She laughed, too, giddy, victorious, and maybe even a little bit of something else as she tried to forget what she’d seen in his gaze at the end there.
More than just sex? More than she could handle with anyone, especially Gideon?
No, she thought again. Neither of them was built for more than this—a perfect, wonderful rendezvous.
“Same to you, cowboy,” she said, pressing her face against his shoulder, smiling into him.
Relaxing as she’d never relaxed before.
***
If the character of Tommy in Cherry’s novel had been given any point-of-view chapters, Gideon thought he might’ve felt this way: bafflement at the emotions Cherry constantly stirred up in him and confusion because of the way Cherry made him betray what he knew was right.
Because Gideon had just finished doing so much wrong, although wrong had sure never felt so right.
He and Rochelle were piecing themselves back together: she was slipping into her robe, holding her wet PJs in her hand as she stood at the cabana’s entrance, and he had gotten back into his damp black clothing, although he’d have to change when he got into the mansion. As they dressed, she had a smile like she’d just flown to the moon and back, and that lifted Gideon up. He liked when women glowed, liked making them happy. But he wasn’t quite in the same place as Rochelle was since his pride in his job had been dented.
No more perfect hands-off-the-clients record for Gideon. He’d become one of those bodyguards who couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. Shit, he could almost hear his dad now.
Never can be responsible in anything, can you, you fool?
Rochelle’s voice cut into his constant dance of memory. “That was definitely worth waiting for.”
“Glad I earned your stamp of approval.”
She turned to him, the sun shining through her thin white robe, revealing a silhouette that was going to get his motor running again if he wasn’t careful.
“Gideon,” she said, “are you mad?”
Was there something like vulnerability in her voice?
He brushed off the question. “You’re always asking that.”
“Because you usually are mad at me.”
“I just need to get back to work. I’m putting on my game face.”
But she was right—he was pissed yet not so much at her.
And wouldn’t the guys at the Rough & Tumble just laugh themselves silly if they could see him now? They’d ask what the hell was with him. They’d say, “Hey, so you slipped up once—no, twice. So what? Who’ll ever know except for you and her?”
Rochelle came to the breakfast table and tore off a scrap of toast with delicate fingers. “Weren’t you telling me earlier to ditch my work and relax? I gave you the time off, so don’t feel bad about enjoying it. As you said to me, we’ve got to slow our lives down, have some fun. We certainly had some of that.”
Yeah, but what they’d just had wasn’t exactly slow. It’d been lively and electric, sparking something in him that he hadn’t known was there. But he’d already stored that away in his eternally convenient mental compartment.
After she nibbled on the bread, she swallowed then grinned. “Are you just grumpy because I seduced you?”
If there’d been any vulnerability there, it was gone now.
“I’m never grumpy.”
She took on a husky voice. “Strong man never grumpy—very happy, indeed. That’s why big smile on strong man’s face.”
Her good mood was contagious, and he beat back a smile before it overtook him.
“Oh,” she said. “I think I see one . . . Is that really . . .? Hey, sports fans, we’ve got a smile!”
“You’re a laugh riot.”
“I know. And I think you’d probably keep smiling if I told you that the sex was . . .” She sighed. “Just listen to me, a writer who can’t come up with a new way to say ‘amazing.’”
He had to respect her honesty, and he found that his smile wasn’t so easily chased away now. “That goes both ways then, except I’m no writer.”
“So you think the sex was . . . good?” she asked.
Vulnerability . . . back again?
Realization dawned on him, and she must’ve seen it. Was this all about that teenaged night together?
“Oh, come on now,” she said. “You can’t tell me that you never thought about improving on that awful little rendezvous we had in the barn.”
Something told him it’d be idiotic to admit that sex on that night hadn’t exactly been . . . ideal. No woman wanted to hear the truth, no matter how right it was. “My problem was with the way things were left after that night. But you already know that.”
“It’s true I could’ve handled my exit better. But I’m talking about the actual deed itself.” She waved the toast in the air. “I wanted so badly to rock your world that night, and when everything fell apart instead . . .? I couldn’t stick around.”
“Yes, you could’ve.”
“I was a kid, and things like that were enough to send a girl into a dark clump of mortification. I even cried afterward . . .”
She stopped, then put the toast down, as if she regretted what she’d said.
“You cried?” he asked. Why’d that have to give him a kick to his chest? It’d been years ago.
Or maybe it was all too fresh for Rochelle, and that’s why she’d been after him to bang her.
She was wiping her hands on a napkin.
“Shel,” he said, “I’m sorry about making you cry. I had no idea.”
“Please don’t apologize.” She pulled the robe around her, only succeeding in highlighting her shapely body. “You tried your best, but I was clumsy and had zero experience, and I was sure I’d disappointed you.”
He had been disappointed, but he didn’t like to remember that part. “And here I thought you regretted choosing me to be the one you were with for your first time.”
“Not at all.” She paused, like she was sorting through what she could say and wouldn’t say to him. “I only regretted being a disaster.”
“You weren’t a disaster.” He had to say something to make this better. “Hell, I had no idea that’s how you’d seen things . . .”
She nonchalantly set her silverware on her plate and pushed it to the side of the table. “Good thing we worked it out then, huh? That other night is gone, erased from the ledgers of history. Today took its place.”
Yeah, today—when he’d thoroughly lost his professional pride. He wasn’t sure it was a very good tradeoff.
“Ah,” she said, reading him. “The mad is back.”
“Not mad,” he said.
“Is this about your duty as a bodyguard? The ‘on my honor, I shall nail no client’ promise?”
“No.”
“I think it is.” She blocked him as he tried to get around her so he could reclaim his Bettie Page lighter from the table. “Gideon, do you think I don’t respect you now? God, how could you even think that after what you did for me at the saloon? There’s not a better bodyguard in existence.”
She sounded entirely sincere, as if her heart was in every word, and when he searched her gaze, she smiled, warming him. Then she glanced away, putting them back on jelly-floored footing once again.
What was she—a client? Or was she more now?
He needed to leave this morning behind, if he could. “Listen,” he said, finally reaching around her and grabbing the lighter, stuffing it into his pocket. He was so close to her that he could smell the shampoo in her wet hair. “I never thought this would happen, but it did. I’ll deal with it.”
“By mentally whipping yourself? Take it easy on the old boy, would you?”
Again, he looked into her green eyes, almost falling deep. Luckily, he was able to step back.
Her next words threatened to draw him in once
more. “It’s not everyone who’d take a job where you could die for your client—and you almost did that for me. Hey, you volunteered for the Army, too. You’re just that type of guy—a hero.”
Why were her sweet words working on him? He appreciated her gratitude, but that was as far as it should go. Any more from her and he’d . . .
Well, he’d really feel like Tommy in Cherry’s book, where she was always leading him down a path he shouldn’t be on, even if he knew better.
Gideon clenched his jaw. Here he’d always thought he was so solid, and all it’d taken to find a chink in his body armor was a girl named Rochelle.
She touched his arm, and the contact sizzled, bringing back every orgasmic memory of the last hour.
Leading him down that path again.
“The last thing I wanted,” she said, “was to make you feel like less than you are. Believe me, that’s no way to live.”
Why was he getting the feeling that she was talking about how her first night of sex had affected her all these years?
Before he could figure it all out, she stuck out her hand for a shake.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to make you a promise right now: no more games from me and no more of my coming on to you. I’ll let you do what’s left of your job until I’m back on the road.”
On the road. His contract spelled out that he didn’t travel, and Suzanne had already told him and Harry that Rochelle probably wouldn’t be hiring anyone to accompany her to those conventions and other stops on her out-of-state tour. His nerves twanged when he thought of her out there, alone.
She was still holding out her hand for him. “I give you my word, Gideon. I’m going to be the perfect client from now on.”
But was she only offering this because she’d gotten what she’d wanted—sex that’d made up for that teenaged night?
A thought poked at him. What did you want from today’s escapades anyway? Something else?
Swiping those questions away, he shook her hand, and as she sent him a grin, Gideon thought that it looked a hell of a lot like the one on her book cover.
The one Cherry wore.
***
When Cherry returned to Vegas from her year and a half in Los Angeles, the first place she went was Tommy’s.
A year full of heartache and disappointment—and her friend hadn’t been there for any of it. She’d missed his voice, his steady companionship, regretting only now that she’d been too caught up with her pursuits to phone and had only written cheeky postcards that she wasn’t even sure he’d received.
At least postcards were more than she’d ever done for most people she’d left behind, and now, standing in front of Tommy’s door, she wondered what had become of him during their separation. Had he grown that goatee he’d been talking about a few months after George Diluccio had gone missing? Had he really been that angry after she’d gone off with yet another fast talker from Hollywood who’d been just like every other man she’d taken up with?
Yes, Phil Tosta was toast now, but Cherry was once again okay with leaving this sugardaddy. She was used to broken dreams, so she raised her chin, smiled, and knocked on Tommy’s apartment door.
As she waited to hear if he was home, she glanced at the stucco surroundings, the pool below that was fringed by palms and sparkling under the sun. The art sales Tommy had made before she’d left had obviously kept him in the same complex on the safe side of town. Good for him.
The door eased open, and Tommy stood on the other side. No goatee, no artist’s beard—just the same guy with the same surfer blond hair and a blue gaze that had drilled into her the day she’d told him she’d met another producer and he was taking her to Hollywood.
They looked at one another, and Cherry was surprised that her pulse was racing a mile a minute. For Tommy? Surely not.
He glanced down at the pink suitcase near her sandals, and words came rushing out of her.
“Surprise, surprise,” she said, laughing.
His eyes took on a kaleidoscope of confusion, seemingly clicking from one emotion to the next: happiness to see her, distance because she’d left, then blankness.
“Oh, come on, my buddy, my pal,” she said. “Don’t you have a word for me?”
“Your hair’s blond again.”
She touched her beehive and shrugged. “I got tired of the red.”
“Did you get tired of everything out in LA, too, and that’s why you’re back?”
She was too involved with really looking Tommy over to answer. He seemed older, bigger, more of a man, even with just a year gone by. Her heart danced again, but she told herself it was only because she was so glad to see a familiar face.
“I missed you, Tommy,” she said, truly meaning it.
When he paused instead of inviting her in, she almost thought he would tell her to get out of his apartment complex. But then he held the door wide.
Cherry beamed, scooped up her suitcase, and brought it inside. “You never answered my postcards.”
“Did you expect me to?”
My, he was cross. “You could’ve come with me, you know. I told you that you could.”
“That would’ve made for some comfortable times, with me, you, and your old man. Where is he, by the way?”
“I left Phil.” She wandered toward a clean yet shoddy plaid sofa where a yellow plastic domed light shone. Tommy had a book open on the armrest—Nietzsche. She smiled at the familiarity of Tommy the philosophical, arty nerd.
Even if he didn’t look so much like a nerd these days.
“Oh, so you left Phil,” he repeated as she sat. “Well, how about that. I have to say I’m absolutely shocked.”
Furthering his sarcasm, he crossed his arms over his chest, and she realized that, somehow, he’d gotten muscles. Nice, tanned muscles that had her struggling to pull her gaze away from them.
But she succeeded, her pulse double-timing. “Phil was this close to getting me a part in a film called The Graduate, but it didn’t happen.”
“So Phil turned out to be yet another hustler, huh? Another daddy for Cherry?”
When a push of tears came, it wasn’t because she was faking them. “Daddy died a couple weeks ago.”
Tommy lowered his arms from his chest. “Cherry. God, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.” She bit her lip, controlling herself. “I mean, I’d already left Phil and went to see my parents . . .” Or more correctly, to find a place to stay because she was broke. “But when Daddy gave me the old talk again about being responsible and coming to work at the appliance stores like I should’ve in the first place, he got really worked up. It was his heart, and after he died, Mom said it was my fault, and . . .”
She couldn’t say any more. Tommy slid onto the couch next to her, resting a hand against her cheek, consoling her as he’d always done.
“Shh, Cherry, it’s gonna be okay.”
Was it? “Mom always hated me. Did you know that? She’s the reason I left in the first place besides all my ambitions. I couldn’t live with her, and the minute my dad passed on, she got rid of me.”
It was the first time Cherry had ever said such a thing to Tommy, and he obviously didn’t have the heart to keep launching harsh remarks at her.
When a tear-stained Cherry wrapped her arms around him, he let her. He held her to him as her heartbeat quickened even more.
“Twenty-five years old,” she whispered shakily, “and I’ve gone nowhere.”
“You’re here,” he said.
“And where’s that?”
“With someone who gives a shit about you, even if you . . .”
He stopped himself, and she looked up at him, her eyes still damp.
“Even if I what?” she asked.
He used a thumb to wipe away a tear. “Even if you can’t see that you’re not really the girl
you’ve always tried to be. There’s someone in you that you haven’t found yet, and her name isn’t Cherry. It’s Julie Tatum, and there’s still a world of opportunities for her.”
Opportunities like . . . him? Was that what he was telling her?
Her heart seemed to explode, because Tommy was just what she needed after being humbled so thoroughly—loyal, ever present, never letting her down.
Without thinking, she leaned forward, and when she kissed him, it felt right. Very right.
She didn’t stop at a kiss, and he didn’t, either. He took her in his arms as if he wasn’t ever going to let her go anywhere again, and soon clothes were on the carpet. Then Tommy was carrying her to his room, where he brought her to his bed and had years full of fantasies come alive for him with Cherry.
He was a more giving lover than she’d ever had, slow with his caresses, attentive to every look that came upon her face as he worshipped her with his hands and his mouth. For the first time, Cherry felt something for someone, and the whole time, he’d been right in front of her . . .
Afterward, as he spooned her and she traced those toned, strong arms that embraced her, her eyes were fully opened—enough for her to see what was actually around her.
That’s when she discovered the painting on the wall.
It was of her, with red hair, straddling the back of a chair while dressed in the leather halter, hot pants, and boots she’d danced in at George Diluccio’s last party.
“Damn,” Tommy said into her tumbled hair, laughing a little. “I never thought you’d be in my room to see that.”
“When did you . . .?”
“I painted it from memory. I already had sketches of you”—he’d done more than a few during idle days when they’d been hanging around by the pool—“so you never had to do a sitting for me. I already knew every feature, every bit of you.”
“It’s . . .” She didn’t know what to say at the idea of him keeping her near him, even when she’d been away.
“I wanted to give it to you some day.” He pulled her on top of him, length to length, smiling up at her. “It’s yours, Cherry.”
At that moment, she realized how deep his feelings had been for her this entire time. It was all in that painting, which showed her as sexual royalty to anyone who merely glimpsed it, but if you took a longer look . . .
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