by Amelia Wilde
Delivered.
I start to type back. How did she like it? Did she slam the door in your face?
Then I delete all of it. I’m not going to go there. Noah did his job. If he wants to tell me what Carolyn looked like when she opened the door, that’s up to him. I’m not going to harass him for details like I’m head over heels in love with her.
I’m not in love with her.
You could be.
It’s probably true. There was something about Carolyn that drew me to her the moment I saw her, and the way she moves—the way she’s witty and sharp and strong and confident—makes me want more of her.
Even though I shouldn’t.
For her sake as well as mine. She’s not going to want to be dragged into this mess.
I can’t let it go. That’s the bitch of it. I can’t stop thinking about her, can’t stop wanting to be next to her. I could have had the guys pack up the moving truck and drive it to my second choice of new places.
If I’m going to approach the rest of my life with the attitude that I’ll never back down from getting what I want, then I’ll start with Carolyn.
Even if it ends in disaster.
The thought of pursuing her makes my heart leap and turn inside my chest.
No. You know what?
Apocalypse or no, I’m going to see where this takes me.
First things first.
I text Eli Pierce.
What’s the plan for the Swan on Friday?
It takes him a few minutes, but he responds.
Go to the Swan. Get our regular table. Drink. Dance.
Who’s going?
This is as close as I can get to asking him if Carolyn will be there. Sending a bag of fancy sushi was one thing. Talking to all her friends about her will make me seem like a creep.
Me, Quinn, Jess, Alec—the crowd.
I sigh heavily. Of course he doesn’t—
Oh, and probably Carrie Banks if she’s free. She’s usually up for a good time.
Cool. When?
9
A strange electricity moves down my arms to my fingertips. Two days and I’ll have the chance to be with Carolyn again. It’s too much to hope for a repeat of last Friday—way too much to hope for—so I won’t even entertain the possibility. Looking at her will be better than this.
The ghost of what I had with Elisa rears up, spearing my chest with cold regret. I swallow hard, trying to get the warmth of excitement back, and it’s hard, and it hurts, but I do it.
Then I move toward the new master bedroom. It’s not as large as the one in my old penthouse, but it’s also not stuffed with memories of Elisa, of what could have been with her.
I pull out a brand new pair of exercise gear, shorts and a tank top that’s tight on my cut abs, from the top drawer of the shelving unit in the walk-in closet. I take one second to survey how I look in the mirror. There’s a glint in my eyes, color in my cheeks. I’m not hunched over with the pain.
Not even Carolyn Banks can deter me now.
Gym. Food. Movies.
And tonight, when I dream about her, it will be all about the possibilities.
17
Carolyn
When I slide into my seat at the Swan on Friday night, my heart is thudding nonstop against my rib cage. Eli and Quinn, Alec and Jess, even Jax and Catherine, are here tonight…and there are three empty seats at the table.
Eli texted me earlier this morning. His invitation was more of a command.
Swan. Tonight! 9!
I rolled my eyes as I scanned the text from behind the counter at the boutique. I was up late last night moderating Rainflower Blue, which doesn’t put me in the mood for a party, but as usual, Eli wouldn’t take no for an answer.
We need you, C.
You do not need me. You can drink champagne and dance all by yourselves.
It’s the big show…you sure you want to miss it?
The big show, sure. Some famous pop singer was slated to be at the Swan on Friday night, and whenever that happens, the crowd surges and grows. People end up inviting all their friends to the exclusive performances to convince them they’re somebody important, I guess.
Of course, the moment Eli started texting, the name of the singer completely escaped my mind. As if it would make much difference to me.
Fine. But only because you’re so charming.
What else was I going to do? Sit at home, picturing Ace’s every movement two floors above me while I ate takeout? Again.
My friends greet me with a chorus of hellos, and Jess pops up from her seat next to Alec and moves over to one of the open seats beside me.
“You look hot,” she says, her eyes sliding down the pink dress I borrowed from the boutique. Her grin is contagious. “Are you going to find somebody new and sexy to take home with you tonight?”
“No,” I hold my hands up in the air. “No way. Last time was a disaster.”
“Was it?” She cuts her eyes to the side, and boom, my heart is in my throat.
There’s Ace, walking across the room through the crowded tables, his suit accentuating the narrow line of his waist and the broad expanse of his muscled shoulders. He walks like a jungle cat, sensuous and sinuous and strong, and my mouth literally waters.
“He did send me sushi,” I whisper.
“What?”
“I’ll tell you later.” Ace is now even with the table.
“Kingsley!” Eli cries from the opposite side of the table. “Sit down, man. The performance is about to start.”
It’s true—on the raised stage behind the dance floor, men dressed in tight black outfits are rushing from side to side, setting up sound equipment and running tests on the equipment.
It all fades blindly into the background against the beating of my heart.
Ace is so close to me that I could reach out right now and touch his tailored Italian suit. I could reach out right now and undo the buttons of his jacket, slip it off his shoulders, and then do the same with his shirt, and run my hands over the bare skin of his chest, his washboard abs.
My shoulders tense. Where is he going to sit?
Ace puts his hands into his pockets and gives a nod to everyone around the table, then saunters around to the empty seats on the other side, dropping into one like he was born to be there.
My heart shrinks two sizes, and I turn back to Jess, trying to force my face into an expression that doesn’t look like disappointment.
“Sushi?” she says in a low voice, her eyes sparkling.
Ace is already engaged in a boisterous conversation with Jax Hunter. “He had sushi delivered to my place on Wednesday. I ran into him on the elevator and….”
“Did you hook up in the elevator?” Jess squeals, and I shush her.
“Oh, my God, Jess, no.”
“And he sent you food?”
“It was from Sasabune.”
“You love that place.”
“I know.” But how did Ace guess?
“What the hell is he doing now?” Jess says, her forehead wrinkling.
“He’s making it pretty clear that he doesn’t want to associate with me in public.”
“You sure about that?”
I glance across toward Ace’s seat and a jolt of pure heat streaks through me, right to my core. He’s talking to Jax, but his gray eyes are locked on me. When our eyes meet, a shiver runs down my spine.
My resolve not to play games with him comes back to me, so I straighten my back and edge my shoulders back. Maybe what he’s doing is putting the ball in my court. I’m the one in charge of how this evening plays out.
My first move?
A slow, wicked grin, my eyes locked on his.
His mouth twitches into a tight-lipped smile, and then he looks away, toward Eli, who has joined in the conversation with a raunchy joke.
Game on.
The conversation swirls around us, but I’m aware of his every movement, so it comes as no surprise when he stands up when a redhead approa
ches the table in the middle of the concert—the music is loud and poppy and the beat throbs in my veins—to whisper in Ace’s ear. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but my throat goes dry, and then he’s standing up, offering his arm to her and heading toward the dance floor without a backward glance.
Heat rises to my cheeks, and for a moment all I can do is fumble with the napkin in my lap. Then I snatch up my wine and take two long sips of it.
A nudge at my side catches my attention. “What are you waiting for?” Jess says into my ear.
“Nothing,” I say, putting the wine glass down and standing up.
Ace and the redhead are in the middle of the dance floor, the music blasting out over us as the pop star shimmies across the stage.
I’m almost on top of them when she leans in to say something. The music is loud, so she’s shouting, and I hear, “—what you did to her. Tell me.”
He turns his face away from her and our eyes meet, and then I’m taking three more confident steps toward him, putting my hand on his arm. “Excuse me,” I say to the redhead. “I’m stepping in for this dance.”
Her mouth drops open, but no words come out. Is she going to scream at me? Cause a scene? Do I care?
No.
The music throbs in my ears.
Then she whirls around and disappears into the crowd and I’m left alone with Ace.
18
Ace
Carolyn turns toward me, her eyes sparkling. “I don’t think so,” she shouts.
I shake my head. What is she talking about?
“You’re not going to look at me like that and then go dance with another woman. Not a chance.”
I laugh out loud. For the first time in my life, I’m standing on the dance floor with a woman who shares my attitude about getting what I want. “Prove it.”
In answer, Carolyn puts her hands on my shoulders, then starts to move with the music, her hips swaying, her dress giving me a tantalizing hint of what’s underneath. When she turns around, the curve of her ass brushing against the front of my pants, moving with the beat, I almost ask her to marry me right then.
A painful stab of regret stops the words at my lips. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it right. My way. And that’s going to involve some planning, if the news is already spreading through New York City. Carolyn could find out from anyone.
The more she dances, the less I can play it cool. By the time she takes my hand in hers and tugs me away from the dance floor and back toward the table, I’m on fire with need for her. The sight of her pink cheeks, flushed from the dancing and flirting, nearly pushes me over the edge.
I resist the instinct to wrap my arm around her shoulders and kiss her temple. Despite the heat between us while we were dancing, I’m not going to lose control in front of everyone else at the table. Let them think what they please.
I’m busy preparing myself to sit back down with all of Carolyn’s friends and order another round of drinks when she stops dead in her tracks, halfway between the dance floor and the table.
“Let’s get out of here.”
My heart flips over, and I give her my most charming smile. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Carolyn’s eyes are huge and dark, and her mouth is set. “Yes.”
She spins around, putting her arm through mine, and takes us directly back through the dance floor, leading me through the crowd with precision and focus. Halfway to the stage, she takes a hard right, sliding between couples that are so into the music they barely notice us. I can’t wipe the smile off my face. We’re ghosting this party, and I love it.
I reach for my phone and almost drop it when Carolyn picks up speed as we leave the dance floor. The text I send Noah is a garbled mess, but I’m sure as hell not going to stop her right now so that I can send a perfect message to my driver.
Carolyn takes another turn into a narrower hallway, me close behind, nearly blinded by the sight of her ass swaying underneath that dress, and then she’s pushing a door open with all the force she can muster. We burst out onto the sidewalk right as Noah pulls up in the Bentley. Nobody’s lurking out here, and it’s a clear path to my car.
We’re almost home free.
“That seemed intense,” she says, her voice loud in the relative quiet of the sidewalk. “Is it always like that when you go to clubs?”
“Not always.”
“Only tonight?”
“She was a special case.”
She takes my arm, pulling me to a stop next to the curb. “Next time, don’t go.”
I cock my head to the side. “Don’t go where?”
“Don’t go with the strange redhead when you could stay with me.”
I raise my eyebrows as high as they’ll go. “You’d let me stay with you?”
Her grin is wicked. “I’d let you do more than that.”
19
Carolyn
We’re outside my building—our building, now—when my phone starts buzzing and won’t stop.
Ace has been kissing slowly down my neck the entire time we’ve been driving and his lips on my skin are so hot and sensual that it makes my entire body hum with electricity, trembling even though his arms are wrapped relatively chastely around my waist. I’m soaked and my knees keep inching apart, subtly begging.
“Somebody wants you,” he murmurs into the hollow of my shoulder.
I give a sultry laugh. “Then let me out so we can go inside.”
“No—somebody really wants your attention,” he says, and I realize that my phone is vibrating nonstop in my purse.
I want to reach inside and silence it without even looking at it, but something pricks at the back of my neck. When Ace leans over to open the door and step outside, I take my phone out.
The screen is crowded with notifications, and they’re all from Rainflower Blue.
I normally don’t have updates sent to my phone. It’s too much of a risk—what if other people saw it? It’s best if nobody knows I have any connection to the website at all, although I know many of my friends are on it. Not one of them has hinted about its existence to me so far, which is something I wonder about when I’m trying to sleep at night. Do they think I’m too naive to enjoy a website like that? Too nice? Being an excellent friend is a top priority of mine—it’s half the reason I have the website in the first place—but maybe I’ve been too sweet.
My first thought is to dismiss the notifications completely. There’s something called a Magnolia Alert on the site for urgent business, rumors that can’t wait, that people want confirmed immediately, and it looks like someone has tagged a lot of posts with it, and it’s probably by accident. I’ll make an admin post reminding people not to abuse that tag unless it’s urgent.
Then my brain makes sense of the text snippets. The alert function on my phone doesn’t display the entire post, but one of them stands out.
DID ACE KINGSLEY MURDER…
The rest of the notices are more of the same, and more pop up onto the screen while I watch.
My heart races in my chest, and my mind plunges directly into crisis management mode.
First, I highly doubt that this rumor is true. Ace Kingsley doesn’t seem like the type to kill a woman and then return to New York like nothing has happened. I also haven’t heard him make mention of having a wife in—well, wherever he was before he came back to the city. That’s never been part of any of the discussions I’ve heard swirling around the Swan, or on Rainflower Blue, for that matter. It’s as if he vanished off the face of the earth and then, not long ago, resurfaced in the city, having done nothing in the intervening time period.
Of course, that nothing has been the cause of much speculation. I’ve never heard a location confirmed.
How would a rumor like this get started, unless someone wants to smear his reputation? Murder isn’t sexy. Most of the rumors I deal with on Rainflower Blue involve whereabouts, cheating, who was seen with whom, not real crimes.
No wonder traffic is spikin
g.
The doubts come hard on the heels of my mental dismissal of this ridiculous rumor. He did brush me off hard last Saturday morning. He was a different person when I came out of the bathroom, brusque and rude and dismissive.
Maybe….
No.
I’m not going to start suspecting people of something like murder because someone on my website doesn’t like Ace Kingsley. That has to be the explanation.
Unless….
There was that woman at the Swan.
“…what you did to her. Tell me.”
What you did to her.
Who?
And when?
That conversation could have been about anything.
Where the hell is Ace?
He’s in front of the building, his driver by his side. Ace has his hand on the shoulder of an older woman. He shifts to the side and I see that it’s Mrs. Hensley, from two floors below me. She has an overcoat on over her nightgown and she’s clearly distressed, tears running down her face. What is she doing down here? It’s well after midnight.
Ace’s face is the picture of compassion, and that’s when I realize I’m sitting in the car like a complete asshole, staring out the window at the scene. I climb out of the car and go over to them, listening as Mrs. Hensley’s shaking voice echoes across the sidewalk.
“I don’t know where he’s gone,” she says, one hand going up to her disheveled hair.
My heart twists in my chest.
“I’m sure we can help you find him, ma’am,” Ace says, his voice smooth and comforting. As far as I know, he has no idea who she is, but he’s stopped out here to help her.
Not something a hardened murderer would do, right?
“I don’t know.” Her voice is pained.
Mrs. Hensley must have woken in the night and been caught up in one of her moments. I’ve run into her in the elevator more than once, a little confused but not unhappy. This is different.
“Mrs. Hensley?” I say, stepping up to Ace’s side. “My name is Carolyn Banks. I live a couple of floors above you. Do you remember me?”