by Jill Shalvis
He’d get naked. No problem there.
Then she’d have to get naked—big problem there. He was perfection, and she… “No.”
Ben let out a soft, rude noise and dared her with both his eyes and his voice. “Chicken,” he taunted softly.
“Just being realistic.”
Another man would have conceded defeat and walked away. Another man would have hidden his thoughts.
Ben stood there, right there, only inches away, and let her see everything he felt. Annoyance. Heat. Frustration.
Heat. “You’re really not going let me prove it?”
“No.” She looked away. “I’m not interested.”
“Ten minutes,” he promised silkily. “I could rock your world in ten minutes.”
“Go away, Ben.”
No big surprise, he did.
BEN SHOVED OUT the front door, slowing down only to lock it behind him. Asada was long gone, everyone kept telling him that, but he couldn’t break the old habit of watching his back.
And Emily’s.
And Rachel’s. Damn her.
She’d kicked him out. Nothing new. Stepping out the front gate, he joined the early Saturday morning shoppers, of which there were many, and lost himself in the streets. They were as different from the mean, hustling, dangerous streets he’d gotten used to as they could get. These were clean and tantalized with mouthwatering scents from the cafés. They were busy, but also easygoing and safe. No need for this terrible tension and aggression, and no outlet for those feelings, either.
Stalking along, blindly window-shopping, he was torn between wishing he was on the other side of the world, and wishing Rachel would have let him fulfill his promise. It would kill them both, of course, being together like that again. Or at least it would kill him, but—
“Ben!”
Oh, and now he was hearing things. Rachel’s soft voice above the crowd. As if she’d be chasing him down, as if she could—
“Ben, wait!”
Whipping around, he stopped short in shock. Rachel, in her loose, gauzy sundress and sandals, using her cane as she chased him down at an alarming speed. She was going to stumble and take a fall, was his first heart-stopping thought.
She looked frantic to catch him. Him, Ben Asher, the man she’d just shoved out her door.
“I’m sorry,” she rushed, still coming at him. When she was within two feet, he held out his arms, completely without thought.
She walked right into them and fit like she belonged there.
At the slight tightening of his arms and his lack of smile, hers faded. She swallowed hard. “Oh, Ben.”
The two words spoke volumes and yet didn’t tell him a thing. “Did you want to finish talking about orgasms?” he asked a little hoarsely.
A woman walking by, arms loaded with shopping bags, looked over with a lifted eyebrow.
“Uh, no.” Rachel smiled apologetically at the woman. “I was hoping we could talk about…other stuff.”
“I’d rather give you an orgasm.”
This time it was a man walking his hundred-pound Saint Bernard who overheard, and he shot them a comical second glance while Rachel closed her eyes. “Talk, Ben. Can we talk?”
“If that’s all you’ve got.”
“That’s all you’re getting.” She pointed to a sidewalk café a few buildings down. “Hungry?”
For you. “Sure.”
When they were seated, Rachel ordered an iced tea, set her menu aside, and looked at him across the table.
“What?”
“Don’t brood.”
“Why would I brood?”
“I don’t know.”
He nodded. “Are you sleeping with Adam?”
She sighed.
His heart kicked once, hard. “Are you?”
“You have such a one-track mind.”
“Are you?”
“You know that’s none of your business.”
He answered with a very impolite one-word expletive and she sighed again. “No, I’m not sleeping with Adam.”
She wasn’t sleeping with Adam. Thank God. “You’re right,” he said primly, folding his hands. “It’s none of my business.”
Across the table, she groaned and cupped her face in her hands. “You’re such a jerk,” she said, muffled.
“Yeah, it’s a special talent of mine.” He took in her confusion, and disgust filled him. Self disgust. What right did he have to want her single?
It was possible that by this time next week he’d be gone, so far gone.
The waitress brought the iced teas. To keep them there, at the same table, talking, even if the air was filled with tension, Ben ordered a large brunch.
“Tell me something,” Rachel said, playing with her straw. “What are you in such a hurry to get back to?”
“A personal question, Rach?”
She put lemon and sugar in her iced tea. Took a sip. Pushed the drink aside and looked right into his eyes. “Yes. Maybe it’s because I’m older. More mellow—” She glared when he laughed. “I am,” she insisted, and lifted a shoulder. “I’d really like to know. Tell me why you can’t stand being tied to one place for longer than it takes to do a load of laundry, when there’s no place in particular even waiting for you. No place and no one.”
“Hey, I’ve done my laundry here. Quite a few times. I’ve even done your laundry. I like your pale-peach satin panties, by the way, and that black lace bra…”
She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”
Yeah. Yeah, he did. And because her curiosity was honest and not bitter, because she obviously really wanted to know, he found he could try to admit some of what he thought of as his secret shame, the one thing he’d never told another soul. “Staying in one spot, making roots…it infers you’ve found your home, found yourself.”
“Yes,” she agreed.
“But I don’t even know who I really am. I can’t seem to find myself.”
She sat back, looking a little stunned. “But you know who you are.”
“Who I am is a man with no idea who his parents were or where I came from.”
Her eyes softened. “I didn’t know that.”
“Because I never told you. I couldn’t.”
“Oh, Ben. Were you always in a foster home?”
“Yes. It was ‘Christian duty.’ They liked to say that.”
“That’s so wrong!” Her voice was thick, emotional. “No child should ever feel that they weren’t wanted. I hate that for you.”
“Don’t,” he said a bit harshly, unable to take her pity. “I’m just trying to explain.”
“You were never given any information about your past at all?”
He downed half his glass of tea for his suddenly parched throat. “All I know is that when I was about two days old, I was found in a trash bin in Los Angeles, nearly dead of exposure and starvation.”
She covered her mouth with her fingers, fingers that shook, he noted. No, it wasn’t a pretty story, but she’d asked. “So yeah, I always knew I belonged nowhere, with no one.”
“How cruel! How could a foster parent, someone trusted with a child, do that? Make you feel that way?” she cried.
“Hey. Hey, it doesn’t matter now,” he said, a little surprised, and touched, at the tears shimmering in her eyes. He put a hand over hers. “I’m trying to make you understand, that’s all. Why I don’t like it here.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me all this before?”
“I never told anyone.” He could hear the hurt and shock in her voice and for some reason, sought to alleviate both. “I just pretended it wasn’t so bad. And when I was with you, it wasn’t.” He smiled into the face of her tears. “Look, Rach, the point of all this is, I always planned on getting out of South Village, only I couldn’t do it until I was eighteen. My entire childhood and adolescence, I was stuck. Held by circumstance, poverty, disregard, whatever. So the minute I graduated—”
“You got the hell out,” she finished softly.
“I got the hell out,” he agreed.
“You never said. I never knew. I never understood.”
“I wasn’t real great at sharing that side of my life. I was so full of frustration and rage and the need to get out, I didn’t know what I wanted—other than to go, of course—or even what I’d do with myself when I did.”
“But you found out.”
“Yeah.” He thought of all the places he’d been, how in each one he’d learned something new, and had added it to the stack, accumulating experiences and emotions in a way he hadn’t been able to growing up. “I loved it. I still love it.”
Her eyes were immeasurably sad, and yet full of something else too, a new understanding. Finally, she understood him.
Why was that the most bittersweet thing of all?
She turned her hand over in his and held on. “Ben? I want to tell you something. Something I should have told you a long time ago, too.” She bit her lower lip. “I didn’t belong anywhere, either.”
“You belong here in South Village.”
“I didn’t always. You know we moved at the drop of a hat while my father raided and pillaged corporations.”
“Yes.”
“Until we came here, until I found South Village, I never had roots or a real home, either.”
“And yet we ended up on opposite sides of the fence.”
Her eyes filled again. “I never saw it that way before…but how I feel about my home…that’s how you feel about your travels. My God, and all this time I thought we were so different.”
“I know.” His throat felt raw, talking to her like this. Sharing. Feeling it all over again. Chest aching, he leaned forward, wanting to be closer. “Want to hear something shocking?”
That got a short laugh. “After all this?” she asked. “Please. What else would shock me?”
He let out a sheepish smile. “Truthfully? It’s not so bad waking up every morning to view the sunrise from the same porch. Not so bad having a tangible address in a full but clean and happy city leaping with life… I can admit that much, even if I can’t share your love for it.”
One lone tear slowly spilled over, slipped down her cheek. “Oh, Ben.”
His gaze dropped to her lips to watch the words come out.
Her gaze dropped to his lips, too.
“This hasn’t changed, has it?” He leaned close over the table, so that her breath mingled with his, making him shiver in anticipation, awareness. Need. “This physical attraction.”
Her tongue darted out, wet her dry lips, making him groan. “It always was crazy,” she agreed in a hushed whisper. “Always uncontrollable, this…this…”
“Need. We need each other, Rach. It doesn’t change anything about who we are, but damn, I’d really like to hear you say it.”
“What, that I need you more than my next breath, in a way I don’t want?” Her eyes were big on his. “Well, I do. God, Ben, I do.”
“Good.” They were so close it seemed like the most natural thing in the entire world to close the gap between them and capture her lips with his.
With a low sound in her throat, she pushed even closer. Ben shoved the things cluttering the table out of his way so he could get more of her mouth, more of her. It was good, and he angled in for even more, which she gave, until a shattering crash of glass had them both pulling back, blinking like moles coming out in to the daylight.
Rachel stared at the ground at their feet, where one of them had knocked over her iced tea. “Was that us?”
He laughed, but it backed up in his throat when she licked her lips again, as if she needed that last taste of him. “Maybe we should get out of here,” he suggested, thinking somewhere…like her bedroom.
She let out a low laugh that was so innately female, so sensual, it revved his engines all over again. “Oh, no. We’re not getting out of here. This is not leading back to the question of my…” She blushed.
“Your orgasms?”
“Uh, yes.” She stole his tea and sipped. “We’re staying right here. Out of temptation and trouble.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes to cool off.”
Great. “More iced tea, please,” he said to a passing waitress.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE CODED KNOCK came before dawn. Manuel made his way carefully through the dark, damp cellar. He still didn’t dare risk using a generator at this time of day, so a small flashlight was all he had.
Specs of dirt and dust danced through the air in the beam of light, but he couldn’t focus on that or he’d lose his mind. He answered the door eagerly, too eagerly, but he couldn’t help that, either. Everything hinged on this. “Did you get it?”
“The raid got a little bloody,” came the hesitant answer. “The villagers fought back.”
“Did you get the money?” Manuel Asada repeated with dangerous calm.
“Y-yes.”
Everything within him relaxed. Finally. The tide would turn now, because with the money they’d stolen tonight, it was a start. Money was power, and with power he could do anything.
Like destroy the man who’d brought him down.
FOR RACHEL, the next few days fell into a rhythmic pattern of continued physical therapy, attempting to connect with her daughter and a silent, intense, arousing sort of dance with Ben. The longing, the hunger was unmistakable, but she knew it would be so much worse if they gave in.
So she did her best to ignore the sensual, earthy humming inside her body—and Ben’s promise to ease that humming.
Always in the past, work had been her savior, but Gracie continued to elude her. Instead, when she sat at her easel, she ended up with a sketch of…Ben of all things. Ben on his knees, his arms around Emily, who was not only smiling as she always had in the good old days, she was cradling the well-behaved—ha!—Patches.
A fantasy. She pulled the sheet off, tossed it aside and started again, this time ending up with a sketch of South Village’s joyful, exuberant nightlife, the refurbished firehouse and the street where she lived in the midst of the scene.
Did she really see her life here like that, joyful and exuberant?
Possibly…lately. She’d be a fool to not admit Ben did that for her, made her feel…alive. Shockingly alive.
She wanted him. She could admit that since he was leaving. He wanted her, too. They could easily fall into a pattern of sharing their nights together before he moved on. Would it really be such a mistake? That she was even thinking it made her reach for the phone for a reality check. “Mel?”
“What’s up?” her sister asked, mercifully answering her cell.
“Nothing much.”
“Uh-huh. You let Adam give you an orgasm yet?”
“No.”
“Don’t tell me you let Ben do it.”
“Mel. You make him sound like a…toy.”
“You did, didn’t you? You did Ben.”
“I did not. We did not.”
“Well, whew.”
Rachel stared at the drawing of him on the floor. Even two-dimensional, he looked so vibrant. Charismatic. “Why do you say it like that? Like it would be such a bad thing?”
“How quickly they forget,” Mel muttered. “Remember your past with him? The fact that he destroyed you, and has the ability to do it again with one little ‘goodbye’?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” Rachel said softly.
“Good. Keep repeating it to yourself like a mantra until your hormones are under control. Or if you must do something about them, call Adam.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“He called me last night…told me he wasn’t going to contact me again until I made a decision on what I wanted with Ben.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, ouch.” But not as painful as she’d thought it would be.
“Well, call him back, tell him you’ve made your decision and Ben is leaving.”
“Mel—”
“Oops,
I’ve gotta run, psycho boss alert.”
“Mel—”
Click.
Rachel set the phone back on its base and sighed. She’d gotten her pep talk. No sex with Ben. Determined to forget it, she turned back to her easel.
EMILY SAT on the backyard deck, laptop on her thighs. Her concentration was on the brilliant colors in the sky as the sun went down, her screen forgotten. She loved this house so much, loved the backyard, her bedroom, the elevator, the fire pole, the easy access to shopping and food…she loved everything about it.
But she wasn’t a little kid anymore. She knew her home was special. And expensive. Everyone who saw it oohed and aahed.
And because she knew it, she also understood something else. She was lucky, very lucky. Bending for the puppy asleep at her feet, she pulled the warm, little body close. Patches let out a soft, sleepy puppy sound and yawned so wide she nearly turned her mouth inside out, making Emily smile before she buried her face in Patches’s neck.
Above her came two quiet voices, her mother’s and…her father’s? They must be on her mother’s deck, watching the same sunset.
Together.
Her heart hitched, but she reminded herself that they’d been together all this time now and, despite her best efforts, they weren’t making wedding plans. In fact, her father had tried to tell her he was going soon. She’d pretended not to understand, but she knew she couldn’t put him off forever. He wanted to say goodbye.
She just didn’t want to.
How could he walk away from them, when lately she’d felt things softening between him and her mom? It wasn’t just her hopeful imagination. Her mom smiled more often, at him. And he often simply watched her in return, something in his eyes making Emily sure he cared.
“Not a bad sunset,” came her dad’s voice. “For a city offering.”
Her mother laughed. Laughed.
Emily strained to hear more, but all she caught was her father’s answering deep chuckle and a husky, low reply.
They were laughing together. Talking. They were—Wait a minute… If they were sitting on that particular balcony together, it meant they’d been together in her mother’s bedroom.
