Splash!
One of the bozos that I had been talking to by the pool, before Eric rescued me, had pushed another one into the pool, and everyone in the yard had turned to see him floundering in the water like a fish on a hook. After only a second, it became clear that the kid in the water couldn’t swim, and after another second, it became clear that none of his friends—if you could call them that—were going to jump in and help him.
Eric let go of my hand and the absence of his touch left me cold. He shrugged his shirt off of his shoulders quickly and stood, making a few large strides across the yard before diving gracefully into the pool only about a foot away from the drunk, flopping idiot, whose friends were laughing hysterically until they, too, realized that he might be in real trouble. Eric grabbed the guy with one arm, and dragged him to the edge of the pool, lifting him up onto the edge.
Finally, the guy that pushed him in sprang to action, drunkenly stumbling to the edge of the pool to help Eric pull him out. The whole ordeal couldn’t have taken more than thirty seconds, while I watched, amazed and slack-jawed from my seat on the chaise.
When he pulled himself out of the pool, I heard Eric yell at the guy who had fallen in and the guy who had pushed him. It wasn’t a long rant, but whatever he said made them gather their group and leave quickly, without even stopping to dry off. He hadn’t seemed like a particularly intimidating person, but apparently they felt otherwise. When he walked back toward me, his face was stone, and his hands were balled into tight fists. He no longer moved with a carefree ease, but stalked awkwardly in soaked blue jeans. With eyes that looked straight through everything. I tried not to stare like everyone else at the party was doing, but even in this state—pissed, distressed, and soaked through—he was the most incredible-looking man I had ever seen, and I found it exceptionally challenging to look away.
“I have to go dry off,” he said when he finally reached me one million long minutes later. He ran a strong hand through his dark hair, in a move I can only assume was planned ahead of time to make the light reflect off of his chiseled chest in a way that would make me swoon. I tried my best not to look disappointed that our kiss had been interrupted, and nodded shyly.
“Do you want to come inside? I can give you a tour of the place, and maybe get you a drink that you actually like?”
I laughed, and stared into my beer. He had caught me.
But I will never be able to explain or stop regretting the next words that came out of my mouth.
“I really need to go find my friend,” I said. “She’s around here somewhere.”
He didn’t protest. He simply nodded and turned to walk away from me, leaving me alone with my thoughts. There was no part of me that considered that we wouldn’t pick up where we left off later that evening.
It didn’t take long to find Lana. She was making out with some guy wearing a backwards baseball cap on the couch in front of the fireplace. I tried to check in to make sure that she was okay, but all I could get from her in response was a nod and a wave of her hand. I looked around in vain, trying to find someone I knew, but I knew that there was no one, and nearly everyone at the party was paired off like Lana, or having their own private conversations. I rolled my eyes. I loved Lana, but it was pretty typical of her to bring me somewhere that I knew no one and leave me alone.
I took off my Doc Martens and sat them next to me by the pool so that I could dangle my feet in. I had never been someone who minded being alone, but being the girl sitting by yourself at a party you weren’t really invited to was kind of lame. The water felt cool and fresh on my toes, and I relaxed and watched the people at the party do their thing. I don’t know how long I was sitting there before he rejoined me. It couldn’t have been more than five minutes, but I had managed to down the rest of my beer, and was starting to feel more relaxed and less self-conscious than I usually felt, which was nice.
“Please don’t jump in,” he said. “I just got clean clothes on, and I don’t want to have to rescue you.”
I turned around at the sound of his voice, and looked up. He had changed his clothes, and was now wearing a dry pair of jeans with a tee shirt that fit him closely enough that I could see hints of the rippled muscles that lay beneath. He was holding two drinks, and handed me one. “You’ll like this better than beer, I promise,” he offered.
I looked at the cup quizzically, as if it might bite me, but ultimately took the drink he offered, setting it next to me without drinking it. I felt like I could trust him, but a part of me could hear Lana’s voice in the back of my mind telling me not to accept drinks from strangers. “Thanks,” I said, “but I’m already a little drunk. I shouldn’t have any more.”
He nodded and sat next to me, rolling up his jeans and putting his feet in the water next to mine, his left foot creeping under the water like an amorous fish to rub my ankles.
“So, you’re quite the hero,” I said finally, after a few long moments of this absurdly torturous game of footsie.
“Nah.” He shook his head. “I just didn’t want my parents to come home to a dead body in the pool on Sunday.” The tone of his voice suggested he was joking, but there was something in the way that he said it that had a ring of truth.
“So this is your place?” Hadn’t Lana told me her cousin was throwing this party? Was this him?
“Yeah. Or, my parents’. I don’t really live here anymore. But there’s no pool at my apartment for people to fall into when I throw a party.”
This time, I laughed. His sarcasm was growing on me. And if I was honest with myself, I’d say that the fact that he had his own place was really hot to the seventeen-year-old version of myself. But it also meant he was older, and I couldn’t help wonder by how much. I tried to push the thought out of my mind. A very cute guy was interested in sitting with me by the pool, and I wanted to enjoy the moment, and make it last as long as possible.
“So, you’re Lana’s cousin?” I asked. This seemed like a reasonable question, but it started a chain of events that I could not have foreseen, and wished that I could reverse.
“Lana? Lana Holland? Yeah…” he began, sounding confused. “How do you know Lana?”
“She’s my best friend. We’ve known each other since we were both playing with Barbies.”
“Fuck! You’re Lana’s age?” He stood up, and I immediately understood where this line of questioning was headed. “Is she here?” he demanded.
I nodded. “She was on the couch making out with some douchebag in a baseball hat.”
I supposed I must have said the wrong thing, because he stormed off in the direction of the living room, and I immediately became invisible to him. I followed, trying to keep up, the concrete patio biting at my bare feet while I carried my shoes in my hand. But he had beaten me there, and was yanking Lana up off of the couch by her arm, to the weak protest of the guy he was cock-blocking.
“Get out of here, Lana. Who the fuck even invited you?!” His entire attitude had shifted, and he was suddenly someone I didn’t want to know at all. “And take your underage friend with you! You think we’re running a babysitting service?! Are you trying to get me arrested?” By now, everyone in the room had stopped to watch the train wreck that was unfolding. Someone had even turned off the music so they could better hear him berate Lana. But all I knew was that the guy who I had desperately wished would kiss me just moments ago was now the biggest asshole in the room, and I needed to get my friend out of there before she started to cry.
It wasn’t until we got back to her house that Lana spoke again, and when she did, she was full of excuses for Eric, explaining that he was twenty-six, almost a decade older than us, and that she never should have gone to the party in the first place. But for me, the damage was already done. I was completely taken with him and disgusted with him in a single moment, and I became infatuated with him for years, watching the tabloids to see what he was up to, and wondering pathetically if he ever thought of me.
Now, eight years later, I most
ly didn’t think about him anymore. That is, until the stupid predicament I was in now, hiding behind what had to be the most foul-smelling garbage can in the entire city of Chicago because I just happened to snap a picture of the mythical Eric Sorenson while on a job investigating a woman whose husband thought she was cheating on him. What are the odds of that? There were almost 3 million people in the city, so the odds, I supposed, were three million to one.
It was becoming increasingly clear that I was going to have to get out from behind the garbage can. My knees were beginning to get stiff from squatting for so long, and predictably, I had to pee. Figuring that the chances of him remembering me were slim to none, I prepared myself to stand.
There are few things that will make you feel older than your age like squatting for over twenty minutes behind a smelly garbage can in downtown Chicago. When I stood, I realized three things in this specific order: First, I was not going to be able to walk immediately. Rising from a squat to a standing position made my knees pop and my muscles feel weak. I had no idea how Wilson Contreras managed it for nine long innings. Second, I was going to have to embrace the smell of rotting meat for a while. Either the stench had burned itself into my nose, or my clothes had absorbed it, making me smell like a dumpster behind a butcher shop. I silently prayed for the former, but feared that the latter was true. And finally, and probably most importantly, Eric Sorenson definitely did remember me. I knew this because when I stood, his face was no more than eight feet from my own, about to climb into the backseat of a Town Car. And when he saw me, he stopped immediately and stared.
Fuck.
5
Eric
I was hallucinating.
Or, at least, I thought I was.
I had just left a meeting with Francine Fields, the CFO of Vance National Holdings. It had gone well, I thought, and Francine and I had wanted to celebrate our alliance with a glass of champagne, but had been forced to settle for a cheap white wine. So my first thought was that the wine had gone bad, and I was now hallucinating beautiful women popping up from behind garbage cans in the middle of the city.
And this hallucination, believe it or not, was one I’d had before.
I mean—I hadn’t hallucinated this exact situation before. That would be too weird. But I had seen this woman. Everywhere. That’s what happens when you have something within your grasp and then throw it away like an idiot. It haunts you, following your miserable corpse to the ends of the earth to taunt you with the idea of what might have been, had you only been smart enough to take advantage of the situation when it was offered to you. She was probably popping up now because I’d just thought about her last night when I was out with Sebastian. And yet, I couldn’t take my eyes off of her. She didn’t look like a hallucination; she looked as real and as beautiful as the day I’d met her.
My parents had been in Europe that weekend. I don’t remember exactly where—the south of France, or northern Italy or something like that. And they had asked me to look in on the house from time to time while they were away. It didn’t matter that they had a housekeeper there five days a week, or that we lived in a million-dollar home in one of the safest neighborhoods in Chicago; they wanted me to be the one to look over it, because that is the kind of people they are, the whole world revolving around them at breakneck speed.
I was really good about it, too. I didn’t even think about throwing a party until they’d already been gone for almost three weeks, and I finally pulled the trigger on it two nights before they returned, fearing I’d never again have such an opportunity while I was young enough to enjoy it.
I can’t explain exactly how the party got so huge. I made a post online that I shared with a few friends, and I guess it grew exponentially from there, but before I knew it, someone was bringing in a keg and my parents’ home was so full of people that they had begun spilling out into the backyard, and even spreading to the upstairs bedrooms. The thing is, I barely knew any of them, aside from Sebastian and a few of our friends from school. Most of the people at my house that night could have been described as vapid human shells. They were these walking wastes of oxygen that had nothing better to do on a Friday night than come to a party thrown by someone they didn’t even know and get blasted.
There was this girl who had been hanging on me all night. Her name was Alexandra, I think. She was the type of girl my parents would have introduced me to if they’d had the opportunity—a rich, blonde Northwestern pre-med student with a stick up her ass. She was gorgeous in all the ways that didn’t matter, and I couldn’t get her to stop following me around like a wounded dog. So I sat by the pool with a beer and surrounded myself with a few friends to look as unapproachable as I possibly could.
Then I saw Grace.
I mean, I didn’t know that her name was Grace at the time, obviously; I just knew I wanted to know what her name was. Like, I’d do just about anything to find out. She was tall and thin, with nice subtle curves that were more like a whisper in your ear than a scream in your face. She had creamy porcelain skin and these crazy auburn curls falling on her shoulders that just begged to be touched.
But none of that was what caught my attention at first. It was the way she moved, and the look on her face when she did so. She was there alone, or so it seemed at the time, and she watched everyone at the party with a bemused smile on her face, like she was reading them, and only half-interested in what she found. She was alone, but she moved with the confidence of someone who owned the place and knew everyone, weaving in and out of stupid conversations like it was her job to get to know as many stupid people as possible that night.
The sexiest thing about her, though, was that she wasn’t really trying to be sexy. She was wearing this little black dress that showed off her long legs, but she wasn’t wearing sandals or stripper heels or even makeup like any of the other girls at the party. She was wearing these chunky combat boots that made her look like a real ass-kicker. She looked like someone who really liked herself and didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought.
So, of course, I had to tell her what I thought.
I pulled her away from the group of idiots she was talking to so that I could have her to myself. It was admittedly a bold move, but I was confident that it would pay off. But even as she sat across from me on the chaise lounge by the pool, I was terrified that she would get up and walk away from me any minute. She looked so uncomfortable, like she wanted to be anywhere else but there in that moment, and she kept smoothing down the edges of her skirt like she was afraid of letting me see her thighs. But it had the opposite effect on me, because every time her hands moved, it drew my attention to her lap again, and I couldn’t help but imagine the sounds that she would make if I could just slide a hand under that skirt and explore that magical space between her legs.
I didn’t get the chance to find out, though, because some idiot got himself pushed in the pool and couldn’t swim, so I had to jump in after him. When I got back out, I’d been pissed, but tried to revive the moment and she turned me down flat. I went upstairs and disappeared for a while to change my clothes and sulk in a corner over my shit luck, but I had never been good at brooding, so it didn’t last long. Just long enough to rebuild my confidence and give it another shot.
When I returned, I thought I was in luck to find her, still by the pool, and miraculously, still by herself. I was sure that any number of guys at the party would have swooped in the moment I’d walked away, but they hadn’t, and now, she was sitting on the edge of the pool with her adorable feet dangling into the water. The smell of chlorine mingled in the air with the smell of her shampoo, and had me so intoxicated that I must have sounded like an idiot, but for some reason she stayed, and kept talking to me. I was grateful for the opportunity until she revealed to me that she was jailbait.
“You’re Lana’s cousin?” she asked me, making small talk. The question confused me, and it took me a moment to come to my senses. Lana, my baby cousin, was 17 years old. I couldn’t figure out
how anyone at the party would know her. So I asked.
“She’s my best friend. We’ve known each other since we were both playing with Barbies,” the incredible angel in front of me answered, shattering all of my hopes for our night together, and making me feel instantly guilty about everything I’d already fantasized about doing to that beautiful mouth of hers.
I lost it. The next several minutes were a blur, as I found my cousin with Sebastian’s tongue down her throat and said some really shitty things to her and Grace, forcing them to leave the party.
Sebastian was pissed at me for a few days after that, but he got over it. That was more than I could say for my attraction to Grace. I had been in a number of short-lived relationships since then, but the truth was, I’d never found anyone who piqued my interest like she had that night.
And now, she was standing right in front of my face.
I looked left and right to make sure that no one but my driver was in earshot before I spoke. If I was crazy enough to speak to a hallucination, I didn’t want it to end up in the tabloids tomorrow. Over the years I had done some really crazy shit, and it had been documented in photographs and written about ad nauseum, but I was almost certain that if one of those stupid papers reported that I was actually certifiably crazy, my parents would probably disinherit me. And I really liked being rich; it suited me well.
When I was sure the coast was clear, I ventured, “Grace?” without fully expecting a response. As it turned out, I actually had to wait several seconds to receive one. By the time she spoke, I had almost become certain that I was indeed crazy, and would need to direct my driver to take me to the hospital rather than back to the office.
“In the flesh,” she said with a smirk, making me exhale a huge sigh of relief.
Not once in the history of my hallucinations and fantasies about this woman had she ever spoken back to me. It was really her. I motioned to my driver to wait for me for a moment, and went behind the car to move closer to her, my brain still trying to convince itself that she was real. But, I had to stop about two feet away because…she reeked.
Keeping Her Safe: A Billionaire Second Chance Romance Page 3
