Reveal

by Bromberg, K.

  He flashes me a megawatt grin. “I think it’ll look nice on you.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  He levels me with a look. “While I more than enjoy that body of yours, you need to cover your tits up if I’m going to be anywhere in your vicinity.”

  I look down as I cup both of my breasts, shirt falling to the floor, and run my thumb and forefinger over my nipples. “They are nice breasts, though, aren’t they?”

  His eyes darken with desire. “Put it on, Vaughn.”

  “I will not. I refuse to sleep with the enemy.” I pout, then close my eyes and let my head fall back in mock rapture as I gently pinch my nipples once again.

  “You already have.” His voice is strained.

  “I thought this was our first date, though,” I say coyly as I fight my smile.

  “I’m warning you.”

  “Does this bug you?” This time I let an exaggerated moan fall from my lips.

  “Vaughn.”

  And before I even have time to squeal, Ryker has snatched the shirt up off the floor and tackles me on the bed in one continuous swoop.

  I squeal in shock and then protest when his fingers find my rib cage so they can dance with tickles up and down their line.

  “I’m not putting it on!” I say through the laughter.

  “Yes, you are.”

  He straddles me so that he sits on my pelvis, his knees squeezing me in place as he tries to shove the shirt over my head. The motion has the thick hardness of his cock pressing against the underside of my breasts.

  He pauses for the briefest of moments as its tip slips just between my cleavage when he tries once again to pull the shirt over my head. This time I push my arms together so my breasts squeeze against him.

  “Stop,” he part groans, part laughs, with eyes that totally beg me not to listen.

  “Or what?” I’m winded and can’t stop laughing.

  “You’re making this harder than it needs to be.”

  I still and lift an eyebrow and wink. “It’s much better when it’s hard.” I squeeze my arms together again.

  “Vaughn.” This time my name sounds like a swear word.

  “Oopsie.”

  After a playful struggle where more tickling is involved, he manages to grab my arms and pin them to either side of my head.

  “How are you going to get the shirt over my head now? Huh?” I ask.

  He realizes his mistake and that his hands are full, so he tries another tactic. “I have Red Sox sweatpants and a sweatshirt somewhere I can force you into if need be. Hell, I’d welcome another barrier between me and your skin, so I suggest you stop struggling and put the shirt on.” He smiles smugly at me, and I do the only thing I can do—laugh.

  And God, does it feel good to laugh with him. Over something stupid and silly and without a care in the world other than how I’m going to make him put his hands on me, all the while swooning over the reasons behind why he doesn’t want to.

  This time when he tries to pull the shirt over my head, I let him.

  “Why? Why are you torturing us?” I ask as I obediently let him put my arms through the sleeves.

  He leans over and presses the softest of kisses to my lips. “Because you matter.” Another kiss of lips. “Because this matters.” And one more to top it off. “Because tonight was perfect.”

  Every single sarcastic comeback I can think of dies on my lips as I run a hand over his jawline and lift my head up so I can find his lips just one more time.

  The kiss is a languorous one. Soft and slow and detailed in its attention. When it ends—when we’re both equal parts sexually frustrated but intimately sated—Ryker rolls off me, pulling me with him, and just holds on tight.

  “Well . . . ,” I say to add some kind of levity to the torrent of emotion this whole evening has brought to me, but it ends up sounding like drugged satisfaction. “For a man who doesn’t want anything else from me—”

  “Oh, I want all right.” He chuckles and presses a kiss to the crown of my head.

  “You sure are holding on like you’re afraid I’m going to bolt.”

  “Maybe that’s because every time you’ve been in my bed before, you’ve left.”

  “Maybe I’m afraid your mom and dad will come home, and when they tell my parents what happened, I’ll be sent off to reform school for sleeping in a bed with a boy.”

  “It wouldn’t matter. We’d still figure out a way to see each other.” He tightens his arm around me and lowers his voice. “We’ve managed to find our way back to each other so far.” He nuzzles his nose against the back of my neck. “I want you to be here when I wake up, Vaughn.”

  I love you, Ryker Lockhart.

  I don’t voice the words, but every single part of me feels them as the sky outside turns that dull gray that happens in the hours before the sun begins to brighten the sky.

  While I don’t say the words, as I fall asleep cocooned in his arms and with the steady rise and fall of his chest beneath my cheek, every part of my being feels them.

  If I thought him making me need him was bad, now he’s made me want him too.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Vaughn

  What was that?

  I jolt awake in my bed. Lungs heaving. Mind fuzzy. Adrenaline coursing.

  Samantha. Where’s Samantha?

  Patting the bed beside me as if I’ve missed her when through the moonlit room I can clearly see she’s not there.

  My throat is dry, and for some reason my hands tremble with fear.

  Toot. Toot.

  I jump at the sound and emit a startled yelp.

  The train. It’s just the train is all. A nightmare and the whistle have me freaking out.

  But the thump outside my closed door only adds to it.

  That and the cry I give when Samantha flings it open and turns on the light.

  “Let’s go.” Her voice is on the edge of hysteria yet has a calm urgency to it as I blink to let my eyes adjust to the light. She’s already halfway across our room to the closet before I can really see.

  “What do you mean—”

  “C’mon, Vaughn. You need to get up right now. We’re leaving.” She yanks open a dresser drawer and takes the first things she comes to—a faded pair of jeans and then a T-shirt—and throws them at me.

  “Sam. What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

  “You need to trust me.” She drops a bag on the carpet with a thud and then proceeds to go to the back of our closet so I can’t see her.

  Pushing myself off the bed with my clothes clutched in one hand, worry begins to course through me. “Sam? Are you okay? What’s—”

  “Get dressed!” she yells at me without any care that she’ll wake up Uncle James. But it’s when she all but runs out of the closet and I see her face that I freeze.

  Her complexion is pale, her eyes are wide with worry, and everything about her seems to be on edge and rushed.

  “Sam?” I ask, much calmer now even though my pulse is racing and unease is tickling at the base of my neck. Tears I don’t understand well in my eyes.

  “Here.” She pushes a suitcase at me, refusing to meet my eyes or answer my questions. “Grab whatever you want to take with you.”

  “For how long?”

  “Forever.”

  My hands still, and my suitcase falls on its side at her words. “What do you mean?”

  “We’re leaving, Vaughn. This town. This house. Him. We’re leaving.” Our eyes lock for the first time since she stormed in here.

  I find it hard to swallow as fear of the unknown future stretches out before us at the same time hope tries to bubble its way up in the crevices the fear of living in this house has created within me. And even though I know this is a good thing—us leaving—it’s still terrifying.

  “Yes, Vaughn. Everything I told you we were going to do—leave here, make a life for ourselves—we’re going to do it right now. So I need you to pack, okay?” Without waiting for me to comply, she begin
s shoving her own clothes from her dresser into her suitcase in one big scoop of items after another.

  Stunned, a little off kilter, and still watching her, I kneel down to open my suitcase, but my hand hits something odd. When I look down, a gasp falls from my lips as I stare at the bag she’d dropped on the floor with a thud after she came in here.

  It’s jewelry. Lots of jewelry—it’s my uncle’s Rolexes and diamond cuff links and rings, when he never wears rings—and cash. A thick stack of bills folded inside his money clip. I stare at the pile, my fingers coiling back as if the items in the bag that I now notice is a pillowcase will burn them.

  “It’s our payoff.” She keeps her head down as she flits around the room and slides a bin out from beneath the bed to grab her vast collection of journals where they’re hidden beneath the winter clothes we’ve stored them in.

  “I don’t under—”

  “Pack. Please, pack,” she urges. “All of that is what Uncle James is giving us if we leave and never come back.”

  “But . . .” The word dies on my lips as our gazes hold, and the look in hers tells me not to question. Not to ask. And to believe her lie that we’re not stealing these items so we have something to pawn and live off.

  Holy shit. This is real.

  I just nod but don’t move, frozen by the change swirling through the room like a hurricane.

  “We have to go, Vaughn.”

  I look at her, my eyes blinking, as I try to process everything and the urgency with which she’s requiring me to do it.

  And then I see it.

  The blood. Little specks on her shirt. On her cheek.

  “Sam. Your shirt. There’s blood. Are you okay? What did he do to you? Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?” Tears flood my eyes as my own hysteria amps up with each and every syllable.

  She looks down at her shirt and blinks slowly as time feels like it passes in slow motion. In automatic reflex, she closes one hand around the key on the chain around her neck as she stares at the little dots of blood speckled on it.

  When she looks back at me this time, there is more determination than ever before in her expression. In her eyes. In everything about her.

  “Yes. He did. He hurt me again, and it’s the last time I’ll ever allow him to. That’s why we’re leaving.” She steps forward and grabs both of my cheeks in her hands and looks into my eyes. “I know this is scary, Vee. I know it’s the middle of the night and I’m worrying you, but Uncle James is, uh . . . passed out on his bed, and this is our chance to leave and never look back. We’ll get a place of our own. We’ll never have to see him again. I’ll take care of you. I promise you, I’ll take care of you.”

  I nod. It’s all I can do as I imagine a life where my sister doesn’t have to tiptoe into our room late at night, scrub herself raw in the shower, and then climb into bed, where she lies to me and tells me she’s okay.

  I’ll do anything she wants me to so long as she never has to do that again.

  “Okay. I’ll pack.”

  Toot. Toot.

  Another train this time. Maybe we’ll be on the next one.

  Toot. Toot.

  I startle awake and bolt to an upright seated position in bed. It takes a moment for me to make out my surroundings—with my breath labored and my heart racing.

  Ryker’s.

  I’m at Ryker’s place.

  Not the mansion in Greenwich.

  “Hey, you okay?” Ryker’s sleep-drugged voice rasps through the silence, and his hand rubs lazily up and down the line of my back.

  “Yes. Yeah.”

  “Bad dream?” he asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “C’mere.” He hooks an arm around my waist and pulls me against him. My immediate reaction is to fight against him for some reason, to keep some distance and gain some space to allow my mind to settle at the memory and the little details of that night I haven’t thought of in years.

  But I don’t.

  I lie back down and allow Ryker to wrap his arms around me so that the heat of his body seeps into the chill of mine.

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Mmm-hmm.” I don’t trust myself to speak.

  “I’ll make your bad dreams go away, Vaughn,” he murmurs and presses a kiss against the crown of my head. “All of them. You don’t need to worry anymore. I’ve got you now.”

  And with my hand pressed against his heart and his chin resting atop my head, I revel in this foreign feeling as his breath slowly evens out with sleep.

  In the comfort.

  In the feeling of being safe.

  In the notion that I’m not alone.

  How could I have wanted to fight this feeling? How could I have thought all this time that being alone was better for me?

  Sure, we’re not perfect . . . but this—Ryker and his arms around me, helping to chase away the demons of my past—is something I can’t describe.

  And almost as much as it scares me . . . it also feels so very therapeutic.

  It makes me realize that this feeling might just make everything worth it.

  I’ve got you now.

  Every last thing.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Ryker

  The Red Sox T-shirt is bunched around her waist, and she’s sprawled diagonally across my bed. The sheets are twisted around her legs, when thirty minutes ago those long temptations were tangled around mine as we slept.

  I let her sleep. As much as I want to wake her up, I let her sleep. My mind ghosts over her bad dream last night. The trembling of her hand against my chest. The racing of her pulse at her temple beneath my lips.

  And I wonder what it was she dreamed about.

  She shifts, her shirt lifting a little higher, the curve of her thigh revealed a bit more, and I find it impossible to take my eyes off her.

  What is it about this woman that makes me fight to not have sex with her?

  Am I fucking crazy to turn those legs and that ass and that goddamn vise-grip pussy down like I did last night?

  I button up the rest of my dress shirt as I watch her. The light hair fanned on the dark sheets. The dark lashes on the pale skin of her cheeks. The pink lips that would make any man beg for mercy. I want her in the best way. In the worst way. Hell, in any way.

  I’m crazy all right, but now it seems I’m crazy for her.

  How’d that fucking happen? When did I become a man who wines and dines without expecting a thing in return?

  My phone vibrates on the dresser next to me. A reminder of my court date in two hours and another about my meeting with Stuart at three.

  He’d better have something for me. Her stockings at my feet catch my eye, and then the bustier a few feet beyond that. I smile. Her blatant defiance shouldn’t cause that reaction from me, but it does.

  She shifts on the bed, and a soft sound of contentment sighs from her lips—the same one she gives when I push into her during sex—as she snuggles back into the comforter.

  What if Stuart has dug up information on her that you’re not prepared to hear? What are you going to do with it then?

  Is it going to change how you feel about her, Ryk?

  How bad would it have to be to make that happen?

  Fuck.

  I blow out a sigh, and even though I know I need to head into the office, my feet move toward her. To the one person I keep being drawn to over and over despite telling myself that it’s too much work, too much hassle, too much feeling.

  I rest my hip on the side of the bed and press a kiss to her temple.

  “Please tell me you’re not dressed yet,” she murmurs but doesn’t open her eyes. Instead, she turns toward me and buries her face between the outside of my thigh and the mattress. The heat of her breath warms my slacks. The scent of her shampoo is faint but there. “It’s too early.”

  “Mmm.” The drapes are drawn to mute the light, so I get why she thinks that. “Not early, no.”

  “What time—”

  “Shh.” I cut her off and
link my fingers with hers. “I have to get to court.”

  “Noooo. Don’t go.”

  Goddamn it. The temptation to call the judge and postpone—give some bullshit reason that won’t hold—so that I can slide back into the bed beside her has never been more appealing.

  “I have to go.” It pains me to say those four words.

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  Exhausted. “That’s what espresso’s for. Stay here and get some sleep. Just lock the door on the way out, and don’t drink all my parents’ alcohol so I get in trouble when they get home.”

  I can feel her lips spread into a smile against my leg. “Promise. But only if I can keep a Yankees shirt here to sleep in.”

  That ridiculously simple statement made in that sleep-drugged rasp of hers just made me way too fucking happy.

  Yeah, I definitely need help.

  She takes our linked hands and pulls them so she can press a kiss against mine. “Promise?” she prompts.

  “Promise.” I run my other hand over her hair. “I left a new toothbrush on the counter for you and one of my shirts for you to wear if you want.”

  “Efficient,” she murmurs as her breathing begins to even out again.

  “Always.” Another kiss to her cheek. “Thanks for not running away this time.”

  “Mmm.”

  It’s the only sound she makes as she slips back to sleep. I don’t move, though. Like a fucking sap I sit and watch her. The rise and fall of her chest. The curve of her body beneath the oversize shirt. And for a moment I’m more than tempted to break every ounce of resolve I held on to last night. I’m more than certain that burying myself to the hilt in her right now would trump the high I expect to claim in court later when I walk away with the settlement in my client’s favor.

  Get up, Lockhart.

  You’ll have more time for this—for her.

  You definitely will.