Joy reached up and did a scrunchy type thing she’d been doing for two hours to my hair. Like there was any chance my hair was going to lose the curl. I’d been praying for my hair to lose it’s curl since I was a kid and no dice.
She’d covered my lips in bright red lipstick. My eyes in glittery eye shadow. I was me but…sexier. Brighter.
I had not expected miracles here, but it sort of felt like one had happened.
Though the underwear was a bitch.
“He doesn’t stand a chance,” Joy said into my reflection in the mirror.
I’d said not one word about fucking Sam Porter. Not one. But Joy knew. Hell, maybe everyone knew. Butterflies exploded in my stomach.
“Am I that obvious?” I couldn’t keep the panic out of my voice. I mean, if I walked into that party and people knew what I was after… forget it. I’d put my jeans back on and drop this stupid idea.
“No. But I have a sense about these things,” she said. “As long as I’ve been here, you haven’t been interested in shopping or make up or hair products and suddenly your brother’s best friend shows up and you’re…” she waved her hands around me.
I groaned and put my head in my hand. All this time, I thought I was playing it so cool. “You want to talk about it?” Joy asked.
“God no,” I said. Talk about Sam? How? Like what words would I even use? If there were words to describe him and how I felt… well, I didn’t know them. I didn’t know the language.
Joy laughed. “If you change your mind. I’m here.”
Joy was the big deal ornament designer my brother hired to turn Kane Co Ornaments around. Prong one of his three-pronged approach to save our family business. Joy was half witch, half artist, half…absolute goof ball. And yeah, yeah, that was three halves.
I stood there in the warehouse break room in a sequined gown and high heel shoes (that weirdly didn’t hurt my feet) amongst the beat up lockers and the old fridge and the bulletin board with the Heimlich and CPR posters and the sign-up sheet to buy popcorn from Rodrigo’s kid’s boy scout troop.
So, yeah, I looked extremely out of place in this place I’d created and controlled. Where I felt strong and capable and the lingering shit from my parents couldn’t touch me.
But up there. Up on the top floor with the new windows, and the big deck and all the staff and everyone in suits and dresses and my mom floating around like some kind of poisonous cloud… ugh.
This was a mistake, I could feel it in my bones. I wasn’t some woman in a rom com whose life got wrapped up in a bow in an hour and a half.
I was Sophie Kane, the black sheep of the Kane family. The embarrassing one. The screw up. And I just looked stupid in this dress.
“Stop!” Joy cried. Because she was part witch she could tell I was about to tear the thing off my body. “Stop. You look beautiful. You do. And I won’t fight you if you want to go out there in your jeans and hoodie. You’re beautiful that way, too. But that dress cost so much money.”
It really did. Come to find out sequins were expensive.
“Fine,” I snapped. “Let’s just… do this.”
I’d spent most of my life wearing smooth the grooves between embarrassment and anger. I’d made that a real easy transition for myself. I could go from embarrassed to outrage in .05 seconds. I wasn’t proud of it, but whatever. When you grew up with my mom you learned some fucked up coping mechanisms. I mean, look at my brother. The shit that guy did? That bravado? Getting engaged to some strange woman on a whim? It wasn’t healthy.
Joy handed me a little black purse. “What do I need that for?” I asked.
“Lipstick. Key badge. Phone. Condoms?”
I felt myself blush bright red. So fast and so hard I got dizzy.
“Isn’t that the point of all of this beauty?” she asked. Waving a finger over all her hard work. “To get laid?”
Is that what I wanted from fucking Sam Porter? To get laid? I mean the truth was I had imagined that more times than I could count. But my imagination and reality were miles apart. Sam talked to me all the time – about the Broncos and Skyrim. Books we were reading. Some politics. My brother, Wes and how he had lost his mind with this crazy engagement. It was constant emails and What’s App messages. Every morning I woke up to the same message from him; stay safe, kid. Which was sweet and infuriating all at the same time.
So, what I wanted…really, really wanted was for him to look at me with…I don’t know, softness? Care? Not see me as one of the guys, but as…me?
Not my brother’s little sister.
Not the pesky kid who followed him around all those years.
Not the trash-talking video game buddy.
I wanted Sam Porter to see me.
The girl who’d loved him since she was fourteen years old.
“Fine,” I grabbed the purse. “The condoms are in there?”
“Three,” Joy said with a waggle of her eyebrows. “Just in case.”
All of this felt stupid. Stupid, stupid. But I was doing it. I had a thong on, so there was no point in backing out now. “Let’s go.”
* * *
One-click for more
TYCOON Prologue
VERONICA
* * *
No one had ever told me about orgasms.
Like, I had a sense, from movies or whatever. But no one ever gave me the complete picture. How they were tricky. How you had to be patient and vulnerable. Naked in a lot of ways—more than just, you know, actually naked. No one told me that they were a little frightening, that feeling of chugging up the incline of a roller coaster. Of something powerful and scary being just over the edge of a cliff.
Really, what no one told me was how freaking consuming they were.
After having some (eight, to be exact), it was literally all I could think about. Even in this stupid dress with the suffocating shapewear and the itchy netting. The boning in the bodice that dug into my armpits and didn’t let me breathe. The way my boobs—always a problem, except in the orgasm department—were squished and flattened.
All of this should be awful. But it wasn’t. Not really.
Because it was my engagement party.
And all I could think about was sex.
And Clayton.
“You didn’t lose the ten pounds you were supposed to, did you?” my stepmother, Jennifer, asked. She had her disapproving sniff going at full speed.
“Nope,” I answered.
“Veronica,” she said and then sighed, the most disappointed sigh. “You were going to try.”
“Was I?”
Clearly, while I’d been thinking about sex, my stepmother had been thinking about the ten pounds she wanted me to lose. The urge to tell her to just calm down, was hard to resist, but I managed -- because orgasms. I used to obsess over those ten pounds, too, and all it got me was another five.
But this was what she’d done to my half-sister, Sabrina. She’d tried to bully and shame her into a size zero. The woman just couldn’t stand to see a girl eat bread. Or be happy.
I would never understand how my father could go from my beautiful, loving mother to Jennifer. They were diametrically opposed.
“Tonight…” Jennifer said, straightening herself up so she looked like the stick that had been stuck up her ass. She wore a blue dress that hugged her body so closely I could practically see her hip bones through the material. “…is important.”
I was twenty-two, not twelve. And it was my freaking night and no one needed to tell me what was important. I turned to face her instead of dodging her gaze in the mirror and I looked right at her. Something I never would have had the courage to do before the last few weeks with Clayton.
But I’ve had eight mind-bending orgasms—and they’d brought me some kind of new confidence I’d never had before.
“Jennifer,” I said, right in her frowny face. “It’s my engagement. It’s my party. It’s my body. And none of it concerns you.”
Jennifer sniffed so hard she nearly turned her
self inside out.
Behind me, Trudy swallowed a laugh. She’d been brought into the upstairs dressing room of The King’s Land Ranch to literally sew me into my dress—no zippers for the girl who didn’t lose the ten pounds.
“We’re nearly done,” Trudy said around the mouth full of pins between her lips. A few more tugs and twitches on my dress and she stood back and smiled at me. “Eres bonita.”
I believed my old friend when she said I was pretty, because for one of the few times in my life—I felt pretty. I felt it down in my bones. Tonight was going to be amazing.
“Gracias.”
Trudy helped me down from the dais where I’d been standing surrounded by mirrors. A thousand reflections of myself stared back at me. It wasn’t pleasant.
“Do you know where my sister is?”
“Where do you think your sister is?” Trudy asked with a laugh, sticking the pins she’d had in her mouth into the pincushion she wore on her wrist.
I sighed. The stables. Probably in her dress, too.
“What have I said about speaking in Spanish, Veronica?” Jennifer asked.
“More than half the people who live on this ranch speak Spanish,” I said, shaking out the skirt of my sparkly tea-length gown. “You could try learning it. But if you don’t want to hear it, you should move.”
Jennifer stepped up to me so fast she was like a snake coming out of the bushes. And her face…uh-oh…I’d pissed her off.
I tried not to smile.
“I have spent the last sixteen years thinking this day would never come. That you would never find a man to get you out of this house. But it’s here and I’m so glad you are leaving.” She spat her venom all over the place. And once upon a time her words would have hurt, more than hurt, maybe. But Clayton and the orgasms were like armor. “You and your alcoholic sister need to just get out of my house.”
“Bea’s not an alcoholic,” I said, but Jennifer was already leaving. “She’s just fun!” I shouted at her back.
And then it was just me and Trudy in this stupid hall of mirrors.
Trudy touched my back, trying to be comforting, but if I had armor around myself, my weak spot was Beatrice. I would have left this house a long time ago if it hadn’t meant leaving Beatrice here. Sabrina, too, for that matter.
Someone had to take care of them.
“Don’t let her get to you. Tonight is too special,” Trudy said.
Right. I was twenty-two. Sabrina a year out of high school. I could have this life. The orgasms and Clayton.
The whole fairy tale.
“You deserve to be happy.” Trudy eyed me sideways, a smile on her face. She was married to Oscar, who ran my father’s stables, and while not employed officially by the King family, she’d stepped in when my mom died and has always been really good to me and Bea. A motherly buffer between us and our stepmother.
We hugged and Trudy left to change her clothes. Her hair was already done, with the white mock-orange flowers from the shrubs behind the house tucked into her curls. I had the same in mine. Well, sort of. They were already slipping out. I turned in the mirror so I could try and tuck them back in, but it wasn’t much help. My brown hair was so straight it was impossible to get things to stay. I was doing my best with the bobby pins, but I didn’t have my glasses and my fingers looked like pink blurs in a bigger brown blur.
“Hello, Veronica.”
Oh, God. A tide of heat rolled over my body and the bobby pin dropped from my suddenly numb fingers.
It was Clayton. And, just like that, I was breathless. Hot.
He stood in the doorway, a black blur that became clear as he walked toward me. My God, that man in a tux. It shouldn’t be legal. He was handsome enough without the bespoke black coat and crisp white shirt, but with them he was nearly unbearable. His dark hair was swept back from his face. And I didn’t know if you could call a face dangerous, but if you could, his was. His nose was maybe too big, his cheekbones too sharp. His resting face was utterly unreadable with perhaps a hint of disdain. His eyes were a penetrating dark brown. Nearly the color of his hair. But his lips. His lips were the rudest thing I’d ever seen. Thick and full. Slow, painfully slow, to smile.
And they tasted so good.
He looked like one of those intense Irish actors. Broody and dark. And the way he watched me; it was like he couldn’t wait to take me apart with his teeth and put me back together with poetry.
He was the brightest thing I’d ever seen and I had to look away. Look away or go blind. Or go crazy. Or strip this damn dress off and ask him to do what he did to me in his office last week.
“Let me help you.”
“With what?”
“The flower?” He crossed the dressing room and crouched at my feet. I stared up at the ceiling and prayed for strength. For calm.
Just…be cool, Ronnie.
He stood holding the mock-orange blossom in his fingers. The smell, thanks to my crushing of the delicate thing, filled the small space between us. It was heady. Like champagne on an empty stomach.
“Where does it go?” he asked.
“My hair…but I can’t—”
“You’re not wearing your glasses.”
I used to think he never smiled. When I met him four years ago, he was humorless. Stern. None of the Irish poet, only the businessman Dad had hired to manage the amalgamation of some of his companies.
But in the last six months, as we started dating he smiled more.
And I knew that was because of me.
He brought me orgasms. I brought him smiles.
Not sure if it was fair, but it was real.
“Why aren’t you wearing your glasses, Veronica?”
“They don’t go with the dress.”
He put his hands to my waist and I swallowed a moan low in my throat.
Kiss me, I thought. Please, just kiss me. Let’s not go downstairs. Let’s not do this whole party. Let’s shut the door and take off these clothes…
He turned me until I faced the mirror and it was everything I could do not to close my eyes. I hadn’t looked in the mirror while Trudy was sewing me into my dress, or earlier, when Sabrina was helping me with my makeup.
I didn’t know myself in this moment, so instead I looked at Clayton.
I couldn’t say I knew him any better, but he was so damn fun to look at.
“You’re nervous?” he asked. His fingers found my bobby pin and tucked the flower back into the elaborate twist that was my hair.
“A little.”
“Me, too.”
I laughed. “I don’t believe you.”
“Why?” he asked. Our eyes met in the mirror and it was a strange, diffused connection. Painfully intimate.
“You don’t seem nervous about anything. Ever.”
Clayton projected a kind of detachment. An unruffled coolness. He was the picture of control. Except… I thought of that time in his office. And again in his condo. That last date when he’d cooked for me.
He hadn’t been cool then. His hands had shaken when his fingers combed through my hair, when he held my skull in his palms. His voice had broken when he moaned, “So good, Veronica. You suck me so good.”
Between my legs I suddenly throbbed.
“You’re beautiful.”
It was weird. Well, maybe not weird, but he always said I was beautiful. He never said I looked beautiful. Every compliment I’d ever gotten on my looks had been about the dress I was wearing or how I’d done my hair. The implication being that without adornment I was not beautiful.
But Clayton was not commenting on the fancy Oscar de le Renta gown. Or my hair. Or the smoky eyes Sabrina had given me.
He was talking about me. Myself. My body. The skin I lived in.
It wasn’t something you noticed until someone said it to you repeatedly. Especially a man like him. Not just that he was handsome or that he was sexy.
It was that he was never wrong.
“This dress,” he whispered, and his fingerti
ps brushed over the strapless bodice. Not quite touching my breasts but close enough that I knew he was doing it on purpose. “Is perfect for you.”
He hummed low in his throat. And his hand ran from my breast down my waist to my hip. The dress was seven thousand layers of pink tulle with gold sparkles and crystals sewn into every layer. The bodice was fitted but the skirt flared out at my waist. Not poufy, just…forgiving.
It was a beautiful dress and I felt beautiful in it. Except that it was too tight.
“I have something for you,” he said.
“Clayton,” I sighed. “You don’t have to give me anything.”
The ring on my finger, the orgasms. The happiness I felt. All of it was enough. Except…well, he could tell me he loved me. That would be something. A gift.
Two months ago, after we’d had sex for the first time (after the first two of my orgasms), we were lying in the big king-size bed in his home, sweating into his sheets, and I’d blurted that I loved him. He’d kissed me, given me the third orgasm. And the next day he proposed.
Maybe he didn’t love me. Maybe he just liked me a lot. Maybe he was pretty sure that he would love me at some point, and just wasn’t there yet.
Or maybe…just maybe…he did love me, and he just didn’t know how to crack through that armor he had around him.
I voted that option. Because there was no reason for him to do the things he did unless he felt something real for me. And because I didn’t want it to be awkward, I hadn’t told him I loved him again. Except a few times when he’d fallen asleep before me, the dark splash of his hair falling down on his forehead. Those rude-boy lips parted as he breathed.
At that moment I couldn’t resist and the words slipped out in a whisper against the skin of his shoulder. Secrets I kept in the night.
Clayton pulled an oblong box out of the inside pocket of his tuxedo jacket and my stomach fluttered. He was so good at picking out jewelry for me. My engagement ring was an antique Tiffany-set sapphire. Elegant, with a bit of filigree around the impressive stone to make it unique. It was my favorite thing in the world.
The Saint Page 21
