One Night in Paradise (15 page)

That did earn her a short chuckle. “Maybe tonight friendship isn’t what I want.”

His words made her shiver, the sensual promise in them turning her on. The underlying, darker meaning she couldn’t quite grasp making goose bumps break out on her arms. “It really is too much,” she said, turning to face him, her nose nearly touching his.

He straightened putting some distance between them. “It’s a perfectly fitting gift for a lover. Are you ready?”

“Yes,” she said, turning his choice of word over in her head. Yes, she was his lover, in the sense that they’d slept together. But there was something in the way he said it, something that seemed cold, when a lover should be something warm. Something personal.

She touched the necklace, the gems cold beneath her fingertips.

T
HE
charity ball was crowded already when they arrived, a sea of beautiful people dressed in black positioned around the ballroom, chatting and eating the very expensive canapes.

Heads turned when she and Zack walked down the marble staircase and down into the room. Everyone was looking at Zack, because it was impossible not to. She was fully appreciating just how he was viewed in the community now. A man of power and wealth, a man of unsurpassed beauty. If you could call what he possessed beauty. It was too masculine for that, and yet she wasn’t sure there was another word for it, either.

Pride flared in her stomach, low and warm. All the women in the room were looking at Zack with undisguised sexual hunger. And Zack was with her. Touching her, his hand low on her back, possessive.

She turned and pressed a kiss to his cheek. He looked at her. “What was that for?”

“Because,” she said.

He looked at her for a moment, a strange light in his eyes. “Let’s go find our table.”

“Okay,” she said, trying to ignore the tightening in her throat.

There was a table, for two, with place cards set on each empty plate. Zack held her chair out for her and she sat, her
heart slamming against her ribs as she read the name that had been written in calligraphy on her place card.

Hannah Parsons.

With Zack’s name tacked on to hers, even. Clara felt dizzy. She looked down at the ring. Hannah’s ring. Hannah’s seat. Hannah’s man. She had to wonder if the necklace had been meant for Hannah, too.

She wrapped her fingers around the card and curled them into a fist, crumpling it and tossing it onto the marble floor.

“What the hell?” Zack asked.

“It had the wrong name on it,” she said stiffly.

“Does it matter?”

That hit even harder than seeing the name. “I suppose not.” She put her foot over the crumpled paper and squished it beneath the platform of her stiletto.

“You’re the one who’s here with me.” He stretched his hand toward hers, covering it, stroking her wrist. “No one else.”

She knew it. And in some ways she knew his words were sincere. But there was also something generic in them. There was something strangely generic to the whole evening and she couldn’t quite place what it was or why.

“Of course.” She looked into his eyes, tried to find something familiar now. Something of her friend. But she didn’t see it. She only saw the man as he presented himself to the world. Aloof, put together, charming. But there was no depth there. No feeling or warmth.

It was frightening.

Dinner was lovely, tiny bits of sculpted beauty made to be admired before being eaten. Of course it was marked up extravagantly, because the whole point of the evening was that the charity received donations.

A woman in a long, flowing dress walked up onto the stage, her air of authority making it obvious that she was the coordinator of the event, and a hushed silence fell over the crowd.

“Thank you all for coming tonight,” she said. “And for the
very generous donation of your time and money to the Bay Area Children’s Hospital.”

She turned and looked toward their table, a smile on her face. “And tonight, we would also like to give special acknowledgment to Mr. Zack Parsons, who has donated enough money to revamp the entire Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit. Everything in the unit will be state of the art. It will be the best equipped facility in the state of California. There have been major advances in the field of Neo-Natal medicine over the past few years. We’re able to offer hope to babies, to families, who wouldn’t have had any as little as five years ago. And now, we’re able to offer even more. So, thank you, Mr. Parsons.”

The room erupted into applause and everyone stood. Except for Zack. Except for her. Her eyes stung, her entire body feeling numb.

Zack lifted his hand and nodded once, his acknowledgment. Her heart broke for him. What a wonderful gift he was giving to so many families. A gift he hadn’t been able to give to himself, to his own son.

She wanted to howl at the universe for the unfairness of it all. And yet there was no point. And Zack was there, broken, and probably in pain. She could be there for him. It was all she could do. And she would. Because she was his friend. His lover.

The speaker went on to talk about some more donations and then invited everyone to stay for dancing and an open bar.

After the applause died away, people started to wander around the room, talking and laughing, some people came to talk to Zack. She wanted to tell them to go away. Because she could feel the dark energy, the grief, radiating from him like a physical force. How was everyone else missing it?

She didn’t understand how they could miss what was so clear to her.

“Let’s go.” She put her hand on his, felt his pulse, pounding hard in his wrist. She ran her fingers along his forearm.
She didn’t think he would accept loving words, but she could offer him comfort in another way. A way he could accept.

There was no question where things would end up tonight. No fighting it. They both knew it.

He nodded once and stood, she stood, too, and went to him, putting her hand on his back. He wrapped his arm around her waist as they headed out of the ballroom.

Zack’s chest felt too full. Everything felt like too much. The whole day. He shouldn’t have brought Clara with him tonight. It was one thing to sit in a room full of strangers and have them talk about his contribution to the NICU, but it was another to have someone sitting there, knowing why he’d done it. Someone else thinking of Jake. It was hard enough to be alone in it. Sharing it made it seem more real. It made him feel exposed.

It made him feel like everything, his failures, his pain, was written on him. Something he couldn’t hide, or scrub off no matter how many layers of control he tried to conceal it with.

Clara saw him.

When he’d picked her up tonight, he’d fully intended on keeping her at a distance, putting her in her place. A new place. Because he had mistresses, women who were with him for the sole purpose of warming his bed and accompanying him to events.

He wasn’t friends with those women. He didn’t eat their baked goods, he didn’t know that they wore yoga pants to bed when there wasn’t a man around. He didn’t know that they were insecure about their bodies, or that their favorite band was still that group of long-haired teenage boys that had been so popular in the nineties.

He didn’t know anything about them beyond what they looked like naked.

He knew the other stuff about Clara. And he knew the naked stuff. And tonight he’d been determined to focus only on the
latter. If he couldn’t keep her as only a friend, and he’d proven he wasn’t doing a very good job of that, then he would have her as a mistress. Because what had happened at her apartment, the way they’d shared dinner, jokes, then made love, him holding her while she’d slept … he couldn’t do that. It was too reckless. To out of his control.

He had to move her into the compartment he could deal with. And she seemed determined to push her way back out.

The expression on her face when she saw the wrong card in her spot had been so sad, stricken, as though someone had slapped her.

And he’d felt it in him. As though her emotion was his. He’d always felt connected to Clara, but this was different. Sharper. Impossible to deny. Beyond his control.

He should have taken her home. Yet he’d still taken her back to his house. Because he had planned on having her tonight, had been obsessed with it all week. If only to prove that he could sleep with her without having his insides flayed. Sex was only sex. It didn’t have to be personal, it didn’t have to mean anything. It didn’t have to be related to the awful, tight feeling in his chest.

She was beautiful tonight, incredible in that form-fitting black dress and the gem, enticing in the valley of her cleavage, drawing his eye, tormenting him.

She was standing by the massive living-room windows, the bay in the background, city lights glittering on the inky surface of the waves. He wanted her. Here and now. A good thing he’d planned for it. It wasn’t spur-of-the-moment, it wasn’t beyond his control.

He had condoms and everything else he needed. He was in control. He desperately needed the control. He tightened his hand into a fist, steadied it, ignored the tremor that ran through his fingers and skated up his arm, jolting his heart.

Ignoring the strange tenderness he felt when he looked at
her. This wasn’t about feeling, not in an emotional sense. This was physical. It was sex.

“Take off your dress,” he said.

She reached behind herself and unzipped the gown, letting it fall to the floor. She wasn’t wearing a bra, only a small triangle of lace keeping her from being completely bare. That and the necklace, the emerald heavy and glittering between her breasts.

She reached around to remove it, her breasts rising with the action, pink tipped and perfect.

“No,” he ground out. “Leave it on.” A reminder. A reminder that she was the same as every other woman he’d ever been with. The exchange of gifts, jewelry, that was how it worked. It was invariable, it was safe. It was unchallenging.

She dropped her hands to her sides and he walked closer to her, loving the way the moonlight spilled silver over her pale curves. The way the deep shadows accentuated the dip of her small waist, the round fullness of her hips and breasts.

She was a woman. There was no denying it. And he was starving for her.

But he would wait. He would draw it out. Because he was the master of this game. He was always in charge. He had forgotten that sometimes over the past few weeks, had allowed her inexperience, the nature of their friendship, to change the way he approached it.

Not now.

She’s a woman. Only a woman. The same as any other.

No. Not the same. His mind rebelled against that thought immediately. There had never been a more exquisite woman, that much he knew for certain. There had never been a figure, not since Eve, better designed to tempt a man.

She was the epitome of sensual beauty, more seductive simply standing there than any other woman could have been if she’d been trying.

Clara.

Her name flashed through his mind, loud, a reminder.

No. He didn’t need it. He wasn’t thinking of her. Only of his own need and how she might fulfill it. He would pleasure her, too, as he did all of his lovers. But it wasn’t different. It couldn’t be different. Not again. Not after that night in her apartment.

“Turn around for me,” he said. “Face the window.”

She obeyed again. She was like a perfect hourglass, the elegant line of her back enticing. He walked over to her, extending his hand and tracing the dip of her spine. She shivered beneath his touch.

“Do you like that?” he asked.

“I’ve liked everything you’ve ever done to me.” Her voice, so sweet, a bit vulnerable. Not a temptress.

Clara.

He put his hands on her hips and tugged her back against him, let her feel the hard ridge of his arousal, the blatant, purely sexual evidence of what he wanted from her. Her indrawn breath, the short, sweet sound of pleasure that escaped her lips, let him know that she was tracking with him. Important.

He would never do anything she didn’t want.

He put his hand on her stomach, soft, slightly rounded. He liked that about her, too, that she was so feminine, curved everywhere. Absolute perfection.

He cupped her butt with his other hand, her flesh silken beneath his palm. “You’re beautiful,” he said. She leaned back against him, her head against his chest. Her slid his hand up to palm her breast, teasing her nipples as he continued to stroke her backside.

He gripped the side of her panties and drew them down her legs.

He move his hand back behind her, moving it forward, teasing her slick folds before parting them and sliding his fingers deep inside of her. She gasped, spreading her thighs a bit wider to accommodate him.

The line of her neck was so elegant, irresistible. He bent his head and kissed her there, tasting the salt of her skin, so familiar now, as he slid his free hand up to her breast and squeezed her nipple tightly between his thumb and forefinger. She arched against him, her breathing growing harsher, more shallow.

He had her pleasure in his hands, how he touched her and where, dictating everything she did. Everything she felt. This was like everything else. Every other sexual encounter he’d had as an adult. He was in charge of their pleasure, both of them. He decided when things happened and how.

This thing with Clara hadn’t been right from the beginning, because he hadn’t managed to put her in her place for their affair. He hadn’t separated their friendship from it. That was why he’d shared with her, held her while she slept. That was why he’d started feeling things.

But he knew it now. He knew what he had to do. He could still have her. He could get a handle on everything, and then he could have her. He touched the necklace between her breasts, fingers sliding over the gem. A reminder of exactly what they had between them.

She tried to turn and he held her so she was facing the window, away from him. He reached over and picked up a condom sheathing himself and turning her to the side so that she was standing in front of the couch.

“Hold on to the back of it,” he said. She obeyed, bending at the waist, gripping the back of the couch. She looked back at him, her eyes round, questioning. Familiar.

He chose not to focus on her face. He gripped her hips, looked at the curve of her hips, how her body dipped in beautifully, perfectly, at her waist.

He positioned himself at the entrance to her body.

She made a short, low sound that vibrated through her. “Okay?” he asked, his teeth gritted tight, every ounce of control spent on moving slowly, on not thrusting in to her the rest
of the way and satisfying the need that was roaring inside of him.

“Yes,” she said.

He pushed into her the rest of the way, her body so hot and tight it took every ounce of his willpower to keep from coming the moment he was inside.