Now it was Alexa’s turn to stare. “You don’t like the fascinator?”
“I hate that dumb thing. Makes me look like I have a dove in a teacup on my head. Nona keeps begging me to change my mind but I wasn’t going to until you finally cracked.”
“I did that last night. I threw you in the pool.”
“And look at you now,” Drea pointed a finger at her. “As cool as can be. Don’t you remember? I stole your fiancé.”
Alexa took a breath as something that had been unbalanced for months started to settle inside her. Her cousin was still spoiled and often impulsive, but she was also the one who’d been at Alexa’s side for every year of her life. Until the Nico-issue, her best friend. “I’m still not going to slap you. I might pull your hair, though.”
With a half-laugh, half-sob, Drea dropped to the floor and covered her face with her hands. “I didn’t want this to happen to us. I didn’t intend for this to happen to us.” Her shoulders shook as she began to cry.
Alexa didn’t have a first thought or a second. One minute she was standing on her feet and the next she was on her knees beside her cousin. Her arms went around the other woman. “Don’t cry. Don’t cry.”
The tears didn’t stop immediately. But Alexa hung on, rubbing her back, murmuring comfort words. Being her best friend. Finally Drea looked up, eyes red, nose red, her cheeks still damp. “I’m sorry. I miss how we were before. I’m so sorry we’ve been at odds.”
Alexa narrowed her gaze. “But you’re not sorry you stole my fiancé.”
Looking down, Drea hesitated.
“It was a rotten thing to do,” Alexa prompted.
“It made you feel rotten and that I regret,” Drea said. She glanced up. “But you didn’t love him.”
“I didn’t love him,” Alexa agreed, then pinned her cousin with her gaze. “Do you?”
“I do.” Drea’s expression turned earnest. “And you weren’t going to wise up and see he wasn’t right for you. Nico wasn’t going to break the engagement, that was sure, until I…I made him see me.”
“You meant for it to happen then.” The hooking-up. The details had never been laid out for her. She’d never insisted upon hearing them.
“Of course I meant for it to happen.” Drea looked insulted. “I don’t just go to bed with men willy-nilly. Sheesh. You know me better than that.”
“Okay.” Scooting back, Alexa pressed her back to the wall. Drea moved to sit beside her. They both stared straight ahead.
“And I’m also sorry about the citrine bridesmaid dress,” her cousin said in a small voice.
Alexa’s sense of the ridiculousness couldn’t take it any longer. She started giggling. “You really don’t like the fascinators?”
Drea flapped a hand. “They were dreadful even when we were sixteen.”
Alexa shook her head. “Yeah.”
Her cousin reached for her hand, squeezed. “Yeah.”
They sat in silence, then Drea turned her head. “What are you doing here today? You should be off playing with that gorgeous man.”
“Um…”
Her cousin’s eyes widened. “You’re not in a fight are you? You don’t think he was flirting with me last night? I just plopped myself down on his lap seconds before you arrived. Poor guy, he was trying to get rid of me.”
“No.” Alexa shook her head. “I trust him.” She supposed he trusted her too, now that he’d shared the tragedy that clearly gnawed at him. But it was also the barrier that kept him from getting close to her…or any woman.
She hauled in a breath. “He’s more…complex than I ever expected.” He blamed himself for his friend’s overdose. While she saw it as a tragic accident, her view on it didn’t matter. He’d had twelve years to brood over it and any platitudes she had to offer weren’t going to change his mind. Though he claimed not to want any long-term relationship, it seemed very clear it was because he didn’t feel worthy of one. Drawing up her knees, she wrapped her arms around them. “I think we’re over.”
“No!” Drea swiveled to face her. “You can’t tell me you’re not in love with him.”
Alexa grimaced and felt the hot prick of tears behind her eyes. “He wouldn’t want me to be. I don’t know if I want to be in love with him.”
“Take it from me,” Drea said. “You don’t get to choose that.”
Alexa groaned, remembering that day at the cemetery with her grandmother. Love happens whether you want it or not. “I think there’s nowhere to go with it anyway. He basically kicked me out last night. I doubt he’d pick up the phone if I call or answer his door if I rang the bell.”
“Do you want him?” Drea wrapped her fingers around one of Alexa’s arms. “I mean really, really want him?”
She tried to smile. “As in ‘Feel to the marrow. Love like there’s no tomorrow’?”
“Exactly like that.”
It was what she’d always hoped to avoid. Though she’d never admit it aloud, sometimes she had phantom pains in her side from the car crash and she welcomed them as a warning against the hazards of passion. Because it was highs and lows and tears and laughter and feeling so damn much for that beautiful man who was hurting…and so could hurt her.
But also make her deliriously happy if only he might love her back. Oh, God.
“I want him,” she whispered.
“Then stop all this sighing and moaning and kick to the curb the stoic acceptance too,” Drea said crossly. She shook Alexa. “You know what you do when you love someone, don’t you?”
“What?”
“You play dirty.”
*
Alexa waited a couple of days before taking Drea’s advice. Maybe Bing would crack, she’d thought. Call her. Come over.
But she recognized the futility of that when she and Brody went on their first run since he’d washed up on his brother’s lawn drunk and delirious. He’d pinned her with eyes that were as sharp as the rest of him looked haggard. “Go ahead and chatter,” he’d said. “I won’t.”
Translation: Don’t bother delving into anything personal.
If Brody wouldn’t soften for her, his twin wasn’t planning on bending an inch.
So she went through with it. This time, as she waited for the inevitable—him to stalk over in outrage—she dressed up for the moment. The summer night called for a sleeveless dress. It was a simple one that she’d borrowed from Drea: short skirt, spaghetti straps, and side cut outs that revealed a bit of skin over her ribs. She’d chosen it for luck, because it was the color of Maddox-blue eyes. Her hair was down, styled in careful waves. Eye makeup was dramatically dark. But her mouth was covered in nothing more than a swipe of pink lip gloss.
Sipping from a glass of pinot grigio on her living room couch, Alexa tried calming her fluttering heart. Her plan was simple, but risky. So risky.
She was going to tell him she loved him. It would make him angry most likely. Shake him up for sure. But her hope was it would yank him out of the deep hole he’d dug for himself twelve years before.
If a good girl was willing to give him everything she had, then maybe he’d see he couldn’t possibly be so bad. Not bad enough to turn from love, certainly. Just bad enough to cause her to squirm on the cushion as she waited for him to arrive.
At the preemptory knock, she jumped.
Then her front door banged against the entry wall. She hastily set aside the wine and rose to meet him as he stalked into the living room.
“What the hell, Lex?” His gaze shot through her like a laser. “Your door’s unlocked?”
“I was expecting you.”
His arms shot out to the side. “You think?”
She couldn’t laugh. It bubbled inside her, but the fury in his expression smothered it quickly. The prank had been effective and easy. A bag of confetti. His truck, sitting in the lot behind the construction company office. Because of the summer temps, he left the windows half-open and her arm was slender enough to reach the lock. Once she was in, she’d poured the multi
-colored paper particles in the air vents.
The instant he would have flipped on the A/C…pastel paper blizzard time.
The confetti was in his hair, was stuck to his skin and dribbled from his T-shirt and jeans as he prowled toward her. She retreated until the back of her knees hit the couch. “Don’t be angry.”
“That’s exactly what you want me to be,” he said, staring down at her.
“Um…” Licking her lips, she looked away.
He brought her face back to his with hard fingers on her chin. A little shiver rolled over her. “Explain,” he demanded.
“I needed to get your attention,” she confessed.
“You couldn’t send a text?”
He would have made some excuse not to see her even if she’d asked—if he’d texted her back at all. “Bing…” She curled her fingers around the wrist of the hand that still held her face.
Pulling free of her touch, he continued to glare. “You’re a trial to me, you know that?”
At least she was something to him. It was a start, that he couldn’t ignore her completely.
“Here’s the thing.” Stepping closer, she began to brush the confetti from his shirt, starting with his shoulders. As her hand traveled to his chest, she glanced up at him through her lashes. Her fingers dusted over the cotton covering his pectoral muscle. His nipple.
He sucked in a breath as it hardened beneath her touch. “Lex…”
“I still need that favor—an escort to the wedding.” She dropped her gaze and studiously applied her efforts to gently sweeping those bits of paper from him, “innocently” touching his other nipple, his ribs, his hard abs. His muscles twitched beneath her ministrations, but he held himself still until her fingertips met denim.
His hand crushed hers. “Hell,” he muttered.
Her eyes lifted. “What do you say?” She held her breath. If he flat-out refused, she didn’t have a Plan B.
His free hand came up to frame her face with a rough palm. “So you want something from me.” His voice was a low growl. “What do I get in return?”
She thought she’d been prepared for this question. It should have been easy to answer. But the wire-tight tension in his lean body and the heat that was radiating off him made her stomach quake and dried the inside of her mouth.
“Didn’t we already set those terms? Wedding events-escort.” She lifted one hand. “Bed partner.” She lifted the other.
“Hmm.” His eyelids lowered to half-mast and he looked lazy and filled with sinful thoughts. “I have my own list now, remember? Do you think you can handle working on that?”
He was trying to scare her off, no doubt. But this was part of her strategy. She had to make clear she wasn’t intimidated by anything about him, not his sexual appetites, not his secrets, not his wounds. Turning her cheek, she tongued his palm.
It must have been an acceptable answer, because he began towing her out her front door and in the direction of his.
Bing’s house was shadowy. “Don’t you leave any lights on?” she asked, hating the note of uncertainty in her voice.
“I know where everything is.”
It was her turn to shudder this time, because there was a dark promise in the words.
“You tell me, though, if you get afraid,” he added.
That snapped her spine straight and cemented her determination. Bing would never do anything to hurt her, physically at least. If he pushed her boundaries…well, wasn’t that what she’d been looking for from the beginning?
In his bedroom, he did turn on a light. A low one that edged the room with a golden glow. “Because I’m going to want to see you,” he said. Then he grabbed something off his dresser and tossed it on the floor close to the bed.
She stared at it. A brown paper bag. The brown paper bag.
“Want to back out, doll?” He smiled. Wolfishly.
The memory of being in the adult store came back to her. His elegant clothes, the devilish light in his eyes. A half-smile curving his mouth. Picked up a few more things, he’d said.
For us.
This was a battle for his heart. For him. For them.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
The smile on his face didn’t falter. She had yet to rattle him—or he thought he still had cards up his sleeve. Whatever was in the brown paper bag. Shy, she’d never taken a direct look at the items he’d purchased.
He sat on the edge of the mattress and widened his knees to draw her between them. A pink dot of paper clung to the outside point of his eyebrow and she touched the pad of her finger to her tongue and then pressed on the tiny circle, transferring it to her own skin. His hands tightened on her waist, and his thumbs found the bare flesh revealed by the side cut outs in the dress.
He edged them back and forth, tiny caresses that shot goose bumps up her spine and down the back of her legs. Her nipples tightened to hard points and she knew he could see them because he was staring there. “You drive me mad, Alexa.” Now he drew his thumbs in slow, mesmerizing circles. “Your skin, your hair.”
Her knees were going soft and she clutched at his shoulders to stay upright.
“These little dresses,” he said, then reached lower to take hold of the hem and draw it upward. Thank goodness the material was stretchy or she would have owed Drea a new one. It caught at her hair, but he continued pulling until it was free of her.
Without looking, he tossed it aside. His hands cupped her hips. His thumbs stroked the skin above her panties. His gaze roamed her naked breasts. Her bare torso.
He drew her even closer. She held her breath, waiting for his mouth on her nipples. But he ducked lower and his lips touched one of the scars from the laparoscopic surgery to remove her spleen. His tongue drew a line to the next and to the next. He mapped them with his mouth, and she shivered, feeling exposed and nervous and totally at his mercy.
He was clothed. She was not. He was breathing easy. She was panting.
But she trusted him with herself. “Bing.” He looked up as she sifted her fingers through his hair. Confetti clung to her hands, and lifting them to her mouth, she blew on her fingers so the tiny pieces filled the air like dandelion fluff. “Make a wish,” she whispered.
Abruptly he stood, and she rocked back on her heels. His movements were jerkier now, his fingers a bit clumsier as he curled them in the top of her panties and stripped them down her legs. Then he delved into the bag next to the bed, drew items free, and tossed them onto the mattress. Alexa’s head turned to see, but he fisted his hand in her hair and brought her mouth to his. The kiss was dark and wet and distracting.
But she’d seen what landed on his gray bedspread.
Cuffs. Black. Two sets. Two sizes.
“Scared?” he said against her mouth. “We can end this now.”
But it wasn’t going to ever end for her. Even as she quivered at what he planned next, there was her plan, her intent to find the right moment to tell him she was in love with him. She squirmed closer, brushing against denim and cotton, and pushed her tongue into his mouth.
Play dirty, she heard Drea say in her head. She was doing her best.
Bing groaned then, and without breaking the kiss, he lifted her into his arms and placed her on the bed, propped on the pillows. Cool leather pressed against her hip before he pulled it free and sat on the mattress.
Staring at her, his big hands toyed with the cuffs. “Last chance,” he said.
She loved the lust-roughened note in his voice. She loved the heat in his gaze as it ran over her nakedness. Beyond anything, she loved that it was him, Bing Maddox, who looked at her with such intensity. All those years when she’d been afraid of passion, of feeling to the marrow, she hadn’t understood that it wasn’t something to fear if the man who made you burn was good with fire.
On a deep breath, she held out her wrists.
His eyes flared wide. But his surprise lasted only a moment, because then he was buckling the leather. Her hands looked delicate beneath the restraint
s that pressed firmly, deliciously against her pulse points. Each one had a stainless steel ring at the inner wrist. While she was still getting used to the sensation of them, he bent to attach the others.
Tight, and just above her knees.
He dipped his head to catch her gaze. Then, one at a time, he bent her leg so the thigh cuff could be fastened to the one at her wrist. The restraints forced her open. Exposed.
A butterfly. Pinned into place.
Bing’s face hardened to austere lines. His mouth was forbidding, his body strung tight, but his eyes were alive, touching her with a glance, here, there, leaving behind a stinging heat on her nipple, her knee, her throat, her clit.
Her skin felt hyper-sensitized. Her sex throbbed, desperate for touch, anxious to be filled. Oxygen didn’t seem to reach her lungs even as she struggled to take deep breaths.
Then the back of his knuckles traced her shoulder and slid down her arm. They bumped her hand and then their fingers tangled. “Alexa…” Frowning, his free hand reached toward her face. His thumb swiped below her lashes. “Why do you cry at times like this?” he whispered.
“Because you make me feel beautiful. Desired.” Her heartbeat sped up as she prepared to tell him everything. “Because—”
But his mouth stopped the next string of words. The kiss was heavy, a surge of his tongue and a hard press of his lips. It pushed her head deeper into the pillows and she didn’t fight it, only opened wide for him to take what he wanted.
When he broke the kiss she moaned, at the moment beyond anything but needing more. “Bing,” she said as he swiftly stood to throw off his clothes. “Please.”
He crawled up from the end of the bed, putting himself between her splayed legs. She tensed, waiting for his touch there, desperate for it, but instead he pressed his hot mouth to the inside of her knee, just beneath the cuff. One hard hand circled her calf, keeping it pressed to the mattress while his lips traced the other, tasting her skin, sucking on it sometimes, scraping his teeth against the muscle at others.
She quivered, her hands testing the give of the cuffs. But they held fast and she was at his mercy as he played over parts of her that she didn’t know were so painfully erogenous: The cap of her knee, the inside of her elbow, the shallow valley between her breasts. But he’d yet to touch the really good stuff and she was squirming and writhing against her restraints to get his mouth on them, too.
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