“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
Hemi said, “You need to leave. Now.”
The tone of his voice would have had anybody else scurrying for the exit. It practically did it to me. Anika paid it exactly no attention. Instead, she held a hand across the table to me and turned it over, flexing her palm so the underside of her wrist was fully visible.
Maybe I was supposed to notice the fineness of her bones, or the graceful, tapering length of her fingers. Except that she said, “Do you see the scar?”
I did. A faint white line interrupting the perfect bronze of her skin. She held out the other hand, then, and showed that to me, too. “Do you know how I got these?”
Hemi was on his feet again. “No.”
Anika ignored him. “Ask your fiancé,” she told me. “Ask him what kind of a husband ties his wife so tightly and for so long that he leaves permanent scars. Ask him what else he did to me that night. Ask me why I loved him anyway. Ask yourself why you do, and how he sucked you in. Why he chose you, a woman without a family to look after her, to ask inconvenient questions, to give her somewhere to run. Ask yourself if that’s the life you want.”
All the nausea I’d been spared for the past week was roiling inside me. The blood had left my head, and I felt so faint, all I wanted was to put my head between my knees. And my hands over my ears.
I didn’t do either thing. I said, “I know who Hemi is. I know everything he is.”
“Do you?” she asked. “Do you really? Do you know I came to see him just a couple weeks ago? Do you know that I begged? Did he tell you that?” She must have seen the involuntary widening of my eyes, because she smiled, a tinge of sadness to it, and said, “Thought not. He had me on my knees. His favorite position for a woman, but then, you know that. He made me beg, and then he laughed at me and turfed me out. Deserted me one more time.”
“Shock,” Violet said. “Considering how you treated him.”
I expected Anika to turn on her, to strike like a cobra. Instead, she said, “But then, Vi, all you knew was what Hemi told you. That’s all anybody knew. Nobody was in that apartment but the two of us—unless Hemi issued invitations—and if I was damaged afterwards, if I acted out? I had my reasons. Not all my scars are on the outside. And I will show them. If I’ve asked Hemi for help, it’s because he’s owed it to me for years. Before, I had no way of getting it. Now I do. Call it justice.”
I asked, “Are you finished?” My voice, somehow, was ice-cold, even though I was a quaking mess inside.
“I’m finished. I’ve done what I could.” She stood up, looked at me a moment more, and then, before I could react, bent and kissed my cheek. Her perfume, all Oriental topnotes on a musky base, swirling down inside me, overwhelming the light floral scent I wore. “Be careful,” she told me, straightening up again and touching my face, a soft caress.
I was on my feet, too, standing as if pulled by a string. My feet weren’t my own, and my hand wasn’t, either. It was rising as if somebody else were in control of it, drawing back.
It didn’t land. Hemi’s iron fingers closed around my wrist instead, so quickly I didn’t even notice him moving.
Anika said, “My. The kitten has claws. Maybe you’ll last longer than I think. Take my advice, though. Get a very good attorney. I wish I had.”
With that, she turned on one graceful heel and walked away. And every man in the room watched her go.
Hemi
I was shutting down. I didn’t want to do it, but I couldn’t stop it happening, like the hatches slamming closed on a submarine before it dove. Preparing to go underwater, to run silent and deep.
“Well,” Violet said, “that was special. Bitch.”
Hope laughed, nothing but an angry puff of air. Not the reaction I’d been expecting. “Why didn’t you let me hit her?” she asked me. “I was dying to hit her.”
When I didn’t answer, she said in a completely different voice, “Pay the check and take me home.”
Vi’s head went up, and so did mine. I stared a Hope for a long second, and she stared straight back at me. Then I lifted a hand for the waiter.
The long ride down in the lift was a silent affair. Out on the street again, I hailed a taxi and told Vi, “Yours.” My voice sounded rusty, and I realized it was the first thing I’d said in some time.
Vi reached up, took my face in her two hands, and said, “Trust comes hard. Don’t I know it. Trust Hope, mate. You can do it.”
When I didn’t answer, she sighed, turned to Hope, gave her a hug and kiss, and said, “Awesome, that’s all. I want you on my team.”
“You’ve already got me there,” Hope said. “Thanks for everything.”
Vi nodded. “Anytime you want that dress. And I mean any time. But I want to watch you wearing it.”
“I want that, too,” Hope said. “I’ll let you know.”
Vi got into her taxi, and as it pulled away, Hope looked at me and said, “That’s enough.”
“Pardon?” Another thing I hadn’t expected to hear.
“Brooding’s one thing. This is something else. I’m starting to get insulted. You’ve got things to tell me, and you need to start.”
I didn’t. I couldn’t. She said, “Right, then. I’m mad. Six months ago—three months ago—I’d have stomped off. I’m not doing that tonight. I’m going to stand right here on the sidewalk and let you know that if you think there’s anything you can tell me about your past that’s going to make me believe I don’t know the man I see, you’re wrong. And what’s worse, you’re insulting my perception and my judgment and my commitment and so many other things, I don’t even want to list them, because it’ll just make me madder. So tell me.”
“Anika already did.”
Hope snorted. “I know what ‘manipulative’ means. Let me guess. She has many faces. Tonight, I got to see the vulnerable, wounded one, because that woman will do and say whatever she thinks will work. You aren’t just ashamed because of something you did. You’re ashamed because you fell for her, and because you let her twist you around. You feel wrong and sick and dark because she wanted you to lose control over yourself, and as soon as you did, she was the one controlling you. That scared you to death. And by the way, you didn’t tell me she’d showed up recently. That’s another thing I’m mad about. So you pick. Start somewhere. Start off by telling me about her showing up, maybe. That’ll be easier.”
I ran a hand over my hair. Every muscle in my body felt stiff. “You’re getting cold. You’re not wearing enough to have this talk here.”
“So have the valet bring your car around, get me nice and warm, and then tell me.”
I did. I started as soon as we pulled out of the SkyCity drive onto Hobson Street. I didn’t put off unpleasant things, and I didn’t duck reality. Not anymore.
“She turned up,” I said. “A couple weeks ago. She did what you saw tonight. She was wounded. Hurting. She did get on her knees, begging me to settle, begging me to give her something. Anything. I didn’t believe her, and I didn’t do it.”
“And you didn’t tell me.” Hope’s voice was matter of fact, not angry.
“I was planning to. Tomorrow morning, maybe, on the drive home. I didn’t want to spoil it. She’s like . . .”
“Poison. Or battery acid. Eating away at all the beautiful things, the sweet things, making you think you can’t trust anything or anybody, including yourself.”
“Yeh.” I felt exhausted, suddenly. “She wants my money. She thinks she has a right.”
“Except that it wasn’t three years.”
“No. It wasn’t. But maybe she thinks she has a right anyway.” There. I’d admitted it, or close.
“Or maybe you think she does.” She picked up on it straight away, of course. “Tell me why.”
I was stopped at a red light, and I sat staring at it, not wanting to see Hope’s face. “She always wanted to push it further,” I said reluctantly. “But maybe that’s just my excuse.”
“You make the f
ewest excuses of any man I’ve ever known. Tell me.”
The light changed, and I drove. “The night she got those scars.” I forced the words out, dragging the memory from its locked box, pushing and shoving it ruthlessly to the surface. “She wanted me to . . .” I stopped, breathed, and said it. “Share her. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but she said it was her fantasy. She pushed for weeks. And finally, I did it. Maybe I thought I’d lose her otherwise. That was how it felt. But I never should have done it. Never.”
“How many guys?” She sounded sick, which was exactly the way I felt.
“Two.” I pulled into the hotel garage, parked, and turned the car off, but I didn’t get out, and neither did Hope. “People she’d met online, she said, but now I wonder if it was more than that. It got . . . out of hand so fast, and I didn’t stop it nearly soon enough. I didn’t know if I should, and I was excited, too. That’s the truth.” The hard truth. The sick truth.
“And what did she say the next day?” Hope asked, which, again, wasn’t the question I’d expected.
“Said it hurt, and it scared her, and it was too much, and she wanted to do it again. Later. When she . . . felt better. She had her wrists bandaged for a week, and every time I saw those bandages . . . seeing those scars tonight . . .” I didn’t go on. I couldn’t.
“And you never did it again.”
“Bloody hell.” I scrubbed my hands over my face as if I could scrub the memory clean. The worst night of my life, when I’d let myself down, and worse. When I’d let my wife down. When I’d done things no man should do. “No, I never did it again. Three weeks later, I heard that I’d got the internship in the States, and from then on, it was all rows, and then I left. When she stopped writing, though, when she didn’t come . . . I thought—of course that happened. Of course she didn’t trust me anymore. Of course she didn’t want me.”
“No. She was wrong.”
“So was I.” I’d never said it. I said it now.
“All right. So were you. And after that, you said you could never lose control again. Because you were terrified of what you’d do.”
I didn’t have to answer that. Hope knew it already.
“Did she tell you to stop?” she asked next. “That night? Did she ask you to make it stop?”
“No. But I should’ve known.”
“Did you tie the ropes?”
I didn’t want to go back to this. I wanted to lock that box again and throw away the key. “No. But I let it happen.”
“Do you want to know what I think?”
I laughed, though it wasn’t funny. “No. Yes. And you’re going to tell me anyway.”
“I am.” She sat straight as a soldier and did it. “I think you found out that you enjoyed domination, but you don’t enjoy pain. Not real, hard-core pain. I think she does. I think she craves it, and she thought she’d get it from you, and when she didn’t, she told you it was because you weren’t man enough. I think she went way further than you wanted to go, and since she knew she could use that to hurt you, she brought it up tonight. I’ll bet somebody’s doing those things to her now, and I’ll bet you know it.”
“Yeh. I do. She said as much, that night I went to see her.”
“And she tried to get you to go down that path again, because it had hurt you to go before.”
I didn’t answer, and Hope said, “And did you?”
“No.” The word was an explosion. “No.”
“That’s right. You came home to me, and you needed it sweet. You needed it gentle. You needed to remind yourself that you weren’t that man anymore. You wanted to tell yourself that you were hard, but you weren’t brutal. You wanted to believe that you could love somebody. That you could protect her from anything, even from yourself.”
I was wrung out. I was shattered. “How do you know?”
“Hemi.” She’d turned in her seat to face me, her face as urgent as the hand she put on my cheek. “I know because I know you. I know because I see you. I know because I love you.”
Hope
The evening didn’t end up the way I’d thought it would. It was so much more.
When we went into the hotel, Hemi had his arm around me, and I had both of mine around him, not caring who saw or what they thought of us. And when we got into our room, he grabbed me.
The kiss was hot and wild, out of control from the second his mouth closed over mine. There was no calculation in the way he devoured me, or any control at all in the way he shoved a hand up under my skirt and got hold of my hip.
His fingers dug in, and I didn’t complain. I had my hands around his head, pulling him into me, but despite his urgency, his own hand was behind my head when he backed me straight up against the wall.
And there was absolutely nothing civilized about the way he ripped off the black underwear I’d chosen so carefully, or the way he spun me around.
His fingers were in my hair, unfastening the clip, and a metallic ting told me it had landed on the stone floor. My hair was falling out of its knot, and then his hands were at the back of my neck, unfastening the hooks holding my dress closed. And controlled, deliberate Hemi Te Mana’s hands were fumbling.
“Shit.” It was nothing more than an explosion of breath. I felt the release of the fabric collar at my nape, then the coolness on my skin as he yanked the zipper down, and I shivered. His hands were shoving the delicate fabric roughly down and over my hips, and I didn’t care. Not about the dress, and not about anything else. He needed this, and so did I.
Hemi talked during sex. Always. Now, he was silent, his ragged breath and my own the only sounds in the quiet room. My bra fell to the floor, and his hands were all over me.
I had my forearms against the wall, and I was surrendering, falling down, falling deep. One of his hands was between my legs, the other one on my breast, not rough even now. He was remembering how sensitive I was, taking care of me even in the midst of his nearly unbearable excitement. But the second his fingers gently pinched my nipple, a dark shock ran straight to my core, my back was arching, and I was moaning.
“Shit,” he said again. “You’re so wet. I have to . . . I have to . . .”
“Do it. Please. Now.” It was almost a sob.
He spun me again, and my back hit the wall. His hands were at his belt, fumbling again, and I was there, helping him. I was naked, dressed only in black fuck-me-now heels and a barbaric display of jewelry, and Hemi was fully dressed, and I didn’t care. There was only one thing that mattered.
One hand went under my bottom and lifted me straight off my feet, and the other was in my hair, tugging my head back. I wrapped my legs around his waist, put a hand down, and helped guide him inside me.
He entered me in one hard thrust, and I let out a choked cry. I’d been expecting it, and still, it was nearly too much.
He stopped dead. I could sense his pulsing energy, his unbearable tension, as clearly as if I’d been in his skin. “Hurting you,” he said hoarsely.
“No.” The need clawed at me. “Never. Do it. Hard.”
He groaned, and then he did it. Hard, and strong, and savage. There was nothing but ferocity in the hips that pumped against mine, and no control at all in the hand that pulled at my hair.
He didn’t kiss me. He didn’t say a word. But he told me everything. How desperately he desired me, how frantically he’d needed to be inside me. How only I could fix this, could soothe the hurt burning in him. He took me hard and deep, and I took him the same way, and when my orgasm came on me with the force of a locomotive, I honestly thought I wasn’t going to be able to stand it.
When it hit me, it felt exactly like that train. Like a shock wave, slamming into me, knocking me senseless. And Hemi doing the same thing.
Too much. Too hard. Too deep. Everything.
Hemi
I thought I was going to pass out. I was sure Hope was. I shouldn’t have done it, and I couldn’t have helped it.
Afterwards, I stayed where I was for a long time, and she sta
yed with me, her hands on my shoulders, holding me close, not asking for a thing. At last, though, my arm relaxed, and I supported her as she slid down the wall.
And still I held her. Even after her feet hit the floor, I didn’t let her go. I couldn’t. I stood, still pressing her between my body and the wall, while my head came to rest against my forearm and I trembled and shook, while I tried to stop it and couldn’t. I needed to move, to let her move as well, but I couldn’t.
It ended, of course. Every moment did. Life moved on, whether you wished it wouldn’t or you couldn’t wait for it to happen. In the end, it was Hope who took off my jacket and tie, Hope who unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it off, then dealt with the rest of my clothes. She unfastened her own shoes and left them where they lay, then stripped off her bracelet and earrings and dropped them onto the hall table. And when we were both naked, she took my hand and led me into the bedroom, pulled back the duvet, drew me down with her, and wrapped her arms around me.
“This is how I love you,” she told me, and if I’d ever thought a gentle woman couldn’t be fierce, I’d been wrong. “This is how I hold you, and this is the way I’ll be holding you forever. In my arms when I can, and in my heart always. Always. You’ll never lose me, because I’ll never let go.”
I did my best to control myself. When my chest began to tighten, I called on the self-discipline of a lifetime. When the tears pricked behind my eyelids, I did my utmost to shut them down. That was what I did. That was who I was.
I failed. My chest heaved, and a ragged, ugly sound came out. I sobbed once, and again. Twice more, and then I was rolling away, onto my back, away from her. I was breathing hard, squeezing my eyes shut against the tears, and feeling them trickling, hot, shameful, and unstoppable, down my temples.
Found (Not Quite a Billionaire Book 3) Page 19