Because of You (Swanson Court Series Book 5)

by Serena Grey

  I don’t doubt that he’s good at a lot of things, but success as a performer has been a dream for me for so long, I can’t imagine anyone not wanting it as desperately as I do. “I’m confused.”

  He chuckles. “What about you? Why do you want to perform?”

  “Because I’m good at it and it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. Also…” I shrug. “I want the world to know my name.”

  He looks genuinely curious. “Why?”

  I look down at my almost empty bowl. “Because I don’t want to be forgotten.”

  We are both silent.

  “No one lucky enough to know you would ever forget you,” he says quietly.

  I can see that he means every word, and I want to explain why it’s so important to me. It matters to me that he doesn’t think I’m just a fame-hungry person. I want to show him my mother’s picture on the wall and tell him about her. How she was making a name for herself. How she sang and danced even while pregnant with me. How she gave everything up after she had me, because she couldn’t bear to miss a moment of being my mother. How, by the time of her death when I was seven, everyone had forgotten that she used to be a performer. She was only Dennis McKay’s wife.

  I don’t want to be known only as a part of someone else’s life. I want to tell him that, but it’s hard to put the words together.

  “I could say the same about you,” I say instead. “No one could ever forget you.”

  “I don’t care about acclaim or recognition.” His voice is low. “I’m already lucky to do what I do. Lucky to be alive. Lucky to have people who support me, even when I don’t deserve it.”

  I don’t hide my puzzlement. “You’re talented, driven and hardworking. You deserve all the chances you’ve had.”

  He looks like he’s trying to believe me, and in his eyes, I see that haunted look again. “Where’s this coming from,” I whisper.

  He shrugs, then chuckles. “Nothing…nowhere. Ignore me. I have a lot of dark places in my mind.”

  “Everyone has dark places in their minds.”

  “I guess.”

  When he remains silent, I return to my food, but after a few moments, I lift my gaze and find him looking at me.

  “I’m made of a lot of dark places, Liz.”

  Is he warning me away? I pull in a soft breath. “I don’t care.”

  “You should.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t. You’re talented, practically perfect…”

  He scoffs. “You are young.”

  My face reddens. “Not that young.”

  “Liz…” There’s a note of caution in his voice.

  I ignore it. “I’ve been attracted to you for a very long time, Aidan. You’d have to start being an even worse asshole to me than before to prevent me from falling any deeper.”

  Abruptly, he rises to his feet, ignoring what I said. “Are you ready to leave? I’ll walk with you.”

  No, I’m not. I want to stay here with him as long as possible. “Yeah, I…” I get up and meet his gaze. “I guess.”

  One moment we were looking at each other, and the next, he lunges toward me. Almost desperately, I reach for him and then his mouth is on mine, hot, demanding, sweet… I wrap my hands around his neck and cling to him as his tongue plunges into my mouth. There’s nothing in the world I need more than his touch, with no inhibitions, no barriers.

  His hands are around me, holding me pressed against his body as his tongue caresses mine. My skin is burning, my heart pounding. I’m wild with an insistent, undeniable desire. His lips trail down to my neck and I let out a soft moan.

  He claims my lips again and as he kisses me, we both fall back on the sofa. His body covers mine, his hands setting fire to my skin.

  “You’re perfect,” he whispers, holding my gaze before placing a soft kiss on my shoulder.

  “You are perfect,” I reply. My body is tingling all over from his touch and I want more. He kisses me again, his tongue teasing mine, then he lifts my top, one hand splaying over my belly.

  His fingers create a tingling path on my skin. How have I lived for so long without his touch, without his kisses?

  He slides his hand into the waistband of my tights, still kissing me as his fingers reach between my legs.

  “I want to watch you come,” he whispers. His hypnotic eyes are fixed on mine. His voice, his words, send hot tendrils of lust coursing between my thighs.

  I wet my lips and part my legs, giving his fingers room to slide over the crotch of my panties. I let out a gasp at the first contact. When he starts to rub me in sweet, gentle motions, my eyes close and my legs go weak. His lips claim mine again, his tongue caressing mine as his fingers mimic the same movements between my legs. He works me gently, patiently, sending tingles of pleasure rocking through me.

  Soon, I lose the ability to breathe. His lips, his fingers, him…it’s too much all at once, and yet I want even more. My body arches into his touch, restless and eager. Something tightens inside me, hot and sweet and desperate, then I’m crying out, my body weakening as his fingers draw a gentle release out of me.

  His eyes are on my face as I try to recover. I’m trembling all over, drunk on sensation.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” I chuckle. “God, yes.”

  He slides his hand out of my tights. He’s still watching me, his blue eyes dark with an emotion I can’t identify.

  “I should get you home,” he says.

  Disappointment cuts through me like a knife and the haze of pleasure recedes. “I don’t want to go.”

  He rises and pulls me up to my feet. His eyes are like a dark cobalt flame, smoking and smoldering, and his lips are full and sexy. As if in a trance, I reach for his face.

  “Liz.” I hate the note of caution I hear in his voice. “It’s late.”

  “Stop talking to me as if I’m a child,” I snap. “I know it’s late. I know what I want.”

  He combs his fingers through his hair in a gesture that looks like irritation. “You do, do you?” He looks like he wants to say more, but instead, he gathers up the food packs, stashing them in the bag before tossing them in the bin. I stare at him, all the delicious feelings from earlier now shrunk into a tight ball of frustration.

  “I don’t understand,” I mumble. “What did I do wrong?”

  “Nothing!” He comes back toward me. “Nothing, you did nothing wrong.” He pulls me into his arms. “You are perfect,” he murmurs. “I don’t want to ruin you, Liz, and if you let me, I will.”

  “You won’t.”

  “That shows how much you know about me.”

  “I know that I love you.”

  His body stiffens. I close my eyes, regret and shame filling me in an instant. Of all the things I could have said.

  “I mean...” I’m fumbling. I squeeze my eyes shut, embarrassed beyond words. “I mean…that I…love being with you like this.”

  He keeps holding me, but his body stays rigid, as if even though we are standing so close, he’s trying to keep himself away from me. I want to cry. I wish I were more experienced. I wish I knew the right things to say instead of blurting out feelings I barely understand.

  Silent, I push away from him and smooth my hair. I don’t look at him, but he waits until I’m ready and we go downstairs together.

  “You don’t have to walk home with me,” I tell him once we’re outside the theater. It’s night, but the streets are brightly lit, and the evening crowds fill the sidewalks. I’m too embarrassed to bear another moment with him. I just want the day to be over.

  He looks at me like I’m speaking in Greek. “Don’t be silly.”

  We walk in silence.

  I don’t want to hurt you.

  What does that even mean? How can he hurt me worse than this?

  The walk seems longer than it usually is. When we’re standing in front of the awning outside my building, I mutter a hurried goodnight and walk toward the doors.

  “Liz…” His voice stops me.<
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  I should ignore him and keep going, but I stop and wait, my eyes on the ground.

  “For what it’s worth,” he says, his voice apologetic, “I loved being with you…like that.”

  Tears threaten to blind me, and I swallow a huge lump in my throat. “Goodnight, Aidan,” I mutter without looking at him.

  “Goodnight.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Aidan

  I know that I love you.

  I keep hearing the words as if she’s living inside my head.

  It was tempting, so tempting, the possibility of letting go and allowing myself to enjoy what she was so willingly offering, but I couldn’t, because she had no idea what she was asking.

  “You don’t even know me, Liz,” I mutter to myself.

  I’ve spent the last two days alone in my tiny cabin upstate, walking, running, and sometimes just doing nothing. I learned to clear my mind and detach from everything a long time ago, to deal with my memories, but now, it doesn’t work.

  I can’t stop thinking about Liz.

  She’s young, talented and beautiful. She has a world of possibilities ahead of her. The last thing she needs is me.

  I know that I love you.

  She’s wrong, and her certainty is proof of how young she is.

  You’re barely four years older, Aidan.

  But I’ve lived a different life. I wasn’t sheltered by a doting father. I watched my mother die in a horrible accident and spent the next decade in therapy.

  Hey, Liz. How would you feel about me if you knew I killed my father?

  Would you still love me then?

  Pain claws through me when I remember that winter almost ten years ago, when I finally lashed out at my father. My mother was leaving him when she had the accident, convinced he was having an affair. Landon and I survived, she didn’t. My dad never recovered from her death, and he secluded himself in the house, barely acknowledging that Landon and I even existed.

  I blamed him too, for everything, even as I longed for him to be the father I needed, the one I barely remembered, the man Landon sometimes described from his memories.

  When I confronted him that winter night, I’m not sure what I expected. I said all the hateful things I’d thought about him for years, and then in the morning he was dead. I’d provided the final crack to a man who was already irreparably broken. When he walked out into the cold that night, he had no intention of coming back alive.

  Because of me.

  There’s a whole ocean of blackness threatening to drown me if I let it. I’ve fallen into that darkness before, after my father’s death. I drank. I left home and ended up in the basement of an abandoned church with a bunch of other teenage runaways, getting high, and hating myself when the highs didn’t last long enough to make me forget.

  And then one day, there was Landon, so out of place in that dark basement, he might as well have been a god. I thought he was my dad, come to take me to wherever he’d found his peace.

  I spent the next year in rehab, with more therapy, and through it all, Landon was there. Working hard rebuilding the hotels and working just as hard rebuilding me. He even tried to save the other runaways by getting involved in the Shelter Project, a charity that helped the kids who didn’t have a billionaire for a big brother.

  I’m a fraud, Liz. A resentful little murderer who’s only where I am because I have a brother who will always move the earth to fix me even though I killed our father.

  I get to survive, to be admired for my looks and talent, because of luck, and family I don’t deserve.

  Just like I don’t deserve Liz.

  She’s so beautiful, so young. What does she know about mistakes you can never take back? There’s no way I can bear to let her see who I am under the persona of the talented Aidan Court.

  I’m not anyone’s fairytale prince.

  I don’t deserve to be.

  Outside the cabin, the wind howls again.

  On the table in front of me, three bottles of scotch are calling to me, promising the familiar comfort of deep, dark oblivion.

  This is who you are, Aidan. Just like your father.

  “What if I’m just like him?”

  “If I end up even half the man he was before he lost the love of his life, I’ll be proud, I guess. And I’ll always be proud of you no matter what.”

  Landon’s voice in my memories makes me smile. I drag my eyes away from the bottles. Outside the windows, the rain is a steady shower. The sound and the solitude are oddly soothing.

  Go back to work, Aidan.

  No. I need a few more days alone with my demons…just so I don’t forget.

  Just so I don’t make the mistake of believing I deserve an angel.

  I know that I love you.

  The words are torture in my memories, because I so desperately want them to be true. I want her to know me inside out and still feel that way about me. I want to share everything with her. The temptation floors me and it scares me because I know once she sees who I really am, her feelings will quickly disappear.

  I need to clear my head. Pulling on a jacket, then boots, I walk out of the cabin and into the rain.

  When I return about an hour later, there’s a gleaming black Cadillac parked at the end of the drive. The driver’s window slides down and Landon’s longtime driver Joe waves a greeting at me. I wave back.

  Inside the cabin, Landon is standing by the stone fireplace, dressed in a suit with his fair hair slicked back, he looks like he just stepped out of a meeting.

  I close the door behind me and pull off my jacket. “Hey man.”

  He studies me for a moment, one eyebrow raised. “You’re running around in the rain now?”

  “I needed some time.” I join him by the fire and warm my hands over the grate. “I thought you were in San Francisco.”

  “I was, but…here I am.” He gives me a look of faint disapproval. “You should change out of those clothes before you catch your death of cold.”

  My lips turn wryly. “How’s that for poetic justice?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Landon says. I can tell from the way his body stiffens that he’s also remembering that winter morning.

  I killed him.

  He exhales. “You skipped out on work, didn’t tell anybody where you were, switched off your phone… Is there something you want to tell me, Aidan?”

  I consider dumping everything on him. My fears… Liz. He’ll know what to do. He always does. He’ll move heaven and earth for me again and again and again.

  He’s always had to.

  Now I need to do my own moving.

  I shake my head. “Not really.”

  “Aidan—”

  “Landon, I’m fine. I needed some time off to clear my head.”

  His eyes go to the bottles on the table. “So, it’s the pressure from the play?”

  “Something like that,” I lie.

  I’m not sure he believes me. “Aidan.” His voice is even. “You’ve taken on a lot of responsibilities for someone your age. I know you have a commitment to the production, but if you want to pull out and start seeing a professional again, I’d understand.”

  I’ve seen professionals for most of my life. After the accident, I didn’t speak for years. Professionals put me back on track to seeming like a normal human being, at least on the outside. They’ve helped me a lot, but I am sick of sitting on couches talking about problems nobody can solve.

  “You always had a lot of responsibilities,” I retort. “Even when you were much younger than I am now.”

  “That’s different,” Landon says. “I had to—”

  “Take care of me? Be the responsible one?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe now it’s time for me to be responsible for myself.”

  He studies me for a long moment, then smiles. “So, what are you doing hiding so far out here?”

  I try to glare at him, but I end up smiling. “I painted myself into that corner, didn’t I?”r />
  He laughs. “You know I’ve always been smarter than you.”

  “Erm, who was it that mistook some girl trapped in an elevator for a hooker again?”

  “Rachel isn’t just some girl.” I give him a curious glance, but he doesn’t explain. “Are you ready to leave now, or do you need a few more days of staring into those bottles? I could give you a ride.”

  “I brought my bike,” I say with a snicker, knowing how much he hates it.

  He shudders. “Not in this rain. Stow the bike. I’m giving you a ride.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Liz

  I know that I love you.

  What was I thinking? Of all the things I could have said to him.

  I groan and bury my face in a pillow. Fiona, lying across the foot of my bed, looks up from her phone and raises her eyebrows.

  “Stop beating yourself up. You slipped and told him how you felt, so what? He’s the loser who’s too blind to see how wonderful you are.”

  “He’s not a loser, but thanks.”

  She sighs, “Just trying to make you feel better. Do you know when he’s coming back?”

  I shake my head. Aidan’s been gone for three days. My dad is furious and worried, and Cruz is trying his best to manage the rehearsals.

  Did he leave because I blurted out how I felt about him?

  Good job, Liz.

  Fiona hands me her phone. “You know how he said he’s full of dark places,” she says. “Maybe this has something to do with it.”

  Curious, I reach for the phone. I’ve already read every interview Aidan has ever done, so I’m not sure it will be something new. The article on Fiona’s screen is old. An archived article from about twenty years ago. I start to make a comment about the date, then my eyes skim over the headline.

  Wife of Swanson Court Owner Dead in Auto Crash.

  A picture of two little boys wrapped in blankets causes an ache in my chest. The older one looks heartbreakingly sad, and the little one looks so tiny and confused.

  Aidan.

  Beside that is a picture of a beautiful couple, and another one of the burned-out husk of a car.