CHAPTER THIRTEEN
?
ADRIAN
“Adrian.”
She was inside the room before I got all the way turned around. Boots still on. Yesterday’s shirt, buttoned wrong at the collar, and the back stairs behind her had not made one sound the whole way up.
I put my eyes around the room the way I do every room I stand in. Window, door, eleven feet between them, and nothing in it that had ever belonged to a Vance except a bed, a jar of steel washers, and the heat.
Ninety already. The tar on the roof over my head had gone soft enough to hold a boot print.
I reached past her and turned the deadbolt.
“Lock’s already turned,” I said.
“That’s not an answer to anything.”
“No.”
“Then here’s the question again, since nobody’s answered it since midnight.
” She stayed where she was, both boots clear of the closed door.
“You lied in that truck last night. I was sitting beside you. I watched you do it to Luca’s face in the mirror and he knew, and Marcus knew, and neither of them said one word. ”
“I heard him.”
“You heard him. Great. He’s known you eleven years and he sat in that mirror and told you to your face that you’ve never lied about anything, and you let him find out different in front of me.”
“Yes,” I said, and it was the truest thing I had said since midnight.
“You told them you only knew who I was on Tuesday.” Her voice stayed level, which is how I know when she is furious.
“That’s not true. You knew before I got in that truck.
You’ve known longer than that, and everybody in the room could smell it on you except me, because I’m the only one down here who can’t. ”
Below us Luca started in on something with a hammer. Four strikes and a pause. Four strikes and a pause. That was the bear in him, keeping his own time even when he had gone quiet.
“Sit down,” I said.
“I don’t want to sit down. I want a sentence out of you with a fact in it.”
I picked the jar off the nightstand. I have kept washers in it since I took this room and I have never once needed one of them for anything.
“Hold your hand out.”
“What?”
“Hold your hand out,” I said again, and kept the jar tipped where it was.
She looked at the jar. She looked at me. Then she put her hand out flat, palm up, the way a person holds a hand out for something they expect to give back.
I tipped the jar. They came down cold and stacked and slid against her fingers, and I closed her hand around them and held it closed.
“What are these even for?”
“Nothing.”
“One,” she said. “Two. Three —”
Her voice had gone down underneath itself. The numbers came out of her in order, flat, one washer at a time onto the sheet, and she was not saying them to me.
On the third one I worked out what I was standing in front of. I did not say a word about it. I put it away with the rest of what I keep.
Then I went to the window with my back to her. Rosewood was white and empty in both directions.
“Nine days until his deadline. That’s not the answer you came for.”
She stopped somewhere past twelve. “Then give me one.”
“Mate.”
The word landed harder than the washers.
“To you?”
“To me. To Marcus. To Luca.” I kept my hands where she could see them. “That pull you feel isn’t the book. You haven’t written a bond in it. It’s us.”
She looked at the washers on the sheet, then at me. “And that makes what I want irrelevant?”
“No.”
“Does it make me want things I wouldn’t want?”
“It makes us notice each other. It doesn’t make you stay. It doesn’t make you forgive a thing.”
“Good. Because I’m furious with you.”
“I know.” I forced myself to finish. “I recognized you before Marcus brought you here. I should have told my brothers. I should have told you. There are records I want beside me when I explain how badly I got it wrong.”
“No more answers made out of my own questions.”
“No.”
She watched me until I looked back. It was harder than taking a punch. I did it anyway.
Her phone buzzed on the nightstand. I turned it so she could read the display. Karim: Corinne and Teddy safe. Shift changed.
She let the breath out. I left the phone where she could reach it.
“Adrian—”
“No.”
The air tasted like metal at the back of my tongue, the way it does before a storm that is not coming.
A truck came up Rosewood from the water end and stopped at our gate and sat there on a low throttle. Dark panel body, no lettering, nobody leaning out. A full minute of that. Then it backed out and went the way it came, and nobody in this building had gotten a look at a face.
I kept her where she stood and I counted our exits, and I counted the ground floor twice.
Then Luca’s hammer picked up again on the northeast gatepost, hard and steady, and stayed there.
She had come around to where she could see me.
“Was that truck for me?”
“Come here, Victoria.”
Her chin came up instead, which is the thing she does about a second before she says something that costs her.
“No. You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to give me half an answer and then give me an order and act like we’re finished —”
“Come here.”
She came. That is the part of it I am going to keep. She crossed that floor on her own two feet.
She caught my shirt in both fists. “This doesn’t settle the other thing.”
“I know.”
Wanting her was not an answer to what I had done. I would still owe her when the wanting was over.
I put her back against the inside of the door with my hand flat on her throat, open, not closing, and got her jeans undone with the other one. Her breath went out of her in a shape that had nothing to do with what she had walked up here to say.
Two fingers into her pussy. She was already slick enough that they went, and her cunt was fluttering around them before her face caught up.
“Hands on the door. Don’t take them off.”
She put them there. My thumb found her clit and stayed on it and she made a sound in the back of her throat with no word anywhere in it.
“Good girl,” I said. “Hands right where I put them.”
“Adrian, the — someone’s going to hear —”
“Let them.”
Her head went back against the wood. Her whole spine came off the door and then went flat against it again.
“That’s not — oh. Oh, that’s not fair.”
“No,” I said, and did not slow down for one stroke of it.
“Adrian, I can’t stand up if you keep — I can’t — somebody’s going to come up those stairs and I can’t even —”
“Then don’t. I’ve got you.”
Her knees tried to go. I took her weight on my forearm and kept working her, slow and flat and without any hurry in it at all, my fingers deep in her pussy and my thumb never leaving her clit.
Her hands stayed where I put them. That was the whole of it.
She could have taken them off the door. She kept them there and let me do it to her standing up.
“Wider.”
She got her boots apart on the floorboards without being told twice, and I got a third finger in her, and her cunt gripped down on all three. “You take everything I give you.” I said it the way I say a fact.
“Look at me.”
She got her eyes open. That was all I wanted. I put the flat of my thumb hard on her clit and held it there.
She came like that, holding nothing, her whole body pulling in around my hand, her mouth open against my shoulder and my palm still spread across her throat. I did not stop until her cunt had let go of my fingers and she had gone loose.
I got her boots off on the bed and everything after them. The white slab of light out of that curtainless window cut across her hips and I moved her up into it because I wanted to see her in it.
“Knees.”
“Adrian —”
I got a hand under each of them and waited about one second for her to do it herself.
“Open them.”
I put my forearms inside her knees and spread them anyway and put my mouth on her pussy.
She said my name once and then she stopped having language at all.
My tongue flat on her clit, two fingers curled up in her cunt, her heels sliding on a sheet that was damp before either of us got on it. She tried to come up off the bed and I laid my arm across her hipbones and held her down and kept going.
Her pussy was soaked through and swollen against my mouth, her clit hard as a knot under my tongue, and she was making one long sound with no bottom to it.
“I can’t — wait, I can’t —”
“You can.”
“It’s too much, it’s too — Adrian, it’s too much —”
“Hold still,” I said into her, and did not give her an inch of room to do anything else.
She did. It came through her cunt hard enough that I felt it against my mouth and in my teeth, and I held her hips flat through every second of it and did not let her get one inch away from it.
Then up her body, slow, with her taste still all over my mouth. My mouth on her belly, on her ribs, on one nipple until she arched off the mattress, then the other nipple, teeth on that one, until her hands came out of the sheet and into my hair.
I took her wrists and put them flat on my chest instead.
“Count them for me. I want to hear you get to the end of something.”
She did not ask what. She got the first button between two fingers and said one, and opened it, and said two, and opened that, and her voice steadied out on the way down my shirt. She got to the last one and said the number and pushed the shirt off my shoulders, and her hands had stopped shaking.
“There,” she said. “Done. Now tell me —”
She went for my belt.
I took both her wrists in one hand and put her up on her knees on the mattress instead.
“Open your mouth, Victoria.”
She looked up at me from down there with her hair coming out of its clip. Then she opened it, wide, before my cock got anywhere near it.
I got my belt out of the way and put my cock in her mouth and fisted my hand in her hair at the back of her skull.
I held her head still and set the pace myself. She let me. Her fingers curled into the denim at my thighs, and every time I fed her more cock she took more of it, and her eyes stayed up on mine until they couldn’t.
“That’s it. All the way. You’ll take it.”