by Anne Calhoun
“Don’t stop.”
The words were almost inaudible, a soft pleading unlike anything he’d heard from her before. He didn’t stop. He kept up his relentlessly steady pace, felt her fly apart under him. Slick contractions gripped his cock as he thrust through the spasms and absorbed her helpless cries with his skin. Balanced on the razor’s edge of pleasure and pain, he hung there, chest heaving, sweat dripping to plunk on her collarbone as she eased back into the mattress. She opened her eyes, and the yearning in the green depths gripped his throat.
“Please come,” she said again in that soft, female voice. “I want to feel that.”
He slid in, back out, in again to the depths of her body, felt her legs curl around his calves as she trembled in response. She looked down between their bodies, watching him plunge into her. He fought to keep his eyes open as sensation pulled him into the rip current.
One hand gripped his hip; the other pressed at the small of his back. “Yes,” she whispered. “Cole, yes. Let go.”
That was all it took. Orgasm hit him like running full tilt into a brick wall. He buried his face in her hair, spasm after spasm wracking him, and felt the world go black around him.
Hearing returned first, Marin’s quick breaths into his neck. Vision. His forearm, the white sheets, her sweat-dampened hair, her ear. He’d slumped over her. He lifted some of his weight back to his arms and tried to remember how to breathe. Once he had that mastered again he got up and went into the bathroom to remove the condom.
When he came back into the bedroom Marin was gone.
Her jeans and sweater still lay in a heap on the floor, but his shirt was missing. He pulled on his shorts and strode barefoot down the hall, past the dining room, the library, the home theater, the three other bedrooms, the eat-in kitchen, into the living room overlooking Fifth Avenue.
She hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights, instead standing in a semi-darkness that made her white-blond hair glow like moonlight. Dressed in his shirt, she was looking out the floor-to-ceiling living room windows at the Central Park West skyline, rising in the distance over Central Park and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The angle of the ambient light shadowed her profile. He stopped just behind her and laid both palms flat on the glass on either side of her head, almost but not quite touching her, restating his opening position but not taking liberties.
The whoosh and rush of a bus’s air brakes reverberated below them. “I heard Wall Street bonuses were down,” she said.
There was always money to be made if you worked your ass off, so he could have bought the apartment in any of the last several years, but he told her the truth. “I inherited it. My great-grandfather built the building. I grew up one floor down.”
Revealing that little detail to a woman was usually like throwing chum in the water, but she tilted her head in curiosity, nothing more. She studied his reflection in the glass, then her oblique gaze shifted back to the small figures in the glass-enclosed Sackler Wing. “You gave this up for the Marine Corps barracks?”
The last time they met was the first time they’d talked in anything other than a formal, scripted way. She’d guessed he was NYPD or FBI, which surprised him until he learned she was a dancer. Marin studied movement like he studied markets and commodities. She’d probably read his history in his body while he was still enamored with Miss Banks.
He waited until she looked at him again, then nodded. “Six years. Two tours in Afghanistan.”
“You are one surprise after another,” she said, her focus shifting back to the skyline.
“And you were expecting a scene like all the others,” he said.
Again, he waited for their eyes to meet. When they did, she nodded.
He thought about her silk and pearl-clad alter ego Miss Banks, about Marin Bryant, Principal Dancer, about the passionate, sexual, adventurous woman no less under his skin than when they’d begun. She wouldn’t be easy, but he liked difficult things. “I got the feeling boring you would be the cardinal sin.”
“You are many things, Cole, but you’re not boring,” she said.
At that something in him eased. The glass reflected her swollen mouth, flushed cheeks, the banked fire in her eyes. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, a statement, like so many facets of their relationship, that could be taken many different ways.
“I’m glad to be here,” she said. “But does being here mean the end of Miss Banks?”
He shrugged, striving for casual. “Only if you want her to end. I don’t.”
A provocative smile curved her lips. “You like her.”
“I more than like her,” he said. “So, Marin Bryant . . . is this the only thing that turns you on?”
She laughed, the sound real, from deep in her torso, and utterly delighted. Then she stepped back and relaxed against him. He braced himself to take her weight and gave in to impulse, wrapping an arm around her waist. The remnant of her laughter became a small, satisfied sound, almost a purr. Marin, tamed.
“Hardly,” she said. “What do you have in mind next?”
Everything. He had everything in mind, but there was no rush. “Find out.”
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Keep reading for a special preview of Anne Calhoun’s new novel
THE LIST
Available from Heat March 2015
Summer Solstice
10:50 a.m.
The window air-conditioning unit clicked twice, then whirred to life. The building on Washington Square was too old to have central air. The cold air drifted through the swath of sunshine that faded the ancient Oriental rug’s reds to a brick shade. Special Agent Daniel Logan took up position at the left end of the love seat and braced his elbow on the arm as he noted the way light fell on the monument in Washington Square Park. Back in his NYPD days, before he left for the FBI, he’d trained himself to note not just date and time but the weather, moon, and astronomical events in his reports to anchor things in his memory. It was useful when he testified in court.
At this very moment the sun was at its highest point in the sky, and the summer would only get hotter.
Today he noted the solstice not because he’d be called to testify, but because he’d met Tilda the preceding summer solstice. One year had passed, the year of Tilda. They’d met, started dating or whatever Tilda called it, gotten married, and were now sitting in front of a marriage counselor, because Tilda thought they needed to divorce.
She folded herself into the opposite end of the love seat, as pale and textured as fine paper, wearing a sleeveless black sheath, her bare legs crossed. No wedding ring. No birthday bracelet. The therapist, a tall, thin man with dark brown eyes and a turban covering his hair, shook both their hands as he introduced himself as Dr. Bhowmick, then settled himself across from them.
“Daniel,” he said in a lightly accented voice. “Do you prefer Daniel or Dan?”
“Daniel.”
“The interpreter of dreams,” Dr. Bhowmick said. “Word origins are a hobby of mine. What do you do?”
“I’m with the FBI.” It wasn’t all that different from interpreting dreams. As an agent assigned to investigate white-collar crime, he reconstructed people’s dreams after they’d been stolen.
Dr. Bhowmick transferred his gaze to Tilda. “And Tilda. An unusual name.”
“It’s short for Matilda,” she said, but she lacked her usual smile.
“Ah,” the therapist said genially. “Do you know the origin of your name?”
“I do,” she said. “It’s German and a combination of two words meaning strength and battle.”
Her face wore her most pleasant expression, as if she batted away idle observations and trivial facts all day, deflecting the conversation down shallow gullies until everything they had left dissipated into the air.
&nb
sp; “What brings you here today?”
“I think we need to divorce,” Tilda said.
“I think we don’t,” Daniel replied.
She smiled at Dr. Bhowmick. “And there you have it.” Crisp, clean, precise, the upper-class British accent the same temperature as the room. She must be freezing, in her sleeveless sheath. Daniel was comfortable in his suit, and he ran much hotter than Tilda, who lived like she could spontaneously combust at any moment but was always cold.
Dr. Bhowmick turned to a clean page in his legal pad, and wrote something at the top. Daniel’s gaze flicked to the words. He could read most handwriting from all angles, but Dr. Bhowmick appeared to be taking notes in some form of shorthand. Tilda was also studying the pen and paper, but Daniel doubted she was trying to read the handwriting. Cheap legal pad, a ballpoint pen that came in packs of ten at the Duane Reade is what Tilda, who owned an upscale stationery store, would see.
“How long have you been married?”
This information was on the intake assessment Daniel filled out before the appointment. He’d do the same thing to a suspect or witness, take information, ask again from a slightly different angle, then ask again from another. It’s how he pieced together the stories that solved crimes. Simple or complex, financial or physical, a crime was always about a story. People had goals, motivations, conflicts that escalated into theft and violence. Stories and numbers were his specialty. “Six months,” he said.
Dr. Bhowmick halted midscrawl. “You’ve been married six months? How long have you known each other?”
“A year.”
“Eleven months,” Tilda clarified.
Daniel slid her a look. “It’s the solstice. We met a year ago today,” he said, standing on the only solid ground in his earthquake-rattled world. That day was written on his bones, as real and solid as the love seat under him, the light on his skin, Tilda’s even breathing beside him.
“So you’ve been together for almost a year, and married for most of that time. Why don’t you want to be married to Daniel any longer?”
She looked away, out the large rectangular window in the living room. NYU were students crossing the square, pausing by the chess games going on at the south end of the park. Daniel remembered his student days, the freedom to explore everything body and mind had to offer. Tilda, four years younger, hadn’t crossed his path.
“Tilda,” Dr. Bhowmick prompted gently.
“I’m not comfortable opening our marriage to a stranger.”
“Neither am I,” Daniel pointed out.
The look she shot him was swift and fierce, like a silver blade. When she returned her gaze to Dr. Bhowmick, he straightened almost imperceptibly. “We married in haste. It was an impulsive decision that, in hindsight, was the wrong one. It would be foolish to repent at leisure, when both of us could be free.”
Words mattered to Tilda; she chose them carefully. She didn’t say to meet other people. She didn’t say she didn’t love him. She didn’t say it was a mistake. She didn’t even say she wanted a divorce. We need to divorce.
“Daniel?”
“I love her. I want to be married to her for the rest of my life.”
Tilda’s unreadable gray gaze never left the window. Her slender, pale fingers, bare of any rings at all, sat unmoving in her lap while the rest of the session passed in silence. Daniel was comfortable with silence, knew how to use it during an interrogation, so he sat and watched the sun shift on the rug as the seconds crawled by. When their time was up, Tilda collected her purse as she stood. “I have an appointment. Thank you, Dr. Bhowmick,” and walked out the door.
“Tilda,” Dr. Bhowmick mused. Reflecting on her name, Daniel thought, not pining for her. He said it that way often enough. “These things take time, Agent Logan. Would you like to schedule a recurring session?”
“I need to talk to Tilda first. She travels for work.”
When he reached the street, Tilda was standing by the curb, her tote slung over her shoulder, one slender arm outstretched to hail a cab. Without looking at him, she asked, “Do you want to share a taxi to Midtown?”
Startled, he laughed. None of this was like Tilda, except it was. She was perfectly capable of walking right up to a ledge, a cliff, and peering over the edge to assess the landing. He loved surprises, loved pitting himself against the unexpected, loved even more his unpredictable wife. To get a better angle on oncoming traffic, she stepped off the curb between two parked cars. He took a moment, just a moment, to admire the taut swell of her calf in four-inch heels, the way her dress hugged her hips, the play of her shoulder blades, the seemingly vulnerable nape of her neck, exposed by the riotous tumble of chin-length black curls.
“I assume you’re still having lunch with the runners club?” she said over her shoulder. “I’m meeting Colin at Barneys before we leave for London. Do you want to share a cab?”
A cab slowed for her, the availability light flicking off as it braked. Her words were a challenge, a dare, a gauntlet thrown down onto the steaming city pavement. She was exactly the same as the day he’d met her, except she thought they needed to divorce. “Yeah,” he said, and slid into the backseat next to her.
“Sixtieth and Madison,” she said, then sat back and tucked her purse in her lap.
The cab crawled through midday traffic. Daniel stared out the window and thought. Tilda didn’t talk about emotions with him, much less strangers, some vestigial remnant of her English upbringing. In an era of constant oversharing on social media, it took months for Tilda to give him even the thinnest slivers of her story. When she did tell him something, she was ruthlessly honest.
“An impulsive decision to marry isn’t a solid foundation for a marriage,” she said, as if she could read his mind. Maybe she could. “We never really meshed as a couple. Your work and family. The deal is about to close, the situation with Sheba snowballed out of control, and I’m worried about Nan.”
Her grandmother lived in a fishing village in Cornwall, England, where Tilda had lived as a child. Two weeks earlier Nan had stumbled off the ramp leading to the henhouse and broken her ankle. If Tilda hadn’t been in the middle of a business opportunity that could make or break her, she would have been in Cornwall already.
The cab pulled to a stop on the east side of the street. She handed a twenty through the sliding window, while Daniel, seated on the sidewalk side, got out of the cab so she wouldn’t exit into the traffic rushing up Madison. Without thinking about it, he held out his hand; he suspected her taking it was equally a matter of habit. He stayed where he was, trapping her between his body and the cab door, and let her forward momentum bring her right up against his body.
It was far too blatant and possessive for an on-duty FBI agent wearing his gun and his badge and standing on one of the busiest street corners in Midtown Manhattan. He was working the case of the decade; even a verbal reprimand could get him yanked back to investigative support. But this was Tilda, his wife, who said there was nothing between them worth building a marriage on.
Then he kissed her.
His mouth landed a little off center, her lips parting in surprise and then softening, heating under his. Her fingers spasmed as if she would pull away. He neither tightened nor relaxed his grip on her hand, but rather slipped his tongue between her lips to touch hers. Then it happened, a hint of flint and tinder, sparks flaring, the hitch in her breathing as she tilted her head just enough to align their mouths.
With one quick jerk she freed her hand and stepped back, her eyes dark with an anguish that triggered a sense of déjà vu. “Don’t, Daniel. If you really knew me, if you really knew me, the last thing you would have done is schedule an appointment with a therapist.”
She pushed past him onto the sidewalk, and disappeared around the corner. Daniel closed the cab’s door and tapped the roof twice with his fist. As the cab pulled out into traffic, Daniel withdrew his
notebook and pen, and took refuge in habit. He made a list.
Risks Tilda Takes:
1. Sitting on ledges
2. Sliding over cliffs
3. Going after the deal that will make her a global brand
4. Asking for a divorce
He walked the few blocks to meet the ultramarathon runners for lunch, his mind only half on the discussion about training schedules, nutrition, hydration, and war stories. Instead he thought about the divorce rate for law enforcement officers, which was well above the national average. Just about every cop or agent he knew well enough to swap stories with fell somewhere on the spectrum from marriage counseling, separate rooms, separations, filing for divorce, to actually divorcing. Then, just out of curiosity, he walked back to Barneys, got an iced coffee from the coffee shop across the street, and stood in the shade under the awning of the coffee shop next to Judith Ripka, just in time to watch his wife get into another man’s car.
Colin Wilkinson, Quality Group’s director of North American acquisitions, had spent the last nine months negotiating Tilda to partner with them. The deal agreement sat next to the divorce agreement on their dining room table. Colin aimed the clicker at a Mercedes that cost more than Daniel made in a year. Tilda called him posh. Daniel would have called him slick except for the fact that Colin had the cheerful optimism and manners of a well-trained, well-bred Labrador. Tilda stood on the sidewalk, her hair curling in the humidity, accentuating her cheekbones and her lush mouth. She reached for the door handle of the rear passenger door; when it didn’t open, she shot Colin a glance across the roof of the car. Colin said something Daniel didn’t catch, but Tilda’s smile didn’t light up her eyes.
The lights on the Mercedes flashed, then flashed twice, then the alarm went off. This time Daniel caught Colin’s buggering fuck even over the traffic between them. Daniel took another sip of coffee. Tilda switched her clutch from her left hand to her right. More impatient thumbing at the key fob, the Mercedes’s lights blinked like it was taking fifty thousand volts from a Taser, and finally Colin silenced the alarm and got the doors unlocked. Tilda folded herself into the passenger seat. For a split second, Daniel let himself drink in the pleasure of watching Tilda get into the car, all clean lines and sharp angles. She could stop him dead in his tracks, the bolt of lust paralyzing him as swiftly and effectively as it had the first time he saw her.