Strict Confidence

by Skye Warren

  CHAPTER TEN

  Beau Rochester

  Jane Mendoza is one of those women who gets energy from thorough sex. Her eyes are wide open in the dark. And she’s chatty. I find this fact about her incredibly hot. It makes me want to fuck her all over again just to find out what else she’ll share.

  Unfortunately she’s actually quite tired. And she needs to rest. I’m not going to fuck her into a state of dehydrated exhaustion where she needs to go back to the hospital.

  “You should sleep,” I say, planting a kiss on her forehead.

  “I don’t want to.”

  I narrow my eyes. “Who’s the nanny here?”

  She stretches, her limbs long and sinuous in the moonlight, her skin the color of sand at night. “Seriously, I feel like I could run a marathon right now.”

  “And someday, I’ll fuck you so good and so hard and so long, then send you out with a bottle of water, and we’ll see if it works. But right now? You need to sleep.”

  “Wait.” Her eyes look serious now. She shifts so we’re facing one another. Her limbs move against mine beneath the sheets, her legs smooth against my rough hair, the soft rasp making my cock flex. I want her spread open beneath me.

  Will I ever get enough of her?

  It strikes me with both hunger and fear, that thought.

  What if I’m always this desperate for a taste of her? What if I’m always this hard to get inside her? Every time I touch her, my need seems to grow. My feelings for Emily were overwhelming. Obsessive. And they nearly killed me. There’s a real chance they killed her. What I feel for Jane is so much deeper, so much darker. What if we never make it out of the abyss?

  “What?” I mutter, unable to look her in the eye, unable to pull away. I wrap her tightly in my arms, tight enough that I expect her to squirm or gasp for air. She does neither.

  “You saw me dreaming.”

  “It was dark, but technically, yes.”

  “And you know my… secrets.” Her voice goes low, but in the sultry way. In the scared way. As if she’s thinking of that night of the fire, when she told me about how she lost her virginity. To the bastard who was supposed to take care of her.

  “And now I want to track down someone and shoot them.” I’m going to do it, actually. Not with a gun, though that sounds fun. Maybe with my bare fists. Or maybe I’ll just crush him with money. They all sound like a fun time. I’m going to enjoy myself absolutely ruining that man. But she doesn’t ever need to know about that.

  Her lashes brush her cheeks. She doesn’t want to look at me. Shy—even as her pussy’s still wet and swollen from my cock. It’s heartbreaking. “I want you to tell me something about you. Something other people don’t know.”

  “Is this some kind of a game?”

  “No, it’s some kind of intimacy. So I don’t feel so… naked.”

  “I like you naked,” I say, looking down at her to prove the point. God, she’s beautiful. Those small tits, just enough to touch and tweak her dark pink nipples. I want to come on them next time. I want so much more than that, but I’m afraid to freak her out. So I give her a very basic, very boring fact about me that no one actually knows. “I hate lobster.”

  “You hate lobsters?”

  “No, I mean I hate them as animals, sure, but I specifically hate the taste. They’re basically bottom feeders, so you’re getting all the pollution in the ocean. Concentrated in a few ounces of meat. And you just slather it with butter so no one notices the taste of chemical runoff.”

  “But everyone loves lobster.”

  “Back when Maine was still a colony, only the poor ate lobster. Livestock ate lobster. Prisoners ate so much lobster that it was deemed cruel and unusual punishment.”

  “Okay, this doesn’t count as intimacy.”

  “What? I’ve never told anyone that.”

  “Because it’s random. Not because it’s important to you.”

  I sigh. “I hate this game.”

  “It’s not a game,” she says, slapping my chest. “I told you. Intimacy.”

  “Fine. Fine. Here’s something no one knows. And something that’s important to me. I only wear boxer briefs. Boxers are too loose. Briefs are too tight. Boxer briefs are perfect.”

  “Oh my God,” she says, exasperated.

  “What?”

  She sucks in a breath, as if gathering courage. “Tell me about Emily.”

  I stop moving. Every muscle in my body goes still. Even my heart. “What about her?”

  “I don’t know. Anything. Tell me about her.”

  I thought I understood what it was like for Jane to share that story with me. It would be hard. She’d feel nervous, naturally. That was apparently a huge understatement.

  Actually sharing hard shit feels like knives inside my stomach. I guess this is intimacy, cutting open your old scars to show people around inside them.

  “She moved to town. I fell for her. Hard.”

  “She was beautiful?”

  “She was everything I thought a woman should be, even though we were only seventeen at the time. Beautiful. Smart. She had this way of carrying herself that made everyone look twice.” A rueful smile. “And maybe I liked her because she made me work for it. I went after her for all of senior year, but she wouldn’t let me past second base.”

  Jane makes a face. “Not easy like me.”

  “Nothing about you is easy,” I say on a sigh, my face against her stomach.

  “You’re just saying that because you want me to have sex with you again.”

  “Oh, you’re definitely having sex with me again. But you’re nothing like her. It was a game. She knew it was a game. We both did. Flirt with all the boys and see who wins a date.”

  “And you were the winner?”

  “I thought I was. I felt like a winner. She was mine. My girlfriend. We were going steady. But she wanted more than a house on the water. More than a lobsterman’s life. So I started building my business. The investors wanted me in LA where I could network with the right funding people, build a team of developers. I left her with my class ring on her finger.”

  “Like an engagement ring?”

  “A promise ring, at the very least. I thought she’d wait for me. Or at least call if she got tired of waiting.” It’s a foolish thing, but I find myself touching her finger. Her fourth finger, where a ring would go.

  She laces her hand in mine.

  “I was cocky enough not to expect a Dear John letter at all, but I sure as hell didn’t expect it to come from my brother. He called me to tell me they got engaged.”

  “Oh, Beau.”

  “It’s not a sad story. Well, it was sad at the time. I was pissed. And then drunk. And then pissed again. But really it was just a natural culmination of what we’d been doing the whole time. Being shitheads who cared more about winning than anything else.”

  “Did you ever talk to her about it?”

  “The business was already successful. After that happened, I pushed hard for a buyout. A big payday for everyone. I wanted the money, the success, to show her what she was missing. But then in the blink of an eye she was married to him, and it didn’t fucking matter anymore.”

  “Of course it mattered. You loved her.”

  “Love. What a strange idea.”

  She puts a hand on my chest. Emotion. That’s what she means. What’s happening deep in my heart, in the bones and sinew of my body—but instead I feel only what’s on the surface. The slight weight of her hand, the smoothness of her palm, how badly I want her to keep moving her arm down. “You loved her. And you loved Rhys. Otherwise it wouldn’t have hurt when they betrayed you.”

  “Or maybe I just didn’t like losing. Whatever the reason, I had more money than sense. I already knew Mateo. It was easy to fall into his crowd with money to throw around.”

  “And then suddenly you disappeared.”

  Her eyes are so dark and so wide. Luminous. I push a strand of hair out of her face. “The way you look at me… with so
much trust. And kindness. It’s only because you think I’m someone else. If you knew the real me, you’d look at me different.”

  An eye roll. “I could say the same thing about you.”

  Except she’s wrong. I’ve already seen into the very core of her. The inherent goodness of her. This isn’t a game to her. I should have known that. I should never have touched her. This hasn’t been a game for her, and the worst part, it hasn’t been a game for me either. “One day Emily showed up at my penthouse. I was drunk. And completely taken by surprise. She’d been arguing with Rhys, she said. They were getting a divorce.”

  Jane sucks in a breath. She can see where this is going.

  “Yeah.” I drop my head back on the pillow, feeling like a bastard for the millionth time. “I slept with her. It was stupid. And it was bad. And it was cheating.”

  “Because she wasn’t really getting a divorce, was she?”

  “No. I mean, maybe she thought about it, but it wasn’t going to happen. Even as I was fucking her, she had to know that it was a revenge fuck. I wasn’t going to marry my brother’s ex. I sent her back to him.”

  “That’s why it hurts you so much,” she says, planting a kiss on my arm. “You feel guilty.”

  “Of course I feel guilty. This is how guilty people should feel. Guilty.”

  “He stole her from you first.”

  “That really doesn’t make it better. I never even spoke to him after that day. Couldn’t. I don’t know if he even wanted me to call him. We were basically strangers by the end.”

  “You were family.”

  “When I got the call about the accident, I swore to myself, if he woke up from the coma, we’d talk it out. I’d tell him what happened, see if he still wanted to be my brother. But he never did wake up. Finally the doctors advised me to pull the plug.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Right there in Regional Hospital, walking the same blue and red tiled floors that I walked to find you that night. They gave me a few minutes to talk to him before they did it. I could have told him then. It wouldn’t really have mattered. They swore there was no brain activity. But then I thought, what if they’re wrong. What if there’s a chance they’re wrong, and he hears me, but he can’t swear at me. He looked so fucking small in that bed. He couldn’t have punched me, and I deserved to be punched. So I didn’t tell him. I walked away with that secret.”

  “Hey,” she says, propping her chin on her palm. Her hair does this sexy flop thing onto my chest. “You had a toxic relationship with your brother. These things happen, but you are not a bad person. You were reacting out of hurt. You didn’t mean to hurt him, and that you wish you could take it back… wherever he is, he knows that now.”

  Rhys is a bastard, and whatever hell he’s in, I hope it burns. I don’t tell her that. I don’t tell her what I learned from Emily’s diary the day after I pulled the plug on my brother. Instead I tell her, “You’re going to make an incredible social worker one day.”

  A lopsided grin. “Really?”

  I spell the letters on her shoulder. Really.

  She’s warm and sexy and everything I want in my very own bed, but I have things to do. People to see. Security to arrange. I can’t pull her against me and ward away the cold.

  “You need to sleep,” I tell her. “Your eyes are already closing.”

  My sleepy girl rolls to her side, palm under her face as she watches me dress.

  I find my jeans first. Then the shirt, which landed over a chair by the window.

  She’s already drowsing by the time I slip out of the bedroom. In the room next door, I check on Paige, but she’s still sleeping. That’s good. The doctors said that’s normal. I should be sleeping too, and wouldn’t I love being wrapped around Jane?

  I can’t let myself drift off in her bed. Look what happened last time. A fire. Devastation. Death.

  Mateo is in the kitchen, which is predictable. He can usually be found wherever there’s food, even in the middle of the night. It’s something of a miracle that he stays as fit as he does, even with regular workouts. There’s a plate of scones in front of him, a dish of clotted cream, but he’s ignoring them in favor of his phone. There’s some argument about what constitutes exclusivity in his contract with a major production company.

  He sees me and ends the call. “My agent,” he says.

  “Want my lawyer to take a look at it?”

  “Nah. They’re just busting my balls because they want me to accept a bullshit offer for the sequel, but I’m going to hold out until they give me what I’m worth.”

  I grab one of the scones and scarf it down in two bites. “Would you have ever imagined the two of us like this back when we were sharing a shithole?”

  “This was the plan. Getting rich. Taking over the goddamn world.”

  Wind knocks some flowers outside against the window. “Remember a few years back you had that nutjob stalker? The one who sent you dead animals?”

  “I try to forget about that honestly. I still shudder when I see a raccoon.”

  “The cops ever find the guy?”

  “There was a profiler who thought it was a woman. And no. After a while, the packages stopped coming, and there was no reason to continue. They said maybe she found a new target.”

  “The fire chief thinks the fire may have been set on purpose.”

  No change in his expression. That’s why he gets paid the big bucks for acting. “Damn.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who the hell did it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe no one. Could have just been an old house.”

  “But you don’t think it was.”

  There’s a bar in the restaurant. I wander there to pour myself a shot of whiskey, ignoring the throb of my leg. It’s worse after fucking Jane, but I wouldn’t take it back for anything.

  Mateo follows me, waiting patiently for me to explain. It’s not amazing whiskey. It burns all the way down. “I don’t know, but I don’t want to take any chances with Paige or with Jane. Whoever did this, whatever their motives, they clearly don’t care about hurting the people near me.”

  “Why do you assume you’re the target?”

  “There were three people in that house. I’m definitely the biggest asshole.”

  “I won’t argue with that.” He glances toward the stairs. “Jane?”

  He means, maybe Jane set the fire. Part of me revolts at the mere suggestion. I want to snarl in her defense, but I force myself to remain calm. “She came in after me. She didn’t have to. Those aren’t the actions of someone who wants me dead. I could have breathed my last if she hadn’t been there.”

  “You’re wrapped up in her pretty hard.”

  “Am I?”

  “She’s going to get hurt.”

  “Don’t make me punch you in the face.” He means that I’m going to hurt her emotionally, although I’m well aware that she also might be physically hurt. She could have died in that fire just as easily as I could have. “She’s the nanny, and sure I have a soft spot for her. I also have a soft spot for the kitten Paige loves. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  His look calls me a liar. “Then who do you think set the fire?”

  “You’re going to think I’m insane.”

  “I already think that.”

  “Remember when we would party in LA? If I died back then, who got the money?”

  “Your brother.”

  “You know that, but what would everyone else think? We hadn’t spoken to each other in years. Everyone knew he stole my woman. Anyone would think I’d rather give the money to a random charity than him. Or maybe some stripper who showed me a good night.”

  “So you die, your money disappears.” Awareness sharpens his gaze. “But now everyone would know that it goes to Paige. She’s an heiress basically.”

  “And whoever has custody of her controls the money.”

  “So who gets custody of her if you die?”

  “That’s the thing. Joe Causey fought me fo
r custody. He’s her uncle, technically. The estate was modest enough when her parents died, but now that it includes my money, it’s a goddamn fortune.”

  “Fuck. Can you make it so someone else gets guardianship if you die?”

  “Not really. I can name someone in my will, but it’s the courts who decide who gets her—and they’re going to choose family first. Especially since he’s local. And it gets worse. He’s the detective assigned to the case.”

  “Are you telling me the person investigating the fire may be the person who set it?”

  “I’m telling you it’s a possibility.”

  He takes the bottle of whiskey and pours himself a drink. “This is insane.”

  I gulp down the rest of what’s in my glass. “Yes.”

  “Did you tell the higher ups about this?”

  “Yes, but it’s a small department. There aren’t a surplus of people available to investigate. And the police chief is good friends with Joe Causey. They go fishing together.”

  “This is fucked up.”

  “All I’m saying is, if you have a minute before your next movie starts, I’d like it if you could stick around. Doesn’t hurt to have another person I trust around.”

  “Sure, man. But you know, it could have been me. I could have wanted to get back at you after our argument.” His eyebrow rises. Maybe he thinks I’ll take a swing at him. Maybe he thinks I’m stupid.

  “If you were trying to kill me, you missed your chance. Back when we were partying in LA, when I’d get so fucking wasted I didn’t know where I was, you were the beneficiary of my will.”

  “Christ,” he says, holding his chest as if wounded. “I was an heiress and didn’t even know it.”

  “Turns out you did have something in common with Isabella Bradley,” I say, naming the gorgeous young woman he once dated. She was heir to a massive hotel fortune. Tabloids had a field day snapping photos of them. No one knew that theirs was a fake relationship. A carefully orchestrated farce between a party girl who wanted guys to stop hitting on her and an actor who needed a break from the speculation to focus on his work.

  Mateo gives me the middle finger.

  I pick up a thick linen card with my name scrawled across in feminine handwriting. Beau Rochester. “What’s this?” I ask. “The bill?”