Evening Storm (16 page)

“It was coincidence,” Logan said.

Simone looked at Ryan. “You didn't even blink.”

“I've got a good poker face,” he said. “Always have.”

But he paid for it with an ulcer. After that, no one spoke for the rest of the trip back into the city. She reached for Ryan's hand when they got on the highway, and held it all the way across Long Island and into Manhattan. He mostly looked out the window until they turned onto the crosstown street, making their way through the Fashion District to Irresistible.

She gave his hand a gentle squeeze to get his attention.

“You sent the orchids,” she said quietly. Neither Logan nor the other agent gave any appearance of listening, but still, she wanted this to stay between them. “The sun catcher. The Shakespeare in the Park ticket.”

“I did,” he said. “I wanted to give you things. I still do.”

He turned his hand over, wove his fingers through hers, then went back to looking out the window until the car idled outside Irresistible, the agent driving not bothering to put it in park. Logan got out and opened Simone's door. Her fingers trailed over Ryan's as their hands separated. He stopped her with a word.

“Simone. The stories were for you. Since the day I met you, it's always been you. That's the truth.”

“I know,” she said.

He got back in the SUV. She watched until the truck turned the corner and disappeared.

***

She didn't see him, or hear from him, for nearly three months. She ignored the media blitz surrounding the rise and fall of the MacCarrens, declined all requests for interviews, and eventually the furor died down. She turned down Stéphane's dinner requests, put on her Fall Fashion Week show, hosted Luxe evenings with Tilda Davies showcasing her lingerie, Tilda's stationery, and art from Sheba. By working a hundred hours a week she harnessed the buzz built during the summer of Ryan, found additional workroom space, hired more seamstresses and a junior designer with experience at Agent Provocateur, negotiated a deal with Barney's, and another with Nordstrom. Fall arrived, and she rediscovered the pleasure of wearing silk under cashmere and denim.

But Ryan didn't come back to Irresistible. One day in October Lorrie mentioned that he'd surfaced for a deposition, but disappeared just as quickly.

That evening Simone made chai tea and took it to the front steps. While she drank it, she wondered if her impetuous actions the night of the storm had cost her Ryan. He had clearly wanted to hold back. As he was the one who knew the whole story, perhaps she should have listened to him. Perhaps he'd wanted to keep her separate, untainted, so he would have something to come back to when the storm passed. Perhaps she was now forever associated with the worst summer of his life. Perhaps, with the passing of time, the memories were too painful, too ugly to revisit. She'd put herself in the same position as Jade and Daria, and even Lily, and had taken what she wanted from Ryan Hamilton.

Perhaps, in giving him what he needed, she'd destroyed any chance they had to be together.

The truth would set you free. In Ryan's case, it set him free to move on, and put a terrible past behind him.

“C'est la vie,” she said to herself. Swallowing the dregs of her tea she pushed down the lump in her throat and went back inside.

***

One day in the middle of November, when a warm front moved up from the south and pushed back the cold winter air swinging down from Canada, she put on a lightweight down vest over her turtleneck and jeans, and went to sit on the stoop. She made herself some tea and put it into an insulated tumbler. The odds of being able to sit outside and enjoy the weather after today were very slim, and she intended to take full advantage of it.

She was sitting with her back to the railing, her face tipped to the sky to absorb the sunlight, when a figure rounded the corner at the end of her street. Her heart lifted with the recognition that her mind talked her out of almost immediately. The man had Ryan's dishwater blond hair, but his shoulders were relaxed, and he moved with an easy confidence that didn't match Ryan's purposeful stride and squared-off shoulders. He wore jeans, running shoes, and a pullover sweater with a half zipper fastened under his chin. A plastic-wrapped bouquet of daisies swung easily from his left hand. Even as he drew close enough for her to see his face, even as he smiled slow and easy at her, it was the daisies that convinced her. She sat up straighter, swallowed the lump in her throat, and indulged in the sheer pleasure of watching him walk.

In her mental script he would stop at the foot of the stairs and hold out the daisies. She'd take them, smell them, blink away tears. They'd go inside and talk rationally about why he was back. In the two seconds it took Ryan to reach the stairs she ran through all those thoughts and a list of possible restaurants for a romantic candlelit dinner humming with sexual tension, but once again, Ryan refused to play to script. Instead he took the stairs in one bound, backed her into Irresistible's door, caged her in with forearms and hips, and kissed her.

No mocking not-French kissing. No agonized fears holding him back. One hand burrowed under her sweater to find the skin over her ribs while the other slid through her hair to grip her nape. He layered kiss upon kiss, sharp nips and flickering licks until she opened to him. The tender, purposeful assault didn't stop until he'd completely conquered her mouth. When he pulled back, they were both breathing hard.

“Oh,” she said rather nonsensically.

The noise he made was somewhere between a laugh and a growl. He kissed her again, this time leaning the full weight of his body against hers, pinning her between the door and the ridges of his body. Hip bones. Cock. Ribs. The difference between the Ryan of the summer and this Ryan was profound, shocking. She wanted to leap over the railing onto the sidewalk, and laugh and shout for sheer, heart-stopping delight. She settled for fisting her left hand in his pullover to pull his mouth down to hers while she fumbled with the doorknob with the other. When she turned the knob they stumbled into the tiny foyer. Only Ryan's strong grip kept her on her feet, but they still careened off one wall, then the other as they stumbled up the stairs.

She led him past the door to Irresistible's showroom to the end of the hall, where an unmarked door led into her apartment at the rear of the building. The space was tiny, a living room just large enough for a couch and a wall full of bookshelves, a galley kitchen with a single stool at the end of the counter where she ate, a bathroom, and a bedroom. Her bed occupied virtually the entire floor space, with just enough room to maneuver to the closet and the bathroom. “It's not much,” she said, uncertain of how he was handling his rapid descent into the ninety-nine percent.

He tossed the daisies on the nightstand. “I really couldn't give less of a fuck,” he muttered, and jerked her sweater over her head, then cupped her frantic, flyaway hair to her ears and kissed her again. The ocean of her breathing and heartbeat echoed in her ears, reminding her of that hot August night months earlier. “Besides, it smells like you. Like warm silk and your skin.”

The word hung softly in the air. Compelled, she tugged his shirt free of his jeans and pulled it and his pullover over his head in one move, leaving the entire expanse of his shoulders, chest, and abdomen bared to her. He reached behind her and unhooked her bra.

She stood in front of him, her heart skittering in her chest, her breath coming shallow and soft in the silence. “If you give me a little warning, I'll put on something more interesting than white satin,” she said.

“This isn't about the lingerie. It's about your skin,” he said, then kissed her shoulder and drew the bra down her arms to drop to the floor. “It's actually about your freckles.”

She laughed until he put his mouth to her forehead, cheekbone, chin. He used his thumbs to tip her face up so he could kiss her throat, licking delicately at the notch between her collarbones as she smoothed her hands up his ribs, murmuring
mine, mine
as he went. Her hands rested on his waist, but moved of their own volition up his chest, her thumbs pressing into his breastbone, then splitting apart to trace his collarbone to his shoulders. Again and again her hands followed the same path, down his arms to his waist, up his abdomen and chest to his shoulders, absorbing the truth in his skin.

He wrapped his arm around her waist and bore her backward to the bed. “I'm going to kiss every single freckle on your body,” he said.

He put one knee between her legs and stretched out on top of her, groaning at the contact of her skin on his, and again when she skimmed her hands over his back to his bottom. She could feel his heart thumping in his chest as he kissed her, deep and heated, his hands cradling her skull while he rocked his hips against hers, wrapped an arm around her waist, tangled their legs together.

He kissed his way down her breastbone to her abdomen, his slow, measured pace driving her wild. “Perhaps you could catalog my freckles another day,” she said with a strangled gasp, and reached for his button fly. His legs were nothing but corded muscle under skin, and his feet, when she tugged off his jeans, socks, and shoes in one go, were covered in calluses and healing blisters. His erection pulsed as she looked at him.

“Now you,” he said, and unzipped her jeans and pushed them and her white silk panties down and off.

“Come in here,” he said, and covered them with the duvet. Cocooned in privacy, he kissed her, the pressure of his mouth alternately slow and intense, then rapacious and wet and demanding. She luxuriated in the full-body contact, sweat slicking their bellies, the hair on his legs rough against hers, the hard points of his hip bones pressing into her inner thighs. His hand stroked her throat, her belly, her sex, a possessive, primitive touch that continued when he rolled her over and kissed the bumps of her spine to her tailbone. She shuddered when he sprawled over her, gathered her hair away from her nape and nipped at the vulnerable skin there. Words vanished first, English, then French, then images she might later string together to remember what happened, until finally her brain dissolved into pure sensation. Smooth cotton against her nipples and belly, his hard cock against her back, thrusting slowly against her tailbone, one hand in her hair, the other arm under her hips, until she pushed up, letting cold air stream over their heated bodies.

“Maintenant! Now,” she said, the only English word she remembered. She scrabbled a condom from her nightstand, handed it to him, and turned onto her back while he rolled it down his shaft. She spread her legs; he kneed them a bit wider; she lifted until the tip of his cock nudged into the slick, yielding heat of her sex. The connection was electric, focusing all of her attention on the slight twinge as he breached her. He blindly sought her mouth, his hands shifting from her hip to her shoulders, into her hair, around to cup her breast, finally settling on her breast and the back of her head.

“Oh, God,” he groaned as she slowly took him deep inside. Every nerve sizzled with the sheer erotic charge of his thick shaft stretching her open.

“C'est bien,” she murmured.

“Fuck me, now is
not
a good time for you to start in with the French. I'm not going to last as it is.”

“J'ai attendu si longtemps. Je vais faire l'amour avec toi maintenant parce que c'est le moment idéal. Un moment magique. Nous allons le faire encore et encore et encore,” she said, with a swivel of her hips as he started to move.

He claimed her mouth, effectively shutting her up, but she couldn't stop the low purr humming in her throat. His tongue slid along hers before he tipped her head to the side and nipped at her jaw. She retaliated, gripping his tousled hair in one hand to expose his throat, then nipping at the pulse jumping in his neck. His cock throbbed inside her, and he curled one leg around hers and pinned her to the mattress.

His next thrust drew her legs up to clasp his hips. The one after that tightened every muscle along her spine until her back was arched like a bow. He set his mouth to the pounding pulse at the base of her throat and scraped his teeth over it. At that she lost her words in both languages, crying out as her orgasm flung her into blackness. He followed moments after, thrusting that extra bit deeper inside her as he came.

Untangling his hands from her hair and their limbs from the sheets took a rather concerted effort. When they were sorted out, the condom disposed of and back in the cocoon, she fitted herself to his side and sighed.

“Now you start speaking in French?”

“It's my first language,” she said. “I lose English when I get worked up.”

He grunted comfortably and settled her a little closer. “I'll pick up some language programs. I want to know what you're saying when you're worked up.”

“You're back,” she said. “How long are you back?”

“I'm back for good. Preliminary hearings are coming up. The FBI wants me closer to hand.”

She tilted her head and studied him. His face was tanned, filled out from the hollowed, haunted look of the summer. He looked simultaneously younger and wiser, and impossibly handsome. “You look good,” she said.

“This is what I look like when I don't have an ulcer,” he said, smiling at her.

She smiled. “It's a good look on you. Where were you?” she asked, taking in his tanned face and arms, the ridges of muscle in his shoulders and legs.

“Remember that guy who said he was hiking the Appalachian Trail when he was really visiting his mistress? I was actually hiking the trail. A friend had a cabin in Maine. I used it as a base for trips. A couple days at a time to start, until I toughened up, then a couple weeks at a time.”

That explained the tan, the youthful appearance tempered with hard-earned wisdom. They lay in a comfortable silence for a few minutes until she leaned over the bed and picked up the cellophane-wrapped flowers. “Thank you for the daisies.”