Chapter One
She was there.
At the bar wearing a dress the color of a bruise’s dark heart. Her brown hair caught the candlelight as she tilted her head to check her watch.
Is she early? Or am I late? Gabe wondered and stepped out of the shadowy elevators into the top-floor bar at the Thompson Hotel.
It was Tuesday night and raining, so the bar was empty. When he walked in, brushing the rain out of his hair and off the shoulders of his jacket, she glanced up. Of course, everyone in the bar glanced up, which he was used to. People noticed men who were six feet, six inches tall and built—as his mother said—like a barn door.
But Gabe really only cared about her.
Her eyes touched him—his shoulders, his wet red hair, his face—and then she went back to her glass of wine, taking a sip with careful nonchalance, as if being sure not to notice him. He wasn’t great at social cues, spent far too much time alone, but that posture he understood: pretending not to notice while actually noticing with every fiber of his being. That was his official language.
She’d told him they should act like they didn’t know each other. Wipe the slate clean. That had been easy to agree to. He liked a clean slate.
He took the stool on the other side of the corner, a few seats away from her.
“What can I get you?” The bartender asked, slipping a napkin on the bar.
“Moosehead in a bottle.” He took off his coat and set it over the stool next to him. He unwound his scarf and set it on top of his coat. Carefully. Neatly. His awareness of her just a few feet away made all these things he did seem conspicuous and deliberate.
Don’t pay any attention to me. He mocked his own seriousness. I’m just pretending you’re not there.
“Would you like a menu?” The bartender asked.
“Sure.”
He was starved. The game had gone into overtime, and there hadn’t been enough guys so he’d never subbed out. Which was okay with him—he played the top-tier Tuesday night hockey beer league for the workout, so he could skate hard enough to empty his head. That was easiest to do when he didn’t get off the ice.
There were a million other places for a post-game drink and burger, but he liked this top-floor bar. His Canadian publisher had thrown a party for him here once, with signature drinks and a piano player. Very swanky. Too swanky, really. But he’d loved the view. The perspective of being above the city when he spent all his hours down in one of the chambers of its concrete heart.
He glanced backwards over his shoulder, taking her in with a sweeping glance that pretended to look outside through the walls of windows.
“Not much of a view tonight.” Her voice was nice. Soft and low and sweet. He heard just that little bit of an accent and wondered—as always—which part of Quebec she came from.
“Not unless you like watching the storms,” he said. The sky was dark, but he could see the storm blowing in from the west, rolling across the front of Toronto, the CN Tower about to be obscured. Rain lashed the windows. It was grey and dark and cold and about to get a little violent.
He was glad to be inside.
“I never thought of it like that,” she said. “I suppose lightning would be pretty awesome up here.”
“If you like that sort of thing.”
The bartender set down his beer, and he grabbed it with both hands like a lifeline.
“Do you?” Her merry eyes gave the impression they were talking about something other than storms. “Like that sort of thing?”
“I grew up in the prairies.” He was surprised to hear the truth coming out of his mouth. “Storm watching was top-shelf entertainment. My whole family would stand on the porch to see those summer fronts roll in and turn the world a kind of greenish purple.”
“Sounds a little scary,” She watched him through her lashes, her lips curled in a teasing smile. “And boring, if watching storms is considered a good time.”
He laughed and nodded. “Boring yes. Scary . . . only if the sirens went off. If they didn’t, we’d sit there and watch the wind kick up so fast and so hard it laid all the wheat flat.” He took a sip of his beer just to shut himself up. He drained half the bottle and almost immediately wanted a dozen more.
He set the beer down.
“I always wondered what do the animals do in those storms?” Her skin was the color of the harvest moon, or the inside of a shell, something white and creamy and perfect. “All the outside cats and stray dogs. Where do they go?”
“We had a dog once, Queenie. She was too stupid to climb under the porch and instead stood in the yard barking at the wind like it was breaking into our house.”
“What happened to her?”
How strange to be talking about Queenie when he hadn’t thought about her in years.
“She came back after every storm, limping and a little more crazy. She still barked at the wind, which probably just confirms that old dog new tricks thing.”
“Only if the old dog is crazy.”
In the silence after their polite laughter, he realized in a great hot rush how he was sitting there, all sprawled out, taking up too much real estate. Despite having lived in it for twenty-four years, his body could still surprise him with its size. His giant hands, his too long legs. He tried to tuck himself under the bar, but felt stupid.
The first trickle of panic slid down his spine. The rain had given him something to talk about. Lame as that was, he could always say something about the weather. And nerves had pushed him right into that stuff about his family, but they’d exhausted that, and now he sat there, nursing a beer, considering an overpriced burger, because he was rich now and had no idea what else to spend his money on but ice time and better burgers.
All of this was brain-buzzing nonsense while he was torn in two between wanting to grab his coat and go home, maybe hit a drive-thru on his way, or slide across the bar stools to get closer to the woman in the purple dress.
“My name is Elena,” she said.
“Mike.”
She blinked before she smiled. What had he told her last time? Something stupid about baseball.
“Nice to meet you, Mike. Are you staying here? At the hotel?”
“I am. I’m in town seeing clients.”
“What do you do?” She was following his lead, pretending because it was so much easier than the truth.
“I’m a lawyer.” The father in his new book was a lawyer. A good guy, trying to understand his kid, trying to do right by doing all the wrong things. Gabe still hadn’t quite figured out how that was going to work for a kid who fought crime in the Underworld, but the puzzle was still new, and he was thinking that maybe the dad would get kidnapped and held for ransom? Forcing the kid into his gumshoe roll? That could work.
“Family law,” he said when he realized he’d been quiet too long. “Messy divorce case.”
Should the dad be divorced or widowed?
She made a noncommittal hum in her throat and picked up her glass, taking another sip, and he pushed away all thoughts of work, those daydream wormholes that could suck him in for hours.
“And you?” he asked. “Are you staying here?”
She nodded.
“Business?” The green glass of the bottle glowed in his hands, painfully conspicuous. As if it were important. The light from the bar made all the drinks seem slightly more weighty than they actually were. Her white wine looked like liquid gold.
“Yes.” Her smile was really beautiful. She had this girl-next-door thing going for her, combined with that Quebec chill, wrapped up in that purply-blue dress—it was powerful. She was powerful.
“You’re French?” he asked. “I’m guessing by the accent.”
“I grew up in a small town outside of Montreal.”
“And what did you do there? While I was watching storms?”
“Disappointing my parents, mostly.” Her smile, dry as a bone, could not quite cover all the pain the memory clearly caused her. And he realized, as he created this shell of lies around himself, that she was either an incredible actress or telling the truth. Or some slight version of it. And he was suddenly wanted to ask this lovely creature how she’d disappointed her parents.
“Parents are tricky things,” he said, instead of asking.
“Agreed.” She reached over and tipped her glass against his beer bottle. “Though I guess since I’m on the other side of it now, I can safely say kids are pretty tricky too.”
“You have kids?” He tried not to sound surprised and relieved. Kids he could talk about. Kids he loved to talk about.
“One. A son. He’s nine.”
He leapt onto the topic with gratitude. “Is he a sports guy, video gamer, or reader?”
“Sort of a video-gamer-reader hybrid,” she laughed. “He’s very serious. I joke that he’s a little old man in a little boy’s body. I worry sometimes that he’s too serious. That he doesn’t know how to have fun.”
“Video games and books are fun.”
“Was that who you were?” She tipped her wine glass towards him. “A gamer-slash-reader?”
“No. Not as a kid. As a kid I was hockey. One hundred percent hockey. It wasn’t until I was older that I found books.”
Her brown eyes watched him with a kind of intention he found awkward. Too much talking about himself. Too many doors opened he liked to have shut.
“What’s he reading?” he asked, shifting the conversation toward the familiar. He could talk kids’ books, especially middle-grade books for boys, for years. He gave her some recommendations based on what books she told him her son had already read and went so far as to write them down for her.
“Thank you.” She tucked the slip of paper into the small black purse next to her now empty wine glass. “You know a lot about what kids read.”
Ah right, how to explain how a lawyer knows about middle-grade books for boys. Or maybe . . . maybe it was time to stop pretending.
“Would you like another Pinot?” the bartender asked Elena, but before she could answer, Gabe jumped in.
“Have another,” he said. “On me.” He didn’t want to stop pretending. He didn’t want the next step, if it meant letting go of this quiet comfort.
She smiled at him—full force—and he knew in a heartbeat that she wasn’t an actress. Her name was Elena, she did have a son and had grown up in Quebec with disapproving parents. He was a bag of lies and half-truths and she was without counterfeit. There could have been a hundred women sitting at this bar and he would have only seen her and the brilliant hard truth of her.
“Why not,” she said, and the bartender took her glass away, only to come back with a full one.
“It looks like you’re drinking gold.” He pointed to the glass.
She lifted it and gave the stupid thing he’d said consideration. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“What were you as a kid?”
“I don’t think the same classifications work for girls.”
“No? What are the girl classifications?”
She shook her head, and he wondered if he was making her uncomfortable. If this was yet another one of those topics one didn’t broach in flirtatious bar banter.
“My sister was a brain,” she said. “That’s where my son must get it. She was the smartest kid in school. She’s a genetics professor in Norway, now.”
“Norway?”
“I know, right? Who goes to Norway?”
“So your sister was smart and you were . . . ? Athletic? Artistic?”
“Reckless,” she said. “And angry.”
Outside a streak of lightning broke through the storm clouds and thunder rattled the window. Elena jumped, sloshing wine on the bar. Her hand flew to her throat, in such an old-fashioned gesture, he was charmed.
She laughed, the skin at her neck and chest going red. “Sorry, that scared me.”
“Like I said, a good spot to watch storms.” He grabbed a few napkins and helped her blot up the spilled wine. When she moved her hand he saw the gold locket around her neck. “Is that real? Your locket?”
“It is. It was my grandmother’s.”
“You have a picture of your son in there?”
“No, it’s me as a kid. I should probably change it, seems weird to have a picture of myself in there, but it was the way she wore it every day for years.”
“May I?” he asked and she switched to a stool closer to him, and he did the same on his side, and now they sat nearly next to each other at the corner. Under the bar, his knee bumped into hers, and he jerked his legs away electrified.
She popped open the locket and tilted her head back to give him room to see. When he leaned forward, he could smell her skin and the perfume she wore, something light and floral. Warm.
“I like the pigtails.” He glanced up from the picture to grin at her.
“And the missing tooth?” She laughed, her eyes on the rafters. “It’s got to be one of the worst pictures ever taken. I have no idea why she picked this one.”
He knew. Anyone who loved this girl would pick this picture because the little girl was smiling with all her might. She beamed. She radiated. She was joy personified.
The anger she mentioned feeling, it must have happened later. After the picture.
You’re lovely, he wanted to say. Just lovely.
“My mom did the same thing to me,” he said, again for some reason the truth finding its way to his lips. “To all of us—”
“All of us?”
“I have four brothers and a sister. I was the youngest of six.”
“Six!”
“Right.” Now he felt himself blushing. “That’s the other thing to do, I guess.”
She wiggled her eyebrows at him and the combination of all of her parts, her warm smell, her wide smile, the shine in her hair, her body in that dress—she really was too much. Too much for a man like him. A twenty-four-year-old guy with all the wrong experience.
“What was the picture?” Her palm stroked his hand, a glancing touch he felt down through his guts.
Pictures?
“All of us in stupid Christmas sweaters.” Why were they talking about Christmas sweaters of all fucking things?
“Are you close? The six of you?”
“Very. You? With your sister?”
The conversation was drifting away from him. He wanted to touch her hand or to have her touch his again. Have her hand sweep over his arm, his shoulder, down his back the tense and shaking muscles of his back. To his waist. His legs. Between them.
God, yes. Between them.
“I haven’t spoken to her in ten years.”
“Wait . . . what?”
She slipped her hand into his, curled the back of it against his palm like some warm trusting thing, and his body exploded into physical life. He felt his blood vessels, the blood thudding through them, the twitch of his hamstrings. The ache of his lungs. He felt all of it. All of himself. In the presence of her.
“Mike?”
He lifted his eyes to hers, a starving man, helpless under her brown gaze. No doubt he was revealing all of his desire. No doubt he was practically drooling.
Mike. Right. That’s me.
Before he could say anything she leaned forward and short-circuited his brain with the warmth of her cheek inches from his. “Would you like to go downstairs?” she whispered in his ear. “To my room?”
Speechless. Shaking. He nodded, once. A quick jerk.
Yes, yes please God, yes.
The heat of his desire, the way it bordered on desperation, terrified him. Panicked him.
And that horrific miasma of fear and desire, that was where the snarling monsters of his past lived. It was the ugly stew they called home.
Last year he’d gone to this counselor to try and get help with his drinking. Well, with the drinking and the sex. And the counselor told him that the drinking gave him distance when it came to sex, and that if he wanted to have sex without getting hammered, he’d have to come up with his own way of distancing himself. Of disengaging from the fear and then managing the desire.
So what he tried to do was make a nice cold hard slice between his body and his mind. He wasn’t very good at holding onto the distance, but for the moment, it allowed him to sit back, pull his wallet out, and throw a fifty dollar bill on the bar.
They stood together, and he grabbed his coat, the scarf he’d felt so stupid about.
Was that a half hour ago? Less. How had this happened? How could she seem so casual when he felt like a giant giraffe, all knees and elbows and an awkward raging hard-on that he covered with his jacket folded over his arms.
She led him out of the bar, and before he could stop them, his eyes traced the round edges of her ass, the curve—top and bottom hugged so perfectly by that dress.
I want her, he thought. I want her so bad.
And then: Please let that be enough.
The elevator hallway was dark, and she stood next to him, right next to him. Against him. He felt her breast against his arm, her hip against his, and sweat gathered at his neck. The gold doors reflected their images. Him so tall and big, huge really. Muscle and height and a flop of red-gold hair still damp from the rain.
She looked like the twilight sky. Dark dress, light skin, that fall of mink brown hair down her back. Everyone was shorter than him, but she was tiny. He could pick her up if he wanted. Imagined her with her legs around his waist, his hands under her hips.
The doors swished open, and they stepped into the dimly lit elevator. As the doors closed she moved against him, a slow turn; her ass, her hip, and then the soft rise of her belly against his body was torture and pleasure combined.
“You didn’t ask if I was married,” she whispered, her hand against the tight muscles of his stomach.
“I don’t care,” he whispered back, his fingers finding the ends of her hair. He knew the answer, of course—or thought he did, considering the nature of their relationship—but this script was exciting. So exciting. She stepped backwards against the mirrored wall and the railing and pulled him against her.
The distance between his brain and his body threatened to close and let in the ghosts, but he thought of hockey, of work, the problem he was working on in the third chapter. Was the dad divorced? Did it matter if the boy had a mom?
Their lips never touched, he simply breathed her in, tasting her—the wine she’d had to drink, the sweetness of her beneath that. His cock throbbed hard against her belly. She pushed against him, perched on her high heels, pushed against the wall, her skirt revealed more of her long legs. He wanted to step back and look at her. Take her in with his eyes so he could imagine her later. But touching was what he was here to do. He was supposed to touch.
Be active, not passive. Another tool his counselor had given him.
Fumbling, his fingers found the smooth muscle of her thigh and when the door binged open, he walked backwards, pulling her into the hallway. “What’s your room number?” he asked against her mouth.
Her eyelids fluttered. “Three . . . three sixteen.”
They ran into the wall, knocking a picture sideways. He let go of her hips to catch the picture and felt her hands come up to cup his cheeks, pulling him down from his great giraffe height. And then her lips were pressed softly against his. A whisper, a tremor, a ghost of a kiss, really.
Shaken, he pulled away from her touch. “Room, Elena . . .”
“Go right. Third door down.” She sucked his bottom lip into her mouth, used her teeth, and he stepped back. Stepped away because all of this felt good and was so exciting. Elena was so exciting. But he felt like he was watching it. Not living it. And despite wanting this, wanting her, so bad he could taste it, he was aware of how close he was to that awful no-man’s-land between what his body wanted and what his head was terrified of.
He could split his mind from his body, but he could never manage the distance.
Maybe he needed more beers. A dozen more beers. A few shots. That was the only way this ever got done, with him blitzed out of his head. What did it matter if he was hammered?
But it did matter. It mattered so much it ate away at him, drove him to these impossible lengths.
Maybe if he’d had just ten more minutes on the ice, rendering his body lived in and useful, something he controlled. His brain an empty and whole vessel. Something, anything so he could be in control of the split, keep his brain and his body in the right spot. Enough that he wasn’t in ruins, enough that he was still here. Now. With her.
He took her by the hand and led her to the correct door where she slid a key card into the slot and stepped backwards against the door, opening it with her body, her fingers still laced with his.
The invitation on her face was as old as Eve. As potent as original sin.
Please. It was a final thought before stepping into the room. Please let this work.
The room was dark, plush. Like walking into a secret.
The door closed behind him and he leaned back against it. A few steps away, she dropped her purse on the floor and began to kick off her shoes.
“Leave them on,” he told her, and she smiled, a lock of hair caught against her lip. Obscuring her eyes.
Her hands pulled the straps of her dress off her shoulders, and he was breathless at every inch revealed: her shoulders, the beautiful rise and fall of her clavicle, and there, the slope of her breast, the black lace edge of her bra. The top of her dress fell away revealing her bra without any straps, her lean muscled stomach.
She pushed the sleeves off her arms and then hooked her thumbs in the slouched fabric gathered at her waist ready to push it over her hips.
“Turn around.” His voice was nearly a growl and he couldn’t move off the door. Couldn’t do anything but stand there and watch and burn.
Oh God, her smile as she turned could have brought him to his knees, if he weren’t glued to the door.
She bent, pushing the dress over her hips and letting it fall to the floor, revealing black lace panties, pale skin, and the most beautiful ass he’d ever seen.
Legs and lace and skin and perfection. That was her. That was all he saw.
And then she crossed the deep divide and three carpeted feet between them and pressed all that perfection up against him, running her hands under his shirt, over the muscles that twitched in a terrible fight-or-flight instinct.
He liked it better when she was over there, away from him. Sexy and real, but distant. So he could watch and appreciate and sex was sort of a perfect, abstract thing.
That’s what the alcohol used to do. Why he needed it.
When she touched him, it all became very real.
Sweat broke out on his neck, trickled in cold icy drops down his spine.
“Take this off,” She tugged on the hem of his T-shirt, and he nodded lifting his arms like a child so she could pull it off.
She had to know he was sweating. Like really sweating; it ran down his sides from his armpits, foul and slick. No doubt she could also feel him shaking, every muscle flexed and contracted, straining to keep him here.
“Hey,” she murmured. Her fingers traced his bones and muscles, skating across his abs, up to his chest. She brushed her palms against the hair there as if she was petting him, and he closed his eyes, pressing his head hard against the door. “It’s okay.”
It’s okay, Gabe. It’s okay. I won’t hurt you.
There was some animal in the room making low, pained noises. Horrible noises.
“Shhh,” she said, her hand slipping from his chest down to his jeans where his cock, so fucking hard it hurt, pulsed against her touch. “You’re so hard.” She undid his belt before he fully realized what was happening, and then her fingers were against his skin. His dick in her hand. “It feels good, doesn’t it?”
It feels good, Gabey. It can’t be bad if it feels good. I just want to make you feel good. See?
Elena pushed his jeans down and bent, breathing over his hard flesh and he knew what would happen next.
Do you know what this is called? A blow job. I’m gonna suck your dick—
Gabe wrenched away from the door, from her, pulling up his pants, tripping over his feet.
“I’m sorry,” he said. With wildly shaking hands he tucked his now flaccid dick back in his underwear. It took him three times to zip up his pants. “I’m sorry, Elena.”
Her dress made a purple-blue puddle on the floor, and he picked it up, too ashamed and broken to look her in the eye as he handed it to her. “You can keep the room for the night,” he said. “And the money, of course.” The dress was pulled from his fingers, and he turned in a circle looking for his shirt, found it draped over the foot of the bed, and quickly put it on. And then because he still felt naked, he grabbed his jacket. The scarf.
To his surprise when he turned for the door, ready to get the hell out of here, she was still standing there, the dress clasped to her chest, her head bent, the dark hair a curtain he couldn’t see through.
“Elena? Please let me go.”