by Angel Payne
Yeah.
Only all the shit like that.
Because I’d mentally run the scenario of that little reveal, too. Not such a pretty picture. Telling Margaux Asher that you dreamed of playing house with her…the carnage from there wasn’t tough to envision. Expecting different was stupidity. The woman had been raised by the love child of Alexis Carrington and Betty Draper, turning the concepts of home, family, and traditions into a joke, if not a horror show, for her. Earlier, when I’d forced myself to make nicey-nice with Andrea and assure her I’d really be returning to the office Monday, I’d wondered what Colin Montgomery got out of his marriage to the woman. For all I could see, the man was nothing more than her purse holder and her drink fetcher. Maybe their roles got reversed when they were behind closed doors…
Wasn’t going there for all the sand in the Sahara.
Talk about an instant yank back to reality—though Margaux’s glower spoke enough about my tardiness to the party, and the “sulk” she clearly thought I was indulging.
Ohhh princess, if you only knew what was really going on.
But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
My silence had put a few pounds on the elephant—and that was just fine by me. Maybe it was time to haul his ass out of here, salvaging whatever relationship she and I could have now.
I had hope, a lot of it. We’d started with less than this in the beginning. We could be good friends, I believed it—once I got my shit together and controlled my rampaging dick.
But tonight wasn’t the time to start. She was right. I’d stayed away too long. And she looked so damn good. Smelled so perfect and sweet. Even glared at me with such perfect fire. If we kept talking…I’d nuke the elephant. My truth would be out. And our relationship would be toast.
Ice Road Truckers was the way better choice.
How the hell I’d muttered that aloud, I had no idea. But I sure as hell had.
“Ice road what?” Margaux charged. “Pearson, are you even here right now?”
Cloud, meet your silver lining. She made my next move damn easy. All I had to do was mutter something sounding stranger than that, then shove on out of here and call her tomorrow, blaming my bullshit on a bad shrimp reaction or something equally lame. My ticket out of the party was also my way to push the restart button on things with her. So simple, it was beautiful—
And went unused.
Because I was an idiot.
An idiot who was nuts about her. Especially now, folding her arms as she shot one foot out from under that dress, seductress gone to sassy, pissy, and hurt—ensuring my senses were blasted equally by arousal and guilt.
The former told me to really get the fuck out of here now. But the latter tied me to her, unwilling to let things be like this, even for one night. It forced me forward to once more flatten the space between us to nothing, one hand snaring her waist, the other slipping up to her neck. Her little gasp was surely just an involuntary burst of surprise, but it was so goddamn sexy, I pretended it was more—at least for one moment.
One moment that made the world go away.
One moment where everything was just me…and her…and the way we’d been in front of the lions at the zoo.
I tightened my fingers along her scalp. Tugged her head back, as if preparing to inspect her. Let our breaths tangle, our heartbeats blend…our lusts crash.
It’s not too late to cash in the carnality card, man. To drag her off to one of Kil and Claire’s twelve bedrooms, bend her over the bed, and show her exactly what kind of damage she wreaks on your cock. Make her bite the bedspread so everyone won’t hear her scream as you stroke her to a climax
then another,
and another,
before you detonate deep inside her—
And shattered the remaining foundations of our friendship.
“Okay…you are here.” It stumbled out of her on another one of those raspy little breaths—which might as well have been a caress that covered everything south of my waist. Fuck, princess. Please stop doing that…
Please don’t ever stop doing that…
After juicing the fortitude from every muscle in my body, I answered, “Not…for much longer.”
Her face darkened. “So…you are going back?”
The longing to kiss away the stress from her lips…Excruciating received a world of new meaning. “Just to my place in town,” I said, instead.
Her shadows remained. Even deepened a little. “Now?”
I teeter-tottered my head a little. “As they say, ma’am, my job here is done.” I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t rise to that one. I wouldn’t have, either. “You know how this shit goes, blondie. It just gets messy and drunk from here. Pretty soon, people will be making out in the bushes, skinny-dipping in the pool…”
“I like choice A or B.”
Damn, damn, damn. “I’m going to go.”
Dear God, I needed to go.
Her shadows gave way to full darkness. With her lips slanted tight, she jerked free from my hold. “Fine. Then go.”
I stepped back, too. Probably the hardest step I’d taken since my first. Mom had kept the video of that moment, so I knew. “I’ll call you tomorrow. Maybe we can grab some coffee.”
She swished one hand, fingers down, in a motion that could’ve been yeah, yeah, whatever or get lost, I don’t care. I couldn’t risk sticking around to try an interpretation. Margaux had already enlisted her other to grab a full glass of champagne off a passing waiter’s tray, polishing it off while waving at me.
As I turned and started toward the house, she’d already downed another.
I glanced back, just once, to catch the gleam of the party lights on the third glass she tipped up—which might as well have been jammed down my throat then shattered there.
Changing the subject again in your own unique way, eh, Margaux?
The assessment didn’t smooth over the shards still tearing my gut. Leaving her here like this, determined to become the new “it” girl for Cristal, felt wrong on thousands of levels. But would staying help? The footing on our “reunion” tonight…shit. It was a round of fucking Frogger. Take one step, breathe in relief, pray like hell not to get slammed while deliberating the next move…
If I stayed, the carnage would only get worse.
I grimaced while crossing the polished Italian marble of Claire’s palatial foyer. If she kept up the pace on the Cris, Margaux was going to wake up in the morning feeling like she’d swan dived off the third floor landing onto this slab. What the hell? Slamming down the bubbles, or even the shit without bubbles, wasn’t like her. Sometimes we’d hung out for hours after work, and I’d rarely seen her go for anything other than water after her second round. But in the last five minutes, she’d killed off three whole glasses of champagne.
Holy fuck, I hoped she hadn’t driven herself to this thing.
My first step out the front door brought a reassuring answer to that.
Her on-call 750i was parked near the front of the luxury car traffic jam in the expansive driveway. Her regular driver, Andre, was leaning against the hood while chatting with another driver. When he noticed me, the big man grinned and waved.
“Mr. Michael Pearson,” the man said in his musical Jamaican. The guy pulled me in for a shoulder bump that felt like colliding with a bank vault. Andre was at least three inches taller than me, with a chest like the bow of a cruise ship and a laugh like an island Santa Claus. “It has been much too long, my friend.”
I smiled. “Yeah, Andre. It has.”
“I understand you have been,”—his mouth pursed as if holding in a laugh—“an apple-plucking, non-showering hermit’ as of late?”
I obliged with a chuckle, all the better to hide the new—and strange—torque to my senses. Andre had all but recorded Margaux’s words and played them back for me, but why the hell had the woman even cared to issue them?
Had my absence really made her heart “grow fonder”, too?
Had that been the
reason for all her bite and snide tonight? And the Daisy Buchanan leaps at the champagne trays after our scuffle? Or…whatever the hell that was.
And in the end, did any of it change anything?
“Apple season doesn’t start for another three months,” I answered Andre, “so technically, there was nothing to pick. And I can attest that showering occurred…hmmm, at least once a week.”
The driver flashed a huge white grin as he chortled. “And it shows.” He poked the trio of baby red roses in my lapel. “My my, Michael Pearson. You clean up well.”
“Pssshh. You’ve seen me in suits plenty of times, man.”
“Not before Miss Margaux has…rearranged them.”
“Errr, right.”
He laughed once more, the sound reverberating even deeper through that cavernous chest. There wasn’t much choice but to endure it. He was right. Andre usually only saw me after Margaux and I had gotten in a solid kiss or three—or four, or five—meaning I probably looked like a mugging victim by the time he rolled up, always ready to take over with a protectiveness toward Margaux that I appreciated.
Right now, the man canted his head toward me with a subtle glint in his eyes. “Will you be joining Miss Margaux for the trip back to her building?”
Awkward kick at the gravel. “No, Andre. I don’t think so. I’m leaving now but she’ll be staying a little while longer.” I cocked my own head to the side, staring back at Claire’s huge house, wishing I could x-ray vision my sights through the damn walls of the place. “She’s…really enjoying the reception.”
“Oh.” Its framework, from front to back, was silence.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “Oh. So take good care of her, you got it?”
“Most certainly, Michael P—”
“Take good care of who?”
I pivoted though didn’t know why. Maybe it was to check if Chad took the knowing snark of his tone seriously enough to pop on the Red Reddington hat along with it. Answer on that was a no, which meant I could skip straight to the trash talk with him. Fine by me.
“Don’t start, fart hole.”
He flung up both hands. “Not here to start anything.” As he lowered them, his expression was sincere. “Just couldn’t help noticing that you and Princess-zilla didn’t seem to be row-row-rowing so gently.”
I attempted half a smile. “Flattered you care, honey. And here I thought the only thing you cared about was getting up Kim Xu’s oh-so-tight leather skirt.”
Andre’s eyebrows lifted in something between surprise and approval, though I focused on—make that relished—Chad’s nervous shuffle. “Claire told me Killian had invited her,” he murmured. “But she wasn’t sure she’d make it.” He dipped his head but not quick enough to hide a subtle smirk. “It’s kind of cool that she did.”
I took a long second to process the meaning in his nervous undertone. Lerner was normally horny dwarf, not bashful. The fact that he was playing coy on this could only mean…
“Dog!” I punched his shoulder.
“Arf arf,” he laughed out, though sobered the next second. “But what the hell…with Margaux and you?”
I glanced to Andre. He grunted and jabbed out his huge jaw, his way of saying goodbye while ensuring he’d remember my request, too. After thanking him with a firm nod, I headed off with Chad toward the garage where we’d first parked this afternoon.
“There’s no…‘Margaux and me’, man. Not going to happen.”
Chad stopped so hard, he sprayed my feet with gravel. “So the nuclear bomb of lust I saw you two concocting on the dance floor was…what?”
“All there,” I replied. “And all real. Which is why it has to stay right where it started.”
“Because…she’s hiding massive warts I can’t see?”
“In that dress?”
“I wasn’t going to go there, but—”
“Good,” I snarled. “Don’t go there.”
“All right, then you’re hiding something. A little woodland fairy back up on the mountain, yeah?”
My turn for the gravel spurt. “Why the hell does everyone think I have someone waiting back on the mountain?”
He frowned like I’d asked why zombies liked brains. “Why the hell else would you stay away for six months?”
Cue the winning question of the night. First Margaux, now Chad…and they were the ones who’d voiced it. Thinking back on my exchanges with Andrea and Colin, even Killian and Claire, I realized I’d interpreted those exchanges all wrong. What I’d taken as weirdness from Andrea and Colin, then nervousness from Kil and Claire, wasn’t that at all. They’d all been curious…perhaps even waiting for me to pop “new mountain girl” out from the shadows for an intro.
Fuck.
If only everything had been that easy.
“I’m going to go now,” I finally muttered.
“Seriously?” Chad fired it even as I swung my fob to pop the Denali’s doors and lights. “But Claire—”
“Is so into Kil right now, she’s forgotten the earth has an axis. But pass along another smile for me, and make plans for a meet-up when the two of them get back from the honeymoon.”
Chad started nodding but stopped himself, peering hard back over to me. “You need to go grab a beer or something?”
I forced a smile. Sometimes the asshat picked the strangest times to go bromance on me. “Thanks man, but I’m solid.”
And the earth was flat. And unicorns really farted rainbows.
And Chad wasn’t relenting. “Come on. I’ll drive. This fucking hamlet has to have at least one dive bar. It’s time for you to get trashed and spew a lot of shit you won’t remember.”
“No, it’s not.” I clapped his shoulder, hoping my appreciation for the effort showed. “Besides…Margaux’s checking the boxes on that one for both of us.”
As I finished the assertion, pain stabbed my forehead. Well, there was confirmation of my decision—as if I needed it. Fuck, even speaking the woman’s name was becoming a shitty lesson in self-torture.
And now it was time to stop. To put down the whip and cilice, regroup my damn head, and figure out how to successfully reset the timer with her.
In short, how to get through an hour in the same room with her—without entertaining a thousand thoughts of kissing her. Feeling her. Flattening her to the wall, wrapping her legs around my back, and burying myself inside her…
Dammit.
Was it even possible?
I didn’t have an answer to that yet.
If it wasn’t, then Plan B was my only option.
I’d have to declare Margaux Asher completely off-limits…forever.
*
Driving into the city yesterday, I’d gotten a weird hair up my ass and stopped at the grocery, stocking up on essentials for the fridge: beer, cheese sticks, chips, and salsa. Yeah, yeah; I knew the chips didn’t go in the fridge. It beat shuttling them to the pantry, where they’d be doomed to keeping company with three soup cans, four expired Clif Bars, and an alphabetized spice rack that had been used twice. Wasn’t like anyone was going to call me out on the shit—except for my mountain-babe-girlfriend-in-hiding, who, according to the entire world, had been waiting naked in my bed all day.
I grunted at the thought while popping my second beer and shucking my pants. I had time before the ice road truckers resumed their adventures. The extended commercial break between the episodes, wedging fast food ads between pitches for motor oil and chili, gave me time to consider putting something on in their place.
“Pssshh.”
I picked up the pants with a toe and dunked them into the dry cleaners bag on top of my shirt, which I’d stripped off the second I walked in the door. I took two steps toward the dresser to retrieve a pair of sweats but ditched the idea, slinking back to the couch in my skivs. The pretend mountain babe liked me better that way.
Screw the fact that I didn’t. Or that part of me—the part even the beer couldn’t seem to drown—that wouldn’t stop clawing at my psyche like
a starving cat at the back door.
Call her. Tell her you’re sitting here halfway to naked, dreaming about her. Command her to put her champagne down, get into her goddamn town car and get her incredible ass over here, so you both can scratch this shitty itch once and for all. If you’re going to declare the woman off-limits, then give her something to remember you by other than lame texts and that ridiculous fight at the wedding.
I grunted again. Harder. Longer.
Fuck it. I was growling. At myself. In a dark apartment. On a Saturday night. In my goddamn underwear. Surrounded by tortilla chip crumbs.
On the TV, an eighteen-wheeler plummeted through a sheet of jagged ice. I dragged on my beer, scratched my balls, and mumbled, “Just give it up, man. The fight isn’t worth—”
The doorbell interrupted me.
Then the demanding pounding at my door.
Then the doorbell again.
I growled again. Cleared the distance to the door in three furious stomps. Flipped the deadbolt free and locked down my shittiest glower.
“Lerner, you dickwad. No means no, okay? I already told you—”
Jaw full of rug burn. What a crazy new experience.
But not half as crazy as the inferno through my brain—and body—as I processed it sure as hell wasn’t Chad standing there, looking like my fucking fantasies come to life, less than three feet away—in a red dress that took my breath away as much as the first time I’d seen her in it.
“What…the…”
Chapter Nine
Margaux
“Take me to Michael’s.” I heaved myself into the back seat of the 750i and turned the seat warmer on. Yeah, yeah; it was June in California, but fitted satin did shit for keeping a girl warm.
“Ma’am?”
“Ma’am? Since when do you call me fucking ‘ma’am’? I’m not ma’am. I am not my mother, Andre. Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay. So—”
“You know what I am, Andre? I’m sick of champagne, that’s what I am. So please—please, already—just fucking—just drive me to Michael’s. Or not. I can always call a cab and just fire your ass tomorrow when I’m sober.”
“Ma’am—Margaux—I am happy to take you. I simply don’t know which ‘Michael’s’ you are talking about. The club downtown? The wine bar in Del Mar?” He grunted and grimaced. “That scary little pool hall in North Park, the one you insisted on going to with Mr. Pearson that night—”
