by M. J. Lowell
“Spare?” I thought enviously of his voluptuous blondes. Nobody would ever call them spare. “Like a tire?”
He laughed. “No, it’s a compliment. There’s a wholeness about you, but no unnecessary excess. You seem complete in yourself, as though you don’t need anyone. I don’t know many people like that.”
“You’re like that,” I said, the champagne making me bold.
He smiled, to himself more than me. “I’d like to think so anyway. But I had my self-sufficiency beaten into me.” His eyes sought mine. “How did you come by yours?”
I hesitated, not sure how to answer, and finally settled on honesty. “My mother was a painter, and my father was a scientist – an inventor, really. They always taught me to think for myself.”
“A painter and an inventor,” he mused. “Two dreamers. That might explain it.”
“Explain what?”
He curled a lock of my hair around his finger. “Why you’re mad as a hare.”
“I’m not mad as a hare,” I protested, sitting up to look him straight in the eye.
“Yes, you are. Only a madwoman would bring her own dinner on a date with a millionaire,” he explained. “A normal person would expect the millionaire to at least spring for delivery.”
“The pizza—”
“Is the best in New York. It says so on the box,” he said, imitating my accent. His eyes danced with warmth. It was a different kind of heat than I’d seen before, and it felt precious and rare and something beyond erotic. “And you wanted to share it with me.”
“Well, only a madman would go to the opera and not watch any of it.”
“I assure you, I had the best seat in the house.” His finger traced the curve of my neck to my collarbone. “Do you have any idea what a revelation it is to watch you come?”
My blush deepened. “You must have seen thousands of women come,” I said as his finger dipped into the hollow between my breasts.
“Tens of thousands, at least,” he said with an easy smile. “Possibly millions.” The smile faded and the joking tone left his voice. “But none of them like you. None of them with the same selflessness.”
“I don’t feel selfless. Just the opposite.”
“You’re wrong,” he said. “You yield so completely to pleasure. You lose yourself in it. Few people can. It’s gorgeous. And incredibly erotic. I could make you come all day.”
“You could try, at any rate,” I said archly.
He gave a bark of laughter. “Now you’ve done it.”
“Done what?”
“Issued a challenge. And I never, ever turn down a challenge.”
I joined in his laughter. Nothing about this, about him, was what I expected. I felt completely at ease, better than that even, not like I had to be someone else, Tuesday Granite, but like I was the best version of myself.
The laughter slowly died, but we kept looking at each other. We were lying side by side, face to face. The silence thickened, becoming sweet and exciting.
I took a deep breath and said what I’d never said to anyone else. “I want you. I want to feel you inside of me.” The words hung in the still air between us for a moment. Then Rhys turned and reached toward the bedside drawer for a condom.
I took it from him and kneeling alongside his body unrolled it down his length. He was so beautiful, combining satiny softness with hard power. The thought of him within me made me shiver.
He started to sit up but I put my palm on his chest and pushed him back against the cushions. Holding his gaze, I straddled his hips and lowered myself onto his tip.
The first moment of contact was extraordinary. I sucked in my breath and his expression went from amused to surprised to something unreadable. “Tuesday—” he started to say, but I put my fingers to his lips. No words, not this time. Our bodies were enough.
I watched his gaze move from my eyes to the place where our bodies joined. A look of wonder spread over his face as, guided by his hands on my hips, I sank onto him, inch by glorious inch. His breathing grew ragged and his grip on me tightened. And then suddenly, incredibly, he was completely inside me. He took my hand and placed it over his heart. I felt its furious pounding beneath my palm.
The connection was startling in its intensity, and became more dazzling as we began to move. His hands cradled my behind, sliding me up and down his massive shaft. We moved in a languorous rhythm, a long slow upstroke nearly to his tip, and a slow, sensuous downstroke grinding him in at the bottom.
The pace began to quicken and his hands moved to my wrists, pulling me down so our chests were nearly touching. My face was only inches from his, our lips almost meeting as our bodies found a shared tempo.
Fingers laced, we moved in time together. I couldn’t say where he left off and I started, what was his body and what was mine. We melted together seamlessly as our bodies danced from one peak to the next, climbing together toward a distant crescendo.
I pushed back so I was sitting atop him, looking down at him, feeling him deep inside me. Reaching a hand behind me I trailed my fingertips over the smooth globes of his balls and heard the catch in his breath, felt him grow even bigger. “I want to watch you,” I said, marveling at him. “This time I want to watch you come.”
He swallowed and with a groan that seemed to mix desire and pain wrapped one arm around my waist and flipped me onto my back. Our bodies never stopped moving, the muscles in his arms and chest flexing with every thrust. The threads of my self-control stretched finer and finer until I was hovering on the edge of exploding. “Come for me,” I called, echoing what he’d said to me so many times. “Come for me now.”
Rhys thrust into me, again and again, rising higher and higher. I felt the moment of his surrender even before he let out the long, low astonished wail, felt the spasm that moved from his core outward, wracking his body, throbbing into me until I exploded around him. My body rode the wave of his pleasure, joining him and coaxing him, each of us pulling the other deeper into uncharted territory, our cries filling the cabin.
We lay tangled together for a long time afterward, our hands entwined, our hearts beating in rhythm. There was no need for assurances. It was right and we both knew it.
This was beyond surrender. Beyond any rules or games.
It was love. I’d told him I wouldn’t, that I wasn’t that sort of girl. But I’d fallen in love with Rhys Carlyle.
And really after all the others, I thought to myself as I drifted to sleep, what was one more lie?
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I heard someone crying out and felt strong arms gently shaking me awake. In the darkness it took a moment to realize the cries were coming from me, and that the arms belonged to Rhys.
“Shhh,” he was saying soothingly. “It’s all right. Everything’s all right.”
Slowly, I was drawn out of my nightmare and back into the present. “I- I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“It was exciting. At first I thought we were under attack from pirates.” Rhys propped himself up on one elbow, his profile etched in silver-blue light from the porthole. “But you kept murmuring something about a ‘wildcat.’”
The dream came back to me. It was familiar, a dream I hadn’t had in months but used to have every time I closed my eyes. I was running, someone was chasing me, grasping at me, and I couldn’t scream, couldn’t push him away.
“Was it a nightmare about a zoo?” asked Rhys. His words were joking, but in the dark I could hear the concern in his tone. “A wildcat escaping its cage?”
I hesitated. “Wildcat is what an ex-boyfriend used to call me. A nickname.” A nickname I hated. One that brought with it an ugly tangle of memories, dredged up from the murkiest part of my subconscious. “I was a little wild when we first— anyhow, the name stuck.”
It had been the fall of my sophomore year, the leaves along Storrow Drive blazing red and yellow on the way to a friend’s boyfriend’s party at a Boston College fraternity. The party was too crowded an
d too loud, filled with people drunk on keg beer and grain alcohol punch and dancing to bad music. I’d wanted to leave the second we arrived, but the friend I’d come with had disappeared onto the dance floor with her boyfriend. I was wondering what to do, lost, when Sawyer appeared at my side.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a dump like this?” he’d asked. He was cute and funny, and when he suggested we get something to eat I was happy to leave with him. We went to a place off-campus, and I remembered sharing a pizza and non-keg beers. After that everything was hazy until the next morning, when I woke up in a strange place, a strange bed. I was naked, sore, terrified. What had I done?
Then a sleepy voice I recognized as belonging to the guy from the party said from next to me, “Two things you never regret, pizza and sex. Am I right?”
He threw a heavy arm over me, and I felt a flood of relief. Whatever had happened, he didn’t regret it. Regret me. “You’re right,” I’d agreed.
He chuckled. “You’re a wildcat, aren’t you?”
I didn’t know what he meant. From his tone I thought maybe I’d done something wrong. “I’m sorry,” I said gingerly.
“No worries. A couple of scratches are a small price to pay for a night like that.” He chuckled again. “I think you actually drew blood.”
When he’d called me the next day, the lingering unease vanished. I hadn’t planned on losing my virginity that way, but it wasn’t a one-night stand, he hadn’t been using me. This was a romance. He wanted to take me out, be my boyfriend. Soon he was calling me his kitten instead of his wildcat, and I was spending every night at the apartment his parents had bought for him in the Back Bay.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Rhys asked now, pulling me from the memory.
“The nightmare or the ex-boyfriend?” I said, trying to keep my voice light.
“Either,” answered Rhys. “Though I’m already thinking I might enjoy getting him alone in a windowless room for an hour. Were you two serious?”
Seriously bad for each other, I thought but didn’t say. I stretched my fingers, reassuring myself that they still worked, even as the memories of those final months with Sawyer came flooding back. Of when my hands went stiff and numb and I couldn’t hold my bow. Of when the map of cracks on the ceiling of my doctor’s office grew as familiar as the ones on the bedroom ceiling that I’d study as I waited for Sawyer to come home, never sure of what mood he’d be in, or what he’d be on.
“It’s a process of elimination,” Dr. Vashi had explained as one test followed another, checking off cancer, lupus, MS with cheerful efficiency. Until the day she shook her shiny black bob and said, “I can’t find anything wrong with you, Lucy. You’re fit as a fiddle. So to speak.”
“But I still can’t play,” I’d said, stricken. “There has to be something wrong.”
“The only other possibility is a mold or toxin,” Dr. Vashi said. “Can you think of anything toxic in your living space?”
“Just my boyfriend.” I’d said it as a joke, but the words were like a dam breaking. The tears came rushing out of me, and with them months of suppressed anguish. Later, Dr. Vashi compared it to how some victims of domestic abuse lose their voices, the result of working so hard to repress what they most want to say.
And now I shocked myself by telling Rhys everything, beginning with the long-ago party and finishing with how the problem with my hands magically ended the day I’d moved out of Sawyer’s apartment. Maybe in daylight it would have felt presumptuous, to assume Rhys would care, would want to hear it all, but somehow, lying there with him in the dark, the story just spilled out.
Rhys was silent for a long moment, but when he spoke the edge of cold steel in his voice contrasted starkly with the warmth of his skin next to mine, the light touch of his hand stroking my hair. “Now I want two hours with the bastard in a windowless room, and he’d be leaving in a body bag. He took too much from you.”
“I let him.”
Rhys stiffened, and the steel in his voice turned molten. “You can’t believe that. It’s clearly not what happened, not in the least. You tried to fight this boy off. Why else would he call you a wildcat? You didn’t let him do anything. You just tried to make it better when you couldn’t make it stop.”
Could that be true? I was suddenly trembling, my heart beating frantically. Could it be so obvious if I’d never seen it, if nobody had seen it?
But you never told anyone else, I reminded myself. Instead I’d kept it locked up inside.
I buried my face against Rhys’s chest, and his arms came around me. I lay there, breathing him in, until the shaking stopped. I turned so my cheek rested on the firm plane of his shoulder. “You’re right. I never saw it. But you did. Thank you.”
“Sometimes it’s hardest to see the things right in front of us.” He stroked the back of my neck. “I broke your rule about asking personal questions. I’m sorry.”
“I’m glad you did,” I told him. I smiled into his shoulder. “Maybe the best thing about having rules is breaking them.”
He held me tighter, and when he spoke I thought I detected a note of wistfulness in his voice. “Maybe.”
I woke in bed with gray winter sunlight threading its way through the rounded windows and Rhys smiling down at me. It must have been late – he was already fully dressed.
“Most people look innocent while they sleep, but you look rather naughty,” he said playfully. “This must have been a much nicer dream than the one you had earlier.”
I reached an arm out for him. “If you come back to bed I can show you what I was dreaming about.”
He grinned. “That is a very tempting offer.” I was curled on my side, and he traced the line of my body with a light hand. “But I have a deal to finalize and I want to be able to give your dreams my full attention. I’m supposed to go to my cottage in East Hampton tonight. I’d love it if you’d join me there.”
Rhys Carlyle was inviting me away to his country house. The prospect of it, a private idyll just with him, was exhilarating. Terrifying. “I—”
“I know, I know, you have plans, but cancel them, just this once? You won’t regret it. I promise.” The eager supplication in his voice filled me with pleased surprise.
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Do more than try,” he pressed.
I laughed. “Okay, I’ll do more than try.”
“Good,” he said, satisfied. He offered coffee and breakfast, but his phone was ringing continuously and I could tell he was distracted, so I dressed quickly and he walked me out onto the deck.
“No need to pack anything for East Hampton,” he told me. “I’ll take care of everything. Except—” he started to say something but stopped.
“Except what?” I asked.
He hesitated. “Would you bring your violin?”
I blinked at him. “My violin?”
He put an arm around my waist and pulled me to him. There was a gleam in his eye. “I want to see if you play it as well as you play my instrument.”
“Now who’s the one thinking naughty thoughts?” I said, trying not to blush.
We were at the top of the gangplank. It was the right moment for me to take my leave, but his eyes still held me. He paused. “You suggested God tempted Faust because he wanted to teach him, to give him the gift of experience. I think you might have been right about that. It’s not so different from the two of us.”
“And you’re God, giving me the gift of experience?” I asked, still playful.
But there was no playfulness in Rhys when he replied. “Who said you were Faust?”
My heart literally skipped a beat. “What do you mean?”
“Perhaps it’s you who’s giving me the new experience,” he said, drawing me even closer.
He’s going to kiss me, I thought, my heart soaring. For the briefest of seconds his lips seemed to move infinitesimally toward mine.
Abruptly he pulled away. Swallowed. “Until tonight, Miss Granite?”
I made a decision. I wanted to come clean. “My name is—”
He put up his hand. “No. Don’t. I just want to— let this moment be this moment.”
I stepped onto the dock and headed toward land. When I turned for one last glance, he was still there on the deck, watching me.
The Bentley was idling in the parking lot and as soon as he saw me Davies hurried from the driver’s seat.
“Good morning, miss,” he said, opening the door for me. “Where can I take you?”
“Home,” I said, and gave him my address. I no longer cared about Rhys finding out who I really was – only what had led me to him in the first place. At least part of the game was over.
And that’s when I realized. Rhys might not have kissed me, but we’d been together an entire night – far longer than three hours. I wasn’t the only one who broke a rule. The sudden knowledge was thrilling, pure exhilaration.
Rhys wasn’t playing games any more, either.
Chapter Thirty
I floated up the front steps and into the apartment. Everything looked brighter today, more colorful.
You’re in trouble, a voice in my head said, but I pushed it aside. Instead I dialed Val at work. I was bursting with Rhys, desperate to say his name aloud to someone, to hear it in the air.
She answered on the first ring. “I cleared my schedule for the next fifteen minutes specifically for you, so talk fast. Tell me about the opera and do not leave anything out, and I mean anything.”
I smiled to myself. There was no way I was going to not leave a few things out. “The opera was…educational.”
“Educational?” repeated Val. Even over the phone, I could tell she had on her most skeptical look. “That’s all you’ve got for me? Educational?”
“He had a box. It was like going to our own private performance.”
“And did he perform?” she asked archly.
I giggled. I couldn’t help myself.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said. “And was there a post-opera performance, too? Because you definitely weren’t responding to any of my texts.”