by Lindsey Hart
It absolutely gutted him. Was there really nothing there? Did he imagine the whole hesitant couple of seconds on her part when he’d kissed her? The instant he swore she’d been about to kiss him back? Had she moved on? Just because she didn’t have someone didn’t mean that she wasn’t happy. She’d obviously carved out a life for herself. Started a business from scratch. She was well on her way to becoming a success.
He wanted to kiss her again, to try to convince her that there was something. Something unfinished. Something, anything. A shred of what they were. That it wasn’t just alive for him. He needed to convince himself that he wasn’t the only one that had battled five long years to put out the fire and lost. That she felt just a little of that inferno, somewhere in her being. That there wasn’t enough water on earth to put it out for either of them.
“Hello? Trey? Anyone home in there?” Ambi snapped her fingers right in front of his face. “If you’re not going to answer me, I’m going to take your silence as a yes and just book the place.” She rolled her eyes. “God, I don’t even know why you insisted on coming down here. You hired me to do this all for you and yet you’re here. Making my life difficult. As per usual.”
“So, you do still feel something.” As soon as he put it out there, he knew it was the wrong thing to say.
Ambi’s eyes widened, and not in a good way. In the kind of telltale way that said she knew exactly what he was doing and that it was a pathetic stab in the dark on his part. She looked at him like he was the fly who had been pissing her off for the past two days. The one she’d finally lined up in the crosshairs of her fly swatter and would be only too happy to smush.
Ambi inhaled sharply, but when she spoke her voice was strong and even. “We’re talking about the hall. I’m doing a job. The job I was paid to do. There is nothing else. There will never be anything else. I’m a professional, which is why I’m here. Because I care about my business. Because this is a huge opportunity to me, and honestly, because you made it impossible for me to say no. I’m not a bad person, Trey, so just tell me. Is this place okay or not?”
Fuck. How had he managed to screw everything up in a matter of minutes? Oh right. He’d done that five years ago when he’d dumped Ambi for a multi-billion dollar company that was set to be his empire as soon as his father passed away, and a six-figure bank account in the interim.
“Yeah.” His voice was foreign to his own ears. “The hall is fine. I guess.”
Ambi breathed a sigh of relief. He literally watched the shiver roll through her, watched her shoulders sag and her body curl into itself. Was she that glad that she didn’t have to deal with him? Was it really just business for her or was she really good at pretending?
“Right. I’ll book it then. I’ll have the menus emailed to you for tomorrow morning so you can pick what you want. Let me know if there are alternative options you need, as I mentioned. I’ll also have a list of potential entertainment and links to samples of their work to you by noon tomorrow. I’ll need a decision soon, since the party isn’t far away, and this is a busy time for everyone.”
Trey nodded woodenly. The way Ambi rattled off facts like that really was impersonal. It was all business. There wasn’t a scrap of feeling behind it. Not even anger. It was all indifference. He hated indifference. That lack of feeling anything at all.
Ambi nodded at him, tucked her hands back into her pockets, and whirled. She stalked confidently out the door, banking hard to head down the hall.
Hell no. He wasn’t going to let her go like that. There was something in him, something raw and broken, like salt in already shredded wounds, stinging and chaffing and burning. He couldn’t let her leave like that. Like any other person in the world would have. He couldn’t let her, because he wasn’t any other person in her world, and she wasn’t in his.
He caught up to her right at the front entrance. There were only two big sliding doors, one for entry and one for exit, and a bank of windows surrounding it all. He ran after Ambi, his shoes slapping against the tiles so hard that she whirled right by the door.
“Trey- what-”
He couldn’t stop himself. He gripped her arm with one hand, curling her into him. He caught her off balance and her hands slapped against the black wool of his coat as her body melded against his. She capitulated from the shock and his other arm encircled her back. He dipped his head at the same time her lips parted.
The instant their lips met, fire erupted between them. She was the gasoline and he was already roaring. The burn ate at them, the intensity wild and alarming and disarming. He plundered her mouth, licking at her lips with burning passes of his tongue until they parted for him on an exhale, granting him entrance.
It was wrong. It was totally wrong, but nothing had ever felt so fucking right.
Trey swept his tongue in and stroked Ambi’s. His whole body reacted, hardening, melting into hers, as he devoured and claimed. He wanted to back her up against a wall, kiss her until she couldn’t breathe. He wanted her in his arms. Always. He wanted her surrender. He wanted to give her back everything she’d taken and ask for all the parts of himself that she still held locked up within all the parts of her. All the parts that had once been them.
While he was still kissing her, Ambi’s hands balled into fists against his chest. She beat at him before she even pulled away. He nipped her as she pulled back, by accident, but he couldn’t stop the groan that vibrated through his chest when copper blossomed and exploded on his lips.
He let her fall away when she pushed. He let her step back, let her break the magic. It didn’t feel like being saved from drowning. It felt like the exact opposite. Like her absence was the lead weight that dragged him down back into darkness.
“What are you doing!” She held a shaking hand up to her lips. She pressed her fingers there and pulled them away after, to check for blood. There was no evidence of the copper he’d tasted and he breathed a small sigh of relief. It was short-lived since her eyes flashed and crackled with rage. “What do you think you’re doing?” she spat out again.
Trey pointed up at the door, where a bough of something as modern as the rest of the place was strung up. “There’s mistletoe above the door. I was just doing my duty and all.”
Ambi’s eyes flicked upwards then her nostrils flared, and her lips thinned out. “That’s not a mistletoe! You wouldn’t know a mistletoe if it bit you in the fucking dick!”
They were still standing close, even with the step back she took. Trey felt drunk on her, drunk on the sensation of kissing her, of the sweet vanilla taste of her still in his mouth, of the lingering warmth of her body that had just been pressed against his. He wanted to keep drinking. To keep drinking her in until he blacked out from her beauty.
She could lie to him. She could lie to him with her words, but her body gave her away. Her lips were swollen, her hands were shaking at her sides. Her entire body was vibrating, and her pupils were blown so wide there were almost no iris left.
Ambi’s shoulders heaved. He thought for a second that she was going to say something. To tell him off. That she’d do something. Anything. Instead, she whirled and ran out the door. Ran. She wasn’t someone who fled from her problems. She wasn’t someone who ran away from anything. She stood and faced it. Not without fear, but with bravery. She didn’t run.
Yet there she was, racing through the parking lot, her braid streaming out behind her. Trey stood rooted next to the window by the door, breathing so hard and sharp that it felt like glass going in and out of his lungs. He watched Ambi get in her car and peel away. He kept watching, long after she was gone. He stood in the same spot for so long that it felt like he wasn’t human any longer, like he’d been turned into some version of a statue, as ultra-modern as the rest of the building.
When he finally forced himself to walk out to his own car, his heart was still racing. Everything felt wild and wrong and torn up inside. He was bleeding out. Not slowly, but violently. He waited another half hour, sitting in the cold of his c
ar without it running. He waited until it started to pour. Raining. Freezing raining. It barely even registered with him.
He waited until he was sure Ambi was back at the office, or at least safely pulled over somewhere else, then he texted her private number. The one she hadn’t ever given out. The one the PI he’d hired to look into her handed him as a little extra gift.
Ambi was Ambi and she wasn’t going to give in without a fight.
Which was why he’d take her off guard with a truce.
CHAPTER 8
Amberina
Somehow a storm snuck up on Ambi and took her by surprise. A vile storm. A genuine storm. A storm raged, brutal and as ugly as the one going on in her heart.
First, the city was blanketed with freezing rain that fell for hours, turning the streets and sidewalks alike into skating rinks. For the grand finale, the wind kicked up and the temperature dropped, and the rain turned to snow. The wind furiously swirled and tossed the fat flakes about until it was nothing more than a good old-fashioned blizzard with whiteout conditions.
Travel wasn’t advised. People were being warned to stay off the streets when and if at all possible. The whole thing had come up in a few hours and by the time evening rolled around, the snow was so mounded up that most people probably couldn’t get around anyway.
The storm wasn’t forecasted, but right after her meeting with Trey at the hall, the weather warnings started dinging away on the weather app. Ambi canceled her plans for the afternoon, which included grocery shopping and a few other personal errands and went straight back to the office. Sometimes it was lucky that she lived where she worked. She parked her car in her spot in the back and hunkered down to work on some unplanned accounting for the afternoon.
She tried not to think about the text Trey sent her earlier.
He was sorry. Bullshit he was sorry. He wasn’t freaking sorry. Sorry that she’d run out on him, maybe. Sorry that she had more than a couple thousand dollars of his money in her pocket and she could choose to just call the whole thing off and slap him with a sexual assault charge. Yeah. He was freaking sorry all right.
He’d texted her personal number, which meant that somehow, he had it. He said he wanted to apologize in person and that he’d come by her office after work. Around six.
Trey was never late. It was six-thirty and when he still hadn’t showed up, Ambi leaned back in her office chair, propped her feet up on the desk and stared at her pink socks with the flamingos. She’d locked the door at four when she normally closed. No one could get around the city in the terrible weather anyway. She’d still sat down at her office, forcing herself to do catch up work and paperwork that she hated.
She stared past her socks, out into the darkness. The window was getting foggy and frosted and there really wasn’t much to see except a blanket of white anyway. The rain had frozen to the glass earlier, smudging and smearing and blocking out most of the world anyway.
Trey was never late. That was his thing. She knew it. She’d purposely shown up late for their past two meetings just to pick his ass.
Ambi picked her phone off the desk, toyed with it in her hand for a bit, turning it over and over, and finally dialed the number Trey texted her from. The call went straight to voice mail, which usually meant that someone’s phone was off or dead. She tried texting anyway, even though she felt ridiculous doing it.
Are you still coming?
The message stayed marked unread, so five minutes later, she sent another.
As fun as it would be to watch you eat crow and humble pie for half an hour, I’m done. It’s late. You’re late. Don’t bother coming. You probably won’t get here anyway.
She waited ten minutes, even though she wanted to slip up the back stairs to her apartment, slip into some really fuzzy pajamas, make herself a cup of tea and camp out in front of the TV to binge watch something totally uninteresting while she purposely didn’t think any thoughts involving Trey.
Ambi picked up her phone again, just to check to see if the blizzard had been downgraded, which wasn’t likely given that the wind was still screaming out there. She just happened to check and see if her texts had been marked as read. They hadn’t, but maybe Trey turned that feature off.
Why was she even still down there waiting, three hours past her closing time? She didn’t want to think about Trey, yet that’s all she was doing. When she realized how pathetic that was, that even though she’d finished her accounting and the extra hours had been about work, they’d also been about something they should never have been, she bit down hard on her bottom lip. She chewed it until it hurt. It was better to concentrate on the bite of pain than to think about Trey’s lips on hers.
Had she been hoping for an apology or something else?
Before she could begin an inner monologue with herself, which was sure to be filled with conflict and a heck of a lot of berating herself for just about everything that had happened in the past week, something hard banged against the front window.
Ambi let out a gasp and shot to her feet. The banging came again, sharper, more brutal, this time from the front door. She didn’t have a doorbell and the pounding continued long past what was normal. The hair on the backs of her arms stood on end. Thank god she’d locked the door. Who the heck was out there?
She debated about charging up the stairs to her apartment, since it separated her and whoever was out there by two doors with locks, one of them thick, industrial, and steel, but then she shook her head.
Trey wouldn’t have been dumb enough to try and get there in the crazy weather, would he?
“Ambi?” As if in answer, her name floated through the door. It was muffled and garbled, but it was definitely Trey’s voice.
“You asshat! What the hell?” She figured it would serve Trey right to stand out there and freeze. On second thought, she didn’t want to be responsible for him really freezing. Trey was so unpredictable that if he knew she was there, which obviously he did given that the lights were on and he could probably make out her shadowy shape inside, he’d likely be too stubborn to leave.
Ambi stalked to the door, flipped the lock and pushed it open. It took all her strength given that mother nature seemed to be pushing with equal force from the other side.
Trey was there. He practically fell through the open door. He looked like some version of a winter monster, caked in snow, breathing hard, his breath frosted and frozen all over his face, his coat cloaked in ice and snow. His eyebrows and eyelashes were frosted over and beaded up with ice. Even his hair was coated and stiff with white.
“What the hell?” Ambi stumbled back. “Why were you stupid enough to try and make it in this? Don’t you know that they’re not advising travel?”
“Y-yeah,” Trey gasped. A violent shiver wracked him so hard that particles of ice and snow actually fell off his coat and dropped onto the floor to melt in little round puddles like he was a shaggy dog shaking himself.
Ambi rolled her eyes to hide the fact that she was more than a little concerned. She stepped past Trey and locked the door. A drift of snow had blown in and was melting on her tiled floor. She whirled and took in Trey. He stared back, his massive shoulders heaving with every breath. His wool coat was sodden, and his black slacks looked soaked through. His square-toed dress shoes were terribly inadequate for the drifts out there and snow still clung up to his knees. His face was cherry red, right along with his ears and when he rubbed his hands together, his fingers were the same angry hue.
“Jesus. What happened?”
“In- in short,” Trey panted. He stopped and gulped in a breath. “In short I ignored the weather warnings and went out anyway. My car got stuck a couple of miles from here. I called for a tow, but apparently, half the city is under snow and they said it would be hours if they could even get to me before morning. I stayed in the car, idling it for as long as I could, but I only had less than a quarter of a tank and it ran out in an hour. I gave up on the tow and decided to walk. It was only a few miles which wouldn
’t have been bad, but I didn’t have boots and I got soaked through right away, there were so much snow and wind. I tried to call you after I tried calling a tow, but my phone died, and I didn’t have a charger in the car.”
Ambi stared at the pathetic sight that was Trey. She should be happy to see him washed in looking like a miserable, drowned rat. She wished she could say that she hoped that he’d contracted pneumonia and died prematurely, but she didn’t wish that at all. Trey’s hands looked painful. His feet might have frostbite. She wouldn’t laugh if he lost a couple of toes at her expense. She wouldn’t laugh at all. Despite everything, she didn’t want Trey to be miserable.
She just wanted him to leave her alone.
Except honestly, she wasn’t even sure she wanted that either. She had been, but now… after two days and two kisses, she had no idea where she stood. She wasn’t as resolute as she should have been. She wasn’t resolute at all.
“You’re an idiot,” she mumbled. “A complete dumb ass. Who drives around in winter with less than a quarter tank and without a survival kit with a candle and a set of warm clothes?”
Trey blinked. Water clung to his eyelashes, starring them above his ridiculously gorgeous jade eyes. He looked pathetic, but still unfortunately gorgeous.
“You’re right.” He shrugged. “It was stupid. All of it. I shouldn’t have come.”
“No. You shouldn’t have.” It occurred to her that now that he was there, Trey was likely there for the night. She wasn’t going to send him back out into the cold. Getting a cab would likely be impossible until the streets were plowed, and she wouldn’t fare any better in her car than he had in his. “You shouldn’t have.”
She debated about making him sleep in the office overnight. The floor would be good enough for him. It was better than being out in the blizzard. Really, that’s all he should hope for. He could get his rich daddy to send a freaking driver to come pick his ass up sometime between now and morning, plowed be damned. Maybe they could land a helicopter or their private jet on the top of the building.