by Stacy Gail
It hit a heartbeat after his, and in that flicker of time she watched as his head flung back, his eyes squeezing tight and cords standing out in his neck as he loosed a low roar of ecstasy. Then she was with him in that blinding bliss, coming so hard she could do nothing more than writhe on the table as she gave herself over to it. She savored the depths of it even as the euphoric ripples slowly, slowly diminished, until at last she came back to herself—sweaty, out of breath, with friction burns on her back.
Perfect.
“Guess what?” Payne’s voice was hoarse from the wild sounds he’d made, sounds she could still hear echoing in her ears, and it turned her on all over again. “You lose.”
She blinked hazily. After a shattering orgasm like she’d just had, she’d never felt more like a winner in her life. “What?”
“You heard me.” He leaned forward and pressed his mouth to where her heart still thundered. “I won the game. I get to do whatever I want with you.”
God help her, he was going to turn her into a nymphomaniac, she just knew it. “Didn’t you just do that?”
“Making love is what I always want to do with you. For my prize, I have something a little different in mind.”
Her pulse paused before she remembered what he’d said about trust. Apparently, it was time to put up or shut up. “A deal’s a deal. Let’s hear it.”
He raised his head to search her eyes. “You trust me?”
“Yes.” Amazing, how he felt he still had to ask.
“Baby.” With a reverence that made her eyes sting, Payne traced a thin, vaguely diamond-like shape between her breasts, the horizontal points of the pattern curving along their sensitive undersides. “I want to tattoo you.”
She couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d said he wanted to teach her his favorite Monty Python silly-walk. “What?”
“It’s my own design.” Once again he traced the diamond-like shape, tickling the area between her breasts where sternum met diaphragm. “I created it for you, to be placed right here at the very center of your body, because I want you to be able to see it every single day.”
Her mind whirled, hardly able to take it in. “Why?”
“Because when you see it, you’ll think of me. That’s why I need you to think this through thoroughly before I touch the needle to your skin,” he added when she remained silent. “You need to be okay with wearing my mark, seeing it every day and thinking of me, for the rest of your life. Tattoos are permanent. That means I would become a permanent part of you.”
Damn him for putting it in terms of permanence, she thought, as a wave of anxiety crashed into her. But a gleeful thrill bloomed right along with it, spearing through the trepidation until it was nothing more than an echo. She didn’t believe in forever when it came to people; people were unreliable, selfish. Fickle. But Payne… he was none of these things. Through every action, every word, he showed her that he was a man who was the human equivalent of the Rock of Gibraltar. Someone solid, someone she could count on.
For a man who was as steady as Payne, it only made sense that she should carry his personal—and permanent—mark.
“You tell me when and where I need to show up, and I’ll be there. I promise.”
If she’d had any doubt about her decision, it would have vanished under the heat of his smile. “We’re both going to be crazy-busy prepping for the upcoming exhibit, but I want to do this before you get cold feet.”
“I won’t back out.”
“I’ll hold you to that.” With an obvious reluctance that made her giddy, he removed his weight from her before pulling her to a sitting position. “I’ll look at my schedule tomorrow to see when I can have lots of uninterrupted time with you at the studio. For now, though, all I can think about is getting you into bed.”
Completely naked, she wrapped her arms around him and snuggled close for warmth. “Are we going to get any sleep at all tonight?”
“Believe it or not, sleep is what I’m looking forward to the most. Or, to be more specific,” he added when she glanced at him questioningly, “I’m looking forward to waking up with you.”
She lifted a brow. “Is this your roundabout way of asking for another one of my spectacular sleeping-man portraits?”
“It’s my way of telling you that, of all the women I may or may not have slept with in my lifetime, you are the only woman I’ve ever fantasized about waking up with.” He kissed the top of her head, clearly unaware his statement filled her with so much glowing emotion, it made her chest feel like it trembled on the verge of bursting at the seams. “So? You ready for bed, Becks?”
“Yeah.” What she wasn’t ready for was feeling more vulnerable than she had in years. “Lead the way.”
Chapter Fourteen
Becks wasn’t sure what the big deal was when it came to waking up together… until it actually happened.
The winter-pale light of morning filtered into her consciousness, and as she drifted up through layers of sleep she became aware of an arm clamped around her waist, holding her to the curve of a furnace-warm body, her back to his chest. The coziness of that shared body heat made her smile and stretch back against him, and as she did so, a nuzzling kiss landed on her neck. But it wasn’t until Payne started sleepily humming “You Are My Sunshine” in her ear that the magic of not being alone as she awakened hit her full force.
Talk about waking up on the right side of the bed.
She couldn’t put her finger on what made waking up with Payne was so special, even as they made love in that sleepy, private world under the covers while snow fell beyond the windows. Only later, as he drove her back to her place around midmorning, did she realize why there seemed to be an added closeness between them now. Having sex with someone… it wasn’t that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. On the contrary, sex could be nothing more than a hit-and-run handful of minutes that could be forgotten once it was done. Wham-bam, thank you, ma’am. Definitely not the most intimate thing two people could do, no matter what the uptight prudes of the world said.
Deliberately choosing to fall asleep with someone only to wake in their arms, though…
Oh, yeah. That was a horse of a different color.
It was another lesson in trust, she realized, nodding a greeting in the direction of Mr. Janek at the mailboxes in the small vestibule before climbing the stairs to her loft. That seemed to be the theme during her time at Payne’s. The trust he’d shown her by bringing her into his home highlighted that as nothing else could. She’d responded by lowering her guard enough to drift off to sleep in his arms, in his bed, and hadn’t felt a moment’s awkwardness when she’d awakened there. Like anyone else when they first awoke, she had been at her most vulnerable, but that hadn’t mattered. She was safe with him, and the only thing she’d been aware of was a dazzling, dizzying happiness.
She ignored the fact that it was a happiness she flat-out refused to name.
She’d just put the kettle on the stove for tea when the sharp buzz of the new door system made her heart pause. Payne must have forgotten something, she thought, smiling in anticipation as she hurried over to the view screen. Maybe he just wanted another kiss goodbye. If that was the case, she could certainly—
Her skin iced over, paralyzing her into place. Numb, she stared at the black-and-white picture of her parents on the stoop outside in the snow.
“No.” The happy glow in her chest snuffed out like a candle, leaving her cold and in the dark and plunged back into the nightmare that had been her life four years earlier. Oh, God, she didn’t want to go back there. They hated her. Wanted her dead instead of her brother. They’d abandoned her when she’d been physically broken and emotionally devastated after Justin’s death. They’d been done with her. Done. Why couldn’t they stay done, when life was finally worth living again and she’d been handed the miraculous gift of hope in the form of Payne? Why?
Unless…
Maybe that was why, she thought, panic and a helpless desolation grind
ing through her until she felt sick. Maybe her true punishment was to never be happy. Maybe it was their job to make sure she never moved on.
Maybe she didn’t deserve happiness.
They can’t do this to me. Please, God, don’t do this to me. It isn’t fair…
She wasn’t aware she’d backed away from the panel, her frozen fingers pressed to her mouth, until she saw a flicker of movement on the tiny screen. She leaned forward in time to see Mr. Janek open the door for them with his usual mournful expression, the way he’d tried to do for Payne.
No, no, no…
“What’s the point of having this new frigging security system?” Bone-shattering tension mixed with toxic dread, and she had to swallow hard to keep from throwing up. No matter how much she’d tried to reconnect with her parents after they’d kicked her out of their lives, the last thing she wanted now was to see them. Her head was in a much better place than when she’d tried to kill herself three years ago. Her father’s cold encouragement to go ahead and die—proof that she was an unwanted and unloved thing—had been her personal rock bottom.
He had sent her there, this man coming up to see her now. That horrible man who wished with all his heart that she had died instead of his son.
Her own goddamn father.
She didn’t want to go back to that. She couldn’t go back to that. The wounds that had been inflicted on her… she’d never fully healed from them. Not deep down in her soul, in that vault where she kept all that bitter anguish on lockdown so it wouldn’t swallow her whole. The only good thing about losing her family was that once she’d accepted that she’d been amputated from their life, they couldn’t hurt her anymore.
Yet here they were.
The knock on her door was so sharp she had to clap a hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. Had it only been a couple weeks ago that a small part of her had hoped her parents would come by to acknowledge her existence, signaling that she’d been forgiven at last? She had changed so much since then. She didn’t need their forgiveness anymore. Somewhere along the way it had finally gotten through her thick skull that the only attention they’d shoot her way would be tipped with poison.
If she’d been smarter, she would have figured that out sooner. They’d never come to visit her when she’d been struggling, after all. Not when she’d landed there at the then-unfinished loft with no money and a broken back that had made climbing stairs an unbearable torture. Not when she’d called them in tears to apologize for something that hadn’t been her fault, only to be hung up on time and again. Not even when Claire had contacted them after her suicide attempt. The one and only thing that had finally brought them back into her life were signs of her success.
Because they wanted to destroy it.
Please, please stop hurting me. I can’t take any more.
Another sharp knock. Demanding. Impatient. “Becks. Open up.”
Her father. Martin, she reminded herself savagely as her eyes burned and her breath panted out of her in blind, trapped-animal panic. They weren’t her parents anymore, were they? They’d insisted she was no longer their daughter, after all. She was a murderer. She was dead to them.
Apparently she wasn’t as dead to them as they’d tried to make her believe.
Go away, go away, please just go away…
They’d go away if she didn’t answer. They didn’t know she was home—
“She’s in there,” came Mr. Janek’s doleful tone. “I just saw her go in.”
Goddamn it.
A third knock set her feet in motion while her stomach tried to evict the Belgian waffles Andreas had made for them earlier. Wishing with all her might that she was still back at Payne’s, she reached out a violently shaking hand and opened the door to her worst nightmare.
God help me.
The mental ties holding her together strained under the stress of seeing the people who had once been the center of her world. Martin Delgado was stocky, built like a bulldog, with broad shoulders that gave him the appearance of being built out of cinderblocks. He’d been a running back in his football glory days of high school, and apparently not half bad at the job. This fact had been talked about ad nauseam in their house, especially after Justin had won a football scholarship to Northwestern. That was something their father had never achieved, and no one could have been prouder, or taken more bows for passing on superior athletic genes, than Martin.
By contrast, her mother appeared thin and more stoop-shouldered than Becks remembered despite the bulky winter coat wrapped around her. Where her husband had always been the proud peacock, Janine was the drab peahen forever trailing in her husband’s showy wake with a voice no louder than a mumble. Her hair, habitually held back on either side by plain black combs, was now completely gray. The last memory Becks had of her mother was watching her follow her husband into the hospital parking lot, with Martin Delgado’s edict for Becks to never visit Justin’s grave ringing in her ears.
They had driven off without looking at her after denying her the right to mourn her brother’s death. They’d simply left her on the sidewalk with only the clothes on her broken back.
Her own parents had left her for dead. And in that horrific moment of abandonment, she’d prayed for that death to come as soon as possible.
“Well? Are you going to let us in?” Without waiting for an answer, Martin pushed inside, with his wife trailing behind like an obedient shadow. Lingering near the top of the stairs, her landlord looked on the verge of cracking a smile as he nodded in her parents’ direction.
“How ‘bout that, huh, Becks? They finally came to see you. Isn’t that nice?”
The word no burned her throat so fiercely she wouldn’t have been surprised if it left blisters. All she could do was shake her head before quietly closing the door on Mr. Janek’s dismayed expression. A closed door was necessary now. She didn’t want anyone witnessing the ugliness that was her family.
“My goodness.” With gloved hands clutched in front of her and looking cold despite the coat around her, Janine Delgado looked around the airy, sunlit loft. “Your place is beautiful, Becks. No one would guess how roomy and free-flowing it is from the outside. Oh, and I love what you’ve done with that landscape mural on the wall—”
“For crying out loud, Janine,” Martin muttered. His aggressively squarish face, grim mouth and heavily lined brow only added to his bulldog-like appearance. He had the bully’s mug down pat. “What the hell are you doing?”
Her mother dipped her head as if trying to duck a blow. “Sorry,” she mumbled and looked away from the mural. With a sinking heart, Becks knew she’d never acknowledge its existence again. Her mother was obviously out of practice when it came to dealing with her; usually in her husband’s presence, her mom refrained from saying anything positive when it came to Becks. She had never even been able to say that she loved her own daughter while Martin was in the room. The few times she had managed to say “I love you,” it had always been when they were alone, when Becks had said it first as a prompt, and she could only say it in a whisper out of obvious concern of being overheard.
Becks had been in elementary school when she grasped that her mother was ashamed to say she loved her. That was when she’d stopped saying the words herself. She did love her mother, heaven knew. But it hurt all the way to her soul knowing that she wasn’t loved back.
“Sorry?” Her father—Martin, she fiercely corrected herself—stared at his wife with that same disgust Becks remembered being on the receiving end countless times before. “We didn’t come here to admire the interior decoration.”
“You don’t say.” At last, Becks chipped her voice out of the ice trying to crush her from the inside out. “What did you come here for?”
That disgusted look swung her way. “Like you don’t know.”
“I don’t.”
“It’s your fault we’re here, thanks to you changing your phone number. If your plan was to drag us all the way out here to Old Town, it worked.”
That had to be some kind of twisted joke. “It’s ten minutes from your door to mine, so don’t make it sound like you had to cross the Alps on foot to get here. And I changed my number because of you. After you called me, I realized how much I needed to sever that last line of communication.”
Shocked silence followed her statement, the same kind of silence that usually followed the dropping of an F-bomb in church. “What the hell,” Martin said very carefully, “did you just say to me?”
It was ridiculous, how dry her mouth went. How her spine shivered. It was like she was five years old again and terrified of making Daddy mad. “I’m saying I never wanted to hear from you again. Ever.”
Her mother made a faint sound, as if she’d been jabbed unexpectedly by a needle, while her father swelled up like a balloon. “How dare you look me in the eye, after everything you’ve done, and make it sound like we’re the ones who should be shunned, not you. We didn’t kill my son. You did.”
“Someone ran into the street,” Becks gritted out for what felt like the millionth time, all the while hating herself for doing it yet again. God knew there was no point. It would only fall on deaf ears, like always. “I swerved to miss them and hit a bridge abutment that led up to the freeway. Justin broke his neck because he’d refused to wear his seatbelt. He was drunk off his ass and in a pissy mood since his big sister had been called to come and pick him—”
“You were the one who was drunk. When we called the ER that night to find out what happened, we were told it was an alcohol-related accident.”
“Technically true, since Justin was so drunk he punched both me and his coach when we tried to do up his seatbelt—”
“An alcohol-related accident. There was only one car involved. You were the driver of that one car. That means you were the one who was shitfaced and killed Justin.”
She dragged her hands through her hair, on the verge of pulling it out. “You know that’s not true, but you still hold onto it. The sun will fall from the sky before you’ll ever bend enough to admit you were wrong.”