games. He wanted to live his life on his own terms and be free.
He knew that using his trust fund money to help Zoe would make things difficult. Gavin was right when he said that his father would feel vindicated by his actions and put even more pressure on him to give up his dreams and stay home. Will Carrington had a strong personality and the influence to back it up. If he wanted, he could manipulate Tate into doing what he wanted. It had taken all of Tate’s emotional energy to break free from him the first time. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to do it again.
He had to try, however. Zoe had made him realize that he had to stop running from his past. He wanted to be a man worthy of her love, and that meant he needed to stop being a coward and face his father.
But first he had to face Zoe. He had to make her understand that the face the Carringtons showed to the public was only the side his father wanted people to see. His life wasn’t as glorious as those news articles had claimed. Most of it had been carefully manufactured manipulation in order for his father to get what he wanted.
Yes, he would have to leave her after the wedding, but the separation would be brief. After he had it out with his father, Tate planned on returning to the island and to her. There was no other place in the world where he wanted to be.
When the conference room door finally opened, Tate’s heartbeat thudded in his chest. “Zoe,” he said as she entered. “Let me explain.”
“You don’t have to explain anything.” She marched across the conference room and slapped him in the face.
“Ow!” Tate grabbed his chin as pain blossomed through his jaw.
“I understand things perfectly.”
“Hey, Zoe. Wait!” He grabbed her arm as she turned to leave.
Zoe glared at his fingers until he finally pulled away. “We have nothing to say to each other.” She turned back toward the conference room door.
“That’s not true. We have a lot to say,” he said as he followed her. “Okay, I have a lot to say.”
She stopped and whirled to face him. “What, that your family is filthy rich? That this is all nothing but a distraction to you? That you have a real life—and a fiancée—waiting for you back home?” She opened the door to the conference room and stepped out into the hall.
“Zoe, will you stop for a moment and hear me out?” He followed her into the hall and toward the front of the building. “There is a perfectly reasonable explanation—”
“Oh, you have an explanation?” She stopped and turned to face him. “This is going to be rich. Go on, give me your explanation. I’d love to hear it.”
“I…” His mind blanked when he saw the hurt in her eyes. He had put that there, he realized, and the knowledge cut through him like a
knife.
“You—what? You aren’t going to marry Claudia?”
“I’m not.”
“And I suppose you don’t love her.”
“I don’t.”
She nodded. “Of course you don’t. You love me instead, right?”
“I— Listen. This isn’t what you think.”
“Yeah, right. When you told me that you were going back to Texas after the wedding to settle some business, I thought it had to do with your construction company. I had no idea it was to marry someone else and become someone I don’t even know.”
“I’m still the same old Tate. Nothing has changed.”
She held up her hand. “I’m sorry, Tate, there’s nothing you can say to me that will make this better.” She turned on her heel and started walking.
Panic gripped his chest as she moved farther and farther away. “It was an arranged marriage, Zoe. I didn’t have any say in the matter.”
Zoe hesitated, then kept walking.
“My father wanted her father’s ships to move his oil to different parts of the world. Claudia doesn’t want to marry me as much as I don’t want to marry her. We’re both pawns in a corporate deal to make our parents more money.”
This time Zoe came to a full stop. “I thought arranged marriages are a thing of the past,” she said. “You two could just tell your parents that you want no part of it.”
“It’s a little more complicated than that.” Tate searched for the right wards to explain how complicated his home life had been. “My father likes to manipulate people. What you see in the papers is often not true, but something manufactured to get what he wants.”
She turned to face him. “I’m listening.”
“While it’s true that Claudia and Gavin hung around our place as kids, Claudia was never interested in me. She had a crush on my older brother, Rob. He’s the one she wanted to marry.”
“Then why would your father say those things?”
“He and Claudia’s dad have been friends for years. After Claudia started showing signs of having a crush on Rob, they started talking about uniting the families. After Rob died…” Tate hesitated as a surge of sadness welled up in his chest. “After he died, my father saw no reason to change things. Claudia comes from a well-respected family, one he approves of, and if I marry her, I would be in a better position to do what he really wants, which is to take over the family business.”
Secret Games (Tropical Temptation) Page 11