by Pauline West
Candlemoth A Holy City Romance
Volume 2: Possibly Never
by Pauline West
Candlemoth: A Holy City Romance © 2016 Pauline West Any credits.
Copyright © 2016 by Pauline West
All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America.
Cover Image by Vanessa Mendozzi.
This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a review; please contact author/publisher first at [email protected]. This is a work of fiction: all contents are a product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.
I may have been strong enough to lock Ry out of my apartment, but now I had to keep myself from unlocking the door. It was agony to have his body so near mine and still be unable to touch him.
I moved towards the footsteps I could hear out in the hallway, just wanting to be close.
One last time.
Even if Ry never knew.
But leaning against the door wasn’t enough.
I peeked out- and saw a huge, intimidating looking man stuffed into a suit and a tie.
“I can see your shadow, too, Ms. Inoue.” The stubble on his face was red in the sun. “Open the door.”
I did, just as it occurred to me that Madison might be pressing charges against me for my recent misadventure. But by then he was already talking. “Ms. Inoue, I have compensation for you on behalf of the Calhouns-”
“Compensation?” I said.
I wasn’t scared anymore. I was angry.
“That envelope,” I said, gesturing. “That’s blackmail. You can tell Calhoun he’s a pig. He knows I’ve been in the system. I don’t want his money. The last thing I’d ever do is sabotage-” I was so angry it actually hurt to talk.
Then I realized I didn’t have to talk.
All I had to do was close the door.
“Oh, just fuck off!” I said.
But the man shot out his loafer like a snake’s head, blocking my door.
“I’ve been instructed not to leave until you take this,” he said. Looming forwards just far enough that I could tell he was trying to scare me. Close enough that I could smell another odor beneath the scent of fresh clothes and aftershave. It was metallic, slightly sour.
Sweat.
What kind of guy goes around doing the dirty work for rich men?
I took a bet. “You know, the definition of breaking and entering includes utilizing the least amount of force. Might be tough for you to keep your job if you’ve got a record. What with Calhoun running for office and all. Or maybe… you already have a record? How’d your probation officer like to hear about you adding to it?”
The threat in the man’s eyes crumbled.
He withdrew.
“Yeah, I thought so.” I closed my door and leaned into it, forcing the locks with a satisfying series of clicks.
Pretending a confidence I didn’t feel as Loafers creaked away down the hall. He didn’t go far. When I peeked out again, he was tugging out his phone.
“No. Yes. Yes, sir. I will, sir,” he said. He pocketing the phone, leaning back against the faded wallpaper. Making himself comfortable.
Great. Somehow I didn’t think the cops would be able to do much about a man who was ‘just waiting for his friend’ out in my hallway. There wasn’t anything I could do to get rid of him. And now, if I left, he would follow me.
I wondered what the neighbors thought.
And they’d thought I was such a nice, quiet girl. “You aren’t like most of these other college kids,” old Miss Betsy even said the other day. Miss Betsy who was famous for yelling at people out her window. “Those dirty girls, coming home late without any lipstick on!”
Until recently I would have agreed with her. With all of them. Then I met Ry Calhoun and all my clothes flew off…
It took everything I had to not turn my phone back on. My compulsion for Ry was a racing heartbeat, impossible to ignore.
But I stood there, not calling him.
The day had dissolved into a gauzy twilight, and I thought of Ry out there somewhere with my dad, the two of them maybe still driving around. Talk about awkward silences.
They’d only just started to get along. Then I’d bolted, ruining everything, leaving my foster dad to pick up the pieces.
“I can’t explain this all to you now, but I need you to keep Ry away from my house. I can’t see him again. Ever.”
What could Steve have possibly said to him?
How do you explain crazy?
“Kiddo, Lily’s just… nuts sometimes?”
I couldn’t picture the conversation between them at all. But I knew all too well what Steve would say to me. “Let me shit fire and save you the matches, babydoll. God dog, girl- it ain’t right to jerk a guy around just because you can.”
But for right now I had to let them both think I was crazy. Right now, Ry had to hate me or he wouldn’t stay away, and then all those kids who relied on the Calhoun foundation-
Not to mention Ry’s inheritance.
There was a shudder of pigeons outside, kaleidoscoping the dusk. The sky was dark with rain, and my building’s ancient drain pipes scraped and groaned, their metal cooling as a rainstorm came sidling in.
It was going to be a big one.
Wonderful. I loved being in storms alone. Perfect.
I stood in my kitchen, anxiously twisting the Alex and Ani bracelet Steve gave me just before I moved to Charleston. It was a gift that had turned into a worry stone. By now, I imagined, the silver must have half-sintered into my fears.
Funny because the charm on it was supposed to remind me to trust.
Scrape, scrape, scrape.
I paused in my twisting. That didn’t sound like drain pipes. It sounded like something- like someone- was clawing up the side of my building.
I raced to my window and looked down.
And saw the top of a familiar ash-blonde head.
A certain famously determined college kid was climbing the side of my old apartment building, using the grooves between the crumbling brick to boulder up the sheer surface.
Ry Calhoun, clinging to nothing, scrambling up like a cat.
My heart swelled with love for him even as I was terrified for him. Ry’s chiseled body shone with sweat, his shirt stretching tight as he strained for the next ledge. Hollows beneath under his eyes I’d never noticed before were pulled taut with the strain of the climb.
At any moment if he leaned back too far; if the old masonry crumbled out from his sneaker or fingers, Ry would smash backwards into hanging space.
He’d drop five flights and hit the asphalt.
As my one-time lover pulled himself level with my window, his face gleaming with the effort, the look of longing on his face sucked my breath away. Ry couldn’t stay away from me any more than I could stay away from him. The attraction between us crashed in my ears like the sea.
“I’ll call the police,” I said, faintly.
“I’ll fall,” Ry said. The raft of confederate jasmine floating along the power line behind him shook in the wind, and my bedroom filled with their sweetness.
Ry’s eyes darkened. For a moment he looked as if he might sway backwards.
I almost leapt through the glass to grab him. Then I pictured the both of us falling, tangling in air until we met black-
With a cry I surged forward, trying to prise the window up only to realize how short the ledge was. Ry clung there by the pads of his fingers. His sneakers must have been wedged against the brick
wall by determination alone. Jamming the window up to let him inside might be enough to cost Ry his balance, but there was no way he could scramble back down, either.
He knew this.
“Please.” My voice was wet paper. “Please don’t fall.”
“Lily,” Ry said.
It was all he said. Waiting.
Trusting me.
I’d been able to open this window only once. Almost immediately it slammed shut, and I hadn’t bothered trying to prise it ever since. Now the old paint, sticky with the Charleston humidity, had glued together again.
“Hold on,” I said, dashing to the sink for a knife. When I finally snapped the seal free and opened the window with a heart-stopping crack, Ry faltered, just slightly. I rushed halfway out the open window, reaching under his arms to relieve the pressure on his fingers so he could climb inside.
His body was hot to the touch, his shirt rough with damp. I braced my feet against the wall as best I could, supporting his weight long enough for Ry to raise one exhausted hand and then the other.
He flooded in, knocking me back just as the air turned to rain. We tumbled to the floor, and Ry lay over me, refusing to move. “Jesus, Lily…”
He trapped my face in his warm hands, trying to make me look at him. To kiss me. “You can’t shut me out. Not like this. Not after everything. You’re not allowed to disappear on me. We don’t do that to each other.”
“You don’t understand-” I pushed his hands away, trying to shove him off. It was overwhelming to have full body contact, knowing we couldn’t be together. At least not right now.
“We can’t…”
But Ry was so much bigger than me.
Deliciously so.
“I have to have you.” The bite of command in his cultured, raspy voice made me clutch as his powerful shoulders forced mine to the floor. I turned my face to the side, trying to prevent what I knew I couldn’t resist.
Ry ran his mouth hotly over my neck, his breath fluttering over my skin. I thrilled into him helplessly.
We were magnets.
His lips found mine, his arms surging around me tightly.
Kissing him was coming home. Our kiss deepened, turning raw and wild as Ry sucked my tongue, his moan humming through me. I quickened, running my hands over his broad, powerful chest and arms. Wrapping my legs around him, even as the promises I’d made earlier to his family lawyer shivered in my ears.
“My heart goes out to you. It really does. But sometimes, when we love someone… we do the hard thing.”
I pulled back.
“Please. Let me stay.” He kissed my hair, smoothing it. “Just for the night. We don’t have to talk. We don’t have to say a word, if you don’t want.”
“Take a smile with you, kiddo. These things sometimes repair themselves…”
I let go, trying to turn away. Ry looked at me, trying to understand what was wrong, what had changed between us. “Is this about your mom? I know you’re nothing like her. You’ll never be like that, Lily.”
“I don’t think that any addict, once she’s found her poison, can stop herself anymore than someone can stop themselves from... falling in love.”
I let my head fall back, looking up at him softly. “So be honest with yourself. Snow is my mom. I have her genes, Ry. But this doesn’t have anything to do with her.”
Ry smiled, rubbing the back of my neck soothingly.
“What are we talking about?”
“Willpower?” I said, hopefully.
He squeezed me.
“I’m going crazy without you, Lily.” His voice was so low and gravelled I felt it in my blood. “It just ain’t right, now,” he said, trying to be playful, but the intensity on his face gave him away and I caught my breath a little. He smiled, seeing it.
“I need you, too,” I said, in a raw, fadeaway voice I hardly recognized as my own.
He hunted me, drawing me into his kiss again as he stroked my breasts, lightly at first. Then with a rough, insistent hunger that sent desire spiraling all through me.
Lemons and cedar, the scent-knowledge of pounding sex.
I was liquid and fire at once.
We kissed, breaking apart only to pull each other’s shirts free.
Skin to skin.
Soul to soul.
Outside, lightning shattered the dusk, and heavy columns of rain began to fall. A long peal of thunder rattled the floor.
I felt it in my lungs, in my bones, and beneath the roar of the pounding rain and the lightning was the man in the hallway, still banging on my door.
He’d had to have heard everything.
He knew Ry was in here with me. That I was already breaking my promise to the Calhouns.
I paused, asking Ry a question with my eyes that I couldn’t bring myself to say out loud.
Stop.
The word I needed to say, but couldn’t.
God help me, I couldn’t. I unraveled around him. Ry always left me mapless, all my plans brushed to the side like dust.
Now, with a quick, brusquely graceful movement, he scooped me into his arms and carried me into the bathroom, whisking the door closed behind us with one foot. He sat on the edge of the tub, still holding me in his arms, and turned the water on as hot as it would go.
He kissed my forehead, stroking his fingers under my chin. Tilting my face up so that I looked into his eyes. “There’s not many things a hot bath won’t help. And I do want to help, Lily.”
Wrapped tight in his arms, naked except for a pair of silky pajama shorts- I’d never have believed how much I’d come to love this man who’d been a stranger to me days ago.
“But you have to talk to me.”
Fate is a clock. I knew this. Just as I knew Ry and I had been rushing towards one other all our lives. But what if now we were already rushing apart?
What if I was rushing us apart?
“Lily.” He buried his face in my neck, letting his breath out in a rush.
The small, white-tiled room filled with steam, and Ry’s eyes darkened to indigo beneath those wonderfully scruffy eyebrows. I don’t know how to fix this. I knotted my fingers in his silky hair, bringing his face close. If I lose you…
I’ll find you again, I wanted to say. I will always find you again.
“I missed you,” I said.
He fitted me against him. I felt denim swell against silk. Pressing my hand down his front, memorizing the carved swoop of his pectorals, the spike of nipple under my thumb. Scraping the tender pink flesh with the edge of my nail, I watched Ry’s beloved face quicken.
His eyes dark with need.
I continued my slow, taunting strokes. Making him wait, making him squirm, as Ry curled his hands into my hip bones. I twisted and rubbed needfully, forcing myself to unwrap him slowly. Both wanting Ry all at once and wanting this never to end.
“God, I want you in me.”
This.
The roar of the rain outside, our bodies slippery with salt and steam. And the stranger’s furious banging out in the hallway. But that was from someone else’s parallel dream, and nothing to do with us.
The flawless perfection that was my Ryland. He cried out, letting his head fall back against the shower wall, his beautiful, darkly stubbled jaw shining wet.
His abs erotically defined, a hard tight line that led your eyes to the edge of those wash-faded jeans. Jeans so perfectly worn that they cupped his gorgeous, muscled ass to perfection. Ry strolling by was enough to make even Miss Betsy squeal.
I loved his ass. I had an indelible mental image of it reflected above us in his car’s front window. I’d been trying to clock in and then suddenly Ry was there, we were in his car parked out back of Divine Catering. Oak leaves shivering above us while we fucked like rabbits on acid in the passenger seat.
The epic fucking.
(Which got me fired.)
My eyes drifted from Ry’s, remembering it, my mouth crooking into a naughty, private smile.
Those throbs. Slow and de
ep and so hard, in and out relentlessly. Jesus, it felt so good to slip together, to become almost one. One pleasure. The beast with two backs, Shakespeare called it.
“Oh god, you’re terrible. So bad. Where’d you go in that beautiful head?” Ry grabbed my hair, made me look at him. “Look in my eyes.”
“Is it so bad to be bad?” I said, teasingly. Moving away, pretending as if I would jump from his lap. Leave him sprung and all alone to figure it out.
But the beast of want was inseparable.
Ry tugged me back, or I crashed to him again. His hands moved over me, weighing my breasts, grabbing me tightly. He watched his effect on me with every move, devouring my response.
While I allowed myself by fractions to thumb open his jeans until he swelled into my touch, his cock thick and heavy and so demanding. Hot to the touch as baked metal.
My womb hummed with the thought of it, metal, pounding in me, and all my senses bursting into fireworks.
I seared down him, watching Ry’s face as I took his length in my mouth, playing my tongue under that column of heat. Ry’s mouth slackened, his teeth shining as his head fell back, brow crinkling as I tortured his senses.
I loved every part of him. Not just his beauty. The easy command he had. His bizarre sense of humor, which always seemed to come out at the oddest moments- but seriously?- his childhood bed was shaped like a cheeseburger. Most of all I loved the Ry that lived deep within his skin, that was drunk now on the pleasure I could give him.
Love! So much it was painful. I loved him, and maybe this was the last-
Ry grabbed my shoulders and then my hair, stroking it back from my face as he moved his hips, his cock purring in and out, slow as honey, my lips and tongue tracing his seams.
My breasts swung over the cool tiled floor. Steam trickled down my sides like sweat, mazing my nipples.
Water like his touch.
Ry’s bare feet curled with bliss. I felt such a surge of tenderness for every part of him. His feet, his naked heart, his lovely mind. For having had to hurt him and for sheer want of wanting to stay like this forever.
Salt on my tongue, his and mine.
Suddenly Ry lobbed forwards, overtaken by a sea change in mood. He grabbed me, forcing me sideways down from his lap to the floor.
