Chapter 26 #2
Maybe he was right, I found myself thinking as Mac drove us back to the townhouse.
By the time we hit the Charlestown Bridge, the void had opened again, and I was struggling to find reasons to keep my promises to Laney.
By the time we reached the house, I would have sold my soul for a drink, a pill, fucking anything to chase this emptiness away.
Let your woman take care of you.
The crazy thing was, she probably would if I asked her.
Laney Fisher wasn’t a pushover by any means.
I didn’t think she was the “please my liege and husband” type either.
But she was the kind of woman who stepped up for people she cared about, whether it was in running a business for a dead woman, pretending to be all right with a father who had all but abandoned her, or being at the beck and call of her Bridezilla of a best friend.
But the fuck if I would take that from her. The fuck if I was going to use her, empty her out the way the others in her life seemed to do, take the goodness she had to offer only to sate my shitty black soul.
I was a bad man. Maybe one of the worst.
But I couldn’t do that.
Unfortunately, I really, really fucking wanted to. Wanted to bury my face between her legs and sink into her so deep she screamed. I wanted to do all sorts of shockingly dirty things to her until we both forgot our names until morning.
That was, as they say, the rub.
“You’ll be all right?” Mac walked me to the front door, checking, as he always did, for interlopers.
I was too tired to argue with him. “No. But I’ll manage.”
“Will she?”
There was that fucking honesty again.
I pressed my forehead against the door, like somehow I could channel whatever state Laney was in without actually seeing her.
Was she angry that I was home so late? Was she ambivalent about whether I showed up at all?
Was she already regretting this marriage within the first forty-eight hours of arrival?
“I don’t want to hurt her, Mac,” I mumbled into the lacquered wood.
The big man didn’t say anything. It was like he knew I needed the time to process such a foreign emotion.
I pressed my thumb to the lock and listened as the mechanism went to work. A few seconds later, the door opened.
“I’ll see you in the morning.” God. I had to do this whole day over again, didn’t I?
“Take your time, Ronan. I’ll be waiting for your call.”
I shut the door behind me. The house was dark and quiet. Maybe even too quiet.
“Laney?” I called out.
When there was no answer, I checked my watch. It wasn’t that late—not quite eleven-thirty. Maybe she was asleep, probably back in the guestroom where she belonged.
Or maybe she’s out, another voice told me, one that sounded absurdly like me when I was giving my brothers as much shit as possible.
Maybe she realized you’re a piece of shit and she can do better.
Maybe she left completely, and when you go upstairs, you’re going to realize that your house is as empty as your conscience.
“Fuck you,” I said to no one in particular. Or, really, to myself.
I was losing the goddamn plot. I needed a drink, a shower, and a reasonable night of sleep, in that order. But since I still somehow couldn’t make myself go for the bottle that was beckoning from the drink cart, I headed up the stairs for the second item on the agenda.
Everything would be better after a shower. Definitely a cold one. My balls needed it bad.
Like a bull headed single-mindedly for the flag, I shed my clothing without thinking about what I was doing.
Kicked my shoes off at the door. Abandoned my gym bag, with the crumpled suit, near the kitchen.
Lost my jacket on the landing, and by the time I got to the bedroom, which was as dark as the rest of the house and just as empty, I was in nothing but my underwear.
So, I was right. She was gone, or in the guestroom, likely having realized that this marriage—and I—were bullshit.
Well, good for her.
Didn’t stop me from thinking about her naked, though. In fact, it possibly made it worse.
After kicking off my boxers, I headed for the bathroom, eager to rub one (or five) out, then jump into the shower to dampen the fire the thought of Delaney Fisher seemed to ignite.
Christ, if this was what love did to a man—
Wait, what?
I froze at the door.
Love?
No.
Not possible. Not after so little time, and certainly not for me. Not ever.
Right?
I pushed the door open, hand on my cock.
“Ronan?”
“Who—ha!” I jumped at the sound of a very familiar, very female voice coming from across the small room.
“Ronan!” Laney shouted. “Oh my God, cover your eyes!”
Obediently, I smacked a hand over my eyes. “Okay, fine. Not looking. But… why, exactly, am I not looking?”
“Because I’m in the bath, you idiot!”
I frowned. “Well, now I have to look.”
I peered through my fingers and discovered my wife was, in fact, in my tub. The giant clawfoot tub I never used because what kind of adult man (who was completely secure with his masculinity, by the way) took bubble baths all by his lonesome?
She was also naked. Covered in a thin layer of bubbles, yes, but still obviously in her birthday suit. And holding a book.
Which she promptly threw when I dropped my hand completely.
“Ow!” I caught the book, but not before the sharp edges hit me in the gut. “What the hell is The Rake and the Romantic? It’s not one of mine.”
“I found it at a bookshop today. Now can you give me some privacy, please?”
“‘A scandal-plagued lord proposes a marriage of convenience to save his inheritance to a starry-eyed bluestocking who quotes poetry and Latin—” I looked back at her with a grin. “Baby, if you want role play, you just have to ask. I can do a killer British accent, you know.”
“Ronan! Get out!”
Yeah, that wasn’t happening. Because Laney had just shaken off approximately three quarters of the bubbles that were previously covering her breasts, and that was when I realized it had been twenty-three days, eleven hours, and fourteen minutes since the last time I had seen Laney Fisher naked in the light—in other words, not since morning after we got married.
We’d fumbled through the darkness in her room the night of Megan’s wedding, and last night, of course, had happened in complete darkness. Both times, I’d been too busy pretending to be a gentleman to sneak another look in the morning (a fact I was now regretting).
Now she was all but presented to me like a teenage wet dream, bubbles barely clinging to those petite curves, skin dewy with moisture and sweat, color high, eyes blazing, nipples teasing through the soapy film.
If I squinted, I was pretty sure I could make out the shadow of her snatch under the water…
Fuuuuck me.
“Ronan!”
I jerked. “What?”
Her eyes flickered down, then away while a deep flush swept up her neck.
I looked down. Oh, yeah, that wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. “What do you want me to do about it? I mean, look at you.”
“I really would rather you stopped.” She looked around, probably for something else to throw, before folding her arms over her breasts. That covered her nipples completely again, which was unfortunate, but also made her cleavage that much more pronounced, which I appreciated quite a bit.
I also appreciated the fact that she couldn’t stop glancing back at the evidence of that appreciation.
I smirked. “Hmm. Yeah. I don’t think so. Besides, I’m the one that’s really on display right now, so maybe you’re the one that should stop looking at me.”
“I’m not!” She was now staring up at the ceiling, a fact I conveniently ignored.
“How do we keep ending up naked in bathrooms together, anyway?” I wondered. “Do you have some kind of Greek nymph magic that makes me strip down every time I’m around you?”
“No.” Her voice was starting to crack. “Ronan, seriously. Can you please just leave?”
By now, she was looking at me like I was genuinely crazy. And maybe I was, since I was very much not listening to any of her perfectly reasonable requests.
“Leave?” I repeated, suddenly feeling philosophical about it, giant erection or not.
“Why? We’re married. And this is my house.
My bathroom. And for fuck’s sake, sweetheart, I’ve seen you naked.
Plus, you’ve been looking at my dick like a lollipop since I walked in here, and then there’s the fact that you rode my hand like a hobby horse last night, so honestly, what’s the—”
“RONAN, JUST GET OUT OF THE FUCKING BATHROOM SO I CAN GET DRESSED!” Laney shrieked at what had to be the top of her lungs. There was no way the entirety of Charlestown hadn’t heard her, much less my neighbors.
I blinked like I’d just been slapped.
Fuck. What was I doing?
“Right.” I grabbed a towel to wrap around my waist, backed out of the bathroom, feeling something brand new. Something I suspected was probably shame.
I didn’t like it.
Even if I did enjoy the image that would be seared into my brain until my dying day. Honestly, if Laney’s delectable body covered in bubbles was the last thing I ever saw, I’d die a happy man.
As I closed the door, my heart pounding, another thing occurred to me:
Just a few seconds with Laney Fisher, naked or not, had done more for my state of mind than any drink, pill, or fight ever could.
I shoved on a pair of pajama pants and went downstairs, where I stewed on that fact in the living room until she appeared about ten minutes later.
She had also gotten out in a hurry and hadn’t bothered to do anything more than wrap a towel around her hair and pull on my white robe. She was more covered up than almost any other time I’d seen her, but somehow she was infinitely more erotic.
A few droplets of water remained on her neck, dripping from a few errant wet strands.
I couldn’t breathe.
“Hey.” Her voice was quiet and a bit hesitant.
I stood. “Hey.”
“Sorry for yelling. I—you just surprised me is all.”
“You surprised me too.”
We stared at each other, suddenly overcome with awkwardness. Which was weird, because I was Ronan Black. I didn’t do awkward.
“I… I wasn’t sure you were coming home,” she said.
Home.
It was the first time she’d referred to my home as hers that way.
I swallowed. “I—yeah. I got busy at work.”
She nodded. “I figured when you didn’t text back.”
Just like that, everything came back to me. The day at work that truly was death by a thousand cuts. The feeling that I was traveling in the completely wrong directly, like a boat lost in a current without a rudder or an oar.
The awful, horrible emptiness that I was starting to realize had plagued me my entire life, but filled in a little bit the moment I saw this woman walking down the Las Vegas strip like she leaving a trail of crumbs for me to follow out of the heart of darkness and back into the light.
“Laney, I—”
She took a step further into the room, coming close enough that I caught the scent of daphne, remnants of her favorite soap. “Yeah?”
But the words wouldn’t come. Maybe because I didn’t know what I wanted to say.
I’m sorry.
I want you.
I need you.
I might even love you.
What the fuck did those words even mean from someone like me?
I had everything I wanted here in this house. The woman of my dreams (literally). Every book I’d ever want to read. Money and privacy and anything else I could ever ask for would arrive with a simple phone call.
And yet, there were still too many secrets between us, too many things she didn’t know, too much to the point where even if she said, as she already had, that she actually wanted to be my wife, wanted to be here, wanted me for me, she still wouldn’t know what she was getting into. And that was all my fault.
I swallowed thickly, feeling like I was going to choke on the final epiphany of the night.
It didn’t matter what house I was in. Whether it was in Vegas or Seattle or Boston or Kathmandu. Home wasn’t a place for me anymore. It was wherever Laney Fisher was, and no amount of jokes or drugs or drink or fights was going to change that.
That was when I grabbed her arms, yanked her to me, and kissed her with everything I had.
Not because I wanted to.
Because I had to.
And she was just going to have to deal with it.