by Dani Collins
“I want—” She tried to roll to the nightstand.
He rose and reached.
“And the stuff.”
He handed her the lube and stood on his knees over her, pushing his shorts down only far enough to bare his erection so he could roll on a condom.
She spread cool gel across latex and he stole a dollop, touching her shoulder in a signal to lie back. He worked the slippery coolness into her and it nearly made her cry. She had missed his touch so much. She had missed the way they knew each other’s bodies and spoke without words. He knew exactly how to press and tease and make her gasp with pleasure.
It had been so painful to lose that a latent sob throbbed from her throat.
“Hurt?” He started to withdraw his touch.
“No. I want you in me so much.” She beckoned him to cover her again. She guided him herself, closing her eyes as she lined him up.
She wasn’t completely ready. There was a pinch as he pressed for entrance. It made her shiver but, oh, it felt good to have him filling her, so thick and hot and hard.
He was swearing, eyes glazed. She could feel him shaking with an effort to hold himself in control.
“Don’t be gentle.” She let her nails bite into his buttocks, then drew her knees up to his rib cage. “I’m really so close.”
With a groan, he kissed her open mouth with his own, lascivious and proprietary. Then he began to move with firm thrusts, watching her through slitted eyes.
She was so aroused, so ravenous for his powerful body moving in hers, she met his thrusts with lifts of her hips, encouraging him to let go. It was raw and gratifying and made her breaths shorten.
Her grip on him tightened. He increased his tempo. The sensations redoubled, and she slipped into a place of pure pleasure that seemed to have no peak, only more and more hot joy as all of her awareness narrowed to that point of potential inside her. She tensed, reaching. “Don’t stop. Harder. Please...”
She shattered. All of her exploded into a thousand pieces while he roared and pinned his bucking hips to hers. His iron-hard arms caged her tight while he groaned into her neck and pulsed deep within her.
CHAPTER SIX
AFTER AN EON, when she floated in a space devoid of thought, Nina realized she needed a full breath. She touched his shoulder.
Reve dragged in his own breath, as though preparing himself for supreme effort, then carefully withdrew. In the same motion, he rolled to grab the box of tissues, offering it to her, exactly as he had always done.
Still dazed, Nina took two and used them while he removed the condom. He took the tissues from her and dropped them into the bedside wastebasket with the condom. He lay back beside her with a heavy sigh. He pulled his shorts into place before tugging his shirt down over them.
Her shorts were still on the floor somewhere. She closed the kimono and stayed beside him, stunned by what had just happened. It had been good, so good. Fast and...necessary? Probably not. Inevitable, she supposed.
Her own exhale was weighted with despair.
His head turned on the mattress. They were both still crooked on the bed.
“Made it longer than I expected.” She looked to the clock as an excuse to turn her face away. “Almost six hours.”
“And may have set a land speed record.” His humor was as thin as hers, the edges brittle.
She pressed the back of her head into the mattress and looked at the familiar ceiling, trying not to cry. Why hadn’t it been awful? Why didn’t she feel dirty so she could hate him and hate herself and leave without ever looking back?
Instead, she felt as she always had, as though he knew her in ways she didn’t even know herself. As though, together, they were greater than the sum of their parts.
It was just sex, though. Really, really good sex, but sex all the same.
“Do you want to stay here?” he asked. “Instead of a hotel?”
“Here?” She pointed at the mattress. She should have seen that coming. “No,” she pronounced disdainfully.
“In the apartment,” he clarified with equal condescension.
“Why would you even offer? Don’t turn this into more than it was.” Good advice for herself. She sat up and scooted to the edge of the bed.
“What was it?”
The spiteful thing to say would be, Why does it have to be anything?
“I don’t know.” She folded her arms across her middle, where an empty ache reached from the bottom of her stomach to the top of her heart. “I’d love to say stress relief, but I think I needed to feel like that again, to remind myself there was a reason I fell for you. We were really good for a little while and there’s no shame in enjoying that. Is there?”
She peeked over her shoulder at him.
His gaze was flinty, his face shuttered and hard.
“So this was closure?” His lip curled.
Her lungs were filled with powdered glass. She looked forward again, unutterably sad. “Yes.”
“Fine.”
The word knocked the stuffing out of her, leaving her so bereft her whole body went numb.
He sat up beside her. “But that means dealing with your things.”
“I told you—” She dug her heels into the rail of the bed, propped her elbows on her thighs and held her palms over her eyes.
“I believe you were threatening my life if I disposed of it without your input?” he reminded in a falsely friendly tone.
“Don’t give it to her. Anyone but her,” she begged, still hiding behind her hands.
“Who then?”
“I don’t know,” she moaned. “No one wants a cardboard box full of some unknown designer’s blood, sweat and tears. I’ll ship it home to Dad, I guess.”
“Quit being such a coward.”
She dropped her hands and glared at him.
His brows went up to a pithy angle. “Yes, that’s what I called you.”
“Oh, okay. I’ll just throw together a show, then. Getting media attention won’t be any problem! But I’ll forever wonder if any success I have is mine or because of the stranger I happen to resemble, won’t I?”
He stared down at her for so long she started to shrink under the weight of his penetrating gaze.
“That really bothers you, doesn’t it?” he said with a baffled snort. “Most people would use every advantage to get what they want.” He shook his head as though it didn’t make sense to him.
“I told you, I’m not like that.”
“I’m starting to believe that. I also think you’re using it as an excuse not to try.”
“Reve!” She stood up, angry and hurt, sweeping her hand out in helpless confusion. “Look at my life right now. I don’t have time to reboot my failed career. Even if I tried to put together a show, it wouldn’t be how I had planned it. The themes would be all wrong. My entire sense of self has changed. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
Even as frustrated tears burned behind her eyes, another part of her latched on to her own words. Maybe that could be the message. Any collection would be a snapshot of her life, not all of it. Sometimes things happened, forcing a detour. If a goal was important enough, you came back and picked up the pieces and tried a new approach...
Concepts began to swirl in her imagination. She was warming to it, playing with it.
“I know that look. You’re thinking about it,” he said smugly.
“So?” She tightened the belt of her kimono and began to pace. “I still don’t have time. I don’t have money.” She threw up a hand at him. “Don’t.”
“I will offer to underwrite it and I’ll tell you why.” He rose, hair mussed, clothing wrinkled, and sexy as hell with his powerful muscles and stern jaw. “I refuse to let you boot this down the road or cobble it together on a shoestring and say you tried. I’ll hire someone to do it right, pay for the show and
take eighty percent of net profit in lieu of you paying me back for any of it.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Seventy-five.”
“I’m not arguing the percentage! Take eighty percent of zero. See if I care.”
He swore under his breath. “I might get twelve dollars. I might get twelve million. That’s called investing.”
She shook her head and walked toward the window. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what? Believe in you more than you believe in yourself?”
She stopped and spun and huffed an annoyed noise at the way he kept throwing that in her face.
“You only need one order for one piece, Nina. If it’s big enough, I could make tenfold what I’ve invested in you so far.”
“You always talk like these things are easy. Get a grip on the real world, Reve! Even if I did get an order, I would have to source the fabrics and find a factory. Get it made, get it here. At a profit. It’s not one thing.”
“So I wouldn’t get my money tomorrow. That’s also called investing. I know how to get a business off the ground, Nina—in the real world,” he snarled. “I’ve had to do it many times. You need capital to set up shop and put a supply chain in place. That’s what I’m offering you.”
“I need to figure out who I am.”
“You’re not a fashion designer? An artist? That always seemed to be at the core of your identity.”
It was, but... “Why are you pushing me like this? Do you want my stuff out of your storage locker that badly?”
“I want it out from between us,” he said forcefully, pointing at the stretch of floor that separated them.
He seemed as startled by those vehement words as she was. He stood straighter and glanced away, jaw clenched.
“Why?” she asked helplessly. “Because of that?” She pointed at the bed.
“No.” He pulled a wrinkle from the bedspread and then dropped the lube back in the drawer. He kept his back to her. “No one gave me a leg up or looked out for me in any way. That’s all I want to do, Nina. Maybe I wasn’t the best boyfriend.” He drawled the word as if it was too puerile a label for what he’d been to her. It was. “Maybe I looked on your being here as a convenient arrangement, not...” His fingers tapped on the night table as he seemed to search for words. “Not a relationship with a future, but I do care what happens to you.”
He turned. His expression was difficult to interpret. He was too self-confident to be defensive. Guarded, maybe?
She swallowed, but the scoured feeling behind her breastbone remained. She had spent months backpedaling through their relationship, taking all of his small kindnesses and thoughtful gestures and reframing them as quid pro quos for sex. Despite the very good sex they’d just had, he didn’t owe her anything, not even a night’s sleep in a comfortable bed. There was no reason for him to keep after her this way beyond the reason he was giving—that he wanted to support her aspirations.
Maybe he always had.
Her eyes grew hot with unshed tears. She bit her lips to keep them from trembling.
“I don’t think you should fly off to Germany by yourself to hunt down potential criminals,” he said, squeezing the back of his neck. “At least let me hire someone to go in for a discreet recon. Stay here while you figure out flights and make a plan. My security is watertight. You can organize a show while you’re here.”
“And you would give me all this support why?” she asked with a husky laugh of disbelief. “So we can part as friends?”
“We’d be business partners,” he corrected.
“You want that?”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s impossible! I’ll wind up in bed with you.” She waved at the bed as proof. “And you don’t want the sort of future that I want.”
“Which is what? Marriage? Children?”
“Yes,” she said firmly, though it felt like a very far-off, abstract goal right now. It had always been in her realm of expectation that her life would include making a family with a man she loved, but as she sank down into the overstuffed chair in the corner, she wondered what the new Nina would want once she came out the other side.
It struck her that these were her final moments as Nina Menendez, the woman she’d always known herself to be. Soon she would be Oriel Cuvier’s sister or Lakshmi Dalal’s daughter. Everything would be different.
Reve was offering her the gift of being herself a little longer.
Damn him, he shouldn’t be making this into such a difficult decision. She had sworn to her family that she wasn’t coming back to New York to see him. He was bad for her. So bad that she had just slept with him. Obviously, she couldn’t be trusted around him.
On the other hand, she didn’t want to rush into the unknown, turning over rocks at random. She needed a plan. She wasn’t actually that good in new places, sometimes confusing her directions. And the signposts would be in different languages, which would be even harder for her to read than English. Her father couldn’t afford private investigators, but she saw the sense in hiring one.
“I would want to know how much you spend,” she said cautiously. “One way or another, I want to pay you back for—”
“I’ll make some calls.” He walked out before she could say anything more.
* * *
Reve was a man of action. Moving, shaking, tearing down and rebuilding gave him the illusion he had control over his life. Back when he’d had little to no say over what happened to him, he’d achieved small triumphs in bashing rusted nuts from a wheel so he could get at the brake parts or by puzzling out how the water pump was installed so he could remove it.
As long as he’d worked toward a goal of some kind, he hadn’t been standing still in the run-down shack that had held an alcoholic father and an empty refrigerator. At the very least, staying busy had allowed him to forget his empty stomach for a while.
He issued his statement that he’d never met Oriel Cuvier and began making calls for Nina’s show. As he did, he realized this was an ironic version of his long-held coping strategy—he was trying to forget her desire for “closure” by providing it for her.
It made for an itchy, irritable sensation within him, but he got the ball rolling. Otherwise, he would sink into reliving their flurry of lovemaking.
Then the memory arrived anyway, running over him like a mile-long train and, damn, that had felt good. He was embarrassed by how little finesse he’d shown, but she’d matched every greedy caress and every scorching kiss. It had been exciting as hell and over far too quickly. He wanted to say, Let’s try that again. Take it slow. Do it right.
Do what right?
Don’t turn this into more than it was.
Her dismissal of their lovemaking had been jarringly close to what he had said. Why does it have to go anywhere? That had sent her running back to Albuquerque.
Guilt crept into his consciousness like fleas under his shirt, itching and biting and driving him to prove something to her. Prove what? That he really did want her to succeed with her dream? He did, but it went deeper than that.
He hadn’t realized how many inner hurdles, along with the external ones, she’d had to overcome. He knew something about not feeling good enough. It ate at him to know she was still struggling with that. That he’d contributed to it by believing she was as driven by self-interest as everyone else in his sphere.
He was still skeptical that anyone could be that honest and empathetic and warm, but he couldn’t deny that she was in a very vulnerable position. Thinking of the hyenas of the press getting hold of her caused an overwhelming protectiveness to rise up in him.
It killed him to see the defeat in her eyes. The uncertainty. He was compelled to do something to build her up, to help her get back the joy she’d felt in her work. He felt good taking these steps on her behalf, as though it forged something between them. Not
an obligation, but a connection. One that wouldn’t break the minute she walked out again.
He clenched a fist, disturbed by how much the thought of her leaving filled him with dread. Loneliness.
He brushed the childish emotion aside. Solitude meant autonomy, that’s why he preferred it. He wasn’t trying to cling. He was trying to be a decent person. If helping her kept her under his roof a few days, fine. At least he got some home cooking out of it.
* * *
By the middle of the next morning, Reve was showing her a two-thousand-square-foot loft in Chelsea that made Nina have to pick her jaw up off the hardwood floor. The row of windows that ran the length of the narrow space provided amazing light. It was perfect!
A man named Andre, who organized fashion shows for some of the top designers, signed an NDA before he met them there. He smiled warmly when he saw Nina.
“Oriel! I wondered who the mystery designer was. It’s so good to see you again.” He walked forward, trying to embrace her.
“I’m, um, Nina Menendez.” She pushed her hand between them, offering to shake.
He fell back on his heel and dipped his chin as though she was pulling his leg.
“Really,” Nina assured him. “I’m not her. I believe she’s currently with her husband in India.”
“You look exactly like her.” His confused gaze went to the pink streaks in her hair and her deliberately bare face and dressed-down jeans and T-shirt.
“I’ve heard that before.” Nina shrugged as if it was a mild nuisance that meant nothing. “It’s one of the reasons I’m keeping such a low profile. I don’t want to be seen as trading on our resemblance. I want my work to stand on its own.”
“Of course.”
Reve left to finalize the lease agreement. After thirty minutes of discussion with Andre, Nina was confident they were on the same page creatively. By that afternoon, Andre’s well-versed team had arrived and Nina was unpacking her work from the boxes. There would be no models and catwalk, but along with a set designer and lighting technician, Andre planned to bring in a photographer, a digital marketing expert and a communications specialist to ensure maximum exposure.
