Yes, yes I am.
He wants me.
He wants me so much I shiver with the knowledge. He pulls me close as he drags his mouth up my jawline and toward my ear, taking his time, typical Saint. You smell good, he whispers in my ear, his fingers running up my belly, causing shivers all over me. He wants me, lust humming between us.
“I want to forget you, Rachel, but I know you’re right, you weren’t lying. At least not to me. You were lying to yourself. You told yourself you’d get to the truth of me and all that time, you wouldn’t admit that you were falling in love with me.”
I hold his gaze, my lungs leaden in my chest. “And if that’s true?”
“It’s true, Rachel.” His eyes gleam with tender possessiveness.
I blush and lower my face, and when he reaches to slip his hand under my shirt and his fingers skim up my abdomen, I whimper and halt him by the wrist. “No, Malcolm, no. You’re going to take me to the edge, and then I’ll be there alone.”
He groans. “If I go to the edge with you, I’ll never come back.”
“What happened to my risk taker?”
“It’s not just myself I’m worried about. It’s my cautious girl who, like my fine wine, comes tightly wrapped and packaged.”
I lift my fingers, touch the hard square of his jaw, abrading my fingertips with his five-o’clock shadow. “Break me. As long as you’re touching me. Shatter me. Use me. Just want me.”
Malcolm. Powerful and in control. I touch his lips with my fingertips, he’s tense and still. I shudder inwardly touching him, but he doesn’t move.
I lower my hand, burning red that he doesn’t move his hand on my bare skin.
He rasps out, watching me through narrow eyes, “You still respond to me like before.”
“I’m the same. I never lied to you.” My heart pumps in fear of his rejection, but I can’t stop myself from needing his forgiveness. “I wanted to be with you and to see you. I didn’t want to stop,” I admit, easing my hand up his silk tie. I feel his abs bunch under my fingers.
I let my fingers wander, never once taking my eyes off his stormy green ones.
He lifts his hand to tug on my ear. I squeeze my eyes shut when he speaks, surprising me with his thick voice. “I remember this ear . . .” He tugs it a little.
I open my eyes to find him staring at me.
I melt.
“When you tease me, it hurts.”
“No, this hurts.” He curls his hand around my arm and I respond a little, moaning in my throat. “If I put my hand on you, you arch to my touch. You push closer so every inch of my hand is on you. You look at me like I’m a bastard, like I gave you your every dream and then took them all away. But you still want my hands on you?”
“Yes. But I want you to trust me.”
“Trust you? Rachel, I don’t trust myself with you.”
I wipe a stray tear. “I want dibs on you,” I whisper, broken.
Our eyes meet for the slightest second and the moonlight hits his face so that he’s so beautiful it’s otherworldly. He grabs my face and inches his head closer, tilting his mouth to my ear.
“I miss you,” I blurt out, reddening when I hear myself say that.
“Do you? Miss me?”
“I miss you so much. I can’t forget you, and I don’t want you to forget me either.” I swallow.
He grabs my face and inches his head closer, and when I open my mouth to say more, he says, “Shh.” Careful like I’m fragile, he draws my face to his.
I shudder as his lips ghost over the corner of my mouth.
His voice is so textured, it’s hardly understandable. Warmth from his big hand seeps into my cheeks as he edges back and strokes his thumb over my lips. “We’re going to start back up slow and easy.” The forests in his eyes are deep with intensity. “And when I’m ready, I’m going to ask you to be my girlfriend, and it’s going to be the last time I ask, Rachel. If you say no, that’ll be the last no you say to me about anything.”
God, I want him to ask me now. I turn my face and press a kiss on his thumb and he uses my action to rub his thumb along my lips a little, like he did when he fed me wine.
Longing unfurls inside me like a ribbon, soft and warm. I can’t even describe the way I want him to kiss me again.
“Don’t tease me,” I whisper.
“I’m not teasing you.”
My eyes well up. “I want you to be greedy, to want all of me, like before, Saint.”
He grabs my face firmly in both hands. “Go out Friday with me.”
“Yes,” I gasp, “I’d love to.”
“It’s black tie. Do you have something to wear?”
I look at the violent tenderness on his expression, my lungs like rocks in my chest as I keep on nodding and nodding. “I . . . I’m sure I have something here to wear.”
“Go buy a dress, it’s on me.”
“No!” I laugh. “Sin.”
“Yes,” he insists. “There’s no more saying no, remember.”
My breathless voice is barely audible. “At what time should I be ready on Friday?” I ask.
“Quarter to nine? Starts earlier but I’ve got a long week ahead too.”
I know why, Saint. I know it’s because you need more and more and always more and I want you to want me like that, all of me.
And I know why you want me at M4, Saint.
Even when you were mad at me, you were trying to protect me. You still are.
“Still getting the moon?” I ask.
He’s quiet. Then, “Something like that.”
And silence again.
I step out his door, peering inside. “Thank you for my lifetime collection of wine,” I add with a little smile.
His smirk is back. “You’re welcome.”
We stare for a minute. From the shadows, his eyes gleam a pure male gleam as he looks at me. I hurt thinking this isn’t real, it can’t be real.
“I’m a challenge to you, Saint. You’ll finally get me and then you’ll be done with me.”
Before I can turn around to walk away, he grabs my hand in his. He pulls me closer to the door. Reaching out with his free arm, he snaps open the glove compartment, and brings out a pen.
My heart stutters when I recognize the pen.
It’s the pen from the hotel room.
I’m singed by his fingertips on mine as he brings my palm to his lap. His eyes blaze between his lashes when he notices me tremble, and his gaze never leaves my face as he scrawls something on my palm. Then he curls my fingers closed.
“Don’t underestimate me,” he whispers.
I savor the possessive way he looks at me as he speaks, so thickly it’s almost inaudible, as he slowly—torturously slowly—lets go of my hand. “Good night, Rachel.”
I feel his eyes on my retreating back as I head toward my building.
When I turn by the door, my sexy parts tingle as I see him one last time; he’s lounging back with an arm draped on the passenger seat, predatorily, with deceptive relaxation, but I’ve never seen eyes look at me so intensely as he stares at me through the open car window.
Helpless to free myself from his gaze, I feel for the door handle, manage to open it, and then exhale when I’m inside.
Shutting the door, I put my fingers on the glass. I can feel Saint through it and the rumble of his car as he starts it back up. I feel his chest under my fingertips and the energy of his being, like a bolt of white-hot liquid lightning flowing through my veins.
I force myself to go upstairs, then walk into my apartment and then lean on the shut door, breathless and I open my hand to read what he wrote.
Dibs.
BLACK TIE
“I say the baby blue.”
“I vote the light pink.”
“Baby blue. The perfect event deserves the perfect dress, just like the perfect man deserves the perfect girl,” Gina argues with Wynn.
“I’m not perfect, but I want to look perfect tonight,” I tell them both.
&n
bsp; “Your billionaire just struck gold with you tonight, you look like a million bucks—well invested and soon to yield.”
“Wynn!” I laugh.
“I still don’t get why you didn’t just bring him up to your room yesterday and let him stake a physical claim on you.”
“Because . . . we haven’t been together in a month.”
“Exactly why you shouldn’t have talked at all! What’s there to talk about? He wants you, you want him.”
I rummage through my earrings for a pair of small silver studs that bring out the gray in my eyes. “He . . . well, we’ve gone over it, I’ve told you two.”
“No, you haven’t. You get red and that’s it. You can’t talk about him without spacing out . . .”
I groan. My friends, Gina and Wynn, they want to know that I’m going to be all right.
“He read my article,” I say.
They’re looking impatient, their faces alive with anticipation. And I’m remembering. I feel his hands cup my face again. I feel his eyes on me again. His lips so close, and so far away. And suddenly . . . on the very edge of my lips. I look down at the palm of my hand, the invisible Dibs that unfortunately washed off after a week of showers.
“He asked me to go out with him tonight.”
Gina opened one of my wines and when she comes back with three foam cups, I tell myself—please don’t ever let Sin see we’re drinking this wine in foam cups. “Publicly?” she asks, handing a cup to each of us.
“Finally?” Wynn asks, taking a sip.
Setting mine aside, I nod as the butterflies fly fly fly in me. Still hidden in my closet is his shirt. I pulled it out of hiding last night—a shirt that brings back every memory—then I quickly stripped and slipped my arms into the sleeves, buttoning it up.
And that’s how I slept.
It felt like hot, sheet-clawing sex on my skin. I lay in bed, my hormones all crazed, telling myself that I’m not going to do anything sexy until he does it to me.
“And I said yes. And he told me to get a dress.”
He’d said it low but casual, as if it were the most natural thing for him to do for me, in his voice that never fails to get to me. Then I refrain from telling them the rest; that he marked my hand with a pen . . . and I went to my bed, and called my mother in the darkness, and told her . . . and unexpectedly, burst out crying from the happiness when I heard her voice.
“We’re doing this black tie thing and if it’s the last thing I do, I want to look incredible tonight,” I admit, looking at myself in the mirror above my vanity.
I haven’t looked this happy in a while—but I haven’t felt this happy in my life.
“This dress does the trick. The side slit is perfect, the strapless bare shoulders, the way it goes all the way down to your toes. You want to say: you know I’m naughty deep down but it’s only for you,” Wynn says.
“Oh please, like he’s not naughtier than anything we’ve ever known,” Gina groans.
I laugh. My cheeks flare red as I think about him and wonder if he’s as desperate to be with me as I am with him.
“But did he read your article? Something in it must’ve done something to him.”
Wynn brings out the copy of the magazine I have hidden under my bed, mainly because it has a picture of him, and taps on the last sentence. “This part: I’d leap blindly into the air if only there were even a 0.01 percent chance that he’d still be there, waiting to catch me.”
“Wynn. You two. Help me get ready!”
They turn on the music and with “Sugar” by Maroon 5 playing, I keep prettying up for him, repeatedly brushing my hair until it falls down my back, as lustrous as glass.
For weeks, I’ve been alone, staring at my laptop, hearing its low hum. It’s quiet for the night, the reporter tucked away. Now, the one humming is me. I’m wearing a dress fit for a princess. Now my friends are fussing around me, pulling out matching bags and shoes.
Gina is being especially helpful. Gina, who’s been concerned about me getting my heart broken. “Now you’re all eager for me to hook up with the same guy you wanted me to stay away from? You’re Team Saint now?” I tease her.
She pauses. “I’m Team what makes you happy. And . . . well, from what Tahoe told me, yes.”
I roll my eyes. “You believe that man?”
“He loves Saint as much as I love you!” she says. “He didn’t enjoy your breakup any more than I enjoyed watching you mope. He said . . .”
“What?” I ask, my full attention on her.
“He thinks Saint is really into you because usually people only fuck up with him once,” she specifies.
Wynn scowls. “What else did he say? If you’re going to be talking to him then you must tell us when you talk about Rache.”
“I only talked to him yesterday, and he said, and I quote, ‘Saint’s really into your best friend. Never seen him like this—ever.’ ”
I never thought my sexy parts could blush but they’ve been blushing every time I think of him.
“What does Momma Rachel say? Does she know?” asks Wynn.
“Mother?” I laugh. Her name is Kelly, not Rachel, but the girls call her Mom or Momma Rachel.
“She wants to meet him. She’s excited that he came over. But I don’t want to pressure him right now, my momma will have to wait until we see where this is going.”
“Okay, let’s get real here though. Are you planning to sleep with him?”
“YES! Dude, YES, I PLAN TO SLEEP WITH HIM. I’M DYING TO!” I say, laughing with pure giddy anticipation.
“The car’s downstairs!” calls Wynn from the window, then she goes to the kitchen to ring him up, and peers into my room. “He’s coming up.”
“Okay.” Inhaling sharply at the news, I hurry to finish strapping up my shoes and get a sheer blue shawl from a closet.
“Hey, Rache,” Gina says, grabbing my hand. She looks at me and squeezes. “I’m happy for you, it’s been breaking my heart. Because I do have one, you know? Paul didn’t take it all, only the men’s part. But the girl’s part is yours and Wynn’s.” She looks a little emotional, her eyes glistening a little. “You know I don’t believe in love. But I believe in second chances, and this is yours, Rache. And you know, I kind of admire his persistence. He really seems set on getting you.”
I squeeze her hand, breathless at the thought. “You have no idea how he is when he’s after what he wants. Patient but so, so ruthless.”
She smiles at me, and I smile back. Dropping my hand, she heads to peer out the door. “Don’t open it yet, Wynn, she has to look perfect,” Gina orders, but seconds later, Wynn is the one we hear speaking.
“Saint, come in! She’s just about ready!”
I hear his low voice as he greets her and I’m not immune to the sound.
I’m in my bedroom, but through the parted door, I see a glimpse of a long arm in a black jacket, silver cuff link and white cuff—his hand at his side. Tanned and square, his long fingers idle. I feel a visceral reaction seeing that hand, those strong, knowing fingers, my body flushing in remembrance of how it feels when he touches me.
I take one last look at myself in a strapless blue dress that falls to my feet, with a long, sexy slit on the left side, the color bringing out the bluish shades in my gray eyes. My hair is loose and, because my shoulders are bare and I could get cold, I draw the matching shawl a little higher.
The nerves tangle up inside me as I step out and take in the full image of Malcolm. His back is to me, but I take a tiny pleasure in seeing the back of his head, his confident stance, the incredible amount of energy he seems to suck from his surroundings.
“Oh, there she is!” Wynn happily tells him, signaling past his shoulder.
He turns, one hand in his pocket, the other at his side, and I can’t help but notice how he makes a fist when he sees me. “Rachel,” he says.
A massacre of emotions sweeps over me.
I can’t fight the nature of my body, and though I want to look cool,
I’m blushing bright red as I smile shyly. “Hey, Sin.”
I walk over, tentatively set my hand on his chest and, seeing the admiring way he’s looking at me, press up on my toes to kiss his jaw.
He touches my bare back and holds me in place, prolonging the time that my lips are on his skin.
“You ready?” he asks quietly into my earlobe, so only I can hear.
I nod and we say goodbye to the girls. He slips his large, square hand into my smaller one, and as he leads me out of the apartment, I turn and see Gina mouthing, “Ohmigod!” and Wynn, a big wide “AAAAAAA!”
When we reach the sidewalk, Otis opens the door of the Rolls as Malcolm gives him instructions. I’ve barely slid into the center of the seat when the door on the other side opens, and Sin slides onto the bench opposite mine.
I don’t know if he likes my little strapless blue dress, the pink-painted toes displayed by my pumps, or the long slit on the side of said long dress. All I know is that my skin has broken out in goose bumps because of his nearness. And as he settles down across from me and his eyes take a slow, delicious trek up my body, there’s a little bonfire in my stomach.
I check him out too, because his tuxedo loves him so thoroughly it’s an instant aphrodisiac to watch them together. God, I’m this living, wanting, throbbing ache now.
“Hey,” he says, his eyes just a little bit liquid. “You look beautiful.” His eyebrows pull low then, shaping a perfect frown. “Though I was supposed to buy you a dress.”
“No,” I deny, smiling and shaking my head firmly.
“Yes,” he grins. “Stop saying no to me.”
Jesus. He looks at me with his green, green sparkling eyes, and I’m gone, gone, totally gone.
“I said yes to this black tie,” I counter.
I’m not supposed to feel shy right now. If there is a man who knows me, it’s this man. But he’s so masculine and looking at me as if I’m so female, he has the ability to make me feel so young and so terribly fragile.
“I bribed you with wine, I’ve come to know your vices,” he gruffs out teasingly. Then, he reaches out to take my hand and draws me across the car, to his bench. He chucks my chin when I’m settled down. “Your every vice,” he adds, deathly sober now.