Chapter Fourteen
Vince
Carly looks like sin personified in a tight black dress. The V is cut clear down to her belly button. Her magnificent breasts beg for attention as she backs herself up against the wall, smiling that sultry smile, her long blonde hair falling in waves over her shoulders. I reach for her, wanting to touch her, but I can’t. An invisible wall stops me. I push against it, but it’s like a thick barrier or glass. I can see through it, I can watch everything happening, but I can’t reach it myself. They can’t hear me when I try to call out.
A firm hand pushes the strap over Carly’s shoulder, but it’s not mine. A dark head bends to lavish her breast with attention, to take her nipple in his mouth and tease it until she’s moaning, eyes closed with pleasure, but it’s not mine. Carly’s fingers move through his hair the same way they moved through mine… but it’s not me.
He straightens. Grabs her arms and pins them against the wall. His gaze rakes over her body, half covered, half bared for him. “Tell me what you want, sweetheart.”
Carly’s breathless. More breathless than she’s ever been for me, and he doesn’t even have her naked. He’s barely touched her. She still seems to be so tormented with desire, she can hardly manage, “You, Mateo. I want you.”
A slow, wicked grin claims his lips, then he leans in and claims hers. Her arms wind around his neck and she pulls him closer as his hand snakes between her legs. She moans against his mouth, then breaks away, her head falling back against the wall as he works his magic on her.
With his fingers still inside her, his hand anchored on her hip, Mateo turns his head to look at me behind the glass.
And the fucker winks.
---
The darkness of my bedroom is a temporary relief. I swallow down the dread, but the rage is still there. It wasn’t real. It was just a dream. Just a fucking dream.
So why does it fucking hurt?
I lie here for a minute, trying to sort my shit out, but there’s too much of every emotion running through me and I need to get it out.
I grab my phone and check the time. Not quite 6am. Fan-fucking-tastic.
I drag my ass out of bed, pull on some clothes, and go out for a run. Maybe if I pound the pavement, I can work out some of this anger. I should head to the gym, take out some aggression on a speed bag. I can imagine Mateo’s smug fucking face and beat it until my knuckles bleed.
Rage curdles my gut and I run harder.
Flashes torment me with every stretch of road I cover—Carly’s face last night, looking up at me with teary eyes. She didn’t look at me like that before. She never looked so betrayed when I got pissed off at her, when I got a little rough with her. I’d never hurt her. She knows that, right? I say shit sometimes, but I just get carried away.
Fuck.
Dream Carly, with Mateo’s fucking hands all over her. I still feel like I’m stuck behind the glass, and the asshole isn’t even here.
What if she was with him before? She didn’t actually deny it. She gave me some asshole’s name. Haven’t looked into it yet. Honestly, I don’t want to. I’m afraid of what I’ll find if I go digging into Carly’s past, and that alone should be enough to convince me to go home, throw my shit in a duffel, and clear the fuck out of Connecticut.
But why would he send her?
It would make sense of some weird coincidences, though. The shampoo she picked up when she went home to Chicago. Obviously Mateo would know what kind of shampoo Mia always used. Some of the shit Carly wears, I swear I’ve seen on Mia before. I don’t know designers or any of that shit, but it just looks like Mia. Mateo could easily have his personal shopper pick up a few outfits for Carly in Mia’s style and doll her up to catch my attention.
But why? And what was she to him? Could she have been his own personal Mia surrogate? She would’ve been 18 when Mia moved out to live with me. If Mateo wanted a Mia replacement to keep him company and remind him of her, Carly might work.
It’s hard for me to imagine him not falling for Carly though, and he never brought her around. With her sexy little smile, her perfect lips, her gentle persistence. No matter if you’re a stubborn pain in the ass; she can always find a new path to your heart. If he’d found Carly when Mia left, why not just keep Carly? Carly’s amazing.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
When did she say she was involved with that guy? Did she say? I don’t think so.
Does it have to matter?
If she did fuck Mateo long before she ever met me, does it have to matter?
I wish it didn’t, but it does. It sours my stomach. The dream comes back to me. I’ll never be able to get it out of my head.
I run. I run harder. I run some more.
When my legs are tired and I’m exhausted, I stop at the nearest store for a bottle of water. There’s a frozen chest of various ice creams up front, and my gaze lands on a single ice cream sandwich. It reminds me of Carly’s stupid scenario yesterday at the diner, her Billy Bob, or whatever the fuck his name was.
I grab an ice cream sandwich and toss it on the counter as I draw out my wallet. “That, too.”
By the time I get home, I’m beat. I put the ice cream sandwich in the freezer and head down the hall, tiredly checking each room, pushing doors open, making sure no one is waiting for me. I almost wish he was. I want this to be over.
No one’s here to kill me today, so I take a shower. I have to work tonight and I’m already exhausted. I should just go back to sleep. Chances are slip that Carly’s going to come beating on my door after last night.
Boss man.
I’ve been so lazy about looking into her. I may not have the resources I used to have, but I still know how to check out a basic fucking story and make sure it makes sense. I should’ve asked more questions about her internship. I should fact check the information she gives me. I should ask more questions, like how someone without a job can afford to buy me a bunch of Christmas shit when she’s paying her sister’s tuition.
I should look up Gavin Halstead and find out why she thinks I’d judge her for getting involved with him.
There are a lot of things I should do, and I don’t want to do any of them. I just want to climb into bed with her and ignore the shaky ground we’re standing on. Let her wrap her arms around me, breathe in the coconut, and close my fucking eyes.
It’s all falling apart. All it took was one text message.
This is why I can’t fucking trust people. Everything is a lie. My whole fucking life has just been one lie after the other. I just want it to stop.
By the time my shower ends, I’m too tired to go next door and take Carly her ice cream sandwich. It won’t go the way I want it to, anyway.
I grab my phone and check the messages, but I haven’t heard from her since last night. I don’t even know if she’ll answer me, but I stare at the screen for a minute, then type out, “Can you come over?”
She reads it after just a few seconds and sends back an unenthusiastic, “Yeah.”
I let her know the door is unlocked, but I don’t move from my bed. Eventually, Carly stands in the doorway, looking in at me. She’s wearing black leggings and a huge sweater that bares on her shoulders. She’s holding a little rectangular package wrapped in red and black plaid paper, a fabric ribbon wrapped around it and tied in a bow.
I almost laugh. “You brought me a present?”
She steps across the threshold and sets the present down on my dresser instead of bringing it over to me. “It’s the one I got for you yesterday.”
Now she approaches me, but she remains by the side of the bed instead of climbing on.
It feels a little like my dream. Like there’s a sheet of glass between us, and I shouldn’t touch her.
I do anyway. I take her by the hips and pull her on top of me, just to see if she’ll come. She does. She moves her legs so she’s straddling me, sitting on top of me. My stupid dick stirs, reminding me how many times we’ve started something and left it unfinished. I ignore it, reaching up and brushing a hand along her jawline. I want to see if she’ll give me more, so I pull her down until she’s lying on top of me and I kiss her.
She kisses me back, but she still feels withdrawn. I get the feeling I could roll her over, spread her legs, and fuck her—but she would go through the motions, emotionally removed.
I swallow down dread at the thought of reliving an experience like that.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her.
Her gaze remains on my chest, not my face. I think she’s trying to figure out how to say something that either she doesn’t like, or she thinks I won’t like. After a moment, she comes up with, “I realize that when other people aren’t around I may respond to things a little differently and be more tolerant of certain things, but you can’t do stuff like that when my little sister’s around. She didn’t hear or see anything, but she could have, and that would have looked… It would have appeared to her that I’m not in a very safe relationship, and I don’t want her worrying about that.”
Her words are like a knife in my gut. The way she delivers them, it’s like she’s trying to protect me from my own reality. She doesn’t want to accuse me of anything, but she wants to let me know we have to keep the way I act a secret so no one gets concerned for her.
Shame coils around my heart and squeezes. I am my father’s fucking son.
“I don’t want you to feel that way, Carly.”
She shakes her head. “I’m not trying to make you feel badly.”
“I know, that’s why you’re making me feel terrible. I don’t want to be like that. I don’t want to be… a shameful secret you have to keep. You don’t deserve that.”
Carly cocks her head to the side, her brow furrowing as she studies me. After a moment, she sighs. I don’t know why. Then she leans in, a bit of warmth coming back to her. Her hands move through my hair and she gives me another kiss, a better kiss, a kiss she wants to give me.
“You are not a dirty secret I need to keep,” she assures me. “I know you have some demons. With the family you come from, I would be frankly stunned if you didn’t. Like I said, we’re going to tackle them together. But we have to trust one another. I need you to know I am not here to harm you in any way, and I need to know the same thing from you. It’s okay if you get angry. It’s okay if you don’t know how to cope with it yet. How would you? Who would have taught you? You may have figured it out by some stroke of luck, but you weren’t given the tools to manage your emotions. I understand that. That can be learned. There’s nothing wrong with you. I just want us to do our very best for one another. We don’t have to be perfect. We’re allowed to make mistakes. At the end of the day, we’re all just works-in-progress.”
I sigh, pulling her down on the bed beside me and turning, pulling her into my arms. “I have questions, but I don’t even know if I want the answers.”
Her smile lacks even a shred of humor. “I have answers, but I don’t know if you’ll want to hear them.”
“We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?”
Carly nods. “Hit me with the most crucial.”
It’s the most crucial one I’m most afraid of. I hate even bringing this up again after last night, and I don’t know what we’re supposed to do if her answer if the wrong one. We’ve been inside an official relationship for a single day.
Life really goes to shit the minute you become official with me. I probably should have warned her about that.
“Have you ever slept with Mateo?” I ask her.
There’s no hesitation. She shakes her head, holding my gaze. “No, I have not.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. Everything else feels manageable. That was the one I didn’t know how to get past. Never figured it out with Mia, and I haven’t learned the secret in our years apart, apparently.
“Your internship—that’s real? And it was really your boss who texted you last night?”
This time, she nods her head wordlessly.
“Okay. How is it you can afford to live without a job? I didn’t get the impression your family had any money to speak of, and you don’t have a career yet, so…”
Sighing, Carly pulls away from me and rolls onto her back. “This is the one I’ve been dreading. I’m afraid you won’t want to be with me after I tell you this. I guess I would understand. It would make me really sad,” she adds, turning her head to look at me with sad eyes. “But I would get it.”
I don’t know if I’m ready to hear whatever she has to say.
I don’t know where it will leave us.
But I do know it’s time to find out.
“Tell me.”