by Amelia Wilde
Then I wait for the silence to break.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Carolyn
On Sunday morning, I sit at my desk and stare out the window for a full five minutes, my hands hovering over the keyboard of my laptop.
The travel agent didn’t reveal much, but this isn’t the end of the line. I can always look for information from sources in Bari, but where do I even begin?
The answer comes to me in a flash so obvious that it makes me think being in love has turned my brain to useless mush.
Gerard has to be my first call.
I haven’t used his services as a private investigator in at least two years because it always makes me feel vaguely slimy to hire a professional to go undercover to confirm rumors, but sometimes—if they’re egregious enough, and if the site gets fixated to a ridiculous degree—I’ve paid him to get the job done so I can give out a Magnolia confirmation.
His specialty is obviously New York City, but people like Gerard know other people, and if anyone knows a person on the ground in Italy, it’s going to be him.
He answers on the second ring. “Jones.”
I’m digging through my purse while I make the call, trying to find the pens that are constantly disappearing from my desk.
“Hi, Gerard. It’s Carolyn.”
“Carolyn!” he says, sounding genuinely pleased to hear from me. We usually meet at a discreet bar to discuss the results of his investigations, and he’s an excellent conversationalist—if completely not my type. “Are you calling about a job?”
“Don’t hate me.”
“I could never hate you,” he jokes. “You need a number.”
“I do.”
“Who for?”
“Do you have any associates in Italy, by any chance?”
He pauses for a moment, and I pin all my hopes on the next words to come out of his mouth. “I do know someone there. Her name is Aida.” He rattles off the number and I thank him profusely. I want to get this woman on the phone before too much more of the day goes by. Though…it is Sunday, so how much can she get done anyway?
It doesn’t matter. I dial the number.
It rings four times, and then a woman’s voice, one with a British accent, answers on the other end of the line. “Aida,” she says, no last name.
My shoulders tense up. I hope she’s as professional as Gerard. I don’t think he’d recommend someone sloppy to me, but if you don’t meet in person, there’s a better chance people won’t take you seriously.
I explain to her who I am and how I got her contact information, and God bless her, she doesn’t ask any questions, just runs through the arrangements for paying her. “Five thousand up front,” she says in a tone that brooks no negotiation. The other ten when I have all the necessary information.”
“Agreed,” I say.
“What am I looking for?”
I tell her the bare outlines of Ace Kingsley’s story, realizing in the middle of the telling that there’s not much to go on. “There’s a rumor going around the city that he murdered his wife. I want to know who his wife was, if she died, and if he had a hand in it.” A lump rises in my throat, and I swallow it down. This part—this is business. I have to separate it from how I feel about him.
“Spell his name for me?” I imagine Aida with a dark notebook of some kind, scribbling down details on the other side of the ocean.
“Ace Kingsley. K-I-N-G-S-L-E-Y.”
“And you’re prepared to learn an answer that might not be favorable?”
“Yes.”
“Is he in the United States currently?”
“New York now, but he only came back recently.”
“I’ll begin work immediately.”
“Let me know what you find out,” I say lamely, but she’s already ended the call.
There’s a strange tightness in my chest. What was I looking for in the purse? I can’t remember. Do I really want to find this out about Ace?
Will it make me love him any less?
There’s a loud knock at the door—the hand on the other side comes down three times—and I almost jump out of my skin. I’m three feet from the door. My cheeks go red and hot, like I’ve been caught doing something illicit, illegal.
Trying to get my pounding heart under control, I go to the door and peer out the peephole. When I see Ace standing in the hall, my heart sinks.
Shit.
What if he heard me?
My first instinct is to retreat from the door, pad silently into my bedroom, and pretend I’m not here.
But that would make me a pathetic coward. Instead, I pull open the door and do my best to look excited.
“Ace! I thought you were busy this weekend. Did you get done early?”
In spite of myself, I am happy to see him. The warmth of the happiness conflicts with the burning guilt churning in my gut.
There’s something strange flashing in his eyes, but Ace just runs a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I did.” He searches my face—Jesus, did he overhear what I was saying just now? And how much?—and it nearly undoes me.
The urge to tell him—to come totally clean, to not have any more secrets from him—is so overpowering that I actually open my mouth to do it, to release myself from the pressure of this secret career, to set him free of what he just heard, if it was anything at all. But before I can get the words out, he steps forward, takes me into his arms, and kisses me so hard it bruises my lips. He’s in the entryway and kicks the door shut behind him pressing me up against the wall.
“I couldn’t wait to see you,” he growls into my mouth between kisses. “I couldn’t wait another second. Not another goddamn second.”
Chapter Thirty
Ace
I want to confront her about what I just heard through the door, but the moment I see her face, the fight goes out of me.
I just want my hands, my lips, on her.
In the back of my mind, all my common sense is screaming at me to stay away, stay far away, until I can sort all of this out, until I can figure out who she was telling about me, but my heart dismisses it. Maybe she was just talking to a friend. Maybe it’s none of my damn business. Maybe I just want to bend her over her bed, and when the truth comes out, then I’ll know, and there’s no point in rushing it….
I have her pressed up against the wall, kissing her hard and deep like I’ve wanted to all weekend. What the hell was I thinking, staying away? If I’d been with her all weekend, she wouldn’t even think about her phone.
That’s a crazy idea, an absurd idea, that spending the weekend with me would make Carolyn want to cut off contact with everyone in her life, and I don’t want that. No. I’m just on fire for her in a way that makes me try to find a justification for everything that I want. Before her, I didn’t need justification. Now I do, but the taste of her skin is driving me wild.
“I couldn’t wait to see you.” The words come out as a low growl, into her mouth, in the space between kisses. “I couldn’t wait another second. Not another goddamn second.”
It’s hardly the accusation I want to level at her. It’s just the plain, unvarnished truth. Her eyes make me want to tell her everything. Everything.
And rumors are starting to break. I’ve been able to ignore it, I’ve been able to look past it, but the woman at the Swan was still in the calm before the storm. Once those people find out….
If they find out from Carolyn….
I don’t care. In this moment, with my hands beneath her tank top, running over her smooth skin, forming a complete thought is impossible. My heart beats with nothing but need for her, overriding my instinct for self-preservation.
I hook my fingers into the waistband of her yoga pants and pull them down, dropping to my knees to bury my face in the front of her panties before yanking them down over her hips to join the pants on the floor. She gasps when I follow suit with the tank top and then her bra, pressing her now naked back up against the cool surface of the wall one more time before I scoop her into my arms
and stride across the apartment to her bedroom.
She’s already panting when I lay her down on the bed, and she immediately goes to her hands and knees. My clothes are off in seconds and I climb on the bed behind her, the mattress caving from my weight, running my hands down the backs of her thighs, my cock ready to burst.
I’m dying to be buried deeply inside her, dying to be close to her, and Carolyn encourages me, sticking her ass out toward me and swaying her hips from side to side, inviting me in.
I don’t refuse.
I plunge into her in one swell movement, burying myself in her to the hilt. She’s soaking, ready, and holds herself steady until I bottom out and she bites back a cry. It’s so filled with pleasure, and something else I can’t name, that it sends me into a frenzy, fucking her so hard she has to brace herself against the comforter.
She only gets wetter, and at some point what she’s saying, over and over, becomes clear. “Yes…yes…yes….”
So I wasn’t the only one.
I fuck her until I’m right on the edge, and just before I go over, I reach around and find her clit with my fingers, bringing her over with me, both of us tumbling into a dark explosion of pleasure, and then sweet oblivion.
When I wake up, light is cascading into the room, but Carolyn is deep asleep, her mouth slightly open, and my heart is pounding.
This is my chance to find out what she’s hiding from me, if anything.
It makes my gut clench, to sneak around in her home like this, but if I’m going to maintain any semblance of control over this situation, I have to know.
I get out of the bed as carefully as I can and stand perfectly still, waiting to see if she’ll stir.
She doesn’t, and I take the opportunity to put my boxers back on. Doing this naked seems ridiculous.
For cover, I grab my own phone. I can always pretend to be making a call.
Then I go out to the living room, where she keeps her laptop.
I hesitate before I open the cover. This is fucking wrong. Maybe the Ace Kingsley of the past who didn’t give a shit about what women thought might not have any qualms about this, but I do.
I open the cover of the laptop anyway.
It’s password-protected, the empty box hovering next to a stylized image of a blue flower.
My muscles go weak.
I have no idea what the password is, but now I’m halfway off the hook.
The second thing I want to see: her phone.
She had it in her hand when I came in. What did she do with it?
Yes—she shoved it into her purse. I can’t remember when.
I slide it out of the bag with trembling hands. Unlike the computer, it has no password.
I scroll through recent messages, not clicking on any of them—somehow that crosses the line to me—and none of them seem to mention my name. I’m just going to look at recent calls.
There are several going to a contact marked as her boutique, but several that aren’t…and I recognize the numbers as international ones. From Italy.
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 Thirty-One
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 Thirty-Two
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.