by Tara Leigh
As a kid, I had a dog. A big, slobbering Golden retriever I christened with the wholly unoriginal name of Rover. He loved swimming. Lakes, pools, the ocean—any body of water was fine by him. That dog would swim until I worried his legs wouldn’t keep him afloat any longer. And when he finally made his way out, legs wobbling, snout practically dragging on the ground, he would shake his entire body so hard anyone standing within five feet would be completely drenched. And then Rover would stumble off to find a sunny spot where he’d lie down and doze for hours.
That’s what I wanted to do. Shake all the Reina off and find a place to recharge. She was everywhere. In my skin, in my blood. I could still taste her, and every inhale was laced with her scent. A man could drown in Reina and die happy.
But I didn’t feel happy. I felt exposed, and vulnerable.
I was a hedge fund manager—I didn’t do vulnerable.
I was also, always, a Bettencourt. Our motto was Frappez Fort Avec Tout. Strike Hard with Everything. We were predators—betting big, fighting powerfully, and winning, generation after generation. We didn’t go weak in the knees over a blond minx with a Mensa mind and a bombshell body.
Reina’s breaths deepened, becoming regular. Sleep tugged at my consciousness, too. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad thing to get some rest, see what happened when we woke up. Life had been such a whirlwind since meeting Reina, maybe I was overthinking things.
But I knew one thing for sure—I already wanted her again, even more than I had an hour ago. Now I knew what it was like to have her lips wrapped around my cock, hear the sound of her needy mewling as I thrust deep inside of her, see the look in her eyes as she climaxed. I didn’t know if I would ever get enough of Reina St. James. And I wasn’t sure that I wanted to, either.
How would Reina feel when she woke up? Maybe once was enough for her. Or maybe it was one time too many. I had no idea, but there was a frisson of fear at the base of my spine. What if she was perfectly happy to end things after tonight? Continue on in a purely professional way? I wouldn’t like it, but could I live with it? Maybe.
But God help me, if I saw an ounce of regret shining from Reina’s cerulean eyes when she woke up, it might just kill me.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
@BettencourtBets: Word on the Street: Millennial will be In-The-Money after a successful road show!
Reina
Sex normally left me feeling keyed up—my skin tingling, blood buzzing with unreleased energy. Afterward, I couldn’t wait to leave, or, if we were at my place, to shove the guy out of bed so I could take care of business on my own. For me, intercourse was more foreplay than finale. And it was beyond irritating to lie beside a satisfied, snoring man and feel so . . . unfinished. Not that I blamed them, of course. I mean, I was the one faking it, so how were they to know?
And yet, in the back of my find I couldn’t help but wonder—Really? Did you really think that was going to get me off? Couldn’t you have lasted a little longer, tried a little harder? Maybe paid closer attention to my whispered encouragements, or suggestive nudging?
Invariably, I always gave up. The men I’d been with had treated their fingers like a cock, prodding and poking at me rather than finding my most sensitive spots and easing into a delicious rhythm. Quite frankly, my last boyfriend couldn’t have found my clit with a compass and a headlamp. A step-by-step instructional handbook seemed like overkill, but if I could give myself an orgasm in under three minutes, why hadn’t anyone else been able to get the job done at all?
But not Tristan. Jesus Christ. No joke, IVy knew what the fuck he was doing.
And afterward. Oh God, afterward—there had to be Ambien on his breath. I doubt even surgical tape could have held my eyelids open, and my limbs felt ridiculously heavy and ponderous. Somewhere above my head a thought bubble was floating: Don’t bother having sex with anyone else. Ever again. Tristan had clearly reset the bar, if I’d even had one at all. I wanted to think about that, analyze in minute detail what had just happened so that I might understand why and how I’d just experienced the best sex of my life. Pick it apart like a case study for a school project. Use it as the basis for future encounters so that I could taste carnal bliss again. And again.
But I was too tired. The craziness of the past couple of weeks, the insane schedule on the road, flying across several time zones, the nonstop sexual tension between Tristan and me, seeing my parents, and then back-to-back, explosive orgasms. How much could one person take? Rather than fight against it, I let myself be lulled by the steady drumbeat of Tristan’s heart beneath my cheek, his calloused thumb kneading the muscles at the back of my neck, and I drifted off to sleep.
* * *
The first thing I noticed when I woke up, besides the fact that it was still dark outside (thank God—the last thing we needed was to oversleep and have to face an irate Kyle), was the small puddle of drool beneath my cheek. Crap. I’d drooled on Tristan? How mortifying. I brought my hand upward, wiping at his chest as gently as I could manage.
“Hey, you’re up.” His voice was rough and scratchy, still thick with sleep.
Good morning, don’t mind my saliva. “Yeah. Just woke up. Sorry for passing out on you, literally.”
He shifted, rolling over so both our heads shared the same pillow.
“I didn’t mind.”
There was just enough light in the room, between the open shades and various electronic devices, that I could see his face clearly. But I wasn’t quite ready for that yet.
I closed my eyes, quickly replaying the evening in my mind. Glittering ballroom filled with glamorous people, a too close for comfort near run-in with Van Horne and my mother, and then an unforgettable evening with Tristan. Even the memory of it warmed me to my core. I had no idea.
“About what?”
My eyes flew open. Had I really spoken my thought out loud? “What?”
“What did you have no idea about?”
Guess I did. I stalled for a minute, considering several responses before finally going with the truth. “What just happened between us. It’s never been quite like that before. At least, not for me.”
Tristan offered a tender smile, his eyes half-lidded and kind as he swiped his thumb across my cheekbone. I blinked, waiting for him to say something, anything. Instead his fingers curved into my neck and he pulled me forward for a kiss. “You made a good call, heading upstairs.”
I wondered what Tristan would think if he knew the real reason for my hasty exit. Van Horne had probably spent the entire evening strutting around like a proud peacock with my mother on his arm. When I decided to swim in the same shallow pool he’d dominated for years, I should have realized avoiding him for the rest of my life would be impossible. “And Kyle is probably cursing me as we speak. He’s got to realize we’re somewhere together.”
Tristan chuckled. “I’m pretty sure Kyle is the last man I want you thinking about right now.”
With a shrug, I ran a fingertip along his well-defined bicep. “And just what do you want me to think about?”
“Round two.”
Though it shouldn’t have been possible, the permanent knot of desire I felt anytime Tristan was near began to unspool. I hooked my ankle over his muscled thigh. “Already?”
He shifted toward me. My breasts brushed against his chest, nipples tightening in response. Evidence of his desire poked at my belly. “I hope you weren’t expecting a good night’s sleep.”
Since the day I met Tristan, all of my expectations had fallen by the wayside. Maybe that was a good thing. “And what if I was?”
“I guess I would have to apologize for disappointing, and redouble my efforts to make it up to you.”
Well, in that case . . . “Then I guess you should know that I’m very, very disappointed.”
I caught the flash of a smile, bright white even in the semi-darkness, and then Tristan turned me away from him, my head landing softly on his arm, his bulk curving around me from behind. His palm skimmed my skin, from my ribcage t
o my hip, moving lower. My head rolled back against his shoulder, breath catching on a sigh as his knee nudged between my legs, lifting my thigh up just enough that he had unrestricted access to the already pulsing bundle of nerves at my core.
In Tristan’s arms my body was loose and malleable, his to control. He nuzzled my neck, whispering sweet, nonsensical things that danced on centipede legs up and down my spine. He could have been reciting the Constitution for all I knew, my mind could only interpret so much. The only language I was capable of understanding was spoken by Tristan’s fingers, his lips, his ridiculously skilled tongue. I cried out softly, then louder, more insistently, until Tristan was sheathed inside me once more. He claimed me, again, relentlessly thrusting to new depths. I could feel myself stretching to accommodate his size, heard a voice I didn’t even recognize as mine begging him for more. He gave and I took. All of him.
My hands gripped the sheet, crumpling it within my fists as a storm raged inside me. “Tristan . . . God. Fuck . . . Please.” My words were little more than grunts, barely intelligible, ripped from my throat as I shuddered against him. Tristan gave a strangled yell, then held me tight to his chest as he jerked inside me.
“Fuck.” Tristan tipped his head forward, resting his forehead on my shoulder. “I didn’t put on a condom.”
I sucked in a breath. A shiver, not the good kind, raced down my spine. “Oh.”
“Are you . . . ?”
“On the pill? Yes. And no, I haven’t been with anyone in a while.” Almost two years. “I’m . . . clean.” I closed my eyes, a blush heating my cheeks. Why did that sound so dirty?
I wasn’t on the pill to prevent pregnancy. My period had always been irregular. Sometimes it showed up after three weeks, sometimes not for three months. When my doctor had suggested going on the pill a few months ago, I agreed purely for planning purposes. Standing up in a meeting with an unsightly blotch on my pants was a prospect I was happy to avoid.
But tonight I was even more grateful for my choice. I was the product of an unplanned pregnancy. And in my case, unplanned was code for unwanted. I would never, ever do that to another child. Lying within the warm embrace of Tristan’s arms, I was relieved not to add the stress of a pregnancy scare to our nascent relationship.
But there was more to unsafe sex than the risk of pregnancy. “Are you?”
Tristan
What was I thinking? Dumb question, of course. I wasn’t thinking, not when it came to Reina. But this was a new low. I always used a condom. Always. “Yes, of course. Riding bareback isn’t exactly on my list of acceptable risks.” But damn, it had felt good to be inside Reina without any barrier, no matter how thin, between us. Even now, I couldn’t bear to pull out of her.
“Okay, that’s good. It’s not on mine either.”
When your last name is Bettencourt, a talk about the birds and the bees comes in the same breath as birth control. Not long after waking up in sticky sheets, I’d been taught that my sperm might as well be pellets of gold. That there were girls who would do anything to have a Bettencourt growing in their belly.
One of them is now my stepmother. Not that my father ever said it in so many words. But he didn’t have to. I was young when my mother died, although not so young that I didn’t remember their easy way with one another, the excited squeal—from both of us—that always accompanied my father’s arrival home from work. More slideshow than movie, I could replay certain moments of the life we shared in my mind.
Of course my most vivid memory is the morning I’d stood by her bedside for the very last time. But others stood out too. Our last Christmas together, holding her hand as I walked into my first day of kindergarten, saying goodnight as she headed off to an elegant, black-tie affair, looking almost untouchable, and nothing like the woman I saw each morning as I crawled into my parents’ bed, nestling into their solid warmth.
When my mother was alive, our home had been filled with joy and laughter, and I always felt safe and loved. But that changed after her death. I didn’t doubt my father loved me, but he dealt with his grief by throwing himself into work. I was handed off to a series of nannies.
When I was ten, Claudia moved in. I never knew her as my father’s girlfriend, or his fiancée. They eloped and I had a stepmother. And not long after that, I had two baby sisters. Their marriage was distinctly different than the one he had with my mother. Claudia didn’t squeal when my father walked through the door, and while I can’t recall many heated arguments and slammed doors, their kisses were more perfunctory than passionate. I’ve seen her face light up at the sight of diamonds, but never her husband. A pregnancy was Claudia’s ticket into the big leagues, a new life as Mrs. Tristan Xavier Bettencourt III.
And now here I was, my cock still sheathed within Reina, no barrier between my semen and her womb. Just a pill and a promise.
Could I trust her? Should I?
And why hadn’t Reina thrown the flag before I entered the field? Had I just given her what she really wanted all along?
Not that a condom guaranteed shit. A few years ago, I was tricked into believing I was a father-to-be. Falling somewhere between girlfriend and one-night stand, Elise insisted that the condom had broken. I’d just finished undergrad, was working in Europe at the time. Advising rich clients on how to preserve their wealth rather than multiply it was not nearly as exciting as my work now, and left plenty of time to party with an insular crew of well-educated, well-off expats. Too much time.
A Greenwich girl studying at the Sorbonne, Elise was pretty and flirtatious, and I didn’t see that she had no ambition of her own beyond landing a rich husband and using his money to become a player on the international art scene. Until a classmate of hers showed up at my office, begging me to leave the mother of his unborn child alone. He was so precisely the stereotypical picture of a starving artist, complete with a French accent and paint-spattered beret, I almost laughed. Except that what he was saying wasn’t funny. I’d already been to the doctor with Elise, had stared open-mouthed at the grainy, gray and white images of what I believed to be the next generation of Bettencourts.
A man of his word, my father remained handcuffed to Claudia. And I had nearly resigned myself to the same fate with Elise, was this close to raising another man’s child. But I’d been granted a reprieve, and it seemed to me that the nursery rhyme I’d learned in preschool might have gotten it right. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes . . . you get the idea.
But love, I’d discovered, is pretty damn elusive.
Since I don’t want to marry a woman because she’s carrying my child, and I wouldn’t want my kid raised by a woman I don’t love enough to marry, avoiding the catch-22 meant I’d always been careful. More than careful—I hadn’t made a single slip- up. Until tonight. Until Reina. I released a confused breath, pulling her warmth into me, breathing in her sweet scent. What the hell, just add it to the ever-growing list. She’d marked me as surely as a bolt of lightning, and the chasm between my life now and the one I lived before Reina was growing.
I was torn. Being inside Reina without a condom, I’d felt every single quiver as she climaxed. It wasn’t long ago that Reina proclaimed she wasn’t looking for a boyfriend or a husband. Wanting a baby seemed like a stretch. But then again, Elise hadn’t seemed to possess a burning desire to become a soccer mom either. For all I knew, she and her beret-wearing Frenchie were sharing a family bed with a pack of rugrats in a Parisian garret right now.
But I wasn’t with Elise, I was with Reina. Either I was the world’s biggest sucker, or I could trust her. I groaned at the thought of pulling out. To hell with it. Go big or go home.
“Now that we’ve done it, and we’re both clean, and we’re not doing this with anyone else . . .” I hesitated. “Right?”
She tensed in my arms. “Are you really asking if I’m planning on having unprotected sex with anyone else while you’re still inside of me?”
My muscles automatically mimicked her wary stance. “Actually
no, as far as I’m concerned, we covered that already, back in New York. I’m asking if you’re willing to be responsible for birth control going forward. If you’re not, then,” I gave a nudge with my hips, “this can’t happen again.”
Reina’s soft giggle floated my way, and she pushed her hips back at me. “This?”
Incredibly, I felt myself hardening inside her once more. “Reina, this is definitely going to happen again.” I pulled out just slightly, savoring her breathy moan when I pushed back in again. The bewitching sound must have been the reason I didn’t reach for a condom. Had to be. “We should really decide if we’re going to play in the rain without an umbrella.”
She rocked her hips in time with mine, offering an answer that took me by surprise. “For now.”
I bit down on her shoulder, slightly harder than I’d planned, although the quickening of her breath assured me she didn’t mind. “What do you mean?”
“Once we find you a suitable girlfriend, she’s going to expect to have sex with you too. And you’re not the only one who doesn’t like to share.”
I nearly choked. “Since when did you appoint yourself my matchmaker?”
Her hand curved into mine. “Since that damn Twitter account started taking aim at us. And since Wendy Whitaker implied that you’re just a Penthouse Player—playing around with a few hundred million for shits and giggles.”
We were both moving now, our conversation growing more ridiculous with each thrust. “Fuck Whitaker. My returns speak for themselves.”
“No. They don’t,” Reina panted. “She’s speaking for you, and so is whoever is writing BettencourtBets. It’s time for you to hijack the conversation.”
“And you think dating a Park Avenue Princess is the answer?” My thrusts were hard, angry. “That’s ridiculous.”