Chapter 29
For a moment the world was right. It was warm and safe. She was sore in all the right places, and she wanted to burrow back down into the comfort of him, cover her head, and forget the rest of the world existed.
Slowly, Annelise remembered bits and pieces of her life. As they seeped in around the edges, she had to fight to keep her breathing even and not wake the man sleeping heavily beside her. She squeezed her eyes shut. What had she done?
Two glasses of Chianti and she was Rowan Velasco's little whore.
No, she told herself, she never had been.
He'd never treated her like one, and she shouldn't be thinking that way—that was just her own self-deprecation.
What they were now wasn't what they'd been before, despite the fact that he looked at her as if history didn't lie between them.
She was wondering how she could lift his arm and roll away—if it was unethical to cast a spell on him to keep him asleep—when she felt the soft press of his lips to the back of her neck.
Annelise was fighting the sigh wanting to escape at the warm, almost whispered, almost growled, “Good morning,” that seeped through her like an old liquor.
“Morning,” she offered back for lack of anything better to say, and then she began what she knew would have to be a relentless campaign. “I need to get up. I don't even know what time it is.”
“It's ten.”
Why did he know that? Had he been awake for a while and just let her sleep? Her eyes flew wide, and this time she didn't think about subtlety. Grabbing at his hand, she simply flung it off. “I have clients at eleven.”
“You're still in Charlottesville.” The languid quality to his voice told her he had no sense of her urgency.
It wasn’t made up. “I need a shower.”
She was standing now, feet on the plush carpet, completely naked in front of him. A fact that registered in the reflection in his eyes and the heat there, too. “Rowan, this was a one-off.”
He didn't answer with words, but just a cheeky grin, reminding her that at best it was a two-off. More likely, if she tried to count the number of times they'd managed to make each other come before they'd finally given up close to four a.m., then it was definitely not a one-off.
“I have to go.” She was trying to figure out the logistics.
Where could she shower? She had to go to the office.
At least she had a change of clothing there.
She wouldn't have to go all the way back to Belle Hollow. She couldn’t—nothing in the house was working yet.
Though the water should be clean by now, she didn’t know if Story had the power on.
In fact, if she had to bet, Annelise’s money was on her grandmother being too busy taking care of everything else to turn on the utilities.
On top of her day job, keeping up her own business, and making up her own full week of lost time, Annelise was also doing everything for the house.
“Shower in there,” Rowan offered far too casually, “then go to your office.”
He was rolling out of bed too, and it was one thing to know that she was standing there naked, her feelings exposed to both of them, but his?
He stretched as if to wake up, his hands reaching up to his full height, over his head.
The look of him affected her, and the fact that it affected her pissed her off even more.
“Fine,” she told him, knowing her irritation was clear and not concerned enough to rein it in. She didn’t have any other options that would get her to her meeting on time.
Gathering up her clothing as she went, she at least found her purse in the corner and dug through it, pulling out a toothbrush and toothpaste. She didn't have shampoo or anything like that, but as she turned she caught Rowan staring at her, frowning, and of course he was still naked.
“What?” she asked.
“You run around with a toothbrush in your purse?” He didn't say the words, but she heard them: You spend the night out a lot?
“One, it's none of your business, and two, I'm constantly meeting with clients whom I'm asking to give me or trust me with large sums of money, so I make sure my teeth are clean.”
He looked less chastised than she'd intended, and she didn't answer the part about staying out overnight a lot, because it wasn't any of his business. None of her life was his business. Except his shower. Now.
She'd appreciated last night. She needed the stress relief. How long had it been since someone had made her come apart like that? It hadn't been too horribly long since she'd gotten rid of the last boyfriend. Not many had come close to anything resembling a relationship, but she’d known all along they weren’t permanent. The last time she’d slept with a boyfriend she realized he was thinking about an office coworker and decided there was nothing there worth fighting that battle for.
So she’d cut him free. But he hadn’t made her come apart like this. Lose everything in the moment.
Damn it, that had always been Rowan Velasco. Another fact that bothered her to hell and back as she turned the shower on and climbed in before it got warm enough. Because she needed him to not be the only man she could completely lose herself with.
When she emerged, she was dressed and the bathroom was steamy.
Her hair hanging in wet ringlets, dripped on the shirt that she'd worn last night.
She kept clean underwear in her purse too, and she'd put them on, though she hadn't told Rowan that.
None of it would matter to any hotel employees who were still on shift and watched them come in together last night.
Definitely a walk of shame, though she felt no shame about what she'd done. Only regret.
“When can I see you again?” he asked, grabbing her hand.
She wanted to shake him off. She was in a hurry, already thinking about the client she was going to meet with and the pieces they said they would bring.
She certainly needed to be on her A game.
This couple traveled and brought her their purchases.
Sometimes for appraisal, often for resale if they had buyer’s remorse, or if what they bought didn't turn out to be what they thought they were getting.
Then they would try to recoup as much as they could.
Sometimes they brought her forgeries, and sometimes she’d held priceless artifacts.
Sometimes she held priceless artifacts that were under multiple international laws not to be trafficked, and she'd had to tell them that, too. They’d had to surrender more than one souvenir back to the nations and peoples they’d been stolen from.
“You can update me as you leverage the insurance company and get us a payout,” she said in response to his question. Unfortunately, her tone was almost chiding. She could hear the words under his question: you know there's something here between us, and we shouldn't ignore it.
Only, there wasn't anything between them except a few orgasms and a past that meant nothing more could happen now. Rowan started to ask again, and she shook her head before he could get the words out. “No.”
This time he protested hard. At least he'd put some damn sweatpants on, and she realized then that he lived forty minutes away in Belle Hollow and he worked forty minutes in a different direction just outside of Richmond, and neither of those places was far enough to need a hotel room tonight or to have spare clothing for the morning.
He'd planned this. Fool that she was, she'd fallen for it.
She knew she was stressed out, knew that she needed a break from worrying if there would be enough money to cover the rebuild of the house.
What would happen to Story if they lost the family home?
What to do with her new cousin—who at least now was speaking to her again and trying to learn about the craft?
What to do about her own life and whether or not she should move out of the little house in Belle Hollow?
Should she find an apartment here in Charlottesville close to work, and maybe, for the first time, become her own person, on her own—without Story, without her missing aunts and cousins? Without Rowan Velasco?
She was so stressed about so many things that she hadn't caught that Rowan had rolled her neatly into his bed. When he said, “I want to see you again,” she replied even more firmly, “We can't do this again.”
“We already did.”
Before she could reply, he held up a hand, telling her to stop, his head tipping, eyes squeezing as if he already knew what she was going to say and she was wrong. “Don't say it was a mistake.”
“Fine. It wasn't a mistake. I needed the stress relief. Thank you.”
His expression turned from irritated to incredulous to cold and numb, and she hated—hated—that she hurt him like that, but she also couldn't run the risk of falling into his arms again. As much as he and Jenna and everyone else was maybe right, she still wasn’t sure what to do.
Maybe Story could do just fine on her own and maybe Annelise should find her own life.
But she would not handle it if this flood came and the change that was coming to the Hollow was that Story was going to go the same way her own mother had. The thought of the woman who had birthed her and raised her to seventeen dying the way her mother had flared the anger inside of her.
“Rowan. There’s too much history between us to ever do anything like this again.”
“The history between us is that you got mad at me for something I didn’t do, and you cast a spell to keep us apart!”
“You walked out on me!” She shook her head at the outburst, exasperated. She didn’t have time to hash this all out. Annelise Lockheart wasn’t late to client meetings, and she wasn’t about to start now. “I’m mad at you for what you did. You picked your father over me. And after what he did.”
“I still don't know what you're talking about. You act like my father did something that caused your family's hardship.” She could see the moment the words left his mouth. Almost hear the reverberation in his brain there. He finally said it.
She finally said it out loud, too. “That's because he did.”
Slipping her feet back into the heels that she'd worn far too late last night twisted her heart. She’d only slipped them off after the first handful of orgasms. She hated the memories that lingered in them right now.
What she wouldn’t give to walk away from this morning cleanly, with her dignity intact, not having had this discussion and feeling that she betrayed her own mother sleeping with this man who would never admit what happened.
“I know, Annelise, that what happened wasn’t fair. It was awful. But it wasn’t my father’s fault.”
“I have to go.” Slipping out of the room, her jaw clenched, and she fought the urge to slam the door behind her.
Until he came to terms with what his parents had done, there could never be anything between them. And he wouldn't, she knew it. He would always stand behind them, no matter what they’d each done, no matter that his father was now dead and gone, too.
Pasting on her best smile, she waved to the hotel employees she passed on her way to her car.
As she climbed in, she slammed the door behind her, finally letting her anger leach through in her actions.
She checked the clock. She had just enough time to get to work and, if she was smart, forget about Rowan Velasco forever.