by Anne Calhoun
“A friend.”
“A friend whose number you don’t have?”
“Never mind,” Ryan said. “Just . . . forget I said anything.”
“Is this a work friend? Someone with a connection to MacCarren?”
“No. She’s just a friend.”
Logan pulled out his phone. “Name?”
“Simone Demarchelier. She owns Irresistible.”
Logan cut him a glance but apparently decided he deserved a reward. “Not one word of this to anyone until the DA breaks the story,” Logan said as he made the call. “Not even a confession to a priest. We’ve come too far and worked too hard to jeopardize this now.”
He rattled off digits Ryan keyed into his phone. “Understood.”
He never felt more alone in his life than he did at that moment. The satisfaction of bringing down a long-running Ponzi scheme didn’t make up for the fact that in twenty-four hours he would be a notorious pariah. Whistleblowers might get the cover of financial magazines like Fortune or Money, but the reality of this walk was that no one could walk it with him.
He wanted Simone. He had no right to ask her to be with him through this, but that didn’t change the fact that he wanted her. She was the only thing that was good and true in his life right now. He had no valid reason to demand her presence, knew better than to tell her what was going on, but that didn’t change the fact that he wanted her with him.
***
Simone set her glass of white wine on the coffee table and tucked herself into the end of her sofa with a sigh. It had been an extremely busy Saturday, the showroom packed with people driven by the curiosity and perhaps even notoriety that Irresistible was gaining. She knew what this would do for her business; even the salacious gossip going around social media would help, in a sick way. But the price was high enough to make her regret it: whatever relationship she might have with Ryan was no longer possible.
If only she knew who he really was, what the last few weeks had meant.
She was going to set that aside and read while she used heated mitts to soothe her aching hand. Even inside her apartment with the windows closed and the air conditioner running, she could feel the damp, humid, ominous promise of the impending storm. The weather forecast called for heavy rain and thunderstorms, but so far only dark clouds hung above the rooftops. It was the perfect kind of night to stay home, read a good book, and decompress.
Her phone chirped with a call from an unrecognized number. She ignored it until it rang again immediately. She looked more closely at the screen. The call was from a 212 area code. Ignoring it, she set her phone down and picked up her electronic reader, but when the phone rang a third time from the same phone number, she picked it up again, her thumb on the button to power it down. But she hesitated, then answered. “Hello?”
“It’s Ryan.”
As if she didn’t recognize his voice. “How did you get this number? This is my mobile number, not my business number.”
“Connections in all the wrong places. I need you to come out to the Hamptons.”
Her jaw dropped. “What? No! I’m not driving out to the Hamptons in this weather, in weekend rush-hour traffic! For one thing, I don’t have a car—”
“Take a cab to the helipad at the South Street Seaport. I’ve chartered a helicopter for you. It’s under your name.”
Her jaw dropped again. “I can’t afford that.”
“I can.”
“Ryan, this is insane.” She shoved open the window without the AC unit in it and looked to the west. Still brooding, ominous, impossible. Like Ryan. “Have you looked at the sky?”
“Simone. Please. I’m begging you. Please.”
He meant it. The quiver in his voice, the hoarse tone, told her that. He was actually begging. Until now, Ryan commanded. Now he was begging.
“Fine. But never again. Do you hear me? Never again do you call me, or cross my doorstep. Lose this number. This is it, Ryan.”
Silence hummed in her ear. Then, “Bring an overnight bag. You’ll just barely beat the storm, so the chopper won’t be able to get you back to the city.”
She disconnected and went to throw her sewing kit, a change of clothes, and toiletries in her Louis Vuitton weekend bag. If she was going to cater to a rich man’s needs, she might as well play the part.
She was in the cab and heading south toward the tip of Manhattan before she realized she hadn’t asked him why he wanted her there.
Chapter Eight
The helicopter was, indeed, waiting for her, the pilot’s smile forced and his eyes strained behind his aviator shades. He offered to take her bag; she was barely buckled into the backseat before the skids left the cement. They gained speed and distance quickly, the rotors chopping and heaving through the air; the ride smoothed out only slightly as they cleared the storm’s leading edge. When they landed, another man in mirrored shades and a black suit drove her from the landing pad to a house on the beach. Tall grass bent to the east under the oncoming storm’s power. Simone claimed her bag from the trunk and climbed the stairs to the front door.
Lily hauled open the door, dressed in a Pucci sheath, her heels dangling from her fingers. Her hair was tousled, sexy, as if Ryan had just had his hands in it, or she’d spent an hour styling it to look like Ryan had just had his hands in it. Shock, then disbelief, then a righteous anger flooded her face. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
The first fat raindrops splatted against the weathered deck. “May I come in?” Simone asked.
Lily ignored her, instead leaning around the door to shout at the driver. “Don’t leave!”
“Ma’am?” he called back, confused.
“I need a ride!” she yelled, stepping into first one heel, then the second.
“Where?”
“Anywhere!” She looked at Simone again. “Anywhere you aren’t. You want him that badly? You can have him. I’m not taking someone’s leftovers.”
“It’s not like that,” Simone said through her teeth, gripping what was left of her temper. “He called to ask if I’d adjust something for you. You’re ready to go out for the evening. I’ll—”
She stopped. Ryan hadn’t asked her to adjust anything. He’d asked her to come to him.
Lily hooted. “Adjust something? You’re fucking stupid if you think that’s why he called. I’m not the woman in his life right now. You are. I heard the whispers, but now I know. Go out with Ryan Hamilton, sure, but get fucked in Irresistible lingerie, because that’s what gets him off. He’s not fucking any of us. He’s fucking you, and don’t think I won’t tell everyone how you came out here when he snapped his fingers.”
The storm surged under Simone’s skin, white-hot and powerful enough to drive her forward a step. Her hair seemed to crackle on her head, and fury coursed through her veins, tightening muscles, driving her to the brink. She could see Ryan standing at the end of the hallway that seemed to lead straight into the storm. He had a glass with amber liquid in it, no ice, and he leaned against the wall, dressed in a suit she recognized with a single glance as Martin Greenfield. The shirt would be custom-made as well, as were the shoes. He was wearing the wolf’s clothes, and they looked utterly wrong on him.
“Arrêtez! C’est assez!” she snapped. “Enough,” she repeated, forcing herself back into English. “Have you forgotten who I am? Who my brother is? My father? How easily I can destroy you? You lie. If I hear one rumor to that effect, even a whisper of a hint of gossip, I will ensure you don’t walk through the doors of any showroom in the world.”
Her words were barely audible under the rumbling thunder, the pitch and crash of the wind, the rain pattering more heavily on the water, the deck, the windows. Lily leaned forward to hear Simone, but whether she heard her or simply understood the threat on her face, the response was the same. She spun on her heel, shoved past Ryan, and disappeared up the stairs.
Ryan stared at her. She stared at him, her stomach surging, her pulse pounding at her temples and in her throat. Lightning cracked, splitting the sky over the ocean, visible in the massive wall of windows at the back of the house. Lily tumbled down the stairs in a clatter of heels and a whirl of knees and elbows and hair, an overnight bag the twin of Simone’s bumping against her legs. Without a word she shoved past Simone and climbed into the waiting SUV, leaving Simone alone with Ryan.
Simone stepped into the house. The wind caught the door, or that was her excuse, because it slammed hard enough to rattle the framed pictures of seashells lining the hallway to the main room. She dropped the bag, stalked up to Ryan, and shoved him as hard as she could, hard enough to rock him back a step. He held on to the whiskey, though.
Until she shoved him again, putting her weight into it. Glass shattered on the slate at her feet, and the scent of good whiskey and wrath filled her nostrils. She reached for him, not aware of what she intended to do, just knowing that wringing his neck was entirely possible.
Ryan gripped her wrists, gave her a little shake. “Stop this.”
She jerked free and went for him again, and this time she got one hand fisted in the collar of his shirt and the other in the too-loose fabric at his side. In the functioning part of her brain she registered his ribs under his skin, not padded with a healthy layer of fat or even a gym-toned muscle. She could move him only because he was skin and bone.
Then she kissed him. She bore him back against the wall and kissed him hard, kept him there with the weight of her body and her fury that was never really anger but something else, darker, deeper, even more primitive. Lust. Blood bloomed in her mouth from the impact of lips and teeth, and it tasted so good. She wanted to lick it from her mouth and his, and snarl.
For a split second he remained frozen, his hands tense in the air beside her shoulders, as if he wouldn’t let himself touch her, not even with sex and violence in the air, not even with their bodies plastered together from shoulders to calves. Then Simone parted her lips and licked the seam of his mouth, deft, fleeting, taunting. His hands slid into her hair to curve around her skull and hold her while he opened his mouth and hooked one ankle around her calf to pull her close.
Oh, he’d been holding back on her. All the carefully phrased descriptions, the dialogue, the way he set the scene, were all modest, clumsily described. His mouth was deft, seductive, opening under hers, his tongue licking inside, then retreating, drawing her deeper and deeper into him. This was lust, fueled by chemistry and deceit and anger, hot enough to burn each other to ash.
She braced her forearms against his chest and pushed free, nearly tripping over his leg. No choreography here, just stumbling, clumsy desire, honest at last. At the very last, because she was getting what he’d taunted her with all summer, and then they were over.
He reached for her, his mouth forming words that disappeared into the red veiling her vision, the thunder obscuring her hearing. She stepped back into his body, put her hands on his hips, and pushed. He slid down the wall, dragging her with him until she landed on her knees, straddling his hips. Liquid saturated her jeans at her knees as she cupped the too-stark line of his jaw, obscured with blond-brown stubble, and kissed him, all the passion and intensity and desire going off like a bomb, white hot, intense, violent. The lack of finesse fueled her until she wanted to lay waste to him with kisses as flagrant and devastating as his lies. She pulled back, licked his lower lip, then his upper, felt his hands clench in her hair, holding but not pulling. She tossed her head from side to side to feel the sting in her scalp.
“Jesus,” he whispered.
She wrenched the front of his shirt and dragged her fist down, destroying hours of a tailor’s work as she went. Buttons pinged against the floor, the wall, the table to their left. When she reached his trousers she turned her wrist and cupped his erection. It pulsed against her palm, heft and heat through fine wool, and when she massaged, he lifted into her hand and groaned. But when she lifted her hands to smooth the ruined shirt fronts to the side, he gripped her wrists. “No.”
“Yes,” she said, searching his gaze. “Yes, Ryan. Here. Now.”
“If we do this now, you’ll hate me.” His eyes gleamed dark with a desperation and loss and an anguish she could hardly comprehend. It would take nothing to leave him in the same state as his shirt. “You’ll really hate me. Right now you just think I’m an asshole.”
“Right now there’s no other option,” she said, her voice rough with a desperation that matched the honest pain in his eyes. “You called me. You asked me to come to you.”
He drew in a ragged, chest-deep breath, but his gaze never left hers. “You weren’t supposed to happen this summer.”
“But I did happen.”
Thunder crashed over the house, rattled the windows, followed almost immediately by a lightning strike that lit up the room. The hair on Simone’s arms stood on end, crackling from electric charge, although whether from the near-miss or Ryan’s erection pressed against her, she didn’t know. The room went dark again, and rain lashed the windows like whip strikes.
“It’s time, Ryan.”
He buried his face in her throat, fisted his hands in her hair. “Jesus,” he said. She could barely hear him over the rain and thunder. “Jesus. I just need you here. I need you.”
She purposefully forced the tension from her body, then wrapped her arms around his head, cradling it against her shoulder, murmuring nonsense words, soothing him, her words a layer of chiffon over the dense dark velvet of lust. “Come upstairs with me,” she said.
The floor was strewn with the shards from his glass of whiskey. She looked down at her knees but her jeans were intact, just soaked with alcohol. She stepped clear of the spatter pattern, took his hand, and led him up the stairs. The first white, six-paneled door she opened had a rumpled king-size bed in it, and Ryan’s beach clothes tossed over a denim-covered wingback by the windows. Lily’s perfume lingered in the air.
Ryan reached past her and closed the door, then turned across the hall and opened the next one. The bed was neatly made in pristine white eyelet cotton, the air somehow tinged with disuse. Perfect. She led Ryan in and closed the door. When she relaxed her grip on his hand, he stopped beside the bed and looked down at her. Without a word she slid her palms up his chest and over his shoulders, easing his jacket down and off. She folded it neatly and draped it over the arm of the overstuffed chair in front of the window.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“You’re wearing the wrong clothes,” she replied.
Lightning split the sky again, illuminating the stark contrasts in the room, the white bed linens, Ryan’s white shirt, the dark navy of his suit, the mahogany plank flooring. Simone ignored the storm and unfastened the two remaining buttons, then undid his French cuffs, setting the gold links carefully on the nightstand. Then she pulled his ruined shirt from his trousers; that she let drop to the floor. Piece by piece she took off the clothes that were so wrong for him, the trousers and undershirt, socks and custom-tailored shoes that comprised the armor imprisoning the man he was and would be, until he stood before her in only his skin.
Beyond the rain-lashed windows the ocean roiled and seethed, waves crashing against the beach as forcefully as her heart beat in her chest. She pulled her cotton sweater over her head, inelegantly dislodging the elastic holding her hair in a messy knot. Ah, well, she thought. Sex is rarely perfectly choreographed. Her hair tumbled around her face as she pulled up the silk camisole and unfastened her jeans, then pushed them down, leaving her in a midnight blue chemise and panty set, embroidering stylized birds across the body from the hem to the strap. She’d worked on the set all summer, between clients, between Ryan’s visits. Without knowing he would call she’d put it on tonight because it had come to represent everything she longed for him: bold, wild flight for a man trapped in something so
powerful he couldn’t share it.
He reached out with his index finger and followed the birds’ path across her body. “This is what you were making for yourself.”
“While thinking of you,” she replied, and drew him to the bed.
He stretched out on his back, watching with hungry eyes as she straddled him. Her hair curtained their faces as she kissed him. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“I needed you,” he murmured back. “You. Always you.”
He seemed hesitant to touch her, his hands coming to rest at the small of her back, but there was nothing hesitant about his mouth, tantalizing and full of promise, the whiskey on his breath, then on her tongue as she rubbed it against his. She held herself above him until he shifted restlessly and closed his hands on her hips, pulling her down and forward. The silk rubbed between their bodies, hot and smooth, transmitting the feel of skin against skin, his heat into hers, her desire into his. Her nipples peaked as she set a rhythm, rocking down then back up, dragging hot, wet silk against his cock until the fabric caught in her folds and slid against her clit. When she whimpered and shuddered, he tightened his arms around her and ground up.
Her teeth clacked against his, blood blooming in her mouth, but she paid no more attention to the blood than she did the storm raging outside the windows. His hand fisted in her hair as his cock nudged against the silk between her legs. She knew how that felt, smooth on nerve endings quivering for attention. The tug of his cock against the silk deliciously chafed her clit. She bit down on his lower lip and held it while he rutted under her.
“Tell me you have a condom,” she gasped into his ear.
“Wallet,” he said indistinctly through the hair trailing over his face.
She scampered off the end of the bed, yanked his billfold from his inside jacket pocket, and tossed it to him. While he opened the inner pocket and pulled out a single packet, she knee-walked back up his legs, watching as he sheathed himself. His gaze lifted to hers and she held it while she pulled the chemise over her head, then wriggled the panties down and off.
