16. Alex
Alex
Iwake beneath a curtain of brown hair with my face pressed against Belle’s back and one arm trapped under her.
For several seconds, I have no idea where the rest of me ends.
One leg is hooked over hers. My chest is sprawled across half her back, and at some point during the few hours we actually slept, I apparently decided she was a mattress.
Belle has migrated toward the middle of the bed beneath me without waking.
I lift my head.
Nothing.
Not even a twitch.
Jesus.
I ease some of my weight off her and study the side of her face pressed into the pillow. Her mouth is slightly open. One hand is curled near her cheek. Her hair has dried in a wayward cloud around her shoulders after the shower we interrupted several times last night.
I lie there a moment longer than I should, watching her breathe.
I have no idea how she is sleeping this deeply with me crushing her.
Then again, I barely let her sleep.
Or maybe it was the other way around.
The memory sends blood directly south.
I close my eyes.
Absolutely not.
Belle makes a soft sound and shifts beneath me.
Every sensible intention I possess leaves the room.
I want to wake her up .
I want to put my mouth against her ear, tell her to open those hazel eyes and demand that she do everything she did to me last night all over again.
I need her greedy.
Laughing.
Breathless.
Bossing me around because apparently my haircut has become a personal grievance.
Getting out of this bed is the single worst decision I’ll make all day, and I already know I’m going to make it anyway.
Everything in me is pulling in the other direction.
My hand is already moving toward her shoulder before I stop it, the memory of waking her twice last night, mouth first, no warning, her voice going rough before she was even fully conscious.
I could spend the entire day exactly like this, learning her slower, without the excuse of urgency driving every single thing we do to each other.
I do not think I can ever get enough of her. That realization should frighten me more than it does. Ten years without Belle, and I thought I had survived them.
Looking at her now, I am beginning to understand that survival might be too generous a word.
I functioned.
I worked.
I built things.
Bought things.
Destroyed competitors.
Took women to bed when loneliness became irritating enough that I wanted to prove to myself there were other bodies in the world. I tried to fuck my way out of remembering her.
It worked about as well as drinking seawater for thirst.
For a few hours there was distraction, and afterward I was emptier than before. I was never unfaithful to Belle in any real sense. She was gone. I believed she had chosen to leave me.
But some part of me still registered every woman afterward as wrong. Eventually, I stopped letting them stay.
Now that I have the real thing beneath me, warm and exhausted and wearing half the evidence of last night across her skin, I cannot understand how I spent ten years pretending substitutes were enough.
If I have to live without her again?—
I stop the thought.
If I have to go back to that, if there’s a version of this where I lose her again and have to build myself back into someone who functions without her in it, I don’t know that I come out the other side of it a second time.
No.
I am done preparing for that outcome as though it is inevitable.
I need to talk to her.
About Mark.
About everything Frank has found.
And the fact that each answer makes her look less guilty and me more like a bastard who spent months punishing a terrified twenty-year-old for surviving whatever Mark dragged into their lives.
About us.
Mostly us.
I need to know whether she wants a future with me when we are not hiding inside bedrooms and calling it a truce.
And if she does, I need to work out what that future looks like. The board can take the company. Edward can choke on the paperwork. I can build another company if I decide I want one. I cannot build another Belle.
She shifts again.
I look down at her.
Not yet.
She’s asleep the way she doesn’t let herself be very often, unguarded, and after the night I put her through, she’s earned every second of it. She needs to rest. I’m not the one who gets to take that from her because I couldn’t wait one more day to say something I’ve been carrying for a decade.
I manage to extract my arm without waking her and sit on the edge of the mattress.
Leaving the bed feels physically wrong.
I shower quickly, shave, dress and move half the day around in my head while I knot my tie.
If Christopher takes the vendor call and moves the internal review, I can cut the morning down considerably.
Spencer can handle legal without me hovering over him.
Danny is still technically in New York, so he cannot cover the in-person meetings unless he has discovered teleportation.
But there is no reason Christopher cannot sit in on two of them.
If I skip breakfast and lunch both, I could make it back before two.
Lunch with Belle.
The thought has me looking toward the bed again.
She has rolled into my side now. My lips curve at the sight of how adorable she looks. Her face is half-buried in my pillow.
I walk over before I can talk myself out of it.
Just one kiss.
I bend and press my mouth into her hair. Belle stirs beneath me, enough to make me straighten, but she does not wake. The scent of her follows me when I pull back, vanilla, shampoo, the warmth of her skin.
Fuck.
I bend again and kiss her forehead.
This time my mouth lingers.
I am seriously considering pushing the entire day to tomorrow and getting back into that bed when the intercom shrills through the apartment.
I freeze.
Belle jerks awake behind me.
“What—”
“Shh.” I sit on the edge of the bed and smooth a hand over her hair. “Go back to sleep. I’ll deal with it.”
Her eyes blink open. Gold catches in the hazel as she tries to focus.
She squints at me, taking in the shirt, the cufflinks, all of it. “Going to work? So soon?”
I almost laugh. “Belle, it’s ten in the morning.”
“What?” She sits upright so quickly the sheet falls to her waist. “It’s what?”
Whatever I was thinking about a second ago disappears. Even words desert me.
Belle follows my stare downward.
Her eyes widen.
“Oh my God. I’m naked.”
“Yes.”
“Stop looking.”
“That seems unreasonable after last night.”
“Alex.”
She snatches the sheet to her chest and looks wildly around the room.
The intercom sounds again.
I frown toward the hall.
There are no deliveries scheduled that I know of, and the concierge does not send anyone up without clearance.
For one irrational second, I wonder if Luis has returned.
Now that his legal problems are resolved and he has apparently quit his residency, he probably has endless free time available to continue his doomed campaign of hovering around Belle.
The thought irritates me less than it once did.
Belle does not want him.
Never did.
I know that now.
The satisfaction I get from that fact is unreasonable, complete, and probably more than I deserve after the way I have lived these past ten years.
I take it anyway.
A low mechanical hum reaches us. The private elevator. My attention snaps toward the bedroom door.
Whoever is downstairs has already gotten through the concierge. More importantly, someone has activated an elevator that is supposed to respond only to authorized credentials.
Belle hears it too.
“Are you expecting someone?”
“No.”
She looks down at herself again.
“Shit.”
Her clothes are nowhere to be found, but my shirt is on the floor beside the bed.
Belle lunges for it. “Oh my God.” She’s a blur of motion, snatching my discarded shirt off the floor and hauling it over her head, and the elevator doors are already sliding open by the time she gets the last button through the hole.
My shirt drops to the middle of her thighs. Her hair is a disaster. Her legs are bare. There is a faint mark above one knee and another near her collarbone that my shirt does absolutely nothing to conceal.
I should probably feel guilty.
I do not.
“Emma!”
A woman’s voice sings through my penthouse.
“Oh no,” Belle stops dead. Her eyes become enormous and round with something close to panic.
I know that voice.
I walk out of the bedroom.
Sofia Moralez comes through my entrance carrying enough bags to suggest she has either moved in or robbed an airport.
Danny follows her.
He sees me.
I look at him.
His expression is almost apologetic.
Almost.
“Hey, Number One.” Sofia beams at me as if this is a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.
Sofia adjusts the collection of bags hanging from both arms.
I ignore her and look at my brother for an explanation. He looks at the ceiling.
Don’t ask, he mouths.
Excellent.
“Where is she?” Sofia asks.
She drops two bags on the nearest chair and starts opening doors.
“Emma?”
The guest bath.
“Emma?”
My office.
“Emma?”
The coat closet.
I stare at Danny.
“She hasn’t met a boundary she respects, has she?”
“No.”
Bee comes tearing around the corner.
She sees Sofia.
Bee launches herself at Sofia’s ankles, yowling loud enough to lodge a formal complaint. Then unleashes a series of meows so dramatic that apparently the past several days have been a sustained humanitarian crisis.
“Hi, baby. Hi. Who’s a good girl who missed her Auntie Sofia?”
Sofia drops directly to the floor.
Thank God.
At least cuddling the cat stops her from conducting a warrantless search of my home.
Bee climbs into her lap and begins complaining at full volume.
“Yes, I know.” Sofia presses kisses over the top of her head. “They neglected you. I can tell.”
“They did not neglect her.”
Sofia looks up at me. “She says otherwise.”
“The cat lies.”
“She would never.”