The Bet: A Manhattan Nights novel

by Natalie Wrye

  VIOLET

  There’s no honor among the freezing cold in New York.

  The cold does something to people, and if you pay close attention to the rushing population, hustling through the streets, huddled in their winter coats, you can see the urgency sketched in their scowling faces, can read the signs that scream Winter Wonderland, my ass as they slip and slide over the icy sidewalks on their way back to whatever borough they came from.

  Manhattan wasn’t made for the weak.

  The winter months will tell you so. If not, the residents will.

  It’s the only reason why when Heath offers me a ride home, I take it. Because Stubborn Spice doesn’t need another warning label printed on her forehead right now.

  Not on a day like today.

  I’m too close to becoming a jaded shell of my former self, and at this rate, I’ll need to paint a smile on my face for the office, my already hard head becoming even more frigid as the calendar slides into desolate, dreary December.

  This used to be my favorite season. Christmas.

  The tourist-filled streets outside Heath’s town car’s tinted window seem peaceful somehow—a quiet chaos, and as I watch a fresh wave of snow flurries pave the city streets, I feel a sense of longing, a tiny mourning for the memory of the woman I used to be.

  A woman I haven’t been in a long time.

  I close my eyes, inhaling as the city passes by—block by block. Heath’s call to his personal car service inside the closing bar only reminded me of the river between us, the gaping rift.

  Heirs to rich grandfathers’ fortunes didn’t pair with low-level lawyers, no matter how successful the lawyers seemed.

  The Sparrows are a family worthy of Manhattan royalty. Or so the SparrowHead building reminded me every time I stepped inside.

  Even sitting inside his rented leather palace sitting on four wheels, I feel small inside the summoned town car, dread pulling my gaze to the safer choice of the driver instead of the New York City prince beside me, the anointed future king of the Sparrow family castle. The peaceful car ride rocks me into a silent state, and with the cheap tequila still running through my system, I let the liquor lift me off into memories I’d almost forgotten. Memories I wish I could.

  I don’t realize I’ve fallen asleep until a caress across my face shocks me back awake, my eyes shooting open only to find themselves staring into a pair of dark walnut ones, the lashes surrounding them surprisingly thick and full.

  The dark brown brows give him away immediately. I straighten.

  Heath.

  He pulls back from me, sliding farther along the seat, his brows furrowed. He drops his hand.

  “Fuck, I thought you’d slipped into a coma for a second,” he exhales. “You fell asleep. Granted… I’d have done so myself, if this tequila wasn’t carving a hole into my stomach. I’m starving,” he declares.

  I finally fully open my eyes. I nod slowly. “Me too.” I glance out the window, taking note of the white blanket now starting to cover the street. “Where are we?”

  Heath levels me with a stare. “Your place.”

  I sit straighter, staring out the slightly frosted window, my body filled with a sudden awareness. My eyes meet the staircase in front of my building, my heart beat picking up pace.

  “How do you know where I live?” I ask.

  Heath never stops looking at me. “I found your address in your wallet.”

  I scoff. “Thanks for the privacy.”

  “When have you ever known me to respect anyone’s?” He grins, his eyes growing lively. “I only looked at the driver’s license, if that helps.”

  My tense body deflates. “It does, actually. Thank you.”

  His face reveals nothing, his stare suddenly blank. “You’re welcome. I’d like to go on record to say I know nothing about the condom stashed in the side pocket of your purse. Or the Brazilian wax appointment written on the back of your business card.” His stare burns into mine. “I decided to stop searching when I found the license, of course, but Mr. Tequila had other plans. And he won the wager between the two of us.”

  “What wager is this?” I glower. “That you’re a raging dick?”

  “Close,” he utters, unblinkingly. “The wager that I can’t keep my hands off anything that has to do with you. That I’m struggling like hell to do it right now. And I gotta tell you, Keats…” He hesitates, the room growing hot under his steady stare, the backseat shrinking around us. He raises the partition that separates from the driver, making the space feel small. His voice is a soft rasp. “It’s been too long since we’ve talked—Hell, touched…” He trails off, his stare sinking to my lips. “And I’m too drunk to pretend I don’t want to.”

  His thumb follows the line of his eyes. Directly to my lips.

  With one hand, he traces the line of my lipstick-painted mouth, circling its small curves. His fingers take a detailed tour along with his heated gaze.

  I want to tell him to take his hands off me. To let me out of the car. To let me go.

  But my Missus Tequila is just as stubborn as his Mister, and she surprises me by pressing a kiss to the edge of Heath’s stroking thumb, letting the skin slip slowly between her lips—skin which she sucks lightly—lovingly, her touch just as tender as his own.

  The touch turns hungry—ravenous. Heath lowers his hand to my jaw, cupping my face with one palm. He stares into my eyes, asking permission, and when I say nothing, he lowers his face to mine, planting his mouth where his hand just lay… and kisses me hard enough to see stars.

  I take the deep breath I didn’t know I needed.

  One. Two.

  Chapter 18

  HEATH

  I kiss her.

  I reach for her, needing to feel all her fucking warmth. With a push of my fears to the side, I replace them with a lust that only Violet can ignite, letting my body show all the need I’ve bottled up.

  I bite down a groan.

  Violet echoes the noise, with a tiny whimper of her own, a frustrated sound that echoes exactly what I feel.

  “Heath,” she mutters as I shower her lush mouth with kisses. “What are we doing?”

  My mouth roams lower.

  “Exactly what I’ve wanted to do since the last time I’ve tasted you,” I speak under her jaw. “And exactly what we both need.”

  I decide that I want to push her over the edge, and my hand lowers between us, cupping one perfect tit. Her formerly dormant hands come alive. My fingers brush higher and higher under her shirt, cupping her bare breasts underneath her silk-laced bra, my thumbs encircling the sensitive nubs that now stand at attention. Tracing a trail with my mouth from her red-colored lips to her collarbone, I reverse direction, sliding my tongue up her long neck until my lips hover above her own.

  I speak the words between my kisses, my teeth nipping at her lower lip. I inhale her whimpering sigh.

  “Everything about you pushes my buttons, Violet. I’m teetering on the edge of my control. I don’t need another shove.”

  She exhales soundly. “I’m—I’m not pushing anything.”

  “You are.”

  My voice tightens with emotion, turning into gravel. I grind the words out.

  “Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to poke and prod a sleeping bear? That someday, you’re going to catch its wrath?” I pause. “I guess not, huh? Because you keep placing yourself in the path of destruction. You push me to a precipice. You drive me to the edge with everything you do. You make me react. And when I do, I don’t know how to find neutral—whether or not to retaliate or apologize—punish you or pleasure you. Maybe it’s a little bit of both…”

  I lean in, speaking the words near the curve of her brow, feeling her eyelids flutter beneath my kiss. She bites her full bottom lip.

  “Do I have a vote in this?”

  My lips curve into a smile and I trail my teeth along her temple, nipping at the nearby skin.

  “Always.” I tap two inches below her circle of a belly button. “And wh
at’s her vote?”

  I feel Violet’s racing heart pick up at my sensitive touch. Her brow furrows, a horrible attempt to mask the sudden heat that’s fanning its way down her curvy body.

  “Is that all you think about?” she scolds.

  “Your pussy?” I pull backwards, separating Violet’s body from mine, meeting her cautious glare. I reach my hands blindly behind her, clutching the top of the head rest, my fingers digging their way into its leather. I grip its edge.

  “Actually…yes, Keats,” I continue. “It is all I think about. That’s all I’ve thought about since I tasted it. Since I had my mouth on it and fucked it with my tongue. Since you came on my lips and I sucked you completely dry.”

  I lean in closer, curling my fingers around the soft hair spread across her delicate nape.

  “Does that answer your question?”

  There’s a barely-contained fire happening behind Violet’s gem-like irises as she faces me—a muted heat glowing beneath her glare. I’m drawn to it. Like a moth to a flame. She looks as if she wants to take a pull closer, but doesn’t dare. And I know it… Because I feel the same thing.

  Fucking scared that I might cross another boundary. Scare her off.

  Violet’s fidgeting and tightly squeezed leg-cross was always a tell-tale sign of her nerves and even now, as she sits—her stance proud, one taut leg over the other, I know she’s scared of me. I can feel it.

  And not that he-might-be-a-serial-killer type of way. But the other way.

  An even worse way. That I-wish-I-didn’t-want-touch-you-so-fucking-much.

  I know. Because I feel it in this moment, just staring at her. Regret I’d forgotten I had reaches inside my tequila-coated throat, making it sore. And I wish for so many things. I wish for willpower. I wish I had the man Violet deserves inside of me.

  I open my mouth, unprepared for what I’m about to say when a camera lens—dark and large—shoves its way against the car window. The flash that follows is blinding, and I blink quickly only to open my eyes and find that the entire town car is surrounded by men and women in suits and microphones. The local media has found us, and they scream questions through the town car’s dark tinted windows.

  “Heath!” A reporter in a fur-line trench coat shouts through the colored glass. “Can you speak on the rumors about King & Sparrow taking the Chris Jackson case?”

  Fuck. How did the bastards see that I was in here? The tint is darker than the dead of night. I scramble to secure my clothes before re-buttoning Violet’s blouse, and with a press of a button to lower the partition and a frustrated “Drive!” to the chauffeur, we pull away from the curb outside of Violet’s brownstone, leaving a trail of cold correspondents in our wake.

  The clamor of the crowd fades to the background noise of the bustling city around us, and as we speed away, we can’t help the burst of laughter that breaks from our throats, the threat of being caught with our pants down a visceral reality that we barely escaped.

  Violet turns to me first, adjusting the button-down blouse my hands were just beneath. She smirks in my direction, dazzling me with her pale blue eyes. Her long lashes are a flutter against her pale cheeks, and she glances up at me, her button nose high, her bottom lip just as delectably red enough to bite. She inhales, closing her eyes.

  “Can’t we ever have just have one normal moment?”

  I snort. “I don’t know if anything between you and I was ever normal.”

  “God forbid…” she hesitates, her head of ginger-colored hair tilting. She looks innocent, so sweet. Sweet enough to eat and I know that if I keep looking at her like I have since I first saw her, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Spread her wide for my tasting until my tongue can’t take anymore. I keep my gaze out the window as she silently regards me, her scrutiny more severe than ever before. She leans forward.

  “And you having a constant driver doesn’t make it any more normal. Why? Do you have some type of secret life?”

  Not the type that you think. I lie. “Hardly.”

  “Hiding from a wife?”

  “Nah.”

  “Hiding from a husband?”

  I stare at her, my eyes slanting. She shrugs. “What? I thought you said you had fun in the Rainbow Room…” She smiles, bowing her head, and I want to kiss the side of her mouth. She looks back up again. “You know, I haven’t thanked you yet for what you did…the other day in the office. When you helped me. It’s been easy for the senior partners to ignore me—keep things a secret, and I sort of…” She wrings her hands. “Reacted badly. Twice. With you showing up and then announcing yourself as Head Partner. I think—I think I went a little nuts.”

  “Violet,” I say her name, reveling the taste. I finally look at her. “What you’d just been through would make any fucking body nuts. And just for the record…” I tip her chin with my finger, liking the feel of her. “You are nuts…but the good kind. Normal is boring—everyday. And there’s nothing everyday about you, Violet Keats.”

  She stares up at me, suddenly serious. The atmosphere in the small back seat of the car suddenly shifts and I can feel that Violet is ready to say something, but suddenly the car stops. I glance out the window only to find that we’ve finally parked in front of my apartment building—the BatCave location of my penthouse. A place I never take women.

  This is a first.

  I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here at fucking all.

  In this city. Running my father’s firm. Talking to a woman I can’t touch. In a world I wasn’t invited to…

  Again.

  The bad decisions just keep on coming, but the moment I stepped into the bar and found Violet, the second I sat down beside her and got a whiff of her fantastic fucking smell, I knew I couldn’t just walk away. Not now. The sound of Violet’s soft sniff is imprinted on my mind and when she turned her teary-eyed gaze to me, sadness in her eyes, anguish molding her pretty mouth into a line, I realize that there is more to this attraction than what I once thought.

  I liked this girl. I liked her a hell of a lot more than I let on.

  But she doesn’t like me.

  She brushed me off when we first met again in the bar with Brett and Elsie, ignored me in the office. Every day at King & Sparrow, before I can touch her, tango with her, say anything at all, she heads for the exit, half-sprinting on her way out, and like the puppy dog I’ve suddenly become, I typically fall in step behind her, scrambling for what the fuck to say.

  I swear all that comes out is a bark.

  It sucks hairy fucking balls what I’m doing to her with David King’s bet—and I know it, and seeing her like this, saddened and alone, makes me want to stroke her misery away with my tongue…or something else that was just as soft that is suddenly rising, as I stare at her beautiful face, dying to wipe her salty tears dry. I touch her arm, lightly stroking.

  “Come on,” I urge. “You’ve been mopey since I saw you sitting at the bar. Doesn’t the holiday spirit usually cheer you women up?” I ask with a small smirk.

  She snorts. “Doesn’t it look like it?”

  “Tell you the truth…it looks like Christmas came to town and exploded.” I glance at the decor outside our windows and then her face. “And… I’m guessing that’s why you’re giving me that look right now that says you want me to slam you in the fist with my face…” I tilt my head, turning to look at her further. “You don’t like this holiday stuff?”

  “I mean, I did once…” She smiles wistfully out the window. “But I don’t know. Someone… Well, Emily made me realize that maybe I could use a little more Christmas spirit.” She glances back at me, and I grin. Her face falls. “So, yeah, I do like this stuff. Just not for me anymore.”

  She looks up and down the decorating buildings, and I find myself shrugging. “So…?”

  She spins to me. “So what?”

  “Maybe we need to make sure the firm gets more holiday cheer,” I add in. “My father would hate it…” I smile at the thought. “But adding a coup
le of bad lights and some tacky streamers into the King & Sparrow office wouldn’t be the end of the fucking world. If it was, my eighth birthday would have been followed by the coming of the apocalypse. My Serbic mother and her plight to act like an ‘American.’ Looked like the Fourth of July had fucked a bag of sprinkles.”

  She laughs, a light breathy sound that makes me want to bend her over right now, and when I look into her eyes, this time, a light dims the sadness that was there earlier at the bar. And I feel the need to keep it there.

  I slap a hand against the seat, sliding over her seat belt. I buckle it before fastening my own beside her in the back seat.

  “Fuck it.” I reach towards the town car’s roof. “Let’s get out of here then.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Where all the magic happens.” I tap her chin. “Just sit tight. I know a place that will take care of all of your needs.” I don’t tell her that the other place is my bedroom… though the dick part of me, the piece-of-shit liar part of me, is dying to. I keep the tidbit to myself. I lower the partition, and the driver finally looks back, his brown eyes widening as he takes in my beautiful date. His gaze darts between us.

  “Where to?”

  “Lead the way, Rudolph. The lady here needs Christmas decorations. And make it stat.”

  Violet laughs softly, obviously disbelieving me. But when the driver pulls away from the curb, heading towards the store, the smile falls from her face, replaced by a look of shock. She glances at me. “Wait, what…?”

  Chapter 19

  HEATH

  Santa Claus, my ass.

  I’m spending way more money than the fat man ever could. And I have no problem dropping the cash.

  It’s St. Heath to save the day. For once.

  Stuck in a red and green hell, stranded in the center of a jam-packed Holiday department store, I load a million things into my cart until there’s nothing to load anymore.