“What are your plans?” Henry asked as he slid between the sheets.
She sat up. “Did you want me to go?” She should probably go.
“No, Vivien.” He wrapped an arm around her stomach and dragged her right back down. Several streams of weak light slipped between the shutters and shone in his black hair and across his tan cheek.
Afterglow. The crazy feeling had to be due to afterglow. “You want me to stay?”
He lay beside her and easily situated her until her back was against his chest. “I want you to stay,” he said next to her ear. The warmth of his chest and cup of his pelvis heated her spine and bare behind. “Is that a problem?” His fingers brushed across her shoulder, tracing an invisible line that raised her sensitive skin.
Afterglow that felt like sparkles inside. “No.” Now that she knew the cause of her crazy feeling, she relaxed and snuggled her bottom against his crotch. She settled into a warm comfortable spoon with Henry, and the easiness of it all surprised her. Like her mother, she didn’t have the best track record with men. Unlike her mother, she was normally long gone before they broke her heart.
She’d just had sex with Scary Henry. His bed was the last place on earth she’d ever thought she’d find herself naked, and she should be freaking out. She should be trying to figure a way to get the hell out of there with the least amount of embarrassment. She should be getting dressed and on her way out the door to avoid the 8 a.m. walk of shame.
Henry’s skillful touch slid down her arm and she felt it all over her body. Pleasure climbed her spine, and she settled firmly against his groin as a whole new round of desire chased the sparkly tingles across her skin.
Henry poured a cup of coffee and his gaze fell on Vivien’s empty wineglass on his coffee table. He stood in his kitchen wearing jeans, a wrinkled T-shirt, and the flip-flops Vivien had worn the night before. The clock on the coffeemaker indicated that it was eight fifteen. Vivien would be gone by now, cruising at 35,000 feet, somewhere between South Carolina and California.
A burnt bagel popped up from his toaster and he lathered it up with cream cheese. He’d only caught a few hours of sleep before he’d had to wake Vivien earlier. She’d been warm and comfy, curled up next to him as if she belonged in his arms and in his bed. She’d fallen asleep first, and he’d watched the rise and fall of her small breasts and her pale face surrounded by all that dark hair. She was thin—perhaps too thin—but her muscles were toned and her skin smooth. The stress lines he’d noticed all week in her forehead were smooth and she looked as if she’d finally found some peace. Her sleep had been deep, her breath even as if she trusted him to keep her warm and safe, but Henry was the last person she should trust.
It had still been dark when he’d driven her to the carriage house to grab her suitcase before her 6-a.m. flight. She’d eaten an apple and washed it down with strong coffee and they’d chatted about the weather and which airline served the best breakfast in first class. They’d talked about Macy Jane’s funeral, but as if by tacit agreement, neither spoke of the night before. As Vivien quickly changed her clothes, Henry had kept an eye on the big house. He’d half expected his mother’s bedroom to be ablaze with light as she awaited Vivien’s return. If she’d been awake and seen his car pull up to the townhouse, his cellphone would have started ringing and his mother’s severely displeased voice would demand to know why he’d brought Vivien home so late, or early in the morning rather. If she suspected anything, she definitely would have had something to say about it by now, but his cell hadn’t so such as beeped with a text and there hadn’t been so much as a lamp burning in the big house. He hadn’t spoken with his mother since he’d left her house yesterday. She was the last person he wanted to speak to now. Henry took a big bite and washed it down with coffee. From the moment Vivien had walked into his house last night—no, the moment she’d slid into his car, he’d fought an impulse to touch her and pull her against his chest. He’d fought it as she’d unpinned her hair and shook her head, letting loose the scent of wild flowers. He’d succeeded in fighting it even as she’d sat on his couch, her bare legs stretched out on the beige cushions, laughing and trying to rile him up. Then she’d cried for her momma, her green eyes filling with tears and pain, her voice breaking, and he’d lost the fight. He’d given into his impulse to pull Vivien against him when he should have stepped away.
Hell, he had stepped away. He’d stepped away and put the distance from his kitchen to the couch between them. He’d tried to ignore her as she’d poked and provoked him, like when she’d been a kid and it had been a game to her. She wasn’t a child now, but her poking and provoking had still been a game. A sexually charged game that he hadn’t wanted to play but couldn’t resist. A game that had big consequences for them both.
Once she’d pushed him into admitting that he’d wanted to toss her on her momma’s pineapple table and pull her panties down, the sexual charge sizzling between them caught a spark and shot straight to his groin. Then she’d turned her face into his hand and the last threads of control turned to ash. She’d kissed his palm and looked up at him, a full-grown woman’s desire shining in her beautiful eyes and he hadn’t been able to recall a single reason why he shouldn’t jump on her like a duck on a June bug. He’d kissed her and touched her and danced the razor’s edge. Right and wrong hadn’t mattered, silenced by the taste of her lips and the need pounding between his legs.
Henry took another bite of his bagel and washed it down with a gulp of coffee. Vivien’s mouth had tasted of Chateau Montelena, of pear and honey. Henry had always been a sucker for good wine on soft lips. Her slick tongue had played with his, and her breathy little moans urged him on, making him want to hear more, filling his head with the sound of her ultimate pleasure.
Henry grabbed his coffee and headed to his bedroom.
I’m not drunk, she’d said. If not drunk, then she’d been tipsy. And vulnerable. Henry set his coffee on his dresser and walked into the bathroom. Vulnerable and grieving, but that hadn’t stopped him from tossing her on his counter and eating her up like a dessert buffet.
He pulled his T-shirt off over his head and stepped out of his jeans. Warm water rained down from the ceiling as he turned on the six heads and stepped into the shower.
He wasn’t proud of his behavior. He hadn’t been raised to take advantage of drunk, grieving women. Henry tipped his head back, and let the water pour over his face. He thought of Vivien’s face when he’d been buried deep inside her. Intense and totally mindless to anything but him and the hot, sexual pleasure he pumped into her.
“If you stop I’ll kill you,” she’d hollered unnecessarily. He’d been mindless at that point, too. Mindless to anything but her tight body milking every last drop of pleasure from him.
Even now, he couldn’t quite wrap his head around the night before. He’d had sex with Vivien. Good sex. If she hadn’t fallen asleep so soundly, he would have had sex with her again. The kind that was hot and sweaty. The kind that could never happen again.
He blamed his mother. If Nonnie hadn’t insisted that he do something about Spence’s hand on Vivien’s thigh, she wouldn’t have been in his house last night.
Once again, his mother’s paranoia had surfaced and she’d expected him to fix everything. That was him. Henry the fix-it man. He was the oldest male and head of the family, the person to make sure that all inconvenient skeletons remain tightly locked in the Whitley-Shuler closet.
He tipped his head forward and let the water rain down his back, waiting for the tension to ease between his shoulders.
So many secrets and scandals to keep hidden. His and Tracy Lynn’s. Nonnie and Fredrickk’s. Macy Jane and Vivien’s. He was tired of it all. Tired of the intertwined lies and secrets that began thirty-five years ago with Nonnie and Fredrickk Shuler and the biological father Henry had never known.
He’d first discovered that Fredrickk wasn’t his biological father in the fifth grade when his school class had learned about genetics. They ma
tched blood types and mapped inherited traits. He learned that he got his earlobes from his mother and hairline from his grandfather Whitley. He learned that he had type B blood, while Fredrickk and his mother had type O.
He recalled sitting in science class, studying his charts and graphs. He remembered his teacher, Mr. Roy, standing by his desk pointing to his mother’s and Fredrickk’s blood types. Then he remembered the man’s voice had trailed off as his finger stopped at Henry’s blood type.
“This can’t be right. You must have confused your parent’s blood types.”
“Yeah,” he’d said, but he knew there wasn’t any confusion. When he’d called his mother and asked about blood types for his class, she’d told him that both she and Fredrickk had type O. He remembered because she’d told him that they’d been real popular at the annual St. Cecilia blood drive because people with type O were universal donors.
Sitting in that biology class, he’d just been a kid, but it hadn’t taken him long to figure it out. It was impossible for type O parents to have a B child. He remembered feeling as if someone had punched him in the chest even as his ten-year-old brain refused to understand what it meant.
The warm water did little to ease Henry’s tension and he reached for a bar of soap. He lathered a washcloth and scrubbed his face and body. His mother had lied to him. Fredrickk lied, too, but he’d already been dead for four years when Henry had stared at the paper that changed his life.
His mother had lied to him. Ironically, she’d been caught in her lie when she’d told the truth. It had never occurred to Nonnie to lie about blood type. If she’d known, she would have lied about that, too.
When he’d questioned Nonnie, she hadn’t wanted to talk about it and had told him to let it go. Some things were best left alone, but of course he hadn’t let it go. He’d pushed until his mother had begrudgingly told him that she’d been three months pregnant when she married Fredrickk Shuler. His biological father was a man named Frank Olivier, a journeyman hired to restore the cabinets at the family plantation, Whitley Hall. His mother was twenty-five and had taken one look at Frank’s dark eyes and handsome face, and she’d instantly fallen for the thirty-year-old. His mother, who’d never seemed to put a foot wrong or breach society rules, had been wildly attracted to Frank and addicted to their secret affair. She’d loved Frank, but love wasn’t enough. Women with Nonnie’s blue blood certainly didn’t marry blue-collar men.
Ever.
Henry shut off the water and reached for a towel. Some things hadn’t changed in Southern society. Young women with old names did not get pregnant out of wedlock and they certainly didn’t marry unsuitable men. Nonnie’s great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had all belonged to the holiest of the holy, the St. Cecilia Society. Nonnie had made her debut at the exclusive St. Cecilia ball. She’d worn a white gown and gloves and her father had presented her to society when she was seventeen. Being a Southern debutante had been very important to Nonnie, and instead of telling Frank she was pregnant with his child, she’d made an “arrangement” with Fredrickk Shuler, ten years her senior. The Shuler name was even older than the Whitleys’ and just as respected.
Luckily for his mother, the Shulers lacked the one thing Nonnie had in abundance. Like a lot of old Southern gentry, they had short arms and long pockets. Land rich but cash poor. Fredrickk had been in desperate need of money, and Nonnie had been in desperate need of a “respectable” husband like Fredrickk who overlooked her expanding waist on their wedding day.
The thick towel soaked up droplets sliding down Henry’s back, and he wrapped it around his waist. His memory of Fredrickk was faded, but he did recall riding in his Lincoln and sailing the two-man dinghy in Harbor Town. He’d never met Frank, but he’d hired a private detective when he’d turned twenty-one. He learned that a few years after Frank left South Carolina, he’d been killed in a motorcycle accident. He hadn’t married or had children—except for Henry.
The sheets on the king-size bed were still rumpled from the night before and Henry dropped his towel to the floor. The day Nonnie had told him about his father had also been the day he was put in charge of guarding the family secrets. Whether or not he wanted the burden hadn’t mattered. It had been placed on his ten-year-old shoulders, and he’d never opened his mouth to anyone.
Not even Spence.
Henry opened a dresser drawer and grabbed a pair of clean boxers. Scandals and drama and guarding secrets brought his thoughts back around to Vivien, her pretty face, and warm body as she slept next to him. Guilt chomped at the back of his neck as he dressed. He’d had hot sex with a beautiful woman. He liked hot sex with beautiful women. Sex with beautiful women took up slots one, two, and three on his list of favorite things to do. If Vivien were any other woman on the planet, he’d try like hell to get her naked and filling up any and all spots on his favorite things to do.
He stepped into his boxers, then pulled on a pair of jeans. Vivien wasn’t just any woman. She was the one woman he never should have touched. For several good reasons, she was the one woman he could never touch again. No matter how much he wanted to kiss her north and her south. Too bad he hadn’t remembered that last night.
He’d only brought Vivien home to keep her from Spence and his brother’s roaming hands. If his mother knew he’d let his own hands roam all over Vivien, she’d pitch a shit fit. Not that his mother’s fits regulated his life. Even if he’d given his mother a thought last night, he still would have gone ahead and stripped Vivien naked. He just didn’t want to hear about it from a self-righteous hypocrite.
Henry looked at his phone and the one missed call from Hoyt. Somehow he’d managed to avoid a self-righteous bullet.
Chapter 12
“I’m not your servant and I’m not your lover.” Vivien read her dialogue out loud as she sat at an oblong table in the HBO production office off Santa Monica Boulevard. Across the table, the head writer for Physic Detectives scribbled notes on the script. Vivien would star in a guest role, playing a woman named Jenny Mumsford, the wife of Reverend Enoch Mumsford. The role had initially attracted Vivien because she’d never played a woman like Jenny. A woman who had the gift of telekinesis, like Stephen King’s Carrie. Enoch is abusive and has convinced Jenny that her powers come from Satan. In the last scene, Jenny gets revenge on the reverend in a spectacular bloodbath.
“I am everything,” the actor who played her husband and antagonist read. “I am your God.”
“Jenny hesitates as if to say something,” the scriptwriter read. “But he is the only thing keeping her from eternal damnation. Close scene on Jenny’s defeated profile.”
Vivien made a note on her script and placed her pen on the table. Shooting the first scene of her story line was set to start in a week. That gave her five days to figure out what she wanted to do with her mother’s estate.
As the director and writers talked about the setup for Jenny’s second scene, Vivien’s mind wandered to Charleston and everything that waited for her there. She had so much to do, and it felt just as overwhelming today as it had five days ago. Her grief and heartache felt just as raw as the day Henry found her digging in her momma’s flower bed, searching for a champagne cork.
Henry. Henry Whitley-Shuler. She’d had sex with him last night. She’d woke in his bed and arms and it all seemed so unreal. He’d kissed her and she’d kissed him right back. One unreal kiss had led to more kissing and touching and getting naked. Vivien had never been the kind of girl to throw caution to the wind and hop in a man’s bed unless she was in a relationship. Something she and Henry definitely were not. Jumping in Henry’s bed the day of her mother’s funeral had been inappropriate, scandalous, and just plain mind-blowing. And impulsive. Vivien didn’t like impulsive. Impulsive got her in trouble. She liked to make a plan and stick to it.
Perhaps it had been the stress of the day and the constant grief slicing her heart, but she certainly hadn’t even given a token resistance to Henry’s touch on her arms and his kiss on he
r neck. In fact, she’d pretty much goaded him into it. Like when they’d been kids and she’d provoked him just to see his reaction. Only this time he hadn’t scowled or called her a brat or threatened to kill her. This time he’d stripped her naked and she’d threatened to kill him if he stopped.
The memory made heat rise up her face and burn her cheeks. Who knew uptight Henry could kiss a woman and make her feel like she’d been struck by lightning? Who knew uptight Henry could make her come all undone?
After the table read, Vivien met with Randall Hoffman at Bouchon and discussed the starring role in his period drama based on the life of Dorothy Parker. Vivien wanted that part, along with every other actress in town. It would not only show her acting range, but an Academy Award-winning director usually meant Academy nominations for acting, too. Not only would starring in a Randall Hoffman film add more prestige to her résumé, it was essential when she started her own production company. Something she very much wanted to do in the future.
Following the lunch, Vivien drove to her house in Beverly Hills. She slowed her BMW as she passed through the gates and pulled into the garage of her Mediterranean-inspired house. Her meeting with Randall Hoffman had gone well. She was fairly certain she’d charmed the pants off him, but he wouldn’t make a decision until he met with the casting director. She’d known that in advance, of course, but waiting added stress on top of stress to her life. She wished she had a feeling one way or the other if he was going to cast her.
Exhaustion weighed on her shoulders and burned her eyes as she parked in the garage and took the elevator up to the second floor. Was it really just this morning that she’d caught a flight to L.A.? Really just this morning that Henry had woke her from a deep sleep and made sure she caught her 6-a.m. flight? Was she really catching a 6-a.m. flight right back to Charleston tomorrow?
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