by Corri Lee
“It’s sorted,” Calloway grunted at me. “There’ll be a retraction and an apology printed tomorrow.”
“Is that necessary? It wasn’t excessively defamatory.”
“They’re calling you Henrietta VIII, Emmeline.” I bit my lip to stifle a giggle. The moniker was clever, though apparently it was true that American’s found it hard to share the British sense of humour because Cal looked less than impressed by my reaction. “There’s nothing funny about this. Bad press reflects very poorly on your father.”
“Why would that bother you?” I asked, craning my neck to look out the window as we pulled up outside The Mary Rose; an audacious hotel in the middle of Greenwich Village. Automatically, I put two and two together and came up with ‘We own this building’. “We’re your business rivals.”
“It’s a matter of respect, and I’d appreciate it if you could extend me the same courtesy.” Glaring at me, Calloway stepped out of the limo as soon as the chauffeur opened the door and slammed it behind him, despite the fact I’d be leaving through the same exit. He wanted to act like a spoiled child? I could ‘extend the same courtesy’.
When the chauffeur opened the door again, I stayed in my seat and shook my head. “Take me around The Village a few times. I don’t want to be seen arriving with him.”
“Mr Ryan will not be pleased.”
I narrowed my eyes. It wasn’t like me to assert my newly accepted status, but I was willing to make exceptions where needed. “I don’t care.”
“As you wish, Miss Tudor.” Too right as I wish. Quietly victorious, I watched an open-mouthed Calloway stare at the limo as it pulled off, reaching into his pocket for his phone.
“Don’t answer his call.”
“But, Miss Tudor—”
“Whatever he’s paying you this evening, I’ll double it.”
That was the only incentive needed to make the chauffeur turn his phone off. We took a short, pleasant route past Washington Square Park, crawling through the bumper to bumper traffic stalled by other limos passing through the side streets that looked far too narrow to accommodate the large vehicles. In twenty minutes, we were back outside The Mary Rose with Calloway nowhere in sight.
I thanked the chauffeur and straightened out my dress, swelling with pride that I hadn’t let myself be quashed at all that day, not even a little bit.
The smell of brewing thunder still hovered above the clouds, carrying with it a suffocating humidity that charged the atmosphere with a tense static.
Sophie had said that something big would happen in New York the night before. She was wrong. It would happen tonight.
Boldly, I walked up the short set of steps into the hotel into an opulent foyer teeming with life. A loud murmur of animated chatter filled the space along with the clinking of glasses and the gentle lull of a grand piano somewhere behind the noise. A Tudor palace it was, complete with an enormous crystal chandelier dominating a high cathedral ceiling covered in ornate moulds of Tudor roses. It was ours all right; the place stank of Henry.
I felt the unwelcome presence of Calloway at my shoulder and tipped my chin in the direction of a group of women wearing dresses too short to be decent. “My cocktail dress isn’t looking quite so obscene now is it?”
He replied with an edge of contempt. “Are you feeling pleased with yourself for that stunt with the limo?”
“Quite.” Turning to him, I gave him a polite smile that didn’t take away from the annoyance in my eyes. To anyone else, it would have looked like I was imparting a precursory hello. If he didn’t know I was pissed off, he was an idiot.
Thankfully, my mother had trained me well in the art of admonishing a man with poise and dignity. “I deduced enough about you this afternoon to know that you’re a man who struggles to deal with a lack of total control over your life.” I raised a hand to stall his indignant objection. “But I’m not going to cooperate with your Machiavellian philosophy. I will not bend to your will to make you look better in a crowd and I will not oppress myself to rub your ego. I let you win over the dress, but the minute you try and force me to think and feel in a way contrary to my instincts is the moment I turn my back on you and have that limo take me home. I’ve taken a lot of crap in my life—mostly from men—and I sure as hell won’t take it from someone who preferred to Google me than make the effort to get to know me like a normal person. There is nothing for you to gain by trying to manipulate me, so don’t waste your energy because not only is it pointless, it’s incriminating and impossible.
“Do you understand?”
His silence extended to the group of stunned onlookers surrounding us, apparently drawn in by my concise rebuff. Resisting the urge to gloat, I prodded him with a further, “Well?” He nodded stiffly, looking more petulant than apologetic, so I scoffed and walked straight past him. “Well, if that’s how you want to play it...”
“Emmeline, stop.” A hand splayed out across my stomach to stay me. “I get it. You’re not mine to control.”
“Nobody is yours to control, Calloway. We were born into a world that blessed us with autonomy.” I didn’t know that using his full name would do me any favours but there was nothing to lose by trying. “Now move your hand and let me leave or stop being a monumental dickhead.”
After a prolonged second of intense eye-to-eye conflict, he sighed, released me and offered his arm. It would have been well within my rights to tell him to go fuck himself and walk out anyway, but I didn’t want to. I really did like the guy, and on some deep, fundamentally fucked up level, I felt like I owed him for not being with him in the panic he’d felt when we kissed.
A relationship borne of pity. Very healthy. Congratulations. And being a mistress was so bad because?
Because Calloway Ryan is not the only one who deserves to be centre of attention.
Admitting that truth to myself was painful. Leaving London had never really been about morals. It had always been about spite and selfishness. I hated that I wasn’t the centre of Blaze’s universe and I hated that money was more important than me.
Money was always more important than me. I’d been taught to ride a bike by Daniel’s father because Henry had been too busy building his empire. My attempts to carve my own identity were always shot down at the pass by Hunter because that empire imposed a responsibility to act like some kind of glorified debutante. When I was sectioned after trying to kill myself, the root cause of the problem didn’t matter as long as the money was there to make it ‘go away’. And then, a man who owned his own fortune already wanted me to stand in the shadows while he fuelled his avarice. I was worth more than that, surely?
I left wanting Blaze to realise that I was, and realise it knowing that he’d lost the best thing he ever had. That was the sad, spiteful, veritable truth of how I became Emmeline Tudor.
The weighted sense of shame hung over me as I worked the room from my place on Calloway’s arm—a place where I now, reportedly, belonged. I hid my feelings well behind polite conversation and forced smiles, donning a mask of outward denial I’d fashioned over the time I’d been hiding my eating disorder as a teenager.
Flooded with gushes of admiration for the way I’d dared to put him in his place when I strayed away, I stood patiently and listened to the repetitive claims that Calloway needed a strong woman in his life to ground him and force him to focus on matters beyond business.
I wasn’t that woman. Nobody listened when I insisted that we’d really only just met, and that their visions of our very public wedding ceremony and the faces of our children’s were best locked away in the back of their minds and left to wither and stagnate. I was too young and broken to have ever really considered having my own family, but when forced to, it wasn’t Calloway I saw sitting at the head of the table carving the Christmas turkey. That man was faceless.
There was little I could do through the official fund-raising parts of the evening other than guard my apathy behind complimentary champagne. The function room of The Mary Rose was grand an
d regal, in a palette of deep reds and golds with thick lined drapes that made it look like a throne room. Photographs of the areas in Brooklyn hoping for rejuvenation were projected onto white canvases that hung from the walls, and every now and then, the event coordinator’s voice would boom out over a PA system asking guests to give generously, making their donations via cheque to the dainty white shirted girls carrying baskets in their arms as they circulated the room.
I gave a substantial amount from my personal bank account, hoping it might help to redeem what had quickly become a poor public image. Calloway tried to peek at the number I’d written, presumably so I didn’t out-do him, but I held it close to my chest until I could take an envelope from one of the baskets.
“Are you okay? You’re very quiet.” He frowned at me and took my hands in his when they were free. I was tiring very quickly of that frown.
“Just trying not to draw any more attention to myself.”
“You may be drawing more attention by suddenly coming over all comely and compliant.”
Sighing, I rolled my eyes at him and tugged my hands free. He might have been right—I didn’t care—but his constant disapproval was starting to cause a tension headache, and I couldn’t let it go un-addressed if I didn’t want to end up plastered over another miserable photo caption on Page Six. “Look, I understand your frustration with my unpredictability and passive-aggressive independence. Nobody ever disagrees with you or tells you no, and the only person that ever did made you question your whole existence. My impulsive nature is a threat.”
With a stutter, he swept a hand through his hair in exasperation. It was almost a confirmation of the conclusions I’d drawn without the awkward conversation divulging the ugly details. “You’re too perceptive. You know that, don’t you?”
“I am aware that my eyes are a little too all-seeing and can spot skeletons in closets from a mile off, but that’s because I’ve been there, Cal. I know what it’s like to feel like you have to go to extreme measures to meet up to the expectations of that one single person who doubted you. I know how it feels to do anything for their approval. I also know how jaded it makes you—how willing you become to see the bad in everyone else so you don’t look so bad in comparison.
“So I also know that you don’t stand a hope in hell of accepting other people as they are until you can accept yourself.”
What I was saying was bold. I knew that, but I was so certain of my assumptions that I wasn’t scared to say it. He could call me out any time and say I was wrong, but as it was, he never did.
Instead he looked me up and down thoughtfully and rocked back onto his heels. “Do you accept yourself?”
“No.” If he was aiming to make me admit to being a hypocrite, I’d make it easy for him. “I know that had I been a little less prideful, this ring would have a wedding band around it one day. I know that if I were as smart as I make out, I’d have called you the day we met, had a dirty fling with you in an expensive hotel and bypassed the path that led me back to you. I know that the world thinks I threw away the best thing I ever had, and I know that they’re right. But I don’t accept that the mistakes I made that brought me to New York were inevitable and I don’t accept the motivation behind them. I’ve handled my life badly and that’s my cross to bear.
“But the difference is that you try to gain your own acceptance by changing other people, and I’m not looking for your approval. I’m not even asking you to accept that I’m a fuck up. I just want you to respect that I am what I am and I have the balls to be honest about it. I’m a wild card, and if you’re looking for someone who’ll spout bullshit at the drop of a hat to make you feel better, you won’t find it in me. I respect you too much to appease you with lies.”
With a weak smile, I took a step back before turning away to find more champagne. Fall down drunk was becoming a serious possibility after all, my willingness to get to that point fortified by the fact I may have just destroyed the only friendship I had in touching distance.
Not a bad thing. Maybe you’ll give up this bullshit mission of self-discovery and go home now.
Not on your life.
You forget that my life is your life. I’m going to be around as long as you are.
Ya think?
“Emmeline?” Dopily, I turned back to look over my shoulder at Calloway. His face was set into an expression of stony determination and his posture stiff. He was never more fun to look at than when he came over all confident and business-like. Honestly, what did my mind think was so wrong with him? I’d been able to replace one hopeless love with another before—this had the potential to grow if I let it.
Wrong.
“Yes?”
“I know it’s early to leave and I’d understand if you want to stay—”
“Spit it out.”
Inhaling quickly, Calloway stepped right up to me and pressed his lips to my ear. “I have an early flight to Boston tomorrow morning, but I’d very much like to see you home.”
I smirked. Even when presented with some unpleasant home truths, he was still powered by masculine urges. My only real female friend, Esme, would say that if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
Calloway was a duck.
“Just home? You don’t want to see me to the door or make sure I get all tucked up in bed safely?”
My own mischief reflected perfectly against his. “I want to see you home all the way around the ball field, Emmeline.”
Suppressing a smile at his all American schoolboy implication of a ‘home run’, I cocked my head towards the door and quietly hummed the baseball stadium organ jingle. “Charge!”
The seal that had kept the storm at bay cracked somewhere on the drive through Chelsea. Fork lightning streaked through a sky of inky blue-black that growled and rumbled dangerously though as it was warning the city of danger ahead.
That was the noise that accompanied my back hitting the solid pine of my front door and the panting that came with a fumble for my keys. Calloway’s teeth grazed my neck ravenously, nipping at my ear lobe the way they had every time I’d had to come up for air.
No time was wasted looking for permission to act when we stumbled into the lounge. We undressed each other with fervour, unabashedly tearing at the fabric with all the primal sense that it was a little more than an inconvenience to be covered.
Shoved back roughly onto my bed, I stared in hungry delight at the man standing shirtless in front of me—toned like a model, skin stretched over almost artistically defined knots of hard, rigid muscle. The work he put into his body showed and he almost didn’t look real...
In a bright flash of lightning, his eyes caught my left side as mine caught his. Several brutal looking keloid scars marred his skin from hip to arm pit, lighter silver scars like mine stemming up from his wrists. However badly I thought I’d felt about my body, he’d obviously felt worse at some point, but I thought I saw him look relieved that he wasn’t the only person in the world so reckless and self-destructive.
In one graceful move he swept over me, pinning me down against the mattress with impossibly more passion than before. He kicked his trousers off with practice elegance and pulled one of my legs up around his waist, pushing into me with a shaking, guttural groan.
Sweet Jesus. All the carefully assembled self-possession I’d sought to put back into my life left me in a split-second. The feeling of being crammed full and consumed by another person dizzied me with thankful bliss. Right there, in that moment, in a situation I knew so well and used so often to feel the acceptance I hypocritically claimed wasn’t necessary to happiness, it didn’t matter who I was. It just mattered that I had those sweet, short moments before the regret kicked in.
Naturally, Calloway was as skillful in the bedroom as he was in life. Every stroke of his hand and thrust demanded my surrender into a state of utter incoherence. The chastest of saints might have been hard pushed to resist regressing into a shambling wreck of moans and screamed out dir
ty sex words. He definitely knew women and how to drive them crazy. Calloway Ryan might have been the best fuck of my life...
... For a while. For too long, I teetered on the edge of my limits until the inability to topple over it began to grate on my nerves. My fingers clawed into his hips looking for leverage for deeper, faster, harder contact, my toes cramped through effort and my back ached through being arched for so long at such an infeasible angle. Seemingly unaware, Calloway continued to drive into me, one hand fisted in my hair while he muttered crude utterances of encouragement and praise. The moment became less about opportunism and all about figuring out what the fuck was wrong with me.
Isn’t it obvious? There’s no emotional connection. This is wrong because it’s not Blaze.
Blaze. The moment the name popped into my head, closely followed by his face, a devastating orgasm hit me so suddenly I yelped in surprise at it’s intensity. Apparently as shocked as me, Calloway stared down at me wide eyed as my muscles clenched so hard it forced a climax of his own.
“Hell, woman, do you do kegels?” Miserable and replete, I shut my eyes in response. I just couldn’t look at him, sure that I’d broken one of the cardinal rules of sex by needing to think about another man to come.
Ah, well, at least you know you’re not broken through overuse, ho.
Shut the fuck up.
Take the hint; go home. You need him.