by Paige North
“Thank you. I mean that.”
As I look out the window, too, I can feel him shift his gaze toward me. Warmth infuses me, mingling with my wild heartbeat.
The jet speeds up, and soon we’re in the air.
“I assume I’m staying in the hotel with my family?” I finally ask.
“That’ll be up to you.”
Does he think he can just stroll back into my life and I’ll simply forget how he crushed me?
When I open my eyes, he’s watching me with an expression so bare and intense that everything inside me twists up in a confused tangle. Heat burns my throat.
“Nova,” he says, “I’ve been looking for you because I wanted you back. God, the minute I let you go, I knew I should’ve stopped you, but it took me a while to come to my senses.”
My defenses rise as memories of that last day with him dig into me, hurting me like fresh stabs. “Don’t tell me—you didn’t want me to be a distraction, so you waited until I wasn’t one anymore. Now you want me back as if you didn’t drop me like hot trash.”
“Nova…”
“Why can’t I help thinking that, once we’re back in New York, the same thing will happen? You’ll blame all your problems on me and I’ll be devastated again.”
He looks pained, as if he’s taking my anguish into his own body so I don’t have to feel it anymore. I only wish he could do that, because I want Travis to really feel what he did to me.
“Tell me,” I say, “just to catch me up, Travis. Am I convenient now because the robberies have been solved?”
His knuckles are white as he clenches the armrests. “While you were gone, the police and my team were able to stop the jewel thieves. But as relieved as I was, I found out that I couldn’t care less that the threat to my business was gone.”
He watches me as if hoping I’ll give him a sign that I’m opening up. Then he stiffly looks out the window again.
The jet levels out. Tonight there’s no attendant to serve us champagne. There’s just him and I and all the hard feelings that fill the space between us.
He stands from his seat, and I shiver at the way his muscled body dominates everything around me and inside me. Damn him for making me feel this way.
His voice is shredded. “All I could think about once you were gone was that I’d lost the love of my life, Nova.”
My god.
But he’s not done. “Goddammit, I would sell every one of my stores just to be with you again for one more night.”
There’s such torment in his tone that I can’t watch him walk away. I can only try to save myself as I drown in his words.
The love of his life.
And, god help me, I’ve tried to deny it, but he’s the love of my life, too, and I can’t let him go, not after the way he just revealed his soul to me.
The grief I’ve been pushing back into a deep place suddenly springs free, and I unbuckle my seatbelt and stumble to my feet, going after him.
“Travis?” I say to his back.
When he turns to me, the oxygen cuts out of my lungs, because here he is—a man with a longing fire in his eyes. A man who’s no longer hiding the certain “something” that I could never identify.
It’s true love, and I rush to him, wanting it more than anything.
Chapter 24
We fall into one another’s arms, clinging, kissing as if no one’s every going to tear us apart again. He worships my mouth with his, loving me slowly even while heat pulses between our bodies, pulling us together.
Breathless, I end the kiss, resting my lips against his chin. Pressed against him, I feel his savage heartbeat in my own chest; I even feel the wild rhythm under the tips of my fingers as I lay them against his neck.
I stroke him there as he cradles my head with both hands.
“The only woman I’ll ever want is you, Nova,” he whispers. “I want to be with you, and only you.”
He doesn’t have to explain: no more contracts, no more deals and stipulations. There’s just us now.
Before all of this, I would’ve been so unsure about what he’s telling me. I would’ve second-guessed him, asking him why he’s saying this to me out of all the other girls. But I don’t have to now as he pulls back just enough to look into my eyes. All the answers are there.
Lust rams through me, spearing its way into my veins and belly and sex, but there’s more to this than just the way I want him. So much more. In his gaze, I see that I somehow saved him. I don’t know from what, but for this passionate moment, I know everything else about Travis. I know that he loves me enough to go out and search for me high and low, to claim me as more than just a prize in a bidding war.
With all the emotion I’ve just found in him, he kisses me again.
I lower my hand to his chest, pressing against his heart, urging him toward the back of the jet, toward the bed I know is there. It’s the same bed that I’d been afraid of on that first night, the one I thought he would rush me to because he’d paid so dearly to take my innocence.
Tonight it’s my choice to go there as we walk to it.
By the time we reach his bedroom, everything in me is swirling around—my thoughts, my need for him, the blood that surges through my body in sharp expectancy of what’s to come.
Our true first night together.
As he watches me with such love in his gaze, I reach up to untangle his tie. I slip it from around his neck as if it’s the first step in undoing him altogether. He seems to sense that, too, and there’s a wariness in his gaze, as if, deep down, he’s cautious about what I’m going to see that no one else has seen before.
But I’m not afraid. I want every bit of him. I want it all.
I unbutton his jacket, then walk around him to slide it off his shoulders, his arms. I discard these protective layers, throwing them on a chair. I feel as if I’m taking down that wall between us, stone by stone.
His breathing is tight as I reach around to undo his shirt. My own breathing hitches in time to his while I ease the fabric from him, revealing his tanned skin, the firm muscles of his torso. After I drop this layer, too, I press my face against his back.
God, the hard smoothness of him. Intoxicating.
I run my hands over his sides, and steam builds in me, ticking and pulsing and expanding. I again reach around him, this time to unbutton his trousers. His zipper makes a moaning, buzzing sound as I lower it.
“Nova.” His whisper is rough, like something that’s just been mined. Something unpolished.
“I’m yours. All yours.” I skim my hand over his cock. It’s already hard for me.
I circle to the front of him, then trace my hands over his waist and to his ass. I bring him to me, his erection prodding my belly. I’m still in the jeans and T-shirt I was wearing when I left my old house, but as Travis looks down into my eyes, I feel sexy, beautiful. I feel like his everything.
We both take off the rest of his clothes together, then he does the same for me, slowly, with a breath-holding awareness that burns between us. My clit is humming, and as we stand together, watching one another, never looking away, I’m so wet for him that I think I might die if he doesn’t take me now.
Primal heat flickers in his gaze, and I know that he knows what I want, what I need. He bends slightly, cupping my bottom and bringing my hips forward just enough so that his bare tip parts my pussy folds. My wetness makes a slick, hungry sound.
He groans, and it’s all I need to hear. His walls are finally falling.
My heart crashes as he sweeps me into his arms, bringing me against him and smoothly pushing his cock up and into me.
I moan loudly, wrapping both of my legs around him to take him in as deeply as I can. Time seems to suspend in that sublime moment, because we are one another’s worlds.
Everything is ours.
I begin to gyrate against him, and he strokes into me again, cupping my bottom, slowing down my desperate need to feel him come inside me.
“My one…” he whispers
as he takes me to the bed. He lays me down, still inside me. “My only…”
As he fucks me gently, he never looks away. There’s no shyness to hold me back now, and I meet each silken thrust as our rhythm picks up. My entire body is buzzing for him—my skin, my core, my clit—and I dig my nails into his arms as the carnal hum gets louder inside of me, taking me over.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Yes, Travis…”
Our cadence quickens, and he pounds into me. I abrade his skin, dragging my fingers down as my tiny cries of delight meet his every thrust. He pounds into me once again, then finally comes in a series of explosions that blast into me.
I cry out, the intensity of my own climax meeting his perfectly.
When I come, it feels like another wall falling, stones raining down and crashing against one another and finally blowing apart: one, then another, then another that completely cracks my world open to a mind-crushing darkness…
When my consciousness clears, Travis is lazily kissing me. I kiss him back, knowing we have all the time we need ahead of us.
Forever.
The word lingers in me as the jet engines sing on, carrying us back to New York where the rest of our lives await us. He runs his hand down my sweat-prickled body, exploring it even further, and my skin sighs with ecstasy. One more sudden aftershock rocks me as I slightly arch off the bed, and he buries his face against my neck.
It’s as if this is his favorite place to be, and he kisses my tender flesh there. I hold onto him tighter, luxuriating in the moistness on his skin.
I wallow in the feel of him next to me, touching me and possessing me in a way that he never has before, because now he’s mine, too.
As my pulse levels out and my breathing begins to match the slow, steady rhythm of his, we lay together with my head resting on his chest, his arms around me. Then, just as I think he’s drifted off to sleep, he speaks.
“I thought my old wounds had all hardened up enough so that I could never feel anything again. Then you came along.”
His words rumble through me, touching places so deep down that my chest aches.
And when he starts telling me everything he’s been hiding, I open even more for him.
Chapter 25
Travis’s voice is a coarse whisper. “I thought I was emotionally damaged, beyond repair. I never trusted anyone, and that made me toxic. All I could do was have convenient relationships on my terms and my terms only. It was a private hell, Nova. Then I saw your picture on Highest Bidder.”
I slide my hand to the other side of him, embracing him all the more, encouraging him to go on. I kiss his chest, and he takes a deep breath before letting it out. It sounds as if he’s been holding that breath for years.
Then he says, “You had these big, dark eyes that seemed to sparkle with so many things—intelligence, innocence, a little bit of mischief… But there was something else that got to me. I think I didn’t know it at first, but it was sympathy.” He kisses the top of my head. “Even then I didn’t realize that I’d been waiting for someone like you, and I fought it tooth and nail during our entire arrangement.”
I laugh against him. “Yes you did.”
Laughing softly, he gathers me closer to him, then his arms tighten. “I kept losing that battle, because I couldn’t tolerate anyone, even you, getting the better of me. I learned early on never to lose.”
I think he’s about to tell me something he’s never told anyone, and I wait, my pulse jittering.
“People assume that I’ve always been well-off, spoiled,” he says, “but I came from an upper middle-class family who held back one key element from me—attention. My parents didn’t know what love was. They never wanted to raise a child, so one day when I was ten, they packed me off to a second cousin of my mother’s. I overheard a conversation between them saying how they wanted to pay relatives to watch me until I was seventeen.” He pauses, then says, “The truth is that my parents sent me away like something they didn’t need anymore. In actuality, they didn’t. There was never any love there.”
I close my eyes against him. No wonder Travis was so remote, building those walls around himself. He was taught to love.
He goes on. “My relatives were paid to look after me, but there was no love there either. I was a paycheck to them.”
“I’m so sorry.” Had he seen the parallels between himself and myself right off the bat, after I first told him about Gary Summers and how I was his paycheck?
“It was what it was,” Travis says. “I never cared much for them in return. Why humiliate myself? Why grovel?” Another pause, another breath, another few heartbeats. “My relatives had their own two kids, and they showered them with affection while I was the afterthought. So that’s how I started to treat everyone else—as an afterthought. I was a rock when it came to feeling anything for anyone else, and the day I turned seventeen, I left. And even though they and my parents have tried to contact me, I know it’s because I have money. They didn’t pay attention to me when they had the chance, so I shut them out. I haven’t seen any of them since.”
My god. This is why he broke up with me so suddenly and decisively, and my heart crumbles for him and the boy he was.
“I’m always going to love you, Travis.”
As if my words have pierced him, he holds me even tighter. We stay like that for a while, until I notice that he’s breathing easier, as if I’ve lifted a profound weight off of him. It’s as if everything has changed.
“There’s something else you should know. Something else I haven’t told anyone outside of my most trusted manager.” He skims a finger over my upper chest, where he once put that diamond necklace on me, right before he took my virginity. “I was always in possession of the Charity Diamond.”
My gaze widens, and I look up at him.
He’s smiling, his dimples so deep that a trill whirls through me.
“I was constantly moving it from store to store,” he says. “The thieves obviously guessed that much, but they’d never gotten the right location at the right time, so the gem was safe.”
My hand is plastered over his heart, and it occurs to me that the jewel is as elusive as Travis has been. The entire truth dawns on me. “The Charity Diamond is almost like a part of you. Your heart, Travis. Always guarded, always kept away from anyone who could hurt it.” I swallow and lie back down on him. “Or appreciate it.”
He doesn’t answer. He only keeps me closely against him, and soon, I realize that he’s fallen asleep. It’s as if a burden has been lifted, not only from him, but me, too.
I keep my hand against his heart as I drift off, weightless, happy, knowing that everything is as it should be.
When I awaken, the morning sun is streaming through the jet’s windows. I sit up in bed to see that we’re parked in an airport hangar.
I also see that Travis has left the bed.
A slash of adrenaline makes me flinch, but then I remember yesterday and how Travis told me everything about his painful past, how he clearly trusts me to guard those secrets for him.
Everything is as it should be, I think again, believing it now.
I see that he’s left a filmy robe for me on a chair, and I grab it, then put it on. He’s also set out some orange juice and a cranberry muffin on the nearby table. I don’t realize how hungry I am until I take a bite of the breakfast food and swallow it.
Then I feel the same tickle on the back of my neck that I felt the first night with Travis, when I found him standing in back of me, a tall, distant stranger.
I turn around to see him, the love in his eyes making him anything but cool and remote. He’s obviously showered, his damp hair combed back, and he’s dressed in a fine button down with trousers.
My Travis.
But he seems very serious with his hands stuffed into his pockets. He walks toward me as I tighten the belt around my robe.
I laugh. “You let me sleep in again.”
“I always do. Always will.”
He smiles, a
nd a flutter spins through every inch of my body. Then he grows serious again.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“Nothing at all.”
Right. There’s something going on, and I don’t know what it is until he leads me to the bed and sits me down on it. His hands are out of his pockets, but one of them is tightly closed.
He gets to a knee, and suddenly I understand. I press my hands over my mouth as a joyful sob pushes its way up my chest. And when he opens his fingers to reveal a diamond ring, I gasp, but it’s only when I see the deep bluish gray of the gem that I let that sob go.
The jewel looks like a smaller version of the Charity Diamond that I saw online when I researched it.
His voice is gravelly. “You said the Charity Diamond is like my heart, Nova, and you were right. After you refused to accept the diamond necklace I left for you with the cash on our last day together, I realized that it was because those gems didn’t really mean anything. But this…” He lifts the ring toward me, and it catches the light with a wondrous sparkle. “This has a piece of the Charity Diamond in it. As you said, it’s a piece of me.”
He holds it out—the offer of a lifetime. A part of him right there for me to take.
My tears are flowing now. His trust. Himself. He’s giving me all of that.
“Take my heart, Nova,” he whispers. “Marry me.”
I don’t even hesitate. “Yes. Yes!”
With a growling laugh, he pulls me in for a kiss. Then just as I’m reeling and starting to catch my breath, he slips the ring onto my finger and holds me until I think I won’t ever be able to haul air into my lungs again.
His heart, my heart, and the sparkle of all the days ahead of us fill me up like a thousand shimmers, and when he tenderly kisses me again, those shimmers glitter with blue-gray beauty, forever lasting.
Forever us.