by Kitty French
He stepped outside, leaving Lizzie happily browsing the new releases. Pulling his phone from inside his jacket, he tapped out the words he hadn’t been able to say.
‘You were amazing today. Dinner tonight?’
She didn’t make him wait. His phone buzzed within a minute.
Around the corner, Genie sagged against the wall with relief.
‘Yes,’ she typed, pressing send.
‘God, yes,’ she whispered, tipping her head back and watching the clouds scuttle across the sky. ‘Yes.’
Chapter Nineteen
Genie climbed out of her cab in front of the same hotel where she’d met Abel way back when. If possible, she was even more nervous this time around than last time. She hadn’t known him then, and she’d had an agenda.
Her only agenda tonight was to speak from her heart and hope that he’d listen.
She was early, mostly because she was running on anxious energy and couldn’t bear to sit around. She’d dressed carefully and then changed twice, settling in the end for a long-sleeved black wrap dress and heels. It had been a close call versus turning up in jeans and tee shirt. She wasn’t interested in dinner or small talk or candles. She just needed to hear his truths, to know whether she needed to try and work out how to live without him.
Would he be in the bar, like last time? Probably not, if Lizzie was with him. She walked across the marble floored reception and put her head inside the bar to check. A second later, the hairs on the back of her neck stood up. He was behind her, his hand on her elbow.
‘Genie,’ he said, and she turned to him, swallowing hard. He was alone.
‘Where’s Lizzie?’
‘Upstairs. She’s in the room next to mine with pizza, movies and a pile of new books. She looked all in, poor kid.’
‘It’s been quite a day for her,’ Genie said. ‘For both of you.’
He looked at her steadily. ‘For all of us.’ His fingers massaged her elbow. ‘I thought we’d eat upstairs. Unless you’d rather…’ he glanced around then stopped speaking when she shook her head.
‘Upstairs,’ she said, quickly. The kind of intensely personal conversation they needed to have wasn’t for crowded restaurants or strangers’ ears.
Abel’s hand lay warm against the base of her spine as he led her to the elevator and stepped inside, leaning his back against the mirrors. Genie stood alongside him, her eyes on the ceiling as they both tried and failed not to remember the last time they’d been here. She could hear his breathing, slightly too fast, and only let her own breath out in a whoosh when the doors opened for them to step outside into the carpeted corridor.
Pausing for a second outside Lizzie’s door, Abel leaned his ear towards it. ‘All quiet,’ he said, and then moved and opened the door to the next room along. Swinging it wide, he stepped aside for her to come inside with him.
‘Are you hungry?’ he said, throwing the key card into the pool of light on the lamp table.
Genie shook her head. ‘Not a bit.’
He pulled a bottle of wine from the mini bar and poured a couple of glasses as she perched on the sofa. Taking a glass from his outstretched fingers as he drew near, she sipped from it gratefully, Abel sitting down beside her, not quite touching, but close.
How could it feel so weird and formal? They’d seen each other at their most exposed, yet they were as awkward as strangers. The air around them was heavy, loaded and tense, as if the whole place might go up if someone lit a match.
‘I lied to you, Genie,’ he said softly, breaking the silence.
She turned to look at him, braced for him to go on, not sure if they were on the verge of goodbye or the verge of forever.
‘In the lift at the hospital, when I told you it was just fucking. I lied.’
Tiny little birds of hope fluttered behind her rib cage. ‘You had your reasons.’ Was she excusing him, or asking a question?
‘Oh, I thought I did,’ he said. ‘I thought I knew you, but I didn’t. I didn’t know you at all. I was so hell bent on separating you from your job in my head that I didn’t let myself see the whole, real, beautiful woman standing right in front of me all along.’
He slid his glass onto the table. ‘I see you now. I see you just as you are.’ Taking her glass from her, he placed it next to his on the table then threaded his fingers through hers. ‘I watched you handle my mother this afternoon, so brave and full of conviction, and I couldn’t believe I’d been such a fool not coming back for you sooner. Every day back home I’ve fought the urge to catch the next plane. Your email… I came because of Lizzie, but I was always coming back for you anyway. I just needed to find a way to climb over my own stupid pride first. ’
Genie stroked his fingers, studying them as he spoke, his words a balm over the lacerations that criss-crossed her heart. ‘It was never you that needed to change, Beauty,’ he said, choked up. ‘It was always me.’
Genie turned to face him, and the expression in his eyes brought tears to hers too.
‘You don’t need to say these things,’ she said, laying her hand against the warmth of his face, tracing over his cheekbone with her thumb. ‘I’ve regretted that night a hundred times over, Abel. I pushed you, and I pushed you, and I had no clue how much I was hurting you. When I think of how you looked just before the ceiling came down…’ she shuddered, hating the memory. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
He turned his lips into her palm and kissed it, resting his forehead against hers with his eyes closed.
‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Don’t say you’re sorry. I don’t want you to be.’ He moved slightly, stroking his hand over her hair. ‘I took what I wanted from you over and over again and then made you feel bad for it. I was just so fucking greedy for you that I couldn’t think straight.’
He kissed her at last, a slow, trembling brush of mouth on mouth, the raw tangle of emotion and relief and lust as powerful as a punch in the solar plexus. Genie melted into him, loving his arms as they moved around her to hold her close, loving his mouth as his tongue slid slowly across hers, loving his strength and his humility and his heart.
‘I should have told you that I loved you in that elevator,’ he went on, lifting his head to look at her. ‘I knew it, but I didn’t say it. I walked away from you, just like she said I would.’
Genie held his face between her hands. ‘Don’t ever say that again,’ she said, urgently. ‘Your mother was trying to make you feel bad to cover up her own shortcomings. I won’t let you take those insults on your shoulders, Abel, you hear me?’
He heard her, and he believed her, because he loved the way she lived her life with clarity and optimism. His defences were on the floor, and his need to hold her was sky high. He didn’t care if he got the showgirl or the backstage sweetheart anymore. He finally understood that they were two halves of the same glorious girl, and he needed her curves and her laughter and her sanity to make sense of his fucked up world.
‘Come to bed with me,’ he said, his voice rough with the need for her to say yes.
Genie took both of his hands in hers and brought his knuckles to her mouth, grazing her lips across them with her eyes closed. Her tears washed between his fingers, and he flexed his hands and held her face up to his.
‘Don’t cry any more, Beauty,’ he said, thumbing away her tears, drawing her onto his lap to lift her into his arms. Any other time she might have protested, ever the independent woman. Not this time. She let him carry her to his bed, and when he laid her down she pulled him down with her.
‘Don’t let me go,’ she breathed, her fingers working the buttons of his shirt free and pushing it away from his body. She was delicate beneath him, glass-like; he knew he could break her all too easily. He’d tried to break her spirit, and he’d nigh on broken her heart, and yet here she was, giving herself to him all over again.
She had the biggest heart of anyone he’d ever met and, crazily, she wanted to give it to him. They’d fucked, and they’d fought, but they’d never made love like thi
s. He’d never made love with anyone like this.
Opening her dress, he lifted her out of it, leaving her lying on his sheets in scant black lace. Knowing that they had all night and that neither of them was playing to win any more stripped away the previous urgency of their sex, exposing the tenderness and yearning that lay beneath.
Unclipping her bra, he swept the lace aside and held both of her hands in one of his own loosely over her head. He’d seen her breasts before. He knew what to expect, so why did he feel as if he were looking at her for the very first time? The lushness of her curves sent the blood rushing to his brain, blotting out every last thought that wasn’t about the girl beneath him.
‘I love the way you look at me,’ she whispered, and he lowered his head to kiss her, taking the warmth of her breath into his mouth as she sighed with pleasure. He slid his hand down the column of her neck as her tongue moved with his, her back curving into a graceful arch when his fingers covered the soft roundness of her breasts.
‘You’re so incredibly lovely, Genie,’ he said, letting his usually guarded thoughts tumble out against her lips. ‘So fucking incredibly lovely.’
He felt her body respond to his words, felt her emotions deepen their kiss into something close to sacred. Her hands slipped from his and went around his shoulders, stroking his back, holding him to her.
‘I want you, Abel,’ she said softly. ‘I’ve ached for you, here.’ She moved his hand over her heart, and then down her body, between her legs. ‘I ache all the time. I think about you, and I want you, and I ache.’
He nodded, kissing her eyes when she closed them. He knew, because he ached too.
‘You don’t need to ache anymore,’ he said gently, kissing the curve of her neck as he moved her underwear down her hips. Genie raised her body to help him and then opened her legs.
‘Tell me what you need,’ he said, resting his hand over the heat of her. ‘This,’ as he moved his fingers between her lips and found her wet for him, and the urge to take the decision from her almost overwhelmed him. ‘Or this…’ Abel flicked his tongue over Genie’s mouth, knowing how goddamn good she’d taste if he slid down between her legs. ‘Or this, Genie?’ he said, and rocked his hips into hers, nestling his cock between her thighs until they both moaned.
There wasn’t really any question to answer.
Genie reached between them and unbuttoned his jeans, and Abel kicked them off and settled back between her thighs, flaring her knee out with his flattened palm.
Stroking her hair from her face, his fingers knotted with hers beside her head on the pillows. Beautiful, beautiful girl. Damp auburn tendrils clung to her flushed cheeks, and the tiniest of breathless, agonised smiles touched her lips.
‘Ready?’ he said, knowing full well that she was from the way her body undulated against his. She nodded, her eyes half closed and her mouth kiss-swollen as he slid his cock slowly against her clitoris, building her higher. He wanted to remember her forever like this, open and wanting him so badly that she trembled beneath him. So deeply, erotically sexy that he couldn’t wait any more. Positioning himself against her, he pushed, sinking all the way inside her body, making her gasp.
Genie tangled herself around him, no spaces, no air, and even if he lived to be a hundred Abel knew he’d never feel such a rush of perfect, intense completeness. For a few seconds it was all he could to hold still and keep breathing.
And then he started to move, a slow, deep grind, loving the way her body held him inside.
‘Look at me,’ he said against her ear, and when he lifted his head, the look in her eyes set him on fire. She was so close to coming, breathless and boneless with it, drenched and hot in his hands and around his cock. He thrust harder for her, and then for himself, because when she hit the top she unexpectedly took his control right along with her own.
Burying his face in her neck, Abel let go, spilling himself inside her as she shook and clung to him, and him to her.
‘It isn’t just fucking,’ he whispered.
What had happened between them in that bed was a long way beyond sex, beyond fucking, beyond making love, even. It was a union of bodies and hearts and lives and love, the kind of big, once in a lifetime love that leaves you with no choice but to surrender to it and be together.
Wrapped around each other later, Genie listened to Abel’s steady heartbeat beneath her ear as he kissed the top of her head.
‘I bought your theatre for you,’ he said, low key.
She pushed herself up on her elbows and stared at him. He smoothed her hair out of her eyes gently, waiting for her to gather herself together and say something.
‘For me?’
‘Yes. For you. Not for a gym. To make it a real theatre again. It’s yours by right.'
‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said after a long, disbelieving pause, blown away. ‘Thank you doesn’t seem enough.’
Abel hadn’t just bought her her home back. He’d given her her life back, if she wanted it, and in doing so he’d said ‘I love you for everything you are,’ which was all she’d ever wanted to hear him say.
‘There’s just one problem,’ he said, twisting strands of her hair around his fingers. ‘I want you to come and live in Australia with me.’
Genie had been so envious of Lizzie when Abel had made her the same offer earlier that day. Knowing that his plans included her too made her feel extraordinary, cherished, truly loved.
‘Or I’ll come here to you,’ he said, uncertain in the face of her wondering silence.
Genie treasured him all the more for making the offer because she knew how much it would cost him to leave his beloved adopted country. She’d spent so long desperately trying to hang onto the theatre and all she thought she held dear. For now, just knowing that her old life was there for her if she wanted it turned out to be enough. Maybe there was more than one way to be happy.
‘I’ve never been to Australia,’ she said, feeling quiet excitement well up inside her. ‘Maybe you could show me.’
He pulled her against him. ‘You’ll love it. I promise you.’
Genie lay in the circle of his arms, tracing patterns on his chest with her fingertips.
‘You kind of blew it with your prospective mother in law this afternoon,’ he said, and she could hear the quiet laughter behind his words. She loved him for his light-heartedness, and even more for the proposal that lay casually hidden in his words.
‘I love you very much,' she said, holding him close in her arms and her heart.
Abel kissed her forehead. 'You too, Beauty. You too.'
Genie listened to his breathing even out as they fell towards sleep, her head full of half formed thoughts about how theirs would be the best kind of family, dictated by choice and love rather than by blood and obligation.
Abel Kingdom. The smallest of smiles touched Genie's lips. If someone had told her a few months ago that he was to be her forever man, she'd have argued herself blind. She'd expected to find very little to like beneath his beautiful, masculine exterior, but she'd never been more wrong.
He was strong, and he was loyal. He was bold, and he was kind. The man was one hundred percent solid gold, and he was one hundred percent hers.
Epilogue ~ Ten years later, Sydney, Australia.
‘London! You’re so lucky, Lizzie,’ Erin said. ‘I’m so coming over to see you while you’re there.’
‘I’m counting on it,’ Lizzie laughed, handing her best friend one of her own secret blend cocktails. ‘Come and help me take these out by the pool?’
Erin tasted the clear red cocktail in the fine-stemmed martini glass and rolled her eyes. ‘I’m going to miss you loads, Liz, but I’ll miss your cocktails more. You have to tell me what’s in this one as a parting gift!’
Lizzie winked. ‘It’s my latest.’ She sipped it and then grinned. ‘It’s bloody good, isn’t it? I call it The Divine Spirit.’
She’d been developing a range of signature cocktails for months and was looking forward
to trying them out on the customers at the Divine Bar in London. Flutters of excitement filled her heart at the thought of her travel plans for the next six months. First stop London for a two month residency as guest bar manager at Theatre Divine, then onward to New York and finally Tokyo before coming home again to Australia in time for Christmas.
Circulating in the opposite direction to Erin with a tray of cocktails, she paused beside Genie and offered her a drink.
‘Wow!’ Genie said, her trademark mile-wide smile brighter than ever. ‘These look stunning. Deanna’s going to have to watch out in London, you’ll have all the customers propping up the bar instead of watching the show!’
‘That’s kind of my plan.’ Lizzie grinned back, her dark ponytail swinging as she moved away to hand out the drinks to the many friends who’d gathered to come and see her off on her big adventure.
Genie watched her walk out into the sunshine, her heart squeezing tight at the idea of Lizzie flying the nest. She was so proud of the confident, beautiful young woman Abel’s sister had blossomed into over the last ten years. Australia really had been the making of her. Genie loved her as a sister, a daughter and a friend, and she was going to miss her enormously.
‘Hey you.’
She closed her eyes and enjoyed the little thrill that always rippled down her spine at the touch of Abel’s warm fingers on the back of her neck. Dropping a kiss onto the shoulder exposed by her wide necked tee shirt, he settled behind her against the kitchen work surface, his hand casually on her waist.
‘Okay?’ he asked, against her hair.
‘Yeah,’ she sighed, looking around the airy, open plan kitchen that led out onto the pool. ‘I know it’s the best thing for Lizzie, but I’m just going to miss her.’
Abel laughed softly. ‘You’ve got enough chicks left here to cluck over, Beauty,’ he said.
‘I know, I know. But London…’
Abel turned her around to face him, a beer in one hand, his other playing idly with the ties at the neck of her bikini. Lizzie had insisted on a casual pool party for her send off, which suited them well as a bohemian family of beach bums. Abel still rocked faded jeans and a tee shirt better than any other man Genie knew; he seemed to just get better and better with age. Leaning into him, she breathed his familiar clean, beachy smell in deep.
