by Katee Robert
Where the fuck was this coming from? The Samara he’d known up to this point was fierce in her ambition and she’d had no problem taking credit where credit was due. The look on her face, the way she described herself—it was almost defeatist.
Anything he said would be viewed through the lens that she viewed him through—the heir to one of the biggest oil companies in the country. Someone she wasn’t sure she could relate to.
“Come away with me.”
Samara raised her eyebrows. “That’s not a solution.”
“It’s not meant to be a solution. It’s meant to be a reprieve.” He hesitated, thinking fast. “I have to take a day trip to LA. I was going to put it off, but the timing is perfect. At the very least, it will get us both out of here for a bit.” Beckett leaned down. “And if you’re willing, we can make it an overnight trip.”
Samara sighed. “It’s really not a good idea.”
“When has anything between us been a good idea?” He ran his hands down her arms. “If you stay in Houston, what will you be doing for the next twenty-four hours?”
She rolled her eyes. “I’ll be sitting in my apartment, driving myself crazy because I don’t know what’s going on at Kingdom Corp while I’m not there, and probably calling Journey a dozen times and annoying her with unsolicited advice about the proposal.”
There it was again, the flicker of guilt. He didn’t know if it was better or worse that she no longer helmed the bid from Kingdom Corp. I did what I had to do. Strangely enough, that didn’t make him feel like any less of a dick. Saying it was just business didn’t excuse him, either, because it wasn’t just business between him and Samara. It hadn’t been since they slept together the first time.
Samara sighed, drawing him out of his head. “I suppose there’s no legitimate reason to stay.”
He stroked her hair back from her face. “If you don’t want to—”
“No!” She flushed. “I mean, I do. It just feels…I don’t know. Decadent. Forbidden. Like a mistake waiting to happen.”
“How about an agreement—we won’t talk business for the duration of the trip.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I thought this was a business trip.”
“It is, but that just means you’ll need to entertain yourself for an hour or two while I take my meeting. The rest of my time is yours. We’ll go on that date I promised you.” While he trusted that she wasn’t fully under Lydia’s spell any longer, there were some things Beckett couldn’t leave to chance.
Samara looked like she wanted to ask for more details but finally nodded. “I’ll go. I just need to stop by my place and pack an overnight bag.”
“Perfect.” He couldn’t resist kissing her a moment longer. Not when they were so close, and not when they might as well have been holding hands on the edge of a cliff, daring each other to jump. Samara melted against him at that first contact. All he had to do was take two big steps back and he’d hit his couch and they could lose themselves in each other for a few hours.
But there was a plane to catch.
Reluctantly, he gentled his kisses until they were the barest brushing of his lips against Samara’s. Finally, finally, he lifted his head. “If we keep going like this, we’ll never make it to LA.”
“Screw LA.” She kissed his jaw. “They’re all crazy in that city.”
He chuckled. “If ever I forgot you were Texas born and raised…”
She went stiff and stepped away. “Yeah, Texas all the way down to my bones.” Her laugh sounded forced, though.
“Samara.” He waited for her to look at him. Beckett recognized the conflict lurking in her dark eyes. He’d seen it in the mirror often enough over the years. He mentally retraced what he’d said, and it all but confirmed there was some sort of familial conflict. “You can talk to me. If you want.”
She opened her mouth, seemed to reconsider, and shut it. “I’m afraid I’m horribly cliché. Daddy issues.”
He ignored the attempt at a joke. “If there’s anyone in this town who knows daddy issues, it’s me.”
“And Lydia.”
His aunt’s name fell like a stone into a still pool, the ripples washing away the rest of his feel-good from the night before. The ever-present reminder that he didn’t really have a claim on Samara. Not professionally, that was for damn sure. Not even personally, because Lydia might like to dangle Samara in front of him as some kind of distraction, but she’d lose her shit if she thought for a second that Samara actually cared for him. It would be her father choosing Nathaniel over her all over again.
He didn’t like to think what might happen then. If she’d actually gone so far as to kill his father, she wouldn’t hesitate to hurt Samara—especially if it would hurt Beckett in the process.
He bit back the demand for her to quit. Samara wouldn’t take orders from him now any more than she had a few days ago. Her independence and take-no-shit attitude were things that drew him to her, but the closer they circled, the more danger she might be in.
If Lydia had essentially kicked her out of the office for a week, it was already too late. She was tainted by her questions, by her proximity to Beckett. He couldn’t let her be hurt. He had to stop his aunt before it got that far.
Beckett took a measured breath. “If you want to talk—really talk—then I’m here. I can’t promise I won’t poke at it a little because it’s a part of you and I want to know every part of you.”
“For God’s sake.” Samara laughed, a little too high to be natural. “You can’t just say things like that.”
“Coming on too strong.” He grinned and hooked her around the waist, bringing them chest to chest again. “I hate to break it to you, Samara, but I like you. A lot. If you want to tell me to get lost, I’ll respect that, but if you’re still making up your mind, I’m going to seduce the hell out of you in the meantime.”
Her strong brows came together as she frowned. “I already agreed to go to LA with you. No seduction required.”
“I’m not trying to seduce you out of your pants.” He kissed one corner of her mouth and then the other. I’m trying to seduce you out of your heart.
Chapter Thirteen
Samara wasn’t the least bit surprised when Beckett drove them to a private hangar instead of the main airport later that morning. It stood to reason that, since Lydia had a private jet, the other side of the King family would as well. She marveled silently that this was her life—had been for several years now.
Granted, climbing the steps into the plane with Beckett’s presence behind her was a whole lot different from taking a business trip with Lydia or Journey. He hadn’t touched her since he’d talked of seduction. He’d been absorbed in his phone at her place when she showered and packed an overnight bag, and she was pathetically relieved not to have all of his attention focused solely on her.
She liked it too much.
She liked him too much.
All the careful rules she’d used to guide her life were under one grand umbrella of a rule—do not end up like her mother. She loved her mother beyond all others, but it was no secret that a bright star had been dimmed by the damage Samara’s father did when he left. There were other single mothers who had gone back to school, who had pushed through to realize the dreams they’d always had. Maybe a bit late, but what did time matter in the grand scheme of things?
Not her amma.
Amma seemed content enough with life, but Samara couldn’t help seeing what could have been—what should have been. If Devansh Patel hadn’t professed his undying love and then turned around and dropped her like yesterday’s news. If she hadn’t been pregnant with Samara when he did. If, if, if.
“You’re thinking awfully hard over there.”
“It seems to be the day for it.” She stroked a hand down the smooth leather seats. The inside of the plane could have been a posh interior room in some resort. So much money and for what? So the King families didn’t have to fly with the rest of the rabble.
Samara was t
he rabble. She couldn’t afford to forget that.
Beckett took her hand, his thumb absently playing along her knuckles. “I don’t think we’re as different as you like to pretend.”
Oh, this should be good. “How do you figure?”
“We’re both walking middle fingers to our fathers, aren’t we?”
She jerked back, but he kept her hand captive. She felt like he’d flayed her first layer of skin away with a few short words, leaving her one exposed nerve in the process. Words crowded against her lips, harsh and petty and guaranteed to slam the distance back between them before he could see how easily he could hurt her. “How?” Was that hoarse, wrecked thing her voice? Do better. She cleared her throat. “How did you know?”
He kept up that soothing touch, granting her the relative privacy of staring out the window as Houston dropped away beneath the plane. “Like recognizes like. I was never cold enough for my father. After my mother died, he didn’t even mourn. He just systematically erased all evidence of her from our lives—from Thistledown—and he never forgave me for not being willing to do the same.” Beckett shook his head. “When I was in college, I had this epiphany. I realized that the whole purge was his grief taking hold, and while I understand that, I didn’t know if I could forgive him. He had a choice after she died. We both did. We just ended up on different paths that never quite met no matter how hard I tried. So I stopped trying.”
“Then what happened?” The words were dragged from her by a curiosity she couldn’t quell. A recognition. She realized she already knew the answer. “You resolved to be better than he’d ever been—and to do it your way instead of his.”
“Yeah.” Beckett chuckled. “Pissed him off like you wouldn’t believe. We became the immovable object and the unstoppable force. It didn’t matter if we both wanted the same future for Morningstar—we wanted it to come about in different ways. It took all of three months of working in the office together to realize we’d bring the company down if we didn’t get some distance from each other, which is why I took over the overseas areas of the business. It worked out better that way.”
“I’m sorry, Beckett.” She’d said it before, and she suspected she’d say it again more than a few times. Samara wasn’t sure if it was better or worse that he’d recognized that his father was just a broken and angry man instead of some monster without feeling—or if he’d walked her path instead.
He brought her hand to his lips and pressed a slow kiss to her knuckles. To the ring she wore on her right hand. “No reason to be sorry. If he’d been less determined to forge me in a fire of his choosing, we would have had something resembling a normal relationship.” His tone took on a wistful note. “We both loved her. There was no damn reason that I had to be left squirreling away evidence of her existence in that house like a damn smuggler. We should have been able to remember her together—to have a bond because of shared loss.” Beckett shook his head. “But that’s a child’s plea. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
She stared at the seat in front of them. The white leather was stitched together with gold thread, a reminder that Lydia was a King, and had been raised with the same playbook Nathaniel had. There was such a thing as a bad egg, but Samara wasn’t blind enough to her boss’s faults to assume that was the case in this situation.
She very determinedly set thoughts of Lydia aside and focused on the here and now. “I never got the chance to know my father.”
“I’m sorry.”
She pressed her lips together. “Oh, he’s not dead. He lives in Dallas with his wife and three daughters.”
Beckett’s thumb paused before it resumed its path on the back of her hand. “Ah.”
Samara had expected his sympathy to sting, to feel like pity, but there was a deep understanding in that single word. A kinship. It was enough to keep her talking, digging into the past and that soul wound she’d never quite gotten to the other side of despite so many years of trying. “He and my amma met in college. He was handsome and rich and from a prominent Indian family with a long and honorable history. It was love, at least on her side of things.” She glanced down at the ring on her right hand. “Maybe it was even love on his side as well. He proposed—a secret engagement that they didn’t tell either of their families about. But love has never been enough. I don’t know which version of the story is more tragic—that he played my amma and as soon as she got pregnant he lost interest in the game and moved on. Or that he really loved her, but was too weak to stand up to his family when they demanded he break off the engagement.”
“Shit, Samara.”
She kept going because to stop now was to leave the story unfinished. If she didn’t keep talking, she might never start again. “Her family disowned her when they found out she was pregnant. Spurned by the blessed Patel family and pregnant with a bastard child? Unacceptable.” Some days she put serious thought into tracking down her amma’s parents just to prove to them what horrible people they were for leaving their daughter to hang in the wind. Ultimately, though, they didn’t matter any more than her sperm donor did.
She laced her fingers through Beckett’s, not looking at him because even if he understood, she couldn’t risk seeing pity in his eyes. “She gave up her future so that I could have one. She worked her ass off under god-awful conditions to make sure I never went without. This…” She motioned at everything and nothing. “I can’t fail, because if I fail then I’m failing her.”
“And the ring?”
Of course he’d noticed the ring. She stared at it, at the simple gold band and the shiny emerald that she’d always loved as much as she’d hated. “My amma kept the ring he proposed with. She let me take it when I graduated. I think she wanted it to be an apology of sorts, even if it wasn’t my father doing the apologizing. I wear it because it’s a reminder of what’s at stake.”
“Have you ever thought about trying to meet him?”
She shook her head even as her stomach dropped. “No. He hasn’t shown any interest in my life up to this point. Even if I could forgive him for what he did to my amma—and I can’t—then what respect do I have for a man who hasn’t been there for thirty-two years? No.” She shook her head again, more firmly this time. “He’s not worth the time we took for this conversation, let alone the effort it would require to attempt a meeting.”
“Monster fathers and saintly mothers.” He squeezed her hand. “See, I told you we had plenty in common.”
Samara loved him, just a little, in that moment. For dispelling the tension, for taking her messy past without pointing out all the holes in her ambition. For just…being there. If she didn’t think too hard about it, she could lean on this man when the world became too heavy to bear.
They could lean on each other.
Dangerous, tempting thoughts.
For the first time, she didn’t shove them away as soon as they entered her mind. Instead, she turned them over, examining them from every angle. Beckett wasn’t her father—he wasn’t his father, either. Samara was most definitely not a college student with no power of her own. Were they equals in the world’s eyes? No. Definitely not.
But if they were equals—really equals—when they were together, then who cared what anyone else’s opinion was?
“Take me out tonight, Beckett.”
He shifted to face her, still holding her hand. “Anywhere you want to go.”
“I don’t want to pick. Surprise me. A real date.”
His slow grin had her stomach doing a somersault. “Consider it done—on one condition.”
Give him the benefit of the doubt. She took a steadying breath. “Okay. What condition?”
“For the night, we’re not Samara Mallick and Beckett King. It’s you and me as we are—none of the other bullshit.”
It wasn’t as easy as that, but the picture he presented was still so incredibly attractive. She leaned forward and ran a single finger down the center of his chest. “Deal.” She stopped at the top of the band of his slacks. “How much
time left in this flight?”
His gaze went white hot. “Long enough.”
“Good answer.”
Beckett didn’t stop grinning all the way from the airport to the hotel. Every time he’d get himself under control, he’d take in Samara’s swollen lips and the satisfied look in her eye and know he’d put it there. Then he’d start grinning again.
“Get control of yourself.” But she was smiling, too.
The car pulled up to the curb outside the hotel, and Beckett moved quickly to climb out and open the door for Samara. She raised her eyebrows at him, but she didn’t comment. He got their bags and guided her through the doors into the lobby. “I’ll get you set up with the room and then I have to head to my meeting.” He glanced at his watch. Plenty of time.
She looked around as they walked into the main lobby. “Do you usually book five-star hotels for a twenty-four-hour business trip?”
“Fuck no.” He slipped an arm around her waist. “I usually use one of the Morningstar condos.” Beckett kissed her temple. “But this trip isn’t all about business.”
“I see.”
He let her process that while he checked them in. Next stop was the suite. They took the elevator up, and he caught her watching him. “What?”
“Are you trying to impress me?”
He grinned. “Nope. We both know you could book this place as easily as I could.” He leaned down and kissed her bare shoulder. “Want to know a secret?”
“Always.”
“The reason I chose this place specifically is because I love the ocean. It feels different than the Gulf. Wilder. Less contained. The views from this room are amazing, and the last time I decided to take a break from work and spend some time here, I sat on the balcony for hours and watched the tide come in.”
She reached up and touched his face. “A secret for a secret?”
“Always,” he said, echoing her earlier response.
“The ocean scares the shit out of me. All open water does. I could live in a swimming pool, but the second I can’t see the entirety of the body of water I’m in, I’m out of there.”
