Manwhore +1 (10 page)

This longing, I bet he can see it in my eyes as he drops his hand. My smile is gone, but the feeling of his touch remains on my lips.

We stand here, and though I want and crave, we stand looking at each other like strangers.

As if you never knew his arms, and how they held you; his lips and how they pressed onto yours . . . always the corner of your lips first.

A breeze hits me, and I know that I have never hurt like this, or had so many regrets. I know that I might not be okay until the first part he touched forgets what it was like to feel his fingertips. But will I ever? I feel like his fingertip just branded my lips for another eternity.

A woman comes over to greet him. He clenches his jaw as if the interruption frustrates him.

“You stunningly beautiful man,” the woman gushes with a manicured hand fluttering up his hard chest. “I tell everyone I know you’re the only man who looks as stunning in his passport picture as he does in real life. Let’s do Monte Carlo again!”

She leaves and I find myself smiling in amusement. “Is that where you’ve been traveling?”

He shrugs disinterestedly. “Among other places, yes.”

“But not with Callan and Tahoe?”

“They had business. I traveled with other friends.”

“Socialites? And . . . playboys who have nothing to do?”

“People who wanted to get away for a while.”

Away far from me
, I think sadly. I kick a leaf from the terrace floor and realize that somewhere during the night, my braid came undone. Now I try to keep my hair from flapping around me and tilt my head to study his face. “It felt like you didn’t even want to come back to Chicago.”

He’s studying me with equal intensity, watching me fail to catch the flying wisps of my hair. “Nothing to come back to in Chicago.”

“M4,” I tell him.

He reaches out to seize most of my flapping hair in one fist and holds it in control against my nape. “M4’s a big boy. I’ve taught it to stand on its own two feet without me.” He smirks. “At least for a little while.”

But you didn’t teach me how to survive the storm that is you
, I think as I reach up and use both my hands to keep my hair still.

When he eases back and drops his hand, I shiver with the breeze—the loss of his body heat cooling me too fast.

“Cold?” he murmurs.

I shake my head—because it’s so much colder in Chicago in winter—but he heads to the end of the terrace, where there’s a pile of blankets.

I wrap my arms around myself and sit down on a couch near the fireplace and I try not to look at him like I have nothing else to do. Then I try not to look at the couple kissing on the other corner of the terrace. They’re making out by the railing. It’s not a full-on juvenile make-out but rather a long adult kiss that seems to go on and on and on.

I shiver and tighten my arms around myself. Malcolm brings a blanket and hands it over, silently looking at me.

He’s standing there, beautiful beyond the imagination. He oozes power and class, sophistication. He oozes testosterone and every woman inside has noticed him—even the ones here with other men. I notice that too. My stomach squeezes unhappily at that. I drop my gaze and I see his shoes as he lowers himself down next to me.

“You all right?” he asks me, pulling the blanket over me.

I shake my head, then nod, then want to groan when I realize maybe the wine is bubbling a little too high into my brain.

When he stretches his legs out, before I can think better of it, I lift the blanket. “Here, it’s cold,” I say, scooting to make room for him.

He grabs me by the waist and slides me next to him so he doesn’t have to move, then he lets go and leans back and doesn’t seem cold at all, the blanket idle by his waist as he sips wine and studies its contents.

The move was easy and natural . . . and Saint looks so calm right now. But I’m floored.
He wants me near?

Holding the blanket a little higher with one hand, I watch him drink his wine out of the corner of my eye.

I think of all those long dreams I had, only to wake up alone in bed. Needing. Needing him. And now my shoulder touches his. I sit helpless. I should move away but I’m stealing this touch and I can’t stop myself.

He reaches out to grab a new wine from a passing waiter.

“Do you want to take a break upstairs or do you want to stay here for a while?” he asks me, his tone casual, but his deep stare is somehow not the least bit casual.

“I’m enjoying the terrace very much right now.”

He smiles. And god, that smile.

“Do you want to try this one? It’s a cabernet, ’sixty-eight.” He offers the wine to me.

“I’m heading into the woozy department, so maybe not,” I admit.

“Just a taste?” He watches me with those eyes full of mischief and dips his thumb into his glass. I watch as he lifts it. My heart stops when he rubs my lips with it and at the wet caress, desire drizzles over every corner of me, every shadowed place.

“What are you doing?” I ask breathlessly.

“Something I shouldn’t,” he husks out, his eyes dark and somber but with a devilish glint.

Holding my breath, I part my lips and suckle a little. His eyes darken even more, and my body contracts when the taste of him—Sin, the only guy I’ve ever wanted, ever cared for—reaches me. Opening up my every memory, my every need.

His voice like silken oak, he whispers, “One more, Rachel?”

We’re playing with fire and we both know it. I can see the devil in his eyes and I can feel the heat that’s going to turn me to cinders and I can’t stop it; I won’t stop it. I nod, but then, when a little fear screams at me that he’s going to hurt me, I say, to protect myself, “Just one.”

This time when he dips his thumb into the wine and brings it up, I suck it delicately, not wanting him to know how much I crave his taste more than anything.

I give it just a tiny suck, as if I’m only interested in the wine slipping down my tongue. But it’s his thumb, square, clean, familiar, that I want to bite into, that I want to kiss, taste, make love to. There’s a moan in my throat, trapped there. A need inside me, trapped there. A love inside me, so very trapped there he might never get to know how much, how very much I’ve come to love him.

Watching me for a moment in disappointment, as though he wanted me to latch on to his thumb longer, he sticks it into his mouth and sucks the rest with one pull. Then he whispers at me, “This one’s sweeter than the rest.”

“I . . . yes.”

There’s a silence after this is done. He’s looking at me with a bit of amusement and a strange yearning I’ve never seen in his eyes and I’m flustered to death.

My voice is thick when I can finally manage to speak. “What those men said . . . about your father.”

“They were business associates of my mother’s. They know my father.” His lips curl sardonically, and his eyes shutter until there’s no more of the fleeting tenderness I just saw. “Don’t worry. I don’t associate with friends of his.”

He brings out his phone. Changing topics.

“Remember this picture?” he asks and turns the screen to me.

I’m both ashamed and excited at the discovery as I peer closer to see. “You still have it.”

With the click of a button, he’s showing me a picture of me on his yacht,
The Toy
. I was staring out at the water the first time I was there, thinking of . . . well, how endless the water looked. And wondering why I was so distraught over watching some floozies feed him grapes and hearing about all the fun he’d had at an after-party I was never invited to.

There it is—that picture of me, my profile pensive as I stare out at the lake. “You were supposed to erase it!” I accuse.

“I erased the one I showed you. I took two.”

“Two, not four?”

His smile appears, but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. His eyes, instead, look endlessly deep and thoughtful. Then he clicks and there’s another one of me. I’m sitting on a street bench with a magazine on my lap.
The
magazine. In which I published the article about him. I’m staring down at it with a look of such loss—as if I lost my whole world that day and all I had left was that single magazine with his picture on it.

I don’t understand where he got it but I’m surprised, embarrassed, and in my heart, so very sad that that picture—that moment—exists at all. “Where did you get it?”

“Online.” His eyes darken a little as he looks at me, a muscle tightly flexing in the back of his square jaw.

“Do you keep photos of all the people you employ on your phone?”

“I don’t employ you yet, remember?” He goes back to the yacht picture. “Nor was I employing you when you were here.” He looks at me.

“Saint,” I say, breathless at his proximity and getting scared by what it’s doing to me. “You never will. I could never look at you as my boss.”

“I wanted to show you this one,” he says, then plays with his phone before turning it back to me again. I see an email from a zoo, and he opens the attachment to show me. I see a huge elephant with its trunk up in the air, almost as if saluting the camera.

“That’s your elephant,” he tells me, watching me closely.

“Rosie,” I say, and when I look at him, I can’t believe the kinds of kisses I want to put on his face and body, on his lips and on his lovely and hard-to-read green eyes.

He lifts his wineglass, cocking his eyebrow, and drinks, then he hands it over since I don’t have one to toast with. I take his wineglass, and—holding his gaze—I set my lips where he drank, finishing it.

The smile he’d been wearing is completely gone when he noticed what I did.

“To Rosie,” I say, lowering the glass.

His phone sits idle in his hand, while the wineglass sits empty in mine.

And Saint sits next to me. He’s staring at me with such intensity, it almost feels like he doesn’t know if he wants to kiss me, spank me, or fuck the hell out of me.

Yes, please.

Handsome and dark-haired, Saint is among the youngest of everyone at the tasting. We both are, but he looks distracting as a comet.

He sits here, overwhelmingly sexual and physical, casual but strong and sophisticated in the clothes he wears, compared to the older men in their suits walking by. I’m conscious of his body heat under the blanket and how, combined with mine, the air is hot enough.

I’m so aware of the hardness of his thigh against mine, of the crackling air and the magnetic pull between us.

Does he feel it too? Does he hate me, but want me still?

Could I compartmentalize like that? Be physical with him while I love him so completely?

I’m not sure I could.

So I sit here stiffly and look at him quietly, looking away when it’s too much to bear, and then back to find him still watching me.

Maybe he doesn’t want me the way I want him anymore. But even when he wanted me, he had the patience of a saint. And I’m afraid he’s going to wear me down until I agree to everything and anything that he wants. Even employment.

“So when is this event at M4 that you’re purchasing all this wine for?” I ask, searching for safer ground.

“Six weeks from now.”

I nod and smile a little, then tap at his glass I just drained. “This one,” I confirm. “I’m obsessed with this one.”

“Okay,” he concurs with a curve of his lips as he calls a waiter and asks for a similar one. “Try this one now, Rachel.”

He puts it in my hand, but I push it back into his, delighting that I have an excuse to touch the tips of my fingers to the backs of his.

“No.” I shake my head and push the glass deeper into his hand, prolonging, stealing the touch of his hand. “I don’t want another. I want this one.” I lift the empty glass, and he laughs and asks for a refill.

I ask him, as we sip, “Why hire me? I’m still battling with myself to write every day.”

He shrugs and looks at me devilishly. “All right,” he concedes. “Then I need a wine taster.”

“So determined, are you, to get me under your command?” I tease.

He looks at me. He looks at me so deeply, I haven’t felt this
seen
in a while.

“You have no idea.”

I
t’s dark outside when we head back into the event room and toward the hotel lobby.

“It’s a good night as always for you, Saint!” he’s told by one of the businessmen as we head out.

He doesn’t answer. Vaguely, I notice the speculative stares coming our way. The men are checking me out, but the women have eyes only for the green-eyed god beside me. They look ready to charge him and get on with the baby making.

“Mr. Saint!” Catherine stops him at the door. He converses with her about the wine orders. He takes my arm in his hand to steady me as we head back into the event room and I discover the world is spinning a little too fast.

“You okay?” A corner of his lips is curled as he looks down at me.

“I’m perfect.”

I don’t think he believes me, because he secures me against the wall of his side with one arm around my waist. And it’s so familiar, so . . . right.

He’s more relaxed than he’s been all night after all the wine we imbibed, and so am I. My defenses are wavering. His presence is intoxicating. He shoots me a smile to melt whatever hasn’t melted already.

“You really are drunk,” he murmurs, as if to himself.

He walks me over to the elevators.

And I don’t question that.

Because . . . because he mentioned there’s a room upstairs where we can chill out for a bit. And I said
yes, let’s chill out for a little bit
. Because I can’t bear to leave, not when he’s still here and every other woman in the room has been waiting,
waiting
for me to leave so they can have him.

“You drank more than me,” I chide him. How come he looks as in control as always? “I bet you drank wine in the crib, only accepting vintage bottles even then.”

He’s suddenly wearing this secret smile. “You know me so well, Rachel.”

We head into the elevator and it takes me a moment to realize he’s teasing me. I laugh a delayed laugh, but then I’m silent and sleepy and I would have usually stood apart, but I’m cold and he steps impossibly close. So close as he presses the top-floor button, that I can feel his body heat, smell the warm, familiar scent of his skin and the scent of wine on his breath as he stands there, staying close as if offering himself to lean on.