by Linde, K. A.
Ten minutes later, he pulled into the winding entrance to a new complex on the outskirts of town. The buildings were in various stages of construction. Some were only partially built, others just had the frames, and some were complete but missing windows. Only one building had the entire brick framing with all the other fixtures and landscaping complete. Liz thought that was odd.
“Is this the right place? It doesn’t even look finished,” she said, peering out the windshield.
“It’s not. It’s still in development. But it’s owned by a division of Maxwell Industries, and so I have access to it.”
Huh. Liz knew how Brady’s family had earned their fortune over the generations. It started out with large tracts of land and had developed into an immense real estate venture coupled with the political side. She hadn’t known about this particular project, though. Granted, she hadn’t been following his career as closely as she had before.
Brady parked the car in front of the one building that looked finished and killed the engine. “We have a fully furnished open house for potential buyers,” he explained when she just stared at him quizzically. “There aren’t any cameras on the premises.”
“Oh,” she whispered. Brady, always thinking ahead about who could see them together. This felt all too familiar and made her voice come out harsher than she intended. “Why didn’t you just take me to a hotel?”
He popped the door open and answered without a backward glance. “Because I like to fuck you in different places.”
Liz’s mouth dropped open at the comment. He had to be joking. She sputtered and tried to collect herself, but it wasn’t working.
He chuckled softly when he saw she was still staring up at him slack-jawed. “Come on, Liz. Don’t make me come get you.”
She scrambled out of the car. Holy shit! This was not happening. She was not following him up the stairs and into a condo when she knew that he had every intention of fucking her. She wasn’t that person. No matter how angry she was . . . she couldn’t go through with something like that.
Brady slid a key into the door and turned the knob, letting it swing inward. His hand on the small of her back sent warmth radiating throughout her entire body and she wondered if she even stood a chance at resisting.
She stumbled into the condo and Brady flicked the lights on. It was a nice-looking place, clearly decorated by someone with taste, but from a corporate angle. No imagination. There were stairs right off of the entrance and a kitchen hidden off of the living room. That was all she got to see of first floor before Brady shut the door and started up the stairs without a word.
Here goes nothing.
Even though Liz knew she shouldn’t follow him, she did. She was drawn to him. No matter how much she tried to convince herself, she always had been.
There were two rooms, and Liz walked into the bigger of the two, where Brady was standing with his arms crossed, staring at the giant king-size bed that took up the majority of the room.
At the sight of it, Liz deflated. Her emotions were all over the place tonight. She was a wreck. The ups and downs had taken a toll on her, and she kind of wished that she could just go to sleep. She couldn’t add another roller coaster to the equation.
“Brady,” she whispered, her voice taking on an edge of desperation.
He didn’t move for a solid minute. Just stood there and stared at the bed. She had no clue what he was thinking at that point.
Finally, he turned around and stared at her. She could see that whatever mask he had been wearing before had completely dropped away. He looked like her Brady—in control, but somehow still vulnerable. She hadn’t really thought about it like that before, but when she looked at him now after all that time apart, she knew that that look of desire that so often crossed his face was a vulnerability to her. He still felt very strongly toward her. It was all over his face, and it made her heart melt.
“Come here,” he said, crooking his finger.
She licked her lips before walking over and standing in front of him. She didn’t even play around by standing at a distance. She knew that he was in control, and she knew what he wanted. She planted herself directly in front of him and tilted her chin up to look at him.
Brady’s strong hands threaded back through her hair. Her eyes fluttered closed at the softest of touches. He ran his hands backward and swept it off of her shoulders. She nearly groaned as his fingers brushed against her ears, neck, and collarbones. But she didn’t move or say anything until he cupped her face in his hands, and then she opened her eyes to stare up into his handsome face.
Her breathing was already ragged and irregular. How often had she fantasized about this moment—about him coming back for her?
“What happened, Liz?” he whispered.
His words seemed to break the floodgates again as they reminded her of her argument with Hayden tonight. Tears welled in her eyes as she started babbling. “Hayden surprised me at the newspaper. I’d been in New York for my internship and I hadn’t gotten through a lot of my work. He saw it and flipped his shit. He basically said I was irresponsible and should give up the paper because I was running it into the ground. Then I saw him smoking and . . .”
“Liz,” he said, cutting her off. A tear trickled down her cheek and he reached up and swiped it from her face. “No. What happened with us?”
Liz opened and closed her mouth a few times as she tried to come up with the answer to that question. “You were going to choose the campaign,” she murmured.
“You left before I had a chance to choose.”
“I didn’t want you to have to make that choice. I didn’t want you to break up with me,” she said, another tear leaving her eye.
“Why were you so sure I would?”
Liz shook her head softly in his grasp. “You wouldn’t let me love you. It was like walking into a brick wall over and over again. I was the liability that you couldn’t figure out how to deal with.”
“Liz . . .”
“And in the end, Brady . . . I let you have the campaign and Congress. I couldn’t let you jeopardize any of that for me.”
Brady released a stifled laugh. “You thought I was happy?”
“I . . .”
“Heather basically talked me off of a ledge for the next three months.”
Liz stood there as solid as stone. She couldn’t believe what he had just said. No way had it affected him that much. No way. She just couldn’t see that being the case. He was dating Erin . . . and had been so happy . . . and . . . Shit!
No. She couldn’t have walked away for nothing. He hadn’t come after her. He hadn’t tried to follow her. She couldn’t think about those months. She couldn’t think . . .
“I wish I’d had someone to talk me off of the ledge,” she whispered. She didn’t even know where it came from. But she’d had no one. She had been all alone with her misery.
Brady’s eyes darkened when she said that. “You mean you didn’t have the boring fill-in to keep you company?”
“We didn’t start dating until the election was over.”
Brady cursed under his breath. “How could you date him?”
“Me? How could you date her?”
“You left me, remember?”
“And you pushed me away,” she snapped.
“Well, I’m not pushing you away now.” He grabbed her by her shoulders and pulled her body against his. Her hands jerked up against his chest just as his lips dropped down to cover hers.
The world stopped. There was only Brady. Nothing else existed. Nothing else ever had. When their lips touched, it was like the fireworks on Fourth of July mixed with the ball dropping on New Year’s. She could feel her body wake up from head to toe. Her mind cleared until everything seemed perfectly crystallized. It was as if she had been wading through mud in a dense fog, and suddenly she walked onto solid ground and the sun
was shining.
Chapter 17
REMEMBERING HISTORY
She was kissing Brady.
Her hands were gripping his suit coat. His were tangled in her hair. Their bodies were flush together. Somehow they had moved to where he was pressed back into the footboard of the bed. Their mouths were moving in time and tongues volleying for position. She could feel her heart practically leaping out of her throat and her chest rising and falling as the adrenaline coursed through her body.
It had been months . . . over a year since they had last been together. The built-up tension superheated the room until she felt as if she couldn’t breathe. It was too much all at once. And still she needed more. She wanted more. She could never get enough.
“Liz,” he groaned against her mouth. He moved his hands down her sides and clutched her hips tightly, jerking her into him.
And then her world came crashing down all around her.
“Oh, no,” she whispered, shaking her head.
“No. Don’t do that.” He brought her face back up to stare at him.
“No. Brady, no,” she said, pushing his chest and walking across the room. “Oh, no. No. No. No.”
“Liz,” he said breathlessly.
“Stop.” She put her hand up hoping to keep him from saying anything.
“Why are you pushing me away?”
“I walked away for a reason Brady, and you didn’t come after me. That door closed a year ago,” she whispered. Her chest ached just speaking the words.
“Are you serious? What did you expect me to do, run after a woman who didn’t want me? Who left me?”
“I don’t know what I would have wanted you to do, but the fact of the matter is, neither of us did anything. Anything at all. The ifs, ands, or buts don’t matter, because I left and you didn’t follow me. And we did nothing for the next year.”
Brady visibly straightened across the room. “So, I’m standing here a year later for nothing.”
“Just like you were a year before this,” she whispered.
She swallowed heavily and waited for him to contradict her, but he didn’t. How could he? They’d been at a standstill then, and they were driving backward currently. This was a terrible, terrible mistake. One that she had not intended to make. One that she had not considered the consequences of when she had called him in her bout of anger.
They stood there in the silence, each waiting for the other to make them stop slipping down this slope. But neither did.
Brady’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he broke eye contact with Liz. He pulled it out of his coat, checked the name, and then silenced it and replaced it.
“Not important?” she asked, even though she knew that she shouldn’t.
His eyes found hers again. “No.”
Liz hadn’t checked her phone since she had gotten into the car with Brady. She wondered how many messages she had from Hayden. She knew she shouldn’t ignore him. He was probably flipping out, and not responding wasn’t exactly the mature way to handle the situation. But she certainly wasn’t calling him back right now. Not while she was with Brady.
She hated the distance that stretched between them. She hated that she had to force the distance and that they couldn’t just fall into their easy rhythm. But a lot had happened in the time they had been apart. She had spent a year moving on.
“I think you’re just being stubborn,” he finally said, breaking the silence.
Liz tilted her head forward and looked at him incredulously. “I’m being stubborn? You, of all people, are telling me that I’m stubborn? Pot. Meet kettle,” she said, gesturing toward him.
“Your sarcasm is a good defense mechanism,” he said casually. “It probably works on someone else.”
“Your politician confidence is a good defense mechanism,” she threw back. “It probably works on someone else.”
“It worked on you.”
Liz laughed and rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “You think I was taken in by your cocky asshole attitude? I’m pretty sure I saw through that a mile off. I didn’t even use your number that you gave to me at the club that first night we met.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
“You’re insufferable,” she spat, pacing away from him.
“You liked every minute of it.”
She rounded on him. “What about the time that you left me at Hilton Head all by myself and never called? Or the time that you were pissed off that I wrote the article I wanted to and not yours? Or the time that you brought another girl to the gala you invited me to?”
“Liz . . .”
“Or just keeping me secret. Oh, look, we’re at a place without cameras in the middle of the night. How convenient,” she drawled, shaking her head.
Brady closed the distance between them and slowly walked her backward until she was pressed up against the wall. Her breath caught in her throat at his nearness. Her whole body woke up. Holy shit! How did he do that?
“You seem to remember history very differently than I do,” he said, guiding his hand down the curve of her neck and over her shoulder. His other hand was on the wall to the left of her head. She swallowed. “I seem to remember afternoons spent on the lake, stripping your clothes off in a cabana, holding you close all night when you drank too much, staying with you an extra night on the Fourth of July . . .”
His hand brushed against the side of her breast and her head thudded back into the wall. He smirked and moved his hand to her slim waist.
“Did you forget about those things?” he asked, his eyes boring into her.
Voice. She had a voice. It was there somewhere.
“No . . . no, I didn’t,” she finally whispered.
“I didn’t think so.”
Arrogant son of a bitch . . .
“If you tell me right now that you don’t want me, I’ll stop.” His fingers found the hem of her waistline and he slid the fabric across the sensitive skin from one side to the next. Her eyes fluttered as she struggled to find words.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t catch that,” he teased. His hand dipped inside her pants and played mischievously with the lace of her thong. His lips moved to her ear and he nipped at her earlobe before speaking seductively. “If you don’t say anything, I’m going to have to fuck you into tomorrow.”
Her body was screaming and moaning and crying out. It was demanding everything that Brady was offering. It was desperate for his perfect brand of ecstasy. But her brain was fighting with her body. It was whispering in the back of her mind, reminding her why she had left, reminding her there was someone else . . . in both of their lives.
In the time that it took for her brain to speak louder than her body, Brady had flicked the button open on her jeans and was sliding the zipper down.
“Stop,” she murmured, pulling her hands up. “Brady, you’re with someone else.”
“I believe you called her an uppity nuisance,” he offered with a sigh as he straightened.
“I can’t do this while we’re with other people. As long as we are, this door remains shut,” she whispered. Her body was such a hussy.
“Are you going to stay with that guy after he upset you enough that you called and came here with me?”
“I don’t even want to hear this from you.”
“Then why the fuck did you call me?” he demanded.
“I don’t know, okay!” she yelled, bringing her hands up to her head and grabbing her hair. “I just didn’t want to be . . . me.”
“I see,” he said softly.
Liz took a second to collect herself. While she straightened and smoothed her hair out, his phone beeped, indicating a text message. She watched him check the phone and then replace it into his pocket.
“That was probably your girlfriend anyway,” she said after a minute.
Brady just stood there starin
g at her. She could feel his eyes assessing her, but she didn’t want to look up at him. She didn’t want to know what he was thinking. He had wanted to fuck her. God! He probably still wanted to, and it would have been so easy to just give in, but she wasn’t that girl. How could she jump back into something with Brady without any guarantee that it wouldn’t all go to shit again?
How could she even think that he wanted to jump back into anything other than sex? The worst part of all was she just didn’t know. She never knew what she was going to get with Brady. There were no assurances. And while that had been sexy, exhilarating, and endearing over their summer together . . . it was flat-out terrifying to think about the future.
“It was,” he finally answered.
Liz nodded. She had figured as much. “What did she say?”
He shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Uh-huh,” she said disbelievingly. “I should go.”
“You’re not going anywhere.”
“Tell me what she said.”
“What does it even matter?”
Liz shrugged. She didn’t know why it mattered. It just did. “Fine. It doesn’t matter. Can I go home now?”
“No.”
Liz yanked the bedroom door open and started out into the hallway. Brady caught up to her easily and grabbed her wrist. “Don’t touch me,” she said, yanking it away from him. “Go talk to your girlfriend or something.”
“It was literally nothing,” he said, stopping her. “She was just saying good night.”
That made sense actually. It still made her stomach turn.
“Read it if you don’t believe me,” he said flippantly, tossing the phone into her hand.
The message was still lit up and she read it word for word.
Good night! I thought I’d already hear from you but I’m exhausted and going to sleep. I love you!!!
