Under Wraps

by Louisa Keller

  “Yeah,” he murmured. “You’re not wrong.”

  “So,” I said, “as someone who has spent years processing trauma, I’m gonna recommend that you look closely at where you’re channeling that anger. Your new stepbrothers might seem like a threat, but I really don’t think they’re going to cause your mom to have another heart attack. And taking out your shit on them doesn’t help anyone.”

  We had reached Dom’s room, and he began rooting around in his suitcase.

  “Okay, fine,” he said, tossing bottles of hair product onto the floor. “I’ll try not to be so antagonistic or whatever.”

  “Good. What are you looking for?”

  “My phone charger.”

  “Dude, I don’t need your phone charger.”

  “You don’t?”

  I let out a bark of laughter.

  “Nah, bro. I just said that to get you away from Beauregard.”

  Dom smiled at that, sitting cross-legged and leaning back against the bed.

  “You’re a good friend,” he said seriously.

  “You’re damn right I am.”

  “Want to go into town, get away from the family for a bit?”

  I nodded.

  “Let’s go.”

  Flashback

  I should have been able to save my family.

  I was a strong swimmer, a lifeguard, trained to keep people from drowning.

  If I had been stronger, less focused on my own injuries, I could have swum to them, held them up, kept them afloat.

  My parents died with their lungs full of water. And I had the ability to save them, if only I had been quick enough.

  Eventually, between the healing power of time and thousands of dollars’ worth of therapy, I was able to see the logical truth: a man with a fractured clavicle and a shattered ankle couldn’t have kept two other people above water.

  But, god.

  I always felt like maybe I could’ve done it if I’d just been determined enough.

  The guilt ebbed and flowed, eventually dissipating to a low-level hum in the background.

  I resumed swimming in my free time, determined to be ready if I ever had another chance to save a person in the water. My body healed, and it thrived in the water.

  Water, impossibly, became my respite from everything else. It had taken so much from me, but I plunged into it every day, facing my fear. I came to love it again, over time. Swimming soothed me, made me feel strong and whole, powerful and driven.

  And somehow, it washed away the shame and guilt, allowed me to become whole again.

  10

  Ainsley

  That night I lay awake in my unfamiliar bed, wishing that Carson was beside me. I yearned for him, the heat of his body, the slide of his lips against mine, the soothing cadence of his voice. I had spent the majority of my adult life sleeping alone, and never once had it bothered me. Even in the aftermath of my relationship with Callie, I was relieved to have the bed to myself again. But there in Abshire Manor, separated by only a series of steps and doors, I felt the absence of Carson acutely.

  Sighing, I closed my eyes and slipped my hand into my boxer-briefs. I imagined Carson’s beautiful body on display for me as it had been in the cavern, every curve and sharp edge ethereally beautiful. My hand tightened around my hardening cock, and I let out a breathy little sigh. It had been a long time since I had indulged myself this way, and it was like breathing out after holding my breath for a long period of time. Relief and joy pulsed through my veins, my body reacquainting itself with carnal pleasure.

  I imagined Carson kissing me, those clever hands carding through my hair and tugging just hard enough to draw a moan from my lips. Licking into my mouth, biting at my lips, pressing open-mouthed kisses against my throat…he was incandescent in my mind. I shoved my underwear down, wrapping my hand fully around myself and beginning to jack my cock at a steady pace.

  Carson, Carson, Carson…

  My mind faltered as I tried to figure out what two men would do together. The possibilities were endless, that I knew, but the specifics failed me. This was brand new territory, after all. I was utterly unprepared for the reality of a physical relationship with another man.

  Relax, I told myself sternly. You know what felt good with Callie. Carson can do most of those things too.

  I wanted him to kiss me everywhere, trail his lips and tongue across every single inch of my skin. I wanted his hand wrapped around my cock instead of my own. I wanted to fuck into his mouth, feel the intimacy of his lips around me, the warmth of being inside of him. I wanted to rut against him, spill across his skin and admire the hot brand of my desire coating him.

  My hand sped up, and I let out a long moan of pleasure. I was leaking already, my body out of control, and I scrambled to get my feet under me so that I could thrust up into my tight fist. Eyes clamped shut and mouth falling open, I was in the throes of ecstasy. Just the thought of Carson was enough to have me nearing the edge, my stamina absolutely shot, and I felt a hot rush of shame at the realization. I was a grown man for god’s sake, a forty-five-year-old billionaire philanthropist—and here I was fighting not to come after just a couple of minutes. I was gone over Carson.

  I imagined him there with me, smiling encouragingly. It’s okay, Ainsley, he would whisper in my ear, let it all go for me.

  My orgasm was building at an alarming pace, whiting out my vision and making every muscle in my body clench. There was a split second where everything felt impossibly clear, and then I was crashing over the edge, coming spectacularly all over myself.

  It took a while to surface from the depths of my orgasm, and when I did I found myself alone and covered in my own spunk. More than that, I was lonely. I wanted Carson even more than I had before coming, if that was possible, and I ached when I remembered that he was asleep across the house, tucked into his own bed for the night. I wanted to jump out of bed and go find him, climb into his bed and tell him what I had just done, how I had thought of him the entire time, come with his name on my lips and his face in my head.

  But that was not an option, so instead I cleaned myself up with the t-shirt I had worn all day, and fell asleep alone in my empty bed.

  “Beau, come jogging with me,” I said, sticking my head into Beau’s room.

  He was sitting in bed, reading the New York Times on his iPad. It was part of his morning ritual, reading the morning’s headlines in bed with his reading glasses perched on his nose. He had started the tradition when we were in high school, and never given it up. More often than not, he gave me a run-down on anything interesting, sparing me from having to read the news when I could be working.

  “Jogging, huh?” Beau scrunched up his nose. “I’m not falling for that again. You run a six-minute mile on your slow days.”

  I heaved a sigh, crossing my arms. “I will knock it down to seven minutes just for the pleasure of your company.”

  “Christ,” said Beau, shaking his head and smiling. “How generous of you.”

  “Please, Beau. If you refuse to come along, I will place the blame entirely on you when I get lost and perish in the Oregon wilderness.”

  That had him rolling his eyes, snorting out a laugh, and pushing back the covers. “Don’t be so dramatic, Ainsley. You have GPS on your phone and your watch.”

  “Semantics,” I said dismissively, waving his words away.

  “Fine, fine,” he groused, “I’ll come. But we’re having a conversation, I’m not going on a jog just to watch you outpace me with your headphones in.”

  “Deal,” I said, tossing him his running shoes.

  I might not have been so quick to agree if I had known that he would want to talk about Alistair. The moment we were out on the road, he started in on a speech he had clearly been practicing.

  “I want you to do something alone with Dad while we’re here,” Beau said cheerfully, as if he were not dropping a huge bombshell on me.

  “Excuse me?” I said coldly.

  “You heard me,” Beau
replied.

  “Why on earth would I spend time alone with Alistair?”

  “He’s our dad, Ainsley,” Beau pointed out. “And he’s making an effort.”

  I snorted derisively. “It is far too little too late. If he wanted a relationship with me, he should have started when I was a child.”

  Beau shook his head. “Don’t you think he deserves the chance to grow as a person?”

  “No,” I said stubbornly. “I do not.”

  “Well, I’m asking you to consider giving him a chance to open up to you. Maybe you shouldn’t think of it as him deserving another chance—you deserve some peace. You’ve been angry for your entire life. Isn’t it time to cut yourself a break, see if you can move past being mad all the time?”

  I shot him a dirty look, which he pointedly ignored. “My anger or lack thereof is none of your business.”

  “I’m your brother, your well-being is my business,” he argued.

  “My well-being? Dear lord, Beau, you make it sound like I am suffering over this.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  That pulled me up short. Could he be right—was I suffering? I had never thought of it that way, but once he said it out loud, it resonated. So much of my energy went into convincing myself that Alistair did not deserve real estate in my thoughts, but if I was brutally honest with myself, I thought of him often and it was painful. His abandonment had shaped my entire life, every choice I had ever made. I hated to admit it, to acknowledge that he had any influence over me, but that was the cold hard truth.

  “How will spending time alone with him fix this?” I asked, neatly avoiding Beau’s question.

  “If you make an effort, that’s the first step in establishing a healthy relationship with him,” Beau said.

  “And what if I have no interest in a healthy relationship with Alistair?”

  Beau looked me dead in the eye as he said, “Then you will continue to spend your days suffering.”

  “Would you kindly fuck off?” I shot back. “I am perfectly capable of determining what is best for me.”

  “Whatever you say,” he replied, backing off so quickly that I could only assume he considered himself victorious. And, though I hated to admit it, he was. I saw his point, and I grudgingly agreed with it…now I just needed to convince myself to follow his advice.

  “We’re kicking up the pace,” I told him stiffly, “because you are such a pain in my ass.”

  Smirking, he flipped me off. “I knew you were going to make me sprint.”

  “Only for nine more miles.”

  “You really will be the death of me, Ainsley.”

  Flashback

  When doctors use plates and screws to fix your broken body, it changes things for you.

  There’s the residual pain, of course, that stems from the injuries. But more than that, you are saddled with an unexpected reminder of the accident that comes up at bizarre moments.

  I didn’t think twice the first time I went through airport security after my surgeries.

  It wasn’t until I was pulled aside by a pair of burly TSA agents that I remembered…as far as they knew, I had weapons strapped to my shoulder and ankle.

  I opened my mouth to explain, to tell them what was setting off their metal detectors, but all at once I was ambushed by memories of that day.

  The technicolor sky.

  The freezing slap of the water.

  The impossibly red blood oozing from my shoulder where the bone was protruding.

  The death of my parents.

  I couldn’t say a word, not a single goddamn word. And as they patted me down, glaring suspiciously the entire time, I watched the worst moments of my life on repeat, chasing each other around my mind like a pack of feral dogs.

  11

  Carson

  “Hey, Ainsley, what’re you up to?”

  I was leaning against the doorframe, peering into Ainsley’s room where he was reading on the bed.

  He looked positively delicious in a pair of black jeans and a fitted white button-down with the top few buttons undone. I wanted to lick the vee of skin that was peeking out, run my tongue up his throat and suck a mark into the place where his pulse was pounding away.

  Head out of the gutter, Carson, I chided myself.

  Ainsley dogeared his page and set the book aside, smiling sweetly up at me. I took a step into the room, drawn to him like a moth to a flame.

  “I was just rereading an old favorite,” he said warmly.

  Hoping I wasn’t being too forward, I sat down on the edge of the bed and picked up the battered little paperback.

  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

  “Oh god, I love this play,” I said, brandishing it at him.

  “I love it as well,” he said, reaching out a hand to stroke my arm. Sparks seemed to emanate from the spot where our bodies met.

  “Dom actually played Rosencrantz back in college. It was pretty epic.”

  “I can only imagine,” Ainsley said, his eyes bright. “Were you in the production as well?”

  “I was the stage manager, actually.”

  “So, you have an interest in theater.”

  I loved the feeling of his eyes on me, his attention like a lovely beam of light.

  “Not so much anymore,” I said, feeling dazed. “It was fun, but not something I wanted to pursue professionally.”

  “It is an entirely different beast when your income depends on it,” he agreed. “I take the Foundation’s donors to Broadway shows every quarter. It is one of my favorite parts of my job.”

  “That sounds amazing. Maybe you can take me to a show next time I fly out to visit Sydney.”

  Or just to visit you, I thought wistfully.

  “It would be my pleasure,” Ainsley said, smiling.

  I wanted to push him onto his back and straddle him, ravish him right there where anyone could walk in on us. But of course, that would be a bad idea. The last thing this clusterfuck of a family vacation needed was a public outing and a sex scandal.

  “How would you feel about getting a drink in town?” I asked, dragging my mind back to the matter at hand.

  “With you? I feel marvelous about it.”

  “Well, uh…”

  He quirked one eyebrow, endlessly elegant and devastatingly handsome.

  “What is it, Carson?”

  I swallowed thickly, not sure how this was going to go over.

  “Do you think maybe…you’d be up for getting a drink with Dom and I? Maybe Beauregard could come too?”

  Ainsley sighed heavily, looking down at our hands as he threaded his fingers through mine.

  “That sounds like a recipe for disaster.”

  “Oh, don’t be a wimp,” I goaded him, smiling brightly. “You’re afraid of Dom? He’s like half your size.”

  “And has the Napoleon syndrome to go with his stature.”

  “Watch your mouth, I’m short too,” I flung back.

  “True,” Ainsley said, laughing.

  “Plus, Napoleon wasn’t even short, they used a different system of measurement back then,” I added, scooting in closer so that my hip was pressed against him.

  “Dear god, are you serious? Shows what I know about French history.”

  “He was, like, five-seven, which was average for French men at the time.”

  “Well, regardless of Napoleon’s stature, somehow I like the fact that you’re shorter than me,” Ainsley said slyly.

  My cheeks heated as I realized what he was implying.

  Fuck, this felt good.

  Flirting and teasing each other, teetering on the edge of anticipation…and he was happy, relaxed even. I had done that. He was comfortable because I had coaxed him out of his shell, shown that I was worthy of his trust.

  God, I wanted him.

  “Well, maybe if you do me this solid, I’ll let you take advantage of our height difference,” I murmured, leaning in close enough to feel his lips brushing mine as he replied.

 
“Oh really?”

  “Yep,” I said, before pulling him into a kiss.

  It was chaste at first, a sweet brush of lips, something that could’ve been fleeting.

  But then he sighed into my mouth, opening to me, and I couldn’t tear myself away. I kissed him eagerly, moaning as the hot flame of his tongue brushed against mine.

  Kissing Ainsley wasn’t like anything I had ever experienced before. There was this intensity about him, vibrating through his entire body, and it made me feel wild.

  Like I was burning up with our mingled desire.

  His hands came up to grip my shoulders, and for one stomach-dropping moment I thought he was going to push me away. But no—he was dragging me in, clutching me to him, whining into the kiss and setting my blood on fire.

  I wanted everything Ainsley had to offer—every inch of skin, every thought in that quicksilver mind, every moment of his time.

  Tipping my body forward, I sent us crashing down onto the bed with Ainsley flat on his back and his legs wrapped around my hips. I could feel his hard cock straining against his sinfully tight jeans.

  Holy shit.

  Holy motherfucking shit.

  This level of desire was lightyears beyond anything I had ever even imagined feeling.

  “Ainsley,” I rasped out, thrusting against him.

  It was futile.

  There were too many layers of clothing between our bodies, too many reasons we shouldn’t be doing this in Abshire Manor…

  With a herculean effort, I wrenched myself away from Ainsley.

  Sitting back on my heels, panting, I surveyed the mess I had made of him.

  I must’ve gotten my hands into his hair without noticing, because he had an epic case of sex hair. His lips were flushed and swollen from kissing, and his eyes were glazed.