by Maya Rodale
Chapter Twenty-one
Dalton’s Department Store
Dalton noted with no small amount of satisfaction that the lines were wrapped around his store once again, all thanks to that automobile display and the extensive newspaper advertising he had done for it.
The people came in droves. The problem was that it was mostly men who were willing to line up and look at the car up close. Oh, the men brought their entire families with them. But it was the men who lingered, talked garrulously, and held up the line, which left women to chase after children and keep them from touching the display and generally running amok.
Nobody shopped.
Nobody could, with their attentions fixed upon ogling a car or wrangling a child or standing by their man.
Nevertheless, it looked like a success.
There were crowds of people clamoring for their turn to view the automobile, the press was raving about it, and everywhere he turned at his club or parties or in the park, people were talking about it.
Of all the people who streamed in to see the car, one did not.
It felt as if none of it mattered—not the spectacle he’d created, the dreams he’d conjured in crowds of people, the sales he’d made—if Beatrice didn’t see it.
Dalton hated that he noticed her absence. He had spent the better part of a decade not noticing her absence. But then again, he’d kissed her last week and the memory was still strong, and he swore he could still taste her. He refused to lose to her, and since he wasn’t certain he could resist her, he stayed away.
Besides, he was busy.
Running Manhattan’s premier department store and assuring it stayed that way wasn’t something one did part-time.
And then he caught sight of Beatrice pushing through the revolving door at three minutes to closing time.
“I’ve come to see that car,” she said by way of hello when she saw him. “The famous, fancy car.”
“The store is closing in . . .” Dalton made a show of checking his timepiece. “Three minutes.”
“I know.” She flashed him a smile and strolled past him as if she owned the place and as if the rules did not apply to her. What was he to do but follow? He couldn’t have his competitor running wild in his store, unchaperoned, after hours. A few salesclerks glanced at her and then him warily as they were eager to complete their closing tasks for the day.
He followed her.
He followed her and reluctantly admired the sway of her hips in that dress, the tendrils of curls that escaped her coiffure and suggested she’d been so busy, running around all day, doing important things.
What? he wondered. What was she up to next?
If he were her lover and not her rival she might tell him . . .
She fought the crowds, all moving toward the exit while she was moving deeper into the store, up the stairs, until she arrived on the roof, in front of the display. A gleaming black open-top automobile on a pedestal. A velvet rope encircled it, keeping the crowds at bay.
Dalton stopped beside her. “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”
“Are you talking about me or the car, Dalton?”
Only Beatrice—impetuous, dangerous Beatrice—could flirt with him when everything was on the line.
She flashed him a smile and all he said was, “Yes.”
Beatrice began a slow circle around the automobile, examining it from every angle. Yet he didn’t miss how her gaze strayed more often to him than the car. He couldn’t miss how her gaze affected him, either. It turned out ruthless millionaire tycoons weren’t immune to seductive glances.
“What are you doing here, Beatrice? Why do I suspect that you’re not here to gawk at a horseless carriage?”
“We kissed,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“It happened.”
“Excellent. I just wished to confirm that it wasn’t my imagination. Especially since I haven’t heard a word from you since.” She gave him a pointed, heated look which he understood to mean that he was a cad for his silence but she was considering forgiving him. All at once he felt a rush of a feeling—shame—for his silence and for the reasons for it. He’d thrown himself headlong into this car and showing everyone that he was still their merchant prince, as if it mattered what all of Manhattan thought of him more than what she did.
Did it?
“You could see how I feared I might imagine it,” she continued.
“You did not imagine it.”
“Good.” She’d done a full circle around the car now and was standing right in front of him. “Because I would like for it to happen again.”
Heart. Stop. Keep. Distance.
“We’re rivals, remember? I’m very busy plotting my revenge,” he said.
“And making plans for after. Or at least a hobby, Dalton. Honestly.”
“One thing at a time,” he said. But she was stepping over the velvet rope designed to keep people out and climbing into the car. “What are you doing?”
“Some people might be content just to look. I’m not.” Her gaze connected with his. He felt electrified. “I want to know how it feels, Dalton, to be on the inside.”
“This is not fair, Beatrice.” His voice was rough. God, she was getting to him. With those tendrils and the sway of her hips and those heated gazes.
Between her and the car and the New York sky at night, he was going to be wrecked.
“I’m not playing a game, Dalton.”
“What is this about, then?”
“Get in. I’ll tell you.”
Dalton paused because this felt like one of those moments where things shifted. He tried, he really did, to think of her only as his rival. As his one and only obstacle to success and revenge and something like happiness. But she was all skirts and pretty hair, and climbing into the front seat of an open-top car after hours and saying “get in with me,” and honestly what human man could say no?
Dalton climbed in beside her. He had ideas about keeping his distance but that was impossible in a little car like this. On a roof. In the middle of Manhattan.
“This is ridiculous,” he said. “We can’t go anywhere.”
“Are you speaking literally or metaphorically?”
“Yes,” he said. Then he made the mistake of breathing her in. “Yes.”
The rest of the world faded away. It was all so very out there and they were right here. Just the two of them in the front seat of the car, parked on a roof, under a rapidly setting sun. Darkness was falling. The city was lighting up. It was still such a novel and arresting sight—an electrified, towering New York—but it paled in comparison to looking at Beatrice.
The store was closed. They had all night.
“My wedding night was fine, I suppose,” she began, apropos of nothing and he suddenly found it hard to breathe. They were going to talk and he was trapped. And they were going to talk as if they were . . . friends, not rivals. Or rather, she was going to talk and he was going to sit very still and listen and try to remember about his plans for vengeance and dominance. He was going to keep telling himself that he cared only for his business and winning and nothing for her.
My name is Wes Dalton. You stole my . . .
His constant refrain was no match for what she said next.
“I knew what I was supposed to do in the sense that I knew I was supposed to do whatever the duke wanted. Allow him whatever liberty. That sort of thing.”
She spoke very matter-of-factly.
Something twisted in Dalton’s gut.
“I didn’t particularly enjoy it and I tried not to let it upset me too much. He wasn’t you, Dalton. He didn’t do the things you knew—or cared—to do.”
Dalton sat very still and willed himself to keep inhaling and exhaling. Breathing. That was something he could do when he felt so damned powerless and cowardly. This was old news, he protested silently to himself. It was none of his business. It was the way of the world. She had chosen the duke and all that over him.
She deserved it, he told
himself.
No one deserved it, or what she described next.
“It was after the second or third time that I started to think I might have made a mistake. He wanted an heir and a spare, of course, to go along with my astronomical dowry. And all I had to do was endure. Submit. Endure. Submit. Endure. Because what other option did I have?”
Leave, he thought.
Fight, he thought.
But these were things more easily said than done. Especially by twenty-year-old debutantes in a world dominated by men.
“It’s very trying on one’s soul, all that submitting and enduring. Until finally he gave up. Thank God.”
“Good.” His voice was rough.
“It was better. But . . .” Here, she paused. Dalton was aware of her turning to him, lifting her lashes, and settling her gaze on him. “But I still wanted to be touched in the way that you had touched me once upon a time. And duchesses locked in castles are not touched. They are politely tolerated until they have the graciousness to expire and make way for a new, younger, dewier duchess.”
Fools. Because he knew no one compared to Beatrice. This woman had a light of her own. She outshone New York City at nightfall.
“And despite all the submitting and enduring, tedious days and torturous nights, after years of purgatory in an old drafty castle still . . . my fire hadn’t gone out.” Her eyes flashed with the wonder of it. Could he believe it? She could not. It was a miracle, that, and she spoke of it as reverentially as a miracle. “My fire hadn’t gone out.”
He nodded, speechless.
“They couldn’t snuff me out of existence and once I realized that, I came roaring back to life. So here I am,” she said, arms wide to the night sky and New York.
They sat side by side in the darkness.
Beatrice reached for his hand.
My name is Wes Dalton. You stole my—
She didn’t steal anything. She’d made a choice and lived with the consequences of it until she could not. During all those years apart, he had imagined her flitting around the castle, duke on her arm. That was not what she had described.
All these years Dalton had been so consumed by his own heartache and fixation on how he’d been wronged that he hadn’t once paused to consider that perhaps she wasn’t flitting about the castle. She was submitting and enduring.
Now he knew.
Since he knew, he would have to rearrange his understanding of him and her in the world.
“Why are you telling me this, Beatrice?”
She turned to face him. “I’m telling you so that you know why I’m about to kiss you. Because I have years of deprivation to make up for. I am telling you, Dalton, why I’m going to kiss you right now even though I am going to ruthlessly compete with you for customers. All. Day. Long.”
“Rivals by day, lovers by night?”
“You can say no,” she said and he had to laugh. Because Beatrice was not someone a man said no to. Not when she was offering the deal of a lifetime.
He could say no.
He could also say yes.
He could suggest that they discuss this more.
Dalton didn’t say anything as he cradled her face in his hands.
What a waste of time and heart and years.
What the world had missed. What she could have done if she hadn’t been all caged up. What they might have done together.
Now she was free to do whatever she damned well pleased and she wanted to kiss him.
A man didn’t say no to that.
Not when he felt the same way.
Her mouth found his, and all that pent-up passion became his to revel in. And he did, oh, he did. Dalton was helpless to resist the pressure of her lips against his, the way she leaned into him, soft and warm and tasting sweet. He sank his fingertips into her hair and held her close and kissed her deeply.
He realized he, too, had been lonely.
This wasn’t like when they’d kissed all those years before, when they’d foolishly thought they would have forever and a day and the world wouldn’t make them choose between love and money. When they hadn’t known better.
He knew better now.
He knew to seize the moment and hold on because it might not last.
Dalton tugged her into his lap and she tumbled over in a mass of skirts of laughter, and something in his heart clenched because wasn’t this everything he ever wanted? Beatrice in his arms, looking up at him with blue eyes full of unconcealed wanting. She was in his arms, in his castle now.
He felt a surge of accomplishment so strong that he had to wonder if maybe this was what he really wanted all along.
“Kiss me, Dalton. We have lost time to make up for.”
And he did. Under the darkening night sky, under the light of the moon, in the ever brightening nighttime glow of New York, he kissed her. And he didn’t stop at her mouth, either.
He found the hollow of her throat.
He unbuttoned her jacket, her skirt and did away with all the things standing between her bare skin and his lips. There was unfortunately all the layers of skirts and petticoats and trousers between his rock-hard arousal and her most intimate spot.
Before he could let his thoughts spiral, wondering what it all meant, she murmured, “I missed you, Wes,” as she shrugged out of her jacket and unbuttoned the rest of her shirt and treated him to the exquisite sight of her breasts peeking above the lace edge of her corset. She writhed above him and he groaned. She was definitely going to destroy him.
He held on for dear life, holding on to bunches of skirts, his hands skimming around her waist, feeling her up and down and learning once again all the secret details of her body. The curve of her breasts, the flare of her hips. These things were no longer fantasies but known to him now. Again.
Buttons, undone.
His restraint, gone.
It was all happening so fast. Her hair tumbling down around her shoulders, bare under his palms. A little bite of her lower lip. A kiss on the lobe of her ear. His strong hands and her lovely breasts.
He had missed her with such a frightening intensity that he couldn’t get the words out. So he kissed her instead, letting himself get lost in the pleasure of her body, the soft sounds of her sighs and moans. He kissed her until the hour grew late, darkness had fallen in earnest, and he forgot all about revenge.
Chapter Twenty-two
Goodwin’s Department Store
The next day
It was not strictly for professional reasons that Dalton exited his own store and crossed Broadway and strolled into his competitor’s store near to closing time, when the shops were emptying of customers and the streets were full of people rushing home. The note had arrived earlier that afternoon, her exquisite handwriting requesting his presence on the third floor at the closing hour.
Business? Not at this hour.
Rivals by day, lovers by night.
Pleasure. Definitely pleasure.
Something like anticipation dulled his attention to the displays he walked by; it was hard to concentrate on how her fleet of employees had arranged parasols and reticules and whatnot when he was about to see Beatrice. See more of Beatrice than he’d glimpsed in the moonlight and city light last night.
He found the third floor, and found it was home to the ladies lingerie department, which brought a wry smile to his mouth. Beatrice had a wicked sense of humor.
A lesser man might have hesitated among the delicate, intimate garments and among the shopgirls tidying up after the last of the customers had left. Dalton strolled right in.
He didn’t see her at first, and while he waited, he considered the merchandise. Corsets and other underthings, all in soft, neutral shades. He found something about it wanting.
And then there she was: Beatrice. A vision in a blue dress, the color of the Newport ocean, to match her eyes. She strolled through like she owned the place. Which she did.
“Oh, hello, Dalton,” she said. She had to acknowledge him for the sake of the shopg
irls finishing up, though after being on their feet since opening hours, they were more eager to depart than to gossip. He watched as they cast intrigued glances over their shoulders on the way out. A moment later, the lights dimmed all around the store.
“Have you come to spy on us?” Beatrice asked coyly.
“Perhaps I’ve come to buy something,” he said.
“The store still isn’t for sale,” she said.
“You know that’s not why I’m here.”
“Is it?”
“Let me prove it to you.”
“Well, if you insist,” she murmured. Then she turned and sauntered off with an inviting glance. He followed her as she weaved her way through tables and displays of all the secret delicate things women wore next to their bare skin. He didn’t miss the inviting glance she gave him.
What was she wearing under that dress?
He would soon find out.
It was just her and him, alone in this great big department store after hours. There was nothing like having an empty public palace to oneself at night. They might have been the only two people in New York who knew the feeling.
He found her in the fitting rooms, in a small chamber enclosed with thick plum-colored velvet curtains that shut out the low hum of closing sounds in the store. Electric lights glowed softly above. And out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glance of her and him in a full-length mirror.
“Of all the places in Manhattan and this is where you abscond with me?”
“Maybe it’s a particular fantasy of mine,” she murmured, and he remembered the younger version of themselves taking this particular risk, sneaking off to steal a kiss in whichever darkened corner was available. Unfinished business. But then Beatrice pulled him close and tilted her lips up to meet his.
They were not wasting time, then.
His mouth found hers and in an instant, all the events of the day melted away. The conversations and problems and matters of business that usually drained him were just forgotten. There was only her and him—her tall, luscious body pressing against his.
There was only this kiss.
And more.
He watched with darkened eyes as she shrugged out of her jacket and he was mesmerized by the arch of her back and the way her breasts strained against her shirt. That little action, like something she might do alone at the end of the day, excited him. Because it was the sort of little intimate action that he’d never gotten to witness with her. And it was one that suggested certain things were about to happen.