Beautiful Secret (Beautiful Bastard #4) (20 page)

I tore my eyes from her and back to the woman leading today’s discussion on hurricane disaster relief budgeting. All around the room, eyelids drooped or hands doodled on notepads. For my part, I’d found the meetings all week predictably intense but fascinating. I loved my job, loved the topic of disaster preparedness and the details we had come together to scrutinize. I enjoyed work in a way I suspected many of my colleagues didn’t: it was my escape, my passion. So it threw me somewhat when I found my eyes
wandering to the clock, my mind drifting to Ruby and what would happen between us tonight.

We had no meetings, no social obligations. From 1700 until the following morning, we had nothing but time . . . together.

With Portia, we’d had all the time in the world, eleven years’ worth. And yet, even in the beginning, more time in each other’s company was never something either of us particularly yearned for. Everything felt more important than having lunch together; even something as simple as a few hours side by side watching television was always passed up in favor of working independently or catching up on odd projects. But Ruby seemed to practically vibrate at the prospect of a handful of hours alone—with
me
.

Clearly what had happened over lunch was an admission that we both needed to move forward, away from the flirtatious games we enjoyed during the day into something more personal and intimate at night.

I simply didn’t know how well I could do it. I had little practice being forthcoming about emotions, and even less experience being bare sexually with another person. I knew I’d made her come. I knew I could give her far more pleasure than what I’d done today. That wasn’t really what worried me. What worried me was knowing she would give me exactly as much as I wanted from her.

If I wanted to make love to her tonight, I could. If I wanted to feel myself deep in her
throat, I could. If I wanted limits,
I
would need to be the one to set them. But did I truly want limits, or did I think I
should
want them?

My stomach cramped and I looked back to the woman at the head of the table. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Ruby tilt her head and glance at me, and I suspected she was watching my every thought pass across my face. I was starting to believe she had a decoder ring and was the one person I’d known other than my brother and younger sister who could take one look at me and know just how much I was hiding.

I blinked up, met her eyes.

She studied me briefly, her expression softening as she smiled, mouthing the words, “Don’t worry,” before looking down at her notes and then up at the moderator.

At once, my shoulders relaxed, my jaw unclenched.

Let go
, her voice whispered in my thoughts.
We’ll figure it out together
.

We walked back to the hotel, and Ruby babbled sweetly about the meeting, the oddly warm weather, the band she’d been dying to see live that was in town. She talked to me about all the wonderful nothings I wanted to hear, distracting me from my own neurosis about the impending evening.

At the Parker Meridien, Ruby steered us to the elevators, down the hall, and stopped in front of the door to my room. Turning her green eyes up to
mine, she whispered, “So. Decision time. Do you want to hang out with me tonight?” She placed her palms flat to my chest. “No pressure. I can go to my room and masturbate to a Ryan Gosling movie, and you can go back to your room and beat yourself up for not getting me topless, but the choice is entirely yours.”

I swallowed, taking a few calming breaths before giving her a kiss that started at the corner of her mouth and slid over to her cheek, then to her ear. “Yes, please,” I murmured.

“So,” she said, managing to stretch the word into at least three syllables. “Dinner out, or in?”

It took no more than three seconds for me to answer, “
In
,” and with a bright smile, she took my keycard from my hand and let us in, bounding across the room. She kicked off her shoes, jumping on the bed and rolling until her face was in my pillow.

“Dammit, they changed the sheets. This pillow doesn’t smell like you.” She flipped back over, hugging it to her chest anyway.

“I’ll make sure to have them leave the linens tomorrow.”

Then, in a Niall Stella voice, she said, “An excellent notion,” and nodded once crisply, bringing a smile to my lips. Smiling back at me, she reached for the room service menu off the bedside table and flipped it open. “What are you in the mood for?”

I leaned against the desk, watching her. Loving seeing her in my room, on this bed, so easy and comfortable in
this role as . . .
girlfriend
.

Sitting down to unlace my shoes, I murmured, “Hmm. Maybe a burger?”

“Are you asking me?” She looked back down at the menu. “They have a few choices. Cheeseburger and fries?”

“Perfect. And whatever dark beer they offer.”

She chucked the menu to the floor and grabbed the room phone. I heard the quiet echo of a voice on the other end of the line and Ruby laughed, cupping her hand over the receiver. In a playfully scandalized voice, she said, “They called me Mrs. Stella.”

I smiled, slipping off my shoes. Mrs. Stella was my mother, or—once upon a time—Portia. “Mrs. Stella” wasn’t this vivacious creature sprawled on my bed with her skirt slowly inching up her long, slender thighs.

But that was the problem, wasn’t it? I was stuck thinking Ruby was just a little too fun, a little too pretty, a little too adventurous for the likes of me. I had a picture of what I thought I deserved, who might like me, and it wasn’t ever someone like Ruby.

If she’d been able to hear this thought, I’m quite certain she would have ripped the phone out of the wall and hurled it at me.

I listened, watching as she ordered, confirmed our selection, and then hung up. All of this was so commonplace, so easy, so comfortable; my shoulders unknotted, stomach settled.

She patted the bed, lifting her eyebrows and giving me a
seductive little smile. “We have approximately forty minutes for mischief.”

“Ruby . . .” I began.

Her smile slipped a little before she picked it up again. “Why are you so afraid of being on a bed with me?” she said, and I could hear the embarrassment just beneath her laugh. “I’m not going to steal your virtue, I promise.”

“It’s nothing about being afraid. I—” I stopped, pulling my tie from the collar of my shirt and draping it over the desk chair. Whenever I wanted to explain myself, say something important—something
personal
—the words in my mind scattered into disarray. It’s why, with Portia, I’d long since given up.

I knew I needed to stop comparing everything to my marriage. Ruby was trying to help me find who I was again, and I needed to let her.

New relationship. New pattern
.

“Tell me.”

I closed my eyes, putting together the sentence before I said anything more. “I feel like I’ve barely processed the idea of being with you and what that entails, and yet here we are, in a room with a bed. Although there is no ‘normally’ to be found in my dating experience, I like to think that ‘normally’ I would take you out to dinner a few times, kiss you at your doorstep, be far more measured in my interactions. At least that’s what eighteen-year-old me would have done all those years ago,” I said with a quiet, sheepish laugh. “Yet, here we are in a hotel room, I put my fingers inside you
earlier, and all I want to do now is join you and relieve the ache I’ve felt all day long. I suppose it surprises me that my body and my heart are so far ahead of my brain here.”

Ruby rose up on her knees so she could crawl to the foot of the bed. Reaching out, she slid her finger through my belt loop and pulled me closer. “Why do people act like the heart and body aren’t part of the brain?”

She worked the top button of my shirt free and moved to the next. And the next. Her fingertips tickled as they brushed over my breastbone.

“When you want me?” she began. “That’s your brain. When you like being around me? Hey guess what?” She looked up at me, sweet tongue-trapped smile in place. “Also because of your brain.”

“Do you know what I mean, though?” I asked in a whisper. Our faces were only inches apart; I’d need to only duck down to kiss her. “I worry you’re young. That I’m neurotic. How can it work away from all of this?”

“In fact,” she said, pulling her brows together in mock seriousness, “I would think it would be easier for you to do this with me back home. In your space, with your routines. I would think what’s hardest about this for you is that you’re away from all of that, and I’m just another piece of chaos thrown in the mix.”

Her words eased my mind, massaged away the growing wave of anxiety. “Are you sure you aren’t really a sixty-year-old bird with a fantastic plastic surgeon?
You seem remarkably wise.”

“I am definitely sure,” she said, smiling prettily up at me. “But I’m also sure that you don’t have to do a single thing you don’t want to, Niall. You’re allowed to not want this.”

I looked down to her pulse point, wondering what it would feel like beating against my lips. “I’m quite sure . . . What I mean is . . .” I sighed, frustrated by my own thoughts. “I do want this,” I said finally.

Ruby giggled, falling backward onto the bed and pulling me down over her. We landed softly, bouncing off the mattress, and I easily rolled beside her, shrugging out of my dress shirt. Almost as if we’d planned it—or had been doing it for decades—she bent her knees, lifting her legs over mine and tucking her feet down behind my thighs as I curled on my side into her.

I stared down at our position, speechless.

“We fit,” Ruby observed quietly. “And look. I got you on the bed with me this time.” She reached up to smooth away the lines that had formed on my forehead. “To be clear, I want to spend time with you, and cuddle while we talk,” she assured me. “We don’t have to get naked before dinner. Or after.”

I smiled, reaching forward and running a palm over her stomach to her opposite hip. “Tell me about your family?”

“Let’s see . . .” Her hand reached up to run along my neck and into my hair. “I have one brother, my twin—”

“You have a twin brother?” I asked. How could I have kissed her, watched her bring herself to orgasm, given her another one with my hand earlier and spent the last five days with her without knowing such basic information?

“Yeah, he’s in med school at UCLA. His name is Crain.”

“Crain? That’s not a name you hear every day.”

“Well, everyone calls him by our last name, Miller, but yeah.” She ran her fingers over my scalp, lost in thought. “He’s good people.”

“And your parents?”

“Are married,” she said, meeting my eyes. “They live in Carlsbad, which is just north of San Diego. I think I mentioned they’re both psychologists.”

I pulled back to study her. “How is it possible
both
of your parents are psychologists and you seem so . . . normal?”

Laughing, she pretended to shove my chest. “That is such a stupid stereotype. One would think if the parents were both very good shrinks, their children would be better adjusted, not worse.”

“One would think.” I felt my lips press together in an amused smile. She . . . she was
unbelievable
. “So you grew up in Carlsbad before attending UCSD?”

“Mmmhmm,” she said, focusing on where she drew her finger back and forth across my collarbones. “Happy childhood. Cool parents. Twin brother who only occasionally dated my friends . . .” She seemed distracted, and confirmed it when she stretched up, kissing my throat. “I’m a lucky girl.”

“No demons, then?” I murmured.

Ruby pulled back slowly, her eyes clouding for a heartbeat. “No demons.”

I studied her face, sliding my hand up to her ribs before telling her very quietly, “That wasn’t very convincing.”
I had no idea why I’d asked that, but now I needed to know. My chest grew tight with this feeling of diving deeper, of making this into more than flirtation, kissing, groping. This here was what I needed but was also most terrified to seek: intimacy in words before action.

“Fine,” she said, smiling a little. “But you first.”

I blinked, surprised. Despite having asked her this, I hadn’t really expected the question to be turned back on me. “Well, I suppose my childhood was fairly happy as well. Looking back I realize we were rather poor, but children don’t often notice things like money shortages when they have everything they need. My marriage, as I may have mentioned, was rather . . .
quiet
. Especially compared with a childhood filled with rowdy brothers and sisters. We didn’t argue much, we didn’t laugh much. There wasn’t much left holding us together at the end.”

She brought her hand to my jaw, following the shape of it with her fingertip as she listened.

“I suppose my demons are my reserve, and how I fear I spent the better part of my teens and all of my twenties with a woman I probably won’t know for the rest of my life. It feels like a bit of a waste.”

“Your reserve?” she repeated quietly.

Nodding, I murmured, “I always wonder if I come across the way I mean to with people.”

“How do you mean to come across?”

“Friendly. Interested,”
I told her. “Responsible.”

“You come off as responsible.” Her lips tweaked into a smirk. “Maybe a
little
aloof.”

Laughing, I admitted, “That’s fair. I’ve always been the quiet one, a bit awkward. Max and Rebecca, who are closest to me in age, were the clowns. I’ve been the contained one, but it also meant I got away with things they didn’t.”

“This sounds like a story I need to hear . . .”

Shaking my head, I bent to kiss her jaw, speaking into her skin, “Your turn.”

When I pulled back, she looked at my chin, her finger drawing lazy circles at the hollow of my throat.

“Ruby?”

Blinking up to meet my eyes, I watched as she took a deep breath. “I had a bad boyfriend my freshman year,” she said, simply. The words were just vague enough that I wasn’t sure how she meant it. Was he violent? Fickle?