The Darkest of Shadows (39 page)

“You can get me that for my birthday,” I told him, and leaned up to press a soft kiss on his lips. “I’d like that present.”

“Done,” he promised, then grabbed my hand and turned back to where Nicholas was standing, partially blocking us from the view of the people coming and going in the entrance of the hotel.

“Finished?” he asked as Lawrence walked past him.

“Hardly.” Lawrence voice echoed back to him.

Nicholas caught up with us when we walked back through the large doors into the room where the party was being held. “Well, after that little display, I need a drink,” Nicholas announced, and wandered off through the crowd toward the bar on the side of the room.

It was about now that I was wishing that I also drank alcohol. I was very tempted to tug Lawrence back through the doors and make a run for it. Or better yet, wasn’t this a hotel? Surely they had rooms here.

“Wanna dance?” I stepped up close to Lawrence, pressed my body against his side, nearly straddling his leg as I whispered the question in his ear.

“Absolutely not.” He stepped away from me and walked further into the room. “And you need to behave. You are most definitely not wearing enough clothes to be tempting me right now,” he reminded me. “I really don’t want to be flashing my employees a sight of me in full arousal in the middle of the dance floor. I haven’t done that since I was in high school, and it was embarrassing enough then.”

“Then find me someone boring to talk to, Lawrence, because I’m not ready to forget that moment in the hall.”

He found me a group of accountants and their wives, which certainly dampened my enthusiasm for pretty much everything. Duncan was an accountant, but I never got to be around him when he was working, and he wasn’t really the same person at home; at least, he wasn’t the same as these accountants. Maybe it was because Lawrence was there; maybe they were trying to impress the pretty little blonde assistant on his arm, namely me; either way, they spoke in terms that were beyond comprehension unless one was an accountant or a very strange person.

“Do you know what they are talking about?” I asked Lawrence quietly.

“No fucking idea.” He grinned at me, and I laughed aloud.

“Can we please leave then?”

“Suitably bored?”

“To within an inch of my life,” I assured him.

“Let’s go find Nicholas.” Lawrence excused himself easily from the group, and we wandered the room, looking for Nicholas. It was some time before we caught him slipping through a side door back into the room. He had a decidedly superior grin on his face, which should have warned me.

“Where have you been?” I questioned suspiciously.

“Don’t even ask,” Lawrence warned, and before I could question them further, a beautiful woman strolled casually through the same door that Nicholas had entered through.

“Oh, you didn’t!” I gasped.

“After your little display, I had to scratch an itch.” He grinned, totally unfazed to have been found out.

“You are officially uninvited to my birthday party,” I snapped.
Good grief
.

“Didn’t know I was on the invite list, but now that I know, I’d be delighted to come,” he replied, totally ignoring the fact that I had just uninvited him. “And anyway, you’re just jealous that you didn’t get some, too.”

Nicholas had a point. “How come he gets to play, and I have to talk to accountants instead?” I queried to Lawrence.

Lawrence met my gaze for a fraction of a second before he held out his hand to Nicholas, who promptly handed over a plastic room key.

“202.” Nicholas’s grin was more than wicked as Lawrence pulled me out of the room.

It was just about the quickest sex of my life, and among the most satisfying. I didn’t even get undressed, nor did we use the bed. All too soon, we were stepping off the elevator and heading back toward the party.

Nicholas was still waiting where we had left him. “That was quick.” He raised an eyebrow.

“That was just the appetizer,” Lawrence corrected.

“See, that’s the difference between being invited to one of these events, and being the guest of honor,” Nicholas explained. “I have all the time in the world to have appetizer, main, and dessert. You have to rush yours.”

“If I had a choice between rushing or not having it at all, I’ll take the rush,” I responded. “And that’s about all I want to hear about your sex life, thank you very much.” I held up my hand when he looked like he wanted to say more.

“So you really want to have a birthday party?” Lawrence asked me later.

I shrugged. “Maybe,” I admitted. “I just think it would be nice to get away, just us and maybe a few friends.”

Lawrence agreed, and Nicholas hastily added his own vote of recommendation.

We walked the room for a few more hours before Lawrence announced that he had enough and we were leaving. Then he surprised me by asking if Nicholas wanted to come back to our apartment too. He had never invited Nicholas, or anyone else for that matter, back to the apartment before, and I think Nicholas was just as surprised as I was.

“Where do you actually live?” I asked Nicholas, as we rode the elevator up to the apartment.

“I’ve got a penthouse suite at Oscar’s,” he replied. Oscar’s was one of his bigger hotels, just as exclusive and boutique as was his trademark, but Oscar’s was like the crown jewels of his empire. It was also one of his most expensive, so I had no doubt that the penthouse would be exquisite.

“Is it weird to live in a hotel?” I asked.

“You tell me. You don’t really have what you could call a normal home environment,” he reminded me.

“True. But I kind of feel like this place is home more than anywhere else we stay.”

“You live in an office building.”

I laughed. “I guess that’s probably more weird than living in a hotel, huh?”

“I actually like living there, most of the time,” Nicholas said. “A hotel is such a dynamic, ever-changing environment. Different people, different reasons for staying, different levels of society, race, religion, color, ideas. I like to watch them all come and go.”

“I like it here, because no one else is here.” I guess we had different ideas about what makes us comfortable. “I like that we could be the only ones in this entire building. No neighbors, no noise, nothing.”

Nicholas cast a glance around us as we got off the elevator. “Yeah, no one except you two—oh, and the horde of security personnel that guards this place.”

I shrugged. “No place is perfect.”

Frost and Charlie took themselves off through the door to the apartment while we watched Nicholas stroll casually around the waiting room outside Lawrence’s office.

“I’ve never been in the inner sanctum of Monterey Enterprises before,” Nicholas announced and I laughed.

“This isn’t the inner sanctum; this is my office and the waiting room.” I moved over to the double doors that led through to Lawrence’s office. His room was much more impressive than mine. “This is where it really matters.”

I pushed both doors open and walked into the dimly lit interior of Lawrence’s huge office. There was more light coming in through the windows along the far wall than was generated by the lights in his office, but I left it like that. It was calming and mysterious.

“This is more what I expected,” Nicholas agreed. “Much more dominant and impressive.”

“Glad you like it,” Lawrence replied. “Let’s just hope you never find yourself in here for business. I don’t think you would like it as much in the broad light of day.”

“Oh, I have no doubt about that.” Nicholas laughed. “I know you well enough by now to understand that I don’t want to ever stand up against you in business. Your reputation, my friend, is not exaggerated.” He slapped Lawrence on the shoulder as he walked further into the room.

“Coming?” I asked them both, as I opened the doors on the side wall that led from the office through to the apartment. I didn’t wait; they would come when they were ready.

There was even less light in the apartment. Frost and Charlie had obviously retired straight to their rooms, so I flicked a few lamps on as I walked through to the kitchen, where I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. Lawrence and Nicholas wandered casually into the lounge a few minutes later, each with a small glass of some golden liquor, which, knowing Lawrence, was most likely old Scotch or cognac.

I settled beside Lawrence on the larger of the lounges and curled my legs up underneath me so that I was half lying across him, relaxed against him.

“So this is home,” Nicholas said.

I glanced around, trying to see what it looked like to him. It was probably a bit impersonal. “For what it’s worth,” I replied. He nodded in understanding, and he probably did get it more than most people.

Lawrence and Nicholas talked for a while, general space-filling talk that was easy among friends. I was tired, half napping against Lawrence’s chest, when Nicholas’s words caught my attention.

“Do you ever wonder what you would have been doing if not for this?” Nicholas was asking.

“Easy,” Lawrence responded without even thinking about it. “I’d be a laborer in my uncle’s timber mill.”

“Sounds like a whole load of fun,” Nicholas teased and I smiled at the picture of the Lawrence I knew doing such work.

“What would you do?” I asked Nicholas.

“I’d be an astronaut,” he responded, with a happy grin.

“Realistically, not your childhood fantasy, what would you really have done?”

“Oh, I didn’t realize dreams were out,” he joked. “In that case, I’d probably be one of the drunken bums that security throws out of my hotels in the early hours of the morning. You?” he directed the question toward me.

“Well.” I contemplated what point he meant, how far back we were talking about changing. “If I went back to the events of my life that had the most impact on my sitting on this lounge tonight, and they didn’t happen…” I wondered if I could even contemplate it. “Then I guess I would still be married.” My voice broke slightly over the admission, and it was even harder to get the next sentence out. “I’d have half a dozen kids and a big white house with a picket fence, and I’d live happily ever after.”

Silence surrounded me, strained, sudden, and intense. My face must have betrayed how much it took for me to admit what I had, because both Lawrence and Nicholas were tense and unsure what to say to me.
Way to ruin the fun, Lilly
. I smiled shyly at them, hoping to draw them out of the silence that I had created with my words, but it made no noticeable difference.

Shit
, Lawrence thought to himself. He wasn’t sure if Lilly’s admission was a good thing, or if it would sink her into another depression. He pushed up from the lounge and pulled her up behind him, she hesitated a moment and then followed more easily.

He shot a glance at Nicholas and indicated for him to stay where he was, and then pulled Lilly behind him and into the bedroom. She remained silent as he undressed her and tucked her into their bed.

“I’ll be in soon,” he promised, and laid a gentle kiss on her forehead.

“Don’t stay up talking all night,” she responded, in a voice that was calmer than he expected. He stood looking down on her as she lay curled into a ball in the cold bed, wondering what was running through her mind, what was she thinking? Was she all right? She looked OK, but with Lilly it was sometimes hard to tell.

He left the room quietly and shut the door gently behind him. Nicholas was still sitting in the chair where he had left him, but he was leaning forward like he wanted to stand, but was unsure if he should.

Lawrence shook his head at him, and then poured them another drink from the sidebar. He handed it over and took his own seat.

“Sorry,” Nicholas apologized. “I didn’t realize.”

“Don’t apologize,” Lawrence told him. “I’ve had to learn the rules myself, and you didn’t do anything that I haven’t already.”

“What happened?”

Lawrence thought for a minute. “There are certain moments, some quite innocent and some more specific, that trigger memories for Lilly that are extremely painful for her to remember.”

“And references to her past are some of those memories.”

“Obviously,” Lawrence replied. “We don’t talk about her past. She’ll talk to you about her life in England, but before that, she is a closed book.”

“What happened to her?” Nicholas hesitated. “Am I allowed to ask?”

“You can ask. But I won’t tell you, because technically I don’t know. At least, she doesn’t know that I know, and I’d rather keep it that way.”

“OK,” Nicholas conceded. “Will she be alright?”

“Lilly has had some horrible tragedies in her life, and she is coping with the aftermath of those events in the best way that she can.”

“By blocking them from her life?” Nicholas was surprised. “I’m no shrink, but even I know that’s not a healthy way to deal with problems.”

“I’m not altogether sure that her previous shrink did much to help her at all,” Lawrence admitted. “But that’s another issue altogether, and one that I’m working through with her.”

“It seems like she has a lot of baggage.” Nicholas noted.

“Yes. But she’s worth it,” he stated, and the flatness in his voice told more than the simple word how he felt.

“Good, I’m glad you realize that,” Nicholas surprised him by saying. “Because she’s an extraordinary woman, and I don’t like to see her this way. She should be happy.”

“I’m not sure that Lilly is capable of truly being happy anymore,” Lawrence explained. “There are events in her past that make it impossible for her to care deeply about another human. Events that I can’t change, things that hurt her to the extent that she might never recover. With Lilly, you take it one day at a time. I had to learn that. It totally changed the way I see my life. When you go from having anything that you want at your beck and call, to living every moment as if it’s your last, you begin to reevaluate what’s important.”

“What do you mean?” Nicholas asked.

“Do you know that Lilly is on a month-to-month contract with me?” Lawrence asked.

“Work contract?”

“Yep, her work contract, which for an assistant should be at least six months, and that’s the initial term. After that we normally would have looked to formalize a two-year deal, but with Lilly, one month is all that she will ever allow. According to law, she is my assistant for the next twelve days, and then she has the right to just walk away.”