Love Me Later

by Libby Rice

  A ragged groan tore from his chest. “Fuck, yes, Scarlet. Like that. Take me as deep as you can.”

  With her eyes closed, she swallowed him deeper, moaning her enjoyment around his shaft and sending a buzz prickling up the base of his skull. Then, in an exquisitely delivered message, she skimmed him with her teeth, letting him know she, not he, would decide the depth.

  Trying not to thrust, to do anything that would make her shy away, he slid trembling fingers into her hair, refusing to apply force but dying for more. Need intensified when she let him pulse against her tongue before beginning to move in earnest. But when she did… What is she doing to me?

  Ethan pressed forward, and then pulled back. His movements were involuntary. Instinctive. So was his grip on her skull. He knew he’d regret letting her sweet mouth steal his control, but as he fucked her, she mewled against him, telling him it was all right, that she liked it as much as he did.

  “I can’t last. Goddammit. Scarlet, I’ll come.”

  She pulled away suddenly, looking up at him with a dreamy grin. “No, Ethan, you won’t.” Her glazed eyes lowered quickly, as though she’d surprised herself and would examine her boldness later.

  He stared at her, shocked, until she returned to suckling him with a vengeance. Then all thought fled.

  On it went, until he vowed he’d either die or kill her with equal pleasure. When she finally let him come, the world imploded inward. He lurched on his feet as she took his semen down her lovely throat.

  When he got her into the shower, he demonstrated that drenched lace did nothing but magnify the sensations—from his fingers, his palms, his tongue, even the top of his thigh. He tormented her aroused flesh. Only when she writhed for release, literally pleading for sex, did he don one of the condoms he’d set by the tub and shove the lace aside, lifting her to sink deep.

  Coming home.

  Chapter 17

  Scarlet learned a lot about Ethan over the next two weeks. Days passed in a blur of meetings, nights in covert splendor.

  Negotiations hobbled along, maimed, but inching forward. Along the way, Scarlet confirmed that Ethan’s arrogant, distrustful, almost misogynistic attitude had been a front. Now he routinely sought her advice, affording her opinions the weight they deserved. Disagreement proved inevitable, but when they found themselves at odds, each presented a rational case. Scarlet occasionally let him win their debates.

  After a string of days scorching Arland Magnus and his cronies beneath her microscope, Ethan told her to dress casually. Finally, an afternoon off.

  She stood behind the wooden door of her armoire, pretending to ignore the fact that Ethan watched her every move in the mirrored panel at her back. “How long do we wait before we throw in the towel and head back to New York?” Her whole team had gotten noisier about the deal’s dead end. “There are other optics companies.”

  “Soon,” he said. “But not…”

  He trailed off when she bent at the waist, slipping one foot and then the other into the legs of a pair of white trouser shorts. Practically kissing her knees, she grinned through the pregnant pause.

  He falls to the rear-view mirror.

  “Do you trust your team?” he asked suddenly. The question came out of nowhere and hit too close to the suspicion she thought they’d addressed.

  “Yes,” she replied, straightening and doing nothing to mask the wariness that crept into her tone, “without reserve. You?”

  “My people have been with me for years. Some for nearly a decade.”

  Time didn’t necessarily equal trust in Scarlet’s book. Ethan had every right to believe in his tried and trues, but not at the expense of hers. “Cagey much?” After all, he’d gone so far as to accuse her of working the deal from both ends. “If you’re right about this whole inside-job thing and the leak isn’t one of mine”—she peered around the closet door and pointed at his chest—“it’s one of yours.”

  A swift tug slid the shorts up her legs and over her ass. She turned and made a show of zipping her fly in front of the mirror.

  Show’s over.

  They left the hotel hand-in-hand. A nagging voice in the back of her head—one she’d been working harder and harder to ignore—whispered that their date-like departure wouldn’t go unnoticed. The voice fought valiantly for her reputation, but ultimately fell to her great reserves of denial.

  A stroll through the city brought them to an arched gate, a curious juxtaposition of gothic architecture and cute Danish flags. White lighting scalloped the stone’s edges, illuminating the sign at the peak of the arch. “Tivoli,” it read.

  “Pleasure gardens,” Ethan murmured close to her ear. “The world’s oldest.”

  The massive gated entrance opened to a wonderland of blooms and fountains. Ethan ushered her from one amusement to another amongst structures done in the exotic-style of an imaginary Orient. The sweetness of thousands of flowers melded with the heady scent of spun sugar wafting from sidewalk confectionaries.

  Scarlet kept a watchful eye on their idyllic surroundings. A public garden was a far cry from squirreling away in one of their rooms. Scarlet hadn’t hidden their involvement. Not technically. She also hadn’t hung a metaphorical sign around her neck that said, “Come and get me, big boy.” Today, any colleague with a hankering to see the city might spot them and connect the dots, realizing she entertained more than a passing fascination with her client.

  Ethan lifted her to the back of a wooden stallion on an antique carousel, toying with her calf while she floated up and down to the tinkling music. The longer they lingered on the ride, the higher his touch drifted. When he reached the cuff of her shorts, her knee jerked with a mind of its own. He paused, looking up in sharp question, but she couldn’t stem the instinctive wiggle and screech that dislodged his grip.

  Later, when the tiny compartment of a toy scenic railway afforded some privacy, Scarlet latched onto his waist and held. On the final bend in the track, she straightened, ready to pull away.

  “It’s all right,” he murmured, stroking over her cheek and down the side of her neck.

  Her eyes slid closed at the tempting sweetness of his words. Enjoy now, deal later. But the worry wouldn’t wait another day. She’d delayed all sense of self-preservation far too long, knowing that allowing their affair to begin and then grinding it to dust was anything but fair to him.

  “I can’t.” The right words refused to lend themselves to an explanation of what she couldn’t do. Have you. Be with you. Love you.

  Silence fell, and Scarlet glanced up. Ethan’s face appeared set, a bronze statue glinting in the afternoon sun. Another moment passed, and she saw a flash of understanding chase across the stillness, registering all the reasons she might pull away and burying them deep. He seemed to decide that unacknowledged walls couldn’t come between them.

  Scarlet frowned in the face of his stoic certainty. She knew better, knew she couldn’t stay on in Ethan’s bed and his boardroom, but Ethan wasn’t one to do things in halves or pieces.

  Ethan the client would have to go. She wondered whether she could orchestrate the transition without losing the man.

  ******

  Ethan steered Scarlet through a commons of eateries serving everything from Argentinian beef stew to German sausages to pickled herring. Settling on Italian-inspired, they swept into an ornate enclosure with curved iron railings that swung outward toward a small, glassy lake. Pure, take-no-prisoners kitsch.

  Watching her gorge on meatball sandwiches and cheap red wine, Ethan gradually relaxed into his chair, answering her questions about Atavos’s early days. “We ran out of a warehouse in Brooklyn, not far from Rancor, actually. Totally cramped, dirty.”

  Like clockwork, water spurted skyward in an elaborate show from the manmade lake skirting their terrace. Scarlet shook her head and chuckled. “And look at you now.”

  Waggling his brows, he said, “Yeah, these days there’s no end to the amusements I can provide.” Letting the suggestive remark sett
le, he sliced off more of the sandwich and slid it her way.

  “For me,” she began, staring at the now-still blackness of the lake. “Yale was perfect, with its ambience of old-world scholarship. It’s corny, but the land, the buildings, the environment itself, seemed to breed knowledge. I felt… peace.”

  Curiosity got the better of him. “How’d you pay for the top-shelf law degree? Loans?”

  “The car.” She spoke quietly, but without hesitation. “The stolen Maserati had been replaced with a top-end Porsche. I sold it and voilà, I had an independence my father never counted on. In that sense—in more ways than one—I’m not at all self-made. And still, my education, my career, even being here exceeds all I ever thought to accomplish on my own.”

  An “on her own” he still didn’t completely understand. “Why the rift between father and daughter?”

  Her chin went up, but her smile didn’t break. “I stopped taking his money.”

  “And?”

  A blank look. “That’s all.”

  A pinch gathered between his shoulders. She’d thrown away a lifetime of stability, of opportunities others would kill for, without a backward glance. “Any regret?”

  Tension stole across her torso. “I didn’t wake up one day and decide to kick him to the curb, you know.”

  A response caught on his tongue, held back by a reoccurring weight that settled in his gut. Her hesitance to explain the rift with her father couldn’t just be about Tripp Leore. Like her hesitance to embrace what they’d found in each other—a feeling she failed miserably to hide—couldn’t just be about her career.

  Luckily, she began without further prodding because he was fresh out of inducements. “He came to the hospital two days after the attack. That’s the last time we met in person. I was hopped up on drugs and literally five minutes before, I’d found out my girlie parts had been mangled beyond repair. Yet he talked of delaying college tuition and directing the household staff, not a word about the prognosis.”

  No. He squeezed her knee beneath the table. He’d dwelled on his own experience in the days following the attack. Anger hadn’t let him picture her, dwarfed by a hospital bed, trying to wring a smidgen of affection from her father’s callousness. “Not like that.”

  “Exactly like that.” Her expression remained calmer than the high-intensity words. “Dad had spoken with the police and knew I suspected you, though at that point I hadn’t made my accusations formal. He told me I avoided my duty to do so because I had childish designs on you. ‘Not a dating game,’ he said. He pulled some strings and before long, I was inundated with NYPD. You were arrested that very day.”

  Her explanation echoed against the hard walls of his head. Her father had pushed and pushed. “You accused me because of him?”

  “I knew you’d think that. It’s why I haven’t talked about the estrangement. For what it’s worth, no, I blamed you because I thought you attacked me.” Her eyes glazed, and her voice dropped to a pained whisper. “Sometimes, when I don’t have the strength to be rational, my subconscious still thinks you were him. It’s like facts don’t count, and I’m only allotted visceral responses that got the wrong memo ten years ago.”

  Ethan didn’t budge. When the authorities had finally gone after the right man, he’d been ready to thank the guy. Now he could easily kill him. And Scarlet’s father? Why wouldn’t she have obeyed? She’d been young, terrified, injured. Her dad had played on those weaknesses.

  “Why do you think Tripp cared?”

  She shook her head on a shallow shrug. “I may never know. I only know it killed me to think I might have allowed my father’s manipulation to punish us both. That I rushed and ultimately did something unforgivable because I depended on his fortune.”

  Leaning his head back, he swallowed, trying to clear his throat. Now he knew. When she’d handed him that check years ago, then in the airport more recently, even after his mocking toast and when he’d fired her in Optik’s conference room, she’d been hiding more than guilt. She’d accepted his censure out of a deep sense of self-loathing, a belief she had penance to pay. Fuck, leaving behind the money and privilege and making herself vulnerable to a harsher world hadn’t been about her dad, it had been about him.

  And he’d ridden the wave, agreeing with her scathing self-assessment. “Tell me,” he demanded gruffly, “what do you want most?”

  Her answer came fast. “What I’ve always wanted—you.”

  The response humbled him. “You can have me.” He lifted his glass for a toast. “What else?”

  Their glasses met, and her eyes regained some of their sparkle over the rim as she drank the sweet varietal in a smooth swallow.

  He watched her throat undulate. Then, in a voice that barely cleared the surrounding tinkling of forks against dishes, he asked, “Parenthood?”

  Her head snapped up. “I can’t.”

  “You could adopt.” They could adopt. Or use a surrogate. Their child, but carried by a woman whose body could withstand it.

  Delight suffused her features, her face slowly coming to life. “I never thought I’d hear a man suggest such a thing. You know, that whole biological imperative to spread one’s seed and all.”

  Many men did feel that way. He had, before. “We live in a brave new world.”

  In roving sweeps, he drank in her classic beauty bathed in nothing but the joy of a long-awaited revelation. She’d dressed simply in pleated shorts and a pink sweater with three-quarter sleeves. Chunky strands of freshwater pearls, glittering with silver accents, caressed the cashmere at her collar bones, popping against the brightness of her clothing and the paleness of her skin.

  She tilted her head, watching him watch her, and a flush crept upward from her décolleté to suffuse her face with a delicate color that matched her shirt.

  Ethan spoke without thinking. “There’s nothing you can’t have or be or do.”

  She stilled. “You work fast, Ethan Blake.” Apparently she didn’t mind too much. Her lips spread wide, into a teeth-revealing grin that spread over him like a spotlight.

  Taken aback by his own sentimental fawning, he pulled her from her chair in search of a distraction. Near the main gate, Scarlet halted their trek out of the park. Silent in concentration, she lifted her arm to gesture across the street.

  Beyond the tips of her fingers and the arched entrance, he saw his assistant dart from an anonymous-looking building to a waiting car. Private, not a cab. Susan wore one of her nappy business suits and carried a briefcase as though she’d been working. Yet her role on these trips involved managing his and his employees’ comfort and convenience—a traveling do-it-all concierge.

  He generally knew her every move, and Susan had no need for evening bouts of work today, when his team did little but await info from Optik.

  Personal outings deviated from Susan’s M.O. She never ventured far during business trips. She smoked in stretch pants, watched American satellite television, and restricted her professional activities to meeting his requests, all while impatiently awaiting the green light to return to New York. She’d asked him three times this week when their Danish stint would end.

  His eyes narrowed.

  Billboard’s first victim.

  ******

  Shifting on her feet, Scarlet watched Ethan’s expression shrink from heavy-lidded contentment to slit-eyed suspicion. The Minion. A woman who’d made it clear she shared more with Ethan than work.

  His hand tightened on hers as they tracked the black sedan down the street. When she tried to slip away through his fingers, he glanced down as though he’d forgotten her presence. She watched his face tighten and refused to fault him for his feelings, but his anger struck her as personal.

  She felt helpless in the face of his mounting fury. “I’m sorry.” That it might be Susan, someone you’ve trusted, helped. The words went unsaid, but a single nocturnal voyage did not a traitor make. She wouldn’t let Ethan make the same mistake twice.

  “Such a long time,�
�� he said, still staring across the street. “With her.”

  “I know.” She didn’t, not exactly. She reached up and trailed her fingers through the silk of his hair. “Who is she to you?” Why are you so wounded? Why isn’t business just business?

  “My assistant, since the day I founded Atavos. More often than not, my secret weapon.” His laugh was bitter, as though he finally got the shitty joke.

  “Nothing more?”

  His head swiveled toward hers, nostrils flaring with each breath. “What are you asking, Scarlet?”

  “Exactly what you think I am.”

  “Whether I’ve fucked her?” She stepped back at his coarse response, but he kept coming, prowling in her direction, sounding aroused. “Whether I fuck her still?”

  Refusing to back down, Scarlet pressed on. “Yes,” she managed, holding Ethan’s searing stare. “Have you? Do you?”

  “No,” he said, and the fight visibly drained away. “I haven’t been an angel.” Surely not. “But neither have I been boning my secretary over the desk.” A wry grin accompanied his answer. “Not exactly my type.”

  His taste had occurred to her. Remember all the models? The actresses? Not that she’d tracked him—okay, she’d totally tracked him—but his liaisons never featured fading chain smokers in, shudder, nylon stockings and open-toed shoes.

  Lost to her musings, she barely registered the movement before he leaned in and drew her to him. Her mind catalogued his many publicized affairs with breathtaking, sought-after women, surely in thigh-highs—the really sexy kind with thin black seams running up the back of the leg—when his deep voice cut through the mental chatter. “You’re the woman I’m fucking, Scarlet. The only one I want.”

  The words should have shocked her. Instead, she shivered in the warm air, wanting him to prove it. Over and over again.

  Chapter 18

  The come-to-Jesus moment came sooner than Scarlet had anticipated.

  “What the hell are you thinking?” Brian flushed an unhealthy fuchsia as he waved his hands in excitable circles, cutting through briny sea air. The brightness of his face countered the darkness of the sky. Heavy clouds gathered over the city, and after a run of balmy summer days, a storm appeared imminent.