by Amelia Wilde
I take a deep breath, another wide grin spreading across my face. “Yes, I’m going to see him again. And he was…” There aren’t sufficient words to describe Gideon Hawke and how he looked in the waves, in the sun, in bed. Not words that I want to say out loud to my sister, anyway. “He was amazing.”
“So the sex was incredible,” Abby sighs, and I wrinkle my nose.
“Let’s not go into details.”
“Let’s. Come on—how am I ever supposed to enjoy anything vicariously if you won’t tell me anything?”
Abby’s tone is light, teasing, excited, but it makes my heart twist in my chest to hear those words coming from her mouth. It’s not that Abby can’t have a physical relationship with a man. But from what I can tell, it’s not going to be anything like what Gideon and I have. The guilt sweeps over me at the same time that my sushi rolls arrive.
“Okay,” I say, biting my lip, heat flushing my cheeks for what must be the thousandth time today. “He’s—he’s a little dark and dirty.”
Abby gasps, and I laugh out loud. “Like, kinky?”
“I’m really not going to say much more about this.” I maneuver one of the rolls to the other side of the plate with my chopsticks. “But yes.”
“I’m dying. I’m dead.”
“I’m going to eat my lunch.”
“You’re not getting out of telling me every last detail and you know it. You owe me that much, Kennedy, because I’m the one who said you had to go, and by the sounds of it, you loved it—”
She’s still shouting at me when I cut her off with a “We’ll see!” and hang up, laughter bubbling in my chest. The moment my phone hits the surface of the table, it rings again.
Leah.
“Are you ready for this weekend, bachelorette best friend?”
“Are you ready for this weekend?” She says it with a laugh.
“I’m more than ready. I have planned my role in your wedding down to every last detail, and I know it’s going to be absolutely amazing, and you’re going to be stunning, and—”
“Are you bringing your new boyfriend?” Her tone turns sly, laughter edging underneath it, and I blink at my sushi rolls.
“What?”
“Your new boyfriend,” she sings. “My maid of honor has a new boyfriend, and I want to know if he’s coming to the wedding.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“You’re telling me you didn’t go on some secret trip with one Gideon Hawke over the weekend?”
“How did you know about that?”
“I read the gossip sites, you silly girl. Those people are always watching the airports like hawks. There’s a nice photo of you de-boarding from his private plane. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me!”
I slap my hand to my forehead. “Oh, my God. Leah! I didn’t tell anyone. It was—it was a spur-of-the-moment thing that happened after our date last Friday, and—”
“Date? A date with the man who is arguably the hottest billionaire in the city and maybe on the planet?” I hold the phone away from my ear until she’s finished speaking.
“Yeah,” I say, and I’m blushing even as it hits me that I have no reason to be embarrassed about this, other than that I should have agreed to dance with him much sooner at the club. “A date, and then he took me to this resort in the Virgin Islands, and Leah, I went climbing on these rock formations there called the Baths.”
“Stop. Stop.” Leah’s voice is full of curiosity and laughter and what has to be secondhand joy. “You are going to tell me all about this, because I can’t believe you came out of your shell enough to do that. Meet me for drinks immediately after work.”
She hangs up before I can argue.
Chapter 28
Gideon
“What are you working on?” Dahlia breezes in through the doorway to my office. She’s carrying a thin stack of folders in her hands that she drops unceremoniously on the desk.
“Coordination.”
“For?”
I type out the last few words of the email I’m writing and tear my eyes away from the computer screen. Dahlia is waggling her eyebrows at me.
“For work.”
“Liar.”
“Fine. For my next trip.”
“Okay,” she says, cocking one hip to the side and crossing her arms over her chest. “Who is this woman? Is this the flowers and chocolates woman?”
I roll my eyes. “If I tell you, will you leave?”
“Probably not.” I give her a look, and she sighs. “I’ll leave as long as you tell me.’
“It’s the same woman. Now go.”
“No way. I want to know more about this—” Dahlia looks toward the ceiling. “Catherine? Kelly?”
“Kennedy.”
“Kennedy. I want to know more about Kennedy. I can’t remember the last woman who had you shirking your duties in the office to plan another vacation the day after you got back from the Virgin Islands.”
“Stop stalking my schedule.”
“It’s my job to know where you are, old friend. If I didn’t, this company would fall apart.”
“That’s probably true.”
“You took her to Virgin Gorda on your first date?”
I lean back in my seat, putting both hands behind my head. “What are you digging for, Dahlia?”
“Gossip, obviously.” This is the kind of joke only Dahlia could make, because nobody on earth is more tight-lipped than she is about my business, personal or otherwise. She presses her lips together, then looks at her watch. “You have time to give me at least some details before the executive meeting.”
I can tell she’s not going to leave unless I give her something, and I might be acting reticent about it, but it’s only because I have special arrangements to make for this vacation that I wouldn’t otherwise need to pay attention to. But Dahlia is arguably my best friend in the city, aside from people like Adam Zeller. I’ve gone to a few of the parties the Wilders—Dominic and his new wife, Vivienne—have put on, but I’m not usually around the city to take advantage of that kind of invitation. And Dahlia is so real with me, in a way that lots of other people can’t bring themselves to be, that it’s stupid to shut her out of the planning phase.
I nod toward the chairs across the desk from me, and she drops herself into one of them, folding her hands in her lap. “I’m ready.” I laugh. Dahlia could have gone to college with me instead of the community college she did go to. She’s that on top of shit. It’s just a good thing that I met her—where was it? —somewhere in Asia on a backpacking trip. She was looking for a job in New York City. I was looking for an executive secretary who wouldn’t be a pushover. It was a match made in heaven.
“Ready for me to tell you…”
She narrows her eyes, leaning her elbows onto the surface of the desk. “I haven’t seen you this obsessed with planning a trip in years. You should see your face.” She presses her lips together and narrows her eyes even more, like she’s squinting at a computer screen with all of her might.
“It’s an important trip.”
Dahlia slaps her palms down on the desk, a playfully serious look in her eyes. “Don’t be cagey with me. Who is she? What’s got you all hot and bothered like this?”
I lean forward, resting my own elbows on the desk. Images from the weekend on Virgin Gorda flash into my mind one after the other. The determined look on Kennedy’s face. The way her body worked to get over those boulders, to get over a barrier in her mind that I’m only beginning to understand. The guilt that filled her expression when she told me about that accident with Abby. “You know, it was only a bet.”
Dahlia rolls her eyes harder. “Another Zeller creation?”
“Naturally.”
“But it didn’t turn out that way?”
“No. He picked the one girl in the bar with an actual life story. She wasn’t just frigid. She…” I don’t want to reveal too much about Kennedy’s personal life, not even to Dahlia, because I know she’d hate th
at. I don’t have to ask her. “She has her reasons for being cautious.”
Dahlia gives me a sidelong look. “She got onto your private jet and flew off to Virgin Gorda on the first date. She can’t be that uptight.” It brings a smile to my face—an idiotic, huge, ridiculous smile—as soon as Dahlia’s words sink in. She can’t help but smile back at me. “Oh, my God, Hawke. Look at you.”
“She did get onto the plane with me and go. That’s true.” But suddenly, in this moment, it doesn’t seem like Kennedy did that because her curiosity got the better of her, because she was interested in money, because she wanted a free trip. If there’s anything I’ve learned over the weekend, it’s that curiosity almost never gets the best of Kennedy. Which means that everything she did, she did knowing that it was a risk.
And taking risks—taking any risk at all—is a big deal for her. A huge deal. It’s all fitting into place with what she told me about Abby, that party, that car accident.
That means that the heat between us, and the ravenous, insatiable woman Kennedy becomes when we’re behind closed doors, or even on the beach against an outcropping of rock, is because she genuinely trusts me.
I grin so hard that it hurts my face.
“Well, I never thought I’d see this,” Dahlia says, and then she lets out a low whistle. “Gideon Hawke is seriously in love. Not that goofy shit where you’re obsessed with a woman for a week and then asking me to send her a kiss-off box of chocolates.”
“It’s definitely not that.”
“I can tell.”
Dahlia stands up and taps her fingers against the pile of folders on the desk. “These need signatures.”
I straighten up, trying unsuccessfully to stop smiling like a fool while I’m sitting in my office at the company that I founded and still own. “Anything else on the agenda?”
Dahlia heads toward the doorway, turning back at the last moment. “Executive meeting in twenty. But iron out some of those trip details first, or they’re all going to ask you why you’re grinning like a kid who just discovered candy.”
I open the first folder and sign the document without even reading it.
But by the time I move on to the second folder, the smile is fading from my face.
Dahlia didn’t bring up Andrea.
But here in my office, away from the beach and the waves and Kennedy, she’s the ghost in the back of my mind, reminding me that last time I felt this way, I got burned.
That’s not going to happen again, I tell myself firmly. Things are different this time.
I sign the rest of the papers with a messy scrawl and turn back to my computer. They’re different now, but one false move and I could send Kennedy running in the opposite direction. Back in the city, things with her don’t seem quite so certain.
I have to get it right this time. I have to.
Chapter 29
Kennedy
My phone buzzes as I take the last step out of the subway exit on the way back to my place from having drinks with Leah. She’d already ordered two Cosmos when I got to the bar we meet at when we meet up to go out after work.
I’d given her a stern look. “I prefer wine after work.”
“I prefer details when my best friend gets whisked off to a tropical vacation with a billionaire.” She spreads her hands over the table. “I ordered snacks, too, so don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud.”
I take my seat. “I don’t think you can call me that anymore. I went on a spontaneous vacation.”
Leah’s eyes light up at the words, and she shakes her head. “I can’t believe you, Kennedy!”
“What’s not to believe?”
“I can’t remember the last time you did anything spontaneous.”
I can. Before the trip with Gideon, it was climbing into Eric’s car at that party. But now that I’m on the other side of our trip, I’m wondering if I should have done things differently. If I should have taken more vacations, risked doing more spontaneous things over the years. Too late for that now.
“I wanted to go.”
“That’s obvious by the way you’re still smiling about it. When did you get in last night?”
“After midnight.” Gideon had kissed me so long when his car dropped me off in front of my building that it was actually closer to one. “I’m kind of exhausted.”
“From the late flight, or from…other activities?” Leah raises her eyebrows in speculation.
That’s how our conversation over drinks starts, and that’s about how it ends, too. Leah walks me to the subway entrance and then gives me a hug that’s way too big for the occasion. “I’m so proud of you,” she says, her head pressed into my shoulder. “Good for you, Kennedy.”
“Thanks?” I pull back to see if she’s joking, the two drinks we had obviously going to her head, but her expression is misty and serious.
“I’m proud of you.” Then she does a little dance, taking both of my hands in hers. “And I didn’t even ask! So? Is he coming to the wedding?”
I laugh out loud. “Leah, don’t be ridiculous. I’m your maid of honor. I’m not bringing a billionaire as a date to your wedding.”
“But you can. You most definitely can, is what I’m saying. It’s settled. I’ll have a place card made up for him just in case.”
I shake my head, laughing again. Maybe the drinks have gone to my head. “Leah, you don’t have to do this. I’m all about making your wedding day amazing, not focusing on me bringing a date.”
She looks at me again, her gaze steady, an odd little smile playing over her lips. “Ask him if he’ll come. And then let me know.” She squeezes my hands one last time, and then whirls around to hail a cab. “You deserve it!” she calls back.
That’s what I’m thinking about when Gideon’s text comes in.
Hi...
Heat rises to my cheeks at the sight of his name on the caller ID.
What’s with all the dots?
Thinking about you.
I’m thinking about you, too.
What’s on your mind, pretty thing?
My thumbs hover above the keyboard on the screen.
We met at a bachelorette party for my friend Leah, remember? I have her wedding on my mind.
It was so long ago. I don’t know if I can summon the memory. Wait…let me…yes, I remember.
I laugh out loud, my voice muffled in the damp heat. Her wedding is this weekend.
And you left her the weekend before to vacation in the tropics? How selfish.
I roll my eyes, even though he’s not here to see me.
Leah’s mother has this planned to an exact science. At this point, all I need to do is show up.
Are you bringing a date?
I haven’t asked him yet.
There’s a pause, and I wonder if maybe I’ve pushed this too far somehow, if even putting the idea into play is just too much, too soon.
Kennedy Carlisle, are you dateless for your best friend’s wedding?
I’m the maid of honor, so it’s not exactly a tragedy.
It IS a tragedy. A woman like you without a date? When’s the ceremony?
5 p.m. on Saturday. Dinner and dancing to follow.
I’m taking this as a formal invitation.
My heart beats hard in my chest. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to have someone to dance with at the wedding, or take me home afterward, and Gideon has already met most of the bridal party, so they probably wouldn’t be overtaken by his incredible good looks, charm, or billionaire status.
If you’re sure. I’ll have to spend most of my time with the bridal party...
I’d go anywhere with you.
Don’t I know it!
What time do you need to be at the church?
It’s not at a church. It’s at the Westbury Manor on Long Island.
Your friend has good taste. But what time?
We’re all supposed to be there at 11 for hair and makeup.
I’ll drop you off.
I don’t know what to say.
What was I thinking, that I’d need to beg him to come with me? Gideon isn’t the type to be nervous about going somewhere new or being in a roomful of strangers. Unlike me, he’s not afraid of risk. Even the kind that involves a wedding and hanging out with lots of people he doesn’t know.
Before I can answer, another message from him lights up the screen of my phone. I don’t see it for a few moments because I’m unlocking my front door and locking it behind me, double-checking to make sure the deadbolt is flipped.
There’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.
What is it?
Call me.
My heart leaps into my throat as I scramble to dial his number. It still seems surreal that his number is in my phone in the first place.
He answers on the first ring. “Hello, pretty thing.”
“Hi.”
“Long day at the office?”
“Longest day since Friday.”
“You must be anxious to relax.”
I stifle a yawn with my hand. “I met Leah for a drink after work. I’m so ready to…wait. What do you mean?”
“I’ve missed you,” he says, and in his voice is all the things we did over the weekend. A gush of wetness gathers between my legs. “I’m sure you don’t want visitors after a weekend away, but I wanted to hear your voice.” He takes in a breath. “I wanted to hear you moan. Are you sitting down?”
I drop down onto the sofa, my skirt riding up my legs. “I am now.”
“Are you wearing panties?”
“Yes.”
“Take them off.”
I obey.
“Are you wet, pretty thing?”
“Oh God, yes…”
“Stroke yourself with your fingers. Run them over that hot slit of yours. I wish I was there.”
I gasp at my own touch, imagining that it’s his nimble fingers, imagining that I’m somewhere alone with him again. “I wish you were…”
“Harder.”
I do as he says.
“Harder. Now put three fingers in.”
My pussy clenches around my own fingers, and I throw my head back against the sofa, my legs spread wide.