by Amelia Wilde
It’s the big show…you sure you want to miss it?
The big show, sure. Some famous pop singer was slated to be at the Swan on Friday night, and whenever that happens, the crowd surges and grows. People end up inviting all of their friends to the exclusive performances to convince them they’re somebody important, I guess.
Of course, the moment Eli started texting, the name of the singer completely escaped my mind. As if it would make much difference to me.
Fine. But only because you’re so charming.
What else was I going to do, anyway? Sit at home, picturing Ace’s every movement two floors above me while I ate takeout? Again.
My friends greet me with a chorus of hellos, and Jess pops up from her seat next to Alec and moves over to one of the open seats beside me.
“You look hot,” she says, her eyes sliding down the pink dress I borrowed from the boutique. Her grin is contagious. “Are you going to find somebody new and sexy to take home with you tonight?”
“No,” I hold my hands up in the air. “No way. Last time was a disaster.”
“Was it?” She cuts her eyes to the side, and boom, my heart is in my throat.
There’s Ace, walking across the room through the crowded tables, his suit accentuating the narrow line of his waist and the broad expanse of his muscled shoulders. He walks like a damn jungle cat, sensuous and sinuous and strong, and my mouth literally waters.
“He did send me sushi,” I whisper.
“What?”
“I’ll tell you later.” Ace is now even with the table.
“Kingsley!” Eli cries from the opposite side of the table. “Sit down, man. The performance is about to start.”
It’s true—on the raised stage behind the dance floor, men dressed in tight black outfits are rushing from side to side, setting up sound equipment and running tests on the equipment.
It all fades blindly into the background against the beating of my heart.
Ace is so close to me that I could reach out right now and touch his tailored Italian suit. I could reach out right now and undo the buttons of his jacket, slip it off his shoulders, and then do the same with his shirt, and run my hands over the bare skin of his chest, his washboard abs.
My shoulders tense. Where is he going to sit?
Ace puts his hands into his pockets and gives a nod to everyone around the table, then saunters around to the empty seats on the other side, dropping into one like he was born to be there.
My heart shrinks two sizes, and I turn back to Jess, trying to force my face into an expression that doesn’t look like disappointment.
“Sushi?” she says in a low voice, her eyes sparkling.
Ace is already engaged in a boisterous conversation with Jax Hunter. “He had sushi delivered to my place on Wednesday. I ran into him on the elevator and….”
“Did you hook up in the elevator?” Jess squeals, and I shush her.
“Oh, my God, Jess, no.”
“And he sent you food?”
“It was from Sasabune.”
“You love that place.”
“I know.” But how did Ace guess?
“What the hell is he doing now?” Jess says, her forehead wrinkling.
“He’s making it pretty clear that he doesn’t want to associate with me in public.”
“You sure about that?”
I glance across toward Ace’s seat and a jolt of pure heat streaks through me, right to my core. He’s talking to Jax, but his gray eyes are locked on me. When our eyes meet, a shiver runs down my spine.
Shit.
My resolve not to play games with him comes back to me, so I straighten my back and edge my shoulders back. Maybe what he’s doing is putting the ball in my court. I’m the one in charge of how this evening plays out.
My first move?
A slow, wicked grin, my eyes locked on his.
His mouth twitches into a tight-lipped smile, and then he looks away, toward Eli, who has joined in the conversation with a raunchy joke.
Game on.
The conversation swirls around us, but I’m aware of his every movement, so it comes as no surprise when he stands up when a redhead approaches the table in the middle of the concert—the music is loud and poppy and the beat throbs in my veins—to whisper in Ace’s ear. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but my throat goes dry, and then he’s standing up, offering his arm to her and heading toward the dance floor without a backward glance.
Heat rises to my cheeks, and for a moment all I can do is fumble with the napkin in my lap. Then I snatch up my wine and take two long sips of it.
A nudge at my side catches my attention. “What are you waiting for?” Jess says into my ear.
“Nothing,” I say, putting the wine glass down and standing up.
Ace and the redhead are in the middle of the dance floor, the music blasting out over us as the pop star shimmies across the stage.
I’m almost on top of them when she leans in to say something. The music is loud, so she’s shouting, and I hear, “—what you did to her. Just tell me.”
He turns his face away from her and our eyes meet, and then I’m taking three more confident steps toward him, putting my hand on his arm. “Excuse me,” I say to the redhead. “I’m stepping in for this dance.”
Her mouth drops open, but no words come out. Is she going to scream at me? Cause a scene? Do I care?
No.
The music throbs in my ears.
Then she whirls around and disappears into the crowd and I’m left alone with Ace.
Chapter Eighteen
Ace
It takes everything I have to get up from the table and walk away from Carolyn with the busty redhead who came over to steal me away. It’s hard to hear the whispers about me over the music of the pop-star-of-the-moment, but as I suspected, it’s making me even more irresistible to the women at the Swan tonight. The redhead is the first one to get up the courage to break into the small circle around our table.
I don’t catch her name. It’s not important. The woman I really want to be walking away with is still sitting at the table, watching me leave. I can feel her eyes boring into my back.
Ever since that smile, my skin has been on fire with the need to touch her. My hands ache to slide over the curves of her waist and pull her into me until the length of her is pressed against me. The heat between us is electric, taut, and I feel it every time she glances across the table at me.
But I’m not going to be the one to make the first move. Not tonight.
I’ve left the door open.
She’ll come to me, if that’s what she wants.
Although if she waits much long, I don’t think I’ll be able to resist taking what I want.
We haven’t been dancing for two minutes when the redhead leans in and says something I can’t hear.
“Excuse me?”
“Did you really kill your wife?”
The smile plastered across her face, her glittering eyes, sends a cold spike of adrenaline down to the tips of my fingers. Somehow, this woman learned what the police in Italy suspected. The rumors have finally reached critical mass among world rumor circles.
“No.”
“Are you sure?” she asks, nuzzling up to me.
Then, “Listen, you’re sexy as hell,” she says, rolling her hips against mine. I can’t seem to get a sense of the beat—the music has turned into a kind of hellish noise—but my legs won’t work. I have to get away from this bitch, but I can’t. “I can’t blame you for wanting to be free. But we’re all wondering what you did to her. Just tell me.”
I’m looking for an escape—any escape—and when I turn my head, I’m looking at a fucking angel. Carolyn is two feet away from us and closing in fast, and before the redhead can say another word, Carolyn’s hand is on my arm and she’s glaring into the other woman’s eyes. “Excuse me,” she shouts over the music. “I’m stepping in for this dance.”
The redhead’s jaw drops and her eyes c
ut from Carolyn to me, then back to Carolyn, who straightens her shoulders.
I expect an argument, get ready to take Carolyn’s arm and lead her off the dance floor, out the side exit and take her…anywhere. Anywhere, as long as I’m next to her.
But the redhead spins on her heel and rushes off through the crowd without another word.
Carolyn turns toward me, her eyes sparkling. “I don’t think so,” she shouts.
I shake my head. What is she talking about?
“You’re not going to look at me like that and then go dance with another woman. Not a chance.”
I laugh out loud. For the first time in my life, I’m standing on the dance floor with a woman who shares my attitude about getting what I want. “Prove it.”
In answer, Carolyn puts her hands on my shoulders, then starts to move with the music, her hips swaying, her dress giving me a tantalizing hint of what’s underneath. When she turns around, the curve of her ass brushing against the front of my pants, moving with the beat, I almost ask her to marry me right then.
A painful stab of regret stops the words at my lips. If I’m going to do this, I’m going to do it fucking right. My way. And that’s going to involve some planning, if the news is already spreading through New York City. Carolyn could find out from anyone.
The more she dances, the less I can play it cool. By the time she takes my hand in hers and tugs me away from the dance floor and back toward the table, I’m on fire with need for her. The sight of her pink cheeks, flushed from the dancing and flirting, just about pushes me over the edge.
I resist the instinct to wrap my arm around her shoulders and kiss her temple. Despite the heat between us while we were dancing, I’m not going to lose control in front of everyone else at the table. Let them think what they damn well please.
I’m busy preparing myself to sit back down with all of Carolyn’s friends and order another round of drinks when she stops dead in her tracks, halfway between the dance floor and the table.
“Let’s get out of here.”
My heart flips over, and I give her my most charming smile. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”
Carolyn’s eyes are huge and dark, and her mouth is set. “Yes.”
She spins around, putting her arm through mine, and takes us directly back through the dance floor, leading me through the crowd with precision and focus. Halfway to the stage, she takes a hard right, sliding between couples that are so into the music they barely notice us. I can’t wipe the damn smile off my face. We’re ghosting out of this party, and I fucking love it.
I reach for my phone and almost drop it when Carolyn picks up speed as we leave the dance floor. The text I send Noah is a garbled mess, but I’m sure as hell not going to stop her right now so that I can send a perfect message to my driver.
Carolyn takes another turn into a narrower hallway, me close behind, nearly blinded by the sight of her ass swaying underneath that dress, and then she’s pushing a door open with all the force she can muster. We burst out onto the sidewalk right as Noah pulls up in the Bentley. Nobody’s lurking out here, and it’s a clear path to my car.
We’re almost home free.
Chapter Nineteen
Carolyn
We’re outside my building—our building, now—when my phone starts buzzing and won’t stop.
Ace has been kissing slowly down my neck the entire time we’ve been driving and his lips on my skin are so hot and sensual that it makes my entire body hum with electricity, trembling even though his arms are wrapped relatively chastely around my waist. I’m soaked anyway and my knees keep inching apart, subtly begging for him to fuck me.
“Somebody wants you,” he murmurs into the hollow of my shoulder.
I give a sultry laugh. “Then let me out so we can go inside.”
“No—somebody really wants your attention,” he says, and I realize that my phone is vibrating nonstop in my purse.
I want to reach inside and silence it without even looking at it, but something pricks at the back of my neck. When Ace leans over to open the door and step outside, I take my phone out.
The screen is crowded with notifications, and they’re all from Rainflower Blue.
I normally don’t have updates sent to my phone. It’s too much of a risk—what if other people saw it? It’s best if nobody knows I have any connection to the website at all, although I know many of my friends are on it. Not one of them has hinted about its existence to me so far, which is something I wonder about when I’m trying to sleep at night. Do they think I’m too naive to enjoy a website like that? Too nice? Being an excellent friend is a top priority of mine—it’s half the reason I have the website in the first place—but maybe I’ve been too sweet.
My first thought is to dismiss the notifications completely. There’s something called a Magnolia Alert on the site for urgent business, rumors that can’t wait, that people want confirmed immediately, and it looks like someone has tagged a lot of posts with it, and it’s probably by accident. I’ll have to make an admin post reminding people not to abuse that tag unless it’s really urgent.
Then my brain makes sense of the text snippets. The alert function on my phone doesn’t display the entire post, but one of them stands out.
DID ACE KINGSLEY MURDER…
The rest of the notices are more of the same, and more pop up onto the screen while I watch.
My heart races in my chest, and my mind plunges directly into crisis management mode.
First, I highly doubt that this rumor is true. Ace Kingsley doesn’t seem like the type to kill a woman and then return to New York like nothing has happened. I also haven’t heard him make mention of having a wife in—well, wherever he was before he came back to the city. That’s never been part of any of the discussions I’ve heard swirling around the Swan, or on Rainflower Blue, for that matter. It’s as if he vanished off the face of the earth and then, not long ago, resurfaced in the city, having done nothing in the intervening time period.
Of course, that ‘nothing’ has been the cause of much speculation—it’s just that I’ve never heard a location confirmed.
And anyway, how would a rumor like this get started anyway, unless someone wants to smear his reputation? Murder isn’t sexy. The vast majority of the rumors I deal with on Rainflower Blue have to do with whereabouts, with cheating, with who was seen with whom, not real crimes.
No wonder traffic is spiking.
The doubts come hard on the heels of my mental dismissal of this ridiculous rumor. He did brush me off hard last Saturday morning. He was a different person when I came out of the bathroom, brusque and rude and dismissive.
Maybe….
No.
I’m not going to start suspecting people of something like murder because someone on my website doesn’t like Ace Kingsley. That has to be the explanation.
Unless….
There was that woman at the Swan.
“…what you did to her. Just tell me.”
What you did to her.
Who?
And when?
That conversation could have been about anything.
Where the hell is Ace, anyway?
He’s in front of the building, his driver by his side. Ace has his hand on the shoulder of an older woman. He shifts to the side and I see that it’s Mrs. Hensley, from two floors below me. She has an overcoat on over her nightgown and she’s clearly distressed, tears running down her face. What is she doing down here? It’s well after midnight.
Ace’s face is the picture of compassion, and that’s when I realize I’m sitting in the car like a complete asshole, staring out the window at the scene. I climb out of the car and go over to them, listening as Mrs. Hensley’s shaking voice echoes across the sidewalk.
“I just don’t know where he’s gone,” she says, one hand going up to her disheveled hair.
My heart twists in my chest.
“I’m sure we can help you find him, ma’am,” Ace says, his voice smooth an
d comforting. As far as I know, he has no idea who she is, but he’s stopped out here to help her.
Not something a hardened murderer would do, right?
“I just don’t know.” Her voice is pained.
Mrs. Hensley must have woken in the night and been caught up in one of her moments. I’ve run into her in the elevator more than once, a little confused but not unhappy. This is different.
“Mrs. Hensley?” I say, stepping up to Ace’s side. “My name is Carolyn Banks. I live a couple of floors above you. Do you remember me?”
She scans my face, and then her expression relaxes. “Oh, Carolyn. Of course. How—how are you?” Another flash of confusion. “It’s quite late,” she says, glancing down at her overcoat and nightgown combo. “It’s very late.”
“You’re right, Mrs. Hensley.” I step forward and link my arm in hers. “Are you feeling all right? Is there anyone you’d like me to call?” I know she has one son in the city and a daughter on the west coast. Somewhere, I have the son’s number written down—she gave it to me forever ago, thinking she’d set us up. He should know about this, if not in the middle of the night.
“No.” She shakes her head. “I think I’d like to go back to bed.”
“Not a problem at all.” She lives on the third floor. I mouth “I’m sorry” at Ace, and he shakes his head, raising his hands slightly. “Tomorrow” he mouths back, and I give him a smile.
In the elevator with Mrs. Hensley, a strange tiredness descends on my shoulders. I was going to sneak up to the penthouse and knock on Ace’s door once Mrs. Hensley was safe in her apartment, but my eyes are getting heavier by the second, and my heart is in two places at once.
Afraid that the rumors might be true.
And warmed through by the sight of Ace Kingsley stopping everything to help a distraught old woman.
I’m falling…despite the rumors.
Chapter Twenty
Ace
I toss and turn all night, wishing Carolyn was here with me.
