Chapter 20
20
When envoys are sent with compliments in their mouths, it is a sign that the enemy wishes for a truce.
THE ART OF WAR , SUN TZU
Bella opened her eyes to the sight of the empty bed beside her. Her heart jerked, the level of hurt near shocking, and warning enough. He’d left?
‘You shouldn’t think so hard so early in the morning.’
Chase’s voice startled her, making her jump and then laugh, and she tried to hide her foolishness by squashing her face into the pillow.
He was still here.
She peeked out at him from the pillow to find him smiling at her. He was holding a cup of coffee and there was a room service tray in the corner of the room.
‘You’re a feeder,’ she complained as her stomach rejoiced.
‘We didn’t get much at the dinner last?—’
Bella’s gasp of horror cut him off.
The dinner! Oh God, she’d completely forgotten!
They’d left early. The whole point of the event had been about redeeming Chase’s reputation and ensuring the gallery was back on track and instead, they’d left before the end.
Her hand flew to her head, her thoughts so frantic they were giving her a temperature. It was another mess she was going to have fix. She needed to call the PR firm and?—
‘You’re doing it again,’ Chase chided. ‘I told the Harrisons that it was a family emergency.’
‘You can’t do that,’ Bella cried.
‘Well, I did , so it’s done,’ he said with a shrug.
‘You can’t lie about things like that.’ She wanted to throw the pillow at him where he stood looking far too good, the shirt from last night open mid-way down and half-tucked into the formal trousers.
So, it hadn’t been an aberration. Just looking at him made her entire body hum, expectant shivers pushing at her skin and wanting more.
‘It’s fine. When I called them this morning, they said they’d raised a record amount of money and they were extremely thankful for the Nayak’s donation – which we will talk about tomorrow,’ he said, with a warning point of his finger. She bit her lip. ‘But apparently it was an extremely popular donation,’ he conceded.
They hadn’t messed up, no one was upset, she didn’t have to fix anything. In fact, Chase had handled it for her. He hadn’t waited for her to fix it, or solve it; he’d done it himself. And God that made her feel…
Her phone buzzed somewhere in the room, but she ignored it. So did Chase.
It made her feel things .
‘Last night,’ she started, her throat rough from the pleasure he’d made her moan with. Just the thought made her skin flush. ‘Last night you gave me a choice,’ she tried again, forcing the words out.
His eyes, hot and heavy on hers, grew serious, and he nodded slowly.
‘And’ – she shrugged, not quite sure how to say it – ‘if you want to just leave it here…’ She trailed off. She didn’t know what to say, what the correct words were to ask whether this was a fling or something more. Good girls didn’t have flings. But Bella wasn’t a good girl any more.
When she looked up, Chase shook his head, slowly, something determined in his gaze.
She bit her lip, hoping to hold back the smile. ‘You don’t want to just leave it here?’
‘Nope.’
She swallowed.
‘You?’ he asked, and she shook her head, quicker than he had. People had always wanted her poise and grace. Chase seemed determined to make her messy and chaotic.
‘But,’ she said, thinking about the next few weeks, ‘I’d rather not tell the staff. At least, not until the gallery is open,’ she said, cutting off her thoughts. Not wanting to think about what would happen after the gallery was opened.
‘Agreed,’ Chase said, finally releasing himself from where he stood, putting the coffee down on the table and stalking towards her with a wicked glint in his eye.
‘Do you want to know what else I did this morning, while you were sleeping?’ he asked, slowly unbuttoning his shirt.
She bit her lip and nodded her head.
‘I bought some more condoms,’ and she squealed as he came down on her and covered her with kisses that started out as teasing and silly, but quickly grew hot and needy and perfect .
* * *
Astrid
I don’t need to know the details, love, but I do need to know that you’re okay. That’s all. Promise. Xx
Bella
I’m okay. Promise. Xx
The dinner had, despite her concerns, indeed been a success, Nayak New York getting good mentions in the press from the Harrisons and attendees of the dinner who had seen Chase and Bella.
Maurice was happy with the newfound confidence for the gallery and now that pieces were coming in thick and fast, Ye-Joon was spending more time here, making Ali happier too.
The website had gone live and the sign-up rate for the newsletter was higher than had been predicted, and the guest list for the pre-opening night was already nearly full, which would hopefully push some over into the actual opening, scheduled for two days after.
Tej had opened his little black book for Bella and she had rifled through it, making a careful selection of who she could invite. She’d thought about asking Astrid about Blake and Aiden, for a hot second. The ‘Twin Tornados’, America’s ice-hockey giants, would attract an entirely new audience to the gallery. But then realised she couldn’t. Because if Chase ever knew about her friendship with Astrid, or the revenge plan, he’d never forgive her. So for however long this thing ran between them, it had to be a secret.
And not just from Chase.
Although Astrid knew – or at least, suspected – Bella hadn’t told the other girls yet and… and she was going to keep it that way too, she’d decided. Bad Bella ignored the unease Good Bella would have felt about it. Because being good had got her dumped and being bad apparently got her some incredibly good sex and Bad Bella was not complaining.
But deep down, she wrestled with it. She had come to terms with Paige and Olly because they had fallen in love with each other. But was it better or worse that she and Chase weren’t in love? Because she couldn’t be in love with Chase. And he certainly wasn’t in love with her.
But the girls had been so worried about her when it had come to Olly and Paige, and now Bella had gone and done the same thing to Astrid. Only it wasn’t the same thing… and then Bella was back in the same circle of thoughts as she had been over the last few days, which made her just want to bury her head in the sand.
And for the first time in her life, she did. She stopped returning calls, saying that she was just busy in the run up to pre-opening and opening. And she was. It wasn’t a lie. But it wasn’t the truth either. Because when she wasn’t working…
Chase walked past the office and she couldn’t help but track him with her eyes. He was dumping another coffee in the kitchen, because he was still finding salt sachets in his sugar and she hadn’t swapped them out yet. She found herself smiling, until she felt Maurice’s gaze on her. She cleared her throat and returned to the report she’d been working on.
* * *
Chase ended the call with Sascha, surprised as well as relieved that she’d been able to finish the collection so soon. He promised to visit the studio tomorrow, but the list of things he had to do before the pre-opening and opening were growing and he couldn’t help but be frustrated by it. His hope to feel a sense of excitement or accomplishment as they neared the opening were beginning to fade. But Chase didn’t exactly have another option at this point and besides, pushing ahead with the gallery still felt a million times better than just the thought of his own art again.
‘It’s okay to grieve it, ’ Tej had told him at the very beginning. But Chase had shoved those words away. Because if he grieved, it meant he’d lost it. And he refused to even consider that. If he didn’t grieve, it wasn’t gone. He could always go back to it. But the further and further he got from his last painting, the more fear, the more anxiety, the more pain built up to a point so overwhelming, he could hardly breathe.
It wasn’t even about being a success. He’d set fire to all the money in his bank account if he could paint again. Hell, he’d go work in an office for the tax man, if it meant he could pick up a brush again.
He checked his watch. Just after five-thirty, and Bella wasn’t at her desk. They’d all started working late in the run up to opening. There was a sense of urgency, not panicked or rushed, but focused and driven. It was good to see what they were all accomplishing together, but a part of him felt separate from it. As if they’d have been perfectly capable of doing it without him.
He gave one last glance at the email he’d received that afternoon from Zadzisai’s agent who’d apparently had a change of heart and now wanted to headline the opening. He wasn’t ready to sort through his feelings about it yet, so he locked his computer and got up, stretching his arms above his head, cricking his neck, and surreptitiously trying to see if Bella was still in the office.
Ever since the gala dinner, they’d hardly been able to keep their hands off each other. Surely he should have got used to her by now. Surely at least familiarity should have made him less… hungry .
Christ , just the thought of it had him achingly hard. He grimaced, adjusting his trousers and left his office. He wanted to check on the latest layout they’d been testing around the life-sized photographs they had of Sascha’s work.
They’d been experimenting with a series of moveable walls that would create separate areas for different pieces. One was almost entirely enclosed where Chase was considering either the quadriptych from Lit Lake or the instillation from Itashi.
He found Bella in the far corner, her gaze flitting between one of the pieces from Lake and the enlarged photo of Sascha’s piece pinned up against the wall next to it.
Her hair was down, partly because every time she tried to put it up, he’d find a way to pull it loose again when no one was watching. She was wearing those jeans again, the ones that hugged her ass and made him damn near feral, but the open-knit cardigan she wore looked soft and innocent in a way that made him want to peek beneath it.
He came to stand behind her, aware that the rest of the staff were still upstairs for now, if not for much longer. She behaved as if she hadn’t noticed him, but peering over her shoulder where she had nestled her tablet to take notes from, he could see the way her skin pebbled. Goosebumps that trickled across his own arms.
Then he saw her notes.
‘You want to move it?’ he asked a little surprised.
She craned her neck to look back at him. ‘I’m not sure. But there’s something about it that’s bothering me and I can’t quite figure out what it is.’
He stared at the positioning of the pieces, trying to see what she saw, but couldn’t. He liked the pieces where they were.
She smiled, and rolled her eyes as if sensing that he was about to dig his heels in. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to argue about it. Not yet anyway,’ she warned.
And he was pleased. Because he liked arguing with her. It was a mental exercise that pushed and pulled and when it spilled over into their bed, it usually became something glorious.
With one ear on the staff upstairs, he dropped his mouth to the crook of her neck, pressing kisses against the flesh exposed by the loose neck of her cardigan.
Bella gasped, and he felt it shoot through him.
‘Chase.’ His name on her lips was half warning, half plea and it was like a red flag to a bull. Unable to stop himself, he wrapped his hands around her, drawing her back against his chest, hands slipping beneath the knit and meeting smooth cool skin.
Nought to sixty, every time he got his hands on her. That’s what it was like. The rush, that same heady feeling when he lost himself to a painting and looked back to see what he’d discovered. She was like that. A fresh painting, a surprise discovery, every single time.
She unfurled against his body, and he thrust one hand between her legs, and the sound she made was near indecent. Christ, he could barely contain himself. It didn’t seem to matter how much he got of her, he still wanted more.
He drew her backwards, slipping behind the screen wall set up in the corner of the gallery, turned her in his arms and claimed her mouth like a starving man. His tongue thrust boldly and she welcomed every bit of it, of him . Her fingers fisted his hair and he relished the difference between the near-glacial poise she maintained at work, and the incendiary wildness she met him with out of it.
He pulled down her cardigan and bra and took her breast into his mouth, knowing that he should stop, knowing that they could be caught any minute. She moaned and he quickly clamped a hand over her mouth, without stopping. He teased her nipple with his tongue and palmed her breast with his hand and she was like fire twisting in his hold. He felt her press against the hand that covered her mouth, but not trying to escape, and the tug of desire that passed through his body tightened his skin and heightened his senses.
‘Is anyone here?’ they both heard Maurice call out.
Chase’s gaze flew to Bella’s, her eyes wide with panic, her body trembling beneath his touch.
‘They must have left,’ Ali responded from the other side of the screen wall and a streak of wicked heat shot right through him.
Bella’s breast still exposed, he blew across the skin, slick from his tongue. She shivered, her eyes fluttering, her body unfurling once again. Her eyes flared like sparklers, and she shook her head in warning, but it was too late. The idea had already taken hold and Chase was helpless to stop it. With one had still over her mouth, he used the other to flick the top button of her jeans and draw the zip down, his fingers slipping into her panties and into the cross-hatch of curls between her legs.
‘Chase usually says goodbye,’ Maurice said, confusion clear in his tone.
He circled her clit once, marvelling at how wet and ready she was. Bella pressed against his hand again, shifting as if unsure whether to pull away or to open for him, but he’d learned to read her body in the last few days, the flicker of her pulse, the near plea in her storm-grey eyes; she wanted this as much as he did.
He bent his head to her ear and whispered, ‘Tell me to stop.’
‘Maybe they had an off-site meeting,’ Ali mused.
And after what felt like an eternity, she shook her head. She didn’t want to him stop. Thank God . He thrust two fingers into her wet heat and she rolled her head back against the wall, whimpering against his hand, her nipple taut and pink, enough to tempt him to take it into his mouth. He crooked his fingers as he thumbed her clit and drew on her nipple and she nearly collapsed beneath him.
‘That must be it,’ Maurice said uncertainly. But their steps retreated, the lights flickered off before the door closed and the lock turned firmly.
The gallery was cast in shadows, lit vaguely by the lights out on the street, but the darkness hid them from the view of any passerby. Bella let out a shuddered breath that was half laugh, half relief and Chase smiled, before crooking his fingers and watching her entire body respond. She was so physical like this – so restrained during the day and he wondered what it had cost her to do that. To separate the two so powerful parts of her so distinctly.
‘Condom,’ she whispered to him and he laughed.
‘You’ve got a one-track mind, Carmichael, and I like it,’ he whispered back, reaching into his pocket.
Bella shimmied out of her jeans as Chase rolled the condom over his length. They came back together in a clash of tongues that teased and teeth that nipped and hands that grasped. He lifted her up and wrapped her legs around his waist as he pressed her carefully back against the wall. And when he positioned himself at her entrance, she rolled her hips and he buried himself deep. His curse melded with her moan and they ceased being separate. Together, they moved, the pleasure just as shocking, just as new as it had been that first time.
She rolled her hips and he flexed deep within her and when he ground into her, and reached that spot that no one had ever found, together they were thrust into a starburst so bright it blinded them both.