Complete Me (33 page)

“And he doesn’t have it. I’m just—I don’t know. I guess I’m just saying that I know what kind of shit you went through as a kid, and now I know what he has to live with.”

I tense, but I say nothing. I can tell he’s not finished.

“Stark’s not ever going to be on my favorite people list, but I’ve seen the way you two are together, and I really got to see it in Germany. I think you’re good for each other.”

I swallow, the ice in my veins melting into a lump of tears in my throat. “We are.”

His smile is tentative. “So that’s it. That’s my apology. I won’t say that I’ll be asking the guy out for drinks and male bonding, but, well—”

A bubble of relieved laughter bursts from me. “Thanks,” I whisper.

“Wanna go get a drink?”

“No,” I say. “Stay and dance with me some more.”

He grins, and we slide back into the music. I can’t say that we’re completely healed, but we’re better, and I feel lighter around Ollie than I have in a very long time.

After four straight songs, I am ready for a drink, so when Courtney comes by and suggests it, we go eagerly with her. Ollie gets waylaid by someone he knows from work, and it ends up being just Courtney and me who ease up to the bar. I tell the bartender to put our drinks on Damien’s tab, and he agrees so easily that I know that not only has Damien already instructed the staff to cater to us, but they have all visually identified me. I’m being watched. Protected. And although it feels a bit strange to be caught in the spotlight like that, I can’t deny it makes me feel safer.

But I won’t feel truly safe until Damien shows up and I can slide into his arms.

“What happened to the destination bridal shower?” I ask Courtney as we wait for the drinks. I have to practically shout to be heard, and I just know I’ll have no voice at all tomorrow.

“I think it’s off the agenda,” she says.

“Why?” I expect the answer to have something to do with her nightmare of a travel schedule. Instead, she nods toward the dance floor where Jamie has her arms up in the air and her hips gyrating between Ryan and Ollie.

“I should hate her, you know,” Courtney says without malice, and that chill rushes over me once again.

“What are you saying, Courtney?” I ask, praying that I’m wrong.

I see the rise and fall of her chest. “I’m not going to marry him,” she says. “I don’t want to be that woman whose husband cheats on her, and I don’t want to get married because I’m a good choice. I can’t do that to myself. Hell, I can’t do that to him. We’d be miserable in a year and divorced in two.”

“Oh.” I try to swallow, but my mouth is too dry. I’m shocked by her words, and I feel bad for Ollie, who is going to know he fucked up, and that will make it all the worse. But at the same time, I’m glad. As pleased as I am that Ollie and I are on the mend, he did fuck this up with Courtney, and everything she’s said so far is dead on the money. “When are you telling him?”

“Soon. Maybe tonight. I just need to get up the courage.” She shrugs. “It’s not that I don’t love him. It’s just . . . ” She trails off, as if she doesn’t quite know how to say it.

“Don’t worry,” I say, clutching her hand. “Believe me, I know.”

I have had too many drinks and danced too many dances by the time Damien finally arrives at the club. Heads turn, as always, and the crowd parts. He strides straight toward me, and I watch, transfixed, as he moves across the dance floor, not quite able to believe that all of that power and grace belongs to me. That out of everyone in that club, I am the one who will see him naked. Who will feel the heat of his mouth upon my skin. Who will cry out when he thrusts himself deep inside me.

He hooks an arm around me and kisses me hard. I cling to him. I am somewhere in that place between buzzed and wasted, and I feel every beat of the loud music reverberating through me. I am sweaty with exertion, my skin slick, my clothes clinging to me. I lift myself up on tiptoes and press my lips to his ear. “I want you. Now.”

I am not exaggerating; I am desperate for him. But considering we’re on a dance floor, I hardly expect my wish to come true. So I am surprised when he grips my arm and steers me toward the back of the club, then tugs me into a small elevator that he calls with a card key.

Despite the fact that I’m in a haze, I can’t help but notice the tension in his face. The hardness of his eyes. Not to mention the fact that he has yet to speak one word to me.

“Damien? What is it?”

The elevator opens and we are in an office. One wall is entirely glass, and I remember seeing it from below. It is made of reflective glass and surrounded by lights so that anyone who looks up sees only the distorted reflection of dancers surrounded by the glare of colored lights.

But from up here, we have a perfectly clear view of the club.

It is to that wall that Damien pushes me, until my back is to the glass and the dancers writhe beneath us and there is nowhere else for us to go.

The heat in his eyes is unmistakable, and I feel the corresponding pull inside of me. I don’t know what has happened or why he needs this, but right now it doesn’t matter. I am his, and he can take me however he needs.

How he needs, is rough.

He shoves my skirt up and rips off my panties, making me gasp. He lifts my leg and hooks it around him, so that I am completely exposed. The air against my hot sex makes me tremble, but it is the rub of his jeans against me as he tugs me toward him that sends tremors running through me.

His erection strains under the denim, and I gyrate my hips, stroking myself along his denim-clad cock, wanting to feel it inside me, needing him to fill me.

I meet his eyes, and he stays silent, but the need I see on his face is as potent as my own.

I practically dive for the buttons of his fly, then watch enraptured as he springs free. I want to touch him, to stroke him, but I have no time. He holds me by the hips, shifts my weight, and impales me on him so hard and fast that I swallow my scream.

He thrusts us both backward, slamming me against the glass, and for a moment, I imagine us tumbling over, falling to the dance floor, still connected, still fucking, while the whole world looks on. The fantasy only makes me more wet.

His gaze locks on mine as the intensity of his thrusts builds. I see his release growing in his eyes, and tighten my leg around him to pull him closer at the moment he goes over.

He shudders, still deep inside me, and I reach between us, my fingers rubbing his cock as I stroke my clit, faster and faster until I come, too, and my muscles tighten around him, pulling from him the last waves of the orgasm that still rocks through both of us.

Finally, we sink to the ground, breathing hard, our clothes and limbs tangled around us.

When the ability to move returns, I prop myself up on my elbow to look at him “Do you want to tell me what that was about?” I ask softly.

He reaches for me, then cups my face, his thumb stroking lightly over my chin. “Nobody fucks with what is mine.”

I frown, not understanding. “What’s yours? You mean me?”

He doesn’t answer, but the darkening intensity of his eyes tells me what I want to know.

“What happened?”

“I paid a visit to Giselle earlier. You won’t be working with her again.”

His words propel me to a sitting position. “What the fuck?” I think about her text. “Goddammit, Damien, quit talking in riddles and tell me what’s going on.”

He lifts his hips so he can readjust his clothes. Then he stands. I scramble to do the same, and follow him back to that glass wall. “She was in the ATM footage. I confronted her, and she confessed she leaked the story about the portrait so she could get cash to help keep her business going after she and Bruce split. She also sold the story about Jamie and the Ferrari, not to mention the bullshit about our little love nest in Malibu.”

“What? No.” But even as I say it, I think about the intensity of her expression when I told her Jamie was staying in Malibu. And I think about all the financial trouble that she told me she was having as a result of her divorce.

Most of all, I think about that text. It was a confession, I now realize. A confession and an apology.

“But she’s the one who told me about the article in the
Business Journal
.”

“Camouflage,” he says. “She sells the story, then tells you. You’re both surprised together, and she looks innocent.”

My head is spinning. “Wait a second.
You
fired her? She was doing
my
walls in
my
office. If anyone was going to fire her, it should have been me.”

“I told you,” he says. “No one fucks with what’s mine.” There is an edge to his voice that I rarely hear. The edge that reminds me that, yes, Damien has a dangerous side. A ruthlessness that helped him win game after game of tennis in his youth, and then claw his way to the top of the corporate ladder without even breaking a sweat. He is not a man to be fucked with.

But that doesn’t change the fact that it wasn’t him Giselle was fucking with. Maybe the articles were about the two of us, but she’d slipped her way into my office, into my life.

Damien is studying my face, and he’s obviously seeing my temper rising. “It’s done,” he says. “It’s over.”

“How is it done?”

“I explained to her that my lawyers were more than capable of dragging out multiple actions for defamation and invasion of privacy. She’s a businesswoman at heart, so she understands that I can keep a litigation going forever, but she’s going to have trouble finding a lawyer whose hourly rate doesn’t break her. We came to terms.”

“What kind of terms?”

“She turned over all right, title, and interest in her galleries to me. She’s relocating to Florida. And good fucking riddance.”

I press my palm against the glass, as if the coolness will ease the bite of my temper. “You don’t have to fight my battles, Damien.”

“I love you, Nikki. I will always fight for you.”

His words are heavy with meaning and ripe with passion. They knock me backward and steal my breath. “You love me,” I say stupidly.

The corner of his mouth curves up. “Desperately.”

I swallow back the knot of tears that has formed in my throat. “You haven’t said it,” I say. “Not for weeks now.”

He closes his eyes as if my words have hurt him, but when he opens them again, it’s not pain that I see, but love. He reaches for me and pulls me close. I lean against him, breathing in the scent of soap mixed with sex. It’s heady, and I want to get lost in it. Lost in this moment.

“I love you, Nikki,” he repeats. “I say it with every touch, with every look, with every breath that I take. I love you. I love you so much it hurts.”

“Me, too.” I brush a kiss across his lips, then meet his smile. “But you can’t protect me from everything, Damien. And you sure as hell can’t protect me by keeping things from me. You should have told me about Giselle. Hell, who knows what else is out there you’re keeping from me. So just stop it, okay? It doesn’t protect me, it just pisses me off.”

“All right,” he says evenly. I think that’s the end of it, but then he continues. “Sofia sent the photos.”

I have to rewind his words in my head, because what he is saying makes no sense whatsoever. “The photos in Germany. Sofia is the one who sent them to the court? I don’t understand. Why? How do you know? Did you talk to her?”

He moves away from the glass wall to the center of the room. He paces, not like a man trying to solve a problem, but like a man who already knows the answer and doesn’t much like it.

“I discovered a discrepancy in one of my father’s accounts. Small amounts siphoned off to an account that I don’t have access to. In excess of a hundred thousand dollars, and yesterday I learned that money was filtered to Sofia.”

I don’t ask him how he knows all of this if he doesn’t have access to the account. I do not doubt that Damien Stark has access to pretty much any information that he’s willing to pay for. “Why would your father send Sofia that much money?”

“Payment for her testimony,” he says. “He wanted her to testify about the abuse—same reason you wanted me to testify. But he didn’t know about the photos. She must have found them in Richter’s things. She took those, sent them to the court, waited around just long enough to make sure it worked, and then used the money to skip out of Europe.”

“How do you know all of this?”

“After I learned about the skimmed money, I had another talk with dear old dad. He told me.”

“And you believe him?”

“I do.”

I nod slowly, trying to process all of this. “Does he know where she is now?”

“He says no, and before you ask, I believe him about that, too. Sofia was never fond of my father. I can see her taking his money. I can’t see her staying in touch.”

“All right,” I say slowly. “I understand that you’re still worried about her, but this means that you can stop worrying that the pictures will turn up in the tabloids. Sofia won’t release them, right?”

“No,” he says with more intensity than I would expect. “I’m certain that she won’t ever let anyone get their hands on those images.”

“So this is good news,” I say. “You’ll find her eventually—doesn’t she always show up?”

“She does, and I may have a lead on her already. I tracked down David and his band. They just arrived in Chicago from Shanghai. I spoke to David on the phone. He tells me he hasn’t seen Sofia, but I don’t believe him. I think a face-to-face conference might help jog his memory.”

“When are you leaving?”

“Tomorrow morning,” he says.

He has stopped pacing, and I go to him, then take his hands in mine. “How long will you be gone?”

“If I’m lucky? I’ll be back by dinner.”

“And if you’re not lucky?”

“Let’s hope I am.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Since Jamie wants to grab some things from our condo, she rides in with Edward and me. The plan is to drop me by my office, then swing Jamie by the condo. Then Edward will take her back to Malibu before returning to Sherman Oaks to wait for me. While he’s gone, I promise to stay inside my office, safe behind the protection of the building’s efficient receptionist.