Chapter Seven
Claire stared at the contents of her closet—which were now the contents of her bed—and tried to figure out when in her life she’d managed to accumulate so many clothes.
And how come, in the entire pile, she didn’t have a single outfit that said “Dessert at a swanky hotel restaurant with an unbearably hot ex and the father of her child, whom she hadn’t seen in years and had less than zero interest in, no matter what her heart rate suggested at just the thought of him.”
“Go casual,” Mack said, pulling out a pair of jeans. “Don’t even change. You barely know him, and he’s leaving soon, anyway. There’s no reason to put in the effort.”
“Go big,” Abbi countered, flipping a streak of purple hair behind her ear. “You’re not the girl he left behind anymore. Show him that.”
“I left him,” Claire reminded her, putting down the jeans Mack had tossed her and picking up a black pair instead. “And he’s already seen me now. Twice. So it’s not like I can show up with rainbow highlights and act like I suddenly got cool.”
“You are cool,” Abbi protested. Which was sweet but…come on. Claire knew her limits.
Which was why she’d called this emergency meeting in the first place.
“Go so sexy it kills him,” Sam piped up. She went straight for a low-cut number Claire immediately vetoed. “Don’t you dare tell Austin, but that’s totally what I would do.”
“I can’t pull off killer sexy even if I wanted to.”
“You’re raising a smart, curious future president into adulthood and running your own business. That’s hot, Claire.”
“I’m also getting ready to tell him that he can’t meet his own daughter because he gave up that right when he told me he didn’t want anything to do with us. I might as well be honest and just wear black and carry a pitchfork.”
Abbi winced. “He actually said that?”
“It’s not a direct quote. But that was the basic idea.”
“On second thought, I’m with Mack. Don’t even shower.”
But Claire thought about the look in his eyes when he’d seen the photograph. The way everything hard in him had suddenly…softened. In that instant, he hadn’t looked like the Ryan she’d left.
He’d looked like the man she remembered from long before, the one who brought her flowers and breakfast in bed and made her laugh so hard her sides hurt.
And he’d looked completely different, too, like someone she hadn’t even met yet. Somebody totally new.
Somehow, she wound up not only showering but putting some sort of goop in her hair that was supposed to make it less frizzy. While she was getting ready, Sam ran home to bring over a black dress of hers that she claimed would be perfect.
Perfect for what? Claire wanted to know. But by that point, she was going to be late if she didn’t just go with it.
As soon as she walked into the hotel lobby, though, she felt like she should have gone for jeans. Her early years with Ryan had been so effortless. They’d seen each other across the room on a night when neither one of them was trying. They’d both been wearing T-shirts and Converse. They’d laughed about it. There hadn’t been all this hinting, all this mystery, trying to gauge intentions. All this history that hurt.
Ryan doesn’t want a family, she reminded herself. It wasn’t like her kid was suddenly going to be spending summers in Chicago, dividing holidays between parents. It was just the novelty that had made him look at Maya’s picture that way.
And she was never going to introduce Maya to Ryan—no matter how charming he could be. What was she supposed to say? “Hi, sweetie. This strange man you’ve never met before is your dad. Now that I’ve sent an earthquake through your world, he’s going back to Chicago, and you’ll probably never see him again. How about that Mom of the Year award?”
So really, she didn’t need to be here.
She didn’t need to be following the maître d’ across the restaurant.
And she definitely didn’t need to be heading away from the tables in the center of the room, toward one of the large black sofas in the corner, lit only by a candle on the low square table in front.
But that was where Ryan was sitting, wearing dark jeans and a sweater, running a hand through his unfairly touchable hair. Just talk about how Maya’s doing great, say you’re happy his album is selling well, remind him that your lives are separate now, and get the hell home.
Too bad even the sofa was against her. It sank beneath her so that as soon as she realized she should have sat farther away from him, there was no way to move. Even worse, Sam’s dress rode up her thighs when she sat, and she couldn’t pull it down without drawing more attention to how much it showed.
“This is nice,” she murmured, glancing around the room.
“It’s gorgeous,” he said. But he wasn’t looking at the stylish bar. He was looking at her.
She tried to stay focused on why she’d come. She asked him about the tour, his new album, what living in Chicago was like. She told him about opening her massage therapy business and why she liked Gold Mountain so much. She had no idea where to begin when he asked her about Maya, though. There was so much to share—and so much to protect.
But he was listening so intently that it was hard to hold back. She could feel how close he was, the press of his thigh against hers. She could sense that it would always be easy to talk to him, no matter how much was left unsaid.
She was grateful when the waitress came over and they had to pull away. They hadn’t even looked at the menu yet. Maybe that would buy her some time, stop her head from spinning. She needed a chance to collect herself before she lost her mind. Ryan wasn’t just a sexy guy who looked at her the way he always had, like she was the only woman in the world and he’d been waiting his whole life to find her. He was the man who’d broken her heart, and she’d better not forget it.
But as soon as she opened the dessert menu, it was harder to stay composed. First on the list was the Chocolate Orgasm, a sinful-sounding molten cake topped with homemade whipped cream. Right now, flushed and heated, she didn’t just want the chocolate.
She wanted the orgasm, too.
To go, please, since sharing either of those with the man next to her was obviously a very, very bad idea.
Ryan must have known exactly what she was thinking because he leaned even closer than they’d been before the waitress came. “I know what you want,” he said devilishly.
“Cheesecake?” Her voice practically squeaked.
“Nope.”
“Tiramisu?”
“I’ve always thought of that as such a tease. Sure, it’s got chocolate, but barely. Why waste time with all that foreplay?”
Oh, please. Claire leveled her gaze at him. “You don’t believe in foreplay?”
He reached over and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. She could guess it was all over the place, no matter how hard Abbi had tried to tame it. She never should have given Ryan a chance to talk to her more. She never should have come. Now here they were, so close to each other, as though no time at all had passed.
“On the contrary,” he said, and then his voice dropped. “But that doesn’t mean every taste shouldn’t be the real deal.”
His eyes locked with hers, the gray darkened to the deep blue of a midnight ocean in the corner where they sat. Was he always like this, so impossible to resist?
She looked away, scanning the rest of the menu frantically, trying to come up with something other than what she obviously wanted. What he knew she wanted. What under any other circumstances, with any other person, she might even have let herself have.
“I think I’ll get the carrot cake,” she said lamely.
That grin again. His lips moved only a little, but his eyes shifted, the gray lightening. A flicker. A tease.
“Now, why are you so hell-bent on denying yourself? The Claire I knew was fed up with being good.”
“The Claire you knew was practically a kid.”
Dammit. She shouldn’t be bringing up the K-word.
But he only pressed his lips together. “So, is this Claire all grown up now?”
His question hung between them. Of course, she wanted to shout. All grown up with a mortgage, a business, an admittedly tiny retirement account—but hey, tiny was bigger than zero—and a five-year-old who made late nights, leftover pizza for breakfast, and twenty-four-hour Law and Order marathons feel like relics of the past.
But no, because she was pretty sure that wasn’t what Ryan meant when he gave her that heavy-lidded look. It was clear Ryan Thomas was all grown up, too. The way he held her eyes wasn’t just panty melting. It was full-blown incinerating. She was saved from combustion only by the return of the waitress just in time.
Ryan, true to his word, didn’t order a drink. And Claire, feeling awkward about it, declined as well. They settled on decaf coffee.
“Anything else?” the waitress asked.
Ryan looked to Claire, eyebrow raised expectantly, daring her to actually order the carrot cake if she was so determined to prove he didn’t know how to get to her.
But carrot cake wasn’t a dessert. It had carrots in it! It might as well be health food.
“One chocolate orgasm,” she said through gritted teeth, not letting herself look at him.
“That’s more like it,” Ryan said, sitting back with smug satisfaction when the waitress left.
“You win,” she said. “I don’t like foreplay, either.”
“You forget how much I know that’s not true.”
She flushed, heart pounding.
“But if one orgasm isn’t enough, you can always have another,” he went on, his voice dripping low enough to make her toes curl.
“Chocolate orgasm,” she corrected him.
“Sounds kind of redundant,” he mused.
On second thought, she definitely should have gone with rabbit food. Her rattiest pair of jeans. And a conversation on the phone—preferably from Fiji, with half the world between them so she couldn’t be swayed by the heat from his smoldering gaze.
“This is my treat. So don’t be shy.”
“I’m sure one is plenty,” she demurred.
“Only if it’s a really good one.”
Was it possible for the candlelight to show how red her face was? “We’re supposed to be talking about—” Us, she almost said. Maya.
But there was no us. And did she really want to bring up Maya again?
Thank God, their coffee arrived.
He took his with no milk, which he’d always done, and a heaping spoon of sugar, which he hadn’t. “Replace one addiction with another,” he said when he finished stirring.
“What?” Claire asked, confused but glad the distraction allowed her heart rate to come down—even if it was never normal with him.
“The sugar,” he said, letting the teaspoon rest on the saucer. “It seems I can’t cut out everything. But a little extra sweetness never hurt anyone.” He took a sip. “Four years, two months, and twenty-seven days,” he added, looking at her over the mug. “In case you were wondering.”
“I wasn’t,” she said.
“Of course you were.”
“Okay, fine,” she admitted. “I was.”
It made a difference, didn’t it? It told her who, exactly, was making her pulse race right now. Was it someone who’d decided not to have a drink just for tonight? Or could she really trust he was different from the man she’d once known?
The dessert arrived. Claire dropped her spoon into the center so that when the cake broke, thick chocolate oozed onto the plate. She may have let out a small moan, although the talk of Ryan’s sobriety had been a good reminder to keep any feelings related to chocolate and orgasms bottled up inside.
“What happened four years, two months, and twenty-seven days ago?” she asked.
“Something tells me you don’t read Rolling Stone.”
She hesitated. But what did it matter if she told him the truth? “I cut all that out of my life when I—”
“Cut me out. Yeah.” He held up a hand to stop her from worrying about her words. “I get it.”
“Things were complicated.”
“That’s a nice way of putting what I did to you.”
“I needed to move on if I was going to be there for Maya.”
“Well, had you been obsessively Google-stalking the lead singer of Little White Lie like half of America, or maybe just three-quarters of New York, you would have seen that he had a miraculous rise to stardom and then humiliatingly flushed it all away when his band broke up and deserted him.”
“Why?” Claire asked, the spoon hovering halfway between the plate and her mouth.
He gave a very wry, very Ryan smile. “Why do you think?”
She ate the bite on her spoon to give herself something to do, but suddenly she hardly tasted it. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, even as she was mad at herself for saying it. Sorry for what? He was the one who’d been drinking. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
He reached over and brought his thumb to her lip.
“You have a little—”
“What?”
“There.” He wiped the pad of his thumb across her lower lip. It came away smeared with chocolate. She watched as he brought his thumb to his mouth and sucked on it. “All gone,” he said, never once taking his eyes from her.
But she had to look away. She couldn’t let herself turn to jelly because—what? He could make it through a meal without drinking in front of her? He fed her chocolate? He smiled with his eyes even when his lips barely moved?
Because he took her right back to all those years ago when, for the first time in her life, she’d felt like she was finally whole?
“Ryan,” she said. “We shouldn’t—”
“You’re so beautiful, Claire. A lot has changed since then. But clearly not everything.”
She didn’t remember when either of them had slid even closer on the sofa. Had that been his doing—or hers? She uncrossed her legs, then crossed them again. But that meant the leg on top brushed his shin, her bare skin against his jeans. In his eyes, she saw not storm clouds but something still tempestuous and ever-changing.
“You’re not good for me,” she said, trying to stay strong. She put down the spoon, but he picked it up again.
“Too much sugar?” he asked, and brought a gooey spoonful of cake to her mouth.
Her lips left a smear of chocolate on the spoon. “You always tasted so good,” he said, flicking his tongue to lick it clean.
Heat rocketed through her. This time yesterday Ryan Thomas was a distant memory. Never completely gone, but no longer with her. The past staying where it should be: behind her.
Now she was thinking about having Ryan Thomas behind her…but in a whole different way.
She knew she should leave. Just stand up and walk out the door. She could sit this close to him, eat dessert with him, flirt like she hadn’t in years. She could smother him with chocolate and lick every last smear from his body, and yes, she could love every second.
But that didn’t change their history. It didn’t make the past go away or hurt any less. It didn’t make it any less of a bad idea to bring him into Maya’s life. He was still heading back to Chicago the first chance he got.
But it was exactly the reminder that he was leaving that made something loosen up inside her. Fun. Why couldn’t she let him give her just a little?
If she walked away now, she’d always wonder. Not what might have been—she knew there was no future here. But how he tasted now. How it felt to have his hands on her again. She always had to be so damn responsible, keeping it together every second of the day. If she could let go for just a few hours, not even for a night…
“What are you thinking?” he asked, his eyes searching hers.
She took a sip of coffee to buy herself time. “Nothing important.”
“Of course it’s important.”
She shook her head.
His arm slid around her shoulder, massaging her with one hand. “You’re so wound up. Would it be so bad to just tell me?”
But it wasn’t what she wanted to say. It was what she wanted to do, without having to talk, or plan, or think about anything at all.
His hand tilted her chin toward him. “Tell me,” he said, his voice a husky whisper that made her thighs clench.
He must have seen it, the way her body still responded to him, because he didn’t wait for the answer she couldn’t give. He kissed her, hard and deep and soft all at once so that she felt her body opening to him immediately, her lips parting, drawing in his tongue. He tasted like coffee and chocolate and something so much sweeter, so much more indulgent than anything she’d just eaten.
She may not have been sure what the hell she was doing, but there was nothing tentative about his mouth on her. She was shot right back to that night when she was twenty, fake ID burning in her back pocket, Ryan pulling her into a back alleyway to press her against the brick in a way she’d never been pressed before.
She would have said she was well beyond the capacity to be shocked, to be so taken. She wasn’t that twenty-year-old girl anymore.
But Ryan’s kiss shocked her—that she could be so flooded by just one touch.
His hands came to her jaw, sliding around to cup her neck, and then one reached around and traced down to her lower back. He was covering all the places he knew she was the most sensitive—her neck, her back, the soft skin of her ear.
She pressed her leg against him, wanting more, frustrated by the clothing between them, the publicness of the place, even as she was grateful for them. There was still some sense of decorum, a line she couldn’t cross. This was a small town, and while no one she saw in the restaurant was a client, the odds were good that at some point they might be.
It was the reminder she needed. His hand began to inch up the hem of her dress, but she pulled away.
“We can’t do this,” she panted, even as his eyes raked over her and she was aware that her swollen lips and glassy eyes didn’t exactly scream stop.
“Upstairs,” he said, his voice a growl.
“I can’t.”
He brought his fingers to her chin again and raised it up a notch so her eyes met his. “If you want to, baby, then you can.”
She bit her lip. But she didn’t move away, didn’t put a single inch between them.
“It’s different now,” she said quietly. “I have responsibilities. I can’t just do whatever I want.”
He came so close she felt the scratch of his jaw against her cheek when he whispered, “You can when you’re with me.”
She thought he was going to kiss her again. But instead, he pulled away, sinking back into that soft black sofa as though they were two proper adults who weren’t right this second stacking dynamite that would blow up their lives.
Just feeling the sudden distance between them made her ache all the more for his touch. She gave a small nod, unable to stop herself, and he raised a finger, signaling to the waitress for the check. It took no time at all for him to sign it to his room, and then he was leading her by the hand across the restaurant, through the lobby, over to the elevators, and her feet were following. She was really doing this; she was really going upstairs with him. She’d spend one night with him and one night only before he went home.
If she didn’t, she’d never get over him again. She’d never stop thinking about the way it felt when he kissed her. How all she’d wanted was to feel him one last time.
She’d keep replaying this instant, this moment as the elevator doors opened and he motioned for her to step inside. She could leave now and go home to Maya, to her real life, but then she’d always be stepping into that elevator in her mind, replaying the moment, wondering what if.
This way, she’d know. She’d do it once, for old time’s sake. Then she’d remember why she left him in the first place, why she couldn’t be with him for real. He’d go back to Chicago, and she’d think of him fondly, look him up from time to time, Google him to see how his music career was going.
When Maya was older—eighteen, say—they could finally have The Talk, and she’d tell her who her father was. Not that he’d once come to town, not that she’d slept with him one last time, not that just the press of his hand on the small of her back still managed to turn her knees weak. Just the facts. Then Maya could make her own decision, could get on a bus and visit him, could wish her mom had been cool enough to stay with her awesome rock-star father, while also knowing, in her heart of hearts as she got older, how grateful she was for the stability Claire had chosen instead.
She felt bold. Reckless. Completely out of her mind. When he followed her into the elevator, she allowed him to push her against the back wall. Work, responsibilities, everything waiting for her at home—all of that vanished as soon as he parted her thighs, right as the doors closed, and kissed her.
“Fuck me, Ryan,” she moaned as he reached under her dress to palm her ass.
She wasn’t twenty anymore, and there was only so long she could hold out.
He brought his hand around, pushing the thin cotton of her underwear to the side, and slid his finger where she was already slick. She thought he was going to tease her there, play with her until she was out of her mind.
But he plunged his finger inside her so deeply she gasped.
“Darling,” he murmured, moving with excruciating slowness inside her. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”