by Amelia Wilde
My heart starts to pound.
What the hell is she up to?
There’s a stirring from the bedroom, and I swipe open the camera on my phone, take a picture of the call list, and dump the phone back into her purse.
Jesus Christ.
Then I go quickly to the couch and drop into it, pretending to thumb through my phone.
It’s not thirty seconds later that Carolyn appears in the bedroom doorway, hair a mess, face still pink from sleep. My heart tears in two.
Chapter 31
Carolyn
I reach for Ace, the gentle afternoon light filtering in through my eyelids, but he’s not there. I still feel half-drunk on the hot fuck that just happened—there’s no other way to describe it—but the cool, empty sheets put a damper on the warm buzz that I felt when I woke up.
Where is he?
I push myself up onto my elbows and peer over the foot of the bed. I can see one of the sleeves of his shirt from here, which means he hasn’t gone home, unless he left in a hurry and didn’t think about clothing.
Damn, he’s good.
I run a hand through my hair. I can feel how messed up it is, but I doubt he’ll care.
I just want him to get back in bed with me.
My heart picks up the pace a little, but I dismiss the tingling in my fingers. Why should I be nervous about the phone call I made just before Ace showed up? If he had a problem with it, he’d have said something. There’s no way he would have come in and pressed me up against the wall if he suspected that I’d just hired a private investigator in Italy seconds before he knocked on the door.
There’s just no way.
Right?
My shoulders start to tense up, but the memory of Ace’s hands on my back, on my ass, on the rest of my body, sends a flood of calm through me. It ends with a spark of need. I want more of him, and I want more of him right now.
But first I swing my legs over the side of the bed and move to the bathroom, where I take a few seconds to brush my teeth and corral my hair into something slightly more presentable. My face is pink from being pressed against the pillow.
There’s no sound from my bedroom, so I go to the doorway.
Ace is on the couch in the living room, looking down at his phone.
“Hey,” I say, and my voice is low, still fighting off the deep sleep.
He looks at me, and his eyes narrow for a split second, and then go wide. I’m still naked, and he can’t stop his gaze from traveling down the length of my body.
“Hey,” he says into the silence. His eyes are bright with what looks like lust, but there’s something else happening in his expression that I can’t quite place.
“Are you okay?” He looks more than fine to me, with all of his muscles on display, but I can’t help myself.
“Yeah,” he says, glancing back down at his phone before he turns off the screen. “Yeah, just checking in on some business stuff.”
Something doesn’t ring true about what he’s saying, and I open my mouth to say so, but then close it again.
Who am I to accuse him of lying? I’m the one who’s looking into his past instead of asking him directly.
Of course, I’ve tried that, but he didn’t have anything to say.
I go back into the bedroom and get a pink silk robe from its place on my bathroom door, tying it around my waist on the way back out to the couch. Then I take the place next to Ace, leaning down so that my head is in his lap.
His hand goes to my hair, running his fingers through it, though his eyes don’t meet mine. There’s a little wrinkle in his forehead that tells me something is on his mind, but I doubt pressing him is going to get me anywhere.
I close my eyes and lose myself in his touch.
“You’re gorgeous,” he says softly.
“You’re gorgeous.” It’s the absolute truth. He is the most gorgeous man I have ever seen in my life, and just being close to him sends a knife-like twist of guilt through my gut.
What am I getting out of all of this, anyway? A lifetime obsession with rumors? The secret satisfaction of knowing that I’m the queen of New York City’s wealthiest gossips?
If Ace were really a murderer, why would the Italian officials have let him return to the United States?
What’s any of this worth, if I lose him in the process?
I open my eyes for a moment and see that he’s pressed his lips together, and my heart plummets to my toes. I close my eyes again. Is he preparing to tell me something that I’m definitely not going to like?
Is this a repeat of that first night we spent together, only with higher stakes?
“Is something on your mind?” I keep my voice as gentle as possible, not daring to ask about anything specific.
“Yes.”
There’s another silence that lasts so long that the only reason I know he’s still in the room is that I’m literally on top of him, and he never stops stroking my hair. My body melts, but my mind is still tense, waiting, bracing for impact.
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
Maybe if I let him off the hook, he’ll feel like he can talk to me. Maybe he’ll tell me what happened before he came back to New York City, and everyone can just move on. If he did that, then I could be certain I wasn’t being set up for another hard fall, and I’d tell him right then that I love him, that I’m in love with him, and that I have to see where this goes.
“I don’t know if I can find the right words.”
That sends my heart racing, thudding against my rib cage, because his tone is so neutral.
The next words out of his mouth could be about anything, and all I can do is lay here and wait, even if I want to whip my head up and look him in the eye and demand that he tell me everything, right now….
Ace takes a deep breath.
Chapter 32
Ace
I am desperate to know what the numbers on Carolyn’s phone mean. I am desperate to know who she was talking to. I am desperate to know if this is all a horrible waste of time.
All my questions stick in my throat.
“Hey,” she says from the doorway, and the sound of her half-asleep voice guts me.
How could this sweet, perfect creature be hiding anything from me?
How could she not be?
When she asks me if I’m okay—I don’t know why she does, but something in my expression must give me away—I lie to her.
I want to tell her that no, there are things on my mind I don’t want to ask her about, but I can’t force the words from my mouth.
She disappears back into the bedroom and comes out a minute later wearing a delicate pink robe, knotting the belt around her waist. I want to unknot the belt and take her back into the bedroom, and I can see by the way she’s biting her lip that she’d be into it, but I don’t get up from the couch.
Carolyn comes around and sits next to me, then leans delicately over so that her head is resting in my lap.
It seems like the most natural thing in the world to run my fingers through her hair, over and over, working out the knots from her sleep.
Her eyes search my face, but I keep mine purposely unfocused. If I look at her now, I’ll lose myself entirely.
She closes her eyes.
I want to say, I heard you. I didn’t mean to, but I heard you through the door, and I want you to tell me who you were talking to. But even in my head, the words sound too overbearing, even for me.
“You’re gorgeous,” I say.
“You’re gorgeous,” she murmurs, keeping her eyes closed, but I feel her back arch a little bit like she’s replaying me fucking her not long ago. Her lips turn down into a little frown, and my mouth goes dry. I want to know what’s happening in her mind so badly that it hurts.
Her eyelids flutter, and I look away from her face. When I look back down, they’re closed again.
“Is something on your mind?”
Her tone is so soft it’s almost pleading. It’s the most gentle invitation
possible for me to talk to her.
All the things I could say rush through my mind in a cacophony of words, senseless and jumbled. You need to tell me what you’re up to. Tell me what’s on your mind. Don’t hide things from me because I don’t think I can take it again. Not one more time in this life or any other. Just tell me, tell me, tell me.
Instead, I say, “Yes.”
Then there’s a thickness in my throat that I can’t seem to swallow away. Elisa swims up in my memory, the way her face looked before she died, and my mind rears back away from it.
I can’t say anything.
I can’t break the silence, which grows heavier by the moment. Carolyn’s face remains completely neutral—I haven’t stopped running my fingers through her hair, and at this point I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to—and her muscles are relaxed against me with a hint of tension humming underneath.
She parts her lips, and I want to lean down and kiss her, but I don’t.
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
My heart twists. Her voice is so sincere, so soothing, that for once I don’t feel like I’m being baited into revealing something in spite of myself. Her shoulders tense a little bit, waiting for my reply.
I can’t leave her hanging indefinitely.
“I don’t know if I can find the right words.”
This is as much of the truth as I can bear to give her. If I tell her everything in a rush right now, there’s no telling what might happen, and there’s a tiny part of me that questions whether she can be trusted, after all that happened today.
I want so much for it to be a meaningless phone conversation to a friend that I can’t ask the question.
I can’t.
But there’s another truth that I can tell her. This one might possibly open some door between us that will rid us of these silences.
Carolyn’s air conditioning unit kicks on, humming quietly in the background, while I struggle to settle on the best approach. Do I just blurt it out?
Jesus, I’m going to look like a fucking idiot, no matter what I say. If it’s not perfect, after spending this long thinking about it, she’s going to think I’m a total dumbass. I have to say something, and even though Carolyn is giving me no indication that she’s in any kind of rush, I feel the moments ticking away with the beating of my heart.
Say something. Say something. Say something.
I suck in a deep breath, hoping that by the time my lungs are filled with air, I’ll be certain of the ideal thing to say to this lovely woman with her head in my lap, the woman I want to spend every waking minute with, the one I’m desperate to be sure of before I let myself go completely.
But I’m already gone. That’s the catch. I’ve already fallen so hard for her, for her kindness, for the way she wants me, that it’s too late.
She must be dying for me to say something, after that little preamble. Who wouldn’t be? But she doesn’t move, just lets me keep stroking her hair. There is not even the slightest hint of a knot now. I’ve been thorough.
“The thing is,” I say, and then I have to stop to clear my throat. “The thing is, I don’t want to spend another day without you.”
The unsaid “but” hangs in the air between us, and Carolyn opens her eyes.
She bites her lip and looks away.
Instead of joy, her face shows nothing but guilt.
Chapter 33
Carolyn
Jesus Christ, I am the worst human on the face of the earth.
Ace’s face is red—he basically just admitted to me that he loves me, or at least cares about me enough to want to spend every waking moment with me, and I—
I do nothing.
I sit up from his lap and look down at my hands, trying to force a smile onto my face.
This is exactly what I wanted. He is exactly the kind of man I want to be with—strong, passionate, complex. At this point, now that we’ve gotten past the asshole exterior, I can see clearly that he only has one flaw…and that flaw might turn out to be nothing.
I look up into his face, but he’s not looking at me. He’s looking blankly across the room, cheeks flaming.
I can’t stand it.
“Ace,” I say into the silence, and he turns to look into my face, his gray eyes dark, his forehead slightly furrowed with embarrassment. “I feel the same way.”
His expression relaxes, but he keeps his lips pressed together, hard. I waited too damn long to say anything and now this is awkward and awful.
I want to tell him how I feel—how I really feel, like my heart is going to explode when he’s not with me, how, more than anything, I want all these rumors to go away and leave us both alone forever, but if I do that….
If I do that, it’s going to mean coming clean about every aspect of my life. Including Rainflower Blue. Including the private investigator.
Now or never.
My phone buzzes in my purse, and then a ringtone kicks on.
“Shit.”
My phone is almost always on silent, so that it only vibrates, but calls from the boutique have a special ringtone so that I know not to ignore them. I leap up from the couch and hustle across to where my purse hangs on a hook near the doorway, fumbling for it and answering it at the last second.
“Hello?” I say, with just a hint of irritation in my voice. The boutique isn’t open on Sundays, so I don’t know what the problem could possibly be. I glance back into the living room. Ace is looking at me, eyebrows drawn together, and when I mouth “just a second, I’m sorry” he rubs the back of his neck and picks up his own phone.
“Carolyn? It’s—it’s Natalie.” Her voice is wavering, shaken. I’m such an asshole sometimes. She wouldn’t be calling me on a Sunday afternoon unless something was wrong.
“What’s up, Natalie?”
“I was coming in to the boutique to make sure we were all set up tomorrow, since—since last Monday was so busy, and—”
“Did something happen, Nat?”
“The front window is smashed!” she wails, and I can tell she’s on the verge of tears, if not already crying. “It looks like there’s some stuff missing on the inside, but I can’t tell what, and….”
“Did you call 9-1-1?”
“N—not yet. I just got here, and I—”
“I’m going to hang up, Natalie. You call 9-1-1 and tell them what happened. I’ll be there in five minutes, okay?”
“Okay,” she says, her voice choked. I can’t leave her like that, even for five minutes.
“Natalie, are you still there?”
“Y-yes?”
“You did the right thing, okay? You’re not at fault for this. Unless you were the one who smashed the window.” I keep my tone calm, with the hint of a tease at the end.
“I didn’t!” she says, letting out a burst of laughter that verges on hysteria. “I would never!”
“I know it. That’s why I hired you. Now, call 9-1-1 and wait for me.”
I end the call and turn back toward Ace.
“Something happen with the boutique?”
“Yeah,” I say, shoulders slumping. Today of all days…. “Someone smashed one of the front windows, and it looks like some of the merchandise was stolen.” I think of Natalie standing on the sidewalk by herself, and that’s all it takes to send me sprinting to my bedroom.
While I’m pulling a respectable outfit from my dresser drawers and throwing it on, Ace appears in the doorway. He leans against the doorframe with his arms crossed over his chest. “Do you want me to come with you?”
“No,” I say, then realize I’ve rejected him too quickly. I give him a flirty smile, but the corners of his mouth barely turn upward. “You’ll distract me with your sexy ways. I don’t want this to take up the rest of your day.”
He opens his mouth like he wants to argue, then moves into the room and starts collecting his clothes. “You’ll let me know how everything goes?”
The sincerity in his tone, the hurt that’s underneath, tears my he
art in two. I want to knock the clothes out of his hands and take him right back to bed, where we can just talk everything out…after a slow, delicious fuck. That’s what I want right now.
I just can’t have it.
“Ace,” I say, straightening up. “I want to talk to you. I don’t think our conversation is over.”
He pulls his pants on over his boxers and waves dismissively. “Another time.” There’s a jolt of something cool in the air between us, and I don’t like it.
I’m going to have to be the one to change it.
But what the hell am I going to be able to do?
“You’re working tomorrow, right?”
“Of course.” He pulls his shirt on over his head, then finishes with socks. I watch him as he scans the room, looking for anything he might have left behind, and then he heads for the doorway.
I follow him out as he moves toward the front door.
“Wait.”
When he turns to me, I pull him down and kiss him, long and hard, and he kisses me back, but there’s a hint of reservation there that sends a chill down my spine.
What have I done?
“There’s one more thing,” I say, slipping on my shoes. Then I go back into the kitchen and open one of the cupboards.
When I get back to Ace, he’s put his shoes on and is waiting to leave.
“Will you come back and wait for me if I call?”
He pauses for a beat, then nods. “Yes.”
I drop my spare key into his hand. “Be ready.”
He doesn’t return my wicked grin.
Chapter 34
Ace
Carolyn doesn’t call me on Sunday, or on Monday, although we exchange several text conversations. She’s completely wrapped up in the business with the boutique.
I walked by later on Sunday evening and she was still there with two of her employees. The glass had been swept into a pile on the edge of the sidewalk.
She didn’t see me, but I saw her. The compassion in her face was just as genuine as her voice had been on the phone when the first call came in. Just before I turned away, she finished speaking, and the three women turned toward the display racks together, Carolyn saying something that made them laugh.