It’s bloody arctic downstairs. Thank god we’re staying at my place tonight,” Dylan said, climbing back into my bed and handing me coffee.
The clock read 6:45 a.m., and the early Monday morning sun was just peeking through the light layer of frost on the windows. He pulled the duvet up over his bare chest and wrapped his hands around his own coffee mug.
“Aw, poor baby,” I teased. “Are your aristocratic toes too delicate for my unheated floors?” A cold front had come in, and late October had arrived with a vengeance.
Dylan looked at me with playful revenge in his eyes, put his coffee down, and slid closer to me under the covers. Suddenly I felt a sharp shock of cold on my warm legs as his frigid feet pressed against my skin. I shrieked and quickly put my coffee down before he wrapped me completely in his chilled body.
“Dylan!” I yelled into his cool chest and laughed as he tried to maximize my exposure to his freezing-cold limbs. In no time he was on top of me, tenting me with his body and the duvet. The heat between us built and the warmth returned. He brushed my hair from my face and kissed me sweetly on the lips while nudging my legs apart with his knee.
“You know, damsel,” he started, punctuating his thought with a seductive kiss to my neck, “if you would just move in with me”—a kiss to my collarbone—“Molly would make the coffee.” His head moved farther south, disappearing beneath the duvet. He kissed me between my breasts, and suddenly I wasn’t cold anywhere. “And your toes would always be warm.”
I fought off my arousal enough to grab his face with my hands and pull it up to my own, kissing him sternly on the lips. “My toes weren’t cold,” I pointed out, smiling smugly. “As much as I adore your housekeeper, my boyfriend made me coffee. And we’ve been over this—it’s too soon.”
“One of these days I’m going to get you to say yes,” he said with an evil gleam in his eye, and he resumed his attack. He bit down gently on my nipple, and I was a goner. That familiar heat pulsed through my veins, and my attention was limited to the physical sensations at every place our bodies touched. My hips thrust up to meet his. Our toes were warm. My coffee was forgotten.
* * *
It was quarter to nine by the time we were dressing for work, and Dylan looked at his watch, sighing. “We have to get out of this habit,” he said. “I used to be in the office a half hour earlier before you came along.” He said it as though he wasn’t one hundred percent responsible for our delay, and I gave him a skeptical glare that said as much. Plus, he may have been trying to mean what he was saying, but he had his hand in my panties and was pulling them off of me while he was saying it. “No. Knickers.”
“This was entirely your fault,” I replied as I pulled the black lacey thong back over my heeled brown boots, up my legs, and swatted away his hand. “I have a meeting today with Hannah and a potential investor. About the store. I’m wearing a skirt. I need underwear.”
“What time is the meeting likely to end?” he asked, alternately holding up two ties to his neck—one a rich burgundy, the other a trendy olive color. He was looking over my shoulder into the full-length mirror behind me, deciding. I took the silky olive-colored tie from his hand and draped it around his collar, and he promptly started to knot the fabric at his neck.
“It’s a lunch thing, so probably two?” I turned around so he could fasten the clasp on my skirt for me, which he did without looking. When I turned back around, I tweaked the fabric behind one of his cuff links, straightening it.
In no time at all we’d fallen into these little habits, habits that involved touching each other when there was no earthly reason why touching each other would be necessary. As if I’d never fastened my own skirt before. As if he couldn’t straighten his own cuffs. We were unabashedly in the thick of it. Touching each other. Looking at each other. As though these things would sustain us during our workdays. As though they were the very things that kept us in love.
“Perfect,” he replied, and I looked at him quizzically. “I’ll come round at quarter past and remove them for you.”
I rolled my eyes and laughed despite myself as I left my bedroom, Dylan following right behind. When we landed in the kitchen, reality hit me like a force field. Frank Abbott, my new bestie, was waiting for me, offering up a second cup of coffee in a travel mug. Frank had been my shadow for the last couple weeks. His official title was security, but I’d been calling him honey because it irritated Dylan.
Ever since that email had arrived two weeks ago, the one that still made me shudder when I thought of it, Dylan had been urging that it was smart to hire some security for when he wasn’t with me. First we had a blowout fight, wherein I reminded him that I could obviously take care of myself and he reminded me that he actually had experience with this kind of situation. In the end, as much as I hated it, I acknowledged that I didn’t have any experience with this, and we agreed to hire Frank, at least for a little while. It felt weird and excessive—people in my world just didn’t hire bodyguards—but until we knew this cyberstalker didn’t mean any real harm, I had to concede that it also felt smart.
That email had added an ever-present thread of stress to our otherwise honeymoonish lives.
LIAR. CRIMINAL. TRAITOR.
Those were the words scrawled across the intimate photo in the email. A photo that should never have been taken, of a moment that no one should have seen. We had been at Dylan’s hideaway in the country. A place surrounded by wilderness, where we should have been safe from prying eyes. But the photo was clear enough—my arms tied high above my head, my chest bare, Dylan’s lips against my skin, our naked bodies flush against each other. A moment so private that seeing it through a stranger’s lens made me see myself differently, made me see just how open I’d become with Dylan, how raw, how close.
The photo made me feel violated. And the threatening words were, apart from entirely confusing, menacing. The subject of the email had been He’s not who you think he is, referring to Dylan presumably. But I kept trying to tell myself that this email proved nothing, apart from the fact that someone had been out to get us. Him. Me. Whatever.
When it had arrived, I hadn’t known what to do. I hated to think of it, but my first instinct had been to believe the harsh words and to not trust Dylan. I’d only just started trusting him enough to let him back in. We were on the heels of the whole Amelia nonengagement/engagement fiasco, which had been spurred by the tabloids, and it felt like too much. Like the relationship gods were putting me through my paces, throwing one too many damning pieces of evidence my way.
So for two endless days I’d said nothing. I’d avoided him. I’d retreated slightly at his touches.
That night we’d been lying in his bed, me flat on my back, eyes staring into space, and him wrapped completely around me. We’d just made love, and I knew he was deep in his post-coital hazy cuddle-Lydia-into-submission phase, which I normally would have reciprocated. But I was distracted, half somewhere else, anxious that I was wrong about him.
“Baby,” he said, followed by some question about whether I’d liked what we’d just done.
“Mmm-hmm,” I replied, not a hundred percent sure I knew what I was replying to.
Before I realized what was happening, he sat up against the headboard and hauled me across his lap, so I was straddling him. Before I had a minute to even register what his intentions were, he had his huge hands braced around my body, forcing me to look at him.
“Enough,” he said. “What is going on with you?”
I didn’t say anything at first. I was stunned that this was the moment of truth. I should have known better—he could always see right through me.
“If you think for a second I haven’t noticed your one-word distracted answers over the last few days, you’re mad. I know every inch of you,” he said, confirming my suspicions.
I sighed and dropped my gaze to his chest, but Dylan promptly lifted my chin with his finger.
“What?” he asked, with notable restraint. I knew him well enough to know he wished he could dive into my mind and just take what he was looking for.
I sighed deeply and began. “I got an email a few days ago.”
He looked only curious at this point. “From whom?”
“I don’t know,” I said, and his curiosity became tinged with concern. “The sender was a series of numbers and letters, and it disappeared when I tried to forward it.” I sighed before deciding the best thing was just to be honest. “Look, I wasn’t sure I should tell you, because, well, honestly, I didn’t know what to make of it.”
“What do you mean? Lydia, what did the email say?”
This was going to be the true test. He’d either look guilty, indicating the truth of the words in the email, or he’d looked shocked, displaying his innocence. “There was a photo. Of us,” I said, and Dylan’s eyes widened slightly. “At your house in the country. In the bedroom.” His eyes widened more and became tinged with something darker. “My arms…” I trailed off, not really able to say it out loud, and instead raised my arms them above my body, mimicking the position I’d been in in the photo. “My breasts,” I said, and I could hear the vulnerability in my voice, the discomfort at having been photographed that way. “Your mouth, your naked back, your profile.” Dylan’s eyes were narrowing now, lining themselves in anger and worry. “The photo was a little grainy, black and white, but it was clear it was us. Clear as day.”
Dylan straightened in the bed, almost going into business mode, ultra-protective mode, a mode that was laced with his concern for me. His friend Grace, who’d committed suicide after being hounded by the paparazzi when they thought she and Dylan were dating, was all of a sudden present in the conversation—his terror that something like that could happen to me. But that’s not what this was about—this hadn’t been paparazzi. It had been a threat. And, I guess, maybe that was worse.
“Dylan,” I resumed, and I told him about the incriminating words scrawled across his back in the photo, about the accusatory subject heading.
As soon as I told him, just saying the words out loud, I knew in my gut that I had been wrong to mistrust him. And as soon as he wrapped his arms clear around me and pulled me into him, I was able to release the tension I’d been carrying around for days. He held me like that for longer than I probably realized, rubbing my back.
“I’m so sorry, damsel. You shouldn’t have to deal with this kind of crap.”
My head flew up. I had been expecting righteous anger, shocked fury, fear that someone was out there directing their evil intent our way. But apart from his initial concerned reaction, he was mostly calm. “Why aren’t you surprised?” I asked.
“Lydia, this crap is just part of my life. People—in the press or in private—say things that aren’t true about me on a daily basis,” he started and then exhaled with sorrowful resignation. “They’ll start saying them about you too before long.” He stroked my cheek with his fingers, and I could see the distaste for these intrusions in his eyes. I thought back to his “engagement” to Amelia and realized just how true this was. I thought back to him telling me how his phone had been tapped and how the police had actually assisted the paparazzi in that situation. He was used to being targeted.
I leaned into him, sighing deeply, inhaling the comforting scent radiating from his warm chest, and he ran his fingers along my spine.
“I’m afraid, baby, that this isn’t uncommon. There’s never been a photo used in one of these personal attacks, and I’m concerned that they were able to get that photo in particular,” he said, and I could hear his brain turning, trying to work out who might be behind it. “But now that you’re here,” he added, squeezing me for emphasis, “they have a new way to get to me. My personal life has always been somewhat unavailable.”
A particular Dylan brand of protectiveness and frustration was running through him—I could feel it. It was like concentration paired with barely tethered energy. “You must understand that when money and position are at stake, people will go to great lengths…I will take care of this,” he said reassuringly. “I have a good sense of who the likely culprits are.”
“Who?” I’d asked.
“I don’t want you to worry about it. Hale Shipping has its own set of…complicated relationships in the world. Or my father has, anyway. This is likely a retaliation for something. I will find out and make sure it’s taken care of.” I looked up at him and could see the determination written all over him. I had no doubt that he would have this wrapped up by sundown the next day given the energy in the room. “I don’t want you to worry, but, baby, this needs to be taken seriously until I know for sure who is behind it and that it’s an isolated incident.”
I met Frank the next day after work. Dylan reassured me Frank would be necessary only for a little while, until he knew for sure that there was no threat, but he didn’t give any indication of how long a little while was.
Dylan stood, frustrated, as I explained that this new security plan was all well and good, but I hoped Frank enjoyed taking the Tube and walking to work. I had waited a long time to live in London, and I wasn’t about to be trapped in an isolated car when I could be out, in the city. Walking and taking the train made me feel connected to London, like I could breathe it in, become a part of it. Dylan knew me well enough to know not to argue, and I knew him well enough to know he admired me standing my ground.
Now, here I was, two weeks later, entering my kitchen and seeing Frank’s now familiar face smiling back at me.
“Morning, honey,” I said to Frank, walking fully into the kitchen and popping my hip in an exaggerated flirtatious gesture. He laughed at my little act of defiance.
“It’s not getting any funnier,” said Dylan, grabbing his keys from the counter.
“Oh, sure it is. Right, schnookems?” I batted my eyes at Frank, who was not my type at all. Big, bald, bearded, burly, with an elaborate tattoo peeking out of the collar of his pressed white shirt. He couldn’t have been more than thirty-five, and if you had a thing for ax-wielding, rugged Alaskan types, he’d be your man. Even in a suit, he looked like he’d be more at home bear tracking than driving the Jaguar. I’d been surprised, expecting Dylan to hire only the most refined-looking staff, but when I’d raised an eyebrow after meeting my lumberjack one-man security team, Dylan had simply shrugged and said, “He’s the best.”
“All right, all right,” Dylan chided, and he gave poor Frank a firm stare. Then he turned back to me and pushed me against the counter in the kitchen, digging his hips into me, leaning his face over mine. He hovered his lips near my ear and whispered, “Remember, damsel. You’re mine. Be good, and I’ll reward you later.” Then he kissed my ear so gently it almost tickled, but instead it stoked the fire that hummed under my skin any time I was near him.
When he pushed back from the counter, allowing space between us, I suddenly remembered we weren’t alone—he had a way of making the world disappear, even if just for a moment. And when he cleared his throat, I knew he’d been affected too. He smiled mischievously and said in a more audible tone, “You’ve got this, baby. You’re one hundred percent right that Hannah should open a brick-and-mortar store. It’s a brilliant plan, and I have no doubt you’re the woman to do it. You’re going to be stunning today.” He was driving his gaze into my own, making sure I heard him, and I nodded. “Take the car—” he started.
“Already planning on it, smarty-pants,” I said with victory. I knew he’d been preparing to go all dominant on me and insist. “I’m going to have Frank take me to the meeting. I don’t want to risk being late.”
I caught the chuckle in Dylan’s voice as he shook his head slightly, clearly amused at my beating him to the punch.
“I love you,” he said, flashing me one of his killer smiles before heading out the door to where his driver, Lloyd, was waiting for him in the long, sleek, silver Mercedes-Benz.
I took a minute to catch my breath. He didn’t say I love you often—he was, after all, still a stoic, proper Brit—but when he did, god, well, he must know what it did to me. I tried to shake it off. I grabbed the coffee from Frank’s hands, thanked him, and said, “Sorry about that, buttercup—I hope I didn’t get you into too much trouble.”
Frank laughed and closed the door behind me. “Not at all, Lydia. Not at all.”