Chapter 31
S ince I left Raven’s over an hour ago, my mood has slipped considerably. I received an email from the Treesprite people informing me that I should hear about a final decision the Monday after Thanksgiving and that I’d have only seven days following that to accept or decline.
I don’t know how things got this far.
I filled out the damn form in a roomful of other neurosurgeons, all of us joking about it. Wouldn’t it be amazing if they took us? Yeah, right, no one gets it. I hear they’re only taking doctors from Europe and Asia right now.
That’s how it all went, despite my lusting after it, and now… now I’m a finalist.
I spent the following I don’t even know how long researching for the hundredth time all that this grant does. The lives it changes and saves. The doctors you help train and teach. The impact I could have, not just on a local level, but on a global scale if I got this.
I think about that woman and her child. The way she was pleading with her husband to let them go in and get the child help. The fear crippling him at the idea of them being deported and forced to leave their child if the hospital called it in. I wanted to help them. I wanted to save them.
It would be the experience of a lifetime just as Will said. But it’s so much more than that for me. How do you turn something like that down? You don’t according to Landon and he’s right. You don’t. But then I think of my mom, and I think about Raven and…
“Luca?” Raven’s sexy rasp rings out through my apartment.
“Back here,” I reply because I’ve been in bed staring up at the ceiling, waiting on her while my thoughts tumble me about like a boat in hurricane waters.
“Hey,” she says, her voice softer. “Did I wake you?”
“No.”
I hear her moving about my dark bedroom.
The blanket on the other side of the bed is peeled back and then her body is beside mine.
Warm. Soft. Smelling incredible. She’s not naked and I’m glad.
I wanted her up here with me tonight. I wanted to sleep holding her.
I don’t want everything with us to be sex, which might sound ridiculous to say and even think, but it’s true.
I want her for so much more than that.
“You okay?” she asks, her head hitting my chest, her ear against my racing heart.
“I don’t know.” I should tell her about this.
About the grant. But chances are I won’t get it and what’s the point of upsetting her needlessly?
We’re so new and she’ll lose faith and trust in me in a nanosecond.
Thinking I’m racing off to leave her again.
I can’t do it. I can’t tell her. I blow out a breath.
“Is it about your mom?”
“Partially?”
“Is it about me?”
Partially . “No.”
I kiss the top of her head because I don’t like doing this to her. I’m not a dark person, but when darkness creeps in on me, it comes fast, and it comes hard, and it’s a sticky fucker. She knows this about me better than most.
“Is this about those pictures with you and Pricilla?”
A mirthless chuckle rumbles through my lips. “No. It’s definitely not about that.”
But…
I roll on my side, shifting her so we’re face to face on my pillows. It’s pretty dark in here, but I can still make out the outline of her face. See some of the sparkle of her eyes as they catch on whatever lighting is here.
“Did they bother you? I’m sorry. I should have mentioned it earlier, but my head wasn’t on her or that at all. She was at the charity thing talking with me and she likes to touch. Likely because she knows cameras are there. I removed her hand from me the following second. I swear I did.”
“Luca—”
“No. Let me finish because I don’t even know if this is out yet, but I gave her a lift home.
She lives here in the building as you know, and she asked for a ride, so she didn’t have to Uber alone.
Carter, Kaplan, and I took a limo, so they saw us pull up in front together.
They took pictures, Raven. Almost as if they were waiting for us. ”
“I know.”
“I didn’t touch her.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
She laughs, reaching out and cupping my jaw. “Where did you go when you came into the building?”
“I got on the elevator with her, and I punched in your floor while she went up to hers.”
“And after that?”
“Here.”
“And do you have Pricilla hiding in your closet or bathroom?”
“Huh? What? No.”
“Luca, relax. You’re all wound up. I know you’re not doing anything with her. You’ve never so much as looked at another woman when we’ve been together. Even back then. I never once was worried that you’d cheat on me.”
I sag, releasing a breath I didn’t realize I was holding. “I don’t look at other women, Raven, because as far as I’m concerned there are no others.”
“I will be honest. I never imagined I’d be able to trust you again, but these past few weeks you’ve done more than just tell me that I can. You’ve showed me. I trust you, Luca. And I want to do this with you.”
My forehead presses to hers, my lips next. “Can I tell the world you’re mine?”
“Not quite yet if that’s okay. It’s not you.
I just don’t particularly want what happened with Amelia to happen to me.
You, Oliver, and Kaplan have always been the media’s darlings.
Landon they left alone—at least when it comes to his dating life—and Carter is a grizzly with them and until Grace, very uninteresting with his dating life. ”
“That’s because he always brought his dates to his place. Never out.”
“Well, the media, this town, likely even the world are obsessed with you. You saw Quill tonight and she’s my friend, married, and harmless.”
“Eventually, people will see us together and I’m going to want to tell them you’re mine.”
Her fingers coast through my hair until they reach the back of my head where she holds me against her. “I know. Just not yet. We have to get through my dad and your parents first.”
* * *
“Did you tell them we’re a thing?” I ask Raven, speaking into my car’s Bluetooth as I sit in Tuesday night rush hour traffic heading out to the compound.
Her husky laugh comes through the phone that instantly has my cock jerking in my pants.
The woman isn’t even in the car with me and we’re not talking sexy, yet the sound of her laugh gets my dick hard.
One day my dick will write a tell-all memoir about my obsession with Raven Fairchild and title it Fucked From The Start .
“I didn’t have to. Evidently, some cocky asshole took it upon himself to do that for me.”
I smirk. “I told them Sunday night that I had other plans, but I believe it’s fairly obvious at this point that the only thing that can drag me away from Sunday dinner with my family is you.”
She puffs. “My dad called me this morning.”
“And?”
“And the two of you need to stop having early morning tea chats on the phone.”
I chuckle, running a hand through my hair as I inch along I-90. “It’s not every day.”
“Luca!”
“Your dad is easily the coolest guy I’ve ever known. And if you ply him with enough caffeine, he tells you stories. Raven, did you know your father jumped out of an aircraft into Iraq during Desert Storm and rescued ten American POWs and there was nothing reported about it in the press?”
“Yes. Did you know Jerome was one of those men he rescued?”
“Jerome, Jerome? As in my mother’s security detail?”
“One and the same.”
I lean back against my leather seat, floored.
“My father doesn’t mess around with your family, Luca. He hires the absolute best and only people he trusts with his life. Do you know how many threats your family had against them last year alone?”
I glare at the screen of my car as if Raven’s face is there and I can give her my WTF look. “Um. No.”
She laughs. “Sixty-four.”
“The fuck?!”
“You’re a family of famous billionaires.
Women have broken into Kaplan’s apartment.
Oliver’s ex stalked him and Amelia all over town before threatening them.
Grace’s ex is a douchebag. Rina was kidnapped and held against her will in a junk house in Harlem.
Landon’s family was harassed morning, noon, and night after Reese died and we’re not even talking about what Elle’s family just put them through.
You have paparazzi following your every move. How are you surprised by this?”
I stare out the windshield, dumbstruck. “I… I don’t know.
I never assumed it was like that.” That’s obviously naive of me.
We just do our thing and live our lives and clearly that’s because of our security team and men like Morgan Fairchild, former MI6, and his group of “don’t fuck with us or we’ll fuck you up” people.
“Well, now you know.”
“Shit. I owe your father a cup of tea in person. If I send him some Earl Grey from England, do you think he’ll like me more?”
“Can’t hurt,” she replies, and I hear noise in the background. Voices.
“You just getting in?”
“I sure am.”
After what she just told me, that has me breathing a sigh of relief. Because if we’re getting threats like this and someone finds out she’s mine… Now I know why she wanted to wait. More than just the press.
At least I know her dad would kill anyone who ever dared to hurt her and no, that’s not an exaggeration.
He’d kill anyone who dared to hurt her. Yeah.
I’m gonna buy the man some English tea. I’m all gangbusters on that trip until I hear a thick Italian accent come through the phone.
Louder and likely closer than the fucktwat should be.
“That sounds perfect. Yes. Thank you, Antonio, I’d love that.”
“And what exactly would you love Antonio to do that sounds perfect?”
She laughs. The woman laughs at my angst.
“Work on my solos tonight.”
“Alone?” I practically spit across my windshield.
“Yes, Luca. Alone. I’m the only cello with a solo. But he knows about you and it’s not like that. Just as I knew those pictures of you with Pricilla weren’t anything, this isn’t either.”
Fuck. This means she’s telling me I have to trust her. And I do. It’s him I don’t.
“Fine.”