Chelsea heard fabric rustle. Something banged against the partition and she knew it was Emma’s backside. He was doing her against the wall.
Frenzied sighs and grunts drowned Chelsea’s thoughts. Her heart thudded as she began to feel weak in the extremities. She pressed her back to the partition, covered her ears, and tried to hear using only the sense of touch.
The partition vibrated in a hard-tempo rhythm. It was strongest at her center, rippling down her legs. Bump—quiver. Bump—quiver. Bump—quiver. Bump…
Heat seeped from her pores and her hands trembled until she removed them from her ears and their voices invaded. Arousal dampened her panties and she let it take her, moving her hand under her dress and spreading her thighs.
Her skin was slick with moisture; her clitoris throbbed for attention.
Behind her the partition trembled with the force of their fucking. She felt the impact of Joshua’s thrusts, drank in the sound of Emma moaning, “Mmm, yes. That—do it like that.”
Eyes shut, Chelsea let the world go dark as she twisted her fingers inside herself and grinded in time to the wall’s vibrations. Tension curled, twisted, tightened…
Emma cried out a whimper, and Joshua spurred her on, continuing to thrust hard until she was saying his name in helpless repetition.
“God, I’m close, Emma.”
“Pull out. Hurry.”
“Where you want me to shoot it?” he growled, and Chelsea was so close she almost answered him.
“I’ll take it,” Emma said, and there was the click of her high heels returning to the marble floor. “Kiss me first, then I’ll take all of it.”
Chelsea’s mouth felt so dry. She bit her lip, suppressing the sound of her release, then she took her hand away and righted her panties. As she listened to Emma drink him down, she pushed her fingers between her lips, sucking her fingers until they were clean…as if her arousal had never been there to begin with.
When they left, their private whispers trailing behind them, she lingered for a few moments.
Fucking in a restroom stall—had that washed away the tension that provoked them to bicker and look at each other as though they were enemies? Could sex fix whatever was cracked in their marriage? Or was it as fleeting a thrill as Chelsea’s self-inflicted orgasm had been?
No revelations would come to her. Resigned, she picked up the strip of toilet paper she’d dropped, threw it away, and washed her hands. She washed away the smeared eyeliner as best she could before fleeing the scene of her voyeurism.
Chelsea saw that Emma’s assistant had gone, but she heard something that gave her pause.
A sob.
Though her friends hadn’t seemed concerned with determining whether they’d had an audience in the powder room, she knew she’d masturbated while Joshua hard-fucked Emma on the other side of the wall, and she felt slightly disturbed to confront her so soon afterward.
But the distress in that sob drew her to the cheerful lavender office and the unmistakably anguished woman sitting on the sofa. She’d just had hot powder room sex. Now she was crying into her hands. “Emma, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“That’s a lie. Did something happen? Is it the company?” Chelsea located a box of tissues and yanked out several. Handing them over, she persisted, “I’m your second in command. We’re a team. You have to tell me this shit.”
“Nothing with the company.”
“Then what…Where’s Joshua?”
“Headed to Privé. Counterfeit invited us.”
“Then why aren’t you headed there, too?”
“I told him I need to finish up a few things here.”
“But you lied to him.” Sighing, Chelsea sat beside her. “He’s your husband and your business partner. Why are you hiding your tears from him?”
Emma slowly shook her head, combed back a blond curl that had bounced out of place, then considered her wedding ring. “This means everything to me. I have to protect it.”
“The ring or your marriage? Emma, seriously, what is going on?”
“It’s nothing.”
Chelsea couldn’t stand to watch her friend cry and manage whatever hell held her prisoner, when Joshua should be here. It didn’t matter that Emma might push him away or pretend that all was well when it was so far from it. He should be here to hold her up, but he was gone and Chelsea resented him for it.
“Do you trust him?” she asked, so quietly. His sin was on the tip of her tongue.
“Of course I do. Chelsea, he loves me.”
“But—” Don’t do this. “Joshua cheated on you.”
Emma stared at her. “What?”
“In the boardroom, during the meeting with Delilah. She jerked him off under the table.” She couldn’t stop talking now. “I confronted them both after you left the room. Neither denied it. Neither apologized.”
“You’ve seen me every day since then and never said anything about this. What changed your mind tonight?”
“I…I just can’t hold their secret anymore. I wanted to tell you because you’re my friend. I didn’t tell you because he’s my friend.”
No fresh tears fell. Emma blotted her face and she sat eerily still for a prolonged moment. “Chelsea, you kept Joshua’s secret. Now you’ll keep one for me. You won’t tell him that I know.”
“If he asks me if I’ve told you, I’m supposed to lie?”
“Precisely. Lie to him, just as you lied to me every time we saw each other and you never took me aside to let me know he’s playing me.”
“God, sometimes I hate you both for putting me in the middle of your fucking problems.” Chelsea strode out of the CEO’s office and to her own, but she didn’t stay. Her skin ached for a sharp sting of elastic.
Damn Dante and the promise she’d made to him. She’d find a rubber band somewhere in this profanely large house.
No, she decided, suspending her search when she was midway through emptying all the drawers in her desk. She walked out and kept moving until she reached the elevator. She took it to the ground floor. Not stopping to respond to a single greeting or question people tossed her way, she navigated the halls until she reached the recording wing.
It was late now. The quiet halls felt deserted. Only one studio was occupied: Studio I.
Through the glass she watched Dante. He was wearing a pair of wireless headphones and straddling a chair, fiddling with a computer and running a pencil over pages scattered in front of him. A bottle of beer was at his elbow. Despite the hour, he was here fulfilling the promise he’d made to write music that would launch a superstar.
He was mad at her and she was confused about him, but she couldn’t break the promise she’d made to him.
So she knocked on the glass.
His features tightened with wariness when he stood up and found her there. Even pissed off, he was off-the-charts hot. It wasn’t fair, really, that he could throw on a T-shirt, zip himself into a pair of jeans, and be completely equipped to make people fall in love with him.
Chelsea kept knocking on the glass even as he flung off the headphones, left the chair, beer, pencil, and his thoughts, and came over to open the door.
“You down here for the new material?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Actually, the music had slipped her mind. “No, that’s not true. I came because—The rubber band. I’m sorry, but I need—”
Dante brought her into the studio and shut the door. He put out his arm. “Go ahead.”
“I can’t keep running to you when this builds up.”
“Why not?”
“I’m getting used to having you here.” Chelsea couldn’t help it. She clasped the elastic, pulled it, and let it go. She heard it snap his skin and was both jealous and relieved. She did it again, kept going until she could see the beginnings of a red welt. “I’m sorry, Dante.”
“Quit saying that.” He held her by the shoulders. “Feel better now?”
Chelsea shook her head. She was still unfulfill
ed, just as she’d been when she walked out of the executive-floor restroom. “Pissed at me, aren’t you, about what you heard me say in the boardroom?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that makes this interesting, because you also told me to come to you when I want—”
Dante grabbed her hair and yanked back, forcing her face up, and he kissed her hard as hell.
Oh, God, yeah. “That,” she said in an aroused whisper.
“I am pissed,” he said, “and we’re going to fight it out. But later. We need to settle this first. Just so we’re straight on what this is, I’m about to fuck every thought out of your pretty head, Chelsea.”
Perfect. This wouldn’t solve her problems, or his, or the ones they created for each other. But she didn’t care. She kissed him, bit his lip, anticipated his reaction when she plucked open the top button on her dress. “Then put your hands on me, you sexy motherfucker.”
—
Dante let Chelsea spend the night. After they fell on the floor of the vocal booth in Studio I, he’d thought she’d slink off to her condo, but when he mentioned going back to the guesthouse to work, she’d tagged along as if it was natural to stick by his side.
When they’d been in a relationship he wouldn’t have minded. Tonight suspicion tortured him, as if someone had tied him to a board and each wary thought he formed was a drop of water to his forehead.
At two-something, he rolled out of bed and left her sleeping while he put on his boxers and riffled through his stuff for a cigarette. Smoking was something he’d set aside with his music. Now both were back, a vice and a passion.
Peering through the darkened room at Chelsea’s peaceful form, he swore under his breath. She was back, too, and this was a cost he sure as fuck hadn’t expected when he’d agreed to help his sister recover what was hers.
In his drawers with a cigarette and lighter in hand, he grabbed his phone and keys and went outside. The rain had brought a chill to the air and he took a greedy gulp of it as he took inventory of his surroundings. He didn’t see figures patrolling the ground but didn’t doubt they were present. The three at the top of this company were too on guard to spare a security expense. Taking precaution, ensuring his own security, he walked to the SUV and got in before dialing someone who’d damn well better pick up.
“It’s late,” his sister said. “Later where you are.”
“Sounds like warfare in the background,” he commented.
“I’m at a club, doing a little business. There’s a DJ I’m looking at. This place is a shithole but the refreshments make up for it.”
He dropped his head back against the headrest. “Fuck, Delilah, what’re you hitting?”
“How dare you? I’m insulted.”
“Don’t put that southern-belle bullshit on me. When you said ‘refreshments,’ my gut told me you weren’t talking about cookies and punch.”
“I’m going to hang up if you insist on this archaic man-knows-better attitude.”
Dante could hardly make out her voice through the crash of music and shouts in the background. “I do know better, and not because I’m a man. I’ve got thirty-one years of experience saving your ass.” He realized he was yelling, and brought down his volume. “Take care of yourself.”
“Well, why should I, when I’ve got you to do it for me?” his sister said. “I mean that, by the way. You’re the most loyal person in my life, Dante. Speaking of loyalty…Where are you with Chelsea?”
He looked through the windshield to the cottage, closed his eyes, and pictured Chelsea lying asleep where he’d left her.
“Dante?”
“We’re working closely together.”
“That’s vague. Troublingly vague. What aren’t you telling me?”
“She feels guilty, just as you’d figured.” He wouldn’t tell Delilah about Chelsea’s rubber band, which was looped around his wrist at the moment. He didn’t mind that she’d snapped him until he had welts on his skin. The shallow nanosecond of pain was soothed by the gratification of being her shield. If she was coming to him, she wasn’t hurting herself.
“Chelsea should feel guilty. She and the others are running my company. Ours, I mean,” she remedied. “Yours and mine. It’s what Daddy intended.”
“Call it yours. I don’t care, because I don’t want it.” Dante had long ago lost interest in taking Jude Bishop’s place at the head of the boardroom table. “I’m not here to take Chelsea’s shares for myself.”
“Because you’re the noble type. I’m happy that you are.”
“Yeah, ’cause it works to your advantage.”
“That was the plan from the start. Don’t second-guess this.” She paused. “Dante, where’s Chelsea at the moment?”
“In town.”
“Be more specific.”
“In my bed.” The pause that followed had him sitting up and glancing at his phone. “Delilah, you there?”
Her voice returned, but she sounded different. “If doing her is part of your plan to get her stake in my company, then fine. But if it’s not, Dante, just know that Chelsea and I are on opposite sides here. There’s no line to straddle. You’re either on her side or mine. And…I’ve got no one but you. This isn’t just about business. It’s about family. So be sure you’re good with the consequences of reneging on me for that bitch.”
Delilah disconnected the call, and when he tried twice to call her back, she didn’t answer.
“Fuck,” he grumbled, leaping out of the SUV and leaning against the side as he lit his cigarette.
He was in Atlanta, on the Devil’s Music estate, to take Chelsea’s 28 percent and turn it over to his sister. It was what he’d agreed to, and Delilah had been in the right to remind him of that tonight. What the fuck was happening to his mind?
The front door opened and Chelsea shuffled onto the porch with a sheet wrapped around her. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
“I didn’t know you’d started smoking again.”
“When I picked up the music, I picked this up, too.” He took a pull from the cigarette, exhaled smoke through his nostrils. “Do you care?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Because it’s part of my songwriting process, right? And that’s all you give a damn about—getting this label a triple platinum album.”
“Dante.” She ventured to the edge of the porch. The light spilled over her dark hair and bled onto the sheet. “I know we’ve got that fight coming, but I don’t want to do this now. Set aside your hurt feelings and put out that cigarette. There’s a bed in here that would really like your weight on it. I’m going home.”
He began to move toward the cottage. “I can’t stop you, but I for damn sure intend to slow you down.”
“What sense does it make for me to hang out here when you want me gone?”
“That’s my decision. When I’m done with you, you’ll be the first to know. Just like last time.” Exhuming the hell of that night, the way his words had bruised her, made her flinch.
“Then we’re using each other, and that’s all there is to it?”
He ground the cigarette into the brick walkway and joined her on the porch, where with a careful look he persuaded her to drop her hands and let the sheet fall away. “You’re getting my songs. I’m getting you. That’s what you said in the boardroom.”
“There’s more to us than that.”
Agendas. Lies. History.
He turned her and sent her inside with a slap on the ass. Picking up the sheet and following her through the house, he didn’t feel like the Dante Bishop who lived on a small-town farm and had stepped onto this territory to recover what belonged to his family.
He felt like Cutthroat Bishop’s son—a man hell-bent on reclaiming what belonged to him.
Chapter 11
Was this a prison or paradise?
Alexis couldn’t immediately decide when a private driver carted her and her mismatched hand-me-down luggage through a pair of tall gates. The Devil’s Music es
tate was magnificent, to say the least.
Wiping a clammy palm on the jacket of her pantsuit, she nervously wondered how out of place she would be the moment the driver opened her door and turned her loose in this beautiful, sexy, tragic, scandalous world.
Her grandmother, who hadn’t put up much fuss when Alexis had told her she wanted to travel and would wait tables to earn her way, wouldn’t have believed her if she’d come to her and said, Some folks from a record label found me on YouTube and signed me up to sing songs for them. They want to make me famous.
At the moment it took some fresh convincing for Alexis to trust her own reality.
She was here, in Atlanta, Georgia. She was sitting in the back of a luxury car with gourmet snacks at her disposal and a loaded iPad optimized for the hearing-impaired. She was in front of a circa-1800 mansion that seemed so large she doubted it’d take less than two days to tour.
Uncapping a chilled bottle of water, she gulped greedily and couldn’t seem to hold in a weird belch-hiccup as the driver swept open her door.
“Sorry. Or, excuse me,” she babbled. Watching his face slip from perturbed to amused, she felt at ease. She was rough around the edges, no debate there, but to the man who’d transported her safely here and encouraged her to take the water with her and drink at her leisure—as opposed to chugging it as though she were ravaging a keg at a frat party—she was amusing.
Maybe even charming. And wouldn’t that be ironic? The Devil’s Music people were licking their beautiful chops to smooth out her every rough edge, to shine her up, to mold her into someone else.
She didn’t yet know just who they wanted her to become, but as she stepped out of the air-conditioned car into the Georgia sunshine, she was certain she’d left the Alexis Lazarus she knew behind in Louisiana.
God knew when she’d next have the opportunity to clean a fuel injector or take apart a carburetor. Or feel her grandmother’s laugh again. Adelaide’s laugh was warm. Even from across a room, Alexis could feel it flutter over the fuzz on her arms.
She tapped the driver’s arm, and he paused. “These people are going to send me somewhere to be waxed, aren’t they?”
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