Authors: Tara Pammi
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
O
LIVIA
SCRUNCHED
HER
eyes shut as the bedroom was flooded with light. Staying with Kim meant she had to put up with her twin checking in on her every fifteen minutes. She pulled the duvet over her head, her head throbbing like a giant ball of pain. “Kim, leave me alone.”
Kim tugged the Egyptian cotton duvet. “Liv, Alex said this is important.”
Her heart thumped painfully.
Stupid heart never learned.
She breathed deep, sucking air into her parched throat, tears seeping into her eyes again. She had cried so much over the past three days she should be dehydrated to even make tears. “I don’t care.”
For a minute, she thought Kim had left. Only the television blared into life, the high volume drowning out her whimpers. “What the—”
She snuck her face out, ready to scream murder. Goose bumps rolled along her skin as a familiar name reached her ears. She straightened and faced the TV, her breath hitching in her throat.
Alexander’s arresting face filled the screen. Her stomach clenched painfully.
He was standing in the huge lobby of King Towers surrounded by a crowd, whom Carlos and his men were unsuccessfully trying to control. Flashbulbs illuminated the angles of his face, microphones were thrust closer, a babble of hungry excitement as the reporters fought to get closer to him.
And he hated it. His expression was blank, his posture ramrod straight. But she could see the tight line of his shoulders, the granite-hard jaw, the way his gaze focused on something faraway. He despised standing there in front of them, yet he was, why?
She shivered and took a deep breath, to clear the roaring in her ears so she could hear his actual words.
He spoke in a hoarse voice, explaining in detail to a rapt audience that his relationship with Kim had long been over, and that Olivia was innocent of everything, that her contract with one of his companies had been won through her sheer talent and hard work. A sob built in her chest as he continued that he was the guilty party, he was the one who had pursued her.
If you believe nothing else, believe that Olivia has done no wrong, toward her sister or anyone else. She’s the one who’s been wronged.
Olivia switched the TV off and buried her face in the bed, her throat a raw mass of aching pain. She should feel vindicated, whether the vultures believed it or not, Alexander had cleared her name. And she knew how much it must have cost him to do it.
Yet all she felt was a hollowness that felt as if it would never go away. Even during the worst moments that day, she hadn’t felt this loneliness, this huge weight in her gut. In fact, in a perverse way, they had distracted her from this, from looking at her shattered heart.
She wiped her face and took a sip of water from her bottle when her nape prickled.
She turned, ready to tell Kim to leave her alone.
Alexander stood leaning against the door, his gaze hungrily eating her up. His jaw unshaven, he looked tired, the jutting cheekbones even more angular. Yet his presence filled the room, wound itself around her, making it harder to draw breath. The bottle cap slipped from her hand and she looked down for it, tears pooling in her eyes.
She blinked a few times and then jerked up into a sitting position. “How did you get here?”
Still leaning against the door, he pointed up. “Carlos choppered me to the penthouse terrace.”
“Because of the press?”
He shrugged. “Wasn’t sure if Kim would let me into the building.”
Olivia nodded. As much as she had tried, Kim wouldn’t stop blaming herself.
She breathed in quick, shallow bursts, the question she wanted to ask most burning her insides. But she couldn’t.
Alexander pushed himself from the door, every muscle in him bunched tight. Aching to touch her, he moved his arm to push the hair off her forehead but she drew back. He fisted his hand, her retreat slashing through him.
He picked up her phone from the bedside table and checked it. She hadn’t turned it off which meant she knew that he’d been calling her non-stop. His mind jumped far ahead coming to conclusions, none that he wanted to know. “You didn’t answer my calls.”
She averted her gaze from him, and the uncharacteristic silence pierced through him. She wore a pink sleeveless T-shirt that hugged her breasts, and she wasn’t wearing a bra. He swallowed at the sight of her nipples against the soft cotton. Matching pink panties peeked out before she pulled the duvet up to her neck, pink flushing her cheeks.
“I didn’t want to talk to you.” Anger bunched her brows together. “I still don’t.”
He nodded, incapable of forming a response.
“I...saw what you did. I know how much you must have hated it. So I...appreciate it,” she said formally.
He kept his hands at his sides. “What did Jeremiah say to you, Liv?”
Her gaze flashed to him, a depth of sadness in it that twisted his gut. She shivered and pulled the blanket tighter around herself. “He—” her gaze brimmed with tears and Alexander felt as though a knife had been plunged into him “—called me a slut who would betray her own sister, without listening to a word I said.” A tear rolled down her cheek and he couldn’t take it anymore. He edged closer to her, sat on the bed and pulled her shaking shoulders to him. “But I stood up to him. I know now that the fault doesn’t lie with me, I do, but I didn’t think it would hurt so much, either. I’m nothing but a fool.”
If he had felt pain before, it was nothing compared to what coursed through him now. Everything inside him wanted to cocoon her, tell her that she should have nothing to do with her father again. In fact, he would make sure she never saw him. He opened his mouth to tell her the same and the words stuck in his throat.
What was he doing?
He had no right to tell her that. Olivia was someone who would always see the good in people, who would always give them a second chance. In fact, his own fate depended on the fact that she was who she was. It was both her strength and weakness, and if he wanted to spend his life with her, if he had any hope of keeping his sanity while doing that, he had to accept that, even if it tore him to see her hurt.
He pressed a kiss on her head, and breathed deeply. The scent of her calmed him and derailed him at the same moment. “You’re not a fool, Liv. Jeremiah is. You’re the most generous, most giving woman I’ve ever met and it’s his misfortune that he can’t see that.”
She jerked back from him, her gaze sweeping over him in confusion and pain. “Why are you here, Alexander?”
He wanted to say the one thing that was tugging at him the most but fear stopped him. It felt as if his whole life was hanging by a thread, and it scared the hell out of him to bare it all in front of her. “I wanted to thank you for what you did for Emily. Isabella said she wasn’t going to sue and I told her she could see Emily.”
Olivia smiled through the tears pooling in her eyes. She wanted to throw her arms around him and hold on for as long as she could, so much that it was a physical ache in her stomach. “I didn’t do it just for her. I did it for you.”
He tugged her toward him, his palms moving up and down her arms. “For me?”
“I didn’t want that tiny part of you that still feels something to be crushed completely. Because that’s what would have happened if Isabella sued you. You would have closed yourself off.” And she wouldn’t have been able to reach him in this lifetime. Because the hope that he would change his mind if not now, then sometime in the future, was the only thing that was keeping her going. Really it had been a purely selfish move on her part.
His gaze filled with such tenderness, such humility that Olivia wanted to hug him and kiss him. She even jerked up from the bed, only to fall back on her knees. She couldn’t bear it if he pushed her away again.
“Don’t do that, Liv. Don’t give up on me now,” he said, his words vibrating with pain. “I’ve been going out of my mind for three days,” he said, moving his mouth to her temple, breathing his words into her skin.
She hugged herself, feeling frayed along the edges, battered, as if a wound she’d thought healed kept opening again and again. “You can’t do this. You can’t just come back into my life whenever you want, dictate your own set of rules and then walk away. I won’t let you. I won’t let you take away what little I have left.”
He tugged her hands into his. “No, I know. I promised myself I wouldn’t even touch you until I said what I want to.” His voice was gruff. “I have never let myself feel so much that it’s a giant ball of ache in my gut. And a part of me flinches and just wants to shut down. I want to do this, I want to tell you how I feel but opening up myself, it’s the scariest thing I’ve done since I walked out on my parents.”
His eyelids flickered down for a second, hiding his expression from her. He touched his forehead to hers, and sighed. “I’m in love with you, Liv, and it terrifies the hell out of me. I missed you so much that there should be a gaping hole inside me. I need you to tell me that I haven’t blown my chance with you, that you haven’t given up on me.”
“I do love you, Alexander. Nothing in this world is going to change that.”
His heart beat normally for the first time in three days. “Will you forgive me for leaving you like that?”
A soft smile curved her mouth. “You’re forgiven,” she said quietly.
He couldn’t go another moment without touching her, without kissing her. He pulled her up for a thorough kiss that breathed new life into his blood. He didn’t want to wait another minute to make her his. His heart felt too big for the excitement drumming through him.
He shifted her hair from her shoulder and pressed a kiss. “Will you marry me, Olivia?”
Her quiet smile slipped. He turned her toward him, uncertainty skewering him. “I don’t have a ring because I know you hate diamonds.”
Olivia took a deep breath, hating what she had to say. “I—”
A shadow loomed over Alexander’s face. He ran a hand over his nape, his mouth a rigid line of pain. “So you
have
changed your mind.”
She scooted from his lap, to the edge of the bed. She cupped his jaw and held fast as he tried to move away. “I want to be with you so much that it’s a constant ache in my heart, Alexander,” she said, pulling his hand to her heart which thundered at his touch. “But these past three days, they have made me doubt everything.”
His heart squeezed up with pain, Alexander took a step back. “I know I hurt you—”
“It’s not what you did, Alexander. All the women you have dated before me, they were all perfect like Kim, without a blemish.” She laid her palm on his mouth and hid her face in his shirt. “If this whole circus with the media has taught me anything, it’s that they will always haunt you, always be hungry for a story about you. They will keep digging, keep making stories. Even if they extinguish every angle of my past, what about our future? I’m someone who will always make mistakes, who can never be perfect. Only one day the disdain will be back in your eyes again, and it will absolutely crush me. If you begin to hate me again, I’ll break, Alexander. And you will,
eventually
.”
Alexander pulled Olivia up and hugged her to him until neither of them could breathe with the pressure. He wanted to touch her soft curves, lose himself in her until she agreed to anything he asked, but he fought the urge to do that. She trembled in his arms and he pressed a kiss to her shoulder. “I’m not saying everything will be a bed of roses, Liv. There will be days when you will want to kill me as surely as there will be days when I’ll want to tie you up so that you can’t wreak havoc on us. But, your past, that will never bother me. It’s what made you the woman you are today. And it’s that woman I love, strengths and faults.”
A shadow still diluted her smile. “But don’t you want to take this slow, play boyfriend-girlfriend for a little while before—”
“No. I want the whole world to know that you’re my wife, my equal. We’ll learn our way as we go. The most important thing you’ve taught me is that life can’t be lived in a vacuum, that you have to keep taking chances on yourself even if it means you might get hurt. So we’ll fail and we’ll try again. It is the scariest thing I’ve ever wanted to do, but I want to do it with you. I want to laugh with you, take care of you, grow old with you, even if it also means you’ll drive me up the wall every other day.”
She met his gaze, a glimmer of a smile in it. “You really think so?”
He laughed and pushed her back into the bed. He tugged his shirt out of his trousers with hurried movements and slid into the bed next to her. Ignoring her gasp, he pulled her tee up in one movement. Desire was a low hum in his blood as he gazed at her tight-tipped breasts, the indent of her navel and her pink panties with little bows begging to be ripped. He bent his head and licked a wet path around her cute navel. “Yes and you better be prepared. I can’t wait for everyone to know that Olivia Stanton’s generous heart, amazing spirit and her luscious body belong to me and only me,” he said, struggling to hide the possessiveness that bled into his words. The emotion he felt for her choked and terrified him with its strength. One day at a time, like he had told her, one day at a time. “If there’s one thing you should know about this, it’s that there’s no half-ways about this, Liv. I’m never going to let you go, ever.”
Olivia plunged her hands into his hair and pulled his head up, every inch of her writhing with pleasure. The possessiveness in his gaze, in his words, rolled over her skin. She kissed him with an urgency that had her suck and bite his lower lip.
He laughed and stroked her thighs, his fingers inching toward her core, achy and throbbing for his touch. “Not that you have a choice except to agree,” he said, his voice dark and hoarse.
Olivia raised a brow. “No?”
“Not if you want me to do all the wicked things I want to do to you.” His hands parted her legs, stole under her panties and his thumb flicked at the heat between her thighs. She closed her eyes and moaned, pushing herself into his touch. “So is it a yes?”
She opened her eyes, and gazed at him. Love and desire gazed back at her, washing away her doubts. “Yes,” she whispered. He plunged a finger into her core and rubbed at her swollen folds again. Olivia laughed and gave into the sensation piling upon her, whispering the single word over and over again as Alexander took her to ecstasy.