Chapter Fourteen
When Hudson double parked his Alfa Romeo 4C Spider in front of Felicia’s apartment, he found her waiting out front, a small overnight bag at her feet, and a wary expression on her face. The woman would never make it as a poker player, but she’d kick ass as a mime. With Honeypot’s wail blaring out of the apartment, he got out, popped the trunk, and grabbed her bag off the sidewalk.
“Wondering if I’m taking you away to kill you in my cabin in the woods?”
She followed him to the back of the car, her ponytail swaying from side to side along with her hips. “Is that where we’re going?”
He dropped her bag in the trunk, using the motion as an excuse to lean down enough to inhale the fruity scent of her shampoo. That’s it. He had become a creepy freak. He jerked back a step and reminded himself for the billionth time that she was in love with someone else. “That’s what you want to know about, not the killing part?”
“I trust you,” she said, strolling to the passenger’s side and opening it before he could reach the handle. “At least not to kill me.”
“Well, don’t you take all the fun out of things.”
She got into the car, and he shut the door behind her, giving him the entire walk around the front—ignoring the asshole in the sedan honking his horn as if no one ever double parked in Harbor City—to repeat all the reasons he could think of as to why taking Felicia to the cabin was a good idea. He came up with pretty much jack shit. Still, he got behind the wheel, pulled into traffic, and headed north out of the city.
The drive took two hours, and for most of it they played a game called “find the shittiest song on the radio.” Okay, really, she was playing without realizing it, but she looked so damn happy singing along that he kept forgetting to tell her that the driver gets to pick the music. In between highway karaoke, they talked art, ants, and architecture—agreeing on next to nothing, right up until they both decided that if anyone deserved a monument created in their likeness it was the Harbor City leprechaun, a fifty-year-old man who dressed up all in green everywhere he went and told everyone, “Top of the morning.”
The conversation dragged once he pulled off the highway, drove the three miles down a county road to an electrified security gate (Grandpa liked his privacy), and punched in the code that only he had. He couldn’t blame her. At this time of year, the trip up the driveway was spectacular with the sun fighting through the clouds to hit the fall leaves just so they shined brilliantly in the afternoon light. It was magic—and it always made him want to haul out a canvas and paint so he could get it all down. Finally, two miles in from the gate, he parked the car next to the ten thousand square foot, two-story log cabin with its stained-glass front door and wraparound porch.
“This,” she said, her eyes round. “Is what you call a cabin?”
Okay, it was more of a lodge, but considering the place in Vail, it was on the small side. “It is by Carlyle standards.”
“Those are some standards.” She turned and looked a little slack jawed at him.
He supposed they were, but unlike the rest of the Carlyle empire, this was just his and it showed as soon as he walked through the door. His gut tightened. That he could see the oak and colored glass from where he stood at the bottom of the steps leading up to the porch meant he was really here, really doing this. After they walked through the door there was no going back, no hiding who he really was.
Shoving his fingers through his hair, he wrapped his fingers around her forearm stopping her from going up the steps. “Before we go in, I have to swear you to secrecy.”
She grinned up at him and pushed up her glasses, stray hairs that had slipped her ponytail dancing around her face in the breeze. “Is this where you’re going to off me?”
“Worse,” he said, covering up his nerves with a slathering of teasing and leering. “This is where I’m going to paint you.”
“Please tell me you’re not going to stick one eye here and the other one over there somewhere.”
“I’m more of a realist.”
This was it. The moment when he could change his mind, keep his secret, and drive them both back to the city. But just seeing her here in this light made him crave a paintbrush and a blank canvas like a chocoholic joneses for a candy bar. It wasn’t all-consuming, but it was damn close. That’s why he was doing this—because he’d known from the first moment he’d spotted her at that fundraiser that he needed to get her on canvas. That was the reason. Not anything else. He could just shove any lingering doubts about that to the dark corner of his brain. Helping her was all part of Operation: Bromance because as soon as Tyler realized all he’d been missing with Felicia, he’d start wondering about everything else and then all the little moves Hudson had made to get Tyler and Sawyer together as friends again would pay off. And what did he get out of this? He got to paint Felicia. Sure, he’d hoped for maybe more, but this was enough. It had to be because as he well knew, no matter how close they became, Henry Higgins and Eliza Doolittle didn’t walk hand and hand into happily ever after at the end of My Fair Lady. They went their separate ways, just like he and Felicia would because fakers like him didn’t end up with women like her. So, all of this would have to end, but not today, not yet.
Stop being such a chickenshit, Carlyle, and take her inside.
He did, the sense of being home rolling over him as soon as he opened the door. There was a reason why he’d set up shop at the cabin besides the privacy—the floor-to-ceiling windows on three of the four sides of the open concept main floor that provided ideal light at nearly every hour of the day. Canvases for his upcoming show at Everly’s gallery covered the space. Each one showed the faces of the Harbor City residents he encountered in random trips around the city. Old. Young. Stock brokers. Cabbies. Kindergarten teachers. Those who worked overnight shifts. Those who’d retired decades ago. Those who were decades away from their first job. Each one of whom helped to tell the story of Harbor City. A card detailing each subject’s story would accompany each painting as it hung in the gallery. The project had taken more than a year to come together and the faces—nervous, excited, grumpy, and even combative—that greeted him from the canvases were like old friends at this point.
Felicia went from painting to painting, respecting the ones still covered by sheets and inspecting the finished works on display. Each step she took, each closer look she leaned in for, squeezed his lungs tighter. He’d watched hundreds, thousands, of people check out his work. It hadn’t ever made him as nervous as he was now as he tried to read her face and figure out what she thought. For once, he couldn’t tell. It was making him edgy enough that he was about to chew a hole through his cheek.
Finally, she turned away from the portrait of the bodega owner with a smile as wide as the horizon and cocked her head to one side. “These look familiar, but I know I haven’t seen them before. They almost look like…”
“Hughston,” he filled in for her.
She nodded, walking to his side. “You’re a big fan?”
“I am Hughston.” He didn’t even hesitate. He should have. “No one knows, so you can’t tell anyone.”
Whatever he’d been expecting—and he really wasn’t sure—it wasn’t for her to laugh. A big laugh. Like a Santa Claus kind of belly full of jelly laugh. The kind that made her wrap her hands around her middle and toss her head back with what looked like absolute shock and joy. The breath he hadn’t meant to keep locked up eased out of him, and he found himself laughing along.
“But why the big secret?” she asked.
“It’s a long story.” One he sure as hell didn’t want to get into now—or ever, really. He poured his emotions out onto the canvas not out in the world. “Besides.” He leaned down, slipping on his charmer personality like a well-worn pair of jeans that didn’t fit nearly as well as they’d used to, and traced a finger down the exposed length of her neck. “You haven’t told me what color your panties are today.”
Her blush and stubborn silence on the topic lasted for as long as it took to give her a quick tour of the place as the wind changed from a gust to a howl outside the cabin. By the time they strolled into the guest bedroom, the sky was nearly as black as his mood. It was the last place he wanted her to spend the night, but she’d been more than upfront with him about her goal. Tyler Jacobson. Captain Clueless. Mr. Shit for Brains. Sir Luckier Than He Had a Right to Be. It wasn’t that Hudson wanted to date her—after all he didn’t date, he slept around, everyone in Harbor City knew it—but Felicia deserved someone who wasn’t totally oblivious. Besides, he’d already accepted a long time ago that any woman worth her salt, when she found out why he’d kept this part of his life hidden from his family, would realize he really wasn’t a keeper. Shame and guilt gnawed at him every day of his life but luckily no one ever bothered to look beyond the charming facade. Until Clover. And now Felicia.
Annoyed all of a sudden, Hudson dropped her bag like it was a steaming hot french fry fresh out of the deep fat fryer at Vito’s. It landed with a thunk that was eclipsed a moment later by the near-deafening crack of thunder that boomed outside the windows. Felicia let out a yelp of surprise right before the lights went out and they were plunged in darkness.
…
Felicia didn’t hate the dark, but it sure wasn’t her best friend. She was the kind of person who left a tiny light on in the bathroom—for Honeypot, of course—and quick-stepped it from the light switch to her bed at night. So when Hudson took her hand in his and led her down the stairs, as the entire main floor lit up in giant flashes of white light followed by loud crashes of thunder, it made the iron hand fisting her lungs loosen its grip a bit. Together they made it to the kitchen where he grabbed a large lantern-like flashlight from under the sink and placed it on the island. The light provided a soft yellow oasis for them while the sudden storm battered the trees outside.
“The utility lines are above ground so the wind knocks out the power whenever a storm comes up like this,” Hudson said, looking out the huge windows at the trees dancing back and forth while still holding her hand. “They’ll get it back on soon.”
Obviously, her body trusted his pronouncement, since her stomach picked that moment to let out a loud growl. “Sorry. I’m a nervous eater.”
“Don’t like the dark?”
“Only if my eyes are open.” Shit. She didn’t mean to say that. With her size, it was hard enough to get people to take her seriously. Admitting she got nervous in the pitch black wasn’t something she did. But you just did.
Hudson didn’t tease her like Frankie would have or roll his eyes at her like Fallon usually did. Instead, he kept hold of her hand as they walked around the lit safety zone and gathered two bowls, a box of cereal—the kind with clover-shaped marshmallows, bonus!—and milk from the dark but still cold fridge. Half a bowl later, her stomach and taste buds in a sugar-induced chill pattern, she tried to reconcile her mental image of Hughston with the man in a dark-blue sweater eating Lucky Charms with her while the storm thundered outside. Maybe she should have doubted him, but she didn’t. It made sense in a way. There was such a sense of joy edged with a bittersweet yearning underlining Hughston’s work that it fit with the Hudson she’d come to know. So when he’d made his declaration, the pieces fit together perfectly logically in her mind.
“So why the big secret? I’d think your family would be proud of you.” The words rushed out before her brain had a chance to stop them.
“Proud?” He snorted and shook his head. “Not likely.”
She’d met his brother and mother. They weren’t as gregarious as the Hartigan clan, but there was no doubting they loved Hudson. The disconnect made her brain itch. “Why?”
He took another bite of cereal. “When did you know you liked ants?”
“The first time my parents took us to a church picnic. I watched the ants marching away with as many crumbs as they could carry, and I was hooked.” She’d followed the little conga line of insects back to their nest, nearly decking a kid older than her who tried stomping the ants at the end of the line. If Frankie hadn’t gotten to the kid first, she would’ve had her ass handed to her. As it was, it took her older brother, who was big for his age even at twelve, to shoot the jerky kid a dirty look and he scurried off.
Hudson nodded and took a deep breath, as though debating whether to share more. “That was me the first time I picked up a brush. It was all I wanted to do. In college, I took every art class I could fit in between business courses. It drove my dad nuts. He called painting a distraction from what I should really be doing—learning the family business. He was so driven, he made Sawyer look lazy.”
What an ass. “Didn’t he see how talented you were?”
His lips compressed as something dark flashed across his face, only to be replaced a half second later with that laissez-faire smile and a cool shrug of his broad shoulders. “He never saw any of my paintings.”
Correction. What an epic ass of legendary proportions. “How’s that possible?”
“When you’re running a business the size of Carlyle Enterprises, it’s easy not to be able to even think about anything else.” The words came out practiced—hollow—as if he’d said them to himself too many times.
“Even his family?”
“He wasn’t that bad, just focused. We did plenty as a family—baseball games, vacations, family movie nights—and I never doubted he wanted the best for me. But I wasn’t like Sawyer, and I know it drove him a little nuts. He never got the art part.”
Old hurt etched lines around his eyes and she reached out, taking his hand in hers. The spark was there, sizzling along her skin, but there was something else, too. An understanding that hadn’t been there before.
“My dad wanted to understand; I just don’t think he could. Then, my grandfather passed away and my mom had a health scare. They thought it was cancer. I think the one-two punch of that made him worry that he wasn’t doing a great job of raising the next generation of Carlyles—at least when it came to me. Finally, my senior year in college he gave me an ultimatum: give up painting and start learning the family business or he’d cut me off. I didn’t give a shit about the money, but losing my family? It wasn’t something I was willing to do.”
She tried to imagine Hudson at twenty-one, forced to choose between family and his passion. That he picked his family both made her proud and broke her heart. “So how did you do it?”
“I gave my dad what he wanted, or at least the illusion of it. I kept painting, it’s just I did it without telling anyone. At first, I figured it was just for me, but then my friend Everly saw them and she helped me come up with a plan. That’s when I became Hughston. Everyone got what they wanted.”
No wonder he slipped between the public version of charming Hudson and the real him so easily. He’d been doing it for years. It must have been exhausting. “Why not tell them now?”
“I was going to a few years ago, but my father had a sudden heart attack. His last words to me were about the family and finding my place in the world of Carlyle Enterprises. I promised him I’d try.” He paused, pushing his half-eaten bowl of cereal to the middle of the island, and shoved his fingers through his hair. “Then, after he died, my mom was more than a little lost. Sawyer and I did everything we could to make her life as smooth as possible. I couldn’t imagine telling her I was doing the one thing I’d sworn not to do. So instead I planted the idea that it was past time Sawyer got married. That gave Mom a mission with some unfortunate results so I had to figure out a way to find the perfect woman for Sawyer, and luckily Clover answered the ad for a buffer.”
“But you’re not being you.” And it was hurting him, she could tell.
“I am,” he said, slipping his hand free from hers. “I’m just giving them the me they want to see.”
She should let it drop. It was his life. It’s not like how Hudson chose to live it had anything to do with her. She shouldn’t even care. But she did. And it wasn’t fair—not to him or his family—and it was wearing him down. There was no missing it in the soft light of the lantern. How she’d failed to see it before, she had no idea.
“Don’t they deserve the real you instead of the charming facade?” she asked.
He looked at her as if the question had never occurred to him before and opened his mouth, but before he could say anything the lights snapped back on in the rest of the house, taking away the intimacy of the moment. The kitchen lights must have been off before the outage, but the change was palpable and accompanied by the switch in Hudson as the mask she was beginning to hate slid into place.
Leaning in close enough to her ear that she felt the heat of him against her neck, he whispered, “So you never told me, what color are your panties tonight?”
There it was. That thing he did to put her off balance. But it wasn’t going to work this time. She’d seen too much of the real Hudson. “You don’t have to distract me.”
“Maybe,” he said, tracing his finger down the column of her neck, leaving a trail of desire in his wake, “I’m trying to distract myself.”
Her breath came in fast as she squeezed her thighs together, trying to maintain some sense of the closeness they had before even as her body betrayed her because it wanted Hudson now. “With my panties?”
He nipped at her collarbone. “You could just show me.”
The words sparked a realization. He needed Hughston to escape not just his family’s expectations but of the world’s, too. The name Carlyle really did come at a cost, and this place—this cabin in the middle of the woods—was the only place he could actually be himself. And he’d brought her here. Her.
Without another thought, she pushed him away and took a step backward, her hands going to the hem of her soft gray sweater, and she pulled it off. Her nipples were already hard, pushing against the lace of her bra. Desire, hot and demanding, heated her skin against the fall chill as she dropped her hands to the button of her jeans.
Hudson watched as she stripped off everything except her cherry red lacy bra and panty set, his eyes darkening with lust. “What are you doing?”
Powered by some kind of confidence that usually only came out in the field, she strutted over to him. “It’s time for another lesson, except this time I’m teaching you.”
“Oh yeah, what lesson is that, Matches?” he asked, the gravel in his voice making her core clench.
“To just let yourself be you in your own skin.” She slipped her hands under his sweater, the sparse spattering of coarse hair on his chest tickling her palms. “It wasn’t easy growing up as a quiet nerd in a big, loud Irish-Catholic family. I had to figure out how to let all of the joking about my height and my nose being always in a book wash over me.”
He raised his arms without her even asking, and she pushed the sweater higher, relishing the sight of his muscular chest revealed inch by inch as she raised it over his head and then let it drop to the floor. God, he was beautiful. He was all hard planes, solid muscle, and hunger—for her.
“And us getting naked,” he said as he wrapped the fingers of one hand around her wrists, stopping her from unbuttoning his jeans. “What’s that going to teach me?”
Lifting herself up on her tiptoes, she leaned against him, pressing her breasts against his chest as she cupped his hardness through his jeans and squeezed. “How to let go.”