One Night in Paradise (16 page)

“Oh, Zack,” she breathed. “Zack.”

His name on her lips, her voice, so utterly Clara. So familiar and still so exciting.

Clara.
Her name was in his head on his lips, with each and every thrust, with each sweet pulse of her internal muscles around his shaft.

And suddenly there was no denying it. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see her face. Her smell, the feel of her skin beneath his fingertips, the way it felt to be in her body, all of it was pure, undeniable Clara Davis.

The woman who baked orange cupcakes and had a pink wreath on the door. The woman knew about his past, about the darkest moments of his life. The woman who smiled at him every morning. Who could always make him smile, no matter what. Who put powdered creamer in his coffee when he made her angry.

The woman who lit him on fire, body and soul.

He couldn’t pretend she was someone else, or that it didn’t matter who she was. There was no way. No one had ever been like her before, no one ever would be.

He had no control. He had nothing. He was at her mercy. If he’d had to get on his knees and beg her for a kiss tonight he would have done it, because he needed her.

Not just in a purely sexual sense. He needed
her.

His climax built, hard and fast, the pitch too steep, too unexpected for him to control. He put his hand between her thighs and stroked her, trying to bring her with him. Her body tightened around him, her orgasm hitting hard and fast. When she cried out her pleasure, then he let go.

“Clara,” he whispered, resting his forehead on her back as he gave in. As he let the release crash through him, devastating everything in its path.

He released his hold on her hips, his body shaking, spent as though he’d just battled his way through a storm. Sweat made his skin slick all over. His hands were trembling, his breathing sharp and jagged.

He looked at her. At Clara. There were red marks on her hips where his fingers had pressed into her flesh. Where he had lost all control. He brushed his fingers along the part where he’d marked her, his chest tightening, regret forming, a knot he couldn’t breathe around.

She turned to look at him, a smile on her lips. She straightened, naked and completely unconcerned about it. Nothing like she’d been at first. Her confidence, the fact that she felt beautiful, shone from her face.

Her beautiful face. Unique. Essential. So damn important.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She blushed, looking away from him. “Didn’t I tell you not to apologize to me all the time?”

“What about when I need to?” he asked, moving toward where she was standing, brushing his fingertips over her hips. “I was holding on to you too tightly,” he whispered.

She met his eyes and they held. He saw deep, intense emotion there. A connection, affection. Something real. It wasn’t part of a facade, or a game. It was the way she always looked at him, whether they were in his office, in her living room or in bed. She was the same woman. She cared for him. She looked at him like he mattered to her.

The realization rocked him, filled him. Every piece and fiber of his being absorbing it. It made it easier to breathe, as though he hadn’t truly been drawing in breath for years and now he was again.

For the first time in fourteen years. Since he’d lost his reason
for breath, his desire to give any sort of emotion, to give of himself. He felt like he’d found it again. In Clara’s eyes.

“I didn’t mind,” she said.

The moment, the tiny sliver of freedom he felt evaporated, chased away by a biting, clawing panic that was working from his stomach up through his chest. He had felt this way before and it had ended in utter destruction.

He knew what this was. And he knew he couldn’t have it. Wouldn’t allow himself to have it. Not ever. Not ever again.

He took a step away from her and bent down, picking her dress up from the floor, rubbing his fingers over the sequins. He felt choked, like his throat was closing in on itself, like his chest was too full for his lungs to expand.

He could do it. He could have her still, keep her where she belonged in his life. In his bed.

He had been careless again. He had lost control. He could find it again. He had to.

“Get dressed,” he said, handing her the gown.

“What?”

“I’ll drive you home.”

“What?” she said again.

He didn’t look at her face. He couldn’t.

“You and I are having an affair, Clara, I made that clear the other day. I don’t cuddle up with the women I’m having sex with at night, and I damn sure don’t have their toothbrush on my sink. That’s just how it works.”

“And I think I told you, I am not just one of your mistresses.”

“When you’re in my bed … or my couch, you are.”

“I am your friend,” she said, her voice ringing in the room.

“Not when we’re here, like this. Now, you’re just the woman I’m sleeping with. We aren’t going to curl up and watch a chick flick after what just happened.”

She jerked back, pulling her dress over her breasts. “I’m going to go get dressed. Send the car. I’m not riding back with you, and I’m not staying, not now so I think the decent thing
to do, if you still remember decency, would be to arrange me a ride.”

“Clara …”

“We’ll talk tomorrow. I can’t now.”

She turned and walked away, her steps clumsy. She ducked into his downstairs bathroom and closed the door. He heard the click of the lock.

And he didn’t blame her. But he had to define the relationship, as much for her benefit as for his. Yes, he had lied. She was different. But she couldn’t be. It couldn’t happen.

He would fix it. He’d gotten it wrong tonight, by denying the one thing that had been there from the beginning. His feelings. The sex … he would pretend it hadn’t happened. Whatever he had to do to fix it, to have her never look at him like that again. As if he was a cold stranger, as if he’d physically hurt her.

It would have to go back to how it was. Because he could live without sex. He wasn’t sure he could live without Clara.

It was the longest car ride in the world. No one was on the streets, and it technically took half the time it normally did to get from Zack’s place to hers, but it seemed like the longest ever.

Because everything hurt. And she was wearing a really fabulous gown that had already been torn from her body once, during the most intense, emotion-filled sexual encounter they’d ever had. There had been something dark in Zack tonight. A battle. She wasn’t stupid. She knew something had changed, she knew, at least she hoped, that he wasn’t as horrible as he’d seemed when he’d sent her away.

She bunched up the flaring skirt of her gown when the car stopped and she slid out, letting the dress fan out around her. She gave the driver a halfhearted, awkward wave. He knew her. She’d used his services quite a few times with Zack. Having
him be a part of this, the most awful, embarrassing, heart-wrenching moment of her life wasn’t so great.

Because it was two in the morning and it was completely obvious what had just happened. That Zack had had sex with her, sex, at its most base, and had her go home rather than have her spend the night in his bed.

She curled her hands into fists and let her nails cut into her palms, tears stinging her eyes. She almost hated him right now. It almost rivaled how much she loved him.

Almost.

If she didn’t love him, it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

You’re my mistress.

Like hell she was. He might be the only man who’d seen her naked, but she was certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she was the only woman who’d ever seen him cry.

S
HE
really hoped everyone wanted cupcakes for lunch. Because there were cupcakes. Nine varieties of them, and someone had to eat them.

She didn’t think she could eat and she was
not
sharing them with Zack, which meant they would be going straight into the break room. On the bright side, she’d found a few new varieties that had worked out nicely.

The sea-salt caramel one was her favorite. She just couldn’t force down more than two bites at a time. Anything beyond that stuck in her throat and joined the ever-present lump that made her feel like she was perpetually on the edge of tears.

She was just too full of angst to eat anything. She hadn’t been able to eat anything since she’d been dropped at the front of her building by Zack’s driver.

Zack.

She put her head on the pristine counter of the office kitchen and tried to hold back the sob that was building in her chest.

Something had broken in him last night. It had started after their time together at her place, the night he’d left. And last night it had snapped completely. But she didn’t know what it was. She didn’t know how to pull him out of it. If she could, or if she even should.

“Clara.”

Clara looked up and saw Jess standing in the doorway of the kitchen. “Zack is looking for you.”

“Oh,” Clara straightened and wiped her eyes. Normally Zack would come and find her himself. Because there was a time when he’d wanted to be with her simply to be with her. Now she wondered if she had any value when she wasn’t naked. “I’ll be there in a second. Take.” She gestured to the platters of cupcakes. “Take some of these with you. I can’t eat them by myself. If Zack comes near them, tell him they have walnuts.”

Jess’s eye widened. “They all have walnuts?”

“No. But tell him they do. All of them.”

Jess gave her a strange look and picked two of the platters up, heading back out the door.

She had no choice now. She had to go face the man himself. And figure out exactly what she was going to say. As long as it didn’t involve melting into a heap, she supposed almost anything would do.

“You sent Jess after me?” She looked inside of Zack’s office, waiting to be invited in. Silly maybe, since she hadn’t knocked on his office door in the seven years since she’d started working at Roasted. But she felt like she needed to now.

“Yes. Come in.” His tone was formal, like it had been the night before when he’d given her the necklace. Distance. Divorced from emotion.

That was the strange thing. He’d been aloof the night of the charity, until they’d made love. Then he’d been commanding, all dark intensity and so much emotion it had filled the room. It had filled her. It hadn’t been good emotion. It had been raw and painful. Almost more than she could bear.

It had caused the break. That much she knew.

But he was back to his calm and controlled self now, not a trace of last night’s fracture in composure anywhere. She almost couldn’t believe he was the same man whose hands had trembled after they’d made love.

She almost couldn’t believe he was the same man she’d known for seven years. The same man she’d watched movies with, shared dinners with.

But he was. He was both of those men.

He was also the cold man standing before her, and she wasn’t sure how all of those facets of himself wove together. And she really wasn’t sure where she fit in. If she did at all.

She stepped into the office, watching his face for some sort of reaction. He had that sort of distant, implacable calm he’d had on his wedding day, standing and looking out the window as though nothing mattered to him. As though he had no deeper emotion at all.

She knew differently now. She saw it for what it was now. A facade. But she wasn’t certain there was a way through it, unless he wanted her to break through.

“I’m about to sign the final paperwork for the deal with Amudee. I wanted to thank you for your help.”

For her help. “Of course.”

They were talking like strangers now. They’d never been like strangers, not from the moment she’d met him. They’d had a connection from the first moment he’d walked into the bakery.

Now she couldn’t feel anything from him. Now that they’d been so intimate, she felt totally shut off from him.

“Once everything is finalized we can let everyone know that our engagement has been called off,” he said.

“Right,” she said, clenching her left hand into a fist.

“That’s all.” He looked back at his computer screen for a moment, then looked back up. “Are you busy tonight?”

Her heart stopped. Did he want sex? Again? After what he’d done last night?

“Um … why?”

“Because I thought I might come over and watch a movie.”

His words were so unexpected it took her brain a moment
to digest them, as though she was translating them from a foreign language. “And?”

He shrugged. “Nothing.”

He was behaving as if … as if nothing had changed. As if they’d gone back in time a few weeks.

He was pretending, she was certain of it, because he certainly wasn’t acting normal, whatever he might think, but she was insulted that he was trying. After what he’d said to her last night. After the way he’d objectified her.

She wanted to yell at him. Maybe even hit him, and she’d never hit anyone in her life. But she wanted a reaction. She didn’t want his control.

“Are you going to pretend last night didn’t happen?” she asked, her voice low, unsteady.

Zack remained calm, his control, that control he claimed to have lost, the control she witnessed in tatters last night, firmly in place. “I think we both know that’s not working out. But you’re right. You’re my friend, and I didn’t treat you like a friend last night.”

“An understatement,” she spat. “You treated me like your whore.”

She saw something, an emotion, faint and brief, flicker in his eyes before being replaced by that maddening calm again. That same sort of dead expression he’d worn when he’d been jilted on his wedding day.

“I apologize,” he said. “I wasn’t myself.”

She curled her hands into fists, her fingernails digging into the tender skin on her palm, the pain the only thing keeping her from exploding. “Do you know what I think, Zack? I think you were yourself. This? This is the lie. This isn’t you. It’s you being a coward. You can’t face whatever it is that happened between us last night and now you’re hiding from it.”

“It isn’t working. That element of our relationship.” The only thing that betrayed his tension was the shifting of a muscle in
his jaw. “But we’ve been friends for seven years. That works for us. We need to go back to that.”

“Are you … are you crazy?” she asked, the words exploding from her. “We can’t go back. I’ve been naked with you. You’ve been. We’ve made love. You can’t just go back from that like it never happened. I don’t care what we thought, we were wrong. That one night, that one night that’s turned into four, it changed everything. You can’t just experience something like that with someone and feel nothing.”

“I can.”

“Do you really think this is nothing? That we’re nothing?”

“We’re friends, Clara. You mean a lot to me. But it doesn’t mean I want to keep sleeping with you. It doesn’t mean I want this kind of drama. We need things back like they were so that the business can stay on track..”

“I’m leaving Roasted. You know that.”

He tightened his jaw. “I didn’t think you would really leave.”

“What? Now that we’ve slept together? You can’t have it both ways. Either it changed things or it didn’t.”

“I care about you,” he said, his tone intensifying.

“Not enough.” She shook her head, fighting tears. They weren’t sad tears. She was too angry for that. That would come later. “I am your sidekick, and that’s how you like it. As long as I give you company when you want it, eat dinner with you when you’re lonely, bake your wedding cake when you decide it’s time to have a cold, emotionless marriage, well then, you care about me. As long as I’m willing to pretend to be your fiancée so you can get your precious business deal. But it’s on your terms. And the minute it isn’t, when I start having power, that’s when you can’t handle it.”

He only looked at her, his expression neutral.

“I’m done with it, Zack,” she said, pulling the ring, the ring that wasn’t hers, from her finger. “All of it.”

She put the ring on his desk and backed away, her heart thundering, each beat causing it to splinter.

“We have a deal,” he bit out.

“You’ll figure it out. If that’s the only reason you don’t want me to go … if that’s all that’s supposed to keep me here. I can’t.”

Zack stood, his gray eyes suddenly fierce. “So, you’re just going to walk out, throw away our friendship over a meaningless fling?”

“No. It’s not the fling, Zack, it’s the fact that you think it’s meaningless. The fact that I’ve realized exactly where I rate as far as you’re concerned.”

“What do you want?” he exploded. “Why is what we have suddenly not good enough for you?”

“Because I realized how little I was accepting. That everything was about you. I’m just willing to take whatever you give me, whether it’s a spot in your bed or a job baking your wedding cake and it’s … sick. I can’t keep doing this to myself.” She turned to go and he rounded the desk, gripping her arm tightly.

“I’ll ask you again,” he said, his voice rough. “What do you want? I’ll give it to you. Don’t leave.”

“So I can wait around for you to decide you want to try a loveless marriage again? So I can bake you another cake? Maybe I’ll help the bride pick out her dress this time, because, hey, I’m always here to do whatever you need done, right?”

“Does it bother you? The thought of another woman marrying me? Then you marry me.” He reached behind him and took the ring off the desk, holding it out to her, his hand shaking. “Marry me. And stay.”

She recoiled, her stomach tight, like she’d just been punched. “For what purpose, Zack? So I can be the wife you don’t love? Your stand-in for Hannah, different woman, same ring. Doesn’t matter, right? You’re still doing it. You’re trying to keep me from leaving, trying to keep control. You’ll even marry me to keep it. That’s not what I want.”

He took her hand in his, opened it, tried to hand her the ring.
She pulled back. “Don’t,” she said, her voice breaking. “Don’t. I’m going to clean my desk out now.”

“Clara.”

Zack watched as she turned away from him and walked out his office door, closing it sharply behind her. Everything was deathly silent without her there, his breath too loud in the enclosed space. The ring too heavy.

Had he truly done that? Offered her Hannah’s ring? Begged her to marry him just so she would stay?

He had. She had gone anyway and there had been nothing he could do to make her stay. All of his control, all of his planning, hadn’t fixed it. He had lost the one person in his life who had given things meaning.

He’d been pretending, from the moment he’d met Clara, that she was only his friend. Only one thing. Because he’d known she could very easily become everything. How had he not realized that she’d been everything from day one?

Pain crashed through him, a sense of loss so great it stole the breath from his lungs.

His chest pitched sharply, his body unable to take in air.

He dropped the ring and it fell to the floor, rolling underneath his desk. He left it. It didn’t matter.

He’d just broken the only thing in his life that did matter.

Control. She spoke of his control, how he tried to control her, keep her in his life on his terms. And she was right. Because he’d known instinctively that if he ever let go of that control she would take over.

She had. His control was shattered now, laying around his feet in a million broken pieces he would never be able to reclaim.

And if finding it again meant losing Clara, he didn’t want it, anyway.

He hadn’t chosen to lose his son, it had been a tragedy, one that had painted his life from that moment forward. He’d let
Clara leave, because he’d been too afraid to give. Too afraid to let his barriers down.

Because he’d been certain he couldn’t live with the kind of pain love would bring, not again. But now he was certain he couldn’t live without it. Without Clara. He loved her so much his entire being ached with it.

And if he had to lay down every bit of pride, every last vestige of control and protection to have her back, he would.