by Maisey Yates
“Loved you?” Louise filled in softly. Chelsea’s jaw dropped.
“Don’t be ridiculous. We barely know each other. He doesn’t know me at all, never mind love.”
“You’re not making sense, Chelsea.”
“I don’t need to make sense,” she snapped. “This has nothing to do with love and all to do with—with—”
Louise raised her eyebrows. “Yes?”
“Oh, just stop.” Chelsea sagged back in her seat. “I can’t take anymore. I don’t talk like this to anyone and there’s a reason. It’s completely draining.”
“I know.” She straightened, thankfully brisk now. “So what are you going to do?”
“About what?”
“About Alex. Are you going to call him? See him again?”
“He hasn’t called since—”
“What are you, thirteen? Do you have to wait for the boy to call? I don’t think so.” Chelsea just shook her head and Louise leaned forward, touched her hand. “Look, Chelsea, I get it. This stuff is scary. Putting yourself out there. Letting yourself be rejected.”
“I don’t see you doing it,” Chelsea muttered.
“No, but I wish—I wish I could.” She sighed. “We’ve both got enough emotional baggage to sink a ship, I know. No dad. Mother one step up from a hooker.”
“Louise—”
“And other things.” She bit her lip, suddenly looking near tears. Chelsea felt that painful lump of emotion burn in her chest. “Look, life is short, Chelsea. Really short. Do you want to live all alone in your ivory tower of an apartment until you die and no one finds you until your rotting corpse starts to smell?”
“What a lovely image—”
“Seriously, that’s what you’re looking at.” Louise took a breath. “What I’m looking at, if neither of us tries to let someone in.”
“And if he doesn’t want to be let in?” Chelsea asked, her voice coming out in a tremble although she’d been trying for a snappy comeback.
“You won’t know that until you ask him,” Louise said simply. “You can’t risk your heart and stay safe. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Chelsea’s phone buzzed and she grabbed her bag from the floor by her seat, reached for it, her heart starting to thump. It wasn’t Alex. It was a text from Michael, reminding her to sign the form Treffen’s lawyer had sent over.
She hadn’t even thought about Treffen today. Maybe she should seek Alex out about that. She still needed that evidence; it would at least get her in the same room with Alex. Seeing him again, touching him...
Or maybe she’d just keep it professional. If she could.
“Call him, Chelsea,” Louise said, and there was a hint of laughter in her voice now. Chelsea realized she was still staring blankly at her phone. “See him again. You don’t have to make a big declaration but give it a chance.”
* * *
“Chelsea Maxwell is here to see you, Alex.”
Alex stilled, his hand resting on the mouse trackpad of his laptop, as his assistant’s voice came through his phone’s intercom.
Chelsea was here?
His pulse kicked up and anticipation as well as a wary sort of trepidation fired through him. He hadn’t called her since she’d left his limo over a week ago now. He’d wanted to, and on several occasions he’d gone so far as to pick up the phone. But then he’d stopped, because he hadn’t known what to say. What he felt.
That tear had freaked him out. He’d wanted to shatter Chelsea’s icy composure, but not melt it. He hadn’t wanted her to cry.
Except part of him had wanted to put his lips to that tear and kiss it away. To ask what had caused it and to make her smile again, this time from the heart.
And didn’t that freak him out even more.
“Alex?”
Belatedly he realized he hadn’t answered his assistant. “Send her in, please.”
A few seconds later Chelsea opened the double doors to his penthouse office, closing them behind her with a neat click. She was dressed in classic Chelsea Maxwell style: a narrow black skirt skimming her knees and cinched tight at the waist with a thin patent leather belt and a crisp, pale pink blouse with gray pin stripes. Her hair was pulled back into an elegant coil, her makeup understated yet sexy. Everything about her was sophisticated, polished, cool.
It made Alex want to rise from his desk and take her in his arms. Pop those little pearly buttons on her blouse one by one and yank down the zip of her skirt. It also made him hard, and he remained seated behind his desk.
“Chelsea.” He nodded toward her, knowing he was behaving like an ass. They’d had sex. Twice. And more than that, more intimately, they’d actually talked. Shared things. And he’d felt the damp warmth of her single tear on the tip of his thumb.
“So I thought you were going to show me some evidence.”
Treffen. She was here because of Treffen. He felt a stupid mix of disappointment and relief, as well as a healthy dose of guilt. He’d texted Hunter several times in an attempt to get closer to Zoe, and left messages with her business asking her to talk. Pretty pathetic attempts to reach her, really. But he’d been focused on Chelsea and what was happening between them.
And that was your mistake.
He might not be able to make Zoe talk, he knew. But he still needed some evidence for Chelsea, and he knew what that had to be. “I do have evidence,” he said, his voice as cool as Chelsea’s.
“So let’s see it.” She raised her eyebrows, waiting, everything about her brittle and hard and so different from the woman she’d last been with him. But that was a good thing, Alex reminded himself. This was how they both needed to play it.
“Fine.” He took a key from his inside pocket and unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk, withdrew a slim manila folder. He took a deep breath, then flipped it open and handed Chelsea a single photo of Sarah.
Chelsea took it, and Alex watched her face as she gazed down at the photograph. Her face went completely, utterly blank, as if she’d power-washed all the emotion away.
It was a strange reaction, because Alex had stared at the photo too many times and it still made his mouth twist, his bile rise. Sarah, naked, spread-eagled on a bed, her body beautiful and pale, and her eyes full of misery. He looked at the photo and he felt like punching something. Hurting someone.
“Who is this?” she asked after a moment and Alex cleared his throat.
“One of his call girls—”
“Obviously. I mean, who is she? Is she around? Can she tell her story?”
Alex felt his hand clench involuntarily into a fist. “I’m afraid not. But her sister has come forward. She’s the one who first approached Austin with information.”
Chelsea’s eyes narrowed. “And she’s willing to speak?”
Alex thought briefly of Katy. “She’s angry and determined to find justice.”
“But she’s still a secondary witness. Is there anyone else?”
“There might be.”
Chelsea stared at him hard before shaking her head. “That’s all you’ve got, Alex? Really?”
“Austin confronted his father and he didn’t even deny it—”
“Was their conversation recorded?” He shook his head. “Would Austin be willing to go on live television and confront his father there?”
A pause. “I don’t know.”
“Then what do you know?” Chelsea demanded and suddenly furious and far too raw, Alex rose from the desk.
“I know that Treffen is a monster who has to be stopped. That he’s turned promising young lawyers into women with wrecked lives. All right, yes, I have one photo. One victim who isn’t willing to speak—yet. But I know what he’s done, Chelsea. I know.”
She stared at him, and all her icy polish seemed to dissolve right in front of his eyes. Her lips trembled and she pressed them together. “I believe you,” she said softly.
That was all it took. All he needed for his own resolve to break. He pushed back his chair, strode around his desk
, papers fluttering to the ground. He reached for her, crashed his mouth onto hers. He wanted her too much to be gentle or slow, and in any case that took them both into dangerous territory. She must have felt the same because she met his kiss with a passionate fury of her own, driving her fingers into his hair, pushing against him.
Buttons popped, scattered and bounced across the parquet floor. He swept aside her blouse, cupped her breasts through the thin silk of her camisole. She mewled in the back of her throat and tugged down the zip of his trousers.
The door wasn’t even locked, Alex realized hazily as he hoisted her onto his desk. Papers went flying and his laptop was skirting precariously with the edge of the desk, but none of it mattered. Nothing mattered but this. Her. Them.
He slid his hands up under her skirt, felt the elastic of her garter and groaned.
“Are you trying to drive me crazy?” he muttered against her mouth and in answer she locked her legs around his hips and brought him even closer to her heat and softness. Her skirt tore up the back, the sound like a screech in the room where the only noise had been their own ragged breathing.
He pushed the material up higher so it bunched around her hips. “Chelsea...” he groaned against her mouth, trying to press every part of his body against hers, and then he realized he didn’t have a condom.
She felt his hesitation and shifted restlessly under him, arching her hips to bring him into exquisite, aching contact again.
“I don’t have a condom,” he said, and she let out a groan of her own.
“I thought you were a Boy Scout.”
He let out a ragged laugh, everything in him pulsing. “I’ve never actually had sex in my office before.”
“And at this rate you won’t ever.” She pulled away from him, clambered off the desk. Alex adjusted his own clothes, watching as she took a few steps away from him, her back to him, clearly trying to repair some of the damage they’d both done to her clothes and hair, and realizing within seconds how useless a task that was.
“This skirt was new, you know,” she said, her back, now straight and so very taut, still to him.
“I’ll buy you another.”
“Not much help now.” She did the one remaining button on her blouse and turned around to stare at him. He couldn’t tell at all what she was feeling, and he shouldn’t even care. “I can’t go out like this.”
“Did you have a coat?”
She rolled her eyes. “In the foyer.”
“I’ll get it.”
When he returned Chelsea was standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the Statue of Liberty, one hand clutching her ruined blouse together.
Alex’s heart turned right over. Or maybe it squeezed, or expanded, or broke. Something happened, and it hurt, because the sight of her standing there, looking so lonely and proud, just about leveled him.
And he was about to hand her her coat?
“Chelsea.” She turned, and he saw that her face was pale, her expression veiled. “Don’t go.”
She arched an eyebrow, still proud, still defiant. “And what am I supposed to do? Sit here in these rags while you get on with work?”
“No.” He offered a smile, small, tentative. This was all so new. “I can’t see you doing that.”
“Neither can I.”
“Come home with me.”
She didn’t speak, but he saw her surprise. It flared in her eyes and tensed her body, and still she just looked at him. So he kept speaking, because after he’d said it he realized how much he wanted her to come home with him. Stay with him.
And it had nothing to do with Treffen or revenge.
“Come home with me,” he said again. “Back to my place. Right now. I’ll leave work.”
“Alex...”
“Stay the night.”
She stared at him, her face bloodless now, eyes like wide pools, the gray-green of a forest lake.
“Chelsea,” he said, and it was a plea. A promise...except he didn’t know just what he was promising. How much.
“Okay,” she said softly, and Alex’s heart did that painful thing again. Squeeze or lurch, leap or soar, it hurt.
This was new for both of them. New and strange and completely terrifying. But they were doing it. God help them both, they were doing it.
Chapter Ten
She was breaking another of her rules. In the past ten years she’d never gone back to a man’s place. Never put herself in so vulnerable a position. The interactions she’d had were always on her terms, at her place. And she kept a can of pepper spray in her bedside drawer.
Although if she was honest, Chelsea acknowledged as she headed out of the Diaz building onto Hudson Street with Alex, there hadn’t been that many men. Certainly not as many as people thought. Just a few forgettable men who had given her a little pleasure and had not got within spitting distance of her heart.
Men who had eased that endless ache of loneliness only a little, not nearly enough.
But she hadn’t wanted any more than that.
And now? Now there was Alex.
Her body still ached from his touch, and she felt the dull throb of remembered and still unsatisfied desire. She couldn’t believe how reckless she’d been, how rough. She didn’t do that. Frantic sex on an office desk...not a turn-on. Not at all, considering her history.
And yet with Alex it had been different. Strong and sexy and somehow empowering. They’d come at it as equals, and even as he’d been tearing her blouse off she’d felt safe. Maybe she needed that. Maybe she needed to reclaim all those years of subjugation, just in a totally different way than she’d thought.
A limo was waiting at the curb as they emerged from the building. “Do you keep a condom in the car?” Chelsea murmured, only half joking, as the driver leaped out to open the door for her; Alex had got there first.
“You must think I lead a far more exciting life than I do,” he answered as he slid onto the seat next to her.
“Come on, Alex, you’ve got a bit of a reputation,” she answered. She pulled her coat more tightly around her. Her blouse was practically in shreds and the slit in the back of her skirt was a good six inches longer than it had been or should be. As for her hair, her makeup...she didn’t even want to know.
But she still wanted Alex.
“You look beautiful,” Alex said quietly.
She turned to him. “How did you know what I was thinking?”
“You started trying to fix your hair.”
Belatedly she dropped her hands and glanced out the window at rows of disused warehouses and old factory buildings that lined the waterfront. “Nice neighborhood.”
“I like my privacy.”
The limo had pulled up in front of what looked to Chelsea like an abandoned warehouse, three stories of weathered brick.
The driver opened the door and Alex stepped out, drawing Chelsea by the hand toward the door of the warehouse, a slab of solid steel with a huge padlock. “Seriously?” she said, nodding at the padlock.
Alex grinned at her in the descending twilight. “Seriously,” he answered, and she felt a thrill of something—fear or wonder—because suddenly she wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the door.
Alex took a key card out of his pocket and swiped it against a panel affixed to the warehouse; the huge door swung open on silent hinges and Chelsea shook her head.
“Now you’re just showing off.”
He chuckled softly. “Maybe a little.” He led her into a dark hallway; motion-sensitive lights switched on as they stepped inside.
Chelsea glanced at the large, old-fashioned elevator, its iron grille open to the stripped girders and beams. “Do you own this whole place?”
“I have the top floor. But Diaz News owns the building— the other floors are guest accommodation, offices and storage.”
“Diaz News, huh?” She stepped into the elevator, Alex’s hand at her back. “That’s still you.”
He acknowledged her point with a nod. “Still me.�
�
He pressed a button and the elevator moved upward through the exposed building, then stopped and the doors opened onto the top floor, one huge open space.
The apartment was completely open plan, with bookcases or counters used as dividers. Chelsea stepped in, Alex’s hand still on her back. “What do you think?” he asked, and she could tell by his tone, light as it was, that he cared at least a little about the answer.
“Give me a minute,” she said, and began to stroll through a space that had been marked in every way by the man who lived there. Oak bookshelves with tattered paperbacks, a mixture of philosophy, nonfiction and a few well-thumbed thrillers. An acoustic guitar on its stand in the corner. Blown-up black-and-white photographs that captured the poignant minutiae of life: an elderly man on a park bench, his gnarled hands resting on a walking stick; a young child at a playground, with a scraped knee and a single tear sliding down his cheek; a woman strolling in Central Park, her face tilted toward the sun.
Chelsea could feel Alex’s eyes on her as she wandered through the apartment, taking everything in. It felt like far more of a home than her luxurious, sterile penthouse did. His personality was stamped on everything while she’d intentionally erased hers. She finished her silent, self-guided tour in his bedroom area, separated from the rest of the apartment by tall bookcases, and stood in front of his king-size bed. Already images danced through her mind, the two of them twined together amid the navy silk sheets, hands and legs and lips...
Desire arrowed inside her and she turned to him, wondering if he could guess the nature of her thoughts. From the glint in his eye, she thought he probably did.
“I like it. It feels like a home.”
“I think I’ve always wanted a space of my own.”
“There’s plenty of that.” She glanced down at herself. “I think I need to borrow some clothes.”
“Not a problem, if you don’t mind them hanging off you a bit.” The grin he gave her was teasingly wolfish. “I certainly don’t.”
He took a pair of sweatpants and a gray T-shirt faded to buttery softness from a drawer, and handed them to her. Chelsea resisted the urge to press the clothes to her face and breathe in the scent of him. “The bathroom isn’t open plan, is it?”
