by Joanna Bell
"Probably not," I conceded. "I actually think it's kind of awesome that they don't."
Cillian narrowed his eyes, not sure if he believed me or not. "Awesome, huh? Why is it awesome?"
"I guess it's more interesting than awesome," I replied, not wishing to be seen to condescend to the people of his hometown. "It's like I always knew there was another America – one where people don't have the time or the inclination to care about things like Michelin stars. I just never saw it, you know? I didn't live in it, I didn't know where it was. Sometimes I thought maybe it only existed in my own head or in old movies. But, I don't know – Sweetgrass Ridge seems like one of those places."
"Well you're right that no one in Sweetgrass Ridge gives a shit about restaurant ratings," he replied. "But I'm not sure about the rest of it."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean it sounds like you might be idealizing small town life a little."
I didn't know it during that dinner – in fact I argued against it quite vociferously – but my new husband was 100% right. I was idealizing small town life. What I told Cillian, about the idea of an 'other' America, was true. I grew up watching movies and TV shows set in small towns, reading books whose heroines lived on Main Streets that didn't look too different to the Main Street that ran through Sweetgrass Ridge. In my mind this other America was idyllic, life there slow-paced and tight-knit. The teenage girls bought their prom dresses at the local department store and church on Sunday was about community and faith – and not gossip about how much this or that soon-to-be ex-wife was going to score in the multi-million dollar divorce. The other America was different. It was better. It was the kind of place you could live a quiet, honest life and raise a few happy, good-natured children who didn't need therapy by the time they were 10.
I was right that the other America existed. I was also right that it was different. But I was soon to be thoroughly disabused of my notion that the people who lived in those places were any better – or any more decent – than anyone else.
***
"What's that?"
Cillian was studying my dish, having inhaled his steak and potatoes in about 5 seconds flat.
"Asparagus. With caviar. Do you want some?"
He shook his head quickly but then paused, reconsidering. "Fuck it. Yeah. I'll try some."
I moved my hands out of the way so he could cut the end off one of my spears, and then watched his reaction.
"Goddamn," he whispered a few seconds later. "Holy shit. That's delicious. What did you say it was? Asparagus and caviar?"
"Uh-huh. The chef this restaurant is named after is famous for his vegetable preparations, so –"
Cillian's phone buzzed. "Sorry, I'll turn that off."
"I don't mind," I told him, ensconced in my bubble of sore-thighed, champagne-assisted bliss. "Go ahead."
I took another bite of asparagus and wondered, as Cillian took his call, if I might finally have arrived at happiness.
For most of my life, happiness has been akin to the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. I've searched for it over and over and always found, at the moment I was about to grasp it, that it remained as elusive as a leprechaun's treasure.
That makes me sound spoiled. I know I have things other people don't have. I know I'll never have to worry about going hungry or not being able to pay my bills – and I know what huge advantages those things are. But at 23 I had still never really experienced the kind of grown-up, adult happiness I used to believe just manifested out of nowhere sometime around your 18th birthday. Sometimes it seemed like everyone except me was in a happy relationship, loved deeply by a husband or a boyfriend – or a child.
That's what my marriage to Julian was supposed to achieve. Happiness. Wedded bliss. When it didn't happen, I was devastated. Perhaps less devastated by the loss of Julian than the loss of the fervently wished-for contentment that, on the day of my wedding, felt so close I could almost reach out and touch it...
"I got married."
My head snapped up. Cillian was still on the phone. Whoever was on the other end was male and I couldn't hear his words, exactly, but I could hear his tone. He wasn't happy.
I took another bite of food and listened to Cillian's side of the conversation, worried.
Real life was still out there, waiting for us even as we hid away from it – and the two of us were going to have to deal with it eventually.
"You don't have to worry about that, her family is richer than we are."
Whoever Cillian was talking to was concerned about gold-diggers.
"Vegas. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Hold on."
He looked at me. "My dad wants you to come for dinner this weekend. You know, meet the family and all that. You good?"
I nodded, even though I wasn't sure I was 'good' with that at all. Dinner? With his family? That weekend? "Um," I replied. "OK. Yes, sure."
The call ended soon after that and Cillian must have seen the look on my face.
"We're gonna have to do it sooner or later, aren't we?" He asked. "Don't worry, I think my dad is going to love you."
I was in no way as confident as Jack Devlin's son that Jack Devlin was going to "love" me. Cillian hadn't said too much about him – but what he had said didn't seem to indicate a particularly easy-going man.
"Do you?"
He hesitated. Just barely. Enough for me to notice. "Yeah. Yeah, I do. He wanted this. He wanted me to get married."
"Oh. Did he?"
Cillian ran his hands through his hair. "Yeah. Uh, yeah. Didn't you read the info from the matchmaker? That little quiz thing she made us fill –"
"That just said you wanted to get married to inherit the family ranch. It didn't say anything about your dad wanting you to get married. Is that – is what this is? Was it his idea?"
My husband reached for his champagne glass and emptied it again. A waiter appeared out of the tasteful gloom and refilled it at once. "No. I mean, yes. It was his idea. At first it was his idea. But then I met you and – Astrid?"
"What?" I replied, reaching for my own champagne.
He reached across the table and took my hand. "I married you because I wanted to marry you. Look at me."
I looked at him, even as I was a little afraid to do so.
"I married you because I wanted to marry you," he repeated. "Yes, it was my dad's idea originally. But it was my idea when we actually did it. You heard me just now, didn't you? My dad didn't even know. He didn't even know I met you."
"He didn't sound too happy about it either," I said, confused as to why Cillian's father would be unhappy about his son's marriage if it was his idea in the first place.
"He never sounds happy about anything."
I laughed at that, but then I looked up and realized my husband didn't appear to be joking.
"There's one other thing."
"What?"
"You know it said we would be living in the main house? You know, in the questionnaire?"
"Yes...?"
"Well we won't be the only ones there."
My stomach dropped. I put my knife and fork down carefully. "We – what? We won't be the only ones there? Do you – do you have a child?"
To my enormous relief, Cillian immediately shook his head and laughed. "No, no, it's nothing like that. No kids. It's just – my dad and Darcy live in the house, too. And my brothers are there sometimes. It's a big place, though. Really big."
I was moving to Montana. Theoretically. Probably. Maybe. I knew that part. I didn't know I was moving to Montana to live with my new husband's extended family – one of whom had just been described as 'never' happy.
If I hadn't been in the midst of the full-on tumultuous bliss that is the first stage of truly falling for someone, it would have been a moment of reckoning. Marrying a stranger is one thing. A huge enough thing on its own. But moving across the country to live with their family?
Cillian must have seen the look on my face. "I'm sure I could talk to my dad about it if you wan
ted to stay at the condo. We could figure something out, I mean. If you don't want to live at the house."
I wanted to ask him why he had to talk to his dad about it at all. He was an adult, wasn't it up to him where he lived?
But I was naive. I had not yet met Jack Devlin, and I did not yet know the power he held over his sons – or the ruthlessness with which he wielded it.
Before I could say anything else, another pair of immaculate waiters arrived with our next course. My next course, I should say. Cillian had the steak and the mashed potatoes and he was done. Which meant he would have spent the rest of the meal watching me eat each new course alone, had I not invited him to join me.
"Have some," I said, pushing the plate towards him – and trying to push all thoughts about where we were going to live out of my mind. "It's langoustine with beurre blanc."
My brand spankin' new husband leaned forward, took a sniff, and said he didn't want any.
"You don't like langoustine?" I asked, surprised.
"I don't like fish."
"It's not fish. It's a crustacean – like lobster. You can –"
"Seafood, then. I don't like seafood."
Even in the delirious haze of post-nuptial, post-coital bliss in which I spent those precious few days, some part of me balked. It probably had more to do with the first rumbling intimations that something wasn't quite right about Cillian's relationship with his father – but I chose to project it all onto dinner.
"You don't like seafood?" I asked. "Like, all seafood?"
"Nope. Can't stand it.'
"But that's like saying you don't like books!" I protested. "Surely a person dislikes a certain genre of book, right? Like historical non-fiction, maybe – or fantasy? Maybe you just don't like cod but you would like salmon. You know?"
"I've never tried salmon."
I couldn't help laughing. "So how do you know you don't like it then?!"
Cillian studied me for a few seconds. "Are you pissed off?"
I sat back. "What? No. I'm not pissed off. I just think it's ridiculous to dislike something you've never tried. How can you say you don't like salmon if –"
"You are pissed off!"
"No," I insisted. "I'm not. I'm really not."
He waggled his eyebrows at me, grinning. "OK, maybe you're not. But it's tough shit for you either way, Miss Fancy-Pants, because I don't like seafood and I don't care about Michelin stars and you're not going to talk me into either one."
I wasn't mad. OK, maybe I was slightly frustrated. Thankfully the waiter arrived to top up our champagne just in time.
"I bet you want some of this," I teased when the dessert course arrived.
"Yer dadgum right ah do," Cillian replied immediately, faking a hick accent. "Looks real purdy, don't it?"
I broke a piece off the nest of spun-sugar on my plate and tossed it at him, giggling. "Stop it, idiot! I only meant –"
"You only meant my simpleton ass would appreciate dessert, didn't you? Well I'm sorry to say that you're completely right about that, Miss Fancy Pants."
I didn't expect or even want Cillian to be exactly like me, or to share my specific tastes and habits. Quite the opposite. And even as I found myself mildly perturbed by his insistence that he didn't like something he'd never tried, there was still a part of me that liked it, that liked how his unashamed, unreconstructed masculinity didn't quite fit into our refined, Michelin-starred surroundings.
***
Cillian Devlin wasn't one for niceties. Julian Acton-Hayes III was.
He fucked like it, too.
I burst out laughing, shocked by my own thoughts.
"What? What's so funny?"
Dinner was finished and Cillian and I were walking slowly back to the hotel, fingers intertwined.
"Nothing," I replied, stifling another giggle. "I was thinking of – nothing. It was nothing."
"You sure about that?" He asked, letting go just long enough to slide his hand up the back of my dress and goose me.
"Hey!" I screeched, quickly glancing behind us and blushing bright red at the sight of two teenagers and their middle-aged parents, both of whom were eying us with open disapproval.
Sensing my embarrassment, of course Cillian's reaction was to immediately try it again. I dodged away that time – not because I didn't want his hand up my dress, because I very much did – but simply because I didn't want to make a spectacle of myself in front of the family behind us.
Instead of letting it go, though, he chased me and grabbed me from behind, picking me up with an ease that sent a jolt of warmth through my belly and sitting me down on a low wall that ran along one side of the sidewalk. He pushed his body between my knees, completely oblivious to the stern look the father of the family shot our way as they passed by.
"Cillian," I protested again, as meekly as a disingenuous cat protesting a bowl of cream. "Don't! There's – there's people here! Let's go back to the hotel."
He stayed exactly where he was, looking down at me all the while, daring me to protest again. "We're in Las Vegas, girl. This city's seen much worse than an ass-pinching."
Yes, I definitely liked him calling me 'girl' way too much. And I liked it when he didn't even pretend to give in to my half-hearted protests. I liked the way he felt, too – big and broad and powerful between my legs.
"You don't even want me to stop," he whispered, leaning down so close his lips were almost touching my ear. "You just wanted that family to think you did."
I looked up and I know he saw it in my eyes that he was right.
"Yeah," he continued, leaving a trail of achingly slow kisses from my earlobe to the base of my throat. "That's what I thought."
***
Another thing I always thought was fake? All the 'no one ever did to me what he did to me!' gushing.
Another thing I was wrong about. Because... no one ever did to me what Cillian Devlin did to me. As far as I could tell, he wasn't even doing much. Standing close to me? Kissing my neck? I had stood close to a man before. I had experienced having my neck kissed. But never, not once, did any of that proximity or any of those kisses cause the sudden heated rush in my blood that Cillian caused. One minute I was sitting on a wall, aroused but cogent enough to feel embarrassed by the fact that we were in public. The next I was speechless, my body weak with lust, unable to even muster up the wherewithal to tell him we needed to get back to the hotel. Now.
Not that he needed telling. No, the rancher's son knew what he was doing to me better than I did. In the elevator on the way back up to the room we stood on opposite sides, each of us aware of what even the merest touch at that point would have led to.
"You were pissed off at dinner," he said, leaning back against the mirrored wall of the elevator. "I saw you, gettin' all uptight because I don't like seafood."
"Maybe," I conceded, watching the floor numbers tick by as my heartbeat pulsed in my throat.
The bell chimed and the doors opened. I moved to walk out but Cillian caught my wrist suddenly and pulled me back towards him.
"What?!" I exclaimed, thinking there was some danger I hadn't spotted.
But there was no danger. Not the kind I was thinking of, anyway. No lurking robbers or open elevator shafts.
"You think you're smarter than me," he said quietly. There was no threat in his voice, no insecurity. He was, as far as he was concerned, just stating a fact.
"No –" I started. He didn't let me finish.
"It's OK. You are, I can admit that. Smarter than me about lots of things, I bet. But you're not smarter than me in all ways, Astrid Walker."
He was standing too close to me – towering over me, really. It was distracting. I couldn't think.
"Oh yeah?" I breathed, because he seemed to be waiting for a response. "And what – what ways are – those?"
His grip on my wrist tightened and in the blink of an eye he had pinned me up against the elevator wall, bending down quickly to kiss my neck again.
"Cillian –" I gasp
ed, pushing my fingers into his hair and pulling him against me as the possibility of making it to the room before ripping my dress off and offering myself to him faded away. "Oh my –"
"Jesus fuckin' Christ you make me so hard," he growled into my neck. "You made me hard in the restaurant, giving me shit over the fucking langoo-whatevers. Everything you do makes me hard. And you know what?"
He loosened his grip and stepped away so he could look at me standing in front of him, slack-jawed and flushed with desire.
"What?" I asked, about as close to begging as I have ever been.
He leaned in close again, slipping one hand up my dress, pushing his fingers into my panties and running one – just one – right up next to my clit. "I promise you, you aren't going to give a single fuck about whether or not I like seafood when I'm done with you."
I reached for his belt immediately, blind to everything in the universe but getting him inside me. He pushed my hands away.
"I don't think so, Miss Fancy Pants. Right here? In the elevator? Scandalous!"
He was making fun of me. I also noticed he was much more in control than I was – which just turned me on even more.
We stumbled into the room a few seconds later, wrapped around each other. Cillian immediately turned me around and bent me over a small table before the door was even shut, yanking my dress up around my waist. I submitted to his hand on my back, holding me in place. The sound of his belt buckle jingling was the only sound on earth.
A little cry escaped my throat when he pushed himself into me fast and hard. It didn't hurt – and it shouldn't have been a surprise. But it was, a little. He was so much bigger than Julian. And as I said, I wasn't used to the kind of sex I was having with Cillian. He was impulsive where my ex-fiancé was always so... pre-planned.
"Oh!" I cried as he thrust into me again, so deep my back arched sharply up – an involuntary, animal response that I suspect surprised me a lot more than it did the man who caused it.
I curled my fingers tightly around the edge of the table, allowing myself to fall into a wordless, thoughtless darkness of pure need as Cillian hunched over me, taking what he wanted.
