by Moriah Jovan
“Eilis,” Knox asked slowly, “why does Fen hate you so much?”
Eilis pursed her lips, the familiar hurt deep in her soul not as sharp as usual, more of throbbing ache than a stab. “He . . . doesn’t.” Both Knox and Sebastian started. “I don’t think. Trudy does. Well, she hates that I exist. I think he’s just desperate to keep her secret from coming to light.”
Eilis stopped, felt her eyes well with tears, bowed her head. Sebastian drew her to him and into his lap.
Knox looked away, Eilis noted, pale beneath his tan, and she saw a tear track down his cheek and his jaw tense up. “I hate that bitch,” he murmured. “I’ve always hated her. Even when I still lived at home, I used Giselle’s mother as my emergency contact.”
Sebastian grunted. “Pardon my saying so, but that little ménage à trois that is your parents is seriously fucked up. At least Oliver wasn’t as whipped as Fen.”
Both Eilis and Knox laughed through their sadness, yet Eilis felt so much better for knowing that her hatred of her mother was shared by her brother, that she wasn’t in this alone anymore.
“Knox,” Eilis began softly, not wanting to know but needing to ask, “will you take me to meet our sister?”
Sebastian’s hand abruptly stopped caressing her arm. Knox stared at her, puzzled. “What sister? You mean there’s another one?”
“Uh— I don’t— All I know is, when he came to see me last year, he said, ‘I have another daughter. You will never measure up to her.’”
Knox and Sebastian both sucked up long, shocked breaths and they stared at each other, wide-eyed, mouths open. Knox swallowed. Sebastian’s body shuddered.
“Oh, shit,” Sebastian breathed. “That’s what that’s about.”
Eilis watched them both work through something that was apparently tremendously significant.
“Gi— Fen’s, uh, daughter didn’t take the news well,” Knox muttered at Sebastian as his jaw clenched. “I called Aunt Lilly right after I hung up with you. She was pissed. She told me not to tell anyone because she wanted to wait until Étienne’s fortieth birthday bash to announce it to the tribe at large.”
Sebastian froze. “She knew very good and well what would happen.”
“Aunt Lilly said Gi— That she slugged Fen a couple of times, but then went after Trudy. Backhanded her so hard it put her on the ground a foot away. It took Bryce and Morgan to pull her off Trudy.”
“Shit. Morgan’s as big as Kenard.”
“Broke a couple of bones in Trudy’s face. Broke her arm and at least one rib. Left bruises around her neck. So the ER called the cops and the cops called me. By then, Morgan had already given me the visual, so . . . ”
Eilis sat and listened to this tale in silence, completely confused. This daughter, Eilis’s sister, the favorite— Punched Fen? Beat Trudy nearly to death? On Eilis’s behalf?
“Got no phone call from Trudy wanting to press charges, so I figure she knew what I’d do—or wouldn’t.”
“And Fen?”
“Oh, he got off light. Nose broken the other way and a few bruises. She was gunning for Trudy.”
Sebastian sighed and shook his head. “What a mess.”
“Who,” Eilis asked slowly, “is this other daughter? And why would she do this? She doesn’t know me and Fen made it very clear she was his chosen one.”
“Fen doesn’t have another daughter,” Knox snapped, his cold eyes glittering at Eilis. “He never did. It was a fantasy he built around a girl he couldn’t control and he loved her for it. She doesn’t respect him, but she does think he’s funny and so she’s indulged him for years. When Aunt Lilly told the tribe about you, she just— She lost it.”
“Man, I wish I’d been there to see that,” Sebastian muttered.
“Me too. Right now I’m fishing around, see if Fen’s looking to retaliate. Again.”
Sebastian sucked in a breath and released it on a long whoosh. “He’d be a fool to try that now.”
Eilis still didn’t really understand. “So who is this woman?”
Neither of them said anything for a moment. “I think,” Sebastian finally murmured, “that’s best left for another time.”
Knox sighed and searched for words. “Fen lied to you, so for a year, you’ve been thinking you had a sister he loved, but threw you to the wolves. You need time to get used to the idea that it was a lie. When you meet her— You need the chance to get to know her and love her. She deserves that chance. It would hurt both of you if you met her knowing this and possibly resenting her for it. We don’t want this to color your opinion of her. Please, Eilis. Trust us. ”
“Please, Eilis,” Sebastian repeated. “Please trust us on this.”
She looked between them. The pain and sorrow, the pleading, on their faces was too real, too deep. Whoever this “daughter” was, these two men loved her and didn’t want her or Eilis to suffer. And right now, Eilis could afford to be generous with the woman: She wasn’t Eilis’s sister, favored or otherwise, and she had taken unexpected and violent vengeance on the two people Eilis hated most in the world.
“Okay,” she finally said. “I’ll wait.” She paused for a moment, looked down at the table because she didn’t have anywhere else to look while she said what she needed to say. Sebastian’s arms surrounding her helped, but not much. “Knox, I’m sorry my father killed yours.”
She felt fingers on her chin and realized that Knox was lifting her face so that she would look at him. “Eilis,” he murmured, “it’s not your responsibility. You had nothing to do with it and I don’t want you to take that on yourself.”
“Eilis, I want you to know something else,” Sebastian said. “If anyone in our tribe had known about you, I can guarantee you, there would’ve been eight families clamoring to take you in and give you everything you ever dreamed of as a child. I promise you that.”
Knox reluctantly chuckled. “Well. They’re clamoring right now. They may not be able to wait until the Fourth of July picnic. Aunt Dianne’s threatening a welcome-home party.”
“Dammit,” Sebastian muttered. “A hundred-plus people using any excuse to have a party.”
“Your tribe— Are they all Mormon?”
Knox and Sebastian looked at each other as if calculating that out. “Maybe two-thirds?” Sebastian finally said. “We all grew up in the church, so you won’t be able to tell who is and who isn’t by the way we talk, although by and large, the ones who aren’t drink alcohol.”
That confused Eilis to no end. She had had very little exposure to religion in her life and none of what she knew about any particular religion impressed her enough to find one for herself.
“I have employees who’re Latter-day Saints,” she said, vaguely proud that she could say that, that she could remember such details about them. “They don’t like the word ‘Mormon’ and they don’t act like you all do.”
Knox looked away and Sebastian sighed. “I don’t believe what the church teaches, but it is possible to have a faith and not live it. Knox and Giselle, Kenard— They’re the minority of about five or six people in the tribe. They believe, they have faith, but they don’t live the way they believe. Then there’s the majority, the believers, and they’re just like the Mormons who work for you.”
“We’re, uh—” Knox cleared his throat. “We’re not normal.”
* * * * *
Sebastian handed Eilis into his car long after midnight once she had drunk in every drop of information she could get about Knox, her family, their family, aunts, uncles, cousins. Her head spun with too much information, too much that was significant. They were almost to the highway when Sebastian spoke. “Eilis,” he began hesitantly, “I told you I had something to show you and I do. What I’d like to know is, do you want to see it now or would you like to wait until tomorrow?”
She was tired, but curious as to what could be so bad that he’d made her wait until he’d shown her, especially after the night she’d worn that kelly dress. “Tonight, I guess.”
&
nbsp; He sighed. “Okay. I do have a guest room or five.”
Her mind stopped on that and she said nothing for a moment. “Um, guest room?” she asked slowly.
Sebastian didn’t look at her. “I’m not holding out any hope that you’ll forgive me, Eilis,” he murmured after a moment. “It’ll be up to you.”
Everyone is damaged. He may have secrets he’s keeping from you. You don’t know.
Eilis sighed as the Virgin’s words came back to her and began to tremble at what he could tell her that would be so bad.
Silence cocooned them on the thirty-minute drive to the Plaza, though it didn’t feel uncomfortable. Sebastian had retreated into his head and Eilis had too much to process not to do the same. Finally Sebastian pulled into an alley behind what looked like a big black concrete box perched high on a steep incline on the west side of the Country Club Plaza. From what she could tell, the house followed the contours of the ground and had three levels. The top level held the garage and it was mostly underground once one drove up the alley on the west side of the house. They parked right next to Sebastian’s old Ford pickup.
The garage door closed behind them and he helped her out of the car, then opened a door and led her down a flight of stairs to another door that led into the house. “Eilis,” he said as he stopped in a corridor with a stark white wall on her left and an open maple platform that was mid-thigh height on her left, “you’ve had a lot of shocks today, a lot of stress. This is going to be another one.”
“Sebastian, you’re scaring me,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry.”
He led her down the corridor where it turned right at a ninety-degree angle, past two doors on the left to a third. He opened the door and it swung inward. The smell of turpentine wafted up the stairs.
“Oh, this is your studio.”
“Yes.” He went down the switchback staircase first, and she could see almost nothing because it was so dark. He drew her into the room and then turned on the light. She flinched at the suddenness of it, but as her eyes adjusted and she looked around, her breath caught in her throat.
Her mouth went dry. She swallowed. Hard. She had no words for the mixture of emotion that swirled within her in a tornado.
Anger
Joy
Fear
Desire
Betrayal
Love
Shame
Happiness
There, in the middle of the room sat the magenta chaise she had lain upon. Before she’d changed her mind. The whole room looked just it did that night, with the exception of a few new paintings covered in tarps.
“You—” she whispered. “You’re Ford.”
“Yes,” he murmured, “I’m Ford.”
“You— You were going to— On purpose.”
“No, I wasn’t going to. I was going to send you home because I couldn’t do it. It would have been tantamount to rape if I had made love to you as a man you didn’t know, but was me, deceiving you.” He stopped, then began again. “I had planned to tell you at Christmas, but . . . I didn’t know if you would ever look at me as me, Sebastian, or as Ford, that guy you dreamed up in your head, which guy is not me and which expectations I could never fulfill, even if I knew what they were.”
She walked around touching things, and he said no more. She didn’t know what to say, what to think, what to do. Sebastian Taight was Ford and she had been too stubborn to let herself see that because she’d been too invested in the Ford she’d fantasized about all those years. The clues he’d dropped:
His training in art.
His anger at the mere mention of Ford and her desire to be painted by him.
His sketchbook, which he most assuredly meant her to find.
His Ford pickup truck that he’d bought when he was sixteen.
He’d wanted her to figure it out on her own and she hadn’t. Now Eilis didn’t know if she was more angry with him or with herself. He’d fooled her with the same transparency that got all the CEOs he’d ever rescued, only for her, it was in his artist’s life. It was so obvious.
She walked to the deep, dark alcove, its heavy cherry panels drawn back, where that magnificent bed stood on its dais in the darkest corner and almost could not be seen at all. He turned up some of the lights in that room and she saw it again in a new light. This was Sebastian’s bed.
There was no Ford.
“I like Mardi Gras,” he whispered in her ear and she shivered with a mixture of desire and anger. “I try to go every year. N’awlins is the most decadent city in the world.”
To her left was the set of oversized French doors that led into that red and gold salon and to the hedonistic bathroom in stark white.
“Eilis, please go around the room and take the tarps off the canvases.”
She looked up at him, unable to say anything. In his face she saw worry, pleading, and uncertainty—three things she never thought she’d see in Sebastian Taight’s face. In his voice, the same things. So she did as he asked and left the bedroom to go around the studio.
A tarp-covered canvas, eight feet long by five feet high, leaned against a stack of blank five-by-five canvases. She uncovered it carefully.
Her jaw dropped. It was her. And she was beautiful. It was his nude sketch of her come to life in vibrant colors and textured oils.
Eilis looked around at the other tarp-covered canvases and she went to each one only to find herself, some nude, some not, all beautiful, the way he saw her. At work, in her home, in her garden.
And then there was that big canvas, a radical departure from his public five-by-five hallmark. She uncovered it to find her garden, every detail down to the last flower. And there was no nude to be found.
“You’ve never painted anything without a nude in it,” she whispered.
“Not true,” he said from directly behind her, and she felt his arms wrap around her. “I just made my name in nudes. What I have never done is paint a woman nude more than once and now I can only paint that one.” He pointed to one of the canvases of her, none of which were on five-by-five canvases; some were smaller, some were bigger, but none five feet square.
Eilis knew what that meant: She was special, unlike the rest.
“I don’t know what to say. I’m really angry. I’m so happy I could burst. I’m shocked. I’m feeling betrayed and shamed all over again. I’m—confused. It was so out of context that I couldn’t—well, wouldn’t—pick up on it. I thought you hated Ford.”
“I do. I hate the one that lived in your head. I couldn’t compete. Wouldn’t compete.”
“You exaggerated his importance to me.”
“I’m sorry. It never occurred to me to ask you point blank. All I heard was that you wanted a vacation so you could find Ford, have him paint you, make love to you.”
“So you destroyed him.”
“That was the intent, yes.”
“These,” she said, indicating the canvases of her. “Are you going to hang these?”
“Only with your permission. I want the world to know what a perfect woman looks like. Eilis,” he murmured reverently in her ear, “I have never, in my entire life, seen or painted a woman so perfect as you. You are my finest work.”
Once again her breath caught in her throat, and she was simultaneously aroused and so very deeply touched.
“In one day,” she whispered. “In one day I met family who likes me and claims me, and I saw how Ford, how you, see me as I’ve never seen myself. In one day—the most incredible day of my life.”
“Better than opening bell at the stock exchange?”
“I think— Much better.”
“Come lie with me, Eilis,” he whispered in her ear. “Come and be worshipped by me, Sebastian, the man who’s been in love with you since the first time he saw you.”
* * * * *
65: NESSUN DORMA
Whatever she thought Ford could’ve given her, Sebastian did. He was luxuriant, sensual, giving. He took her to his bedroom upstairs, into
a hot shower naked, tall and cut—a man who could bear her weight with ease.
He took her hand and turned her around so that they were touching from knee to collarbone. Their hands locked with fingers entwined, he devoured her skin. Her neck, her throat, her collarbone, her shoulders, her breasts. He got on his knees and devoured her belly, then lower and lower. He turned her around again and devoured the skin of her back, the skin of both her buttocks, the crease where her thighs met her torso.
He bent lower, licked and sucked and nibbled on the backs of her thighs, then the backs of her knees. Again he turned her back to face him and he worked his way up her legs until his hands gently parted her legs and he kissed her most private of places. His tongue licked and his fingers slid through the folds of her and she thought she’d die.
Eilis wrapped her hands in his hair as his tongue did so many marvelous things to her that she had never expected a man would ever do to her. Her head fell back and she panted for air, and she knew she was going to fall over the edge—but he drew away just as she got to the top of the mountain, and she felt cold, bereft.
She opened her eyes and looked down at him. He stood, sliding up her body, his hands trailing, touching wherever they moved. He smiled at her, a crooked smile that, under other circumstances, would have melted her heart a little. Under these circumstances, it made her ache inside and feel her emptiness just a bit more acutely.
Sebastian picked her up slowly, raising her far above him so he could look up at her for a moment. She looked back at him and what she saw astounded her: A man in love. With her.
Then he lowered her slowly and took a step forward so that the shower wall was at her back, supporting her.
He wrapped her legs around him and slid his hard length up into her. Immediately she gasped and clenched him. Her mind froze as her body took over, quaking, the sensations like nothing she had ever experienced. Exquisite pleasure, so fine and ephemeral, like the delicate undulating lace of sunlight through leaves. Her eyes closed and her head dropped back against the wall. She could only feel his skin against hers, his big hands wrapped around her hips, his body inside hers stroking in and out.