Dare (15 page)

He was such a sweet distraction. As sweet as honeysuckle.

Sebastian swept me up suddenly into his arms, and I giggled as I was forced to throw my arms around his neck.

“Allow me to show you where I serve dessert, then,” he said, carrying me from the main room and into an adjoining bedroom. A flick of the switch revealed a bed that was low to the floor but covered in sumptuous pillows and blankets, a long chest of drawers, and not much else.

“Where are all the decorations?” I asked, as Sebastian lowered us both to the bed. It was interesting to be this close to the carpeting. “Are you waiting to travel more to fill it up?”

“I like to keep this room quiet,” he said. “To help me focus.”

“On dessert?” I countered wickedly.

“And sleeping.” He kissed me again, taking his time, inching my shirt up my torso until he had it over my head and off. “Better turn off the lights in here so we don’t give the neighbors a show.”

“You can leave them on,” I suggested innocently.

Sebastian’s eyebrows shot up nearly to his hairline. “Are you sure about that?”

I shrugged. “It’s kind of our thing, now, isn’t it? Sex in public places?” Our first tryst had been the barn at the farm, our second had been my truck at a loading dock. I’d discovered that I liked that edge, the excitement of the possibility of discovery. Maybe I had a little exhibitionism in me. I’d never explored the idea consciously until now.

“I like the way you think,” Sebastian said, his grin widening enough for his dimples to mark his face.

We undressed ourselves leisurely, as if we were doing it for an audience as well as each other, and I couldn’t help but shudder at the electricity I felt at the prospect of someone peeking in on us. It was damn sexy, and I was bound and determined that I was going to enjoy myself.

Sebastian kissed every inch of me from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes— and everywhere between—until I was breathless and writhing. He lapped at my pussy and I nearly came undone, grabbing at his head, my breath harsh in my own ears.

“Don’t hold back,” he said, grinning up at me. “Our possible audience can see, but they can’t hear. You have no one to bother.”

That was all the encouragement I needed to howl and moan and cajole him on as he did all sorts of wicked things with his tongue, my wetness soaking the bed beneath me, making my thighs soaking with sweetness.

“You’re good at that,” I told him, limp and on fire all at once.

“I’m glad you think so,” he said magnanimously—a true gentleman. He covered me with his body and sank his cock into me gently. Sebastian didn’t have to wait for me to adjust to him, but he did all the same, pausing until I pushed against him, desperate for more friction than what he was giving me.

We moved together. We always moved together, but this was different. We were both here for the same reason—to feel good. Our thrusts were gentle but powerful, playful but meaningful. We were both here because we wanted to be here. The bed allowed for a lot more freedom of movement than our previous couplings, even though the erotic edge was still there, our lovemaking on display for anyone who cared to take a gander.

I didn’t hold back at all when Sebastian shoved me right through the door to orgasm, shouting myself hoarse as he tossed his head back and joined me there. He continued to thrust so softly, extending that bliss until we’d wrung out the last drops of our pleasure together. We simply rested there, breathing on each other, until I realized that Sebastian’s deeper breaths meant he’d fallen asleep right on me, his cock still buried inside my body.

My heart squeezed, and I remembered that I cared deeply for the man sprawled out on top of me, snoring softly. It was a vulnerability Sebastian hadn’t revealed to me before. Up until this little nap, he’d been all bravado, all the time. Something about holding him while he slept endeared him even more to me. My stomach grumbled fussily, and I winced before poking him gently.

“Shit, sorry,” he mumbled, waking up and rolling off of me. “Was I squishing you?”

“You were fine,” I told him. “However, dinner was promised. Even if we did have dessert beforehand. I’m hungry.”

“I have just the thing.” Sebastian sat up in bed, rubbed his face, and pulled his boxers on over his shapely ass. It was almost a tragedy, but a girl couldn’t survive on nice looks alone. I needed food, and if he preferred to cook in his boxers, that was how I was going to get food.

“I can help,” I offered.

“No, no.” He leaned down and kissed me. “Stay. Relax. Grab a nap. There’s no need for you to be exhausted.”

But the longer I stayed alone in the bed, smells wafting in the open door from the kitchen, the more my stomach grumbled. I wondered if there was anything I could poach, realizing that I hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast. Also if I didn’t work to distract myself, I found myself sliding into a pit of despair over Dad and the farm.

I stepped out of bed and shrugged on Sebastian’s shirt before padding out to the kitchen to check on the status of dinner.

Sebastian glanced up from a steaming stove, the food sizzling in front of him. “That’s a good color on you,” he told me, eyeing me in his shirt. “This is just about ready.”

“That was fast.”

Our late dinner was grilled vegetable and shrimp skewers, made right on Sebastian’s stove. The range was like something I imagined inside of a restaurant, full of devices and options that I didn’t even have names for. But the dinner was filling without being overpowering, and we stood there at the countertop even though chairs and tables abounded, feeding each other offerings from the skewers, Sebastian in his boxers, me wearing his button-down shirt.

“Do you believe me now?” he asked.

“About what?”

“That I’m a good cook.”

“I wouldn’t be eating it if you weren’t a good cook,” I said, laughing. “But yes, this is very delicious. The veggies are really good. You have a good source for those, I’m sure.”

“I sure do,” he agreed. “They’re from your farm.”

A slow smile spread across my face. “You’re lying.”

“I’m not. Why would I?”

I sniffed. “To get me to fall into bed with you.”

“Again? I think I’m doing pretty good on just my charms. Lies need not apply.”

I laughed at him. I was doing a lot of laughing for how poorly Dad was doing in the hospital, and I sobered immediately. “I should go.”

“Rachel, what are you going to do for your father at three in the morning?” Sebastian asked. “Be realistic. Take care of yourself. Let’s get some sleep.”

I hesitated. “I wouldn’t forgive myself if something happened and Dad was all alone.” That something was both him dying and him coming miraculously back to himself. He needed me there.

“Okay, let me make a call.” Sebastian plucked his phone from the countertop and pecked at the display with his finger. “Yes, hello, doctor, this is Sebastian Clementine. I told you I might be calling you tonight so you could keep Rachel Dare informed about her father’s status. Yes. Here she is.”

Sebastian handed me the phone, and I took it from him, tentative, my fingers still covered with the delicious juices from the skewers we’d just eaten.

“Hello?”

“Yes, Rachel, it’s your father’s doctor,” the man said on the other end of the call. “You’re calling about his status, are you not?”

“That’s right,” I said, clearing my throat lightly. “Yes. How is he doing, please? Has there been any change?”

“No,” the doctor said. “All of the readings are what we’re expecting at this point. Like I said earlier, we’re more or less in a holding pattern in this point…” I let his voice wash over me, not willing to allow my mind to try and wrap around the concept of someone waiting for me to make a decision about Dad’s life. Wordlessly, I handed the phone back to Sebastian, who held it to his ear to listen.

“Thank you, doctor,” he said, his tone professional and polite. “I appreciate you taking the time to keep us updated. We’ll see you in the morning…well, later this morning.”

I watched as he ended the call and set the phone back down on the counter. “Thanks, Sebastian. I just can’t right now. I don’t know. It’s too frightening.”

“You don’t have to be frightened,” he said, hugging me gently. “It’s a scary situation, sure, but your father has good people taking care of him. And a daughter who loves him—but who needs to get some rest.”

I opened my mouth to try and argue, to try and say something, but my body suddenly made it known that it was tired and I yawned instead. “Maybe I could sleep for a few hours,” I admitted.

“Then it’s to bed for us,” Sebastian said, leading us back into the bedroom, leaving the mess in the kitchen for later or for his maid or God knew who. It didn’t matter. I was exhausted.

And maybe it was just an extra perk—a rare bit of mercy—that as I curled up with Sebastian in his bed, the lights of the city glittering through the windows and serving as our stars, it was the sweetest feeling I’d ever experienced. I was safe.

A woman bent over Dad’s motionless form in the hospital bed as Sebastian and I walked in later that morning—showered and fresh and physically ready to face the day.

“How is he doing?” I asked, nervous that there had been some change in his condition while I’d been away and enjoying myself. I was worried even though we’d settled that idea with a simple phone call.

“You’re the health professional,” she tossed over her shoulder before resuming her observations.

“No, I’m not. I thought you were.”

The woman straightened and looked at me, and that’s when I realized it was my mother. She looked almost the same now as she did when she left us ten years ago, but how was that possible? I’d grown up in the interim, and Dad had practically withered before my eyes. Upon closer examination, I saw things that didn’t match my memories of my mother—a brighter red in her glossy tresses, telling me that she dyed her hair, an elevated slope of her breasts beneath her tight shirt that defied the laws of gravity, a blank smoothness on her face that screamed Botox.

She had been escaping the march of time in whatever ways were available to her. It was my mother and it wasn’t all at the same time. I was sure I looked different to her, too.

“You haven’t been wearing a hat,” she blurted out, and I sighed.

“Really?”

“You have a lot more freckles than I remember,” she amended. “Sorry. My dermatologist told me that if I’d taken more care with my skin when I was younger, I wouldn’t have had to have so many facials.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked carefully.

“You’re the one who emailed me,” she said. “I got on the first flight out that I could make. Right after a performance.”

“All I did was ask you a question,” I said. “You didn’t have to come out here.”

“Yes, I did,” she said, unperturbed by my attitude. “You and your father need me. This is a situation where families need to come together.” She looked pointedly, then appraisingly, at Sebastian, who remained at my elbow. “Families only. Unless this fine young man is my son-in-law.”

“Um, no,” I said quickly, cutting in before Sebastian could say anything. “This is Sebastian Clementine. He’s a friend.”

“A well-proportioned friend,” my mother said. “And if he’s just a friend, maybe you wouldn’t mind me asking him out for a drink later.”

I exhaled heavily and pinched the bridge of my nose. Was this really how this interaction was going? It had been a decade since I’d seen my mother, and our reintroduction to each other was going horribly. I didn’t know what I had expected for this situation, but it definitely wasn’t this.

“Let’s unpack that,” I said slowly. “The father of your daughter is on his deathbed. You haven’t seen either of them for ten years. And you’re asking Sebastian, who just so happens to be more than a friend, out for drinks in the middle of the morning.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Dare,” Sebastian said smoothly, stepping forward to offer her his hand. “It’s considerate that you flew in to be here in this difficult time.”

“Please, it’s Amanda,” my mother said. “I left Mrs. Dare behind a long time ago.”

“Ten years ago, to be exact,” I put in, just to be difficult. But as my mother stepped away from Dad’s bedside, all of my rancor fell away. He looked so small beneath the sheets, dwarfed by all of the equipment around him, which was doing the heavy lifting of living right now for him. The guilt I felt at immersing myself in Sebastian deepened and widened, and I discovered that I didn’t care about my mother’s reasons for being here or how she acted. All I cared about was Dad. He was so frail. He didn’t deserve to be so weak, lying there in that hospital bed. He didn’t deserve this heart attack, or the farm going under, or my mother leaving him.

I went to his side and took the hand that wasn’t impaled with a needle, squeezing it and willing him to squeeze back, to show me some kind of sign. His grip stayed limp in my hand, and I felt so devastated that I didn’t even have the urge to cry. It was more like an infinite emptiness inside of me. He’d been the only real parent I’d had for the last ten years of my life, through many, many difficult times. Why was he lying here instead of my mother? She had left us; she hadn’t been worth a damn during the tumult of puberty and beyond. A girl needed her mother, but Dad had worked so hard to fill those shoes for me.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and knew it was Sebastian from his touch, the smell of his cologne. It strengthened me significantly and made me angry in another vein. He’d seen that I needed comforting, but my mother hadn’t recognized it. How could someone I had only known for weeks know me better than the woman who had given birth to me?

“It’s going to be okay, Rachel,” my mother said, and my name sounded foreign coming from her mouth.

“You can’t say that,” I said, turning to face her. “You don’t get to say that. The only thing you get to say is whether he ever mentioned anything to you about his wishes. About what he wanted. How he wanted to go.”

My mother looked contrite and shook her head. “No, I’m sorry. We were young. Invincible, you know. The way you feel right now. Like nothing bad could ever happen. We were more focused on the farm, on raising you, than anything as morbid as that.”

That didn’t help at all. “Do you know if he made a will?” I asked. “Maybe there would’ve been something in there.”

“You’re the one who’s been living with him for the past ten years,” she said flippantly. “You would know better than me.”

“Look, I get that this isn’t a priority for you to be here,” I snapped, done with her. “I know that you probably left behind some very important shit in Las Vegas, but this is the father of your daughter, here, lying in a bed. Can you at least pretend that you want to help me deal with this? If only because you had a hand in creating me?”

“Maybe you two shouldn’t have this conversation here,” Sebastian said, making me jump as he squeezed my hand. I’d forgotten he was here. “I think only good energy should be in here, if only to make your father more peaceful.”

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” my mother said, her shoulders sagging. “I…I don’t know how to do this mothering thing. I think I used to, but I obviously wasn’t very good at it. I left you, after all, and that wasn’t fair to you. I don’t think I can make it up to you, and that’s just something I’ll have to live with. It keeps me up more nights than I care to admit. But will you let me buy you a coffee downstairs so we can get this hashed out? You deserve to be angry with me, but your friend is right—oh, sorry…your ‘more than a friend.’ We should take the negativity outside.”

I caught a quickly hidden smirk from Sebastian at the “more than a friend” comment, and I turned to my mother.

“I guess we should take this outside,” I said glumly.

“I can stay here with your father,” Sebastian offered.

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “You’ve already done enough. I know you’re busy.”

“One of the perks of being president and CEO is that I can choose when I come in to work. Today, I feel like taking the day off. There are more important things.”

“Thanks,” I said, kissing him on the cheek. “You’re not so bad after all.”

“I told you so,” he said, winking.

“Wait, he owns his own company?” my mother asked, as we walked out of the room and down the hallway toward the elevators. “Is he rich?”

“I guess so,” I said glumly, more at the fact that I had just agreed to spend time with my estranged mother than at the fact that Sebastian was rich.

“Well, if you’re not going to ask him to marry you as soon as we get back, I will,” my mother said, stepping into the elevator behind me. “You need to lock that down, girl.”

“Can you not for a little bit?” I asked her. “I remember a few things about you when you were still my mother, but being a flirt isn’t one of them.”

“I’ll always be your mother,” she informed me. “Nothing can change that.”

“I think absence can,” I countered, walking out as soon as the elevator doors rolled open.

We walked in silence toward the cafeteria as I let her absorb that barb, hating myself a little bit. She didn’t deserve how mean I was being to her, but I also didn’t deserve to hear her drone on and on about subjects unrelated to what I needed her to dredge up in her memory.

“Two coffees, please,” I told the cashier at the register when we got to the head of the line. “Do you want anything else?”

“A slice of pie, please,” my mother said. “Oh, and a sandwich. I’m famished.”

I thought about asking her how she could eat at a time like this, but I resisted. After all, I had sought comfort last night in the form of Sebastian, and I had a closer connection to Dad than she did. It wasn’t right of me to judge her, and I resolved to find some crumb of patience to offer her.

We took our coffees—and my mother’s feast—to a table outside, the sun just starting to slant into the courtyard. It was kind of a sad place, that courtyard—trees walled in and the smell of stale smoke even with the surfeit of no-smoking signs. But it was better than Dad’s room in the intensive care unit, no matter how much I loved him.

I let my mother have a few bites of her sandwich, waiting for my coffee to cool, until I tried again.

“Are you sure that you and Dad never discussed this kind of thing?” I asked, blowing over the mug, watching as the steam vanished before rising again. “Whether you would want someone to wait for you to try and come back, or pull the plug and let you go? You know, like a late-night conversation or something you talked about when you were bored and driving somewhere far away?”

My mother waved her hand in the air dismissively, talking around her mouthful of sandwich. “Rachel, nighttime was for sex and sleeping, and we never went anywhere far away in a car. Your father was crazy about that farm, and it drove me crazy. That’s not a mystery to you.”

“I know that,” I said. “But are you sure you can’t think of anything? Like whether he leaned one way or the other?”

My mother shrugged exaggeratedly, cursing as she took a sip of her coffee before it had cooled down enough. “No, Rachel, we just never talked about it.”

“Not in all the years of being together,” I said flatly.

“No.” She polished off her sandwich and took another sip of coffee—this time, more carefully. “Would it make you feel better if I made something up? If I told you that I suddenly remembered something that would help you make up your mind? I can do that, if you think it would help.”

I recoiled. “No, that wouldn’t help.” She could’ve lied to me and I would’ve seized on it, I realized, eager for someone else to make the decision for me. But I was beginning to realize that Dad’s life, his future…that was going to be all up to me. No one knew him better than me. Not the woman with whom he’d made me. Not Sebastian. Not the doctors. Me. I knew the implications of what I might have to do, but it didn’t make the decision any easier.

“The farm will be yours, you know,” my mother said offhandedly, as if it had just occurred to her. “If your father doesn’t make it, of course.”

“I thought you didn’t know if he had a will,” I said.

“I don’t have to know. We’re divorced. You’re his heir. The farm is yours. It doesn’t take a lawyer to figure that one out.”

My mother had started on her pie, but I still hadn’t tried the coffee. I didn’t really feel like drinking it. The idea that the farm would be mine was overwhelming, to say the least. I didn’t know what I would do with it, or whether I actually wanted it. The farm would come with the bank, all of the various creditors Dad owed, all of the bills that were past due. The farm was a tangle of headaches and heartaches, and I was about to inherit all of it.

“I thought you might be excited about having the farm,” my mother said, watching my face carefully. “You stayed there, after all. Even after you finished college.”

“It was what I majored in,” I told her, giving up on my coffee and setting it on the concrete table.

“You don’t want the farm,” my mother said. It was a statement, not a question, and I knew she could see it in my expression. I tried to make my face as blank as possible, but she just laughed. “It’s no use. I can read you like a book. You’re my daughter, Rachel, no matter how much that idea might repulse you.”

“It doesn’t repulse me,” I sighed. “I just…I don’t understand how I’m your daughter. We’re really different.”

“Are we?” she countered. “We look just alike.” I gave her a dubious stare, and she backpedaled. “Well, you look like I did when I was your age. I had you when I was twenty-two, you know.”

“I know. But beyond appearances, we’re completely different. You act so…”

“I act the way I do because I know what I want,” my mother said simply. “That’s all there is to it. I decided, after I left him, that I was done pretending to like things I didn’t, demurring when I knew that sounding off would get me what I wanted. I was done pleasing others. I was ready to please myself. Everything I did was something that made me happy. No regrets.”

“Not even leaving me behind?” I asked her.

She eyed me. “I’m sorry, but no. I don’t even regret that. I could’ve taken you, but that wasn’t a life for a child. You’d have been backstage waiting for me every night, or with a babysitter, or out in the audience, nursing a soda while I danced. That wouldn’t have been a good upbringing for you.”