Chapter 28
Sometime in the night, El reached out his arm looking to sweep Sophie against his side, but she wasn’t there. Panicked, he sat up in the bed and breathed again when he saw her clothes still thrown across a nearby chair.
He glanced around but did not see her. Climbing out of bed, he wandered into the living room, and there she was. Even in the dark he could make out her slender form. She was standing in front of his bookcase, which took up one wall of the room.
“You okay?” he asked, rubbing at his blurry eyes.
“Yes,” she said, but her voice sounded strained.
“What’s wrong?” Still half-asleep, he padded across the room to her.
She turned to him, her arms stretched out to encompass the whole area. “Is this who you are? Really who you are?”
He paused. They’d spent the night making love, but the problems of the day before still hung in the air between them. “Yes,” he said.
She smirked, slightly angry at his blunt answer. He wondered if he should’ve lied to spare her feelings.
No, that’s how I got in this mess to begin with.
She turned back and continued looking at books, and Eliot crossed the room to turn on the lights.
He could see she was dressed in his robe, which looked adorably oversized, seductively hanging off one shoulder. “What’d you do that for?” she snapped, covering her burning eyes.
“Consider it a metaphor,” he snapped back. He’d had enough apologizing and begging. He wanted them to be done with this so they could get on with their lives. He wanted to marry this woman and build that future he’d told her about earlier. And they would never do that if every time she saw something unfamiliar, something she didn’t know about him, she started hating him all over again.
“I love books, so much so it’s hard for me to give one up, so I ended up with this.” He nodded toward the wall. “You like books, too.”
“Doesn’t make us soul mates,” she muttered, determined to be disgruntled.
He walked over to the bookcase and, reaching overhead to a shelf of oversized books, he grabbed a thick one and brought it down.
“Here,” he said, plopping it in her hands. He then crossed to the leather sofa and fell back on it.
“What’s this?”
“My mother’s recipe book.” He yawned. “It’s how I learned to bake.”
She looked up at him, more interested than she wanted to admit. “Really?”
“Yep.”
She sat down on the floor in front of the bookcase and started glancing through the pages. “These look like Grandma’s recipes.”
“They’re not. I thought the same thing the first time I saw the book in the store. But after I compared the two books, I realized your grandmother’s book has a lot of herbs and spice in the recipes. Things I never would’ve imagined in pastries. Not sure where she got them, but they are some of the best pastry recipes I’ve ever tasted.” He smiled. “You know, that was the first thing that struck me about the place when I first arrived. How much
Mama Mae reminded me of my mother.” He smiled. “That ol’ school breed of mama—love you to death, but don’t take any mess off you.”
Sophie smiled. “That’s her.” She glanced at him. “Where’s your mother?”
“She and my father died in a car accident when I was ten. That’s how I ended up with Uncle Carl.”
She frowned. “I’m surprised he was willing to take you in.”
El huffed. “He was more than willing. My parents named my father’s sister, my Aunt Carol, as my guardian. But Uncle Carl fought her for custody and won.”
“How? I mean, your parents left a will, so it’s not like there was any question of what they wanted, right?”
“He had better resources and more money to spend on lawyers.” Eliot sighed. “In the end, he painted my Aunt Carol as unfit because she worked for a janitorial service and lived in a one-bedroom apartment. The court agreed I would be better off with him.”
Sophie’s frown deepened. “Why would he do that?”
El sat for a moment thinking of the past. He pondered the unusual hand fate had dealt him, and how all those things had brought him to this place in his life. For so many years, he’d hated the fact that he ended up in his uncle’s custody, but had he not, he would have never met Sophie.
“When Carl took over the reins of Fulton Foods from his father, he let it consume his life. He’s managed to build it to twice the size it was when his father died. But time got away from him. He never married, or had any children.” Eliot looked directly at Sophie. “I am the only child of his only sibling. Apparently, when I was born he tried to talk my parents into letting me come live with him then, promising to make me his heir. They refused.” El shrugged, fighting to hold back the bad memories. “And then they died.”
“Wow.” She tilted her head, watching him with a wary expression. “So, how was it? Growing up with your uncle?”
His lips twisted in a sarcastic expression. “You’ve met my uncle.”
“Understood.” She bit her lip, and he could see she was trying to find some good in the situation.
“Don’t bother, Sophie. The man is rotten to the core. I spent
the greater part of my youth trying to find the good in him. There is none.” He laid his head back against the sofa. “He took me from my aunt to make me his heir, but every time I did something that displeased him, he’d try to use the threat of leaving me out of his will as a way to control me.”
He laughed. “The funniest part is that I didn’t care about his will, or his money or his company. I was so miserable without my parents that I didn’t care about anything. Until…”
“Until?”
“Until I got old enough to understand how much hecared.” His head came up and he looked at her with narrowed eyes. “Then I wanted it all. His fortune, his position, everything he cared about—I wanted to take it all from him,” he said bitterly.
“No, El, don’t.” She shook her head emphatically. “Don’t allow yourself to be consumed by that kind of hatred. You’ll end up just like him.”
He gave her a soft smile. “I’ll have you to save me.”
“I told you, redemption is God’s business, not mine. I’m just a woman.”
He got on his knees and began crawling across the floor to her. “But, oh, what a woman.” He stopped in front of her, his face only inches from hers. “This conversation is depressing.”
“Actually, it’s pretty wonderful.” She reached out and touched his face. “Everything you’ve said feels like the truth.”
“It is. But it’s still depressing.” He moved forward, bearing her down to the carpeted floor and settling into the crook of her body. “I much prefer to do this.”
“Surprise, surprise.”
“So…? Are we okay?”
“Yes. But one day I want to hear the rest. I feel like you know so much about me and my world, and I’ve only had a glimpse of yours.” She frowned, as if a sudden unpleasant thought occurred to her. “You were right, by the way—about Lonnie.”
“Really?” He tried to hide a smile.
“Go ahead and laugh. That little hussy has been playing me for years. Here I’m living like a monk, and she’s bonking like a sailor on shore leave.”
This time he did laugh. “That’swhy you’re mad? She was getting some and you weren’t?”
“No, and I’m not mad. If I had been paying closer attention I would’ve realized she was growing up and changing. Anyway, I guess I’m grateful it was Dante, someone who really cares about her. Someone else could’ve really taken advantage of her.”
“That’s true.”
“El? What did you mean in the elevator when you said I wouldn’t have to wait long for Fulton to go out of business?”
Suddenly, he rolled off her and sat up. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Having met your uncle, it’s kind of hard not to.”
“Have a little faith in me.”
“I have all the faith in the world in you, but I also know what a feud can do to a family.”
“There is no feud.”
“Really?”
“A feud is an ongoing disagreement.” He glanced over his shoulder at her. “There is no feud.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Exacting vengeance.”
“El—”
“Shh,” he said, and turned on his side to lie beside her. “Don’t worry about what is going on between me and my uncle. You just focus on the new clients I’m sending you, and taking care of your grandmother.”
“I want a long, full life with you, Mr. Wright. Now that I’ve found you.”
“And we will have that. I just have a little unfinished business, that’s all.”
She tilted her head to look at him. “Obviously, you’re not going to give this up, and quite frankly, I’m too sleepy to care about it right now.” She stood and stretched. “Come on, let’s go back to bed.”
He stood beside her and, taking her hand, headed toward the bedroom. She paused beside a statue of a phoenix, and he turned to see what had caught her attention.
“I like the symbolism of the phoenix.” He answered the unasked question in her eyes.
She smiled. “You’re kinda deep, huh?”
He arched an eyebrow. “Not yet, but come on into the bedroom and I’ll rectify that.”
She laughed. “I mean it. Here I thought you were this arrogant pastry chef and now…it’s like I’ve all of a sudden started dating someone else, and I’m getting to know him for the first time.” She reached up and placed a quick kiss on his lips before walking ahead to the bedroom.
He followed at a more sedate pace, deep in thought. “What if that’s true?”
“What?” she asked, dropping the robe she was wearing. She began to crawl across the bed, and Eliot suddenly lost his train of thought.
Quickly he came up behind her. “Wait, don’t move,” he whispered, holding her by the hips, he held her in place on her knees. “Perfect,” he purred, climbing onto the bed behind her. “Absolutely perfect.” He ran a hand over her hip, and around her firm bottom.
“Don’t move,” he instructed once more, before reaching into the nightstand and quickly finding a condom. Looking back at her perfectly positioned on the bed, he hurried and donned the latex cover, then came up behind her once more.
“I’ve been dreaming about this position for weeks,” he whispered in her ear, as he guided himself inside her. “Did you miss me? When we were apart?” he asked, before running his tongue over her earlobe.
“Uh-huh,” she managed between stilted breaths, her focus split between what was going on behind her and what was going on inside her.
Holding her hips in place, El pulled back a fraction. “I don’t believe you.” He held himself at her wet opening, just waiting. “I’ll ask again. Did you miss me?”
“Yes,” she said, and moaned.
“Hmm.” He pushed forward a fraction. “That sounded a little more believable.”
“El!”
He laughed and moved a fraction deeper inside her. “Once again. Did you miss me?”
She pushed back, trying to bring him inside her. Her small elbows dug into the comforter as she grinded against him in frustration. “Yes, damn you! Yes!”
“That’s what I’m talking about.” He kissed her shoulder, even as he planted himself deep inside her body. Using all his skill as a lover, he wrapped himself around her body and pumped into her. He held back when he felt her reaching for the finish line, and when she began to cool, he held her hips and pushed her to the limit once more, until finally he could not hold her back any longer and she screamed his name as her release forced his. Together they leaped off the cliff and into the abyss.
An hour later, curled against his side, Sophie said, “You know when I drove up to this place today, I didn’t think I had the right place. It’s so different from where I imagined you would live.” She glanced around the ultramodern bedroom, with its sharp angles and sleek lines, and nodded. “But now, I think it does kind of fit you—in a way.”
“Think you can get used to the place?”
She looked up at his face. “What do you mean?”
“Living here.”
“Here? In Memphis? I can’t live this far from the bakery, what if something happens in the middle of the night?”
“What if…what if you moved the bakery here?”
“Why would I do that?”
He sighed, as if he were about to reveal something he didn’t want to. “Make no mistake, Sophie. When all is said and done, I plan to put my uncle out of business. And there will be a huge opening here. An opening you will be perfectly posed to fill.”
She sat up in the bed. “How long have you been working on this?”
He folded his arms behind his head. “Long enough to have most of the pieces in place. Any day now I expect Humpty Dumpty to take a tumble.”
She huffed. “Problem is this particular Humpty Dumpty may get up and wipe the floor with you.”
“Sophie, I know you’ve only seen one side of me, but I’ve spent my life learning at the foot of the master of deceit and
double dealing. He wanted to make me ruthless, and to a point he succeeded. I’m better equipped than anyone for the task of bringing down Carl Fulton.”
El blinked away the fierceness he was feeling, seeing the wary concern come into her eyes. No matter what she said, El realized she still saw her gentle pastry chef when she looked at him. And that was fine, because that was also a part of who he was.