Evening Storm

by Anne Calhoun

  She was sitting with her back to the railing, her face tipped to the sky to absorb the sunlight, when a figure rounded the corner at the end of her street. Her heart lifted with the recognition that her mind talked her out of almost immediately. The man had Ryan’s dishwater blond hair, but his shoulders were relaxed, and he moved with an easy confidence that didn’t match Ryan’s purposeful stride and squared-off shoulders. He wore jeans, running shoes, and a pullover sweater with a half zipper fastened under his chin. A plastic-wrapped bouquet of daisies swung easily from his left hand. Even as he drew close enough for her to see his face, even as he smiled slow and easy at her, it was the daisies that convinced her. She sat up straighter, swallowed the lump in her throat, and indulged in the sheer pleasure of watching him walk.

  In her mental script he would stop at the foot of the stairs and hold out the daisies. She’d take them, smell them, blink away tears. They’d go inside and talk rationally about why he was back. In the two seconds it took Ryan to reach the stairs she ran through all those thoughts and a list of possible restaurants for a romantic candlelit dinner humming with sexual tension, but once again, Ryan refused to play to script. Instead he took the stairs in one bound, backed her into Irresistible’s door, caged her in with forearms and hips, and kissed her.

  No mocking not-French kissing. No agonized fears holding him back. One hand burrowed under her sweater to find the skin over her ribs while the other slid through her hair to grip her nape. He layered kiss upon kiss, sharp nips and flickering licks until she opened to him. The tender, purposeful assault didn’t stop until he’d completely conquered her mouth. When he pulled back, they were both breathing hard.

  “Oh,” she said rather nonsensically.

  The noise he made was somewhere between a laugh and a growl. He kissed her again, this time leaning the full weight of his body against hers, pinning her between the door and the ridges of his body. Hip bones. Cock. Ribs. The difference between the Ryan of the summer and this Ryan was profound, shocking. She wanted to leap over the railing onto the sidewalk, and laugh and shout for sheer, heart-stopping delight. She settled for fisting her left hand in his pullover to pull his mouth down to hers while she fumbled with the doorknob with the other. When she turned the knob they stumbled into the tiny foyer. Only Ryan’s strong grip kept her on her feet, but they still careened off one wall, then the other as they stumbled up the stairs.

  She led him past the door to Irresistible’s showroom to the end of the hall, where an unmarked door led into her apartment at the rear of the building. The space was tiny, a living room just large enough for a couch and a wall full of bookshelves, a galley kitchen with a single stool at the end of the counter where she ate, a bathroom, and a bedroom. Her bed occupied virtually the entire floor space, with just enough room to maneuver to the closet and the bathroom. “It’s not much,” she said, uncertain of how he was handling his rapid descent into the ninety-nine percent.

  He tossed the daisies on the nightstand. “I really couldn’t give less of a fuck,” he muttered, and jerked her sweater over her head, then cupped her frantic, flyaway hair to her ears and kissed her again. The ocean of her breathing and heartbeat echoed in her ears, reminding her of that hot August night months earlier. “Besides, it smells like you. Like warm silk and your skin.”

  The word hung softly in the air. Compelled, she tugged his shirt free of his jeans and pulled it and his pullover over his head in one move, leaving the entire expanse of his shoulders, chest, and abdomen bared to her. He reached behind her and unhooked her bra.

  She stood in front of him, her heart skittering in her chest, her breath coming shallow and soft in the silence. “If you give me a little warning, I’ll put on something more interesting than white satin,” she said.

  “This isn’t about the lingerie. It’s about your skin,” he said, then kissed her shoulder and drew the bra down her arms to drop to the floor. “It’s actually about your freckles.”

  She laughed until he put his mouth to her forehead, cheekbone, chin. He used his thumbs to tip her face up so he could kiss her throat, licking delicately at the notch between her collarbones as she smoothed her hands up his ribs, murmuring mine, mine as he went. Her hands rested on his waist, but moved of their own volition up his chest, her thumbs pressing into his breastbone, then splitting apart to trace his collarbone to his shoulders. Again and again her hands followed the same path, down his arms to his waist, up his abdomen and chest to his shoulders, absorbing the truth in his skin.

  He wrapped his arm around her waist and bore her backward to the bed. “I’m going to kiss every single freckle on your body,” he said.

  He put one knee between her legs and stretched out on top of her, groaning at the contact of her skin on his, and again when she skimmed her hands over his back to his bottom. She could feel his heart thumping in his chest as he kissed her, deep and heated, his hands cradling her skull while he rocked his hips against hers, wrapped an arm around her waist, tangled their legs together.

  He kissed his way down her breastbone to her abdomen, his slow, measured pace driving her wild. “Perhaps you could catalog my freckles another day,” she said with a strangled gasp, and reached for his button fly. His legs were nothing but corded muscle under skin, and his feet, when she tugged off his jeans, socks, and shoes in one go, were covered in calluses and healing blisters. His erection pulsed as she looked at him.

  “Now you,” he said, and unzipped her jeans and pushed them and her white silk panties down and off.

  “Come in here,” he said, and covered them with the duvet. Cocooned in privacy, he kissed her, the pressure of his mouth alternately slow and intense, then rapacious and wet and demanding. She luxuriated in the full-body contact, sweat slicking their bellies, the hair on his legs rough against hers, the hard points of his hip bones pressing into her inner thighs. His hand stroked her throat, her belly, her sex, a possessive, primitive touch that continued when he rolled her over and kissed the bumps of her spine to her tailbone. She shuddered when he sprawled over her, gathered her hair away from her nape and nipped at the vulnerable skin there. Words vanished first, English, then French, then images she might later string together to remember what happened, until finally her brain dissolved into pure sensation. Smooth cotton against her nipples and belly, his hard cock against her back, thrusting slowly against her tailbone, one hand in her hair, the other arm under her hips, until she pushed up, letting cold air stream over their heated bodies.

  “Maintenant! Now,” she said, the only English word she remembered. She scrabbled a condom from her nightstand, handed it to him, and turned onto her back while he rolled it down his shaft. She spread her legs; he kneed them a bit wider; she lifted until the tip of his cock nudged into the slick, yielding heat of her sex. The connection was electric, focusing all of her attention on the slight twinge as he breached her. He blindly sought her mouth, his hands shifting from her hip to her shoulders, into her hair, around to cup her breast, finally settling on her breast and the back of her head.

  “Oh, God,” he groaned as she slowly took him deep inside. Every nerve sizzled with the sheer erotic charge of his thick shaft stretching her open.

  “C’est bien,” she murmured.

  “Fuck me, now is not a good time for you to start in with the French. I’m not going to last as it is.”

  “J’ai attendu si longtemps. Je vais faire l’amour avec toi maintenant parce que c’est le moment idéal. Un moment magique. Nous allons le faire encore et encore et encore,” she said, with a swivel of her hips as he started to move.

  He claimed her mouth, effectively shutting her up, but she couldn’t stop the low purr humming in her throat. His tongue slid along hers before he tipped her head to the side and nipped at her jaw. She retaliated, gripping his tousled hair in one hand to expose his throat, then nipping at the pulse jumping in his neck. His cock throbbed inside her, and he curled one leg around
hers and pinned her to the mattress.

  His next thrust drew her legs up to clasp his hips. The one after that tightened every muscle along her spine until her back was arched like a bow. He set his mouth to the pounding pulse at the base of her throat and scraped his teeth over it. At that she lost her words in both languages, crying out as her orgasm flung her into blackness. He followed moments after, thrusting that extra bit deeper inside her as he came.

  Untangling his hands from her hair and their limbs from the sheets took a rather concerted effort. When they were sorted out, the condom disposed of and back in the cocoon, she fitted herself to his side and sighed.

  “Now you start speaking in French?”

  “It’s my first language,” she said. “I lose English when I get worked up.”

  He grunted comfortably and settled her a little closer. “I’ll pick up some language programs. I want to know what you’re saying when you’re worked up.”

  “You’re back,” she said. “How long are you back?”

  “I’m back for good. Preliminary hearings are coming up. The FBI wants me closer to hand.”

  She tilted her head and studied him. His face was tanned, filled out from the hollowed, haunted look of the summer. He looked simultaneously younger and wiser, and impossibly handsome. “You look good,” she said.

  “This is what I look like when I don’t have an ulcer,” he said, smiling at her.

  She smiled. “It’s a good look on you. Where were you?” she asked, taking in his tanned face and arms, the ridges of muscle in his shoulders and legs.

  “Remember that guy who said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when he was really visiting his mistress? I was actually hiking the trail. A friend had a cabin in Maine. I used it as a base for trips. A couple days at a time to start, until I toughened up, then a couple weeks at a time.”

  That explained the tan, the youthful appearance tempered with hard-earned wisdom. They lay in a comfortable silence for a few minutes until she leaned over the bed and picked up the cellophane-wrapped flowers. “Thank you for the daisies.”

  “You’re welcome. They’re all I can afford now.”

  The blunt honesty rang as true as the comment about the ulcer. He was so calm when he said it. The man who could afford to give her twenty thousand dollars for a few hours’ work, who could swing the hottest ticket in town on three hours’ notice, could only bring her daisies now. Six dollars for a plastic-wrapped bouquet from the bodega up the street. No velvet ribbons, no hand-painted pot, no plant nurtured in a hothouse. But he looked so calm, so centered, so grounded in who he was. I’m a man who can afford daisies. Take me or leave me.

  She’d take him. All day, every day, and twice on Sunday.

  She opened the cellophane and spread the daisies out, fanning the flowers, stripping low leaves from the stems so they wouldn’t rot in the water. “I love daisies,” she said as she worked. “What happens next?”

  “If the MacCarrens fight the indictment, there’ll be a trial. I’ll have to testify. I have to find a job.”

  “Will that be difficult?”

  “I won’t know until I start looking,” he said. “But I don’t know that I want to go back to Wall Street. What I do know is that I want to be with you. Like this, if this is all you want. More, if you’ll have me.”

  “Do you think I went to bed with you to get you out of my system?” she asked.

  “I entertained the possibility,” he said. “You might have come to your senses while I was gone.”

  He’d worried, too, but was endearingly determined to do the right thing, and so he’d waited. Then bought daisies and walked up to her front door and kissed her like he meant it. Like he meant forever. “I thought what happened the night of the storm might have gotten me out of your system.”

  “Crazy,” he said dismissively.

  Smiling, she snapped a daisy free from its stem and tucked it behind her ear. He reached up to settle the daisy more firmly. “I have no idea what my future will look like, but I want to make that future with you,” he said.

  “I want that, too,” she said, and turned to nuzzle into his palm. He smelled of the truth of them, her skin and his. She’d spent months trying to figure out who he was, and in the end, it was this simple. So simple.

  He was hers.

  Keep reading for a preview of the next novel in the Irresistible series

  THE MUSE

  Coming December 2015

  The cab’s horn went off like a shot, twice, then settled into a long, indignant blare, shattering what passed for quiet on Fifth Avenue on a Sunday afternoon. Arden MacCarren’s heart rate spiked abruptly as adrenaline flooded her nervous system. Startled in the act of removing her bags from the backseat of the SUV, she banged her head on the frame. One hand clapped to the back of her head, she hunched over to extricate herself from the car when the horn blared three times. Her heart rate spiked again, nearing the terrifying sharp thrum that was the precursor to passing out. She reached out blindly for any solid surface, and gripped the door handle until her fingers went numb, then forced herself to relax her grip slightly. Balanced on the razor wire between frightened and a panic attack, her body would interpret even the slightest stimuli as a reason to tip over the edge.

  You’re overreacting. Calm yourself. Brain over body. Mind over matter.

  Her brain snapped into hyperalert mode, cataloging her surroundings. Fifth Avenue. Sunlight glinting off chrome and mirrors, coating the trees with gold. The cabdriver righteously taking to task the driver of a Mercedes double-parked while a woman unloaded her take from an afternoon of shopping. Hermes, Tory Burch, Barneys, Irresistible. Arden scanned the woman’s sharp features without the click of recognition, but her brain, already on a hair trigger thanks to the horn, slid into the worst-case scenario like tires on black ice. No one she knew, but in her New York world it was only one degree of separation. She knew someone who knew this woman.

  This woman knew.

  The woman stalked up the red carpet leading to her building’s front door, and the Mercedes turned the corner onto the side street, allowing the cab to roar off down Fifth Avenue with one final blaring honk. Arden’s heart stutter-stepped up a notch, the resulting spike in blood pressure throbbing in the sore spot on the back of her head. Not good. She forced in a deep breath, inhaling long past the point her lungs thought possible, then exhaled as she focused on what was right in front of her: the black leather backseat of her SUV, the tote holding her sketchbook, pencils, charcoal. Reach out, ignore the tremor in your hand, and close your fingers around the handles. Good. Don’t forget your purse.

  Derek, her driver, waited patiently until she closed the door. Arden turned to find Tony, the doorman, sweltering in his gray wool uniform and white gloves as he hovered under the canopy stretching from the building’s heavy brass doors to the sidewalk, his normally friendly face a smooth mask. “Allow me, Ms. MacCarren,” he said, reaching for her bag.

  “I’m fine, Tony, thank you,” she said, and ordered her knees to quit shaking. But Tony’s unusual formality sent a new wave of anxious thoughts surging to the forefront. The woman in the street knew. Tony knows. The only people who didn’t know your father and brother were arrested for orchestrating a decade-long Ponzi scheme that swindled thousands out of hundreds of millions of dollars were living under rocks or in yurts somewhere without electricity or satellite television, and how many of those people were left? Six, maybe eight? Everyone knows. You’re exposed; you’re all exposed for everyone to see, stare at, a shining example of how the mighty have fallen . . .

  The cool air in the building’s marble-tiled lobby swirled against her skin, drying the sweat at her nape and sending goose bumps down her spine. Without meeting her gaze, Tony pushed the button to call the elevator. “Ms. Cottlin said to send you straight up,” he asked.

  “Thank you,” she said.

 
The doors opened and she stepped inside. Tony pushed the button for fourteen, then stepped back.

  When the doors closed, she held it together through sheer will, inhaling slowly, filling her lungs, forcing her diaphragm to expand into her belly, safe in the cocoon of the elevator. That’s all it took to make her feel safe: several layers of thick walls between her and the outside world.

  No. I’ve given up on finding peace, inside or out. I will not give up on feeling safe.

  At the ding the elevator doors opened, revealing the marble floor of the fourteenth floor. She strode off and nearly collided with a woman obscured by a marble-topped table holding a profuse arrangement of flowers. Her heart jackrabbited again. “Excuse me,” Arden said as her face flushed.

  The woman looked up from her phone, and did a double take before her jaw dropped in shock. That’s the way it would be from now on, stares and double takes, whispers behind her back and tirades on social media, their honor dragged through the mud again and again, for ratings. The woman’s gaze flicked over Arden’s clothes, the sizable oval ruby ring on the middle finger of her right hand.

  “I hope your father burns in hell,” she said, teeth bared in hatred.

  Arden froze. The woman sidestepped into the elevator, the doors closing, leaving Arden with the spray of flowers and her reflection in the mirror. Unbrushed blonde hair spilling around her shoulders. Pale skin. Near-colorless lips. A lavender tunic her personal shopper chose to draw attention to her eyes, which only served to highlight the smudges under her eyes and the scar tissue on her shoulder and chest. White jeans. Gold sandals.

  Put on some lipstick, Arden. It brightens your face.

  Her mother’s voice echoed in her ears until a door at the end of the hallway flung open, and Betsy Cottlin peered nearsightedly into the hallway. “I thought I heard the elevator,” she said. “Why are you standing in the hallway? Come in and help me find my glasses.”