Fractured (Not Quite a Billionaire #2) (18 page)

“Of course I’m not worried.” I took another bite of a white fish that should have been delicious, but somehow tasted dry as bone. I would have looked out at the lake, but the window next to me showed only my own reflection, and that was nothing I wanted to see. I didn’t know how to arrange my face, so I looked down at my plate instead. “It’s fifteen years, not twenty. And just think about all the women whose husbands were married before, men who have children with their ex-wives. Are those women worrying every time their husbands have contact with their exes?”

“I bet they are if she’s still hot. I hope she isn’t. Did Hemi say what she looks like?”

“He doesn’t know, remember? He hasn’t seen her. I know she’s Maori, and that’s all.”

“Maybe she’s, like, really ugly now,” Karen said. “She’s old, right? So maybe she is.”

She wasn’t. I knew, because I’d looked her up online, and had found her, too, in words and pictures. A fiercely beautiful face, golden skin, and lots of thick, dark hair. And a body.

Most people smiled in those pictures, and so did she. Barely. Her smile said,
Happy to see you, my dear. I know your secrets, and I’m going to use them to chew you up and spit you out.

All right, so I was projecting. Back in the real world, she was a buyer for a textile design firm, which sounded like a glamour position for a glamorous person, and that’s how she looked. In fact, she looked more than that. In a sleek black dress that showed both the richness of her curves and the slimness of her waist, she looked dark, predatory, and mysterious. In other words, Hemi’s match, and my polar opposite. I was about as mysterious and predatory as a puppy. I’d have been willing to bet big money that she had at least four inches on me, too. In height
and
bust size.

I switched the subject with an effort, and by the time Karen and I finally headed back to the house, it was starting to rain. We had to run, and that helped. After that, we watched a movie, and Karen went to bed with her book, and I didn’t.

I’d hoped Hemi would text me when he was done, but nine o’clock came and went, and I’d still heard nothing. I took a shower, thought about putting on something sexy, and didn’t do it. I’d never wanted more to push, and I’d never been more sure that pushing would be wrong. So instead, I dressed in something else from Shades of V: a pair of silky-soft white cotton pajama pants and a pale-pink camisole embroidered with flowers at the neckline.

I wasn’t going to try to be something I wasn’t. If I had to compete for Hemi’s love, for his desire? I’d already lost. And then I finally got into bed, opened my book, listened to the rain drumming on the roof, and read the same page over and over again.

When I heard the front door open, I put the book down and got out of bed, trying to calm my heart.

No pressure,
I told myself.
No fear.

I went out into the hallway, then out to the lounge, walking softly so as not to wake Karen, and found Hemi taking his shoes off by the door. He was in jeans and a dark brown merino T-shirt tonight. Whether that had been to tell me this was casual, or to tell Anika, I didn’t know.

He stood when I walked in. He looked at me, and his eyes…they were empty.

I walked straight into his arms, put my own arms around him, and said, “I’m glad you’re home.”

He didn’t smell like Hemi. He smelled like tropical flowers and oriental spices. He smelled like another woman. Looking up, I saw a trace of red lipstick on his neck, below his earlobe, and then I didn’t look, because he was holding me tight, squeezing so hard it almost hurt, picking me up so my feet left the floor. And I could swear his arms were shaking.

“Shh,” I whispered, barely knowing what I was saying. “Shh. It’s all right. Come to bed. Come with me.”

I held his hand, then, through the dimly lit house. Outside, the wind whistled and howled, and the rain beat against the huge windows as if the night wanted the world to become water. As if it wanted to drown us. It couldn’t, though. It couldn’t get in here.

When we reached the bed, he sat down, started to say something, then stopped and ran a hand over the back of his head. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m all good.”

“Hemi.” I drew my hand over his carved cheekbone, the same way he’d done with me the night before. “No. Please lie down. Please.”

He stared at me for long seconds, and I held my breath. And then he lay down.

I took my clothes off. Slowly, because I knew he liked to watch. I shimmied the soft trousers down my legs, and then I drew the camisole over my head and dropped it at my feet. I didn’t take off the matching pale-pink flower-embroidered thong, though. I knew he’d like to look at it a little longer, to delay the moment when he’d touch me, when he’d feel me. And tonight? It was all about what he liked.

He still hadn’t said anything when I climbed over him and straddled his hips, and he didn’t say anything when I stroked his face and kissed his lips, either. That was fine with me. I didn’t want words, and I didn’t need them. Instead, I tried to tell him everything I needed to say through my hands and my body, through the power of my touch. How much I loved him, and how glad I was that he was mine. How
sure
I was that he was mine. And how sure I was that I was his.

I held my breath as I finally, so slowly, pulled his T-shirt up and over his powerful chest, but he sat up and let me do it. And when I kissed his mouth and stroked his sculpted arms, his chest, his firm abdomen, his sides, tight with hard muscle—he didn’t say anything then, either. But he closed his eyes.

I tasted her on him, so I washed him clean. I kissed his neck where her lipstick had stained his skin, and then I licked it away. I kissed my way down his throat, over his chest, finding his sensitive spots and lingering there. Down here, I tasted him, but I didn’t taste her. But then, I’d known I wouldn’t taste her.

When I felt him sinking into the mattress, relaxing under my touch, I pulled off his jeans and briefs, climbed off of him, and drew my thong down my legs. His eyes were open now, and I was suddenly, fiercely glad of it. I wanted to be the face in his vision tonight. I wanted to be the woman in his arms and the peace in his dreams. I wanted to be his everything, the same way he was mine. I wanted him to know it for sure. I wanted him to believe.

For once, he wasn’t trying to be in control. For once, he let me make love to him. He let me kiss him, and touch him, and lick him, and stroke him. And finally, he let me climb on top of him, and he let me please him.

I touched myself, too. I slid my hands over my breasts, my belly, and then on down, bold and fearless, and he lay in the light of this bedside lamp, his breath coming harder now, and watched me do it.

I didn’t want to make him work tonight, but when his hands came up to my breasts, I didn’t object. Instead, I hummed, closed my eyes, rocked him a little better, and said, “Yes.”

He was caressing me, then. His hands felt so much better on me than my own did, and when they held my hips, when he started to move me over him? That felt the best of all.

“Hemi,” I said, continuing to touch myself, doing exactly what I wanted, exactly what I needed as he pulled me over him, onto him, again and again. “I love you. I love you. I…”

After that, though, I couldn’t say anything else. And neither could he.

Hemi

Hope had stolen my heart long ago. Tonight, she locked it away and took the key.

When we were lying together, when my breath had come back and hers had, too, I said, “I didn’t sleep with Anika.”

She had her hand on my chest, two slow fingers tracing the whorls of my tattoo. “I know.”

“How do you know? Why do you trust me? I haven’t been a man any woman could count on. And I came home stinking of her.”

“Hemi.” She propped her chin on my chest, now, and ran a hand over my bicep, then up to my shoulder. “If you had, wouldn’t you have taken a shower?”

I had to laugh, the barest breath. “Yeh.”

She smiled, a thing of such sweetness and such light that I had to catch my breath. “I didn’t need that in order to know, though. Of course I didn’t. When you say you aren’t a man a woman can count on—when haven’t you been that for me? When haven’t you tried?”

“Well, not so much at the beginning, maybe.”

“Maybe not so much then, but you’re trying now.”

She stroked me some more, her fingers running lightly over the cool greenstone of my pendant, the adze that stood for strength and courage and determination. All the hard things, all the things I’d always thought mattered most. She traced up the braided cord and down again, over my skin, over my heart. And because she didn’t ask, I told her. “It wasn’t good. She said some things to try to hurt me, and I said things to hurt her. Like old times, eh.”

“Mm.” She was still drawing that soft hand over me, and it soothed me and calmed me in exactly the same way as water flowing over rock, just as I’d imagined earlier. The rain beat down outside, drumming out its liquid message of connection, of going away and coming back again, of the endless web that was life and death, past and present and future. Of the world and all the creatures that moved in it, and the people, too: those who’d been, those who were, and those yet to come. Of the world to a Maori.

And inside, in the warmth, in the night, Hope untwisted my heart and made me whole.

I put my hand over hers, felt the smoothness of her skin and the solid edges of my ring on her finger, and said, “I love you.”

She held my hand, kissed the spot on my chest where my heart beat, and said, “I know.”

Hope

Something changed between Hemi and me after that night. Some twisted place in him had loosened, and he laughed more easily, smiled more broadly, and, I could have sworn, loved more deeply. I knew I did. I loved him more, even though I wouldn’t have said that was possible. Or maybe the answer was, I loved him better.

To truly love, we have to see, don’t we? And the more Hemi let me see him, the more I saw to love, even when what I saw wasn’t entirely lovable.

That makes no sense? It felt true anyway. But then, I was pretty new to love, and loving Hemi wasn’t exactly wading in the kiddie pool. I’d been in the deep end from the start.

Too bad we couldn’t take all that love and get married with it. Instead, we made our leisurely way down New Zealand and ended up in Queenstown, the adventure resort in the lower part of the South Island, where an enormous lake glowed as richly as the sapphires in my bracelet beneath a ring of snow-covered peaks and an ice-blue winter sky. And in the mountains, Karen learned to snowboard, and I found out that I hated skiing. Which was awkward.

Hemi loved to ski, naturally. And even more naturally, he was good at it. At least he seemed like he was to me, although what did I know. As for Karen—something about the medical crisis she’d been through had made her fearless. She said after her first morning’s lesson, when I commented on it, “I already kind of died, you know? Now I’ve got all this
life,
and I just want to do it
all.”
And I looked at Hemi, he looked at me, and I knew exactly what he was thinking.
I’m going to be vetting every guy who turns up, no worries, and he’s going to notice me doing it.