by Ally Blake
She dropped her hand and took a step closer. “You still want me, Finn. And I still want you. If this lasts another night, another week, another month, for me, that’s better than walking away simply because you’re scared.”
“You think I’m scared?”
There. That flash of male pride. The heat of it burned holes in his guard. Giving her a way in.
She shrugged. Took another step closer. “I think you’re scared of something. Something you’re hiding. Something you’re avoiding. Something you don’t want to talk about. And I want you to know that whatever it is, I can handle it.”
The guard was back. She stopped moving. Stopped breathing.
“What do you want from me, April?”
She put her hands to her hair. “I want you to stop calling me April in that voice of yours. It’s like warm honey running down my spine and it makes my mind melt. I want you to put a shirt on so I can think straight. Then I want answers.”
“I don’t have any answers you’d want to hear.”
“Bullshit. You, my friend, have all the answers. You hold all the cards. You have me so worked up I’m resorting to figures of speech.”
He laughed. More of an outshot of breath through his nose, but still it was a warming. A softening. A new way in.
And then he took a step towards her. His words came slow, steady, determined. “I told you what I wanted from you, April. What do you want from me?”
“I want to know who you are.”
“Anything else?” he asked, his voice like liquid fire.
“I want to know why you have such a beautiful apartment and refuse to furnish it.”
“That all?”
He was close enough to touch now. She could feel the waves of his magnetic pull, tugging at her skin like a million tiny hooks.
“I want to know why when I Google your name there’s nothing. It’s as if you don’t exist.”
“You want to be my Facebook friend?”
Her hands went straight to her hips. Wonder Woman pose. Talk about body language. “Seriously? That’s all you got out of that?”
Nothing. The man gave her nothing. When all she wanted from him was everything.
Dammit. Damn him. Damn it all.
April took one final step and slapped Finn on the arm. Then the chest. Her hand slid off the wet planes. So she went at him with a fist. And once she’d started she couldn’t stop.
And he let her. He stood there like a big, meaty wall and let her pummel him. What the hell was wrong with the guy?
She hit until she ran out of puff. Till she couldn’t remember why she’d even started. Then her fists uncurled and her palms rested against his chest. Her forehead followed, sinking into the safety of his shoulder.
His skin was warm. Damp. He smelled like big, clean male. He felt like home.
“I’ve had a bad day.”
“I can see that.”
“I had a fight with my sister. I lost it with my mum. I made mistakes at work because I couldn’t keep my head on straight. I’m lying by omission to my boss who’s only ever been nice to me. I don’t like how it feels.” And here was the kicker. “I wanted to feel better. So I came here.”
She fully expected him to stay silent. To pretend she hadn’t said what she’d said. It wasn’t what they were about, after all.
Instead, he nodded. And something snapped inside of her. Her feelings poured through the crack like water bursting through a broken dam.
Her voice was husky as she said, “You say I make things feel simple for you. Well, for me, you make my life feel real. Like it’s finally happening, right now. It’s not just dreams or hopes or plans or wishes on fairy dust. Or looking back and making sure not to make the same mistakes. But now. It’s scary. And I love it. I know it’s not what you want to hear. But it’s the truth.”
Time slunk by. Long, slow beat after long, slow beat.
“I’m such a fool.”
“You’re not a fool.”
She looked up, into his eyes. Such beautiful, deep, secretive, sad eyes. “I’m not?”
He shook his head.
Knowing she was about to step over a great big line she’d drawn in the sand when her father had walked out on their family, a line that put her solely in charge of her own destiny, April let go. She let go and she felt herself fall. Deep, spiralling out of control. It was like every urge to be a little bit bad she’d had over her whole life contracted into one giant explosion of experience.
It was transformative.
Thus transformed, she lifted up onto her toes, placed her hands on Finn’s face and pressed her lips to the edge of his jaw.
Tipping his head the other way, she kissed just below his other earlobe.
She could feel his heat, his breaths, the solid thumping of his heart.
She could also feel his resistance. He was still fighting against letting go. Maybe he always would. His will was stronger than hers. Meaning the moment he dropped the towel, letting it slide to the floor with a swoosh and drew her into his arms she could have cried.
A sigh melted through her body at the contact. At the knowledge that the only thing between her and all that beautiful skin was a Wonder Woman t-shirt.
Pulling his head to hers, she covered his mouth with her own.
It felt like a lifetime since she’d last tasted him, leant on him. It felt like all she’d ever done. Like she could go on doing so for a million years more.
Kissing, kissing, kissing, she went with him as he backed her against the couch.
His mouth moved to her cheeks, her neck, pushing her hair from her face so he could kiss her all over.
No way was she going to cry, but emotion welled in her, so thick and fast, it had to spill out of her somewhere or she might just explode.
Then he was on his knees, lifting her Wonder Woman shirt, lapping at her belly. Shoving her jeans down so he could graze his teeth over her hipbone. She gripped his hair, sinking her fingers into the wet strands.
Her button went pop. Her zip went scrape. Then he turned her slowly, kissing the hipbone he’d bitten a second before. Kissing the curve of her backside. Running his lips back and forth over her lower back as he slowly, slowly pulled her jeans over her—
Finn gripped her by the hips and tilted her backside to the nearby lamp.
Seemed he’d found her tattoo.
She twisted. Stretched so she could see the words “To the Bitter End” scrawled on her coccyx. All it needed was an arrow to be really obscene. Thankfully, being a redhead, her tolerance to pain wasn’t up to scratch and she’d stopped the tattoo artist before she could go all the way.
She closed her eyes tight while she awaited his reaction. When it came it was a doozy. He burst into laughter. Laughing so hard the beautiful sound rocked the room. Laughing so hard he let her go.
She spun to face him, her eyes flying open; any and all arguments flying out of her head at the sight of him in all his naked glory. Kneeling before her. It was amazing she could get a word out at all.
“I was eighteen. Wouldn’t have dared get one till then. I’m the good sister, you see. My mother calls such lapses in judgement my ‘little rebellions’.”
“What do you call it?” he asked.
“A motto. Of sorts. I’m not much one for giving up.”
“You don’t say.” His eyes clouded as they ran over her t-shirt, her bare belly, her jeans halfway down her hips. Then he tugged her to the rug, and balanced over the top of her. She helped, wriggling herself free. Panting. So ready for him she ached.
And when he resumed his kisses down her body she slammed her eyes shut to contain her emotions. Not all that easy as his tongue dipped into her belly button. His teeth grazed her hipbone. His chin nudged her thighs apart and he went to town.
As the world dipped away, sensation spiralling and tightening and coalescing into such sweet, tender heat it tore her apart, she knew. She was in so much trouble with this guy. Deep, deep trouble.
With a
sigh that shook her to the core, she welcomed trouble, she owned trouble; for though she’d tried so hard to live a life without trouble, she was her father’s daughter too.
April stared at the ceiling of Finn’s lounge room; one arm flung over her eyes, the other lying across Finn’s sweaty chest, a couch cushion lodged under her left knee as she struggled to find her breath.
Finn ran a finger up and down her wrist. And while it tickled like crazy she was too exhausted to protest. Or move.
“Hungry?” Finn asked.
“Famished,” April said, her voice scraping against her throat.
“Hmmm. Me too.”
When Finn didn’t move, April thumped him on the chest. Growling, he curled into a ball. But she knew it was all an act. She’d never met anyone more mentally tough. Or more thumpable. She thumped him again, her attempts as chastisement bouncing off his muscles like a pillow off a trampoline.
Gathering the tattered remains of energy, she moved the cushion out from under her and turned to face him. He really was the most beautiful man she’d ever met. He was going to be the absolute undoing of her if she didn’t at least try to save herself.
Meaning she needed ammunition. Reminders of why he was so bad for her. “Temporary” wasn’t cutting it. “Illusive” hadn’t done the trick. She needed something big, something that would cut through the fugue of desire and stick.
Which was why she decided the time for unearthing had come. “So where’s your tattoo, big guy?”
“What makes you think I have any?”
“Please. You have tattoo written all over you.” So to speak.
“I’m a respected businessman.”
She snorted. Real ladylike. But it only made him grin.
“I’ve never met any man I’ve considered less respectable.”
His eyes narrowed. “Who else have you dated? Men of the cloth?”
Dated? Did that meant he now considered them dating? Word choices were telling, even if the teller didn’t mean for them to be. April blinked hard, trying to squeeze out her mother’s voice.
“You may know how to turn on the charm, Finn Ward, but you are a predator. Like a shark who’s come out the other end of rehab for an addiction to eating people but still enjoys a raw steak.”
Finn rolled to his side, took her cushion and used it as a pillow. He looked into her eyes. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”
“It’s all there. All in your eyes. The scars on your body. The way you keep yourself separate. The things you say and the things you don’t. You just have to bother to look.”
“Most people don’t bother to look.”
“Their loss.”
He ran a finger over her eyebrow and down her cheek, his hazy gaze following all the way.
His voice came out quiet, almost as if he was talking to himself. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
“You bet your life you haven’t.”
The intensity remained in his eyes, only now it was tempered with heat as his big hand pushed her hair away from her face so he could look. And look. And look.
April swallowed. Tried to come up with something pithy to ground her, to take away the feeling that she was falling, tumbling, with nothing but an abyss at her back.
Instead she said, “Tell me something true.”
“You’re a fan of confessions, aren’t you?”
“Here’s why.” She pushed him back onto his back and shuffled to lean her forearms and chin on his big chest. “My mother wrote a book about me. It hit bestseller lists in Germany, Croatia, and on the New York Times.”
“That’s... random. What was the book about?”
“It’s called The Truth Will Set You Free.”
“Of course it is.”
“Mmm. She’s a psychiatrist, see. A dedicated one. She thought she had life figured out. Then Dad left, messing up everything she thought she knew about the world. And it was either crumble or make a new kind of sense. She spent the next few years moulding my sister and I into the kinds of women who’d never be so sideswiped. She encouraged Erica’s wildness and my self-control in an effort to see which personality type survived tragedy best. And she put her results into a book.”
Finn’s jaw twitched. “You’re making that up.”
April shook her head. “All true. Your turn.”
“You do remember I didn’t fall for this the last time you tried it.”
“Of course I do. But we know one another a little better know. Biblically. Surely that counts for some softening of the Finn Ward steel.”
A smile lit his eyes. She rolled hers.
“Not soften then. Mollify.”
He breathed out hard. “So you want to know something about me. Something I don’t normally talk about. Is that how this goes?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.” She’d never had to.
Her brand of enthusiastic questioning always yielded results. And most people actually liked talking about themselves. Finn was not most people.
Finn glanced at the ceiling, no doubt praying for patience. A muscle worked in his jaw. His arms bunched so tightly new veins began to pop along their lengths. Could this really be that hard for the guy? That hard to give up even a tiny piece of himself to her?
Not yet ready to give up, she said, “Okay. Here’s how a professional goes about it. Believe it or not, I was a hellion as a kid. Always climbing trees I wasn’t meant to, digging holes in other people’s yards looking for treasure, following stray dogs down the street without telling anyone where I was going. Dad was sure I was born without fight or flight instinct. I think it was closer to the truth to say I just felt safe. My mother was so protective. My father so relaxed about everything. Their yin and yang were my comfort, my buffers against fear.”
She played with the golden hairs on his chest.
“I was twelve years old the day I’d set my Hello Kitty watch to wake me up one night – a meteor shower was going to be at its most visible around two in the morning. I climbed out the window. Was straddling the bow of a tree when I saw them. My dad, and a woman who wasn’t my mother, leaning against a car under a streetlight on the other side of the road. Kissing. I got such a shock I fell out of the tree. Broke my collarbone. Turned out he’d been seeing this other woman for years. He stayed over three nights a week when he told mum he was travelling for work.”
She breathed in. Breathed out.
“He left us the day after I fell out of the tree. Left the other woman too. As if he didn’t want her unless he wasn’t meant to have her. Now he lives like a perennial bachelor.”
April paused, trying to piece the torn fabric of her memory together. “I remember the night as pitch-black. No moonlight, making that streetlight extra bright. It must have been a clear night or the meteors wouldn’t have been visible. But I can only recall feeling scared for the first time in my life. And completely in the dark.”
Finn stilled her hand, pressing it against his heart. Saying nothing. The guy was a hell of a listener. She’d give him that.
“Mum practically went catatonic, disappearing into her study and into herself. Erica – who’d always been daddy’s girl – became caustic, brittle. Since then, she’s turned self-destruction into an art form.”
“And you?”
Her? In trying to prove to Finn how easy it was to share, she’d gone deep – choosing a subject she actually didn’t talk about much, even though it was always lurking at the back of her mind. She swallowed down the lump in her throat and forged a smile.
“It became my job to hold us all together. I’d bring mum tea. Tidy up after Erica. Hug them whether they wanted me to or not. Set the table so they had no choice but to have dinner together every night.” April picked at a knot of cotton on the cushion behind Finn’s head and thought about always feeling like the meat in the Swanson girls sandwich. “That hasn’t changed.”
“Explains the not giving up thing.”
“Mmm. I guess it does.”
>
“Explains more than that too.”
Her eyes swung to his.
“It wasn’t your job to hold them all together, April. And it wasn’t your fault.”
April sniffed in a breath. For all her self-awareness, that was something she preferred not to dwell on. “It was my fault. My dad had told me about the meteor shower, you see. Had even tapped the side of his nose, like it was our little secret. And I went along with it, even knowing Mum wouldn’t approve. Thing was, he’d wanted to be caught. I was simply the device to get the job done. If he’d only told the truth, said he’d fallen out of love with my mother, fallen in love with someone else, it would still have been awful, but it wouldn’t have been as awful as it was.”
“You really believe that?”
“I wouldn’t say it otherwise.”
Done, dusted, emotionally wrung out, April climbed over the top of him, straddling the guy, a thrill of pleasure shooting through her as she felt him respond. “I’m tougher than I look, Finn. I have a cool head in a crisis. And I understand human frailty. So if you ever decide to tell me what’s going on with you, I can take it.”
With that she leaned down to kiss him.
When his hands stole around her back she lifted her mouth an inch from his. “Your turn. Tell me something you’ve never told another living soul.”
For a second she thought he might. That all the allusions would be brought to light.
But then he tipped her over, braced his impressive weight over her. Then he looked into her eyes and said, “Here’s a truth you can take to the bank. I don’t want to see you get hurt. I don’t want that so much it hurts. Everywhere.”
April’s heart stuttered in her chest. For she’d never imagined, not in all her hopes and dreams, that she’d be on the receiving end of a confession like that.
“So don’t hurt me,” she said and pulled his mouth to hers.
Finn watched April sleep the sleep of the just.
He, on the other hand, did not. He sat on the edge of his bed, feet pressed flat into the cool floor.
Somehow he’d convinced himself that beneath April’s dewy skin and ingenuous gaze, beat the heart of a wild girl. That her frankness, the tough talk, and impressive tenacity were the hallmarks of a desire to shock.