He nodded, then paused. “You know, I really don’t feel any pressure, at all. Everything I had any control over is too late to change, now. There’s no sense in worrying. All I have to do is remember my speech.”
If Neil had stood up and proclaimed that he was Jesus Christ returned to Earth in judgment, I would have been less surprised. “Are you feeling all right? Because this whole admitting that something is out of your control thing is concerning.”
“You’re very funny, aren’t you?” he grumbled. “Honestly, as this project has progressed, I’ve felt…lighter. Less caught up in the past. My need to control every aspect of my life, even the things I couldn’t possibly control, seems to be lessening. I don’t know if that’s the therapy, or the distraction the center has provided.”
“I think it’s a little of both. And because you’re making something wonderful out of something horrible that happened to you.” He needed to give himself major credit for that. “I know this is going to sound weird coming from someone half your age, but I’m proud of you.”
“It doesn’t sound ‘weird’ coming from my wife.” He dropped his gaze to my feet. “Did you, by any chance…”
I lifted a brow and handed him the tube of lotion.
“You know what the best thing about your foot fetish is?” I asked with a happy sigh as I wriggled back to get comfortable.
“All of the foot massages.” He rolled over to brace himself above me for a quick kiss, then crawled backward to sit at the end of the bed with my foot in his lap.
“No,” I corrected him. “The fact that you actually told me about it.”
A crooked smile tilted his mouth as he squirted some lotion into his hands and warmed it between his palms. “Yes, well, consider that a side effect of my increased emotional health. I’m far more comfortable talking about sex and all of my repressed desires.”
“Yikes! You were repressing stuff?” I laughed. Neil took my foot between his big hands, and I sighed with contentment.
“Don’t tell me there aren’t things you fantasize about that you don’t share with me,” he said, his cheeks going bright red. He kneaded my foot firmly, but not too hard, the lotion on his hands easing the slip of his skin on mine. “Even for as adventurous as you are.”
“I’m not repressing anything. I never really got a chance,” I reminded him. After he’d blown the doors off my sexual inexperience in one incredible night, I’d had a very hard time stuffing all my wants and desires back into a psychological box. “I mean, except for the liking girls thing. But I’m not repressing that, anymore.”
“No, you certainly are not.” He bent his head and lifted my big toe to his mouth.
“Ew, I hope that didn’t have lotion on it!”
“My kinks are many and varied, but consuming skin care products is not one of them.” He spread my toes with the tips of his fingers, and I almost purred like a cat.
I would never have considered my feet an erogenous zone. While I didn’t get off on them quite the way Neil did, knowing that he was slavishly worshipping a part of my body that was often an afterthought was sexy as hell. It was also nice to spend some time with just the two of us.
“You’re very quiet all of a sudden,” Neil said, moving on to the other foot.
“I was just thinking about how I always think, ‘this is the calm before the storm,’ when we’ve got something big coming up.” I shrugged. “I feel like, once this gala is over, then everything settles back down. But it doesn’t.”
“Life is a bit like that, I’m afraid. Always running from one thing that needs to be done, to the next.” He dug his thumbs into the arch of my foot. Sweet Jesus, but the man could turn my feet into mush. In a good way.
“Maybe, after the center opens and everything is on its feet, we could run away somewhere where nobody would come looking for us,” I suggested.
“Tahiti?” Neil suggested.
I shook my head. “I was thinking Reykjavík.”
“In February?”
“Hear me out.” We’d both grown up in brutally cold climates, so the winter wasn’t about to scare me away. “We can go to the house, hole up with a bunch of food that’s terrible for us, and not answer our phones for a few days. We don’t even have to tell your brothers that we’re in the city.”
“And, when they find out because you can’t resist putting a picture on Facebook, you’ll deal with that fall out?” Neil asked, arching a brow.
“Fine. I’ll just post to Instagram.”
His expression didn’t change.
I sighed. “We’ll work in a visit to them, too.” I didn’t mind Neil’s brothers, and I really liked their wives. Probably because they had, like me, married ridiculously wealthy men while coming from modest backgrounds themselves. It was nice to be around people who seemed grounded, especially when I found myself becoming less and less grounded every day.
“You just want me all to yourself.” Neil gave me his half-smile, the one that still stopped my heart every time I saw it. That simple expression could take me back to the airport the day we’d met almost nine years ago.
“I’m not sure you fully understand how sexy you are,” I said, holding up my hands as though I was helpless to resist him.
And, really, I was.
He lunged up my body, and I squealed a laugh, spreading my thighs around him.
“I didn’t really mean to do this tonight,” Neil murmured against my neck. “Are you up for it?”
“Are you?” Spontaneous sex had gotten a little more difficult after Neil had gone through chemotherapy. He took erectile dysfunction drugs—he was pretty defensive about me calling them boner pills, so I’d stopped doing that—but we generally needed half an hour’s notice for them to work. Then again, sometimes we didn’t.
“Ah. Good point.” He tilted his hips, pressing his erection against me. “I think we may be all right. I did get optimistic and took a pill after dinner.”
“Hmm.” I pretended to consider, then reached down to the waistband of my panties. I grinned at him. He peeled the cotton up my bent thighs, over my knees and down the rest of the way. I kicked my feet to help him, with a flurry of movement that seemed clumsy but felt as easy as if we’d done it a million times. We’d had sex a lot, but not that much, I was sure.
We didn’t bother with foreplay. We were both ready, and he sank into me in one easy slide. I tipped my head back and moaned. There were times when sex was all about the game for us. But, most of the time, we had moments like this. Silliness that devolved into sex, sex that became communication.
He buried his face in my neck and sucked a line of kisses along my throat. Braced above me on one elbow, he held my hip in his hand and rocked me in slow rolls of achingly sweet pleasure.
“There isn’t a single place on this Earth that I would rather be than inside of you,” he whispered beside my ear.
It was a good thing for him that I felt exactly the same way.
CHAPTER THREE
When I’d married Neil, I’d taken on a responsibility that I’d never considered. Nothing much about our lives changed, except that, now, I was expected to be a billionaire’s wife in the eyes of rich people society. Which was, as I always had suspected, a real thing and not just something made up for television. Rich people just seemed to know each other.
I stood in front of the trifold mirror in the dressing room of our Fifth Avenue apartment. We’d discussed selling the place several times, but we’d never really had the heart to part with it. It was a sprawling apartment at the most prestigious address in Manhattan, and while it might not occupy two floors and include a staircase modeled after the one on the Titanic—we had a very eccentric neighbor who frequently showed off her home in magazines—it was pretty damn impressive. It was also the place where Neil and I started out. Well, kind of. Technically, that had been at the Crown Plaza at the LAX airport. But the spot I occupied was the very place I’d realized I loved Neil.
The person I’d been back then
seemed very far away, now. For one, she’d been skinnier. I grimaced at my triceps. “Am I getting bingo wings?”
Neil made an impatient noise. He looked up from fastening his cufflink. “Stop it. Whatever part of your body you’re complaining about, just stop.”
That was easy for him to say. When we’d gotten together, he’d been in pretty good shape. Then, he’d gone through cancer and chemotherapy, a horrible transplant, and a year of being kind of squishy. Since he’d retired, he’d gone on a stupid workout kick, and now, he looked even better than he had when we’d first gotten together. All I’d done was watch my metabolism slowly circle the drain as I got closer and closer to thirty.
“Well, I’m sorry, but all your celebrity friends are going to be there with their Swedish supermodel girlfriends,” I complained. “And I’ve gained—”
“Six pounds since Christmas,” Neil recited along with me. “Does it help at all if I tell you it’s all in your breasts?”
I plucked the top of my dress. Trish, my stylist, had been mortified when I’d said I wanted to wear the Fadwa Baalbaki gown, because it was from last season. But it was so pretty, and I’d never gotten a chance to wear it, then. Still, I’d liked the look of the high-neck and capped sleeves on the model more than on myself; I felt like I was just a pair of green-lace covered breasts bouncing around the room.
I turned and looked over my shoulder to admire the fall of teal organza ruffles, like a mermaid’s tail attached to the back of the dress. Someone might step on it and trip me, and I would break my neck, but it would be worth it. As long as I was the only person to die tonight, and it was as a martyr to fashion, I would consider the evening a resounding success.
“Now, let’s stop worrying about how you look and focus on me,” Neil said, gesturing to his tux as he walked toward me.
“If I didn’t know you better, I would think you were gunning for my position as most vain person in the family.” I tilted my head and pretended to consider, but there was nothing that needed considering. Neil looked amazing in a tux, no matter the occasion, or the cut. Tonight, he wore a sleek black modern fit. I couldn’t resist running my hands over his broad shoulders.
“You already can’t keep your hands off me.” He grinned. “I’d say this is a success.”
“Not quite.” I reached up and adjusted his bow tie, which hadn’t been skewed in the first place. “Now it’s a success.”
He kissed my forehead—a very light kiss, so as not to disturb my foundation—and said, “I’ll meet you in the foyer.”
I turned to the mirror for one last check. Trish had done my makeup flawlessly. I was good, but for something like this, having a professional touch was a must. I could never get my eyebrows to look so spot-on defined. There was a little shimmer to my blush and glossy, rose petal pink lipstick, and my face was contoured as perfectly as if I’d been Photoshopped. My hair fell in loose curls around my shoulders. I looked like I could have been going to the Oscars in the 1940’s.
But my arms still really bothered me.
Maybe Neil was right. Maybe I was being overly critical of my body. But something about my last birthday had really bugged me. I’d turned twenty-seven, so I couldn’t explain why it had been that particular birthday that set me off; I’d thought I wouldn’t start freaking out over aging until I hit thirty.
Living so close to my mother again wasn’t helping. I knew all of her comments, from suggesting we start working out together, to sending me Pinterest links for low-fat recipes, were meant in the best possible way. She wasn’t happy about her weight, and she worried that I would hit thirty and gain weight, too. Her insecurity was messing with my head.
The really fucked up part was, before she came to live with us? I couldn’t have cared less about my weight and my body. I owned one of the few mainstream fashion magazines in the market that employed a wide range of body types and ethnicities. But, somehow, I felt more self-conscious about my body than when I’d been subjected to an endless parade of traditionally slender fashion models. Now, I was obsessed, in a way that was beginning to feel really unhealthy.
I wasn’t going to think about that tonight. This evening wasn’t about my arms, or my dress, or me, in general. It was all about Neil and his amazing accomplishment. I wasn’t going to let myself bring both of us down.
Mom and our driver, Tony, were away on a romantic ski trip to the Berkshires. Tony had a timeshare at a resort, and his week had overlapped this reception. I think Neil was kind of relieved. He and Mom clashed on a lot of things, and many of them were, unfortunately, related to differences in their upbringing. While I had learned to adapt to a lot of what I thought of as “rich people life”, Mom was living in our seven-million-dollar guest house but doing her shopping off QVC. It wasn’t that Neil was a snob, but he had no experience with people who weren’t born with silver spoons jammed in every possible orifice. My mom made him extremely nervous.
Since we didn’t have a chauffer tonight, Neil decided to drive us. He grumbled about how he shouldn’t have brought the flashy supercar, because high performance tires apparently weren’t that “high performance” in snow. And it was really coming down. We rode the short distance to the center in the… I couldn’t remember the name. Keurig? Something with a K, slipping around the corners a little.
“I hope no one runs over a valet,” I said as we pulled up, and I was only half-joking. My phone peeped from within my purse.
As I scrambled to answer, Neil echoed, “And I hope you don’t plan on answering your phone all evening.”
Ugh, he had such an attitude about how I was allegedly “tethered” to technology. I ignored him. “It’s Emma.”
“Tell her to give me an early birthday present and show up on time,” he said, only half-serious.
I answered the call as we stepped out of the car. “Emma?”
“Don’t be mad,” she said. I heard Olivia fussing close to the phone. “We’re on our way, right now.”
“It’s a party. You can be fashionably late.” I shot Neil a recriminating look when he made an impatient noise. “I have to get off the phone, because your father doesn’t want me to have any communication with the outside world.”
“You answered my call at the party?” Emma asked, her tone withering. Almost as withering as her father’s could sometimes be.
“Look, you both need to get off my back. I can’t help it if I’m in constant demand.” But they were both right. Guests were already arriving; I couldn’t walk through the front doors on my phone, like I was running in to shop at Barney’s. “Okay, going now.”
I hung up and slipped my phone into my clutch.
We weren’t early, but we weren’t the last to arrive. Neil didn’t like the idea of “making an entrance” and diverting the attention from the center to himself, which was pretty stupid, in my opinion. His name was on the side of the freaking building.
A black awning stretched across the sidewalk for arriving guests. Reporters and photographers crowded behind velvet ropes. Enough of Neil’s celebrity acquaintances had RSVPed that we’d expected this. As soon as we stepped out of the car, a few flashes popped, but nothing compared to whoever had gone in ahead of us. I thought it might have been Khloe Kardashian.
Oh, my gosh. I might get to speak to an actual Kardashian tonight.
Most of my job for the evening would be to stand beside Neil, smiling and nodding, and answering the occasional question. The answer was usually something along the lines of, “I’m very proud,” or “This is only the beginning.” They started to sound mind-numbingly similar before we even made it out of the press line and into the building. And, though my face was going numb from holding my smile and my brain was leaking out of my ears from mindlessly repeating myself, I truly was proud of Neil. He knew it, though he did seem amused as the questions became more and more redundant. I swear he liked watching me squirm.
At least it was warm enough for that kind of nonsense. There were outdoor heaters making wet little ho
les in the snow piling up on the sidewalk, and the crush of reporters helped block the January wind and blowing snow. I thanked a few of them for taking one for the team, before I realized how bourgeois I sounded.
As we neared the doors, Neil took my hand. I looked up at him. Nine years ago, I’d met the sexiest man I’d ever seen. In a single night, he’d changed who I was, and who I had planned to be. And, now, standing beside him at what was arguably his biggest triumph, I realized that I’d done the same for him.
When we finally made it into the atrium, I almost went blind from the bling. This room would never see so many diamonds again. At least, not until the next high-profile event. Everyone had dressed to impress, and in a crowd like this, with people with bank accounts in the eight digits and up, impressing was a difficult feat to pull off.
I squinted at a stunning blonde near the fountain. “Is that Billy Joel’s wife?”
“Sophie, can I take your coat?”
I turned to see another stunning blonde, who I nearly didn’t recognize. The only thing that gave her away was the gleaming silver necklace she’d borrowed from my mom.
“Penny! You look amazing!” I took her hands and held them out from her sides to examine her. The dress she wore was as nineteen-nineties as the necklace, more a sleek, form fitting tube of black velvet than a gown. Her bobbed hair was sculpted away from her face in a look that wasn’t quite slicked back, but definitely skirted that line. Her makeup was flawless, and her eyes weren’t red from crying, which was important; she and her boyfriend, Neil’s college buddy Ian, had broken up at Thanksgiving, and she was still taking it exceptionally hard. I scanned the room, looking for age-appropriate men I could hook her up with. Then again, maybe hooking her up with an age-inappropriate man before meant I wasn’t allowed to hook her up with anybody, anymore.
She reached up to self-consciously touch her hair. “You don’t think it’s a little too Sharon-Stone-in-Basic-Instinct?”
“Oh, it definitely is, but that’s not a bad thing.” In fact, it might be a look we’d want to explore in an upcoming issue. I was digging the early 90’s femme fatale vibe.
The Baby (The Boss #5) Page 5