One Night to Risk It All (10 page)

She turned away from him and fumbled for the door into the room. He slid it open and he walked in behind her, sweeping her hair over her shoulder, his lips on the back of her neck as they walked inside.

Then he gripped her shoulders and turned her to face him, kissing her lips. “Can’t wait,” he said, tugging at her dress until he slipped it from her body, then pulling her panties down her legs, while she worked on the closure to his jeans. He stripped them off, along with his underwear, leaving him blessedly naked.

He gripped her thighs and tugged her up so that her legs were wrapped around his waist before lowering them both to the carpet. The door was still open, the traffic noise and ocean breeze coming into the suite, but she didn’t care.

There was nothing but this. Nothing but Alex.

“Please, Alex,” she said. “I need you.”

He positioned himself and slid inside of her, filling her, stretching her. She felt right for the first time in weeks. Or maybe more truthfully, she felt right for the first time in eleven years. More herself.

And then it was all wiped away as she gave up emotion for pleasure. There was nothing but their fractured breathing, Alex saying rough, coarse things in her ear. In English, in Greek. Words she’d never heard before. Words that sent a shiver of illicit longing through her, that heightened her desire, amped up her arousal.

After the orgasm he gave her outside, she was shocked that she had another one building already. But with each stroke, each rough, whispered word, he pushed her higher, faster.

He put his hand beneath her lower back, lifted her hips off of the ground and thrust harder into her, the sound of skin on skin overtaking the traffic noise from the street below.

He thrust into her one last time, a hoarse sound rising in his throat as he came. The sound, his loss of control, the look of tortured pleasure on his face, was so intense that she felt it as it echoed through her, grabbed hold of her own pleasure and expanded it, pushed her over the edge, their orgasms blending into one until she couldn’t tell where hers began and ended, until she felt like they’d genuinely become one.

When it was over, the traffic noise came back into her consciousness. He rolled away from her, lying on his back on the carpet. A breeze blew through the door, chilling her bare, sweat-slicked skin.

“Well,” she said.

“Yes.” She looked over at him. He was on his back, his arms up, hands beneath his head.

“I suppose that was inevitable,” she said, sitting up, drawing her knees to her chest.

“Clearly it was,” he said.

“Obviously. Because it happened.”

He turned and rose up, cupping her cheek. “Yes, it did.”

“It didn’t fix anything,” she said, a cold feeling stealing into her chest.

“No, but I don’t suppose sex ever stood a chance of fixing anything.”

“I thought we might...” She stopped talking, because she didn’t know what she’d thought. That it would steal the mystery? Break the bond? That it would bond them? Answer the questions and reservations she’d had?

No, she hadn’t thought any of that. She’d thought of nothing but need. Her need to have him, the way he’d looked at her. The way he’d wanted her.

Not the façade, but her.

But now, with the haze of orgasm fading slowly into the background, she was acutely aware of the fact that she was, yet again, naked with a man she didn’t know. Yet again, she was exposed with him.

This time she’d gone and shown just how needy she was. For some kind of acceptance. It made her cringe. She knew better than to show this much of herself. Than to be anything more than self-contained.

Her mother had been that way. So perfect. So gracious. And she’d tried. Rachel had always tried, and never quite lived up to it all. She’d failed eleven years ago, on purpose and with blazing, spectacular glory because at the time it had seemed better than trying so hard and still not measuring up.

And she’d failed again with Alex.

“I think I need...”

“A cigarette?” he asked.

She laughed. “No. Oh, man...I haven’t had a cigarette in...more than a decade.”

“But you’ve had one? I’m shocked.”

She took a deep breath. “I think you’re too easily shocked. Everyone has a past, you know.”

“Oh, believe me,” he said. “I know about pasts.”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“You seem far too...good, to have a past,” he said, frowning.

“I seem good? After that? I need to work on my moves.”

“I just mean...you were a virgin. You’ve never had your name in the paper for anything even remotely scandalous.”

“By design. All of it. Anyway, since when does virginity equal goodness? Mine’s certainly not a reflection of that. It was...fear, mostly.”

“You didn’t seem afraid that night with me. Though you did tremble a bit.”

“I hate you.”

He stood up, naked still and entirely unconcerned.

“I’ll bet the people in the building across the way are getting a show.”

He turned and waved. “Probably.”

“Good grief, Alex, have you no shame?”

“No. A product of my upbringing, I’m afraid. Hard to have shame raised in the environment I was.”

“But the people across from us might have shame.”

He grinned and bent, grabbing his black underwear and tugging them back on. “There, how’s that?”

“Better for some,” she said.

“Not you?”

She felt her face get hot. “Not really.”

“How is it you kept all this passion hidden for so long?”

“I hid it so well, I even hid it from me,” she said, hoping to redirect the subject. Away from things like this. Away from drunken parties and stupid decisions. “Plus... Look, I’ve made some crappy decisions, okay? And I almost got burned seriously and permanently because of it. Who am I kidding? I did get burned just...privately. I learned my lesson, though. I learned that you can’t just do things without consequences catching up with you.”

“Do you have lung problems from all your smoking?” he asked, his tone dry.

“If only that were the case.”

They looked at each other for a second. She was still naked. And he was mostly naked. And she realized they knew so little about each other.

She knew about his past, but the only thing that felt real, the only thing that had seemed as if it was connected to a real emotion and not just a cold, hard fact about the way he’d grown up, was his honesty about the pizza.

They didn’t know each other. He didn’t know her. But then, as he’d already pointed out, no one really did.

And here she was, having just shared herself with him in the most intimate way, pregnant with his baby, no less, holding tight to shame that was so deeply embedded in her, trapped beneath that layer of steel.

“Do you know what I used to love?” she asked, because she was naked anyway, so there was no reason not to say it.

“What?” he asked.

“Driving really fast. I was...such a jerk behind the wheel. Really dangerous. Alana and I used to cruise around a lot when we were in Greece. We didn’t really get the chance to drive in the city so when we were here...? All bets were off. I had this great car. It was red and sleek, and it went...well, it went fast, let’s just say that. And we’d cruise with the top down and flirt with guys at stoplights. It made me feel like I wasn’t Rachel Holt, this big disappointment to her mother. I hated all the things she wanted me to do. I just wanted to do something
I
wanted. And for a while, I just wanted to...forget that I cared and...drive fast.”

“That’s normal...isn’t it? I don’t really know since I didn’t have what you’d call traditional teenage years, but even so, I think I’ve seen things like that in movies.”

“Sure, I suppose it’s normal. But that doesn’t make it smart or safe. Especially not when you’ve been drinking. Which...we did. It was stupid. I was stupid and I...I don’t know what I was doing. Rebelling against a life that was too...sedate, I suppose. A life I didn’t feel like I was excelling at. I just wanted to feel something. Something exciting and dangerous. The wind in my hair, bubbles fizzing through my blood... I liked to flirt, too.”

“You were an innocent, so it’s not like—”

“There is a lot of ground between innocence and not having had intercourse, Alex. I would think a man like you would realize that,” she said tightly.

“Oh.” He looked...unhappy with that.

“Does that bother you? That you aren’t the first man I’ve been intimate with? Though I’m not really sure you can call a quick blow job in the back of a car intimate. But I make very poor decisions under the influence of drugs and alcohol, let’s put it that way.”

“This has never been in the papers. Everyone talks about you—”

“Like I’m the sainted Holt Heiress who spends her days sitting on a cloud playing a harp? I know. And it’s not by accident. My father... He covered for me. He paid off every cop that pulled me over, he bought any incriminating club photos. He kept me from being exposed. And then...” Her throat tightened, a sick sense of shame pouring through her, choking her. “I did something...really stupid. That seems to be the only descriptor I have for that year of my life. One year, Alex. Out of...twenty-eight. I acted out and I almost lost everything. I almost changed the way people saw me forever. I...I know I did change the way my mother and father saw me.”

“What happened?” he asked, his posture suddenly stiff, something in his stance deceptively, unnaturally still. As though energy were building in him, coiling tightly beneath the surface of his skin, ready to pounce at any moment on an imagined enemy.

Too bad the only enemy was her. The things, the desires, in her.

“Everything kind of came to a head—bad choice of words, you’ll see why in a second—when I met this guy at a club. Colin. I really liked him. We met up and danced a couple of weekends in a row and he asked if I wanted to ‘get out of here,’ which, you know, means that a guy wants something from you. I was drunk and feeling like giving it because he was hot and I liked him. A lot. He was handsome, and he had a nice smile. He thought I was pretty.” She rolled her eyes then looked down at her hands. She didn’t want to look at Alex right now.

This reminded her of standing in her father’s office, sweating and shaking, about to embarrass herself fatally, because she didn’t know what else to do. Because if she didn’t expose herself to her father, she would be exposing herself to the whole world.

“Anyway, I ended up in the backseat of the car with him. Which... You know what that means. We parked at the beach. At least it wasn’t a back parking lot somewhere—that makes it less sordid. Kind of. He got out his video camera. Pre the days of cell phone recordings, and thank God because the whole thing was much more concrete back then, not this nebulous digital web that could have had it in a thousand places immediately.”

“What did he do?”

“He filmed me. He asked and I thought, why not? I thought it was hot that he wanted to commemorate the event. I was drunk. I was seventeen. And right when he asked me to do it I thought maybe I even loved him, because being drunk and seventeen is basically all it takes to feel like you love someone. He wanted me, and I... Well, what I really loved was being wanted. For me, you know. Because, clearly, my blow job skills were the essence of me as a woman.”

“He videotaped you...”

“Going down on him. Yes. And the next morning I woke up with a raging headache and very little memory of it. Until he came around the villa the following evening looking for things to go further. I said no because...I didn’t feel ready for sex yet. Which maybe doesn’t make a lot of sense but...I just knew I wasn’t. He got mad and he threatened me. Because he had the video and he was going to send it out. To the media, to the internet. And I was...so afraid that he would. That...
that
would be out there. Me...doing that. Thinking about it makes me panic even now. I just...can’t imagine anything more exposing or humiliating. Though telling my father about it and begging him to bail me out was a close second.”

“And what happened?”

“He made it all go away. He protected me, because that’s what he’s always done. But he...he was so disappointed, I could tell. And that was when he told me he wasn’t protecting me anymore. He told me that anything could have happened to me. Driving drunk, going off with strange men... He said I was going to get myself killed and he wouldn’t watch while I did it. He wouldn’t enable it. No more help. No more money. No more family. He said I had to behave myself, or lose everything. And...I have. Until now. Probably I’m cut off, I suppose, but...but...”

“That’s why you aren’t calling home.”

She nodded silently. “I don’t want to know.” Her eyes stung, but still, there were no tears. “I don’t want to see him look at me that way ever again. Like I’m a...lost cause. I don’t know why I did all that stuff, not really. But I know why I stopped. Because I wanted more out of my life than what I was going to get partying until my brain fell out of my ear.”

“And that more was marrying a man you didn’t love or even want to sleep with?”

His words hit her, cold and hard in the chest.

“Apparently, what I was really waiting for was to meet a stranger and have a one-night stand with him and get pregnant with his baby. My goals were much loftier than a mere loveless marriage.”

He cleared his throat and looked out the window. “Did your father tell you what a worthless asshole that man was?”

“What?”

“Did he tell you what a horrible person that man was? Because it seems to me that all of this was about the situation you put yourself in, and while I get that there were poor decisions on your part—and I’m the proud owner of many poor decisions so I’m not throwing stones—he was the one determined to take a private encounter public. He was the one who was threatening to expose you.”

“I... He wasn’t there to be lectured, I was.”

“And you were the one who had to change.”

“I really did though, Alex. I was trying to take a long walk off a short pier.”

“I agree with that in terms of the substance abuse. Drugs mess things up, Rachel, in ways I’m sure you never saw in a club. But you’re clean now, I assume.”