I woke up the next morning with a pounding head, sprawled on the couch and surrounded by the wreckage of my own idiocy. The pale light coming in the window told me that it was barely past dawn, but there was no way I could get back to sleep, no matter how appealing unconsciousness felt right now.
All that mattered to me was that Gwen was gone, and she wasn't coming back. Somehow, I had pushed her away, and then I had let her simply go without fighting. I let the intense pain of that roar up inside me, felt all its hot edges and its terrifying fury, and when it subsided to a slightly more functional level, I finally breathed.
Gwen was something special, and though I could physically live without her, it would be hell and there would likely not be much left of me at the end of it. Gwen made me better, in every possible way. I was kinder around her, more honest, more appreciative of the beauty of a world that all my money sometimes occluded. Though I admittedly hadn’t been very kind with that airplane speech. The memory made my gut clench and the alcohol still flooding my veins roiled in warning.
As I fought the nausea, a memory tugged at my mind. During that terrible encounter at her little apartment, she had mentioned Jordan. Why the hell would she mention Jordan? Jordan was staying at the hotel, I knew, but she hadn't mentioned running into Gwen.
I felt something like ice reach inside my chest and freeze hard. It helped. It gave me a place to put away the rage and the heat and the fear. I showered using that perfect cold to keep me going. I shaved, dressed in new clothes, and called down to housekeeping to let them know there was a serious mess in the penthouse. Honestly, I was more of a mess than anything I’d destroyed last night, but they couldn’t help me. Only one person could.
I knew that this cold couldn't last long. If it did, it might last forever, and I got a vivid idea of what life might be like without Gwen.
Finally, I took a deep breath, and reached for my phone.
“Why, Donovan,” Jordan purred, her voice low and sensuous. There was a time when it would have at least piqued my interest, but now it only infuriated me.
“I need to talk to you,” I growled. “I'm coming down to your room.”
A pause.
“Well, that's a lovely surprise.”
“Shut up.” I said. “I want answers.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gwen
Carly got me the waitressing job across town. It wasn't as nice as the job at the hotel, and frankly the owner gave me the creeps, but at the end of the day, it was work, and I needed it. I wasn't going back to Fox Hotel and Suites, not for any amount of money. Gus begged, something I never thought I’d see, but I was unwilling to take the chance of running into Donovan and Jordan, arm in arm, laughing together.
Though I wanted Donovan to be happy, I knew what I could tolerate and seeing that was something I considered a physical impossibility. I’d lose it.
I had ended things with Donovan almost two weeks ago, but though my mind knew it, my body and my heart weren't playing along. My body still tingled sometimes where he had touched me. My heart still leaped whenever I saw a man who was his size and with his hair color. I was a mess, and I couldn't even say that I had learned my lesson. Somewhere underneath it all, I would have gone back if he had been willing to ask for me, to fight for me.
But of course, he wouldn’t. No chasing.
With my roommate out of town for a conference, I spent my work day dreaming about getting home, kicking off my shoes, and trying to find my way back to the music which had temporarily gone to sleep inside me.
At least that's what I thought I was going to do before I walked up to the building and found Donovan seated on the front steps, waiting for me. His eyes were closed, his face tilted up to catch the last rays of the setting sun, and for one shocked moment, I simply took in the dark circles under his eyes, the hard set of his jaw. Then Donovan opened his eyes and looked at me, and there was such a depth of pain in his gaze that I nearly cried out.
“Gwen...” he said, and in a moment, he was on his feet, throwing his arms around me in an embrace that felt almost desperate.
I stood stiffly, not daring to let down my guard. “Donovan, what are you doing here?”
“I came for you,” he said, pulling back just a little. “Gwen, I need you.”
God, how many times had I imagined him coming to me and saying just that, but I couldn't do it. Not when his kind of need would eventually kill me with its indifference.
“Donovan, I can't do this again,” I whispered, stepping back. “I'm sorry. Please go.”
Donovan looked devastated for a moment, but then a fierce look came over his face, dark and possessive. When I tried to draw back, one hand fell on my shoulder and the other cupped my face, bringing my gaze up to his again.
“No. Not until you've heard what I have to say. Then I'll leave. I'll never see you again if that's what you want, but you need to hear me now.”
I nodded, unable to talk for the lump in my throat. When he saw that I was going to listen, Donovan took a deep breath.
“I need you in my life,” he said, his voice urgent. “When you left, I felt as if I had been set at sea on a boat with no sail and no rudder. It was empty without you, and the emptiness felt like it was going to reach up and devour me.”
He so closely described the emotions that I had been feeling all month that I gasped. Once I had tried to sit down and to write it into a song, but it had only made me cry.
“Donovan...”
“Let me finish, please. Then... I suppose you can do as you see fit. I can't stop you, and if you think you would be happier without me, I suppose I will find a way to live with it.
“But...Gwen... do you really want to? We were good, so good together. You made me feel like no one ever has before. I nearly killed Jordan when I realized she had said that shit to you. You belong with me. I... I can change. I want to change, because it's you. You are the only woman that I have ever, ever had these feelings for.
“Gwen, I need you. Not just your voice or your body. All of you. Your heart. Your eyes. Your smile. Your shy, sweet beauty. God, Gwen. I love you. Please.”
The look on his face was haunted as he said words I was sure he’d never before said to anybody. And yet …
I swallowed hard. I wanted to say yes, to fall into his arms and to let him take care of everything again. I couldn't though. Not with a man who didn't know me well enough to know what I wanted, a man who could turn away and just let me leave.
“I can't... “I said, and I started to walk away blindly.
From behind me, I could more feel than hear Donovan draw in his breath, and then, amazingly, he started to sing. His voice was low and cracked slightly. It was a good voice, but untrained, and the song had been written for my soprano.
“She fell in love, down a deep deep well, and there was no one to tell her no...”
I turned around in disbelief, and Donovan kept on singing, his voice breaking more than it had before. It was my song, the song I had sung to him once. He sang about love as I saw it, as I needed it to be, and with a choked cry, I spun around and threw myself into his arms.
“Thank God,” he muttered raggedly, holding me so tight I could barely breathe, and I didn’t want to. I never wanted to breathe again without his arms around me. Tilting my chin up, he kissed my lips, then my eyes, my nose, my forehead, whispering, “God, I love you, I love you, Gwen. I’m so sorry. Please don’t ever leave me.”
I looked up into his eyes, swept away by the depths of the truth in them. “I love you too, Donovan. So much. But it has to be different this time. I already love you. You don’t need to buy me.”
He kissed me again, threading his fingers through my hair and rubbing the ball of his thumb gently over the curve of my cheek. “It will be. Because so help me, Gwen, if you walk out again, I’ll chase you next time. And you damn well better come after me if I do anything stupid.”
His eyes gleamed and I smiled into them, leaning up into his hungry, passionate
kiss as he lifted me into his powerful arms. “Deal.”
EPILOGUE
Gwen
I barely recognized myself in the mirror. The gleaming white dress was almost heavier than I was; I looked like a fairy tale princess.
“Just twenty minutes until we start,” the wedding coordinator told me, and then the door closed and I was left alone in the bride's dressing room. Carly and Andrea were waiting just outside, lovely in their coral dresses, and somewhere beyond them was Donovan.
I was going to be married today, and my heart sang a song I could only dream of capturing some day...
I looked up in surprise as the inner door, one that led to a joined dressing room opened. I thought it would be the photographer again, or the wedding coordinator, but it was Donovan.
“Hello, songbird,” he said with a grin, striding up to me. He was achingly handsome in his tux, and I fell into his arms for an embrace before drawing back.
“Donovan! What are you doing here?”
“They said I had a few minutes before everything was going to start, and there was only one person I wanted to spend that time with. God, you look amazing.”
He smiled so hugely that I relented even as I chided, “It's bad luck for you to see me before the wedding...”
“Its never going to be bad luck for me to see you,” Donovan said tenderly. “I promise I'll act surprised. I need you, Gwen.”
As always, hearing that from him melted me and I fell into his arms, forgetting the dress, because nothing was more important than this man. This man who I thought had lost, a year back, who came back to me, who had spent the last year showing me the side of him no one else had ever seen. His darkness remained, the darkness that had so attracted me initially, and I would never wish it gone. But it was also off-set now by words of love and promises that he kept, such as the billionaire conference that he’d arranged where I actually did get to sing this time. The conference that had started me down the path to a recording contract, one Donovan hadn’t needed to buy for me; he’d simply shared me with the world for that evening and that had been everything. He was everything, here, now, as he kissed me, sweetly careful of the makeup that had taken so long to put on, smoothing his fingers down my cheek and gazing into my eyes.
“You're sure?” he asked, touchingly serious. “You want me forever? Because songbird, I have no intention of letting you go once I have a ring on your finger. I wouldn’t have let you go before, but even more so now.”
“I'm sure,” I promised, drawing him down into another kiss. “Tonight I’ll sing for my new husband.”
When Donovan drew back, the emotion was so stark in his gaze that if there hadn’t been a wedding party standing outside, I’d likely have dragged him to the nearest bed. His unabashed adoration never failed to move me in every possible way.
“I better go,” he said reluctantly, trying to smooth my dress, which had wrinkled just very slightly. “Meet me at the altar in 15?”
I grinned. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
“You are the world, Gwen Love,” he said huskily. “My whole world.”
And for the rest of our lives, from this day forth, to have and to hold, he would be mine. There was a song in that, definitely, but it was put on hold indefinitely as the man of my dreams drew me in for another kiss and we spent the last few minutes before our wedding together. The way we would always would be.
The End.
No Promises
A Bad Boy Billionaire Romance
English grad student Anoushka ‘Noosh’ Taylor is working as a junior reporter for a successful New York City radio network under the mentorship of her heroine, Allison Monroe. On the cusp of producing her first big story, an exposé of New York’s BDSM club scene, Noosh is issued a challenge to go the extra mile and attend a club to see for herself. Summoning her courage, she finds herself caught up in a moment she can’t escape with a devastatingly handsome man, and after being humiliated by him, she leaves in tears, vowing never to return.
Angry and hurt, Noosh drops the piece but cannot stop thinking about her almost lover.
When they decide to do a piece on the most eligible bachelor in New York, Noosh is thrown into the path of Christofalo Montecito, playboy and son of organized crime boss, Fogliano Montecito. Christo is gorgeous, brooding, sensual – and the man who humiliated her at the BDSM club.
Noosh reacts badly, but when Christo apologizes, she begins to see a different side of him. Soon, their mutual attraction grows, and Noosh finds herself falling for Christo – but can a son of a crime boss ever be reliable, trustworthy?
When dark secrets from both of their pasts reveal themselves, Noosh and Christo have to decide whether their attraction is more than just a casual thing, and discover just how far they will go to save it.
Can Noosh give him the trust he has yet to earn? Or will Christo reveal himself to be his father’s son?
Chapter One
Long Island, New York
Christofalo Montecito stared at his father in astonishment. He couldn’t be taking Christo’s news this easily. Nuh-uh, no way. “Dad, you understand what I’m telling you?”
Fogliano Montecito gazed back at his son with the same brilliant green eyes he had bestowed on his only child. “Christo, do I look like an idiot? You want out of my business, that’s the crux of the matter, right?”
Christo hesitated. “Right. Look, Dad, it’s not as if I haven’t mentioned this before, and I’m almost forty now, and it’s time. I’ve given you the last seventeen years, all my time after college.”
“College that my business paid for.”
Here we go. “Yes, Dad, and I’m grateful for it, don’t get me wrong. But I need to make my own way…and some aspects of the family business don’t sit easily with me.”
Fogliano held up his hands. “Enough. Christo, you must do what you think is right, what is appropriate.” He sighed and pushed back from his desk, standing and clapping his son on the back. “Now, you’ll still be coming to the meal tonight?”
Christo, still stunned, nodded. “Sure, Dad.”
“Good. Now, I have to get back to work. You can see yourself out?”
“Of course. See you later.”
Christo nodded to his father’s personal assistant, Mandy, who simpered at him. Christo tried not to roll his eyes and instead gave her a polite smile. At thirty-eight, with his father’s Italian good looks and devastating smile, Christofalo Montecito had turned heads since he was a teenager. Wild dark curls, long, long legs and a body to die for meant that Christo had the pick of any women he wanted. And he took full advantage.
Lately, though, the constant stream of ready women was tiresome. Where was the challenge, where was the fight? Christo was feeling jaded by his entire lifestyle. Rich beyond imagination, he had begun to crave a simpler life, with a partner he could settle down with. Someone who would challenge him hold her own against the shattering weight of his family’s reputation.
The Montecitos were well known in New York as one of the biggest family businesses – and that business was crime. Corruption, drugs, murder – Fogliano Montecito’s reputation was feared by everyone, even his son. Christo had lost his mother to Fogliano’s devotion to his corporation. Ornella Montecito had leaped to her death from the roof of the family’s eighteen million dollar home in Sands Point, Long Island when Christo was seven years old, leaving her only son bewildered and broken. Christo had become an expert at shutting off his feelings after that, and after graduating summa cum laude from Harvard Law, he had passively gone straight to work for his father.
Over the years, Christo had told himself that at least he, personally, was on the right side of the law, that he himself never oversaw anything that was technically illegal…but as he’d reached his late thirties, his conscience began to nag at him.
And there was something else. Christo, like his mother, had an artist’s soul, and the more mired he got into practicing law, the more that side of him – and therefor
e his connection to his mother – faded. For the last couple of years he had been living a double life, and now that other life was the one he wanted to live. Hence the conversation with his father this morning.
Christo took the glass elevator from the top of his father’s building down to the basement parking garage, and then slid into his Mercedes. He sighed, blowing out his cheeks, and dialed his best friend’s number.
Bertie Franklin-Hart answered on the first ring. “Hey, dude, how’d it go?”
“It went…well.” Christo knew Bertie would hear the astonishment in his voice, and by Bertie’s silence, he knew Bertie was feeling it too.
“Well?” Total disbelief. Christo’s mouth hitched up in a smile.
“Yup. Can you believe it?”
Bertie let out a long breath. “Well, no, to be honest. What’s his game?”
Bertie, who had been Christo’s roommate at Harvard, had no time for Christo’s father or his associates, and was the only one of Christo’s friends to say as much to his face. Bertie came from old money, older and even more powerful than the infamous Five Families and their successors. Bertie’s money dated all the way back to the signing of the Declaration of Independence – and no one fucked with Bertie’s family. No one.
Bertie sighed. “Well, I guess you’re clear. Just, for me, take Fogliano’s word at face value for now, but don’t trust him, Christo.”
“I know. But it’s the first step.”
“I know you, Christo. You’ve got a glimpse of freedom, and you’ll run at it full tilt. I love that about you, brother, but as your best friend…well…I got your back.”
“Don’t trust to hope.” Christo’s smile faded, although he knew Bertie was right. Fogliano wasn’t someone people left behind without consequence, not even his own son.
Hacked For Love & The Dom's Songbird Page 14