Into My Arms (5 page)

Z lifts me from the water with two strong hands. Gently, he drapes the robe over my shoulders and gathers me like a child, cradling me against his hard body as he strides into the house, up the stairs. It’s not until we’re entering my room that I realize…he’s touching me.

The shock of his skin against mine radiates into my bones.

I don’t say a word. I barely breathe as he settles me on the bed, awkwardly yet tenderly plumping a pillow beneath my head.

“I’m sorry about that.” I wipe my eyes. “Tears are sort of a buzzkill.”

“It was gorgeous,” he murmurs. His tone is gentle, so utterly out of character that this could be a dream. For the rest of my tenure at Zavtra Tech, I’ll be haunted by a stunningly real fantasy about the time my sexy boss whisked me away for a dirty weekend.

“You touched me.” I eye the thick bulge in his suit pants. He doesn’t seem to mind.

He freezes; his face is ashen, as if he is suddenly on the edge of collapse.

“Wait.” I rise to my elbows. “You didn’t even notice, did you?”

“The sight of your tears—” He breaks off, scrubbing his face. “No thought entered my mind except getting you into my arms.”

“Wait, that’s good, though, right?” I push through his obvious misgivings. “You conquered. Everything you were afraid of was simply in the mind.”

After a long pause, he frowns. “How optimistically American.”

I inhale deeply, willing myself to calm down even as anger surges through my chest. We were so close to something, a truth, and he retreats to the safety of sarcasm. “What does that even mean?”

“The way you bandy around words like
conquer
,
fear
. As if one moment is enough to erase years of…” He growls in frustration. “What is inside you that made you weep as if the heavens were ending? Tell me that, Bethanny.”

“You know what?” I sit, pulling the robe tight around me as if that will serve as de facto armor. “Stop. It’s not my turn for twenty questions. I held up my end of the bargain downstairs and now I expect you to honor yours.”

“You want a secret.”

“Yes. One that you’ve never told anyone else.”

“Very well.” He sits on the edge of my bed, scowling at the wall. He doesn’t get close. Whatever moment he had of being able to be near me, to touch me, is gone. “I shall tell you one that will make you want to leave. How much you imagine you know of the world’s darkness. How much you believe you’ve experienced.”

I shove my damp hair behind my ears. “Don’t presume to know about me or my pain.” My annoyance flares; the simmering temper that has been my near-constant companion of late is back. “You flew me to this place, asked me to do things of an utterly personal nature, and I did. I trusted you. Then I ask for a single thing in return and you make a mockery of it. And worse, you tell me how I feel doesn’t matter. You know what? I don’t need to have you diminish me any further. I can assure you that I do a fine job of that on my own. If you want to treat me badly or make me feel worthless, too late, get in line.”

He flinches as if I’ve struck him. “Never have I and never will I desire such a thing. You are a most surprising woman,” he says slowly. “I weary of people. Everyone always does the same things. I can predict reactions and am always correct. Except for you. I think you’ll turn right and you go left. I think you’ll say no and you say yes. I don’t know anyone like you.”

“Well, let’s face it,” I say with more bravado than I actually feel, “you also don’t get out much.”

He grins at that, a grin that is so full of self-loathing that it makes me want to reach out and cradle him.

“Kiss me,” I say in a stern voice. “Now. On the mouth.”

“I can’t.”

“I’m calling you out on that. There is no way you carried me across your yard, through your house, and up a flight of stairs and now can’t give me a kiss.”

“Perhaps I can indeed physically bear to kiss you. That’s an interesting notion, appealing in the extreme. But first, don’t forget about your payment. You wanted to peek inside Pandora’s box. I shall make it worth your while.”

An alarm bell rings. Is this what I want—a secret? His eyes are hard, telling me there is no going back. Once you hear a thing, you know it forever.

Is it better to be ignorant? I’ve been in this situation before with Pippa, where I could have said
Please, don’t tell me,
and maybe then she’d still be alive. Instead, I let her talk about her eating disorder, plans for treatment, how she’d tell her parents, and she didn’t notice the car coming too fast. It only takes an instant for brain death to occur.

Seeking truth can be dangerous. But a deal is a deal and if Z wants to scare me, let’s see him do his worst.

“I’m listening,” I say, my voice steel.

His shoulders drop as he lifts haunted eyes to mine. If I have rooms locked away within me, he has whole countries. “When I said my parents were dead, I omitted an important piece of the story. I killed my father.”

Y
ou…killed your father. But…wait…how?” It’s as if the thick fog outside has entered my brain. Z—a murderer? Something is off. I’m not sure what but I need more information.

“Does it matter?”

“Yes.” I don’t know why but it does. My gut says this isn’t a guy who goes around ice picking others in the back. Although, then again, how many people do I know that I’d be like,
Oh, yes, him? Yeah, I totally expected that guy to be a murderer.

Not many. Not anyone.

“There are ways to kill a man without giving him a bullet.”

“So you didn’t physically do it?” I swallow hard, my shoulders dropping a little.
Calm down. Remember Z is a little bit—okay¸ a lot bit—dramatic.
It serves him well when unveiling new products and capturing national attention during Zavtra Tech’s annual sales meeting conferences. There is speculation that part of his reclusive Howard Hughes act is also to foster that image of mysteriousness. But right now he doesn’t appear to have a big act to play. He looks almost boyish. At last that wave of hair flops over his forehead and he doesn’t move a muscle to shove it back into place.

“You are an interesting woman,” he says.

“It’s funny to be called that,” I whisper. “A woman.”

“Why?”

“I am not quite sure when I ceased to be a girl.” But as I say the words, I see it’s a lie. I know when my girlhood ended. It was before my parents’ betrayal. It was the day when I sat, strapped in a crushed car, smelling my best friend’s blood, feeling the wetness leach into my favorite shirt.

“You are tough and not altogether innocent. The sort of woman who scares most men.”

I think to my roommate, Courtland, and the cocky way he grinned at me, as if he could smell the desperation wafting from my body like a pathetic pheromone. “You’re wrong. Besides, I don’t like talking in circles. You told me you killed your father, but then alluded that it wasn’t through physical violence. What did you do?”

His eyes harden and at last the correct color of his irises comes to mind.

Granite.

“I took away the one thing in his life that he lived for,” he says.

“If you’re trying to frighten me, I promise that it’s not working.”

His lips twist in the corner. “You have stared into the darkness too. It was one of the first things I saw about you.”

“When did you see me?”

“I always watch you,” he says simply.

“The camera. The one over my desk.”

He inclines his head.

I knew it.
“I have to say, that doesn’t feel like a romantic gesture. I’d actually argue it’s questionable behavior.”

“You do not know how much of my day I’ve spent, staring at you, at your desk, your hands on the keyboards, your brows furrowed in concentration. I’d wonder, ‘What is she thinking? What is happening in her day that gives her that strange little smile or frown?’ Yes. I wondered about you. And that is most unusual seeing as I don’t wonder about anyone.”

“Kiss me,” I challenge him. He twists around words and dances from truths. But he can’t evade body language.

He gazes at me as if I’m something he’s never seen. “I tell you how I did a terrible thing, an act akin to patricide, and you offer a kiss.”

“There is much you aren’t saying, so maybe we need to streamline the conversation. Your lips touching mine. What could be simpler?”

For once, I have taken him by total surprise.

“Or more destructive,” he says.

“You kiss me with your eyes every time you look at me.”

“Ah.” He goes utterly still. “Very well, then. Yes. I think I understand.”

“I want you to do it,” I say softly, reaching out my hand. “Please. What can I call you? Aleksander?”

“No, that’s what
he
used to call me, the bastard who was my father. At boarding school, I was Sander and that, too, never felt right, not exactly.”

“So what do you prefer?”

“Call me whatever you like. You are the exception to my rule. The exception to all my rules.”

“Why?” My voice is breathless, more than a little unsteady.

“If I knew that, I’d be a wiser man than I am now.” His eyes close and his next breath is long, slow, and shuddering. “If I kiss you, will you hold still?”

Hold still if he actually kisses me? The idea of his full lips slanting on mine, his hard chest pushing insistent against my breasts is enough to make me writhe all on its own. “No.”

His gaze snaps to mine.

“How can I promise such a thing? After all, a kiss isn’t one-sided, at least not a good kiss.”

He stands, wiping his hands on his suit pants, his shirt a little wrinkled.

He walks to the window and looks out at nothing but night, seeing only his own ghost face reflection, and my own behind him. He places a hand on the glass and the heat from his skin heats the pane. When he turns, it remains, a foggy imprint.

I move to the end of the bed, hang my feet off, the robe slipping off one shoulder.

He is there then. I don’t even have time to register movement. He braces his hands on either side of the mattress, on the outside of my thighs, and there is no more oxygen in the room. The flame in his expression has sucked it all out.

His lips crush mine as if time has run out. We don’t have the night, or the hours left to the weekend. There is only and ever this moment. No play-acting or showing off. No coy moves. It’s need, pure and raw, urgent and fierce. His lips are cooler than I imagined. A distant place in me registers that thought. Cool except there is his tongue, easing against mine, and the contrast makes me sigh.

The moments when I realize I exist are infrequent. Flashes of realization that I am alive, and this is an actual life that I am living and for those few precious moments I’m on the outside, looking at my whole world and seeing it not for what it normally feels like, an all-consuming crushing adventure rather than a spider’s web tangling me.

And that’s what this is. His lips. My lips. Nothing else is touching. Not hands or bodies. Not even our faces. Only our hungry mouths.

What will happen if I reach out, cradle his cheek with my palm? This man who in so many ways is powerful beyond imagining, in control, who plans everything down to a meticulous degree and yet seems to have no idea that it’s all too much. That everyone needs a moment of letting go.

I don’t think. If I do, I won’t be able to make the move that I must. The move that like a kiss is so soft, so normal, so everyday it should be nothing at all except it’s for these exact things wars have been fought. People have killed and died for the price of a touch.

I lift my hand quicker than the speed of doubt and pull him into my arms, my cheek pressing against the barest hint of stubble. He freezes…no, not quite. His temperature increases as if my touch burns him. He doesn’t move. I pull and he’s strong, so strong that he doesn’t budge even as muscles beneath my hands bunch and flex. Everything about him is hard and inflexible, like steel.

I rise on my knees and slip my fingers into the neck of his shirt. A shudder runs through him. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “I won’t let go.”

“Lie back on the bed,” he rasps.

I respond to the order in his tone. He opens my robe and stares his fill. Then he turns and strides out. Across the hall a door opens and shuts.

I lie there, belly hitching.
What the hell just happened?
Forget the rabbit hole—I’ve gotten sucked up into a tornado and am off to Oz.

The wizard behind the curtain didn’t turn out to be great and all powerful, rather just a man. And Z didn’t walk away; he almost ran.

What chases him?

I roll off the bed, still in a bathing suit and bathrobe, and strip in a daze. I hang the wet suit in the shower in my bathroom before returning to the closet to see what else could be in there. Of course there are pajamas. One is a silk set, pale blue camisole and pants that feel light as air. I slip them on and stare into the mirror, realizing it’s an exact match for my eyes. For some reason it doesn’t feel coincidental. I should go to bed. Back in the bathroom, I wash my face, and there is a fresh toothbrush, toothpaste, face cream. I can’t help noticing that they are all the brands I favor.

How does he know? He has never been to my house.

But there are whispers.

The hacking. The renegade. It’s part of the Zavtra mystique, fuels the air of bad boy.

The house is silent and I’m exhausted. A bone-deep weariness settles into my bones but at the same time, the idea of sleep is like a bad joke, mocking me.

I looked in Pandora’s box and it’s unnerving; there are strange things, scary things and I don’t know what they mean. I don’t understand half of what Z says and what he does share raises my hackles.

There is danger here.

But I know that old myth and there is more to Pandora’s box. Despite everything, one thing was left, the key piece that makes all the unbearable suffering bearable.

Hope.

I leave the room and head to his.