Blush

by Jen Doyle

  She closed her eyes. Imagined how it would feel to be with him again…

  And then how devastating it would be when he left.

  Ignoring the sting in her eyes as she opened them, she whispered, “It’s time for you to go.”

  He didn’t move. Not right at first. For a moment, she even wondered if maybe he wouldn’t. But then he bent his head down for a brief brush of his lips before letting go. She closed her eyes again to savor the feeling of his kiss, the tingly heat that he elicited just as much today as he had back then. When she opened them again, he was gone.

  11

  He should have put an end to things right then. Should have packed his bags, left the details to someone else, and jumped on a plane. He knew that the moment he walked into the suite and Jeremy headed immediately to the bar for Macallan’s.

  He should have done it later that night when the picture of him kissing Nicki went live on ten different websites at once.

  He should have done it at one in the morning when his mobile began to ring incessantly, a blatant reminder of the last middle of the night phone call, the one he’d received that night in Vegas.

  Although he did answer again, the shrill voice on the other end of the line had the opposite effect that it had had the first time, however. His mother wasn’t harmless; she was too devious and, having kept her true self behind carefully cultivated façade, still had too many people she could pull to her side. She no longer had enough control to manipulate him the way she once had, but there were still plenty of ways she could hurt him and she made no effort to pretend otherwise. After a five-minute long diatribe, she ended with, “If you can’t take care of this, I will. I will crush her, Simon. She will not destroy this family’s legacy.”

  Simon had, of course, come to the conclusion by now that Nicki was entirely innocent—that she always had been. That he could explain the situation with the annulment and she’d sign the papers leaving him free and clear without a second thought. Except that also most likely meant she would wash her hands of him entirely. And no matter how much he knew that was the eventual result, he was too selfish to let her go.

  Not just yet. One kiss hadn’t been nearly enough.

  “I have it handled,” he snapped. Then he hung up on his mother and powered off the phone.

  When he turned it back on in the morning after a restless night, he deleted her messages without listening to them and went directly to Nicki’s instead. She said nothing about the kiss, which was probably for the best. Especially when her message was that she’d set up another meeting for him that afternoon at 4:00. And thus began their daily outings to the craftsmen and women of Sonoma and Napa Counties.

  Although following her rules got harder and harder as they traveled all over the blasted countryside and one week progressed into the next, he did abide by them. Up one mountain and down another, all twisty and treacherous but breathtakingly beautiful roads.

  Somewhat like Nicki, actually.

  With the exception of the first day, she’d conceded to let Jeremy drive them in the Rover and, honestly, Simon had been fine with that. He pretended to work on his laptop and not pay attention to the electricity snapping between them, and she pretended her body just had an extraordinarily sensitive reaction to the air conditioning in the car. It would have been an easier sell if her cheeks weren’t perpetually flushed with heat at the same time.

  And there was plenty of time to do their pretending. He’d honestly never known there was so much Godforsaken potential for craftsmanship. They’d been to anyone who might have the potential to be working on his house: cabinetmakers, glassblowers, landscape designers… Nicki had even set him up with a personal sommelier.

  “What?” she’d said. “We’re in wine country. And you know Scotch, not wine.”

  Although that was entirely true, Simon wasn’t thrilled she’d realized that. He’d always thought he’d hidden it pretty well.

  Other than introductory phone calls, it appeared she knew these people no better than he did, but she had a tremendous capacity to put them at ease. It wasn’t exactly a skill he would have ascribed to a woman who’d spent most of her adult life removed and up on stage, but it did gradually come back to Simon that she’d become the best of friends with nearly everyone they’d ever interacted with, from the room service deliverymen to the ticket taker at the Hoover Dam. He supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised. He just wished she’d talk to him as easily as to them, especially since they’d been together for at least a couple of hours almost daily since the day they’d kissed—now a full fortnight ago.

  He could feel her letting her guard down, though, bit by bit. She’d stand closer to him when they met with someone. Have a glass of wine with him and Jeremy before heading home. One time she even casually rested her hand on his thigh as she leaned forward to give Jeremy directions, not even realizing it until she began to settle back, her body twisting towards him in what seemed very much like the prelude to a kiss. She stopped herself a mere few inches from getting all the way there, straightening up quickly and pulling away. At which point she ignored his amused—and, he was sure, somewhat hopeful—smile, before sliding as far across the backseat from him as she could.

  But that was as close as they came to anything remotely personal until the day she was looking at her phone and made a distinctly disgusted noise along with a muttered, “Oh my God. I hate her.” And then she froze.

  It was odd.

  “Hate who?”

  “Um… No one.” She very intently put aside her phone and looked out the window. Then she huffed and turned back to him. “That was a total lie. Charlotte. Charlotte St. Claire.”

  Charlotte St. Clair, as in the starlet he’d slept with six months after leaving the U.S. The starlet he’d spent a week with on his yacht, in fact, the photographs of which has been broadcast around the world. The first of the many women Simon had desperately hoped would push any lingering desire for Nicki out of his system once and for all. It had never been successful, of course, as he was being reminded of every damn day. Simon shut his own phone down. It appeared they were about to have a conversation.

  “There was a princess, too, I think. Right?” Nicki said before turning away again the second his gaze met hers. Not so quickly that he missed the hurt in her eyes, though, or the way her hand shook as she brought it up to her face.

  Should he tell her he’d been so high at the time that he hadn’t even known Charlotte’s name until he’d seen it in the Sun? That after months of hearing his mother go on that he’d come to believe he truly had been delusional to think a whirlwind affair would have anything to do with something real? That he’d let his friends pull him back into their clubs and their parties and their days upon end of complete uselessness before coming to fully accept that he’d been born into a very specific role from which there was no escape, whether there was a title to his name or not. So he’d decided to use those few years left until he came into his inheritance to make the point that his mother could exert as much control as she liked, but that didn’t mean she could keep him contained.

  His mother didn’t like the Vegas showgirl? He’d run off with an actress instead. When his mother had countered by offering him control of his inheritance a year early if he’d at least make a strategic match, he’d gone off and found an actual princess. Deposed and without a penny to her name, but she at least had a title of sorts. She also managed to destroy his yacht about ten minutes into the relationship and it had gone directly downhill from there. By the time his mother agreed to leave him be, her entire household staff—including the diehards who had stuck with her from childhood—had resigned.

  Not for Simon’s sake, of course. But out of protest to the battleground the family estate had become. His mother had had to triple each of their salaries and double the amount she was leaving them in her will in order to entice them back. Simon was quite proud of that, in fact, and he’d lived mostly in peace thereafter until the day he turned 28.

>   Or, at least, right up until the moment Nicki had come back into his life.

  “They meant nothing to me.” For the first time since that day of the kiss, he broke the no touching rule, his hand closing over hers. “They were vapid and destructive and there for the sole purpose of telling my mother to shove it up her arse.”

  Nicki turned back to him. Her chin was trembling, but it was a start. He grasped the back of her neck and pulled her closely enough for their lips to almost touch. But he wasn’t going to kiss her again, no matter how much he wanted to. This was too important. It was also something he knew he should never voice aloud and yet at the moment he couldn’t care less.

  “You were the only woman I ever cared about. The only woman I ever loved.” He tightened his hold. “I know you have no reason to trust me but it’s the absolute truth.”

  Not until she nodded did he pull back even a little. And then Jeremy coughed and he shot Simon a glance and Simon let go and moved away entirely. Because if Jeremy weren’t there to keep track, Simon would have broken the rules every damn day.

  After a minute, Nicki pulled away, too. Put herself back at the other side of the seat. But this time when Jeremy brought them back to the Buena Vista, she let Simon walk her back to her car. Let him brush her hair to the side and caress her cheek and gently touch his lips to hers and he knew his desire was impossible to hide. He held himself back though, his hands in his pockets and his body tight with restraint as he moved aside so she could get into her car.

  Just before she drove away, she rolled down the window and said, “I believe you, Simon.”

  The relief of it nearly had his knees buckling. And the thought of it had him smiling for days.

  12

  A few days after their brief but somewhat earth-shattering conversation about the other women in his life, Nicki arrived at Simon's suite in an unusually tentative state. She appeared as if she were on the verge of saying something, but then she threw that stage smile of hers at him and moved right along into the routine they’d settled into, with her bringing a box of pastries from the café down the road for his security team and whatever staff had come up from the San Francisco office for the day—Simon had heard there was an entire contingent of junior analysts who’d been jockeying for a date with her, none of them aware he’d kill any one of them who got too close. She made small talk with the staff through their afternoon tea break and then he left the team in his assistant’s capable hands and headed out with Nicki and Jeremy to whatever was on the day’s agenda.

  “Just one stop today,” she said, before turning to Jeremy. “Could we take two cars?”

  Jeremy was too good at his job to show surprise, but Simon knew the other man was as unprepared for that as Simon himself. Simon’s groin tightened at the thought of being alone with her, even though that was the absolute wrong response. The proper thought to have was: even though he knew they’d never be that to each other again, nor should it even enter his mind. But it did enter his mind. On a nightly basis. And he’d had no success in putting it aside.

  “Sure. I’d like nothing more than to follow this madman up and down these mountain roads,” Jeremy muttered, even as he was texting the security team with the update in plans.

  Nicki looked at Jeremy and smiled sweetly. Much more sweetly than she did at Simon, and it bothered him a little too much. Even though this was just Nicki being her friendly self, however, Simon found himself moving a little bit closer, staking his claim in a way that couldn’t be denied. It amused Jeremy to no end, his lips quirking into a smile even as Simon frowned.

  Completely unaware of their exchange, Nicki made a final note in the notebook she carried around and tucked it into her purse. “This one’s easy. Back to the golf course. The house just before Simon’s lot.”

  “And what are we going to see this time?” If it meant getting to spend more time with her he wouldn’t complain, but he couldn’t even imagine what else there was to look at.

  “Mosaics.” She finally smiled up at him. “Do you remember the photos from the booklet I showed you?”

  He remembered nothing from the first day at the property other than the scent of her hair and the fact that he’d agreed to spend nearly ten million pounds on a completely extraneous home. “Of course.”

  “Well, you’re about to meet the designer and tell him what you need.”

  What Simon needed was to tell Nicki why he was really here and then begin picking up whatever shambles of his life would be left after she washed her hands of him for good. Because she’d be furious. And he wouldn’t blame her. It had been three weeks and he’d yet to broach the subject, insisting to Jeremy he was just waiting for the right time, although they both knew that was a lie. But he’d become much too accustomed to seeing Nicki regularly, and even if it was only because she was determined to do her job, he didn’t want to do anything to change her opinion about going along.

  He also didn’t want to watch her climbing into the car as the late afternoon sun shone down on her or look over as she pulled the shoulder belt tight across her breasts—but his cock insisted. Which led to a less than smooth exit from the hotel. And that was nothing compared to his nearly stalling the car when, only a moment later she said, “What would you have said if I’d taken your call after you first left?”

  It was not a question he’d ever expected her to ask, and yet he remembered exactly. The thought of his own naivety still made him cringe. “That I hoped you hadn’t married me for my money because my mother threatened to cut me off entirely and I would have been destitute until coming of age.” Despite having come to the understanding over these last few weeks that he’d been specifically led to believe Nicki had done that very thing, Simon wasn’t entirely sure how she’d answer when he asked, “What would you have said if you’d picked up?”

  The harsh laugh she gave was also unexpected. “That you’d better either adjust your tastes immediately or get ready to hire yourself out as an ex-royal escort because there was otherwise no way in hell we’d be staying in any more $15,000 per night hotel rooms.”

  Luckily, they were still on Main Street with its stop and go traffic or else he might have swerved off the road. He’d never been a particularly emotional person; he’d been even less of one after shutting himself down completely in the post-Nicki years. But the fact that that was her immediate response nearly gutted him. And for the first time he wondered if maybe it wasn’t the worst thing that the annulment hadn’t gone through. That maybe she might still be willing to make a go of it.

  He wasn’t going to say that, of course. Thinking it was bad enough. And yet the light she brought into his life was no less brilliant now than it had been nine years before. Since the next forty years would be a never-ending loop of duty and obligation, however, he was giving himself this gift for as long as she would allow it. “You do know I’m not a royal, don’t you? And that all the titles in my family became extinct in 1852?”

  She dismissed that with a wave of her hand. “You still have a castle, though. I’m pretty sure that would be enough.”

  It wasn’t a castle, it was a manor house. With fifty-two rooms, yes, but there’d been no castle in his family since medieval times. The smaller estates barely even counted.

  “And, of course, there’s the part about you being worth several billion pounds. Although,” she added thoughtfully, as if she weren’t talking about the very thing that had broken them apart, “I guess you wouldn’t have been a billionaire any more in this scenario.”

  It was actually several billion dollars; not nearly as many pounds based on current exchange rates. But that was hardly the point. And he was once again reminded of how very wrong he’d been about her motives all those years ago. Considering she still hadn’t cashed the check he’d given her, he wondered if she’d even accept a settlement if he offered her one.

  “You wouldn’t have minded me having sex with other women just so we could keep our suite?”

  Now she frowned. Which
in itself was exceptionally cute, but even more so as she ticked off her answers on her fingers and her cheeks got that rosy glow. “First of all, it’s illegal to pay an escort for sex, yes, even in Vegas. Second of all, I’m not the one who would have had a hard time getting used to a life without fancy hotel suites, so it would have been your choice. And third of all, I will scratch the eyes out of any woman who even thinks about having sex with you.” Having made her point, her hands dropped down into her lap as she looked out the window.

  He couldn’t help the huge smile that came over his face. “Will?”

  “Huh?” Having just brushed a nonexistent piece of lint off her sleeve, she turned to him.

  “You said ‘will.’ You ‘will scratch the eyes out.’” In an enormously gratifying proprietary way.

  “No, I didn’t,” she snapped.

  “You did.” Lord help him, he almost started humming.

  She froze for a second. And then cutting off the line of conversation entirely, she pointed up the road. “Take that left turn.”

  He did so with pleasure. And with a Cheshire Cat grin. He couldn’t help himself.

  As she’d said to Jeremy, the mosaic designer, Alejandro Garcia, lived back towards the country club, almost directly below the lot Simon had just secured. “He’s your neighbor,” she had said. And then with a little bit too much of enthusiasm added, “You’ll love him.”

  Well, that remained to be seen.

  They turned into a long, gravel drive, at the end of which was a house that was small in comparison to the rest of the properties nearby yet exuded warmth and comfort in a way that made Simon’s heart ache. For a moment, he allowed himself the fantasy of living in a place like this—with a woman like Nicki—for the rest of his days. He even closed his eyes so the picture could imprint upon his brain.

  When he opened them again he felt the weight of Nicki’s stare and turned to her.