More laughter, and Nadia reached across and jovially touched his hand. Suzanne could hear the blood rushing in her ears. Dylan began talking about their project and how he had always been committed to law enforcement and those who serve our country in uniform. On a personal note, he added, Officer Daniels had been not only a great mom and a great cop, she had helped “someone close to me” in an hour of need. He put his hand on Suzanne’s as he said this.
Close to him, Suzanne thought. Her insides thrilled at the words and at his touch, despite her promise to herself to stay calm and emotionally detached in all their dealings. And then Nadia was speaking to her, and Suzanne saw the camera shift in her direction.
“I read the report Officer Daniels filed about your horrifying experience,” Nadia said. Great, Suzanne thought, if they dug that up, they probably dug up the thing at the High, too. No way she could explain that in fifteen seconds or whatever they had. “It must have been so scary.”
“Well, yes,” Suzanne said, and then heard her father’s voice in her head. You own this room, darlin’. Run the conversation and you rule the world. “But I’m not here to talk about me or my experience. The fact is that Bonita Daniels touched my life and many others, and that’s what law enforcement officers around the country do every day. They have a hard, dangerous job, and often sacrifice everything for our safety. Their families make sacrifices, too, and this organization was founded to honor those sacrifices. Mr. Burke has been instrumental in helping us get started, and we’ve had participation from many other artists and musicians who have donated their time and resources.”
A digital clock to the side of one of the cameras counted down seconds, indicating that there were only 29 left. Suzanne was terrified there was still enough time for them to flash a picture of her running half-naked across the lawn of the High Museum across the screen, but Nadia turned her attention back to Dylan.
“So, your summer tour is over and you’re doing meaningful work in Atlanta.” Nadia stressed meaningful, Suzanne supposed, to connect it with the name of the segment. “What’s next for Dylan Burke?”
“Actually,” he said, and cleared his throat, “I’ve decided to take a sabbatical for a while. At least six months, maybe longer.”
“Really?” a shocked Nadia replied. “And are you making this announcement exclusively here on American Breakfast?”
“Well, I guess I am, yeah.” Dylan did not look at Suzanne, but she saw his Adam’s apple bob up and down as he swallowed nervously.
“Dylan Burke,” Nadia was saying dramatically, either for emphasis or stalling for time while she figured out what to ask next. “Taking a sabbatical in the prime of his career. Of course, everyone will be wondering why.”
Dylan inclined his head as if to acknowledge the truth of this and said, “Well, to be honest with you Nadia, I’m in love.”
The perky host looked taken aback, but quickly recovered her wit enough to say, “Wait a minute, you aren’t going to go all Tom Cruise on me, are you? Because Oprah can afford sturdier couches than we have.” She looked at the camera with a significant frown and raised eyebrow.
Suzanne thought she might faint. Only curiosity about what would happen next was keeping her upright, as though her own life were keeping her on the edge of her seat.
“Nah,” said Dylan with his usual charm. “That’s not really my style. But I think Tom could agree with me that love will do strange things to a man. Anyway, I don’t know if the woman I love really loves me, or if she was just saying it because she got caught up in…a moment.”
This last part had just enough innuendo to be endearing and funny all at once. Dylan was playing to the audience, per usual. Only Suzanne—whose heart was now pounding so audibly she was sure the microphones must be picking it up—knew that the moment in question had been a lonely sunrise on Dylan’s mountain deck during which they had not so much as touched hands. “But I do know that my job scares her, and I’m willing to set that aside for a little while so she can figure out if she likes the real me enough to put up with…the me that everyone else knows.”
And then he turned to her, still grinning. Suzanne realized he had taken her hand in his. She was too shocked to move. Her face felt frozen, like her mother’s did immediately after Botox. She glanced at Nadia, who seemed to be wearing the same lack of expression herself.
This seemed to bring the TV host’s attention to the fact that they had a few long seconds left and were stuck in dead air. “Well, there you have it, America. Sounds like, unless Ms. Suzanne Henderson—er, Hamilton—is completely out of her mind, country music’s hottest bad boy Dylan Burke may be off the market. And off the stage, at least for a while. We wish them luck with that, and of course with their wonderful charity. Next up, workout secrets of a former supermodel.”
When the red camera light went off, Nadia got up and huffed away without a word to either Dylan or Suzanne. “She doesn’t like surprises,” said Kevin the producer, by way of explanation. He smiled uncomfortably and raced after her, presumably to fix whatever harm Dylan’s surprise had caused.
But Suzanne had no room in her flooded brain for concern about the fragile ego of a morning show personality. She was staring into the familiar, yet surreal, face of Dylan Burke. The man she loved, who until this moment, had never told her that he loved her back. Words failed her. So he spoke, gingerly. “Sorry if that caught you off guard. I figured publicly humiliating each other was kind of our thing, right? Anyway, I heard somewhere that girls like grand romantic gestures.”
She was hearing the words, but they weren’t sinking in to her addled brain. “Dylan, I’m… your career—”
“Hey, let’s talk about it at the hotel.”
“The hotel?” Suzanne had checked out of her hotel this morning, and her carryon bag was waiting in the green room for her to take to the airport as soon as she left the studio.
“Yeah. There’s a lot to say, I think, so I hope you won’t be offended that I got us a room. Push back your flight. You can hear me out, make a list or something, and then go home tonight.” Now it was his turn to blush. “Or we can stay.”
We can stay. There’s a we? We have a room? Try as she might, she could not get her tired brain to process what had just happened. So she nodded numbly and followed a chipper production assistant back to the green room to collect her bag, rescheduled her flight for later that evening, and followed Dylan out of the studio to the waiting town car.
He held the door for her. “What? No limo?” she said, grasping for a joke to break the tension between them.
“I hate limos,” he said, not seeming to notice her anxiety. “If I’m going to be in a room on wheels, I’d just as soon it was an RV or a tour bus, so I could at least go to the fridge and make a sandwich. Or to the bathroom. Just one of many things you’ll have to learn about me.”
She laughed nervously, and he slid in next to her. The car pulled into New York traffic and drove just a few blocks before letting them back out again.
It turned out that Dylan’s definition of a hotel room was actually a mind-blowing penthouse suite with damask draperies, exquisite furnishings, and views of the city on all sides. “So you hate limos, but not all luxury accommodations, I see,” Suzanne said as they exited the elevator into the massive suite. She was feeling more like herself now.
Dylan put her bag in a closet by the front door. Easy getaway, she thought instinctively, dropping her purse on a nearby table.
“Well, can you blame me? I am trying to woo you, so I thought it couldn’t hurt to stack the deck in my direction, at least a little bit.”
“Trying to woo me? Dylan, you—”
“Wait, me first,” he said firmly, putting a finger over her lips. “You don’t get to make all the speeches in this relationship. There’s something I have wanted to say to you ever since you drove up to the mountain, but I have been trying to figure out how to say it. How to say it right, I mean.”
“Okay,” she said, holding her breath.
He drew her close to him, holding her hands down at her side. His body was inches away, warm and comforting, and she wanted to reach out and touch him.
“Suzanne, I love you, too.” He said it in almost a whisper, and then reiterated in a stronger voice, “I love you. You deserved to hear it from me sooner but I’m an asshole about stuff like that sometimes. I’m trying to get better. Anyway, I have loved you since the moment I saw you at the stadium in those ridiculous heels—”
“Hey!”
“—looking like the hot girl from a sexual harassment video. And then you showed me up, and insulted my friend’s batting stats, in front of everyone. I sort of hated you for it, but I liked you, too. I can safely say you are the only woman I have ever loved, liked, and hated at first sight.” She felt herself smiling. She realized she could say the same about him.
He dropped one hand and led her to a bedroom with an oversized four-poster bed, a sitting area by the window, and a gorgeous floor-to-ceiling view of what she assumed was Central Park. She gasped involuntarily at its beauty in the mid-morning light. She wished she had her paints and a canvas.
“See?” he said, as though he were continuing some point he’d been making before, gesturing out to the park below. “That’s exactly what I mean. You appreciate things. You never seem to take anything for granted. I love that about you.”
He turned back to face her. “I know we don’t seem to have a lot in common; I know you think our age difference matters. I know I’m not,” he hesitated, rolling the next words around in his mouth as though they had an unpleasant taste, “William, or somebody like him. Somebody whose parents know your parents and whose family isn’t on the front page of the gossip magazines every other week.”
“I told you I broke up with William months ago,” she interrupted. He ignored her.
“I’ve been thinking for weeks about everything you said, about how you never wanted to get married and how you don’t know how to bring kids into this scary world and my tour schedule and the women and Journey…and I want you to know I get it. All of it. And I’m not going to play games or try to be more relaxed than I feel. I’m as serious about this as I have ever been about anything. Cards on the table.”
He dropped her hand and held up his palms to her in a gesture of surrender. “If you decide to leave this room now, or,” he stole a shy glance at the bed, “after, then I understand. You can sneak out with your bag and add me to the list on your wall, and I won’t resent you for it. I’ll understand. Really.
“But Scarlett, when I’m away from you, you’re all I think about. Even when I was so pissed at you this summer. In fact, I haven’t so much as touched another woman since that awful day in your apartment. Not the entire damn tour. And believe me there were chances.” He emphasized this and shook his head in a way designed to let her know just how hard some of those chances had been to pass up.
“What about Gretchen?” Suzanne demanded.
“Nope. Told her I needed a shower and stayed in there until she passed out.” He smiled. “Got kind of wrinkly in there, actually. I think somebody had given her a Red Bull.”
“But why?” Suzanne asked, curiosity mingled with jealousy. “You were mad at me. I was seeing William. You and I certainly weren’t dating. You had no reason to—”
“I know,” he said. “That was the frustrating part. I was so mad at you, but at the same time I wanted to be loyal to you. And that made me even more mad at you. It was a pretty ugly cycle for a few weeks there. Just ask the guys in the band. And about forty thousand people in Sacramento.” He shook his head regretfully, remembering something.
“They probably all hate me.”
“Nah,” he said dismissively. “Sacramento is a pretty forgiving city. Though I did get a couple of bad reviews from that show.”
She rolled her eyes.
“No, the guys don’t hate you. Actually, Eddie convinced me to do this.”
“To confess your love for me on national television?”
“Well, no, that part was mine. But to tell you how I feel, that was Eddie.”
She nodded. She always had liked Eddie. “I guess you took that suggestion and ran with it, huh?”
“At first I didn’t know why I was doing it,” Dylan went on, “avoiding the other women, I mean. Well, avoiding, and rejecting, and in a couple of cases, really pissing them off…Anyway, I think in a way I wanted to prove to myself I could be true to one person, even when I didn’t have any obligation to you. I thought if I could be faithful to the idea of you, then maybe I’d deserve a chance with the real you. I know that probably sounds stupid but—”
“No, it doesn’t sound stupid,” she interrupted gently, touching his arm. “It sounds sweet.”
“When I was a kid I used to think I’d marry the first girl…well, you know. And obviously that didn’t work out, and since then—”
“I know,” Suzanne said firmly. Even though it was all in the past and she had absolutely no room to talk, a sizzling pang of jealousy was cutting through the sea of other emotions like a hot blade. The image of Misty traipsing into her apartment like the cat who ate the canary was pushing itself to the front of her brain.
Dylan cleared his throat, looking at the floor. “Considering we’re both…uh, experienced at this stuff, I wanted to do something that would make this thing between us different. I figured if I ever got to stand here, and touch your face, your body, I wanted to know that I’d earned you in a way none of those other guys ever did.”
Suzanne wiped tears, aware that she had cried more in front of Dylan Burke than any man she’d ever known, maybe including her dad. Seeing this response seemed to bolster Dylan’s resolve. The words came out in a rush. “Suzanne, I love you. I’ve known that for a while now. I didn’t want it to be true at first, honestly, especially at Kate’s wedding. I was so pissed at you, even though I knew I had no right to expect…Anyway, the plain truth is: I don’t want anyone else. We don’t have to get married if you don’t want to, and we can talk about kids; I mean, I think you’d be a great mom, but I have nieces and nephews I love, and I know life with a musician can be hard, but if anybody can handle it, it’s you—”
“Shut up,” she said.
“What?”
“Shut up.” Suzanne lifted herself onto her toes and kissed him lightly. “You talk too much.” She kissed him more deeply, allowing herself to believe the fantasy, just for a moment. If this was all going to disappear when she woke up, she might as well enjoy it now.
Dylan beamed down at her, and then sank to his knees. Oh, no. Her head was spinning. Please, please don’t propose. It was too much, too fast.
Only when he laughed at her did she realize she’d spoken aloud. “Don’t worry, Scarlett. I’m not going down that road today,” he said, grinning up at her. He ran his hands up either side of her legs. “We haven’t even gotten to the fun stuff yet.”
He found the upper edge of her control top pantyhose, which she’d chosen on her mother’s advice for the TV appearance—the camera adds ten pounds, sweetheart—and rolled them down to her ankles. In the fitted brown and pink suit she’d worn on the show, Suzanne felt like half temptress, half little old lady. She attempted to sit on the bed behind her, but it was too high to scale with her legs immobilized. Dylan gave her a crooked grin, lifted her onto the bed by her waist, and slipped off her shoes and hose. He rose to face her and kissed her again, starting softly, and then building to something more forceful that eventually pressed her back onto the bed, with him on top of her.
Dylan continued kissing her—her face, neck, and collarbones—while he unbuttoned the sensible suit jacket and silky pink shirt she’d ironed hours earlier in her own hotel room, a few blocks away. Suzanne had had no idea, at three thirty this morning, that Dylan was even in New York. Much less that they’d be on TV together, he’d announce he was putting his career on hold for her, and that now she’d be in the biggest hotel room she’d ever seen, letting him undress her. And he l
oved her. She prayed her alarm wouldn’t go off to end the dream.
With expert hands, he had her bra off in seconds. He cupped one breast and made an elaborate circle around the nipple with his tongue, smiling up at her. He gently bit down, sending a fiery thrill all over her. She gasped again, and he made an approving noise as he kissed the other breast the same way. She arched her back and instantly his hand was under her, supporting her and pulling her in. With her suspended in air like that, his unyielding mouth traced the midline of her torso down to her navel, pausing there to hover deliciously over her belly with his hot breath. Maybe it’s not so bad, she thought, that we have a little experience.
When he reached the top of the little brown skirt, he lowered her gently to the bed before unzipping it with utmost care. Her body was buzzy with excitement, amplified by caffeine and lack of sleep. She willed herself to relax and stop quivering. She took deep, slow breaths as he shimmied the skirt down and off.
He stopped then, and looked at her for a while from the foot of the bed. Suzanne, panting and nearly naked, thought she had never felt so exposed. Dylan seemed to be taking a mental picture, in the unfiltered light of ten in the morning. He would be seeing the bags under her eyes, the wrinkles at either side of her mouth, spider veins on her calves. She felt squirmy and uncomfortable under his gaze, wishing he would close the curtains.
Dylan, on the other hand, looked fresh and boyish as always, still in the white Oxford and jeans from the show. But he wore a serious expression, and Suzanne fought hard to hold back the building anxiety threatening to overthrow her desire. Just when she was about to ask him whether anything was wrong, he bent to kiss the toes of her right foot, grinning at her. “You’re so beautiful,” he said, kissing her ankle. “Even more amazing than I’d imagined. And I spent a lot of time imagining. A lot.”
She was fishing for a light remark to make that would ease the tension, but lost focus as she felt his hot breath moving up her leg, to her knees, grazing her thighs, and then hovering over her panties—the one piece of clothing she had left. Through the lace she could feel the warmth of his mouth, and she wanted so badly for him to devour her, she could have cried. But he moved up to kiss her on the mouth again, and then pulled his head back a few inches. She saw the serious look return.
Regrets Only (Sequel to The Marriage Pact) Page 26