by Amelia Wilde
“Business.”
It’s a lie, and we both know it. If not a full lie, then a half-truth. The way his face has frozen tells me that it was more than business. Much more.
The voice comes again. That doesn’t make him a murderer.
I have a sense that I’m up against some boundary, and if I touch it, this idyllic afternoon will come to a grinding halt.
And maybe it’s stupid, maybe it’s naive, maybe it’s even dangerous…but I can’t let it go.
Not yet.
Chapter 22
Ace
The instant Carolyn asks me where I was before I came back to New York, my heart clenches within my chest and my hands and feet go cold.
I don’t want to talk about this.
I have to bite back the urge to get up and leave. It’s almost as strong as the urge to wrap her even more tightly in my arms.
The conversation has already been heading in a direction that makes my heart hammer against my rib cage, even though I’m doing my damn best to stay calm and relaxed in the cocoon of blankets with Carolyn.
Please, I think. Don’t do this now.
“I’m still right here,” I say, arching an eyebrow and throwing myself into the performance of flirting…which turns out to only be half-false.
She swallows.
“I mean, before you were here. Before you…came back to New York City.”
I have a few options. I can choose not to answer. I can choose to do something else with her—to her—right now. I can get up and leave.
Or I can just tell her the truth.
What is it about her that makes me want to tell her the truth more than I want to protect myself? There’s going to be hell to pay for this eventually. Why do I have to start now?
Because if I lie to her in this moment, I’ll never be able to stop myself. It’ll be too fucking easy.
“I was in Italy.”
Her eyes go wide for a split second while she searches my face.
“Italy?”
“Yes.”
I almost can’t believe that she doesn’t know that already, but I didn’t exactly advertise my new address when I left the city two years ago. Back then, I had no idea I was going to end up in Italy with Elisa. I had no idea what was going to happen to me—to both of us—before I returned to the city.
Carolyn swallows hard. “Why were you there?”
Maybe she does know more than she’s letting on. Maybe she’s digging to see if I have a wife back in Italy that she doesn’t know about. Maybe, like me, she’s been burned before.
But she doesn’t say.
“Business.”
The word comes out with a tone that’s far less convincing than I hoped it’d be, and Carolyn looks away, toward the massive headboard of my bed. When her eyes meet mine again, she’s got a little smile on her face that almost—almost—makes me forget everything we’ve just talked about.
“I’m asking way too many questions.”
“I agree with that.”
Carolyn sways her hips underneath my arm, and the movement sends a shock of pleasure straight to my spine, my mind blanking out. Damn. Does it matter if she’s prying a little? Really, in the long run, do I give the slightest fuck if I can keep my hands on her for as long as she’ll let me?
Not today it doesn’t.
On the next sway under the covers, I slide my hand lower, between her legs.
She’s already wet.
We don’t come out from under the covers for another hour.
Carolyn laughs over her plate of sushi, fork halfway between her plate and her lips. “Stop. That can’t be true.”
“Afterward, my entire torso was red. It looked like I’d been slapped by that guy from Harry Potter.”
“Hagrid? The half-giant?” she says, her voice rising with every word. “Ace Kingsley, I would never have imagined you to be the Harry Potter type.”
“I’m not.” I shrug, then take another sip of miso soup. It’s fucking delicious, and I’m starving after what was essentially an entire day with Carolyn in bed.
When we emerged from the bed, the sheets a complete wreck, she ran naked into the master bathroom and turned on the shower. That evolved from a quick rinse to very nearly another round. I had her wrists pinned against the marble tiling on the wall, hot water rushing over my back and my lips pressed hard against hers, but she turned her head to the side, gasping, a huge smile on her face.
“I want to. But I can’t.”
“You can’t?”
I pressed my lips against the smooth, wet skin of her neck.
“You—oh, my God, Ace,” she groaned. “If we—” She could hardly get the words out, and it was so hot I wanted to turn her around and take her right there. “If we do this again, I’ll be wrecked for a week.”
I pulled back, leaving her with a wicked grin.
She stuck her tongue out at me and soaped up her unbelievable body, rinsed off, then reached for one of the towels on the hooks next to the shower.
“I’m starving.”
“I’m starving for you.”
She eyed my cock, standing straight out from my body under the jets of water, and gave me that same wicked smile right back. “I can see that. But I’m really hungry.”
“Sushi?”
“Is that becoming a theme?”
Now I’m looking across the table at her in some hole-in-the-wall place with impeccable service three blocks away from our building. How did we ever start talking about the time I belly-flopped into the pool in front of every girl in the ninth grade? How did she draw that out of me? I’m used to being a little cold, a little aloof, when I’m out with women. All except Elisa.
When her name comes to mind I still feel it—that jagged pain, the wrenching worry—but when Carolyn is in front of me, it’s dull, distant.
Am I using her so that it doesn’t hurt?
Or am I really falling for her?
In the end, will it matter?
“Then how do you know about the giant in Harry Potter?”
“I saw the movies.”
“You watched the movies?” She stares at me, open-mouthed.
“In Italy.”
“Oh,” she says, shaking her head slightly as if I’ve just told a joke. “You would do that.”
“Yes.”
Good save. I can tell she doesn’t want to steer the conversation in that direction.
“My turn. One time, I was at the pool with every guy worth knowing in my college classes and all of my girlfriends, and I did an incredible dive off the diving board.”
“This isn’t like my story.”
“No. Because at the end, my top came off.”
She’s so fucking graceful.
I never want her to leave.
Chapter 23
Carolyn
It’s easy to put off the rumors during the weekend, with Ace as the sexiest distraction known to mankind, but when I wake up on Monday morning, I know I’ve waited as long as I can.
Rainflower Blue is still buzzing with it, the visitor count humming, climbing by the second. I thought I’d been fairly careful about letting it slip to certain individuals through various channels, but people must be talking because there are new requests for memberships coming in every hour—and nobody is balking at the cost.
Of course, in addition to ad revenue, I implemented a membership fee almost as soon as I started the website. There was a small group of users I allowed in for testing, and when it became clear there was a hunger for this kind of site—secure, secluded, and secret—I knew it was going to need more than password protection to keep out random gossip hunters and the press. And that was going to cost people money.
The fee for joining Rainflower Blue is a thousand dollars a month, which is part of the reason I’ve never been forthcoming about the fact that I own the site. With over a hundred regular members and more coming to the site every day…well, you get the idea.
While I do profit quite a bit from t
he ad revenue and kickbacks from retailers who I’ve partnered with to advertise on the site, most of the membership fees go toward cybersecurity.
I have two different firms constantly going over the forum with a fine-toothed comb, looking for any weak access points and beefing up the encryption every time there’s a new advance in technology, which seems to happen about every three days. Twice a year, I have them compete against each other to find any hidden backdoors that people might use for nefarious purposes. So far, one has been found, and ever since then the site has been locked up tighter than Fort Knox.
I call in to the boutique. I’ve been running Rainflower Blue for long enough to know that the rumors about Ace won’t settle down until new information comes out. If I can prove he didn’t do it—didn’t murder his wife….Jesus, that sounds so absurd, after the weekend we’ve had—and issue a Magnolia confirmation, then all this will die out, and I won’t feel so damn guilty about sleeping with him.
My heart flutters in my chest.
He’s not upstairs right now, at nine-thirty in the morning. He told me last night that he’s doing some work at his father’s firm—advising someone, or some department—so he had to be in the office today.
“We can’t just stay in bed all day,” he’d said, grey eyes shining with possibility.
I bit my lip. “We could stay in bed all night.”
That’s exactly what we did.
But this morning at seven, while he was in the shower, I crept out, leaving him a note on his bedside table.
Work beckons… ~C
I had every intention of going into the boutique and putting in my regular hours there, but in the elevator I took a minute to check my phone.
Even more alerts.
Even more updates.
People are clamoring for information, and I’m the trusted source.
So instead I’m at my desk, a blank browser window open in front of me, getting ready to do as much of a background check as possible on the man I’m in love with.
The moment the thought crosses my mind, my cheeks go dark and my heart starts to race.
Oh, my God…I’m in love with him.
Why is this hitting me so hard right now, after we spent all weekend wrapped in each other’s arms? After he made me laugh? After he started to seem like a different version of himself, not nearly so defensive? I can’t imagine this version of Ace dismissing me the morning after like some prickly asshole.
I put a hand to my chest.
Shit.
I can’t help how I feel. I can’t stop it, even though I know it grew out of an instant obsession with his body. Now that I’ve spent a solid three days with him, getting to know him, I can feel our rightness for one another thrumming underneath my skin.
My hands tremble above the keyboard, a cold flush of fear trickling down my spine.
What if I find out something about him that I don’t like during this search?
What if I find out that he is a cold-blooded murderer?
Would it be worse to find out that he was a passionate murderer, one who killed in a jealous rage?
Is that what happened to his wife?
Who was she, anyway?
“Stop it, Carolyn.” I give myself the command firmly, in a tone that broaches no argument.
First things first: I need to confirm that he was in Italy. There’s no point in getting ahead of myself with this. If there’s anything I’ve learned from owning a website like Rainflower Blue, it’s that most rumors have some element of falsehood. This one, for all I know, could be totally untrue.
I try a few cursory searches, but they reveal nothing but press releases from his company, which apparently he started with the help of his father when he gained access to his trust fund. From what I can tell, he doesn’t run the day-to-day operations, just sits on the Board of Directors, so there’s not much to run down there.
Finally, I come across the first solid piece of evidence that Ace was, in fact, in Italy, and when I see it, my heart drops into my stomach.
It’s a photograph of him, his arm wrapped around a petite blonde woman—even behind her dark glasses, she’s stunning—in front of the Colosseum. It’s from an odd Italian paper that seems to just have been digitized, and lists him as “American tourist Ace K and his wife.”
So he was in Italy—at least he was eight months ago when the photograph was taken.
I close the monitor and stand up, running my hands through my hair. I feel giddy, anxious, like I need a walk. I’ll go get a bagel from the deli down the street.
And even though my heart pounds—the chase is on, and I’m going to get some information about this, even if I don’t like it—I can’t stop myself from smiling.
I love Ace Kingsley.
I do.
Chapter 24
Ace
I can’t stop thinking about her, even when I’m supposed to be advising the department heads at my father’s company on streamlining employee retention practices. The figures on the sheets in front of me keep slipping away from my attention.
“Mr. Kingsley?”
“Yes?” The man who’s sitting to my right—his name completely escapes me—looks at me through thick, round glasses, his face pink, like he’s doing something slightly embarrassing.
Oh, right. I’ve been staring at this sheet of paper for God knows how long, and everyone in this meeting is waiting on me to say….
What the fuck was I talking about?
“I’m sorry, Mr.—”
“Mr. Howard. Joe Howard,” he says, then clears his throat. “You were suggesting some alternative forms of compensation to add to our repertoire.”
“Right. Of course. Thank you, Mr. Howard.” I don’t smile, but I give him a nod. His shoulders relax. “I have a memo here that describes the relative success of flexible vacation time and paid travel opportunities in some of the other divisions. You should all have copies of the emails in your inboxes.”
I stand up, and the rest of the people sitting around the massive meeting room table follow suit. “I’ll be available for further discussion, if necessary.”
A chorus of “Thank you, Mr. Kingsley” rings out around the table, and I slide the leather portfolio carrying my paperwork off the table and leave the room.
I try to keep my stride in check as I head back to my corner office. I want to get back to my phone, to send Carolyn a dirty message, and start making plans for this weekend.
When I came out of the shower this morning, she was gone, a little note on my bedside table.
Work beckons… ~C
In a way. In another way, work is screaming at me to remember that my net worth is well over a billion dollars, and that if I don’t show up at the office, nobody will be the worse for it.
Of course, my father did pull some strings to put me in this temporary time-suck, so I’m not about to figuratively tell him to fuck off, even if Carolyn is the one woman in the world I want to spend all day in bed with. Possibly ever.
It’s a dangerous thought, but the majority of my mind doesn’t seem to care. The majority of my mind wants to toy with the possibilities, wants to spend every moment without her thinking about what she might be doing, daydreaming about being with her again, fantasizing about making her laugh…and making her do so much more.
She probably won’t answer. She’s probably working in that little boutique of hers—she hasn’t invited me to come see it yet, but I hunted around online until I found out where it was and walked by last week just to see where she spends her days—and if I know anything about Carolyn, it’s that she’ll single-mindedly focus on work until the work is done.
Just like she’s been focused on getting me out of the Swan and back to my apartment.
So far, we’re one of two success-wise. I want to erase that first disastrous night together from her memory completely, and I can only do that if every weekend from now on is a fucking stellar one.
I’m three doors down from the office when my fathe
r comes out of one of the presidents’ offices at high speed, looking over his shoulder to say one last thing.
“Oh, and Schell, don’t even think about—shit!”
I skid to a stop, my hand on his shoulder, just in time to keep from running him down.
“Son!” he says, laughing, and claps his hand against my shoulder. “Where the hell are you going at such a high speed? Don’t tell me you’ve discovered a passion for advising.”
“Maybe I have,” I say, sticking my hands into my pockets. “Sorry about that.”
My father looks just like me, only he’s twenty-five years older and a silver fox. His smile is as genuine as they come. At least he doesn’t think I’m a killer. Although it’s possible he hasn’t heard anything out of Italy either. If his board members haven’t brought it up, he likely doesn’t care. My father’s business is his life. I rank pretty high up there, but the main thing is that I don’t hurt the business. I don’t resent him for that, but my throat tightens. I hope this shit somehow stays in Italy. I hope it doesn’t get to New York. I don’t want to put that on his plate.
It’s not true, of course. Only one thing about that situation is true. But I would feel like shit if it damaged his enterprise in any way. Me? I can recover. My investments are rock solid. But he’s been known to take a risk with the stock market here and there, and….
I open my mouth to say something, but there’s nothing I can say right now—not coherently, at least. My marriage to Elisa wasn’t a family celebration. It was more a matter of necessity, and now that she’s gone, I don’t want to give my father the punch to the gut of knowing that he wasn’t at my wedding, even if it was just a—
He throws his arm around my shoulders and turns me back in the direction I came from. “Let’s get the hell out of here, son,” he says jovially.
“Wait—what? I don’t have—” I don’t have anything, aside from my wallet. My phone is locked in my desk. I want to send Carolyn a message so badly I can practically feel it underneath my fingers.
“Your phone? Leave it! We’re going to lunch.”
