“Holy…Mary…Mother of…fuck!” My head fell back as I stared at the sky. There were stars up there somewhere, obscured by this city, exploding in the universe just like I was in this park. “Oh, Christ, doll, I’m gonna come!”
But instead of taking my release in her mouth, Nina pulled me out and started working my cock furiously with her hands. Sliding up and down, then pressing me between her breasts. I looked down, and the sight of myself nested in her perfection was my undoing. She was my undoing. Maybe she always had been.
“Fuck!” I shouted as I emptied myself onto her skin. Her breasts, her neck, the sleek lines of her collarbones. My eyes squeezed shut, and for a moment, I imagined it everywhere, coating her naked body with my pleasure. Pressing myself deep within her, into the places where some part of me would stay for good. Making her mine. Not just now, but always.
Eventually, her grip softened and released me, and just as gradually, I came down from my high. My heartbeat adopted a more reasonable rate.
I inhaled deeply, then exhaled toward the hidden stars. Then again. And again before I could remember where I was.
“Jesus,” I whispered. “That was…you are…”
I looked down, wanting to tell her everything she meant to me. But instead of seeing the satisfaction I felt deep in my soul, I only found misery at my feet.
There, on her knees, on the cold ground of Central Park, Nina Astor de Vries started to cry.
“It hurts,” she whimpered, her hands clutching her chest, flattened over the remnants of what I had left there. She curled into herself, rocking toward the earth. “Oh, God, it hurts.”
“Fuck!”
Quickly, I put myself back together and lifted her up, then whipped a handkerchief out of my pocket. She shook while I mopped her off, arranged her dress back into place, then pulled her coat, now covered with dirt and dust, back over her shoulders.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, no…” I gathered her closer, pulling her into my arms. Trying to do something, anything to stop her tears.
Her fists beat at my chest again, but lighter now. Weaker. Defeated. Eventually they stopped as she was overtaken by tears.
It broke my fucking heart.
“Please,” she said as I sank to a bench and arranged her in my lap. “Please stop chasing me, Matthew. My heart can’t take it anymore.”
“Why, Nina?” I asked. “Why shouldn’t I chase you?”
Look at me, I commanded her silently. Look. At. Me.
And as if by power of my thoughts alone, she did. Her eyes glowed with sorrow and want.
“Because I know you’ll catch me.”
Jesus, Mary, it was torture even thinking about being separated from her again. I wanted to get the hell out of this park. I wanted to take her home.
“Is that such a bad thing?”
Her eyes were silver pools of pain and sadness. “It is when I want to be caught.”
Chapter Twenty
I held her like that for several minutes, until her thin shoulders stopped shaking and my shirt was wet through from her tears. We were both wrinkled, dirty messes, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even care that I was sitting in the middle of Central Park at night or that anyone could come across us like this at any time.
All I cared about was her. Erasing the despair that was breaking us both. Letting her know she wasn’t alone. How many times would Nina Gardner allow me to rock her through her tears before she realized what I already knew? There was no fighting this thing between us. There was no fighting fate.
“Come on, baby,” I crooned as I stroked her hair. “When are you going to figure out that you and I aren’t just some tawdry fling? Since the second I met you, I knew.”
“How could you possibly know that?” Her voice was muffled in my collar. “How can you know a future you can’t see?”
I gestured toward the sky, toward the dusky corona of light that blanketed New York, even at night.
“We’re like the stars, doll. I may not be able to see them clearly, but I still know they’re there.”
Together, we gazed up at the cloudless sky, wondering at the tiny glimmers that peeked through the city’s aurora every so often.
After a few minutes, I loosened my grip on Nina’s waist and tipped her chin down so she was looking at me. Both of us had calmed. She didn’t seem in a hurry to get off my lap anymore.
“I’m sorry I slept with Caitlyn. Trust me, I regretted it immediately, well before I found out who she was to you.” I brushed my thumb over her lips. “Truth be told, beautiful, I regret every woman I’ve ever been with who wasn’t you.”
She stared for a long second, then slowly leaned in and kissed me. It wasn’t the same angry fight as before. This was desperate. Depleted. So fucking sad.
In that moment, there was only one more thing I could think of to say.
“Leave him,” I said as soon as it ended. “I’ll take care of you. You have to know that.”
I wasn’t exactly sure how I’d take care of the daughter of one of New York’s first families, but I’d give her the clothes off my back if she needed them.
“Oh, Matthew. It’s not as simple as that. This is my marriage, not some teenage crush. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“I’m Catholic, doll. I consider marriage a sacrament. But that doesn’t mean I think you should martyr yourself to a bad one.”
I kissed her again, willing her to understand the truth. Her fingers clutched my lapels like she was afraid I’d disappear, mouth working against mine as if pulling away might kill her. Like we were both thousands of feet underwater, providing each other the air we needed to live.
This is it, I thought. She gets it. Finally, she understands.
But when she broke away, my surety splintered all over again.
“I can’t.” Nina shook her head sadly. “I’m so sorry, darling. I just can’t.”
“Why?” I asked. “Give me one good reason why you should stay with that neglectful piece of shit?” The words came out more bitterly than I intended, but I couldn’t help it. I needed someone to blame, and Calvin Gardner was as good a target as any. I looked at her wrist, the one that had been ringed with bruises. It was pristine now, and there were no signs of others.
“Because I’m not just thinking of myself!” Nina sputtered all over again. She pushed out of my arms and started pacing in front of me. “I have a daughter, Matthew. A little girl who needs her father.”
“This is about your daughter?” I couldn’t get my head around it. “Nina, I don’t want to minimize the needs of your kid, but she doesn’t even live here most of the time. I know you love her, but honestly? It sounds like she hardly sees you—”
“We see each other!” Nina insisted emphatically, to the point where I could see I’d touched a nerve. “I visit her in Boston more often than you know. And then she comes home, and I—”
“Okay, okay,” I said, doing my best to soothe her fury. “But does she see him—Calvin?” I hated saying his name, but for some reason saying “her dad” felt so much worse. “Does she see him as much as she sees you? Because from what you say, he’s gone. A lot.”
The look on Nina’s face told me I was right.
“So then,” I said. “Would it be that different if you and Calvin lived separately?”
“It would be different,” Nina said bitterly as she wrapped her arms around her waist.
I frowned. “Why?”
“It just would.”
“That doesn’t answer the question. Why would it be so different?”
“Because Olivia isn’t Calvin’s daughter!”
She whirled around, a tornado of red and white, then flopped onto the bench beside me. Her face was creased with sadness, and her hair, pulled out when she was on her knees, was half tousled around her blotchy face.
“She doesn’t know, Matthew. She doesn’t know at all, and I will not risk her ever finding out. I don’t care what it costs me. I won’t do it!”
I blinked
while her voice rose to near hysteria. I breathed in. Breathed out. Let the revelations sink in.
Nina had a daughter.
I already knew that.
But her husband wasn’t the girl’s father.
This I didn’t know. And for some reason, neither did the little girl.
Olivia.
The child’s face, which I’d only seen for a minute or two, flashed in my mind’s eye. She was a looker, all right. As full of sunshine as her mother, though a bit more dark-eyed, more shadowed than the de Vries family’s Scandinavian heritage might indicate. And also so unlike Calvin, of course, whose jaundiced paunchiness was about as different from that olive perfection as it got. Probably from her biological father, then. She’d break as many hearts as her mother when the time came.
Nina was searching my face intensely for something. Absolution? Forgiveness? I couldn’t tell, but I had nothing to offer yet.
“Tell me,” I said. “Tell me everything.”
She opened her mouth as if to argue, but eventually, wilted into her seat. “You really won’t let this go, will you?”
I tipped her chin up. “Not a chance.”
She sighed, but defiantly pulled her chin out of my grasp. “I was barely twenty. On a semester abroad. I studied art history, did you know that?”
I didn’t reply. It wasn’t much of a surprise, given how involved she was on a bunch of museum boards.
“My professor, he was…” She stared at her hands. “He was very charismatic. Much older than me. Old enough to be my father, even. Worldly. And we—well, I thought it was we, but it was really I who fell in love. Or what I thought was love.” She shook her head. “I was so, so young…”
“And you got pregnant.”
She nodded. “But it couldn’t go anywhere. He was married too. With two other children, one nearly my age.” She wiped a stray tear that hadn’t yet dried on her cheek. “Are you ashamed of me?”
“Seriously? You’re asking me if I’d judge you for being the other woman?”
She chuckled through her sadness. “No. I suppose you wouldn’t, would you?”
I didn’t laugh. I couldn’t really see any levity in this situation. Not yet. It was far too easy to imagine this scenario already. Older European professor spots angelic coed. Seduces her with art, food, wine, and an accent. Then, what, tosses her aside? A woman like Nina de Vries?
“So, then what?” I barely managed to keep my voice level.
Nina shrugged. “Then…I came home. It was May. I was close to two months along, sick in the mornings, and very scared.”
“Did you tell your family?”
She shook her head. “How much has Eric told you about why he left the family in the first place?”
I frowned. “Ah…well, not a lot. The basics, I guess.”
I knew Eric had left New York when his previous fiancée died. From suicide, which at the time he believed was driven by ongoing harassment from his family because she didn’t fit their idea of who was appropriate for their heir. Though Eric now suspected Carson and Letour had been responsible, at the time Nina would have believed the former version too.
I told Nina as much. “Am I missing anything?”
She shook her head. “No, that’s about it. But what you don’t know is what happened after.” She shuddered. “My grandmother, my mother, my aunt—they were all very upset about it. Eric took off for over a year before he moved to Boston. No one knew where he was, what he was doing. And all that aggravation and worry…”
“Got put on you,” I finished for her.
Nina nodded. “I was the only one left. Eric’s father died when we were children. My mother, well, you haven’t met her, but if you had, you would know she’s utterly useless. Grandmother was always desperate about passing on the family’s birthright to someone worthy. She was incredibly angry about Eric’s defection. I was already the wrong sex to carry it on.”
“Was that when you changed your name to de Vries?”
Nina nodded again. “Grandmother said that one more damage, one more embarrassment…she swore it would kill her.” Her hand slipped over her stomach. “So, I didn’t tell her what had happened to me. I decided to take care of it.”
She sighed, staring at her hand. The big diamond on the left was muted in the dark. I wanted to hurl it into the trees and let the park swallow it up.
She went to a clinic in Queens. A neighborhood where she knew no one, and no one would recognize her. It was harder than it sounded—the de Vrieses had been local tabloid regulars for generations. But outside of Manhattan, after years away at school, Nina thought she might be safe enough to do what needed to be done.
“Again,” she said. “So, so naive.”
“You were spotted?” I couldn’t imagine having to worry so much about being recognized. It did explain why she had the bad habit of running into deserted parks for privacy.
“By Calvin,” she said. “He was in the neighborhood looking at an investment. Long Island City wasn’t built up yet at that point, you remember?”
“How did you know each other?”
“Calvin was a friend of my father’s, and Eric’s father too, when he was still alive,” she said. “He worked for them before he moved to real estate development. That’s why he’s always gone, you know. The company he works for now owns property all over the world.”
I grunted in acknowledgment. I didn’t really give a shit why Calvin Gardner felt he could leave his wife all the fucking time. I just wanted to know why she couldn’t leave him.
Nina sighed. “Back then, I knew his face, but I didn’t really know him. After all, I hadn’t seen him in years, and I was just a child then.”
When they met again, it was by chance. He saw her approaching the clinic, called out her name just as she opened the door. With her hand at her stomach, there was no hiding why she was there. And so, when he asked her…she told him the truth.
“Why didn’t you just tell him you were going in for contraceptives or a checkup?” I wondered. I couldn’t help it. The investigator in me had to look at things from all angles.
Nina shrugged. “I panicked. I was young. I hadn’t prepared a story. And believe it or not, I wasn’t quite so good at masking my emotions back then.”
I brushed some hair out of her face. “I like it when I can see your emotions, doll.”
For a moment, she leaned into my palm. “I suppose that’s good, since I can’t seem to hide them from you.”
I was about to tell her that was fine by me, but then she continued.
“It’s hard to explain, but he was just so very nice. Kind. Understanding. He knew, of course. Well before I admitted to anything. And I thought, well, there is really only one reason why I would have been there.” Nina shook her head. “Calvin would have known I had my own doctor in the city. Someone who could prescribe birth control or whatever other care I needed. After all, what other reason would someone like me be entering a strange clinic in Queens except to have the one procedure most women hide from the world?”
I nodded. It did make sense when she said it like that. Rich girl. Beautiful. Page Six fodder. There wasn’t much else she would be getting at a community women’s clinic that wouldn’t ask for a name or insurance.
“And to my surprise, he offered to come with me. And I—I said yes. It was kind, I thought. I didn’t have any other support. We sat in the waiting room together. But when they called my name…I couldn’t do it.” She swiped a new tear from under her eye. “I just couldn’t.”
I took her hand and squeezed. “Of course you couldn’t, doll.”
“I could have,” she insisted. “I’m not Catholic, you know. I believe in a woman’s right to choose. And I don’t think it makes anyone a bad person either way. Not matter the reasons.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. Not all Catholics think of women as vessels, doll. Besides, look at me. Look at what kind of person I am. I would be the last person to ever judge anyone’s decisions, good or
bad. Especially yours.”
Nina buried her nose in my neck, inhaling my skin like I was oxygen.
“Who are you?” she whispered. “Where did you come from?”
“It doesn’t matter, baby. All that matters is where I am. Right here. For you.”
We sat like that a few minutes more until she could bear to finish.
“Calvin took me home in a car he ordered. Walked me up to Grandmother’s flat and reintroduced himself to the family. Said we had reconnected when he was on business in Europe and had kept in touch over the last year.”
“I’ll bet he did,” I muttered. I had an idea about where this was going. Old Calvin saw an opportunity and ran with it.
“I was so stunned, I didn’t even bother to correct him. I was so scared…” Nina drifted off as the memories kept coming.
He had come back to call on her, again and again. Daily, weekly. As with her professor, it wasn’t hard to imagine. Another older guy, a barely legal girl. The domestic violence bureau, the trafficking bureau—they saw it all the time with different kinds of sexual predators. People who groomed their victims when they were at their most vulnerable. Targeted them when they were scared, isolated, alone.
For Nina, this was the second time that year. She had all the money and privilege in the world, but she was pregnant, terrified of a family who, at the time, she believed was capable of real harm, and desperate to please her grandmother.
Calvin had presented himself as her only ally and gotten a bargain for himself.
“I was almost three months gone when he asked me to marry him. He said they would notice soon, and we could pretend he had actually proposed in the spring. That I wanted him to meet the family and get used to him before we announced.” She shrugged. “I was still sick most mornings. Grandmother had already called the doctor. I was a coward for taking the out…but in that moment, I saw a future. I saw a father for my child. I saw a source of pride for my family.”
“And for you?” I broke in. “What did you see for yourself?”
She smiled, an expression so impossibly sweet amid the darkness that surrounded us that I couldn’t help but smile back myself.
The Other Man (Rose Gold Book 1) Page 23
