Selfish
As he unlocked the front door and strode into the apartment, the question struck him: if Riley was at home, what did he expect to find?
Had he expected a devastated woman, shattered by whatever Catriona might have said to her? Or was it the girl looking up at him with surprise written all over her face, holding two steaming pie plates she’d lifted from the oven, salsa music playing loudly in the background? Her blonde hair was secured in a high ponytail, and she was wearing a pair of loose thermal pajamas; spectacles cloudy with steam completed the look.
“What are you doing here? I thought you were having dinner with the boys,” she said, glancing at the clock above her stove before pivoting on her feet and setting down the pie dishes on the counter. Ashe took two steps into the narrow kitchen and closed the oven door before she backed into it and burnt her leg. It was a tight squeeze but he was used to it, although her studio apartment seemed to grow smaller each day. Turning around to face her, he made sure not to step on her bare toes.
“Did you have a visitor just now?” he asked, searching her face.
Riley shook her head, frowning. “Only you. Why?” Then her eyes widened. “Was someone supposed to come over? Did I forget?”
The innocence in her eyes told him that Catriona hadn’t made it upstairs and Ashe sighed in relief. “No, petal, you didn’t forget anything, but you ought to keep your phone on. I’ve been trying to reach you the whole day.”
“I left my charger at your condo and my phone’s dead,” she replied. “What happened to your dinner with Ben and Lance?“
As Riley slid her arms around his waist, Ashe realized he was still wearing his heavy coat. “They’ll survive without me for one night,“ he said, kissing her lightly on the lips. “I missed you. Is that allowed?”
“Allowed? I demand it,” she chuckled, blushing. Without a trace of make-up on, she looked so innocent, her blue eyes twinkling as he pushed a lock of hair from her face. “I’m sorry about last night.”
“I’m sorry, too.”
She smiled.“It was unreasonable for me to do what I did.”
“Riley, it’s all right. We’re here now.”
Whatever she had just taken from the oven made Ashe’s belly grumble. He’d eaten enough restaurant food for one day, though he’d barely touched the many pastries and fruit platters that had graced the buffet table during the press junket. The aroma of mashed potato and butter, cheddar and nutmeg made his mouth water. The dish reminded him of his mother’s meat pies, but there was something different.
“Were you expecting someone for dinner? You’ve got two pies there,” he said as she removed her arms from around his waist and switched off the oven.
“No, but now that you’re here, I’m expecting you,” she giggled, pushing him out of the kitchen so she could open the refrigerator and pull out a bowl of salad she had set aside, covered in plastic wrap. “Kyle gave me this recipe for vegetarian shepherd’s pie and I wanted to try it. For all I know it could be horrible, and I don’t know if you’ll like it.”
“I will love it, Riley,” said Ashe, grinning. Kyle, or ‘Mr. Kyle’ as she used to call him, was one of Riley’s regular customers. He came every day during the week, and she didn’t need to ask him for his order. The moment he walked through the door she made cappuccino, and not in a paper cup either; old-fashioned cappuccino in a demitasse. He even had his own table in the far corner which was always laden with books so no one would sit there until he walked in, then the books would mysteriously disappear.
“Is there anything I can do?” asked Ashe. “Will I set the table, perhaps?”
“You can wash your make-up off and get comfortable,” she laughed. “I hate it when you’re more beautiful than I am.”
“I’ll never be more beautiful than you.”
“So says the man who’s among the finalists for Sexiest Man of the Year,” Riley remarked with a smile, snapping the kitchen towel toward him.
“Be careful, now,” Ashe warned, grinning back at her. “It might all go to my head.”
“Go!” urged Riley, pushing him toward the bathroom with his compliance. It was moments like this that made Ashe love her even more. Her spontaneity and the easy way she laughed always had the power to make him smile.
She was right about the make-up. Though he’d washed off the cosmetics for his TV appearances that morning, he’d had to sit through a lighter application for the press junkets, which had included filming a few promotional video clips meant for the web. He stepped into the shower and washed off the scent of work, hotel suites and cigarette smoke, and most of all, Catriona’s perfume, which seemed to cling to his nostrils.
Fifteen minutes later, Ashe emerged wrapped only in a towel and went to get dressed behind the wooden divider that separated her bed from the rest of the studio apartment. He kept a few pieces of clothing inside her closet, most of them for lounging, like jeans and sweatpants. Hers was the one place he didn’t want to be reminded of work, though sometimes they discussed it. To Ashe, it was a place where there was just Riley and himself and no one else. There was Miss Bailey, of course, but she was a cat and minded her own business most of the time; Ashe suspected that she didn’t mind either way as long as her dish was full and the litter box refilled whenever necessary.
Riley’s vegetarian shepherd’s pie was delicious, the meat replaced by lentils along with tomatoes, onions and carrots. Ashe would have devoured an entire pie if he hadn’t remembered that he had another picture shoot at the theater the following day. Even with a moderate helping the lentils made the dish filling and the wine, a New Zealand pinot noir, was divine. With conversation focused primarily on why Riley had taken the week off—manicure, pedicure, facial and the final fittings with Ashe’s stylist—he felt the stresses of the day slide away.
Afterward, despite her protests, Ashe did the dishes and put them all away as she showered. After all, he told her, she had made dinner and the least he could do was clean up. Doing such mundane things grounded him and made him feel normal. There were no assistants tittering around him, asking him if he needed anything or reading off the day’s schedule and directing him to where he needed to go or whoever he was supposed to see next. Domesticity made the events outside the apartment building feel almost trivial, though they were far from that. They were things that Riley needed to know, now more than ever.
“Catriona was downstairs when I arrived,” Ashe said as Riley sat down next to him in her bathrobe, her hair slightly damp from the shower. She took that in, frowning.
“Is that why you wanted to know if anyone had been by? You could have simply said so.”
“I was too upset to talk about it then, but I’ve calmed down now.”
She sighed. “Well, at least you waited till after dinner. I wouldn’t have been a happy camper if she’d shown up at my door. What does she want from you?”
“She wants me to help her,” Ashe replied after a pause.
“Help her do what, exactly?”
“To get her name in with Abe and maybe get involved in a few projects in development. She believes I owe her.”
“Owe her for what? Discovering you and then trying to ruin your career with her stupid blind items? Does she actually think that will get you to do whatever she wants?”
Ashe shrugged. Although Betty had made it clear that reporters must confine their questions to the play, she’d had to remove two reporters who had tried it on. “God knows. No, I don’t owe her anything. Like I told her downstairs, whatever debt she thinks I owe her was paid by Hazel.”
The moment Ashe said his sister’s name, exhaustion hit him. He closed his eyes and leaned his head on the couch, pinching the bridge of his nose with his fingers.
“What happened with Hazel?”
“I let her get close to Catriona; too close,” replied Ashe, feeling the couch shift next to him as Riley repositioned herself. When he opened his eyes, Ashe saw that she was now sitting cross-legged beside him. He exhaled, realizing that up to now he’d never told anyone what had happened the night he’d walked out on Catriona.
“When she wasn’t driving my parents up the wall with her antics, Hazel lived with me and the lads in Hackney, in London. When she was diagnosed with leukemia, she stayed with us during her treatments in the city. Mum and Dad couldn’t leave the farm for too long, and so I took responsibility for her whenever she was in London.”
Riley smiled. “You were a good brother.”
“I was the boring older brother,” Ashe said, chuckling. “Of the two of us, she was always the wild one. She was a little delicate, and so she was spared from most of the chores. Mind you, being delicate didn’t stop her from running away with the circus because she fancied herself in love with the trapeze artist, or joining a goth crowd when she was thirteen because she thought they were mad cool. When I first moved to London, she thought she could live with me then but of course it was out of the question. She was barely fourteen.”
“She must have been a handful.”
Ashe chuckled. “Aye, petal, she was. And when she got sick again, I tried to help as much as possible. I was going to drama school but I did whatever I could, financially and in other ways.”
“Did Catriona help, too?”
He shook his head. “No. As far as Catriona was concerned, she would tell me about upcoming roles but I was responsible for acquiring them. Everything else I paid on my own and Hazel stayed with me and the lads while she had her treatments. It was my responsibility to keep her away from trouble, and I didn’t.”
“What happened?”
“I made the mistake of introducing her to Catriona, who thought that it would be interesting to show my sister what I was really like behind closed doors. Maybe she did it out of desperation, to punish me, to show me who was the real Dominant. I don’t know; I stopped agonizing over the reason a long time ago.”
“So that’s when you quit this BDSM thing.”
Ashe nodded. “More or less. I gave Catriona back her collar just before I had to go to Cornwall to shoot a scene for a mini-series. I promised we’d talk when I got back, but we never got around to it after what happened with Hazel.”
“What exactly happened?”
“While I was away filming, Catriona invited Hazel to one of our play parties at Club Fet. I had given Catriona strict instructions never to show Hazel what we did behind closed doors. She was too young to know such things, especially about her brother.”
“How old was she?”
“She was eighteen.” Ashe felt his jaw clench and his throat tightening. “It was the same day I’d finished filming in Cornwall. When I received a call to say that Catriona had brought Hazel into the Romper Room, I could have killed her. It’s one thing to have an inkling of what your brother may be involved in, and another to see it with your own eyes.”
Ashe had to stop for a few seconds, his heart pounding as he fought away the memories. It was no use struggling; he had to open that box of secrets and let everything out.
“I arrived at the club too late that night.” He paused, finding it difficult to continue but forcing himself to, omitting the one detail he couldn’t yet say out loud. “She’d been drugged, Riley. Looking back now, I’m glad of it because it meant that she had no memory of what was done to her. I was in no state to drive and Lance drove us all the way to Reeth while I stayed with Hazel and made sure she was all right. Two months later, she called me while I was working in London to tell me she was pregnant.”
Riley’s brow furrowed. “So Rowan’s father is someone from the club?”
“I’m afraid so.”
Riley’s hand tightened around his. “I thought your neighbor, Will Emerson, was Rowan’s dad. When you took me home to meet your parents last Christmas, didn’t you introduce him to me as Rowan’s dad? Everyone referred to him that way.”
“As far as Rowan is concerned, he is her father,” Ashe replied tersely. “Will offered to marry her and raise Rowan as his own. He was her first boyfriend, after all, and he loved her. Reeth is a small town, and he didn’t want to hear Rowan being called a bastard; none of us did. A year later, after Rowan was born, Hazel’s cancer returned; by then I was already working in Hollywood. I had a failed pilot here, a supporting role there, but I flew back whenever I could until she went into remission again. When she died, I couldn’t forgive myself. She’d flown out to watch me make a movie on location; her older brother finally making it big in a Hollywood production. Then she caught a bloody cold on her way back that turned into pneumonia.”
His voice broke then, his jaw clenching as he spoke. “Seeing Catriona again brings everything back, Riley, everything I don’t want to remember. It reminds me of how I failed Hazel, and what a selfish prick I am.”
“You may be driven, Ashe, but you’re far from selfish,” she said.
“How can you say that? You just found out from me that you could be illegitimate, not too long after finding out what Paige and Clint had done behind your back. Now here I am talking about my sister and managing to bring everything back to me again. How can you say I’m not selfish?”
“Because you’re not,” Riley said angrily. “Are you going to question my judgment too? Are you going to tell me what to think?”
Her question caught Ashe by surprise and he shook his head, his voice softening. “No, of course not.”
“That’s how I know you’re not selfish, Ashe,” Riley continued. “Because you do everything you can to empower me. You give me choices. And as for my dad saying that I’m a bastard, so what? Does it change who I am?”
“No, it doesn’t You’re still my Riley.” Ashe pulled her toward him and she straddled his hips, the split in her robe revealing that she wore nothing underneath. Riley wrapped her arms behind his neck as she drew her face closer to his until their foreheads touched. She smelled of lavender and roses.
“You’re my Ashe, and you’re far from selfish. In fact, you love too much sometimes.”
“Maybe so.”
“But I want my old Ashe back,” she whispered. “I want the man whose smiles always reached his eyes. I want the Ashe who believed in himself, the one who always reminded me that tabloid gossip is only business and that even bad PR is still PR, the same one who told me never to believe what I read in the tabloids. I want the one who loves me whether I’m Riley Eames, Riley X, or ‘Ashe Hunter’s current plaything.’”
At her last words, Ashe groaned. “Riley, there’s a storm coming, and I don’t want you caught up in it. Whatever it is Catriona wants from me, her program or anything else, she’s not going to give up until she gets it. The way she’s going about all this may well expose what I used to be, and Hollywood might not be ready for it. I could lose everything I’ve worked so hard for all these years. Most of all, I could lose you.”
“Then let the storm come,” Riley said, her hands cupping the sides of his face as she gazed at him intently. “I don’t know how Hollywood is going to take the news about your past, but I do know you: I know you won’t give up something you love without a fight.” She kissed him, her lips soft and warm against his mouth before she pulled back. “And if Catriona thinks she can bamboozle her way back into your life without caring whom she hurts along the way, then she’s in for a surprise. Call me selfish, Ashe, but I’m not sharing you with anyone.”