Chapter 6
Grace
Duke strokes a thumb along my forearm resting on top of his.
With my back pressed against his chest, I can feel the rise and fall of his steady breaths.
I’ve been sitting between his legs for almost two hours now, and other than reaching across the bed for popcorn, we haven’t moved. He’s gone very quiet.
I pull his arms to tighten our embrace. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re enjoying this movie.”
“Shush,” he says, grabbing a few pieces of popcorn and feeding them to me.
It keeps me quiet and I let him watch the ending without interruption. Right up to the moment the boy gets the girl.
“Your verdict?” I ask, tilting my head to him after he switches off the TV.
“Not my usual kind of movie.”
“That’s what you get for letting me choose.”
Duke had pampered me thoroughly in the shower this morning before spending the next few hours getting me messy again – also thoroughly. He’d made me coffee and we’d had a late breakfast, or was it an early lunch? We’d dozed a little and fucked a little more until he suggested watching a movie.
I suspect it was a ruse to avoid anything close to a serious conversation about… Well, about anything. Duke might have modified the parameters of what was meant to be our one-night stand, but there’s still an expectation that this is a one-off.
Was that why I picked a movie where the couple have their meet-cute then leave it to fate to bring them back together? Of course it was.
Duke kisses my nose and I settle back against his chest. I bite my lip. Do I say it? Should I say it? If not now… “Do you think we’ll ever meet again?”
“We live in different cities.”
He doesn’t say it as a problem to be overcome, but a simple statement of fact. It answers all the questions I’ve been wrestling with while he watched the movie. He doesn’t want a second date. He doesn’t want a long-distance relationship. He doesn’t want more than this. Not with me.
Duke feels me tense and his lips brush my ear. “For me to find you again, I’d have to be looking for you. And I’m not looking for anyone.”
“Wow. Thanks, Duke,” I say. I try to sound flippant, but it’s harder than I’d like. The words scratch my throat when I add. “I’ve never been so flattered.”
I’m shifted forward by the deep inhale expanding Duke’s chest. “I might have mentioned this once or twice already, but you’re a fucking goddess, Grace.
I’m sorry I can’t be what you need, I really am.
More than you could possibly know.” He strokes the side of my head with his nose.
“Do I at least get bonus points for treating you better than your useless ex-husband?”
His attempt to lighten the conversation fails miserably, and my shoulders hunch. However long I’m able to delay it, I will be going home to Cameron. “Technically, he’s not my ex. Yet.”
Duke slides his hand along my jawline, turning my head so he can kiss me before saying, “You don’t need to worry about him. He’s gone.”
I jerk my head back, rocked by shock rather than relief. “What do you mean gone?”
I’d checked my phone earlier and had been pleasantly surprised not to have had a single new message from Cameron, but now I’m picturing Max marching him out of the hotel. Where did they go? What did Max do to him?
A smile tugs at the corners of Duke’s mouth. “Despite appearances, I’m not in the habit of making people disappear if that’s where your mind’s going.”
“I’ll have to take your word for that since you won’t tell me exactly what you do for a living.”
It’s an opening for Duke to explain his role in the Moncrief empire, but he doesn’t take the bait.
“Cameron is alive and well,” he reassures me.
“But he’s been told in no uncertain terms to keep away from you.
The divorce papers you’d left in the kitchen have been signed.
Your house is still your house. And Cameron isn’t going to be there when you get home. ”
My eyes bounce between Duke’s. It takes a moment to process everything he’s just said. I’m finally free. And I get to keep the house. My vision blurs. I should say thank you. I will say thank you, but I’m still in shock. “How do you know the papers were in the kitchen?”
“Max escorted Cameron to your house to help him pack his things and leave. And he made sure your ex-husband didn’t leave before signing them.”
“Max was in my house?”
“Let me do this one thing for you, Angel,” Duke says as he strokes the pad of his thumb across my lips to stop me asking more. “You deserve so much better than that asshole, and I’m sorry he ever made you feel like you don’t.”
I wish I could believe him, but Cameron isn’t the only one making me feel lesser than, and my arched eyebrows must give me away.
“I know you think I’m not much better,” he admits. “But trust me, Grace. You deserve a hell of a lot more than I can give right now.”
I pull his hand away from my mouth. “Right now?” I repeat, grasping that one glimmer of hope. Unlike Duke, I do want to see him again. The longer I stay in his company, the more I dread getting back in that elevator and consigning us to the past.
“Grace…” Duke warns.
“Who knows what the future might bring? Maybe one day the Moncriefs will hire my services and we’ll just bump into each other. My services as an interior designer,” I clarify. “Not an escort.”
Duke chuffs out a laugh. “An interior designer who, if I remember correctly, called this hotel a fuck you to the past. Utterly soulless.”
It’s what I’d told Brooke. Almost word for word. “Did you eavesdrop on all my conversations?”
There isn’t a hint of guilt in those ocean eyes. “Yes.”
“I only said those things to Brooke because she was sore about not getting the contract. I could hardly say the designer had created the perfect balance between tradition and modernity.” I scan the room that’s been my home for almost twenty-four hours.
My gaze snags on the abstract mosaic prints that still manage to reflect the wild landscape of the Scottish Highlands.
Old and new in perfect balance. “I do love all the subtle nods to the Moncrief’s heritage. ”
“Are you admitting you couldn’t have done a better job?”
I shrug. “Possibly. My area of expertise is renovation rather than new builds. I’m more about peeling back the past lives of a building than copying and pasting a sanitized version of history onto a clean sheet.”
He kisses me softly. “The Moncriefs would love you.”
“Of course they would,” I say with a confidence that isn’t deserved given they’ve already rejected a proposal I had a hand in developing. But I can dream. “It’s perfectly possible they’d want to employ me at some point.”
“And the rest we leave to serendipity,” Duke says, returning us full circle to the movie.
It’s my turn to laugh. “That movie really got to you, didn’t it? Is this where I write my address in a book and you scribble your number on a five-dollar bill so we can spend years waiting for fate to bring us back together?”
“I don’t think so,” Duke says as he lifts me effortlessly to one side. He settles next to me so we’re on our sides facing each other. He drags my leg over his hip. “Fate shouldn’t need props.”
I narrow my eyes. “Yeah, not when you have my address apparently.”
“I’m not going to look for you, Grace,” he reminds me. A shadow falls across his face, but with a blink it’s gone. “And besides, that movie was full of flaws.”
“What flaws?” I demand, attempting not to be distracted by the hard steel of his cock against my stomach. Oh, and the hand that trails down my spine, following the crack of my ass to my pussy.
Duke’s fingers tease my entrance, but for now he doesn’t explore deeper. “The main characters spend years apart, building new lives and experiencing new things with other people,” he replies. “There was a good chance they’d never meeting again, but that wasn’t the biggest risk.”
“Then what was?” I say on a gasp as his thumb presses against my clit.
Duke makes me wait for the answer as he leans in for a kiss. He sucks on my lower lip before releasing me. “Let’s say they do meet and have their first kiss, but instead of fireworks, it’s just…” He shrugs. “Meh.”
“Meh?” I repeat, affronted by the suggestion.
“After all that yearning and all those long nights in bed reliving every second they had together… After all of that… You seriously think there wouldn’t be fireworks?
Damn right there wouldn’t be fireworks. There’d be earth-shattering explosions. Trust me.”
I don’t know if my chest is heaving because of the attention Duke is giving my pussy, or my annoyance at the suggestion that Kate Beckinsale and John Cusack wouldn’t get their happily ever after. All I know for sure is that I need to kiss Duke and I need to kiss him now. While I can.
My mouth crashes against his and my hand sweeps around the back of his head, pressing him to me as my tongue plunders his mouth. Duke stops playing with me and lifts my leg higher. His cock needs no help finding its way to my center where it belongs.
“Fuck!” Duke hisses, the pressure he was applying quickly disappearing before he’s even inside me. “Condom.”
We briefly untangle and Duke reaches across to the bedside table to grab what he needs. I’m confused when he hands me my cell while he rolls on the condom.
“And who exactly am I calling?” I ask.
“No one,” he says, pulling me back to him so we’re side by side again. He lines himself up, seating himself at my entrance, then stops. “You suggested last night that you’d want to record what it sounded like when you came for real. Now’s your chance.”
I scrunch my face. I know exactly what I’d said and to who. “Please don’t say you want me to send it to Cameron.”