She looked up.
“In case you were wondering, she’s not my type at all.”
Dylan didn’t look up from her meal, but felt her face grow warm. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mark smiled. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’m glad I’m not the only one.”
“The only one what?”
“Who gets jealous."
The difference though, was that he had no reason to be jealous. They ate in silence for awhile more, until Mark emptied his wineglass and rested both his elbows on the table, smiling at her.
“Enough left for seconds?” he asked.
“Should be,” Dylan said.
Mark took his plate over to the Viking—a stove so sophisticated it was taking awhile to figure it out completely—and heaped more pasta and sauce onto it. On his way back to the table, he stopped and kissed Dylan on the neck before sitting to resume his meal.
“What is your type?” she asked.
Mark held his fork in mid-air and looked at her.
“What?”
“You said Paige Allen wasn’t your type. What is?”
Mark smiled. “You are,” he said taking another bite of his food.
“So most of the women you dated before looked something like me?” she asked.
Mark chewed slowly and swallowed. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I? Why do I feel like I’m about to get in trouble no matter what I say?”
“I don’t know,” Dylan said running a finger around the rim of her wineglass. “Why do you?” Mark put his fork down and pushed his plate away.
“Something’s on your mind,” he said. “Tell me.”
He was always so straightforward; the least she could do was return the favor.
“Who’s Patricia?”
In an instant, his eyes closed off to her. He took a sip of his wine. “Who have you been listening to?”
“Is that an answer?” Dylan said lightly. “It doesn’t sound like one to me. But for starters, Pedro mentioned her name at dinner. He made it sound like she’s someone you know quite well.”
They stared at each other, both of them willing the other to look away first. Finally, Mark did.
“We were going to be married,” he said.
She knew that before he answered, but somehow hearing him actually say it felt like a punch to the gut.
“How long ago was that?”
“We broke up three years ago,” he said.
“What does that mean ‘we’?” Dylan asked. “Who did it?”
“She did,” Mark said.
Dylan swallowed. A hot poker lanced her heart. So if it had been up to him, he would be married now. To Patricia.
Dylan stood and grabbed her plate, scraping the remnants of her meal into the trash can and putting the plate in the sink. She turned and went to take Mark’s plate.
“Are you done?” she asked, reaching for it.
He grabbed her wrist. “Is that all you want to know?” he asked.
“It’s enough, don’t you think?” she asked. “I understand now.”
“What do you understand?” Mark asked, his voice quiet.
“That you were going to marry someone and she didn’t want to marry you. At least not then.”
“Is that what you understand? If so, you understand nothing.” Mark said. “And what do you mean by ‘not then’?”
“She’s back, isn’t she?”
Mark hesitated. “You have been talking to someone,” he said.
“No, I haven’t,” Dylan said, pulling her hand loose. “Are you done or not?”she snapped, reaching for his dinner plate once again.
“Yes.”
She snatched up the plate and realizing she’d left his fork behind, indelicately used her bare hands to slide the food off it into the trash. Mark watched her as she turned to the sink.
“She is back,” he said finally. “But that doesn’t have anything to do with us.”
“Doesn’t it?” she asked, her back still to him. “Was that her in the paper with you? Did you take her to a Mets event?”
“No,” he said. Then he paused. “I mean, yes that was her in the paper and no, I didn’t take her to a Mets event.”
“Really? Are you sure?” Dylan turned on the water and watched as the marinara sauce washed down the drain. “You want to think about that, and answer again?”
She was holding her breath, waiting for his response when suddenly Mark was behind her, his hands were on her shoulders, and he was turning her to face him. Dylan stubbornly refused to look him in the eye, focusing instead on his naked pectorals, angry that even at a moment like this she was distracted by his beauty. Of course, other women wanted him. The question was why would he want just her?
“I don’t lie to you.”
Dylan kept her gaze stubbornly focused on his chest, refusing to budge until Mark held her chin between his thumb and forefinger and tilted her head back. The force he used was minimal, but still, tears rose to her eyes.
“Who are you listening to?” he asked. “Who’s telling you this stuff?”
“I overheard some of the women at the party at Pedro Lima’s house,” she admitted. “They said you brought her to a press event.”
Mark rolled his eyes. “And you believed them without asking me? Is that why you were flirting with Ray Hernandez that night?”
It was Dylan’s turn to be exasperated. “I wasn’t flirting with Ray Hernandez. I was being nice to him because he’s your teammate.”
“And you found him attractive,” Mark said.
“He is attractive. There’s no question that he’s attractive,” Dylan said.
Mark threw his hands up as if to say, ‘see?’
“But that wasn’t why I was talking to him!” Dylan said. “And don’t try to change the subject! This isn’t about me having a conversation with someone in full view of you and a dozen other people; this is about the fiancée you hid from me!”
“Former fiancée,” Mark corrected. “And keep your voice down.”
Dylan pursed her lips, and tried to turn to the sink again, but Mark refused to let her. Tears rose to her eyes.
“Why would I hide her from you?” he asked.
“Because maybe you wish she wasn’t your former fiancée. Maybe because you wish she was your wife.”
Mark froze and Dylan felt a stab of panic.
Oh my god, she was right. He did wish that.
She tried to push her way past him but Mark grabbed her into a hug, his arms like a vise about her, so that she couldn’t move. He held her like that for awhile and when he saw that she wouldn’t struggle, he finally spoke, but his words were not at all what she expected.
“What makes you think things like this?” he said, his voice like a hiss in her ear. “I say I’m crazy about you, you don’t believe me? I say I want you to live with me, you think I want to be married to someone else. I get jealous about another man, and you think I want to be with another woman. What do I have to do?”
Dylan was heaving now, her breaths coming hard and fast. She closed her eyes tight. Ava was always telling her she was insecure, and that she sold herself short. Boyfriends in the past had said the same thing. She’d pushed them away with her neediness and insecurity; they grew exhausted, as anyone would. As Mark would. As he probably already had.
Then Mark was lifting her by the waist and putting to sit on the butcher block island so that they were eye-to-eye.
“Dylan,” he said, sounding exasperated now.
She raised her eyes to his. What she saw there was honesty, warmth and something else she couldn’t name. They stared at each other, their eyes unwavering.
“I asked Patricia to marry me when I was only eighteen,” he said. “She was the first girl I’d been with. We were together since I was sixteen . . .” and when Dylan tried to look away, not sure she could stand to hear anything further, he gently turned her head so she was looking at him again. “I didn’t know anyone else as well as I knew her. Her father
was my coach, so I spent hours in her home and with her family. I loved her because I loved her family. And because my family loved her.
“And when I knew I was going into the minors, I asked her to marry me and she said yes. Our families were happy, but I wasn’t sure.”
“So why did you ask her, if you weren’t sure?” she asked, her tone accusatory.
“It seemed like the natural next step,” Mark said shrugging. “And she was so comfortable and familiar to me. And I was about to leave home. Be away from my brothers and sister and my parents for the first time. I was trying to hold on to home. So I held on to Patricia.”
“But you didn’t leave her,” Dylan pointed out. “She left you.”
“At the end of my second year, she told me she wanted to get married. She wanted to get married and start having babies and I panicked. All of a sudden all I saw when I looked at her was what I didn’t feel for her. What I would never feel. So I . . . I cheated on her. I lied to her and she found out. And when she broke up with me, I was relieved.”
Dylan looked into his eyes. What she saw was regret.
“I treated her like crap. And she left, which was what I wanted her to do. Because I was too cowardly to just break it off. But she protected me. She didn’t tell her father, or my family. So all they knew was that she didn’t want to get married anymore. If she had told them, it would have caused a rift; Wilfredo would never have forgiven me. He’s one of my parents’ closest friends.”
“So you’re grateful to her. What about the Mets event where they took your picture together?”
“I invited her father and he brought her along. I didn’t even know she was back, Dylan. But I was happy to see her. She’s a good friend and we’ve known each other a long time,” Mark explained. “When that picture showed up in the paper, I was worried you would see it and think the wrong thing. But you never mentioned it.”
“I did see it. And I did think you were with her,” Dylan admitted. “But I had no right to ask you about it, so I . . .”
Mark looked almost pained at that. “What do you mean you had no right?”
“We weren’t together.”
“You keep saying that, but since I met you, Dylan there’s been no one else. Since we met . . . just you. ¿Entiendes?”
She looked away, resisting his words, not knowing why it was so hard to accept. Mark turned her head to face him yet again and leaned in, pressing his lips against hers, trying to get her to kiss him back, but she pulled away.
“But now that Patricia’s back, your family and everyone will expect . . .”
“My family loves you, Dylan. And as for Patricia, she’s a good person, but I don’t love her,” he said. “I love you.”
Dylan’s head snapped up and she looked at him.
He’d never said it before, and she hadn’t expected it. At least not so soon. She knew possessiveness didn’t equal love, and had never believed that Mark’s occasional jealousy meant anything other than that he wanted her to himself. Men were like that. They didn’t like to share their toys.
It should have made her happy to hear it—and it did—but she also felt an inexplicable surge of panic, a flight response that came from she knew not where. She literally wanted to run.
“I love you,” Mark said again, as though he sensed what she was feeling. “Can you handle that?”
He put his arms about her waist, moving closer, so she couldn’t help but look at him.
Dylan’s heart was pounding in her chest, but with some effort, she managed to steady herself and wrapped her arms about his neck. Mark lifted her off the butcher block, carrying her into their bedroom. He placed her on the bed and with his eyes never leaving hers, undressed her. The way he looked at her once she was naked made Dylan shy, even though her body was one thing she’d never been uncertain about.
He lowered himself over her and she sighed. With his weight on her, she felt calmer, safer. With him pressed against her like this, it didn’t seem so implausible that he might love her, or that it might be safe for her to love him back. Mark kissed her, his tongue in her mouth, his lips closed about her lower lip, gently tugging it between his teeth. He led and she followed. When she opened her mouth wider, he captured her tongue, sucking on it in a way that sent a shock of sensation down to her center.
She arched toward him, and he slid a hand between them, his fingers spreading the moisture he found there over the most sensitive part of her, until all Dylan was aware of was his touch.
“Qué preciosa.”
Dylan felt his hardness against her, pressing between her thighs, gliding between her lips, but tantalizingly avoiding entry. Mark lowered his head and pressed the flat of his tongue against her breast, then without warning, taking her nipple between his teeth and Dylan cried out his name, convulsing beneath him, surprised by the suddenness and intensity of her orgasm. Mark pushed into her and she gasped at how far, how deep he went. He bent and flexed in and out of her and Dylan wrapped her arms about him holding on for dear life. He was whispering in her ear, words of endearment that she couldn’t translate, but fully understood.
“Dylan,” he said her name as though summoning her back to him from some faraway place.
She opened her eyes, and looked at him and in that instant, she saw it. The words may have been hard to believe, but there was no mistaking what she saw in his eyes, and Dylan came apart in an overwhelming flood of tears. Mark’s movement slowed as he held her tight, kissing her, soothing her until finally, he tensed and grabbed her tighter, so Dylan opened herself to him and took everything he gave.
It was bitterly cold outside and spring training was only one short week away. Dylan dodged the patches of ice outside the building and considered once again whether she should bother going in to the office. A blizzard had put the city at a standstill for several days and no one would have batted an eyelid if she wasn’t able to make it in, but she was beginning to go stir-crazy in the apartment, and Mark, quite frankly hadn’t been such great company lately.
As the time for him to leave for Port St. Lucie drew closer, he was alternately testy and withdrawn, walking about with headphones on, reading playbooks or working out on his BowFlex. The workouts were intense—he spent three hours at a time on resistance training; and because it was too dangerous to run outside, took to going into the stairwell, running up and down to get his cardio that way. When she tried to talk to him, he responded with grunts and sometimes not at all.
And so she woke up this morning and decided to flee to the office, where she would be safe from the new and disconcerting feeling of—for once—not being the focus of Mark’s attention.
The building was locked and Dylan had to use her security pass to get in. The security desk was unmanned, and there was no one else in the lobby. She rode the elevator up to her floor, and once there had to turn on lights as she made her way to her office. The entire place was deserted. She sighed. No one had been as foolish as she had, to think that there would be work to do today. She had left home for nothing.
But rather than return home, she turned on her computer and looked through her files, trying to find projects she could work on independently without having to check in with any of the attorneys. There was a review memo she’d promised Grant she would finish, and some filing that she’d allowed to languish over the holidays. Dylan worked steadily for a few hours until the silence got to her and she picked up her cell phone, dialing Ava’s number.
“Hey, pal. What’re you doing here?”
Dylan dropped the phone, startled by the unexpected sound of another voice.
“Grant!” she put a hand to her chest. “You scared the . . .”
“Sorry.” He came in and sat at the edge of her desk. “I didn’t know there was anyone else here. What the heck moved you to schlep all the way into the office on a day like this?”
Dylan smiled. “I might ask you the same thing.”
“Jenn was driving me insane,” Grant admitted. “I had to get out of t
here or one of us was going to kill the other.”
“Same at my place,” Dylan said without thinking.
Grant’s eyebrows rose. “Wait. So you’ve got a boyfriend now? Whatever happened to the Dylan who was lamenting the lack of a dating life. Who is this guy?”
Dylan blushed and opened her mouth to give a generic answer but Grant stopped her, holding up a hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That’s probably not an appropriate question for me to ask as your boss. Particularly not as your male boss. So feel free not to answer.”
Dylan hesitated for only a moment. She actually wanted to answer him, now that she thought about it. No one knew about her and Mark except for her mother and Ava. Their relationship almost didn’t seem real because of it.
“His name is Mark,” Dylan said. “Mark Acosta.”
Grant paused as he processed this, narrowing his eyes. “Wait,” he said. “Mark . . ? Do you mean . . ?”
Dylan nodded, smiling. “But it’s brand new still, and . . .”
“You’re dating Mark Acosta, the Mets’ new short stop,” Grant confirmed.
“Yes. Just after the holidays, we moved in together.”
“Holy shit, Dylan!” Grant said. “Way to grab the most eligible bachelor in New York.”
“I don’t think of him that way. He’s just . . . Mark.”
Grant shook his head. “You really have to get over that self-effacing bullshit, Dylan. Really.”
“So I’ve been told,” she said wryly.
“Okay, so this merits a longer conversation,” Grant said. “Let’s go in the break room and make some coffee. I’m going to want all the details to share with Jenn later.”
Dylan laughed and followed Grant when he led the way out of her office, down the hall and into the firm kitchen.
Along with the coffee, they managed to scavenge the remnants of someone’s birthday cake, which looked like it was only about a week old. Dylan described for Grant how she and Mark met, relishing the telling of the details about their talk on the fire escape, how he had left and come back just to get her number and finally, how he’d insisted that she come with him to the Dominican Republic for Christmas.
“Well, I hope he knows how lucky he is,” Grant said when she was done telling her story.
The Seduction of Dylan Acosta Page 12