The frustration moaned out of her.
“You need more?”
Stunned that he seemed to know, her eyes flew open, but he did know. Of course he did.
Words were about five minutes behind her and all she could really do was nod and twitch and want to come so bad she could taste it.
She dropped herself onto him, prepared for him to heave up and over her and end this, but he kept her there, one hand on her hip and the other slipping between her legs. His fingers found her clit and he pressed his thumb hard against her and she felt sparks drift outward from her skin, as if she were a torch held up against the night sky.
“Make yourself come,” he breathed. “I want to see it.”
With his thumb against her she smashed through the plateau; pleasure was a force living inside of her, ready to break through her bones and muscles and skin, ready to take her over and she couldn’t stop it, didn’t want to. She sobbed, sweat running down her back as she shook over him, no coordination left in her body. Nothing left in her body but this one stubborn strand keeping her on earth.
He surged up, wrapping one arm around her waist, and she felt his palm against her back, imagined it against Ophelia’s body. Ducking his head, he caught her nipple in his mouth and sucked hard and the points of contact—the nipple, clit, tattoo—severed the strand and she was shattered. Simply shattered.
He held her while she shook, stroking her back, murmuring nonsensical things, her hair sticking to both of them, trapping them in a web. A cocoon.
I like it here, she thought, her face pressed to his chest. His deodorant smelled good.
He was still hard inside of her and there was no urgency on his part to finish, at least it didn’t feel that way, and she nearly laughed.
Honest-to-God, who is this guy?
What were the chances that the best lover she’d ever had would stumble into her bar on a Tuesday night?
And be named Harry.
She leaned back, untangling her hair from around them so she could see him.
“Thank you,” she breathed.
His smile was drawn tight; the poor guy was barely holding on.
Such a gentleman, she thought, lifting herself off of him so she could lie down on her back across the king-size bed. His eyes burned their way across her body, leaving trails of cinder and ash from her breasts to her waist, down the long length of her legs.
The boots.
Whatever remained of the polite southern gentleman in this man left town at the sight of those boots, because he growled and pounced. His body, hard and heavy, over hers, his cock, hard and hot, sliding right back inside of her. Deep. And then deeper. So deep she had to shift her head back to breathe.
His body slammed into hers, and she embraced the violence of it, the deeply erotic sound of flesh hitting flesh. The growling, grumbling roar in the back of his throat.
Yes. Yes, it should always be like this, she thought just before mindlessness slipped over her. Just before she was reduced to animal in his animal arms.
“Ryan,” he growled. “God. Come on. Fuck. Come—”
He roared through four more hard, heavy strokes, so bruising, so punishing, she fell apart again under their lovely brutality.
And he collapsed against her, boneless and sweet.
It took a few moments for her heartbeat not to thunder in her ears. For the world not to sparkle in the corner of her eyes.
“Wow,” he breathed.
She laughed, lifting boneless arms to wrap them around his neck.
“Yeah, wow.”
After a long, delicious moment he shifted to the side to take care of the messy reality of the condom, and she began the slightly excruciating process of getting up and getting dressed and getting gone. But he stopped her with an arm around her waist, pulling her back into the muscular curve of his body.
“Stay,” he breathed, and she could sense him starting to drift away on sleep. So she turned around, facing him, running fingers through his pretty blond hair with the slight curl. She touched his cheek, tickling him until the dimple made an appearance and his eyelids fluttered open.
“Hi,” she breathed.
“Tell me another story,” he breathed, shifting against the sheets, burrowing into the bed. “About your entrepreneurial sister. And your brother who would tear down the world for you.”
“Why?” She laughed.
“It sounds nice.” He yawned so hard his jaw popped. “Sounds like a nice way to grow up.”
“It was,” she whispered. “How did you grow up?”
“In a bowl. Without air,” he whispered, but before she could ask him what he meant, he gave way to dreams.
Just a few more minutes, she thought, and closed her eyes to better enjoy the astronomical thread count and his strong arms and the rare illusion of care.
Chapter 3
She woke to a room thick with shadow. Alone. The white duvet pulled up to her chin. Her boots were gone—he must have taken them off her sometime in the night, because she didn’t remember doing that. She stretched her toes in the soft, sleep-warm sheets.
Dawn, she thought, and listened for the sound of the shower, or of Harry quietly getting ready for the trip to find the man who would get his sister out of trouble. But then she realized the sunlight coming in under the blackout shades on the window was knife bright and she rolled over to see the clock on the bedside table.
Nine thirty.
Beyond the table, the closet was open and empty. The bathroom was dark. The sink counter empty of toiletries. Next to the TV were her bag and her clothes, folded and stacked.
Harry was gone.
The slice of pain was embarrassing and awful. And totally unexpected.
She sat up, clutching the sheet to her chest, trying to staunch the slow bleed of startling emotion.
It was a hookup at a bar. You can’t go falling in infatuation just because he was sad and provided expert cunnilingus.
Though the truth was she’d fallen in love for far worse reasons before.
But there was a flash of white paper on top of her clothing, and she flushed with a sort of seventh-grade thrill.
A note!
She managed not to leap out of bed like the woman in a rom-com movie, but she couldn’t stop the hard chug of her heart as she picked up the note, the dark scrawl of his handwriting not quite legible in the shadowy room.
She flicked on the light and sat down on the foot of the bed.
Ryan Kaminski. His handwriting was like the way he moved—no flourishes, but graceful in its economy. I watched you for a few moments before leaving, debating whether to wake you up. But in the end I decided to let you sleep, because you are simply lovely and while sleeping you are only more so. Also I was in no great hurry to start a conversation about why I cannot see you again, or call you. Why anything more than this amazing night between us would be an impossibility. I arranged a late checkout, and breakfast will be arriving around ten. I hope you can stay to enjoy it.
Thank you.
Harry
That had to be one of the most lovely kiss-off letters she’d ever seen. Really quite masterful.
Her stomach full of a weird kind of regret and morning-after melancholy, she made a quick call down to the front desk to cancel the breakfast. She would shower at home; the #7 train to Sunnyside would remove some of Harry’s fairy-tale dust that still lingered on her skin.
She dressed, and after a moment of painful consideration, folded the note and tucked it into her purse.
The door clicked shut behind her and she checked her phone as she walked down the hallway toward the elevators. Luckily, she still had some juice left.
A text Lindsey had sent last night bloomed on her screen.
So? Did you make Ken Doll happy?
I gave it my best shot, she texted back hours after Lindsey’s original note.
Atta girl, came the response fairly quickly. She imagined Lindsey in bed with her phone.
How was the rest of
the night?
Gary asked some questions about you and Ken Doll. I threw him off the scent.
For some strange reason, that made her feel almost weepy. Talking to Harry last night about his sister when it had been years since she’d talked to her own. Years. She talked to her brother more often because he was pushy that way, but that she was closer to Lindsey, whom she’d known for only two months, than to her sisters, well, it hurt on this weird morning when she felt all raw and turned inside out.
Thanks, Linds.
The elevator doors opened and she turned left out of them, tucking her phone back into her bag, which was why she didn’t see the men’s bathroom door open and Gary come stepping out.
“Ryan?” His familiar voice made her stop in her tracks, her stomach slipping down into her boots.
“Gary.” He really was a nice guy and if the bar were unaffiliated, what had happened between her and Harry probably wouldn’t even get her hand slapped. But The Cobalt Hotel was a part of a conglomerate and there were rules about this stuff.
“What are you doing here this morning?” he asked, pretending to be casual, clearly trying to give her a chance to lie.
There was no point in pretending. That wasn’t quite her style.
She smiled and shrugged. “What do you think?”
“Christ, Ryan,” he said, stepping alongside of her and pulling her into motion, down the stairs toward the bar. “Couldn’t you have taken him to your place? Why the hell did you have to stay here?”
“Because I’m a sucker for the free shampoo in the rooms.” She had swiped it. She might be too proud for a free breakfast, but she wasn’t too proud for travel-size luxury toiletries.
He paused in front of The Cobalt Bar’s locked doors.
“Do you even know who he is?” Gary asked.
“You’re not my father, Gary.”
“No. I’m not asking do you know his name and sexual history. I’m asking do you know who he is?”
“He’s … someone?” She’d known that, of course. The gravitas. The way other people in the bar watched him from the corner of their eyes. She just chose to ignore it.
“Oh, Christ, doesn’t anyone read the newspaper anymore? I thought you were smarter than the rest of the idiots who work here. He’s Har—”
Some remnant of self-preservation made her hold up her hand. “Don’t tell me. Don’t. It’s over. It won’t happen again.”
“But you did it here. And now you told me about it.” He lifted his hands as if to show her how they were tied. Poor Gary. Stupid Ryan. “I have to fire you.”
“Don’t bother, Gary,” she said. “I quit.”
She patted his shoulder, because he was better than most, and headed out into the full summer reality of July in New York City. It was hot and close, though the smell of the garbage hadn’t taken over yet.
The sun had heft to it and it fell over her bare shoulders like a lover’s arm.
Instead of heading toward the subway, she turned east toward Central Park. A hike in heels that pinched her toes, but such was life.
In Ryan’s reality, everything had a price. No pleasure came without its sorrow. No joy without its despair. And perhaps losing her job on top of the vague despondence she felt over the letter in her bag was overkill, but karma was a bitch, and sometimes she took more than her due.
Still, she thought, dodging a couple holding hands on their way to work, the fact that she’d gladly pay the cost for another night with Harry might indicate she wasn’t quite done paying.
Chapter 4
Wednesday, August 7
Harrison Montgomery’s hands couldn’t stop shaking.
In his tumbler of water the ice cubes bounced against the crystal.
It wasn’t the fault of the jet engines, or transatlantic turbulence. The ride, as ever, in the Montgomery family jet was smooth as silk.
The shaking was from him. From inside him. From his muscles. His brain. The damaged edges of his exhausted heart.
It’s done. It’s over. She is safe and we’re taking her home.
That mantra had no effect on the shaking. He put down the glass and balled his hands into fists, hoping that might help. Exhaustion made him nauseous, but every time he slipped into a doze, all he saw was his sister, beaten and bloody, filthy and unconscious, and his eyes popped open, his heartbeat pounding in his throat.
Ashley had been kidnapped by Somali pirates.
The thought—even though he’d been living with it for the last three weeks—was still surreal.
Who gets kidnapped by pirates?
The statistics of that particular question got skewed by the fact that Ashley had spent the last year as an aid worker in Kenya and a friend had convinced her to take a vacation to the Seychelles. They’d rented a boat for a day and the pirates had picked them up.
In the last three weeks he’d negotiated her release, gathered the ransom, and found Brody Baxter, a former bodyguard for the Montgomery family, who was the man who actually went into the tiny desert village that had been armed to the teeth to get Ashley. They then spent twenty-four excruciating hours in a Nairobi hospital making sure she was okay to fly, that there weren’t internal injuries or brain trauma.
Thank God there weren’t.
He’d scheduled a more thorough exam to be done by their family doctor once they got back to New York City and called ahead to their grandmother’s building, letting them know Ashley would be arriving and that she didn’t have any keys. Or ID. Or clothes.
In front of him was all the paperwork that would allow her to enter the country without a passport with as little hassle as possible.
Luckily, being a Montgomery had a few perks, and he could count on some political friends on that score.
He’d done all of this—negotiating, ransoming, traveling, waiting—without the press finding out. Which was a miracle, really, considering he was a Montgomery and the press, as a rule, cared about what he and his family were doing.
He’d also done it without major international incident or a SEAL team.
Or sleep, really.
All while running for the United States House of Representatives.
And now, for some reason, with Ashley finally safe and sleeping in the back of the plane, he found himself unable to use his hands. The pen he’d picked up to finish the paperwork shook right out of his fingers.
“It’s the adrenaline,” Brody Baxter said from the seat across the aisle. His eyes were closed and his head shimmied against the headrest with every small bounce and shift of the plane.
“What is?”
Harrison yanked further at his tie, trying to get some air.
Brody opened one dark eye. “You are jumpier than the Somali boys we got her from, and they were pretty damn jumpy.”
Harrison stared down at the same passport paperwork he’d been looking at for the last twenty-four hours and the words blurred.
Tears stung hard behind his eyes and he had to gasp to catch his breath.
“She’s safe, man,” Brody said. “You did it.”
Until the day he died, he would not forget his first glimpse of her in Brody’s arms as he ran down the tarmac toward the ambulance. Unconscious, bloody, her dress in tatters, her hair a wild mess, filthy.
I’m too late, he’d thought, putting a hand against the ambulance so he wouldn’t fall to his knees as nurses and paramedics swarmed Brody and Ashley. If I’d worked faster, done more, she wouldn’t have been hurt. Those men wouldn’t have kicked her. Beaten her.
“Harrison.” Brody’s hard voice worked on some instinctual level and he brought his head around to stare at the man. “You did it. You did it just right.”
“It was you, actually,” he said, his voice catching on emotion and exhaustion.
Brody had always been an impossibly cagey guy, and the years since he’d started working for the family only made him more so. His dark eyes both lauded him and damned him, which Harrison guessed was fair considering their history. The
Montgomerys had not been kind to Brody Baxter.
“What you did,” Brody said. “There aren’t ten guys in the world who could have done that as well. She’s safe, because of you. I was just the muscle.”
He thought of the days in New York, talking to senators and lobbyists. Retired generals. The assistant to the President’s chief of staff. Had all of that been time wasted?
Trying to get all of that done on his own, holed up in a hotel room, avoiding press and family. Had that been a mistake?
They heard Ashley in the back, stirring. She’d been in and out of sleep, disoriented and confused, and Harrison didn’t want her to wake up alone and scared. He began to shift to his feet, but his arms would not help him. His knees were jelly.
“I got it, man,” Brody said, clapping his large hand on Harrison’s shoulder. “Try to get some rest.”
Harrison sagged back into his seat and let the big man go sit beside his sister. Briefly, he wondered if this was going to be a problem. Ashley had, at one time, caused quite a scene over Brody.
But Harrison found he did not have the energy to be worried. He couldn’t even follow the thought to any conclusion.
He propped his elbows up on the small foldaway table and scrubbed his hands through his hair and down over his face. When was the last time he showered? Changed his clothes? Slept?
The answer to the last question came in a vision of a tattoo, a woman wrapped in seaweed and vines being pulled underwater, her blond hair a cloud around her composed, nearly blissful face.
Ryan.
Perhaps it was his general defenselessness, or exhaustion, but the thought of Ryan Kaminski slipped into his skull like an assassin.
He couldn’t count that night as a mistake. It was the first time in his life a woman had slept with him without knowing his family. Without one eye on his connections and his money.
Ryan had picked him, for him. And not at his best. At the very lowest point in his life, she’d held out a hand.
What kind of person did that?
What kind of person found such weakness and confusion interesting? And not just a little … What had happened in that room destroyed him. It wasn’t just the incredible sex, but the honesty. The honesty had been addictive and erotic and rare. So rare he hadn’t realized what a kingdom of lies and half-truths he ruled, until meeting her.
Indecent Proposal (Boys of Bishop) Page 4
