The Drake Restrained Collection: Part 1 and 2 (The Drake Series Book 3) (19 page)

"I think you
do.
You
like
me. You don’t like
the fact that you like me. You don't want to like me but you can't help it."

"I don’t
believe
you," she said with affront. "You're …" She clenched her fists. "You're awfully certain of yourself."

Then, she tried to escape me, but I took her arm once more and leaned in close so that my face was just inches from hers. Her perfume wafted up into my nose and I breathed in deeply. It sent a jolt of lust right to my dick.

"Yes. I know what I want."

"Well, so do I. And it's not
you
."

She
pulled her arm out of my hand and turned to the door.

As if to save the day, and with impeccable timing, Ethan entered. He saw us and smiled.

"There you two are." He rubbed his hands together. "Has she shown you her photographs of Africa yet?"

I cleared my throat, still affected by her nearness. "No, she hasn't."

"Come on, Kate. Show Drake your photos. I know he's interested. He's been there many times with Doctors Without Borders. You two have a
lot
in common." He took Kate’s hand and then he laid a hand on my shoulder, pulling us both towards the wall where all Kate’s photos were hung.

Then Peter, Ethan’s chief of staff entered the room. "Judge? There's a call for you."

Ethan raised his eyebrows. "Duty calls. I have to take that, but you two stay here. Kate, show him your photographs. I'll be back when my call is finished."

When he was gone, I turned to Kate but she refused to look at me. She stood silent, her glass of soda clutched in her hands like a some magic amulet to ward me off.

"You're not really going to make me tell you about my trip to Africa are you?"

"I most certainly am," I said, my voice soft. "I'm truly interested. I've been to Africa many times. Besides, I want to see into you, Kate. Right inside. Please, tell me." I waved at the wall and watched her, not giving an inch.

"Nothing's going to happen between us," she said, her voice low in warning. "The meeting was a mistake so you might as well forget it. There's no reason for you to see 'right inside' me. We're opposites. You vote Republican. I'm a Democrat."

I smiled inwardly but forced my voice to be serious. "None of that matters, Kate, when we fuck. All that matters is that we both need what each other has to offer."

"We're not going to…
fuck
," she said, whispering.

"Whatever you say." I couldn’t stop my smile, but turned to face the photos so she wouldn’t see it. "I still want you to tell me about these photos. Your father is really proud."

I heard her sigh heavily in resignation. "There are a lot of painful memories in them."

"Just the happy ones, then."

She pointed to a large picture of her with Nigel. I leaned closer, wondering about her friendship with Nigel, who I already knew was into BDSM, having seen him several times over the past few years at private dungeon parties.

"That's us, the day we arrived in Niger. Our driver took it. Nigel had been there before but I had no idea what to expect and so I was excited."

I peered at the pictures and listened as she told me about her trip. She talked about working for the UN program to provide food and medical care to new mothers. The photos captured the camps, filled with refugees who were desperate to escape the horrors of war.

She studiously avoided talking about one picture in particular, so that was the one I focused on.

"What's this one?" I pointed to one depicting two figures alone in the vast emptiness of the African desert.

She covered her mouth and shook her head.

"I can't."

I tried to turn her face gently towards me but she fought and turned away. I decided not to force her, and instead, merely touched her arm to show that I recognized she was upset.

Then Nigel himself walked into the study.

Damn
… Just when things were starting to open up between us…

"Kate, my
dear
." Nigel pushed into the study and bent down to Kate, speaking in a conspiratorial tone. "Your father let slip that Dr. Morgan was coming a bit early, and so I thought I'd be chivalrous and offer my services…"

I bristled at that. Did he imagine he was somehow protecting Kate from me?

Nigel hugged and kissed Kate on both cheeks and on her part, Kate looked relieved, as if she’d been rescued.

"Can I get you a drink?" she asked.

"Please." Nigel smiled at me but I could tell he wasn’t pleased to see me. "My usual."

Kate left us standing in front of the wall of photographs.

“Look here,” he said, wasting no time in speaking to me as soon as the door to the study had closed. “Kate is a very delicate young woman, who has suffered quite a bit of trauma in the past couple of years.”

My back stiffened at his tone. “And you’re telling me this because…?”

“I’m telling you this
because
she’s not for you,” Nigel said, moving a bit closer to me, staring down at me the way a headmaster does his students. “Kate is not your usual kind of woman.”

“And my usual kind of woman would be…?”

“You know very well what I mean. I’ve known Kate for years and she is not your type,
Dr
. Morgan,” he said, emphasizing the Dr. “Kate is
not
the kind of girl to be trifled with.”

I smiled. Almost my exact words to Dave the night I drove Kate home from the fundraiser.

“I assure you that I don’t intend to ‘trifle’ with Kate. Quite the contrary. And perhaps you don’t know Kate as well as you think.” I stepped away, not willing to have him intimidate me with his larger physical presence any longer.

“If you hurt her, there will be repercussions,” he said, stepping closer to me once more.

The door opened to admit Kate carrying a glass of red wine for Nigel. Nigel raised his eyebrows at me before turning to Kate and smiling once more, the happy lovable big brother.

Kate turned to me without meeting my eyes. "How is your drink, Dr. Morgan?"

"Please, call me Drake." I bent down and tried to catch her eye. "Considering. And it's still fine, thank you."

When I stood back up, Nigel gave me a look that said ‘back off’ but there was no way in hell I was backing anywhere from Kate.

Full steam ahead was more like it.

As much as I tried to stay by Kate’s side over the next half hour, Peter pulled me around the room to introduce me to the other high rollers who were in attendance. Ethan himself was still busy on a conference call and couldn’t join us right away, so he’d asked Peter to take over and introduce me to his group of financial supporters.

Every time I got within three feet of Kate, Nigel stepped in between us and tried to keep me away from her. It was almost comedic at first as the two of us jostled for position, but after a while, it became tedious.

Finally, about half an hour later, Ethan entered the room and pulled Nigel and Kate together, urging me and a few of the other guests to follow. I followed in their wake, only slightly peeved that it was Nigel, and not me, in Ethan’s grasp.

"Kate has some wonderful photographs from her trip to Africa. Come dear," he said to Kate, "and talk about your trip."

Kate seemed quite unhappy that she was being forced to perform and frowned as her father pulled her down the hallway.

"Go ahead, dear," Ethan said to Kate once we were all in the study. "Tell us about your trip. Start here, with this one."

Kate spoke about her trip to Africa, going through each photograph, talking about the relief camp. When she came to the one photo that she avoided with me, Ethan wouldn’t let her off the hook.

"Tell them about Alika and Chinua," Ethan said, turning to the rest of us who were gazing at the photos. "A couple and their baby that Kate and Nigel rescued from the desert."

Kate looked as if she wished a hole would open up in the floor and she could disappear, but I saw her steel herself, taking in a deep breath. The story was quite emotional – of she and Nigel finding a young couple with a newborn who were lost on the road to the relief camp, wandering in the middle of nowhere. Kate was overwhelmed at one point and had to stop. Nigel took over and told the rest of the story.

Then Kate picked back up again, her voice shaky, but she was trying.

"He crawled like a crab because his knees were bloody," she said, her voice barely audible. "Alika was carrying her baby. They hadn't named him yet because they weren't even sure if he would live. I thought he was a newborn because he was so small, but he was three months old and starving. Her breasts," she said, shaking her head, her voice almost inaudible. "She had no milk left. They were like deflated balloons."

Kate had to stop speaking, and covered her mouth with a hand, tears in her eyes. Nigel stepped up to the plate and finished the story of how they had saved the trio, but the husband died once they got back to the camp and he knew his wife and baby were safe.

I remembered Kate’s articles in the Columbia Journalism Review and how impressed I was with them, how well-written and objective they were. From speaking with Ethan, I knew that a few months after returning to Manhattan, Kate had a breakdown. She hadn’t properly mourned her mother’s death and then, the trauma of the camps proved too much. Sympathy for her filled me. She was brave to take on such a harrowing ordeal so soon after a personal loss.

I was impressed.

Ethan stood watching Kate, his eyes filled with emotion, tears visible in them as he listened to his daughter speak.

"Excuse me," Kate said left the rest of us behind, closing the study door quietly behind her.

Nigel turned to follow her, but Ethan took his arm and stopped him.

“Let her go. She gets very emotional when she talks about the camps. It was very hard on her. She was very brave.”

Nigel nodded and turned back to the wall of photos, talking to someone who asked him to describe one of the photos that showed Kate and Nigel together. I took that as my cue to leave and follow Kate, wanting to be with her when she was especially vulnerable.

I quietly opened the door to the study, hoping Nigel didn’t see me. He was occupied, but Ethan saw me and smiled as if he approved.

God, he was making this so easy…

I closed the door and went down the hallway, peering in each room to see if Kate was there. I found her in a small bedroom at the back of the apartment, which looked as if it had been hers for the furniture was feminine and a bit girly, French Provincial, white with gilded detailing and ornate. There was a cork-board on the wall over a small student desk with a half-dozen ribbons of blue and red – the kind you won in school for sports or for academic achievement. I wanted to check everything out, curious about this woman I was planning to seduce and dominate, but I held back. She needed my attention by the looks of her, sitting on the side of the bed, a tissue clutched in her hand, daubing her eyes.

When I entered the room completely, she glared at me and then turned away.

"I'd like to be
alone
."

I sat beside her and nudged her with my knee, bumping my shoulder against hers. "Being alone is the last thing you need right now." I purposely sat a bit too close to her, wanting our bodies to touch, make a connection. I rested my elbows on my knees and craned my head so I could look her in the eye. "I'm sorry. Your father doesn't seem to understand how upset Africa still makes you."

She frowned. "He always sees everything, every event, every word, for its strategic purpose. How it can aggrandize him and our family – or hurt us. He doesn’t really pay attention to people,” she said, her voice petulant, still emotional. “What he said about those photographs being key to what makes me tick? He thinks it means I'm some great humanitarian – some angel of mercy – but really, I was just a student looking for a topic for my honors thesis. I had
no
idea what I got myself into."

I was a bit taken aback at her confession. "You didn't like Africa?"

She said nothing for a moment, her arms wrapped around herself. She was very emotional, almost childlike in her response to her father. Part of me was surprised, for she was twenty-four but part of me completely and totally understood. How many times had I cried as a boy over my own father’s neglect? How often did I see fathers and sons together, deep in conversation as two adults, and ache to have my father still alive and treating me as a real son?

He never did. I never had that kind of relationship with him. Even now, it hurt.

Here Kate was, well-educated, well-bred, obviously self-sufficient to a fault with her scholarships and part-time jobs, trying so hard to impress her father and she never really felt he was impressed.

How could she be so wrong? Ethan clearly loved her very much and was completely impressed with her.

"I hated it – the corruption,” she said. “It was so hard. Painful. As soon as I could, I changed my topic. I couldn't
do
it. I'm not strong enough, but he can't see that because it would mean
his
daughter isn't up to snuff."

"You saw the worst of the worst." I turned to her, trying to catch her eye. "Where the people have resources, they're full of hope. I see it in the hospitals. The young doctors and nurses – they've been trained in America and they want to raise their countries out of poverty."

I leaned against her again, trying to nudge her into feeling better, thinking that she needed some affection at that moment. Of course, she didn’t respond, but I thought I felt something between us. Something cracked just a bit in her reserved and tightly controlled demeanor.

"I admire you for going. You didn't have to so that does say something about you, what makes you 'tick'."

"You'd be wrong to think that." Her voice was bitter. "My father has
no idea
what makes me 'tick'. He practically chose my thesis topic and arranged everything. I
wanted
to do something on the fine arts, but
no
. It had to be political."