But now the waiter was here asking if we were ready to order, and I couldn’t even think—I was still wanting Weston’s hands on me and wishing he was inside me—I couldn’t be bothered with the daily soup and fish specials.
“We’re going to need a moment,” Weston said, reading me. “In fact, I’ll signal you when we’re ready.”
The waiter nodded and shuffled off to his other tables. There was a beat of silence, and I took a swallow of wine, trying to figure out what I was going to say to Weston to get him to touch me again. Also, how not to panic this time when he did.
How was I going to explain to him what was going on inside my head when I couldn’t even explain it to myself?
Thankfully, he asked the right questions, the kinds of questions that helped me think, helped me sort myself out.
“Can I ask why? No judgment. Are you not into me? Or is it that we’re in public? Because it’s okay if you’re not into that like I am. Just because it turns me on, doesn’t mean it has to turn you on.”
I swiveled my face toward him. “That’s just it. It does turn me on. A lot. I think I kind of made fun of you at first when I realized that was something you’re into, and then I realized that it was really awesome.”
He nodded. “Really awesome.” He paused, and his face changed. “Then it’s me. You don’t want me touching you.”
“Weston, I can’t... I don’t even know how to put into words how much I want you to touch me.” I looked down at my hands, too embarrassed to face him for this. “This doesn’t make any sense to you, I’m sure. I wish I knew how to explain. See, it’s one thing if Darrell thinks all I’m good for is spreading my legs. If he thinks I’m slutty it doesn’t matter. And it really doesn’t matter if most of the Internet thinks I’m slutty, either, though. I mean it kind of does. Since I’m trying to build a reputation of being a classy woman and everything. One step at a time, I guess.”
I snuck a glance up at him and saw he was listening to me carefully. “I know the Internet isn’t here right now, that it’s just me and you. And that’s the problem, because I really do care what you think of me. It really matters to me that you respect me and that you think that I’m capable of being this thing that I’m trying to be.”
Out of the blue, tears stung my eyes, and my throat got tight.
“You’re the one who’s been teaching me and building me up for this, and if you don’t think I’m a classy person, if you only think that I’m worthy of spreading my legs, then—“
He cut me off. “I respect the fuck out of you.” His hand was back on my knee, but comforting this time, not attempting to make a move. “Are you saying you’re worried that having sex with me takes that away? That if I find out you’re into kinky things, I’ll think you’re less brainy?”
It was what I was saying, but I couldn’t trust my voice. So I just stared at my hands, twisting them around each other.
“Did you know the minute I saw you, I couldn’t breathe? I lost all ability to speak. I didn’t even know words anymore. It wasn’t even because you looked amazing, which you did, by the way. It was because I could tell you were the smartest person in the room. Do you know how hot that was? I am so attracted to you, Elizabeth. I have been from the minute you walked into that Reach lounge, because I could tell you were a woman who knew what she was after, a confident woman, a smart woman. And the way you could just bulldoze Donovan? That took some serious skill. I have mad respect for you. I spent that entire meeting hiding my boner.”
Air stuttered into my lungs. I burned with the relief of it.
“And every time you speak, every time you argue with me—I wouldn’t put up a fight if I didn’t enjoy hearing what you had to say.” He leaned in close again, his lips brushing my neck. “The only reason I want to touch you right now so fucking bad is because I respect you.”
Under the table, I took his hand and guided it up under my dress toward the damp spot on the crotch of my panties. I let go of his hand once he was where I wanted him, and grabbed on tight to the chair edge while he slipped his fingers inside my panties to find my clit under the hood of skin where it was hiding, plump and aroused from his words.
I could feel him smile at my ear. “So wet. You want this so bad.” He massaged expertly in fine circles, small and then wide, clockwise then counter. “You’re so disciplined and strong, your eyes on the goal. Not even giving in to your own pleasure when you think it might take you away from what you want in the end. If you had any idea how much this stuff fucking turns me on, Lizzie... I wish I had half your ambition. Your drive.” I opened my legs wider, making it easier for him to dip his fingers down my slit and back up. “I wish I had your brain. You’re the total package—sex and smarts all in one. The sexiest thing I’ve ever had underneath me. The sexiest thing I’ve ever had in my bed, in my mouth, around my cock.”
I focused on the cars driving through the park, the dots of light beneath us as my orgasm built. Each compliment, each line of praise was as much of a turn-on, as arousing as what he was doing with his hands, and it wasn’t long before I was exploding, right there in the restaurant, coming from just his whispered words in my ear and his thumb on my clit. I tried to swallow my gasps, tried not to make a single noise. Weston took his free hand and covered my mouth to help stifle the sound, and I turned my face toward his, locked my eyes on his baby-blue gaze, and for the first time in my twenty-five years—as I was climaxing in a French restaurant owned by Donovan Kincaid—it occurred to me that maybe men didn’t just hurt women after all.
“Can we go home now? I’m not really in the mood to eat anything,” I said, when I’d come down, desperate for another orgasm with him inside me.
“The only thing I’m hungry for is you.”
And for the second Friday in a row, we skipped The Sky Launch and stayed in.
Chapter Seventeen
“You grew up out here, not in the city.” Elizabeth made it sound more like a statement than a question as I pulled into the driveway at my parent’s house in Larchmont, probably because I’d told her this already.
“Yep.” It was Thursday, nearly a week after she’d come back from her spa vacation, and we were taking another trip, this time together and just for a day. I’d borrowed one of Donovan’s cars to make the ninety-minute drive out here to the suburbs. It seemed stupid to use Elizabeth’s driver to come to my childhood home, and even more stupid to take a train, especially if we planned to lug a bunch of crap back with us.
“And your dad did that commute every day of your life?” she asked as I put the Tesla into park in the circle drive.
“Ten-hour workdays, five days a week. He had a driver so he worked in the car both to and from. He still does it. Mom says his days are shorter now.” I turned off the car and looked over at my fiancée. “Mom wanted the house. It was the price she had to pay. At least that’s what she always said to me.”
For all her talk of sacrifice, I’d learned it had a limit.
But we hadn’t come out here to get worked up about the past.
“Let’s do this,” I said to myself more than to Elizabeth, then opened the door of the car and ran around to her side to open hers. Together, we walked up to the front of the Georgian-style house. I pulled out my spare key—it was strange that I had one, and not strange, too. After all, I’d grown up in this house. And yet now it felt like it belonged to somebody else, like I was an intruder sneaking up on it.
With sweaty hands, I entered my code into the security pad, praying it still worked, and when the light went green, I put my key in the door, and we slipped inside.
Once we were both in the house, I took Elizabeth’s coat, then peeled off my own and hung them both in the hall closet. I couldn’t shake how nervous and uncomfortable I felt being here. Being here with her. There were so many ghosts from the past, memories of a lifetime spent in these rooms. Thankfully, we didn’t need to take a tour of the grounds and visit them. It was a straight shot to where I was headed today—through the
gallery, past the living room, into the library.
I grabbed Elizabeth’s hand and started tugging her in the direction I wanted to go, when Linda, our housekeeper and my former nanny, appeared in the archway coming from the dining room.
“Weston,” she greeted me affectionately, her Swedish accent still lingering after all these years. I let go of Elizabeth’s hand so she could hug me. “What are you doing here? It’s been so long. You nearly gave me a heart attack. I heard someone walking through the house. I thought we had a prowler.”
I kissed her on the cheek. “Just me. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. It was last minute. Needed to grab some things from the library.” I turned toward Elizabeth. “Linda, this is my—“ I paused. I’d introduced her as my fiancée to everyone in town, including my parents, but in some ways I was closer to Linda than I was to them. It felt weird to tell this lie to the woman who had gotten me through both AP European history and my first wet dream.
My former caretaker finished the sentence for me. “I’ve heard much about your fiancée, Elizabeth. I’m right to assume that you’re her?”
“That’s me,” Elizabeth said, smiling nervously. She held her hand out to shake, but Linda drew her in for a hug that Elizabeth did well in tolerating.
“I’m so glad to meet you. A little heartbroken that it hasn’t happened sooner.” Linda glared at me in the way she always had when I was younger, the glare she used when she wanted me to know she was disappointed in me without actually saying the words.
“Well, you’ve met her now. You can stop with the guilt trips.” I snagged Elizabeth’s hand again and started toward the library. We were already going to be here all day, and I didn’t want to risk staying any later than we had to. “I don’t mean to cut this short, but we have, you know…”
“Always busy, that one,” Linda said, sticking her tongue out. “Go on into your library, and I’ll bring you some coffee and cookies.”
“Thank you, Linda. You’re the best.” I turned forward, pulling Elizabeth closer to me as we headed to the library.
“She seems nice. Pretty, too,” she said, looking back to where Linda had just disappeared into the kitchen.
“Oh, you can’t even imagine how many times I spanked off to her when I was growing up.” Confessions of a former horny teenager.
And then we were in the library, the reason for our trip to Larchmont and my day off from Reach.
“This is it,” I announced.
It wasn’t that the library was so spectacular. It was that all my books from school were still here, including all my textbooks, complete with the notes I’d taken in business school. That wasn’t the kind of thing that you could just buy on Amazon and have shipped to you. I’d tried to keep her out of this piece of my life, but so much of the stuff I wanted to teach Elizabeth was here on these shelves.
And the more time I spent with her, the weirder she found that separation, so this seemed like a good idea.
My parents had always believed that sharing was what you did with books. And I did rightfully own a lot of the ones that were here already, so it wasn’t like I was doing something wrong by showing up and grabbing what I wanted. But I had purposefully not announced my intentions, afraid my mother would have skipped her weekly bridge game, or worse—that she would’ve told my father, and he would be here when we arrived.
No, this was perfect. A quiet house, with no one but me and Elizabeth and Linda.
“This is really nice,” she said, trailing her fingers along the spines of books that lined the bookshelves as she walked along them. “My father had a library like this in his château in France. He never let me touch those, though.”
She drew a book out of the section dedicated to Peter Drucker and flipped through the pages. “And you’re serious that I can take whatever I want? Your parents won’t miss them?”
“My father will only be pissed if you take any of his Steve Berry’s or Dan Brown’s. Other than that, he won’t even notice.” I headed toward the wall that I knew contained my textbooks from college and started pulling the books I wanted to take. Business Ethics: Concepts and Cases, Consumer Behavior, Anatomy of a Ponzi Scheme. I laughed to myself, finding the last one on the shelf.
My father could’ve written that book.
I flipped open my old earmarked copy of Business Law and sunk down in the oversized leather armchair while Elizabeth collected books she was interested in. Thirty minutes went by, then forty, and soon I found I was not reading at all, but staring out the window at the bay in the backyard. It was a beautiful house to grow up in, a beautiful life that I had taken for granted.
It was the kind of place I liked taking girls home to, to impress them, the kind of place that Elizabeth was already accustomed to. The kind of place where she deserved to live. I felt an ache between my ribs because I couldn’t give it to her, which was dumb, because I wasn’t trying to give her any life at all.
And even if I were, I hated the kind of sacrifices this house had required. Yes, my mother loved her maid and her groundskeepers and her water view—at the cost of only seeing her husband two days a week. At the cost of everything he did during his time away from this house.
Reach would one day be that successful, as big as King-Kincaid had been for my father and Donovan’s father. I believed it, not just because I believed in myself and our company, but because Donovan had the skill of not letting anything go any way except exactly how he’d planned. And he planned for us to be successful. So it would happen.
But even when it did, I didn’t want to only come home to see Elizabeth on the weekend, only see our children from the doorway of the bedroom while they slept in their beds every night.
Why this fantasy had Elizabeth’s name in it, I had no idea. Except that she was the one currently wearing my ring and playing my bride-to-be.
Anyway, I guessed I’d rather live in the city. I could raise kids in the city, as tricky as that was. Donovan had grown up that way, and he’d turned out…well, he’d turned out.
And I was a long way away from having kids, so all of this was ridiculous overthinking, inspired by being in my childhood home with someone who had me talking about weddings all the time.
There was a bustle in the house all of a sudden, voices coming from the vicinity of the kitchen. Linda had already brought us the coffee and snacks, and a glance at the clock on the wall said it was about time for my mother to be home.
Elizabeth heard it too, and looked over at me expectantly.
“I’ll go tell my mother we’re here,” I said, getting up before she could offer to join me.
I left the room, closing the library doors behind me, afraid that whatever conversation I had with my mother might escalate quickly, and I didn’t want to disturb Elizabeth and her studying.
As I’d suspected, I found my mom in the kitchen, filling up a glass with ice water from the dispenser in the refrigerator. She looked over her shoulder at me, then back to the task at hand.
“Linda said you were here,” she said crisply, obviously upset. “If you’d told me you were coming I would have had lunch prepared.”
“Lunch wasn’t necessary, Mom. We didn’t come for food. We came for books.” I stuck my hands in my jean pockets, avoiding the temptation to reach out to her physically.
She turned around toward me and took a swallow of her water, then put it down on the counter between us. I’d left that barrier on purpose.
“Books. You came for books?” It seemed like she was sorting through a lot of thoughts in her head, a lot more than she was speaking out loud.
“I’m helping Elizabeth brush up on her business skills, and there’s a lot of textbooks I left here.”
She nodded. “Your father’s not going to be happy he missed you. Are you coming home for Thanksgiving at least?”
I hadn’t spent a holiday in this house for more than three years. It was amazing that she kept asking. Amazing how I still got choked up when I told her, “No.”
&nbs
p; “Your father won’t be happy about that either,” she said sharply.
I looked out the window and caught a heron flying, tracked its flight with my gaze. It was easier than watching her when I said, “Yep. I’m sure he’ll be disappointed.”
I knew she wanted me to offer her more, but I didn’t have more to give her. It was hard enough being on her turf. Couldn’t she see that?
When I turned my head back to her, she was patting the kitchen counter with her hand soundlessly. Our eyes met, and hers were brimming with tears.
Jesus. Not today, Mom. Please.
But I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. I let her talk instead. Let her say the things pressing against her heart, pushing those tears to the surface.
“I understand why you’re upset, Weston. I do. I didn’t for a long time, but I do now. I just don’t understand why you’re so upset with me.”
“I’m almost more upset with you than with him,” I said, exasperated. She didn’t understand. She didn’t understand at all.
“Why? What did I ever do except—”
I lurched forward and placed my hands on the counter. “You encouraged him, Mom. You begged him to do the wrong thing. You could have convinced him—“
“I couldn’t live without him! We would’ve lost everything. Our house. Your trust fund. The company, Weston. Everything. Don’t you get it?”
The sacrifice was too great to pay. That’s what she was saying.
Too great for her to pay, anyway. She didn’t care that someone else had to pay it for her.
Well, I did.
“I came for the books, Mom,” I said, pushing off the counter, stepping away. “I didn’t come for this conversation.”
I headed back into the library and shut the doors behind me when I was inside. Then I locked them, afraid my mother would come in after us. I didn’t need any more of her tears and her heartache. Her excuses.
Elizabeth looked up from her book, but the look I gave her said I wasn’t in the mood to talk, and she went right back to reading.
Girl Meets Billionaire Page 173
