The Greatest Risk

by Kristen Ashley

  He scowled at the fire.

  He’d gotten everything he wanted, including Simone tucked tight to his side, sipping a martini, but not including the night ending with them naked in his bed with him buried inside her.

  So it was no wonder he was bloody fucking furious.

  But it wasn’t that.

  Why you think I deserve it.

  It was fucking …

  That.

  seven

  She Made It Until Morning

  STELLAN

  Stellan woke alone in bed.

  This meant he was out of it, reaching for his jeans on the floor, and tugging them on even while striding toward the door.

  He only stopped when he saw the Valentino clutch sitting on his desk, now with the flap opened.

  But it was still sitting on his desk.

  He drew in breath while doing up his fly. He glanced around the room, listening to silence while buttoning the button.

  No noise.

  No sign of Simone.

  He moved back to the steps up to his bed.

  On the nightstand were her choker, bangle and earrings. And over the chair in the corner Simone’s dress was thrown, her heels on the floor, her Bendel bag close to her shoes.

  All where he’d put them.

  He looked to his side of the bed, and the shirt he’d worn the day before and tossed to the floor the previous night was gone.

  He pivoted and strode to and through the door, down the hall and down the stairs.

  He didn’t have to go to the driveway to ascertain if her car was still there.

  He saw her through a set of doors at the back by the pool.

  She was sitting in a chair at a patio table outside, wearing his linen shirt, her back to him, a mug on the table in front of her, knees drawn up, heels to the seat.

  Stellan moved that way, glancing toward the kitchen as he did to see a mostly full pot of coffee.

  Simone was making herself at home—his kitchen, his coffeepot, his patio furniture, his shirt.

  His breath started coming easier.

  He only noticed when he got out the door that her head was bent and her arm was moving.

  On bare, thus silent feet, he walked to her, got close and stopped dead.

  Against her thighs she had a large, top-ringed sketchpad.

  On it were blocks of different sizes made of precisely drawn lines and in them in black and white was a series of carefully crafted, intensely interesting, utterly distinctive drawings intermingled with white shapes filled with text.

  And white bubbles filled with dialogue.

  Fascinated, eyes locked on the pad soaking in all he could see, he took another step toward her.

  “Darling—”

  He immediately took a step back when she jumped violently in her seat, the pen she was using went flying, hitting the deck, and her head whipped around so fast, she had to have strained something.

  She slammed the sketchpad to her chest and puffed out, “Jesus, Stellan, you scared the hell out of me.”

  “Good morning,” he murmured, staring into her makeup-free face, her short hair messier than the purposeful mess she normally styled it in, her pad moving up and down with the rapid rise and fall of her chest, thinking, on his deck, in his shirt, after a night spent in his bed (even if it was a morning after he did not fuck her), she’d never looked as shatteringly pretty.

  “Morning,” she mumbled, took in a deep breath and shared, “I made coffee.”

  “I noticed.”

  She held the pad to her chest and continued to look up at him but said nothing more.

  “I saw it, Simone, you don’t have to hide it,” he told her gently.

  She pulled the pad away from her chest, flipped the cover over quickly, hiding away what was inside, and then made a move as if to get out of her seat, saying, “I’ll get you some coffee.”

  “I can get my own coffee.”

  “Then I’m just going to—”

  He put a hand on her shoulder and pressed her back down into the chair.

  She resisted a second, then sank to her ass.

  He moved to stand at the arm of her chair, looking down at her.

  “What is that?” he asked, dipping his head to the pad she again had protectively clutched to her chest.

  “Just doodles,” she lied.

  “It didn’t look like doodles to me,” he replied.

  “Well, they are. It’s something I do when my head’s a mess to clear it, just not think of … I guess … anything.”

  “May I see?” he requested.

  She shook her head and reached for her coffee with the pad still tight to her chest. “They’re just nonsense.”

  They were absolutely not nonsense.

  “It looked like a graphic novel,” he noted.

  She turned her attention to the pool, sipped coffee, swallowed, and told the pool, “It’s just a load of nothing.”

  “Do you carry it with you everywhere?” he asked.

  Still talking to the pool, she answered, “I keep it in the car for when … you know,” she cleared her throat and set her mug back down, finishing what she was saying like she’d missed a variety of words, “at the ready.”

  “You leave it in your car?”

  “I take it out when I’m home.”

  “Ah, and you’re home now,” he stated meaningfully.

  That bought him her eyes, her temper clearly snagging, and she snapped, “Apparently. At least for a month.”

  “This would be getting to know you, Simone,” he pointed out. “You sharing your ‘nonsense’ with me.”

  “It’s not interesting,” she told him.

  “Now see,” he whispered, “that’s a lie.”

  “It really isn’t,” she clipped.

  “Everything about you is interesting,” he told her the truth.

  “Everything about Sixx is interesting,” she shot back.

  “No,” he drawled. “Everything about Sixx is excruciatingly boring.”

  Waking up thinking she’d left him only to find she hadn’t, but when he approached her, having her shut him down, shut him out of something he sensed was important … no, crucial to understanding her, had put him in a certain mood—not a good one—and the words came out.

  And it was the wrong thing to say.

  She was up out of her chair and rounding the seat, moving away from him and doing it rapidly, indeed before he could make a move or even blink.

  And she was speaking while she was escaping. “I’m going to get dressed, and then, if you’ll—”

  Stellan could move fast too, and he did, catching her elbow.

  She halted and her eyes shot to his. “As I was saying, if you’ll trust me to go home alone and get my stuff, I’ll go do that now.”

  “I’d like to go with you.”

  “I’d like you to take your hand off me.”

  “Not until you return to your seat, we talk through what’s somehow become a rocky start to our first morning together, and we decide what’s on for the rest of our day.”

  “Oddly, if I can’t go home and get my stuff by myself, I’m feeling like being in your house together … but alone.”

  “Not oddly, darling, I’m not feeling that same need.”

  Her eyes squinted. “If you think I can’t take you to your ass, you’re very wrong.”

  “You cannot.”

  “Try me.”

  “Sweetheart, we’ll wrestle, but I’d prefer we do it somewhere more comfortable, not on the pool deck.”

  “Stellan—”

  He pulled her closer. She resisted fully that time, but she didn’t take it past resistance.

  With her career, she had to have moves.

  But she was not stronger than him.

  So when he got her close enough, he said low, “You don’t have to show me if you’d rather not.”

  “I’d rather not,” she hissed.

  “And I apologize for that remark about you being boring. It wa
s unnecessary as well as untrue. I woke up to you gone, thought you’d left, broken your promise already, and last night had not ended as I’d hoped.”

  “I agreed to your month thing.”

  “You did, and I’d hoped for that. But I’d further hoped that would be celebrated with mutual orgasms, not me brooding into the fire and you passing out on my chest and then stumbling half-asleep through taking off your clothes while I helped you before you fell into my bed for the first time. Regardless, I shouldn’t have said what I said. When annoyed or frustrated, I can be biting. I’d hoped you’d learn that, perhaps, the last day of our month together, after, of course, I spent the thirty days prior convincing you to try happiness with me. Not within hours of this exercise we agreed on for getting to know one another.”

  He heard her take in a deep breath through her nose.

  “Shall we try this again?” he suggested.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Good morning, sweetheart.”

  She was not ready to let it go and shared that by replying acidly, “Can I get you some coffee now?”

  “I can still get it myself,” he murmured. “Sit back down. Finish yours. I’ll get mine. We’ll take a moment to breathe, you in an effort to forgive me, me to reflect on my mistakes so I don’t repeat them. Then I’ll make us breakfast. We’ll get dressed. And we’ll go collect your things.”

  She still wasn’t ready to let it go, and she shared it again, this time by saying, “I’m not going to break my promise, and it’s insulting your first thought on our first morning was that I did.”

  “Then I apologize for that too,” he returned smoothly.

  “I’m so grateful you gave me this opportunity to have beauty, Stellan,” she said drily, and sarcastically. “I can already see the path and how bright and cheery being happy is going to be.”

  “Please, honey, don’t say anything more,” he whispered. “I surprised you when you were doing something private. I insulted you. And before all that, I doubted you. It’s already bad enough. Don’t make it worse.”

  She looked to the French doors for a moment before she heaved a breath.

  “Get your coffee,” she murmured, pulling lightly on her arm still in his hold.

  He let her go but otherwise didn’t move a muscle.

  She headed directly back to the chair she’d vacated.

  Stellan waited until she sat, and only then did he move back into the house.

  He could well imagine Susan’s response to all of that and decided that the sister of his heart who’d replaced the sister of his blood (who’d also had his heart) might be a woman he told everything.

  However he would not be sharing this clusterfuck of first-thing-in-the-morning, first-day-of-what-could-be-the-rest-of-their-lives-together, colossal fuckups.

  He made his coffee, took it out to the pool deck, and noted the pad was still closed, sitting on the table. She’d retrieved her pen, and it was resting on the sketchbook. And she was seated as she had been, curled into herself, now likely unconsciously due to self-protection, the fingers of both hands wrapped around her coffee held up to her chest, her eyes glued to the pool.

  He sat at the angle beside her, not opposite her, stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles.

  He sipped, openly studying her.

  And he did this with an emerging feeling of shock.

  This shock came from the realization that in the entirety of his life he’d wanted precisely six things that he could not buy, broker, maneuver or simply take.

  His father not being a weak, pompous, self-important, self-indulgent, supercilious, useless mound of flesh.

  Segueing from that, his father not marrying his second wife. A woman who’d had a brother who’d hidden the monster within from everyone but Stellan, who’d hated him on sight, and Silie, who’d done the same and thus avoided him like the plague that he was, only to be raped by him when left alone in the house together.

  Segueing from that, his sister, unable to deal with the fact that their father would not allow any form of justice to be served, for if it got out he’d allowed a monster in his own home, a monster who’d torn the innocence and light and beauty from a fourteen-year-old girl who’d never even been kissed, he’d never live it down, so she’d made the momentous and terrible decision to end her own life.

  Fortunately independent of that, he’d wanted Amélie.

  And independent of that, Simone.

  And finally, he wanted very badly to thoroughly peruse what was inside that sketchpad.

  Simone broke the silence, mercifully alleviating the pain forming in his chest that felt like someone had parked a building on it.

  “In case you didn’t notice, I’ll share I can be a screaming bitch when my feelings are hurt and hold on to that a lot longer than I should, not to mention, I strike out when I’m feeling cornered.”

  He fought back his relieved smile and murmured, “That was noticed, darling.”

  “And I don’t want you to go to my place because it’s a pit,” she declared, talking to the pool, as she had when she broke their silence. “And not a pit because I’m a slob, which I am, but because my place is just simply a pit, so it’s not worth being tidy but also because my place is such a pit, I don’t spend a lot of time there in order to actually tidy.”

  “I have a housekeeper,” he reminded her.

  “This I know,” she muttered.

  “You can be as much of a slob as you like. Margarita will, of course, ride your ass about it, as she does mine every morning she shows and finds my clothes on the floor or my towels in the sink. I just ignore her, and she’s glad I do because if I wished to pick up after myself, she wouldn’t have the ass of another member of her brood to ride.”

  “I doubt very seriously she’ll like picking up some random woman’s clothes off the floor, Stellan.”

  “Considering no random women have slept in my bed and she’ll know what it means when a very much not random woman is sharing my home with me, you’d be wrong, Simone.”

  That earned him her eyes. “You’ve never had a woman in your bed?”

  “I didn’t say that,” he replied. “They’ve never slept in my bed.”

  Her lips twitched.

  “They’ve been fucked there,” he elaborated.

  “I’m sure,” she mumbled to her coffee at her lips before she took a sip.

  “I must admit, darling, they’ve also been tied there,” he shared carefully.

  “I’m sure about that too,” she returned, sounding unfazed at having that information.

  “And I’ll allow there might have been a catnap or two,” he muttered.

  Her eyes twinkled.

  Christ.

  It was now, in his shirt, by his pool, eyes twinkling, that she’d never looked more shatteringly pretty.

  “But I’m afraid, as ungentlemanly as it may seem, they’re gone before morning,” he finished.

  “I feel like you should award me a crown with a pink satin sash placed over my chest with the glittery words ‘She made it until morning.’”

  “My sashes, my darling, are black, they’re silk, not even a hint of glitter, and I’m relatively certain I could be creative with your enchanting chest, but their more frequent uses are at wrists and ankles.”

  She shook her head, now fully smiling, took another drink from her coffee, and looked back at his pool.

  “I don’t care where you live, Sixx, because you live here for now,” he said quietly. “And if my home says I’m wealthy and have exceptional taste in interior designers, your home will say you lead an interesting life and you don’t spend it doing things that are not only uninteresting but are a waste of your time.”

  “Stellan Lange, will of steel, demonstrated even when he’s determined to see the best in me,” she remarked.

  “This is true, with one alteration, that being when I’m determined to introduce that to you.”

  Her gaze slid to him and that …

  Now that …


  The warmth and gratitude and sweetness.

  Stunning.

  “Shall I make us breakfast, darling?” he asked quietly.

  “You’re criminally gorgeous, insanely wealthy, excruciatingly generous, irritatingly intelligent, and you can cook?”

  “Are you beginning to understand my frustration at you not jumping at my offer in front of the fire last night?”

  “I forgot ridiculously arrogant.”

  He burst out laughing, did it rising from his chair, bending to her and catching her behind the head.

  He kissed the top and straightened, letting her go but dipping his chin to look into her eyes.

  “Eggs and toast or pancakes?” he asked.

  “Surprise me,” she answered.

  He smiled.

  Her gaze fell to it and it came back.

  Warmth and gratitude and sweetness.

  “I’ll be back,” he said.

  “I’ll be here,” she replied.

  Yes.

  Yes, she would.

  Stellan moved into his house, for the first time that morning breathing easy.

  * * *

  “I told you it was a dump.”

  Stellan had closed the door to her dark, cramped studio that was not cramped due to Simone having a good deal of belongings, but cramped because, no matter how many belongings she had, it would be cramped because it was miniscule.

  And he stood there marveling at the fact it also smelled dank when it hadn’t rained in Phoenix for over four months.

  Dillinger had given him her address, of course, and he’d noted it, of course, but the south side of Phoenix was not his stomping grounds.

  He had no idea.

  He also had no idea if he could wring the miracle he needed to wring in just a month—finding a way to free Simone Marchesa from the overbearing protection Sixx held her under at the same time allowing Sixx to remain at liberty to be all the glorious parts, with none of the damaging ones, she’d formed herself into being.

  But even if he failed in besting the greatest risk he’d ever taken …

  She was never moving back here.

  “Can you tell me why you live here?” he asked.

  “Relatively central,” she stated, throwing open the door to a closet whereupon a foot-high expanse of feminine paraphernalia rolled out onto the floor. “Shit,” she muttered, bending to paw through it and finishing, “And cheap.”