Chapter 3
Ava
I spent every second of the taxi ride letting lie after lie slip out from between my teeth about my time studying contemporary art at college while wracking my brain to figure out how I was going to avoid him for the rest of my life.
Or maybe I could just dye my hair black again, since that seemed to make such a massive difference.
But as his hand reached out for me from where he stood on the deck of his sailboat, I couldn’t help but feel a massive pang of relief that he hadn’t realized yet. The likelihood of tonight ending the moment he knew who I was weighed on my mind, and I would lie as much as I needed to in order to keep that from happening.
I took his hand and stepped off the dock, the far too large sailboat rocking just an inch from the inertia. He steadied me before I even had a chance to potentially lose my footing, and for a second, I almost told him that he didn’t need help, that I had spent enough time on sailboats growing up—even this one—and didn’t need assistance.
But that could raise questions, so I accepted the assistance.
“One drink,” I smirked, lifting a single digit between us as I stepped down off the edge of the boat and onto the main deck. “That’s it. Nothing else.”
The corners of his mouth twitched upward into a smirk and for the smallest of seconds, I let myself take this in, take it all in, as he stepped down to meet me. It was never truly dark in Manhattan, but the clear, black sky behind him mixed with the glittering lights of the city’s skyline on his left lit him up almost like a dream, a dream I was sure I’d had hundreds of times in my life. Adrian—or John —had littered my thoughts for years, and now here he was in the flesh, likely not believing my insistence on one drink.
It was almost hard to believe that I wasn’t dreaming again.
Adrian’s tongue dragged across his upper teeth as he chuckled breathily through his nose. “One drink,” he parroted. He slipped his hand into mine and dragged me toward the interior of the boat, right where I knew the kitchen and bar were positioned. “And what drink would that be?”
The polished oak door swung open, and he flipped a switch, illuminating the large space in a warm, soft glow. “What do you have?”
He didn’t bother dropping my hand. Instead, he pulled me with him as he slipped behind the bar, marble countertops lining either side of us with a wall of alcohol and under-counter fridges to our right. “Everything,” he said, releasing my hand in exchange for wrapping it around my midsection. For the briefest of seconds, our chests touched, his warmth seeping into me through his pressed shirt—but then I was lifting, up, up, up, until my rear slid onto the marble countertop. His hips slotted between my open thighs, his jeans catching and pulling just slightly at my skirt. It tugged the waistband just a little lower on my hips, exposing just an inch more of my midriff. “It just depends on what you want from me, Lily. ”
The bar lights twinkled in the blue of his eyes as he leaned a little closer. Each little line in his skin reminded me that this wasn’t just any man who was coming on to me. This was Adrian, dressed up as some strange, different version of himself who went by John. This was my father’s friend. This was someone I was convinced I would never have the chance to go on a date with, let alone touch, and as I slid my fingers gently across the curve of his jaw and felt each little prickle of his five o’clock shadow, I couldn’t help myself.
I’d wanted this for so long with him. Fuck my rules when it came to dates—this was different.
I pressed my lips to his. Taking that plunge myself instead of letting him do it felt like I was giving in to something I shouldn’t. But this wasn’t like how it had been up near Central Park. This wasn’t confined and restrained because of the public nature of it.
He wanted more, and it was blindingly obvious here in the privacy of his sailboat.
He kissed me hungrily and greedily, his mouth devouring me as if I were a meal and he hadn’t eaten in years. His hand, far larger than mine and so fucking warm, trailed along the top of my thigh over the patterned fabric of my skirt. His other wrapped around the back of my neck, holding me in place and keeping me from retreating from the invasion of him.
But I didn’t want to retreat.
I wasn’t sure exactly how far he would go. Memories of him hit me the more his cologne demanded my attention, and although I hadn’t heard much about him since my parents had divorced and my father left Boston for the shimmering lights of New York City, I had vague recollections of attending an engagement party for Adrian when I was fifteen, just a few months before I’d last seen him. How many levels of bad is this?
His hand trailed lower, over the curve of my knee and down around my calf, slipping under the lower hem of my skirt and meeting bare flesh. He gave me an inch of space as he pulled his lips from mine and half-lidded eyes met mine too close to focus on. “If you’re truly just here for a drink,” he said, his fingers tightening on the back of my neck, “you’re doing an awful job of ordering one.”
“It’s hard to order anything when my mouth is preoccupied,” I teased. “But I’ll take whatever is nicest.”
His digits traveled up the back of my leg, pulling the fabric up with it as it pooled on top of his jacketed arm. Slightly swollen lips pulled back into a far too cheeky of a grin, and for the briefest of seconds, his fingers brushed against the inside of my thigh, sending a wave of electricity through me. Higher, I wanted to say, but they disappeared as quickly as they’d come, and soon his hand was leaving me entirely and lifting up a bottle of red wine that must have been stored beneath where I was sitting. “ This is the best bottle I have on the ship.”
I almost wanted to scream at him for teasing me just to get to a bottle of wine, but I took it in my grasp and turned it to look at the label. A hand-drawn design of some kind of estate house took up the majority of it, and beneath that, in faded letters, were the words CH?TEAU LAFITE ROTHSCHILD, 2009.
I knew enough about wine from my father’s obsession with it to know that this was fucking expensive, and it was meant to be aged.
“Do you really want to waste opening a Lafite for one glass?” I asked, turning the bottle over in my hands.
“Let’s be honest for one second,” he laughed, plucking it from my grasp. He reached between my legs again, and my heart rate nearly doubled as he brushed against my inner thigh. Just like he had thirty seconds ago, he retreated, pulling out a multi-faceted corkscrew. “You’re not just staying for one drink.”
He cut away the top of the wrapping before I could protest and shoved the spiral into the top of the cork, twisting it down until it had almost entirely disappeared.
“Pass me two glasses, would you?” he asked. “They’re just behind your head.”
The moment his hand flexed, gripping the screw and leveraging it out, I gave up what little fight I had left in me. No going back now.
I spun around, reaching for the thin stemmed glasses with wide tops. Dad used to shout at me for grabbing the small ones whenever he had red wine, and for once, his training paid off. I passed them to Adrian—or John —and he carefully poured out two servings worth before handing me one back.
I stared at it for longer than I intended to, watching as it moved in the glass and painted the sides a clear, dark maroon. He watched me closely, his eyes lingering with far too much weight, and every second under that stare felt like a hurricane brewing far too close for comfort.
“Come on, pretty girl,” he mocked, clinking his glass against mine. “Even if it’s one glass, you have to at least try it.”
I wasn’t entirely sure how to tell him that I couldn’t give two shits about the wine and just wanted him to take me back to the bedroom I knew existed on this godforsaken sailboat, but I obliged, letting the heat of him calling me pretty girl settle in between my thighs as I lifted the glass to my lips.
Fuck, it was good.
“There you go,” he said. He slipped between my thighs again, sliding his free hand around my waist and settling it on the small of my back. He pulled, and my rear moved along the slick surface, bringing my parted legs directly against his waist. Heat swarmed over my face, and I knew damn well it wasn’t from the one sip of alcohol I had taken.
“You shouldn’t have opened this one.” I swallowed past the lump in my throat and sipped at it again, my mouth salivating from the tannins.
He shrugged. “I’ve got twenty more at home.”
Twenty more . It didn’t surprise me in the slightest, but I wasn’t supposed to think he was as wealthy as he actually was—not as John , at least, and not as Lily . Lily knew him as a decently well-off travel expert and photographer, not the multi-millionaire head of a global events planning company. But Lily also wouldn’t know how expensive this wine was, and I wasn’t sure how exactly to respond in order to fit with the narrative we were both presenting.
“Besides,” he started, offering me a little smirk as he set his glass down and brought himself closer, his lips hovering against the shell of my ear, “I find it hard to believe that you’d willingly sit in a taxi for twenty minutes just to have one single drink with me.”
An electric current shot down my spine from the heat of his breath. Instinctually, my hand reached for him, landing solidly on the warmth of his shirt between the folds of his jacket, and his answering breathy chuckle only added to the sensation from my ear.
“So tell me, Lily ,” he rasped. His hand found the bare skin of my knee again, and within an instant, he was lifting the fabric of my skirt further, dragging it up my thigh, his thumb caressing the sensitive flesh. “What exactly would you like me to do with you?”