When He Saw Me

by Amelia Wilde

  “We did?”

  He’s got his phone out, scrolling through something, but he looks up and quirks an eyebrow at me. “Yes. You told me you had a writing deadline, and then you clammed up and wouldn’t say anymore.”

  “Well,” I say primly. “There’s not much more to say.”

  It’s automatic. The dismissal. The downplay. But the instant the words are out of my mouth, Ben goes still. “I don’t believe that for a second. I think you have a lot more to say. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”

  My face is painfully red. “What if it’s just for your calming presence?”

  “You seemed pretty anxious to get away from my calming presence this morning.”

  “Obviously that was a mistake.”

  “Yeah,” says Ben, and I want to know what it would be like to kiss him. He has nice-looking lips. Honestly, he could be a model on the cover of a romance novel. Looking at him, I’m sure I could write one. “If you, as a writer, need me that much, I assumed it would be because of writer’s block.”

  “Whitney didn’t...tell you anything more than that?”

  “All she told me was that you are her oldest friend, you are a writer, and you were coming to the party.”

  “Right. And you’re not an idiot, so you figured it out.”

  “Writer, deadlines—all the clues pointed in the same direction. What else could it be?”

  I want to say “I’m terrified.”

  But I don’t.

  Instead I let out a big breath that I’ve been holding.

  “Okay. Yes. It’s a deadline. It’s—it’s a hard deadline, and I’m not going to make it.”

  “There are tons of things we can try.” We can try hits my ears like three pebbles hitting the surface of a still lake. “Going for a walk. A dinner out. Though—we did that last night, and we both know how that turned out.” His eyes move back to mine and a flush moves over every inch of my skin. It’s so dangerous to have him see me like this.

  Ben glances back down at the phone and his eyes darken with what looks like anticipation, even though we didn’t come anywhere close— “Centering activities.”

  “What’s a centering activity? Do tell.”

  “Massages. Sex.” Those eyes flick back up to mine, and you know what? I could go for that. I could go for a quick, hot fuck. I could go for Ben’s hands on my body, rough and strong. I could go for letting my mind be silent, for the body taking over...

  But I can’t get into that. Not right now, and maybe not ever, if I want to keep him safe. And I know, in this instant, that I would never forgive myself if something happened to Ben.

  He doesn’t know it, but it’s a risk being in my orbit. People think of orbits as steady, stable, but the truth is that planets wobble off their paths and crash into the sun in a deadly blaze all the time.

  “More practical, on-the-ground solutions,” he continues, and “on the ground” sounds exactly like “bent over the bed.” “How much left do you have to write? What kind of article is it?”

  “It’s not an article.” A strange laugh escapes me. “It might be easier if it were an article.”

  “What is it, then?” Ben furrows his brow. “A blog post or something?”

  “It’s a book. I write books.”

  His face opens with a delight I’m very familiar with seeing in other people’s expressions. “What kind of books?”

  “Thrillers.” I run a nervous hand through my hair. Another wave of desperation rises, tidal and inexorable, and I take another gulp of air and try to swallow it down. “I write psychological thrillers.”

  Ben nods, and I can tell just from the set of his face that he wants to ask a thousand questions about this. Most people do, when I tell them what I do for a living. But the man isn’t just sexy. He’s aware of other people around him, which is a rare find in the men of Manhattan. “So, you’re almost at the end of the book, and—”

  That makes me laugh. It makes me laugh hard, so hard that after a moment, Ben’s serious, helpful expression cracks into a smile like a sunrise, and then the low rumble of his laughter joins mine. Stray tears leak from the corners of my eyes, and I brush them away, careful not to disturb the makeup I applied for the special occasion of having Ben Powell over to my apartment. I take a deep breath, and then another, fighting off another laughing fit.

  “Oh, no,” I tell him, when I’ve finally regained the power of speech. “No, it’s much, much worse than that.”

  6

  Bennett

  Eva is smiling, but her big green eyes show nothing but a fear so strong it borders on panic. Even so, she keeps a little natural grin on her face as if this is all a big joke, though “it’s much, much worse than that” sounds too serious for smiling. Between getting her text and showing up at her apartment, I only had time to research what I thought was the probable cause of that tension she carries around in her shoulders, so I have no idea what she means. And for some reason, I thought she wrote short articles, not books.

  “Are you sure this isn’t a matter of perspective?” I say it carefully, because I’m not a complete fucking prick and she didn’t text me to hear that it’s all in her head. I’m genuinely curious. Morbidly curious, to be totally accurate. But if it’s really that world-ending...

  Eva shakes her head, still smiling, and it breaks my heart a little, how hard she’s trying to hold it together. Clearly, this is getting to her, and it’s been getting to her for more than the weekend. “Isn’t everything a matter of perspective?”

  “Touché.”

  She draws in a long, slow breath and lets it out then casually wanders toward the window. It seems like an old habit, and it’s a good one, because she looks stunning bathed in the city’s ambient light. Her entire apartment is like a photography studio, all white walls and neutral furniture and low, low lamps that cast a warm glow over the space. It’s almost as if she wanted to keep it clean and boring so that all the excitement could come out in her writing. But what do I know? My apartment’s painted white too, and it’s only because it was like that when I moved in.

  “No, there are some...unavoidable facts in play.” Then she narrows her eyes, glancing across at me with a look that burns. “Don’t get all hot and bothered. I know that word does it for you.” She must be trying to torture me, because she says it again. “Facts.”

  It catches me off guard, her little joke in the middle of what’s clearly some breath-stopping fear, and I can’t hide the laugh that escapes my. My heart turns and twists and falls a little more. Not that I can ever really fall in love with Eva. I can be intrigued with her, I can want her, but I can’t get carried away. Eventually, she’ll discover I’m not the kind of man she wants. That what I need for my own life will always take me away from her. That’s how it always goes. But for now....

  “I’ll try to keep my dick in my pants.”

  Now it’s her turn to laugh again, giggles bubbling up and out, her body shaking with them. “Oh, God, don’t...don’t set me off again. I can’t spend the rest of my energy laughing if I’m going to fix this today. Which, you know, I have to. I have to take some action toward fixing the enormous problem I’ve caused.” She says this last bit quietly, and I hear there are two layers of meaning there. I’m not sure what either of them are.

  I arrange my face into a stoic expression. “Let’s focus here, Eva.” She struggles to look serious, too. “You don’t know the ending of your book?”

  She wriggles her shoulders and sighs like a woman at the end of a hot yoga class. “The ending is the least of my worries.”

  “So you know the ending.” I try to force my mind away from how gorgeous she is and how much I want to touch her. “I’m guessing that’s the most important thing in a thriller, so if you have that—”

  “I don’t know the ending. I haven’t started yet.”

  I’m missing some key pieces of information here, and it makes my blood run hot. That’s a bigger deal than I thought, and it explains why she’s making
a last-ditch effort to fix it at ten o’clock at night. I do my best work in the early hours of the morning or when the clock is ticking toward midnight. But then...my work isn’t creating entire books from nothing.

  “You haven’t written any of the book yet?”

  “Not one word.”

  I get it. I get why, as a writer, she’d be under so much stress to meet her deadlines. But a book must take weeks to write. Maybe even months. The dots aren’t connecting. Most of the writers I’ve met in my life do it on the side, not as their main career, so missing a deadline now and then is the cost of doing business.

  So it’s different for Eva.

  “And someone has already paid you for this book?”

  She laughs again, a choked little thing. “Oh, yeah. They’ve paid me. They’ve paid me so much.”

  Who is this woman? The surface of my skin is alive with the mystery of her, hairs rising on the backs of my arms. Whit said she was a writer, but this seems like...more than that.

  “Hey, Eva.”

  “Yeah?” She raises her eyebrows, hopeful and suspicious all at once.

  “Who...are you?”

  Eva narrows her eyes, and then I see understanding flicker into her face. “See, if I tell you, this is all going to be ruined.”

  “Not possible. I’m already ruined.”

  “How?”

  “You slept in my bed last night.”

  Eva blushes. “And that was enough to—”

  “I don’t invite just anyone to sleep in my bed.”

  “Only failed authors, right?”

  How can she be a failed author if she’s already been paid for it? Eva’s apartment is nice enough that she either has lots of money squirreled away somewhere or she got a pretty hefty advance, or both. “Are you a failed author?” Or, I think, some kind of secret heiress? A socialite of some kind?

  “No!” She turns away from me, takes three big strides across the living room, and falls onto the couch. I get a flash of her black panties before she smooths the skirt of her dress over her legs, staring at the ceiling. I’m hard as a rock as I follow her.

  I want to lean over her, covering her entire body with mine, and kiss her until all the worry is gone from her eyes. I settle for sitting on the nearby loveseat instead. Eva throws her arms over her eyes and breathes deeply.

  “You’re cute as hell,” I tell her. “But if this is a booty call, you can admit it at any time and we can move past—”

  “It’s not a booty call.” Another deep breath in and out. “I’m not a failed author. I’m really, really successful. I’m so successful, Ben. You have no idea.”

  “Give me an idea.”

  I have plenty of ideas. But none of them, in this moment, would be any help to her. Not with writing the book, anyway.

  “I normally don’t go around saying….” She presses her lips together like this is a huge and terrible secret then flings her arms away from her face and sits up. “You know what? This was a mistake. I shouldn’t be saying anything.”

  She stands up from the sofa and heads around the other side, like she’s going to open the door and see me out, but I’m faster. I go around the back and stand in her path. Eva keeps coming, but before she can brush past, I hook my arm around her waist.

  It’s just like last night. She leans toward me, instead of away, and her body relaxes. “I’m not leaving that easily.” Her eyes are so bright, so green. “Who are you?”

  “I’m….” She shakes her head. “I really shouldn’t.”

  “Look.” It takes everything I have to string the words together in my mind before I say them, because she’s so warm in my arms, and I’m making contact with curves that I would kill to see naked in broad daylight. “If you’re a serial killer, I’m already screwed.”

  She hesitates again, a little laugh, and then, “I’m J. Beckett.”

  I look down at her.

  Is it...another joke? Is this name supposed to mean something? The sound of it tugs at one of the wires in the back of my mind, a memory coming to the surface. It’s almost meaningless, what I remember. I’d been riding the subway to the support group and the people-watching had been fucking terrible. I got sick of staring at my own lap and glanced over the ads. There was one for a book called The Miracle Girl.

  By one J. Beckett.

  A New York Times bestseller.

  The cover had been up there next to someone’s review—I can’t remember whose—but I can remember it said “Deliciously terrifying and utterly unforgettable.”

  She’s not some struggling author. J. Beckett is huge. The ads on the subway aren’t the only things I’ve seen, now that I think about it. Bookstores have copies of that book in the front window and it came out a year ago. It’s one of those books that’s destined to be a classic, or at least obnoxiously popular for a good long time. I wonder if she’s already sold the movie rights. She probably has. But the Eva standing in front of me is never going to be able to sit down for one of those chummy interviews with the author they put in the bonus content for the DVD release.

  “You’re J. Beckett,” I say stupidly.

  “Yes.” Eva rests a hand tentatively on my bicep, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to step away, even though the discovery of this is like a mini-high and the adrenaline is making me want to pace around, walk it off a little bit. “I’m J. Beckett. That’s my pen name.”

  “And you can’t write.”

  “I haven’t been able to write the next book.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. And they’ve already paid me a shitload of money for it. I’ve had months to finish it, and I haven’t even started.” The last traces of her smile fall away from her face. “The deadline is coming up in three weeks and I have nothing to show for it. I…” Color floods her cheeks. “I’ve been lying to my editor.”

  “Can you...” My mind is caught in the maze of the problem, and at every turn, I run into dead ends. Why can’t she write? What’s stopping her now? Did something happen to her last year to shut her down like this?

  How the hell can I get her to tell me about it without having her pull away?

  I want her body next to mine almost more than I want to know what the fuck is up with Eva Lipton, who is also J. Beckett, who is the country’s darling when it comes to the kind of books that are flying off the shelves right now. I can’t believe I never saw her picture before. I also can’t believe Whitney didn’t mention this little detail. “Can you tell them the truth? Let them know what your needs—”

  “My needs are not….” Her hand tenses on my arm and Eva turns her face away from the light, into a shadow that makes her green eyes look dim. “I’m not going to call my editor and say “‘I’m sorry. I’m too stupid to think of an idea for this book. I haven’t written anything. I can’t do this.’ I can’t say that.” She takes a deep breath and it does nothing to calm her. “You don’t have a clue, Ben. You have no idea what kind of risk I’d be running if I did that. You think I can take that chance? I can’t take that fucking chance, okay? I can’t—”

  She’s winding herself tighter and tighter, and I know right now that if I let this continue, Eva’s going to snap.

  There’s only one way to stop this.

  7

  Eva

  Ben leans in and kisses me, stemming the tide of total nonsense coming from my mouth and swallowing it so tenderly that tears spring to the corners of my eyes. It’s oddly...centering, like a good turn with that meditation app on my phone, but it feels a thousand times better than that. A million times better.

  I melt into it, my body into his, gripping that firm bicep. There’s so much pleasure in his hands on my hips. So much pleasure in the way he tugs me closer, against the bulge of him in his pants. I can taste need like electricity on his tongue and it’s a flavor so fine and sharp that I moan into his mouth.

  The tenderness ebbs away and he ramps up into a hot, hard possession, and oh my God, oh my God, he’s really kissing me li
ke this. Like a man who’s lost control. He’s yanked me bodily away from all my spiraling anxiety. He’s cut it off at the neck. I don’t feel anything but those hands, that body….

  God, he’s hot. I knew it when I first saw him, but touching is believing. And I believe now that Bennett Powell is the sexiest, most magnetic man I’ve ever met in my life.

  I have to breathe, but I don’t want to come up for air. I tear myself away from the kiss and gasp in a single, deep breath, my mind clearing for an instant with the influx of oxygen. But then I see his lips, see his eyes searching mine, and it’s all over again. I curl my arms around his neck and pull him closer. I’ll do anything to keep him near me. I’ll do anything for more of this.

  He makes an approving noise in the back of his throat that I feel all the way down to my core and between my legs. Jesus, he’s hot. He’s so hot, and it’s making me hot, and wet. I step my legs apart, just in case, just in case. If he touched me there, I would allow it. I would love it. I want it—

  Ben pulls back.

  He does it agonizingly slowly, like he’s putting on the brakes on an icy road, and by the time his lips leave mine, I can tell my face must be the color of a Valentine’s card. “Why? Why?” I breathe, and those brown eyes lock on mine. Nobody looks at me like this. Nobody. Not the reporters who have interviewed me, not the photographers who take my headshots for the book jacket...no one.

  “Why what?”

  The entire world has shrunk to his thumbs moving slowly up and down on my hipbones and the sound of his voice.

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Just being a gentleman.” His mouth curls in a smile that is the most ungentlemanly thing I’ve ever seen. “Any other questions?”

  “Why did you start?” My heart is beating fast, a startled rabbit in my chest.

  He has an answer. Of course he has an answer. “The articles I read suggested that touch could have—” He laughs. “—a calming influence and give the...receiver...a rush of endorphins, which might overpower—”