by PJ Adams
She took his list and stood. “Thanks for the list, Thom”, she said. “That’s really useful.”
Then she leaned over and kissed him tenderly on the cheek, and in that moment they both really knew that it was over.
“Are you going to be okay?” he asked, as she straightened.
She nodded. “I am. You?”
He shrugged. “I’ll get there.”
And then she turned and walked out of his life.
10
She recalled her own advice to Ray, when they’d had that brainstorming session about how he was being pulled in every different direction as he built up to relaunching his career.
Why are you doing this? Who are you doing it for?
He wasn’t doing it for the record company executives, or all the people around him. He wasn’t even doing it for the fans. He was doing it for him.
When he realized that it shaped everything. The whole relaunch became a stripped back thing, even the music pared back down to the raw energy and spark that had inspired him to do it in the first place.
This was her life.
Why are you doing this? Who are you doing it for?
She’d had enough of running around, chasing shadows. Of caring about what everyone else wanted and expected. She needed to do what was right for her.
Before, she’d been afraid of ultimatums and making demands, but sometimes that’s exactly what you need: a clear question, and a clean answer.
Stripped back.
Pared down.
This is it.
§
Are you home?
He’d said he only had a few loose ends to tidy up and then he would fly back. He should be home by now, but she hadn’t heard anything.
Had he taken her departure as a closing scene, or was he simply trying to be discreet and give her some space?
I am xx
§
He met her at the front door. He’d been watching out for her, and when her cab pulled up he was there, in the doorway of his north London house.
He looked different, but she couldn’t work out why at first.
He stood there in blue jeans, white t-shirt, arms folded protectively across his chest.
That was it: protective. Defensive. Scared.
She liked that in a man, that he was capable of understanding just when to be really scared. Knowing when it really was make or break, when there was so much at stake.
She stood one step down from him, and yet still she felt as if she was the one in the dominant position.
“You’re just a man,” she said.
He waited for her to go on, but instead she climbed the last step, and moved past him into the house. She pushed the door and went into the front room. The walls were painted white, the furniture black; an upright piano in scuffed, dark wood stood by the window. That old chestnut acoustic guitar still leaned against the far wall.
“I never claimed to be anything else,” he said, coming in to stand by the piano.
“You’re not a rock star. You’re not the delicious eye candy from all those posters I had.” He looked mock-hurt at that. “You’re not who the press say you are. You’re just a man. Full of complications and flaws and contradictions. I always thought I understood that, but, well... I think it’s only now that I really get it.”
“I’ve been trying to make you understand this all along. I try to be a good man, but I know I find it very easy to be a complete jerk. I desperately want to be the man worthy of you.”
His eyes transfixed her.
“I’m not the only one who wears a mask,” he said. “Or who has masks applied to them by others. We all do. Different masks for different situations. I see who you are, Emily. I saw through all those layers and masks right from the moment I saw you in the crowd at the Roxette. I see who you are and I love you, and all I want is for you to do that for me.”
That moment... in the crowd. The eye contact.
“The song... was that just a line you spun me? You’d already written the song: it didn’t come to you then.”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t a line I was spinning,” he said. “All I told you... the song coming in a flash, knowing that it meant something special... all that was true, just in a different order. Sometimes reality just doesn’t write the story the way it should. Yes, I’d already written that song, but I didn’t understand it. When I saw you, I knew. It was your song. Our song. It all made sense then. Everything did.”
They each took a step, another, and now they stood, toes almost touching, bodies almost touching, hands hanging at their sides, as if neither had ever touched or held another person.
“Like I say...” His voice was husky, faltering. “I want to be worthy of you, but I can be a jerk. I’ve been a jerk. But it’s only because it matters so much. I’m scared, Emily. I’ve never felt like this before. I don’t know how to trust people. I don’t know how to be loved. It’s new ground for me, it really is.”
She reached up, put a finger to his lips to silence him. Turned her hand so that she could cup his chin, gently draw him in, down, until his lips were against hers.
Some time later she pulled slightly away and looked up into his eyes.
“I love you, Ray Sandler,” she said.
She’d never felt like this either. Never really known how to trust or how to be loved.
Not properly.
Not like this.
Epilogue
It was a few days later, the Sunday, when Róisín came.
Emily and Ray were out in the park behind his London home. They’d spread a picnic blanket, brought a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and settled in for the afternoon.
Emily was sitting, Ray lying, his head in her lap. It was a strange and simple pleasure to be able to do something like this, but this pocket of the city was somehow different, the park almost a private garden where the press would finally leave them alone.
Ray sat up, twisted and kissed her, then stood. “Just heading inside for a minute,” he said, and strolled over to the doorway through to his back yard.
Emily settled back onto her elbows and closed her eyes, soaking in the warmth of the sun.
A shadow fell over her and at first Emily thought it was a cloud, but the sky had been blue. She opened her eyes and Róisín stood there, tall, angular, hands on hips as she looked down at her.
For an instant, Emily panicked, remembering Ray joking that Róisín was becoming a stalker.
Emily’s eyes darted around. There was no one nearby. The nearest people were a young family across on the other side of the grass, the father playing football with small boy and girl; a dog-walker heading away along the path that angled across the park. Pigeons and starlings scuffing in the dirt.
She remembered that slightly manic interview where Róisín had claimed to be back with Ray.
There was something Ray had said: Don’t worry about Róisín... She likes the mischief, but she’s not dangerous. If he had felt the need to say she was not dangerous then did that mean there was the possibility that she might be?
Then she saw the look on Róisín’s face.
It was the same expression that had stolen over Thom’s features that evening. The realization. The acceptance.
“I was wrong, wasn’t I?” said Róisín.
Emily nodded.
“He won’t always come back to me.” There was a melancholy beauty to those Dublin tones, now. “This is different. Mo said that to me. Rake did, too, after he’d met you. He tried. Rake did. Stupid. I thought Ray would come back if his old friends could remind him about all the good times...”
The good times: the drink and the drugs. The old days.
“But I was wrong. I just thought you should know that.” And then she turned to walk away. After a few paces, she paused and looked back. “Don’t break him like I did,” she said. “You hear? I’ll have your ass if you do. You take good care of him.”
And then she really did walk away.
§
/> Ray emerged seconds later.
He looked down at Emily, saw something in her expression and his eyes narrowed. Then he followed Emily’s gaze to the tall, skinny figure now in the distance and just about to leave the park.
“Is that...?”
He looked back at Emily.
“Is everything okay?”
She nodded, then smiled. “It is,” she said. “I really think that it is.”
Afters
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About the author
Writing under other names, PJ Adams is a successful novelist, with several novels published by major publishing houses and optioned for movies. As PJ Adams, she writes in the genre closest to her heart, erotic romance – love stories with that added heat, including the international bestsellers Winner Takes All and Black Widow. Working as Polly J Adams, she writes best-selling erotica, relationship stories crammed full of explicit sex. Among Polly's most popular stories are the Girls’ Club series, and Wings of Desire, the story of a young woman's relationship with the wealthy owner of a New England sex club.
You can find out more about PJ and her writing on her website, on http://www.facebook.com/pollyjadamswriter and on Twitter as @PollyJAdams.
More from PJ Adams
Winner Takes All
When a guy in a tux walks into a bar in the middle of nowhere, dripping wet from the storm, and pulls out a sodden roll of hundred dollar bills, you just know he's going to be trouble.
Denny McGowan has lost his girl, his best friend and millions of dollars. All he has are the clothes on his back, the money in his pocket, an easy, wise-cracking charm that could melt the hardest of hearts... and two gangsters on his tail and out for revenge.
Cassandra Dane is down on her luck, and on the run from a father fresh out of jail. She's probably the last girl you'd expect to hook up with someone as hot and exciting as Denny - and she knows it. But things are not always what they seem and sometimes you're just on the tail-end of a string of bad luck and worse decisions.
When a one-night stand looks like becoming something more than that, Cassie must decide whether she can trust a complete stranger like Denny and work out what he's really after. As matters of the heart become matters of life and death, Cassie has some tough choices to make.
And foremost among these: just how many chances do you give a guy like Denny McGowan?
Winner Takes All: the explosive bad boy romance from bestselling erotic romance author PJ Adams.
Winner Takes All is available from: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and other Amazon stores.
Excerpt
“Hey, Bub. You going to drink that beer or shall I wrap it so you can take it home?” Same old line, same old grunt of a response. Old Bub would be there till ten, down the rest of his Bud in a single swallow, and then head out into the night.
Cassie glanced across towards the window table. The young couple didn’t need anything yet. Back to her nails, hooker red and chipped. That kind of summed up how she felt right then. Cheap and worn. She liked it here at Pappy’s, but was she really going to be back in March to open up again? Was this her life now that she’d lasted more than a solitary season?
She took a cloth and gave the bar a spray and a wipe, even though it already had enough shine that she could do her face in it.
All this cleaning, it was wrecking her hands. The skin was dry. It made her feel old when she wasn’t even 25 until January. She hated this time of year, hated this sinking feeling, the Fall blues. She needed change. She needed something new.
She needed this not to be it.
Just then, with perfect timing, the door burst open, slamming against the wall as the gale took it. Standing there, framed in the doorway, was the guy Cassie would come to know as Denny McGowan.
In that tailored tux he looked like he should be someplace else entirely, but yet... it looked like he had walked here. On a night like this! His patent leather shoes were scuffed and dirty, there was mud around the cuffs of his pants; his shirt was untucked, his undone bow tie hanging loose. His jacket hung heavy with the rain, and his black hair was plastered to his skull. Maybe there had been an accident, or his car had broken down back on the highway.
Then, with a cheeky grin that cracked his face and put a sparkle in his eyes, he reached into his pocket, produced a fat roll of hundred dollar bills, and casually thumbed one free of the sodden mass of paper.
“So tell me, what does a guy have to do to get a drink around here?” he asked in an accent somewhere between Boston and genuine Irish, and then he stepped inside, pulling the door shut behind him and shutting the wild storm out.
(continues...)
Winner Takes All is available from: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and other Amazon stores.
The Object of His Desire
When Trudy goes to her estranged brother's wedding, the last thing she expects is one of those moments: a handsome stranger, their eyes meeting across a crowded room... a tempting, but dangerous stranger. Determined to find out more, she discovers that dark secrets bind him to her brother; she also learns that he's the kind of man who gets what he wants, and what he wants right now is Trudy.
Introducing her to the world of the super-wealthy, he showers her with designer clothes, shoes, and diamonds, whisking her off to dinner dates by private jet... what more could a girl want?
But as she finds out more about him, Trudy begins to wonder if she can ever love a man she can never fully trust. A man involved in murder and blackmail, who may just be using her as an alibi. Should she run or let herself fall for him? And will he give her a choice?
A passionate erotic romance, where scandals buried away in the past lead to murderous intrigue in the present, in the intensely steamy world of the super-wealthy and powerful.
The Object of His Desire is available from: Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and other Amazon stores.
Excerpt
Even now, I’m unsure whether it was a genuine Jane Austen moment or the worst of clichés: eyes meeting across a crowded room, for heaven’s sake.
What can I say?
I was nervous, in a crowd of mostly strangers and distant acquaintances.
I was feeling flustered after a difficult journey and finally arriving at this little chapel in the middle of nowhere later than I’d intended – I hate not being in control.
I was unsettled by the rush of mixed emotions in my head. I was about to see my big brother again after far too long; despite following him across the Atlantic to England we’d drifted ever farther apart over the last couple of years.
I was thrown by the realization that his best man was Charlie, the ex who could still wrap me around his posh little English finger after all this time.
Under these circumstances a girl can surely be forgiven a lapse into cliché. No?
§
I’d driven for nearly four hours to reach this remote little Norfolk chapel. It had taken far too long to escape the tangle of London traffic, and even longer driving through the winding East Anglian lanes trying to find the place.
Deep breath, Trudy. I was here. I’d made it on time.
I stood outside the chapel and straightened my three-quarter length Anoushka G dress. Deep cornflower blue, with scooped neck-line and a lily fascinator pinned to my long auburn hair, even I’d admit that I felt good in my wedding outfit.
I realized I was falling back on coping strategies I’d developed in my teens: a constant interior monologue of commentary and pep talks.
You look good, Trude.
That dress will make up for all sorts, and you can get away with those sucky-in Magic Knickers you bought in desperation, because you just know you’re the only one who’s ever going to see them.
Nice shoes, by the way.
Whatever it takes.
I recognized a few of the faces of the guests milling around in the churchyard. They were Cambridge buddies of Ethan’s. When
I’d first come over from New Haven, I’d hung out with him in his college halls for a few weeks before landing my temporary job at Ellison and Coles, a wonderfully quaint traditional publisher with offices just off Covent Garden, right in the heart of London.
As we waited to enter the chapel, people smiled at me and nodded, but they were all in their own little groups and no one seemed particularly interested in me. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t in any mood for small talk, just yet. Instead, I checked my cell phone, only to find that there was no signal. I opened my mail just the same, and glanced through emails I’d already downloaded.
“You’ve got signal? Or are you just bluffing so you look busy even though you’re here on your own and nobody’s talking to you?”
I didn’t look round. I didn’t have to.
“Bastard,” I said softly.
“But a good-looking bastard, right? You always did say that I scrubbed up rather well.”
I turned. Honey-blond hair, sharp blue eyes, and the way the tuxedo and neatly pressed pants hung on his lean body... I took a deep breath and tried not to find him attractive.
Charlie didn’t look a day older than when I’d last seen him over a year before, ducking a flying ash tray as he backed out of the Islington apartment we’d shared back then.
“Last time I saw you–”
“You were a lousy shot. I only ducked to make you feel better about your aim. See? Even then I was looking out for you, babe.”
“I only missed because I didn’t want blood on the carpet. It was deliberate.”
“You preferred that dent in the door?” The ash tray had made a nasty gouge in the wood-panel door on impact. I’d never got round to fixing it: my little memento of the year with Charlie.
“Okay, so I misjudged that one. I should have hit you with it.”