CHAPTER EIGHT
Two hours later, while Chance slept and dawn broke along the horizon beyond his bedroom windows, I slid quietly out of bed and looked down at him with affection.
I thought that he was so beautiful, so perfect, that I didn’t want to leave him now. But I knew that I had to. We were of two different worlds, and last night was a fevered beginning to an amazing end. One on level, I knew that the intimacy we’d shared had meant nothing. But on another level, it had meant everything.
You were wonderful, I thought while I looked at his peaceful face. Thank you for everything—especially for allowing me to trust someone again. I swear that I’ll never forget it. Or you, Chance.
As much as I wanted to stay with him, I knew that I had to leave before he woke. Last night was an anomaly. It was special, it was gentle, and at times it was wonderfully brutal—but now it was in my past.
I needed to go while the sex between us was still sweet. The last thing I wanted was any kind of morning-after awkwardness, which Brooke and Elle had long warned me against. And so I gathered my clothes from the bedroom and living room, pulled myself together in front of the large mirror that hung in the entryway, and then wrote him a note with the paper and pen I found in the suite’s kitchen.
“Thank you,” I wrote. “For the first time in my life, I felt like a woman last night. You did that. I asked you to make love to me as if you really did love me, and you did. I know that was asking for the moon, and I know that all of it was an illusion, but I still believed it. You were that good—and that thoughtful. And I’m grateful for all of it. I hope that one day you find a woman who is deserving of you. We won’t see each other again, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be moments in my life when you creep into my thoughts. When you do, it will be with affection. —Abby.”
I re-read the note and was horrified to see how much emotion I’d put down onto the page. What was I thinking? Was I that badly in need of getting laid? I didn’t recognize the person who wrote that note—my subconscious must have lost its mind. I knew that I couldn’t expose myself to him like that, so I crumpled the note in my fist, searched for a trashcan, found one near the kitchen island, and dropped it inside.
I went back to the note pad and simply wrote, “Thank you. It was beautiful. —Abby.”
With nothing more to say, I stepped out of the suite, took the elevator to the lobby, and left him and The Plaza behind.
* * *
As I left the hotel and started to walk down Fifth, Manhattan had yet to come to life—it was just past five on Saturday, so only the most die-hard of individuals were out, most of them jogging or running along the sidewalks before it became too hot later in the day to do so.
I thought of Brooke and Elle, and it occurred to me that they likely were worried about me. I’d been so consumed by what had happened last night, I’d never texted either of them, which was a cardinal rule not to be broken. I dug into my purse and retrieved my phone. And sure enough, there were several texts from each of them.
Texting wasn’t an option now—they were likely asleep. So I called Elle, who answered on the third ring.
“Where are you?” she said. Her voice wasn’t drowsy as if I’d just woken her up—instead, it was as sharp as it was hot. “Why haven’t you called? We’ve been worried sick about you. I was giving it another hour before I called the police.”
She was angry as hell, and she had every right to be. I’d never done anything like this before, but that didn’t excuse me from following the rules Elle had set into place when all of us first moved to Manhattan. If any of us didn’t plan on making it home at night, for whatever reason, then we called or texted at least one person in the group so everyone’s mind would be at ease for the rest of the night. I hadn’t done that. I felt terrible about it, and I fully took the blame.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what I was thinking—I should have called. Or texted. But I was so caught up in the moment, I didn’t even think of it. I swear I didn’t, not that that’s an excuse. It isn’t. I’m an idiot.”
“Abby, you always come home. Brooke and I were frightened out of our minds for you. You never don't come home after work. So, where have you been? Why didn’t you call?” She paused for a moment, and then her voice trailed off. I knew her well enough to know that she was thinking this through and putting together pieces of a puzzle that would nail me against a wall.
And then she spoke. “What do you mean that you were so caught up in the moment that you didn’t even think to call? What does that mean? What have you been up to? Better yet, let’s just get down to it. Who were you with last night?”
“Get the coffee on,” I said. “I was going to walk home, but screw it—my feet still hurt from last night’s shift. I’m splurging on a cab and I’ll be home soon. Then I’ll share my evening with you.”
“You slept with someone, didn’t you?” she asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, please—I can smell it. So admit it.”
“I’m admitting nothing now.”
“So, you did sleep with someone. You finally did it. You got your mother out of your head, and you gave it up for the better good of all of us. Thank God.”
A jogger dashed in front of me, and I couldn’t help but smile at Elle’s comment. Finally, she and Brooke had gotten what they wanted—me free enough to let myself go. “The coffee,” I said. “Put it on. Give me fifteen minutes to get home, and then I’ll tell you what happened. OK?”
“Brooke will kill me if I wake her from her beauty sleep.”
“I thought she stayed up with you.”
“She did, but then I told her that I’d stand watch. She went to bed about an hour ago. But don’t worry. By the time you get here, we’ll both be ready to hear all about your sordid little evening, even if I have to slap Brooke around a bit just to get her to wake up. You know how impossible she is when it comes to getting her sleep, but I’ll handle her. And then we’ll handle you. See you in fifteen, cookie. In the meantime, gird your loins, because you’re moving straight into the biggest Q&A of your life.”
CHAPTER NINE
When the cab driver dropped me in front of our pathetic, two-bedroom walk-up apartment on Prince Street, I glanced up at the five-story building through the cab’s open window, and felt the same way I generally felt whenever I looked at it—depressed. Suicidal. On the verge of tears.
And in need of new shoes, which tended to fix everything.
We lived on the fifth floor, which—after surviving last year’s heat wave—we’d since nicknamed ‘Hell in a Low-Rise’.
This year, we’d been able to afford a used air conditioner. It was too small to cool the entire apartment, but at least it made the living room somewhat tolerable. If we didn’t have it, given this year’s heat, somebody likely would have found us dead by this point.
After paying the driver and stepping out of the cab, I reminded myself that one day, Brooke, Elle, and I would earn enough money to live somewhere that actually supported human life—instead of condemning it.
The question was when.
The first thing I saw when I unlocked the front door and opened it to a rolling wave of heat was a mouse darting beneath the staircase. Nice, I thought. I walked up the suffocating five flights of stairs, turned the corner toward our apartment door, and was about to unlock it when it opened for me. Elle stood just beyond it, and on her pretty face was her usual layer of mischief.
“Tough climbing up those stairs?” she asked.
“Well, it is hot,” I said.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
“Feeling a little bit… I don’t know… chafed?”
“I’m not taking the bait, Elle.”
“Have your sugar walls turned into fire walls?”
I had to laugh at that one. “You’re a mad woman. Let me inside before you let out all the cool air. Today is going
to be murder. It’s, like, eighty already.”
She stepped aside so I could move past her. At five-foot-eleven, Elle was the tallest among us, and her French-Canadian genes gave her olive skin a tone that made her look as if she had a tan even when she didn’t. Throughout the winter, she had a healthy glow. But now? In July? After spending time walking around Manhattan? She was golden brown and beautiful, which perfectly suited her job at Vogue.
“Looks like someone’s in need of a cold shower,” she said.
I knew this was coming, and I was armed for it, but I didn’t answer her. Instead, I wanted her to pull it out of me. I dropped my purse on a side table, and moved into our tiny living room, where Brooke already was sitting up on our beat-up sofa with a cup of coffee in her hand.
Elle wasn’t joking—Brooke looked as if she hadn’t gotten any sleep. She held the rim of her cup just below her bottom lip and took frequent sips while she just stared at me and—given her sour expression—damned me to hell for cheating her of what she loved the most—sleep.
“Hi,” I said.
“Coffee,” she answered.
“Right,” I said.
“Wrong,” she answered.
Oh, dear….
Brooke was the fairest among us. She was a petite blonde with blue eyes, a pale complexion that burned easily in the sun, and hair that just came to her shoulders.
“Not even a phone call?” she finally said to me. “Not even a text? Are you crazy? Don’t you ever do that to us again, Abby. I’m glad you got laid and all—seriously, it’s about damned time that you went through with it—but you’ve got two people here to consider. Two people who’ve had your back longer than whatever stud picked you up last night.”
She was right. These were my girls—my oldest and dearest of friends. Brooke Martin and Elle Pierce were like sisters to me, and I’d let them down, which made me feel horrible. We’d known each other since grade school, had been through the highs and lows of adolescence together, and nothing had parted us since. We were that close.
“I screwed up,” I said. “It won’t happen again. I’m sorry, Brooke.”
“Whatever. Now that I can see that you’re alive and breathing, you and I are fine—just don’t do it again. OK? OK. Now, get a cup of coffee, sit down, and spill the goods. I didn’t get out of bed for nothing. Elle and I want the deets. And they better be salacious.”
“As Elle kindly noted, I really should take a shower first.”
She came up beside me. “Really?” she said. “Just because I noted it? Let’s cut to the chase, cookie. To be honest, you need that shower because he’s still all over you, isn’t he?”
“Jesus….”
“I can smell him.”
“The hell you can.”
“Want to try me?”
“Go for it.”
She smelled my hair. “His cologne has a woodsy hint to it. That’s not you—it’s all him. And I can smell it just like I can smell the sex seeping out of your pores.”
Is it that obvious? Do I smell that much like sex? No wonder the cabbie kept giving me weird looks in the rearview mirror. He thought I was a slut. A hooker. Look at where he dropped me off, after all. Our apartment complex looks like a damned drug den.
I felt mortified.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” I said.
“Don’t you dare be sick,” Elle said. “Because then I’ll get sick. And then Brooke will get sick because that’s what Brooke does whenever I get sick. We all know that. We’ve seen it time and again for years, ever since we stole that bottle of vodka from your parents’ liquor cabinet when we were thirteen. It’s a goddamned pattern at this point. I puke. Then Brooke pukes. Worse, if we all barf, our living room is going to smell more like a sewer than it already does. All because you decided to get sick. So, don’t do it. Suck it up and get yourself together, Abby. I mean it.”
“I’m going to hurl.”
“It’s bulimia,” Brooke said.
Elle shook her head. “No, it isn’t. I see that shit all the time at Vogue—not that I’m planning on sticking around that joint much longer. Still a secretary, my ass. But let’s face it—bulimia takes the boobs first, and Abby still has Abby’s infamous rack. She’s just sick because I called her out for spending the night flat on her back. I can smell it all over her—and it just hit her that if I can, others can too. She’s a feverish, walking sex bomb exuding her uncontainable pheromones into the world.”
“Stop it,” I said.
“Not until you sit your ass down and tell us what happened.”
“That will cost you a cup of coffee.”
Elle moved briskly into the kitchen. “Coming right up,” she said brightly. “Black?”
“You know how I like it.”
“I know how you like your coffee, but since it’s been so damned long since you’ve gotten laid, I’ve forgotten how you like that.”
“Oh, look at you—aren’t you clever?” I sat down on one of the two over-stuffed chairs and leaned my head back against it. “I’m exhausted.”
“You look like shit,” Brooke said.
“Thank you, Brooke.”
“It’s true. You look all roughed up. Like you’ve been spanked and slapped around, or something. Hell, one of your eyes looks lazy—the left one. It’s kind of hooded and droopy. Whatever he did to you must have been intense.”
“Neither of you has any idea.”
Elle came to my side and handed me my coffee. “If we have no idea, then it’s time for you to do the walk of shame and start talking.” She took the identical over-stuffed chair to my right. “So, you know, talk.”
“Do I have to?”
“You know the rules. We all do the walk of shame, and you’re way overdue for yours, so don’t you dare hold back.”
“Fine. I’ll talk.”
And I did. Over the next hour, I told them everything that had happened between Chance and me. When I was finished, they just looked at me, their mouths agape.
“Who is this creature of such endowed proportions?” Brooke asked.
“I don’t know. Well, not really. He said he owned some patents. And corporations. Things like that.”
“That means he’s rich.” She got off the sofa. “Come with me, girls. To the bedroom. We’re Googling his ass right now.”
CHAPTER TEN
When we stepped into the bedroom I shared with Brooke, she sat down at her desk, opened her laptop, brought up a browser, and went to Google.
“My Internet powers of steel are about to be revealed,” she said.
“Just because you work in IT doesn’t mean you have Internet powers of steel,” I said.
“The hell it doesn’t. Watch me. What’s his name?”
“He only said his last name when he introduced himself to Steve before all of that went to hell, but I think he said that it was ‘Caldwell’.”
“Chance Caldwell has a nice ring to it, so Chance Caldwell it is. Let’s do an image search first. If you recognize him, then we’ll know that we have the right name.”
When she typed his name into the computer and pressed enter, what appeared on the screen were hundreds of photos of him, from photos at black-tie events to shirtless photos taken on a tropical island. And it seemed that the only time he didn’t have a woman on his arm were in those few images in which he was being interviewed.
“Is that him?” Elle asked as she leaned toward the screen. She was standing over Brooke’s left shoulder. “If it is, holy mother of God is he hot.”
“That’s him,” I said.
“And he got all drunk in love over you?”
“I may have gone sexually dormant over the past year, Beyoncé, but I still have feminine wiles you can’t even wrap your head around. And yes he did.”
“Why do I want to lick the screen?” Brooke asked. “I mean, look at him in this photo. Look at that body. That chest, that face, those abs. Pure candy. The photo is captioned ‘Caldwell International CEO, Chance Caldwell
, in Martinique’. Who’s the woman he’s with?”
Just seeing him again was enough to make goose bumps come alive along my arms. His light blue eyes were almost too much for me to bear—they were one of his best features. And then there were his lips, which I remembered all too well, likely because of all of the places they’d been last night.
“How would I know?” I said.
“This guy is a total player,” Elle said. “How else do you explain how many women he’s been photographed with? Pure one-night-stand material.” She gave me a look of approval. “Good for you, Abby. With a guy like that, you can enjoy everything that happened between you, but move on with your heart intact.”
I wondered whether I could. Even though I knew that I’d never see Chance again, I couldn’t help but feel a sting of disappointment, which I’d never admit to the girls because they’d just razz me over it. After all, it was he who suggested that hooking up with other women wasn’t his thing. So, why were there so many photos of him on the Internet with other women? He’d also suggested that last night could become something more than just a one-night stand. Had that been a lie, too?
I decided that I’d never know.
Best to let it go.
Still, I was curious about who this man was, so I placed my hand on Brooke’s shoulder. “Enough of the photos,” I said. “Let’s find out who he is. What’s Caldwell International all about? Can you look it up?”
“Just allow me to linger over that body of his for a few more minutes—”
“Look it up, Brooke.”
“Settle down. You’re such a possessive one-nighter.”
“I’m not possessive. I’m just interested in finding out about the man who was on top of me last night.”
“And inside of you.”
“That’s right.”
I watched Elle take the mouse from Brooke’s hand and click on a photograph of Chance in a dark business suit. He looked like a damned model to me. Why did I feel such a pull toward him? It made no sense to me. We’d had a wonderful, no-strings evening together, but that’s all it was, so what was my problem? Emotionally, I needed to accept last night for what it was, and forget about what he may or may not have suggested during his conversations with me.
Chance (The One More Night Series) Page 6
