Every Part of You: Takes Me (#5) (6 page)

He looked up at her. His expression was bleak, but he wasn’t crying. “My father got out of prison a few months ago.”

It didn’t seem like “congratulations” was the right response, so she stayed quiet. Elliott cleared his throat, not getting up from in front of her. His fingers slid between her thighs and the chair. He pressed his face again to her lap.

“My father was married to a woman named Molly. He was an asshole. He drank and ran around on her. He beat up on her. Not all the time, but more than once. Once is too much.”

Simone said nothing, letting him speak.

“He had an affair with my mother. She had me. My dad was never around much, even though he never made me a secret. If anything, he kind of flaunted me to Molly. Taking me to their house sometimes, parading me around like a trophy. But then he’d disappear for months at a time. Years. He left me with my mom, who had an addiction problem. She lived in squalor, Simone. I grew up with roaches crawling on me in the night and rats in the pantry.” He looked up at her, his expression grim. “We didn’t have to live that way. She had a trust fund, of all things. A fucking trust fund, and we lived in filth. When I was seventeen, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to make something of myself. I showed up at Molly’s door, and she took me in.”

“That was good of her.”

Elliott managed a small, tight smile. “She took me in and stood up for me against my dad, who said he didn’t want to be bothered with being responsible for me, not when I’d be eighteen in a year. They fought about it. He punched her in the face and threw her down the stairs. She was in a coma for three days.”

“Was he drunk?”

“Does it matter?”

She stroked his cheek. “No, honey. It doesn’t.”

But it explained a lot.

“He went to prison for vehicular manslaughter a few years after that. She divorced him. She’s had a lot of health problems since then, and now she’s got a late-stage degenerative brain disorder. Dementia. She’s dying. I bought her house from her so she could afford to stay there, but now she’s in an inpatient facility.”

“You take care of her,” Simone said, understanding.

“She took care of me,” Elliott answered. He cleared his throat again and leveled his gaze with hers. “Last night, he showed up at my house. We got into a fight. I spent the night in jail, and you know what I thought about the entire time I was in there?”

“How bad it smelled?” She tugged his earlobe to get him to smile.

He did, just a little. “That, too. But mostly, Simone, I thought about you. And how much I missed you. How good you were to me, when I was nothing but an asshole to you, all the time. How much you gave me, and I never gave you anything.”

“You gave me…” she began, and trailed away because to continue would be to end up sobbing.

Elliott pushed up on his knees to kiss her. Softly. The taste of tears between them. He held her close, and this was not like the night in the parking garage, when anger had sparked their passion. She clung to him, opening her mouth. Giving him herself once more even though she knew it was probably going to hurt her in the end.

“I thought about how much I missed you,” he whispered against her mouth. “I couldn’t stop thinking about you, and how the other night I’d been going to call you, except my father called me instead. And I thought about all the times I’d let the things my father had done stop me from doing what I wanted to do. All the times in my life when I tried so hard to fight against him or what he was that I didn’t give myself a chance to figure out who I was.”

Simone wept for him, then. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. So, so sorry.”

“My father liked to hurt people,” Elliott said. “I didn’t want to be my father.”

She took his face in her hands and looked into his eyes. “You know that what we did, what we both liked … that is not the same as what your father did. Don’t you?”

“I do.” He nodded and turned his face to kiss her palm. “I couldn’t face it before. I didn’t want to be that man, Simone, the one who hurt the person he was supposed to love. The one who loved him. And I did anyway, didn’t I? And not the way you liked.”

“No.” She gave a soggy laugh. “Not in the way I like.”

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I was an asshole because it was all I knew how to be.”

She stroked the hair back from his forehead. “Shhh. We all have our faults and our flaws and our quirks. But don’t you know, honey, I’ll take every part of you?”

“I don’t deserve it, but can you forgive me? Can we try again?”

His words would also not have made the list of things Simone would’ve ever expected from Elliott Anderson. Another laughing sob burst out of her, and she kissed him. Over and over, until both of them were breathing hard. She took his hand and put it on her heart. Then slid it lower, over the slope of her breast and the taut, aroused peak of her nipple.

“What do you think?” She asked.

“I’m not going to be perfect.”

Simone laughed without crying this time. “Oh, honey. You don’t have to tell me that. I can tell you already, we’re going to have a few go-arounds about the proper way to load the dishwasher.”

They both laughed, then, and kissed again. Elliott pulled her closer. Held her tighter.

“I love you, Simone.”

Everything inside her lifted and ignited. She turned inside out. She kissed him again, lingering this time, and looked into his eyes.

“Yeah,” she said, “I know you do.”

*   *   *

Three months hadn’t seemed like such a long time, not when every day of it was filled with Elliott. It
was
an anniversary of a sort, a silly one, but still something to celebrate together. And what better way than with a pepperoni pizza and some good red wine and maybe, just maybe, a little late-night office lovemaking?

Simone knocked lightly on Elliott’s door, listening for him to say she could enter before she pushed open the door. He was on the phone with Molly when she came inside, she knew it by the way his brow furrowed, but then he laughed and Simone thought maybe it was one of the older woman’s good days. She’d been having a number of them lately. She held up the pizza box and bottle of wine, then settled them onto his desk while she waited for him to finish his call.

“Molly sends her love,” Elliott said when he disconnected. “I thought we were going out for dinner.”

“Yeah, that was two hours ago when I thought you might actually get out of here on time.” Simone made a face, though she wasn’t really angry. The charity work Elliott had picked up, volunteering to handle some legal matters for a local women and children’s shelter, was something she never begrudged.

“Well,” he said after a moment, “I was in the mood for pizza, anyway.”

Simone gave him a glance over her shoulder. “What else are you in the mood for?”

Elliott said nothing, but heat gleamed in his eyes as he got up from behind the desk. “Be careful with that pizza, Simone. It might make a mess.”

“You mean like this?” She said, all mock innocence and purity as she dipped a finger in the sauce and deliberately smeared it on the edge of the desk. “Oops.”

The heat between them blazed. He moved closer to push her firmly but gently down over the desk, her hands flat on it, her ass in the air. Her skirt rode up a little. She tried to swallow, her throat gone suddenly dry as Elliott pulled the heavy, old-fashioned wooden ruler from the special place on the desk. Her nipples peaked, and she couldn’t stop herself from letting out a little moan, anticipating the moment when he’d pull her skirt up over her thighs and rear and tap that wooden ruler against her flesh, teasing her until she begged him to actually use it.

But first, something important.

Breathless, Simone looked over her shoulder at the man she loved more than anything in the world. “Baby,” she said, “do me a favor, first.”

“Anything,” Elliott said immediately, and she knew he’d move heaven and earth to please her.

Her heart ached with love for him and everything they’d become. Simone smiled. “Make sure to pull the blinds.”

About the Author

MEGAN HART is the
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling and award-winning author of many romance and erotica novels, including
Switch, Tempted, Deeper,
and
Dirty.
She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and children.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

EVERY PART OF YOU: TAKES ME.
Copyright © 2014 by Megan Hart. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.stmartins.com

Cover photograph © B2M Productions/Photodisc/Getty Images

Cover design by Olga Grlic

e-ISBN 9781250039378

First Edition: April 2014