His Mistress, His Terms

by Trish Wylie

  He smiled his hint of a smile and a sense of joy consumed her.

  ‘Until I got to see that.’ She jerked her head to her right and watched as his gaze moved.

  He looked at her from the corner of his eye. ‘You stole your mother’s birthday present?’

  ‘Borrowed. You do know I did Art Appreciation in college? We’re taught to read meaning into things like that. It’s my evidence.’

  He pursed his lips and nodded, then turned his head to look into her eyes again, nodding in her direction. ‘So am I allowed over there yet?’

  ‘Frankly I’m amazed you’ve stayed put for as long as you have. I must be losing my touch.’ And it might even have helped with her sense of vulnerability as she told him how she felt if he’d been closer. But then she had told him to stay put…

  Yup. Still her own worst enemy.

  He chuckled as he took his hands out of his pockets and stepped forwards. ‘Oh, you’re not losing your touch, O’Connell. Staying over here has taken every ounce of self-control I have.’

  ‘You see, I remember a time when I used to be able to make you lose your self-control…’

  ‘More than any other woman ever has.’ He slid his hands up the outside of her legs and underneath her crumpled skirt, until they rested on her hips, his deep voice laced with tenderness. ‘Or ever will.’

  She bent to the side and picked up the framed photograph, holding it in front of her body. ‘So tell me about this. Did you do Art Appreciation at any point?’

  Alex nodded firmly, his fingertips moving against her skin. ‘I did.’

  ‘We-ell, then you knew what you were doing with this, didn’t you, Alexander?’

  He smiled ruefully, his gaze locked on hers. ‘I’m never going to hear the end of this, am I? Years from now you’re still going to drag it up—and when we go to visit your parents you’re going to look at it and smile smugly, aren’t you?’

  She nodded as firmly as he had. ‘Yes, I most certainly am.’

  She unlocked her ankles, opened her legs, wiggling her backside forwards on the counter so that he could step closer, and then she held the photo up in front of his face. ‘So what does this photograph tell us?’

  With a sigh he peeked over the edge. ‘Why don’t you just tell me what you see?’

  ‘Okay, then, I will.’ She grinned as she turned the photograph round, holding it pressed against his chest while she forced the grin away and mock-frowned with concentration, her voice in ‘Art Appreciation’ mode. ‘The central focus of this photograph is a girl in a green dress—that being me, you understand—in the dress I’m currently wearing, as it happens, not that you’ve noticed…’

  ‘O’Connell, I only ever see you.’

  ‘You see when I have a short skirt on.’

  ‘All right, that I do see.’

  ‘Shh.’ She frowned at him again. ‘I’m not done.’

  Alex rolled his eyes.

  And Merrow laughed before she put her concentrating face back on. ‘The girl in the green dress is in colour, she’s in focus, whereas the background is in shades of grey and out of focus—it’s all blurry.’ She tilted her head and quirked a brow at him, batting her long lashes. ‘So what does that tell us?’

  Alex shook his head, his mouth twitching. ‘You’re gonna pay for this, you know.’

  ‘What does it tell us, Alex?’

  ‘You tell me. I just took the damn photos.’

  ‘And then put the shots together so beautifully.’ She planted a swift kiss on his mouth. ‘So if I was interpreting this photo I would say that it looks like the girl in the picture—i.e.: me—is all that the photographer—that’s you—sees. Everything else goes blurry around her when he looks at her; she’s maybe even—dare I say it?—the centre of his world?’

  Alex removed a hand from under her skirt to snatch the photograph from her hands and set it, face down, on the counter. ‘All right—enough.’

  He removed his other hand too, both of them framing her face, fingers sliding into her hair, thumbs stroking her cheeks, and then he leaned his head in closer to hers, his voice husky.

  ‘You got me. You had me on the bridge that day, O’Connell. O’Connell on the O’Connell Street bridge, ironically enough. But you got me—I couldn’t see anything else. I think I fell in love with you that day.’ He smiled. ‘Not that I’d have admitted it to myself at the time.’

  Merrow reached her hands forwards, wrapping her arms around his lean waist to tug him closer. ‘Keep going.’

  Alex blinked slowly, his eyes full of emotion she could finally see, almost as if the deep water that had been too cloudy to see through had suddenly taken on a Mediterranean-sea clearness, so that she could see all the way to the bottom and all the wondrous sights that had been hidden from her.

  ‘It’s not all my fault, you know. You helped. An affair wasn’t enough for me, O’Connell; it wasn’t anywhere near enough. So I started to break the rules one at a time—I figured if I did it that way rather than telling you I wanted more, then I might get you to realise that what we have is way too deep to ever be just an itch to scratch…’

  Merrow sighed contentedly, leaning in to place another, softer kiss on his mouth. ‘Keep going.’

  ‘You want every single part in one go?’

  ‘Yup.’

  He bent in for another soft kiss. ‘I tried to show you we could work by charming your friends—’

  ‘At disgustingly record-breaking speed. But then the musketeers were always suckers for a pretty face…’

  ‘Do you want all of this or not?’

  ‘I’ll behave,’ She bestowed another kiss on his mouth, then leaned back and waggled her eyebrows ridiculously. ‘And I promise to reward you for every single detail…’

  ‘I’ll be quick, then.’ Another kiss. ‘I tried to show you how I felt when I made love to you, but you still weren’t getting it, so I “coaxed you” into sleepovers so I could hold you in my arms all night and you’d see that we’d be able to live our everyday lives and still make time for each other. I reckoned asking you to move in would have been pushing my luck—’

  ‘It would have.’

  ‘See, I knew that. So then I went away for a weekend to try and give you the opportunity to miss me—’

  ‘You said you had that booked for months!’

  ‘I was a last-minute sub—’ he flinched when she kicked the back of his leg ‘—but it backfired. Because I just ended up missing you so much that I pushed my luck again on the phone by telling you you’d nothing to worry about. And you don’t. You’re it for me—chaos and all. No matter what you may think, my life isn’t anywhere near perfect unless you’re in it.’

  She smiled at the choice of words. ‘And you’re it for me. I’d rather feel lost with you than without you.’

  He grinned and rewarded her with another, longer kiss. ‘You’re not lost, O’Connell. You don’t ever need to feel lost again, ’cos whatever you give of yourself to me you’ll get back a hundred times over. I promise.’

  ‘I love you so much.’ She grinned back at him. ‘You done confessing all the things I was too blind to see?’

  He moved his hands from her face to wrap them around her waist. ‘I could say yes and just go ahead and get my reward…’

  ‘You see, that won’t work ’cos I now know there is more. So hurry up. You’d just done the part where karma got you for fibbing to your girlfriend…’

  ‘Well, then, of course, I conned my way into your apartment so I could try and wriggle my way into your life a little further. But that didn’t go so well…’

  ‘That was me starting to fight how I was feeling.’

  ‘I know that now. But I didn’t let it go, did I? So then we moved on to the part where I tried to prove to you that our families didn’t have to get in the way. Though of course I now know that that wasn’t really the problem. So long as we’re this strong, O’Connell, nothing they do will get between us—ever.’

  ‘I know.’ She lea
ned in for another kiss. ‘But there’ll be cringe-worthy moments every time they’re together—be prepared.’

  ‘Stuff them.’ Another kiss. ‘We’ll lock them in a room and let them fight it out. Now where was I? Oh, yes…you fitted in beautifully in Fitzgerald land—’

  Merrow moved her arms from around his waist and began unbuttoning his shirt. ‘I quite liked Fitzgerald land.’

  ‘You’ll make an amazing Fitzgerald.’

  ‘Is that a proposal, Alex?’

  ‘I thought you’d have guessed you’d get one of those some day when I talked to you about my wife adding to the business and knowing her name was on the plaque.’

  Merrow tilted her head, her fingers still working on buttons as she smiled impishly at him. ‘I did think that sounded just a little bit wonderful at the time.’

  He tightened his arms around her, pressing his forehead to hers as he grumbled, ‘You see, if you’d just said that at the time then this wouldn’t have taken anywhere near as long!’

  She raised her long lashes and smiled a meaningful smile at him. ‘And miss out on the cabin in the woods?’

  ‘When you cried? That part I’d have skipped. I don’t ever want you to cry because of me again. I thought I’d done something very wrong and it killed me. When what had happened—when there was nothing between our bodies—’

  He almost choked on the words and Merrow loved him even more. ‘It was just the most incredibly amazing…I mean…I’ve never…’

  There was nothing in the world as beautiful to behold as a strong man made weak by the woman he loved, was there? And she’d done this to him. She was his weakness too.

  She stopped unbuttoning and lifted her hands to his face, staring across into his gorgeous eyes to inform him in a firm voice, ‘Why do you think I was crying? It was the same for me. It was overwhelming, it was intense, I’ve never in my entire life felt so close to someone or had someone do to my body what you do. I just needed time to process it all. And to do that I needed space—I’ve always been that way. When something affects me emotionally I have to run away and sort through it on my own before I can come and talk about it. It’s one of my failings. One of the ones I’m aware of but don’t make public, remember? But you pushed. It was the wrong time to push me, that’s all…And then you were leaving me—’

  ‘O’Connell, I was never leaving you. I may fight with you the odd time and you may do the occasional thing that makes me feel like strangling you, but I was never, ever leaving you. If you hadn’t come to find me this time I’d have hated you for a while and felt like a bloody idiot. But eventually I’d have hunted you down again and started over. You have to know that.’

  Merrow’s face lit up, and she kissed him again, long and deep, before informing him, ‘I do now.’

  ‘I love you, O’Connell. I will ’til the day I die. And I’m up to the goldfish, which you already understand—so, no more secrets—and I’m ready for my rewards—’

  She placed a finger on his mouth when he leaned in, squirming a little and unable to look him in the eye. ‘Erm, one more secret…’

  His eyebrows rose in question.

  Merrow blushed when she looked at him. ‘And this is a secret secret. One I haven’t told anyone, not even any of the musketeers.’

  His eyes widened in surprise.

  She searched the air, tilted her head from side to side. So Alex lifted his hand and removed her finger from his lips. ‘And now you’re scaring me a little.’

  She fixed her gaze on his and smiled before she took a deep breath and confessed her deepest-held secret.

  ‘When I left you in Galway that time, I cried myself to sleep for a week solid. I never told a soul, because they’d have wanted to know why. And at the time I didn’t know why…’

  Alex’s voice was thick with emotion, his hand smoothing over her back to reassure her he was there now, that he wasn’t going anywhere. ‘And you know now?’

  ‘Yes, I know now.’ She smiled a tremulous smile, her eyes glittering as she looked at him. ‘I think I knew the first time I looked in your eyes that I would love you one day. I don’t know why I felt that way, Alex, but I did. I looked into your eyes and it was like I already knew you and that sleeping with you wasn’t just some seedy one-night stand. It was the start of something important.’

  She saw his throat convulse and she laughed a low, half-sobbing laugh. ‘I know. It’s dumb. But it felt like I’d walked away from something huge and taken the chance on never finding it again. I felt so-o-o empty and when I cried I really sobbed my guts out, until I was so exhausted I fell asleep. It was like a bloody bereavement, I swear. And how could I ever have explained to anyone why I felt like that?’

  He frowned, his hands stilling on her back as he whispered with wonder in his voice and in his eyes, ‘You’re shaking.’

  ‘I know.’ She half laughed again. ‘How pathetic is that? Even remembering how it felt does that to me.’

  ‘Shh.’ He kissed the memory away, then held her in his arms and rocked her, whispering how much he loved her into her ear until the shaking stopped and the inevitable heat began to rise between their bodies, and then he whispered, ‘Let’s go and make you feel better, shall we, O’Connell?’

  ‘Now you’re talking.’ She lifted her legs and wrapped them around his hips, her arms around his neck as he lifted her off the counter and swung round to carry her down the hall, raining kisses on her neck along the way.

  ‘You do know you won’t be able to call me O’Connell any more when my name’s Fitzgerald?’

  ‘You’ll always be my O’Connell.’ He mumbled the words against her neck. ‘Even when you’re a Fitzgerald.’

  Merrow leaned back, waiting for his head to rise and hazel to look into green before she grinned at him, her heart in her eyes. ‘You know, that very thought scared me once, but now that I know you’re my Fitzgerald—I’m fine with it. It’s perfect. Just promise me something?’

  ‘Anything. I love you.’

  ‘I love you too. Just promise me we’ll elope.’

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-2513-2

  HIS MISTRESS, HIS TERMS

  First North American Publication 2008.

  Copyright © 2008 by Trish Wylie.

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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