by Stacy Gail
“You kidding me?” As they entered through the automatic doors into the lower lobby level, he turned and gave her an admiring once-over, making her feel like the peach A-line dress in a light, shimmery Lycra material and matching heels was as good as a Badgley Mischka evening gown. “You’re so gorgeous you outshine the world.”
Was it legal for him to be this charming? Somehow she doubted it. “I think I’ll keep you around for those low self-esteem days.”
“Is that the only reason you want to keep me around?”
Her face heated as he led her into a brass-faced elevator. “I can think of one or two reasons besides that.”
“Like what?”
She leaned into him as another couple joined them in the elevator right before the doors slid closed. “I like your art.”
Something that could have been a chuckle sounded deep in his throat, and he curled an arm around her to bring her closer. “And?”
“I like your smile.”
“And?”
“I like your…” Why the hell was it so quiet in this fricking elevator? Some stupid rendition of a Carpenters song wouldn’t have gone amiss at that point. “Personality.”
“Shit, you can do better than that.” His hand slid down her back to her ass, and cupped it firmly. “What else?”
Thankfully, the elevator slid to a gentle stop and the doors opened. The couple got out, and without waiting for the doors to close Tag turned and plastered her to the elevator’s wall, his eyes locked on hers as he eased his body against hers. Her breath caught when she felt how hard she was, and a look of pure masculine satisfaction sizzled across his face. “Tell me, Ivy. What else do you want to keep me around for?”
“Your sexy-ass body that I can’t get enough of,” she whispered, lifting her face to threaten his lips with her own, and when his breath caught it was enough to make her heart flip over in her chest. “And those amazing hands that know exactly how I want to be touched, every single time. But even more than that…”
“Yeah?” His lips just brushed hers before retreating, doing some sensual threatening of his own. “What?”
“I want to keep you around because I love life when you’re in it,” she whispered, letting her pelvis rub against that magnificent hard-on she wanted, so much. “Life feels like… I don’t know. Life feels like it’s more, whenever I’m with you.”
“Ivy. Jesus.” For a moment his eyes closed, and for one crazy moment she wondered if she had somehow offended him with that confession. Then he kissed her, hard and deep and long, before the elevator doors clanged opened once more, and deposited them on the rooftop. “Come on, tiger. Time to take in the view.”
Chapter Fourteen
The sun was setting in the west, not quite seen through the manmade canyons of downtown Chicago, but Tag noted that its summer heat still lingered as they stepped out into the purpling light. He showed his ID and keycard to the attendant, who looked at the former, then ran the latter through a machine he held. Verifying who he was, the man nodded politely before melting back to the bank of elevators that, Tag knew, wouldn’t open again until he wanted them to.
From this point on, the rooftop was theirs alone.
It didn’t surprise him that his observant Ivy perked up right away as they stepped down into a sunken area filled with built-in seats, rounded tables lit with single candles and surrounded by every type of potted plant known to man. “It’s kind of quiet up here, isn’t it? Guess we beat the rush.”
“Guess so.” He threaded his fingers through hers and moved determinedly past an area of little cabanas, their curtains pulled back on three of their four sides to show double-sized chaise loungers. His destination was on the other side of the rooftop garden, where an outdoor bar with about a dozen unoccupied, ultra-modern stools was set, and he nodded at the bartender. “There’s one area of this garden that looks almost like a park, complete with grass cut through with concrete pathways. The view isn’t the best at the moment, since it’s basically of that building with all the scaffolding, but the grass and flowers are so unexpected it’s worth a look. Wanna see?”
“Absolutely.” Happiness glowed in her whiskey-colored eyes as she leaned into his arm and gave it a cute little hug. Everything she did was cute. This was who Ivy was when she wasn’t going to war with the world, and he was smart enough to know it was a privilege to get glimpses of this side of her. “I can’t believe I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life and this is the first time I’ve ever visited a rooftop garden. Practically every commercial building has one now, for crying out loud. Oh, look, roses.” She made a beeline for the roses, and he smiled as she carefully cradled a bloom and bent to sniff it. “Ah, heaven. Isn’t it beautiful, Tag?”
“Yes,” he said without looking away from her. “So beautiful I doubt I’m ever going to forget a second of this.”
She glanced up in surprise at a response that probably seemed over the top to her, but to his mind it was just right. “Are we still talking about flowers?”
“I was never talking about flowers. Champagne,” he went on when the bartender approached with two flutes and a bottle. “We’re celebrating tonight up right. I’ve decided I’m going to get you drunk, because I can’t wait to see what drunk-Ivy is like. Then I’m going to fuck your brains out right here among the roses.”
“Good Lord, Tag.” Glancing in horror at the bartender as she took the flute off the proffered tray, she rolled her eyes at him. “One quick way to ruin the evening is to get arrested for public lewdness. Just imagine the show we’d put on for all the patrons.”
“I thought you would have figured it out by now.” With a smile and a quickly handed-over tip to the bartender for pretending to be deaf and blind, Tag took the tray from him, plucking up a flute with his free hand. “What patrons are you talking about?”
“Yeah. About that.” She glanced around as he slid the tray onto a nearby table, then took her by the hand to head near the edge of the building itself. “This is getting kind of weird. There’s still no one around. Is this place closed, or something?”
“It’s closed to everyone but us.”
“What?” Her eyes went spectacularly wide, and he had to lean down for another quick kiss because, damn, he couldn’t resist. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that I rented out the entire garden for us.” He reached for the bottle, topped off her champagne, and clinked their glasses together. “Tonight is all about you.”
“Seriously?” It came out weakly, as if she didn’t have the strength to say anything above a whisper. “You did that for us? That must have cost a fortune.”
“I did it for you. That means it was worth every penny.”
“Oh, wow.” She pressed a hand to her heart and looked like she was about to faint, which gave him every excuse in the world to wrap her up against him. “Thank you, Tag. No one has ever done anything like that for me. Not even close.”
“Tonight’s surprises aren’t over yet.” He tilted his glass to her mouth, and nearly groaned out loud when those soft, plump lips pursed around the flute’s edge to take in the pale liquid. “Do you know where we are?” he asked after she’d drained his glass and he set it aside on the brick half wall.
“Um…Illinois.” She brought up her own glass to his lips, a high stretch for her, and he helped her by guiding her hand so that he could drain her glass. “Chicago. Downtown somewhere. But that’s not where I really am.”
That made him pause. Maybe she was an easy drunk. “Okay, so where are you?”
“Heaven.”
Damn, who the hell cared if she was an easy drunk? If it made her this sweet, he’d keep her buzzed all the time. “Heaven?”
“Maybe just at the gates of heaven,” she apparently thought it was judicious to add, looking so fucking serious he couldn’t stop himself from smiling like a damn fool. “But if we do actually do the nasty among the roses, I’ll definitely know, for sure, that we’re in heaven.”
“Holy fuck, woman
. What you do to me.” Taking the empty flute from her and setting it aside on the half-wall with its twin, he kissed her long and deep, trying in the most basic way to absorb all the beauty that she was into his system so he would never lose it. She made him believe there was goodness in the world, when before he’d only known the darkness. That gift she gave him had become as necessary as air, and he didn’t know what the hell to do with that.
All he could do was hope that he gave her a fraction of that goodness in return.
When her arms wrapped around him and she shifted so that she could rub her leg with slow, sensual invitation against his, his head almost exploded. “Not yet,” he whispered against her lips before reluctantly easing away from her. “You’re making me lose track of the world, woman, and I’ve got one more surprise for you.”
“I don’t need any more surprises.” On tiptoe, she gently bit his lower lip. “Just you.”
Thank you, God. “You’re going to like this surprise, tiger. And it has everything to do with where we are.”
“Illinois? Chicago? Downtown?”
“The Loop. Wabash Street, to be precise. Does that address ring any bells?”
She smiled her bewilderment up at him. “Wabash is a pretty famous street, honey. Lots of things are on Wabash.”
“Yeah. Like this hotel. And right next door to it, Cloud Life Digital.”
He fucking adored the shocked widening of her eyes. “What?”
Yeah.” Leaning against the half wall, he pointed to the left. “Right there. No more than fifty yards from where we’re standing right now.”
“Oh.” Craning her head around to look in the direction he indicated, her brows pulled together in a patented Ivy Scowl, before she gave the building a straight-arm middle-finger salute. “A pack of fucking, misogynistic assholes. They’re the ones who offered me some big bucks to do their exterior and interior, just as long as I pretended to have a penis, remember?”
“Oh, I remember.”
She gave the building another snarl before turning her attention back to him. “I’m so glad I’m with you in heaven and enjoying life to the fullest. They could never stop me from being me and enjoying life. Stupid shitheels.”
That was his warrior woman. “It just so happens I agree with you, tiger. Remember when you showed me that piece-of-shit email they sent you about hiding how you’re a female artist?”
“I didn’t exactly show you. As I recall, you grabbed my phone and read that piece-of-shit email without permission, but whatever.”
He shrugged the details aside. “You were polite at that news conference. You didn’t let anyone know what soulless, fucked up woman-haters Cloud Life Digital is. You spared them, Ivy.”
“Yeah, I guess that makes me a real sweetheart.”
“It does. Luckily, I’m nowhere near the zip code of being a sweetheart.”
She frowned her confusion. “I don’t understand.”
“Sparing Cloud Life Digital perpetuates this bullshit idea that since you don’t have a goddamn penis, it somehow makes you less of an artist. That’s not right. That’s not. Fucking. Right.”
“I know.” She cupped his cheek with a soothing sound that shot right to the center of his chest, and for some weird reason it was suddenly hard to breathe. “In a lot of ways, women live with that kind of crap day in and day out. It’s not fair, but it doesn’t stop us. It only challenges us, challenges me, to be even better than any man ever dreamed of being. It gives me strength.”
“Because you’re you, ready to wage war with anything that stands in your way. But it pisses me off, and when I get pissed off, I do something about that shit. That’s why we’re here, exactly here, tonight.”
“Why? Why is it so important that we’re here?”
“The paint’s still tacky,” he said, and grinned at the bewilderment sliding over her expression. “From that first news conference almost three weeks ago to right the fuck now, I’ve been working on this, and I only just finished it yesterday so it’s still not completely dry. But I couldn’t wait for you to see it, so that’s why we’re here.”
“See what?”
“My latest project.” Without further ado, he tugged his phone from his back pocket and hit a button. “Okay, Maude, we’re all set up here. Hit the lights and unveil.”
He heard her gasp. “What…?”
The rest of her words were drowned out by the sound of the floodlights set both on the scaffolding across the street and on the corners of the rooftop garden powering up. In a heartbeat the construction tarps covering the building across the street were flooded in a pool of white light, drawing Ivy’s startled attention. He signaled for their attendant to refill their glasses a few seconds before the tarps fell. Wordlessly he handed her the champagne, and watched her face as she took in his revealed project.
It wasn’t his most original work, mainly because a large part of it was a roughly two-story-sized copy of that woman-hating email Cloud Life Digital had sent to Ivy. Every fucking word. She’d been nice about not mentioning the company’s name while explaining the bullshit misogyny they’d so casually dealt her.
Not him.
He wanted the world to see what Cloud Life Digital was.
He wanted the world to see how strong Ivy was when she’d walked away from a huge payoff because she wouldn’t pretend to be something she wasn’t.
But most of all, he wanted the world to see the greatness that was Ivy Gemelli.
That was why, at the bottom of that disgusting, misogynistic letter, he portrayed Ivy lifting the bottom of the white page, as if it were a smothering curtain, fiercely pushing it upward and struggling to stand, to hold her ground against the crushing weight of it. Her face was a study of beauty at the heart of struggle and pain and never-ending frustration. From her eyes shone the ferocious determination to lift that smothering curtain, so that she could be free of it once and for all.
On the front of the t-shirt she wore was her tag, the tag that had brought them together in the first place. He’d used phosphorescent paint to recreate it, something that couldn’t be seen now, but long after the floodlights were shut down, her tag would still glow.
Just like Ivy.
“My God.” Her whisper brought his attention back to her, and he was surprised to see tears rolling down her cheeks. “This is… oh my God, Tag. This is the most unbelievable thing I’ve ever seen.”
Oh fuck, she was crying. “Ivy? Don’t you like it?”
“I…” She swallowed convulsively. The strangest sensation flooded through him, and it took him a second to realize he was damn close to freaking the hell out. He’d never given a shit about what anyone thought of his art before. Who gave a fuck about them when he did his art for himself? But Ivy’s opinion mattered. It mattered a helluva lot.
“Ivy.” He cupped her chin and brought her head around to face him. Her eyes were the last to turn his way, clearly transfixed, but possibly not in a good way, by his project across the street. “Talk to me, damn it. Do you like it? I tried to—”
“I love it. Oh, Tag.” With a muffled sob, she launched herself into his arms, her hand still holding the champagne flute. “No one has ever…ever…done anything like this for me. I never even knew anyone could do something like this. I can’t believe the thought you put in to this, the effort, the all-out back-breaking work to make this happen. My God, Tag. My brilliant, beautiful Tag.”
“So you do like it.” A sigh of relief burst out of him, shocked all the way to his bones at how much her reaction meant to him. But it was good, this feeling. Better than good. “I’m glad. Life is good when you’re happy, so I’ll just keep on doing my damnedest to keep you that way.”
“I would be an idiot to fight you on that one, so I’m not going to even try.” Grabbing up his newly filled flute, she clinked her champagne glass with his. “Congratulations on the birth of your new project, honey. You’re magnificent. Better than magnificent. You’re my hero. Thank you for sticking up for me, and eve
ry woman who’s struggled against this kind of shit.”
“My pleasure.” His chest expanded at her words, and his head spun dizzily as he drank. But it wasn’t the champagne that had him spinning.
It was Ivy.
Setting aside their empty glasses once more, he led her toward a lounging cabana, the floodlights illuminating the darkening skies around them. “As much as I like the idea of taking you among the roses, it’s too bright to do that now without us being seen, and I don’t want anyone’s eyes on you but mine.”
“Public nudity has never been high on my bucket list,” she half-laughed, her fingers squeezing his in a gesture that oddly felt like a hug. “But give me one more glass of champagne and I just might not care.”
That was all it took for him to deviate toward the table where the champagne bottle had been left, snagging it up before once again aiming for the cabana. “Sounds like drunk-Ivy might be crazy-Ivy. Let’s find out.”
“You’re shameless. I like.” Another laugh escaped her as she sank down onto a chaise lounge, while he set the bottle aside and pulled the gold ropes that held the cabana’s curtains back. “Come and be shameless with me, Tag.”
“That’s the plan.” And he was damn glad she was totally on board with it. “I want you to ride me tonight, tiger. You gonna make room for me?”
In a heartbeat, she scooted over and patted the chaise cushion invitingly. “Whatever you want, honey.”
Whatever you want.
Fuck, he was one lucky man.
He sank back into the chaise cushions, a slow, achy throb of need building in his balls as he stretched full out. No furniture on earth fit him comfortably, but when Ivy curled up next to him, her mouth finding his as she slid a hand over the buttons of his shirt to slowly undo them, he didn’t give a shit that his feet hung over the end of the chaise.
“I want this night to last forever,” she whispered against his lips while cool air hit the exposed skin of his chest. His pulse kicked up pleasantly when her questing fingers worked downward to free him of his jeans. “But most of all I want you, Tag. I want you inside me.”
