Boston Avant-Garde: Impetuous (12 page)

She splayed her hands against his chest and used his solid frame as an anchor in the sensual storm. Their combined energy culminated to a point of explosion. Feeling as though she was pushing them both past all reason, she arched her back and rode him hard.

He was about to climax. His expression grew pained, lines drawn tight across his familiar features. She felt the answering chord in her body, the liquid sensation of weightless arousal that narrowed to a sharp focal point of desire.

Nicolai shouted just as she felt his cock erupt inside her body. He pulsed, the shock waves shattering the last barrier between her and completion. She gasped, her nails scoring his chest as she threw her head back and let the orgasm sweep her over the edge.

Nicolai didn’t have to look to know Desiree was nearby. Her scent drifted across the bar, tickling his senses with the promise of passion.

“A girl could start to think bad things when she keeps waking up alone in your bed.”

He shifted on the piano bench to make room, and she sat. She’d opted to wear one of his T-shirts this time. He didn’t know why, but it gave him a feeling of deep satisfaction. The white cotton barely cleared the tops of her thighs, and it was her naked ass cheeks sitting on his bench. Even better.

“I was thinking about earlier tonight.”

He’d seen this coming, but it wasn’t going to make things easier. The words he would choose had never seemed so important.

“When you got me upstairs into your apartment, you wanted to call my brother.”

He played a short riff on the keys. “Yes.”

“You called him by name, Nicolai.” She put her hand on top of his. “How did you know I have a brother named Erik?”

He looked down into her face. She was so beautiful. In the neon glow of the jukebox’s light, she seemed almost unreal. She’d shown him again and again that she was more real and more woman than anyone he’d ever come across. “I’m going to explain everything, but I need to start at the beginning, and you’ve got to promise me you’ll listen until the end.”

A tiny frown marred the skin between her delicate eyebrows. “If this is about the gambling thing, I don’t care.”

“That’s only part of it.” He wondered if she’d be so forgiving when he got to the other side of his story. “My mother’s name was Eleni. She was what they used to call a ‘picture’ bride. She came over from Greece to marry another Greek from the West End. It was all arranged by their parents.”

“So you have a lot of family here in Boston.”

His family resembled a Tilt-a-Whirl, and while he loved them, he also loved the ocean between them. “All my family lives in Greece.”

“Did your parents stay married?”

“Yes, although I was their only child. My parents never really clicked as a couple. When I graduated from high school and joined the navy, they decided to go back to Greece to help out my grandparents. I visit once or twice a year. They seem happier there than they ever were here. My mother was the one who taught me to play the piano.”

“I can’t picture you in the navy. There are too many rules.” She wrinkled her nose, and he couldn’t resist leaning down to kiss the tip of it.

“I couldn’t picture it either. That’s why I resigned my commission and bought the bar.”

“When did you start gambling?” There was no condemnation in her voice, only curiosity.

“I started while I was on ship. There was nothing else to do.”

“Why did you stop?”

“I won this piano not long after I’d bought the bar.” He stroked the keys, playing a simple scale. “I’d started getting serious about a woman named Katie. I gave it to her as an engagement present, and we moved into her place together. She didn’t live too far from here. She’d inherited a house from an aunt and owned it outright.”

“What happened?”

“I’d been winning really big, but I got into a losing streak not long after I won the piano. I kept thinking if I could just get one big win, I’d get out. A club called Asylum was holding a high-stakes poker tournament with a big pot. So I took the deed to her house and put it up.”

Beside him, he could feel the tension in her body. He wondered if she was rethinking the offer of forgiveness.

“When I lost the house, I put up the bar to try and fix things.” He thought back to that night, to the insanity of thinking multiple wrongs could eventually make something right. “Six months before all that, I’d met an idiot rich kid from Brookline who was trying to kill himself to avoid taking over the family company.”

“Oh. My. God.”

“He came in here and started a fight with the biggest, meanest drunk he could find. I bailed him out and gave him a job. Then when I moved in with Katie, I let him live upstairs. He’d quit school and didn’t have anywhere to go.”

“
This
is where Erik was all those months when my father was sick?” She got up and began pacing in tiny circles. “It took me forever to find him. I had to trace a dozen bad phone numbers from former college roommates all over the freaking city. How did I never find this place?”

Nicolai wondered what would have happened if he’d met Desiree under any other circumstances. He was inclined to believe there was a perfect moment for everything, even meeting the woman you could love more than life.

“If I could find him right now, I would kill him with my bare hands!” She clenched her fists and closed her eyes.

“Sometimes things happen for a reason, Desiree.” He pitched his voice to soothe, pleased when she sank back down and leaned into his body. “He might not have listened to you at all if he hadn’t just watched me destroy my life with the type of selfish behavior he was showing toward his own family. I lost everything. The home I had with Katie, her love and respect, the bar, and I would have lost my life if your brother hadn’t stepped in and bought my debts.”

“He owned Jack’s?”

“Legally he still does. We’re in the process of changing the ownership back.” Nicolai tried not to think about how Desiree being in his apartment and his bed would affect that eventual outcome.

“You never gambled again?”

“Your brother made me join the twelve-step program. I’ve been clean since that night.”

She was silent for so long Nicolai began to wonder if he’d overloaded her. “Why wouldn’t Katie forgive you?”

“I hurt her in ways I couldn’t fix.” He thought back to the Irish Catholic girl who’d stolen his heart with a few laughs and a brilliant smile. Truthfully, she couldn’t have held a candle to the fiery hellcat sitting next to him. “It’s all been for the best. She’s happily married.”

“What about you?” She actually sounded outraged.

“I’d go through the last fifteen years all over again if it meant you would be waiting at the other end.”

HOW COULD HE sound so certain? Desiree thought of the hell he’d been through. She thought of the woman he’d obviously loved. Even though he’d done something so horribly wrong to her, he’d pulled himself back to the surface. The guy had been clean for ten years.
Ten years!
Could anyone else say they had that kind of strength? Could she?

“Does my brother know I found this place?”

There was something in his smile that made her heart flutter like it was about to stop. “I mentioned it to him yesterday.”

“My name.” His standoffish behavior suddenly made perfect sense. “I told you my name for the first time the other night. That’s why you sent me packing the next morning.”

“Your brother has always been a good friend.”

“I will never understand male rules. It’s like you guys make them up as you go.”

“Sometimes we do.”

She looked around at the darkened room and tried to picture Erik lounging at a table or sitting at the bar. Surprisingly it wasn’t difficult. “What did he say when you told him?”

There was a subtle hesitation that made Desiree wonder how much of a jackass Erik had been. “He doesn’t know you very well.”

No, he didn’t. Nicolai was the only one who
did
seem to know her. More than that, he understood her.

Lowering his head, he brushed a featherlight kiss against her forehead. “He wants what’s best for you.”

“So he says. Let me guess. Did he tell you to stay the hell away from me?”

She couldn’t imagine what had possessed her to ask such a question. She didn’t really want the answer, because she was afraid she already knew. If high-and-mighty Erik had demanded Nicolai stay away from her, would he do it?

He took forever to answer—long enough that she dreaded his response. “After tonight it doesn’t matter what Erik said.”

“Why tonight?”

“After everything that happened, you came to me for help.”

Until he said it, the significance of that small fact hadn’t fully impacted her. Her pseudodate with Jackson had been terrifying. Her sister’s fiancé had intended to rape her in the corner of a ballroom, with only palm trees and banana plants for cover. Worse, he’d alluded to the fact that he intended to continue their “relationship” after his marriage to her sister. The man was a depraved pervert. But her first instinct after climbing into the cab wasn’t to run home to her family. The only thing she’d been able to think about was Nicolai, about how badly she’d wanted that sense of comfort his solid presence always provided.

“I’m safe with you,” she finally told him. “I think this is the only place I’ve ever felt like I could really be me. You’re the only one who has ever told me to quit apologizing for myself and live my own life.”

“Did I say that?”

She swatted his arm.

“I just want you to stop trying to please everyone else. Mothers and even brothers always want what they think is best. But you’ve spent years twisting yourself into little knots trying to fit that ideal. In the end you’ve got to let all that go and become your own woman.”

His fingers slid over the keys. She didn’t know much about music, but the melody struck her as sad. “You said your mother taught you to play. Do you ever play in the bar?”

“Only to an empty house.”

“Why?”

He shrugged and moved his hands. The new music was familiar, but it took her a moment to recognize one of the overplayed pop songs the wedding planner had suggested for Selena’s reception. “You could be selling tickets or charging at the door if there was live music in here.”

“I hate playing this bubblegum crap. I’d rather make a little less tending bar than be miserable playing to audience.”

How long had it been since Desiree stood in front of her bathroom mirror and told Selena it wasn’t about the money? A day? Two? Didn’t it always come back to that? How much money you had, how much you spent, what you spent it on, what it could get you, and who it could buy. Those were the things that defined her world.

“Erik thinks I’m nothing but a spoiled shopaholic.” She gazed into his face, trying to read in his eyes if he saw her the same way. “Everyone thinks that.”

“You let them.”

“Because I don’t tell them otherwise.”

He put his hands in his lap, focusing his full attention on her. “Because you let it be true.”

His words made her angry. She got up, tugging the hem of her borrowed T-shirt down over her butt. “I like to shop. I enjoy buying things for myself, for other people, for…for whatever. That doesn’t make me a spoiled shopaholic.”

“Define whatever.”

Out of everything she’d said,
that
was what he zeroed in on? She turned her back and stared at the shadowy shapes of the tables and chairs clustered around the bar. It was really a haphazard mess. She got that he wanted a laid-back atmosphere. If you looked up “unassuming” in the dictionary, it probably told you to see Nicolai. She wondered if it was a Greek thing.

She remembered looking over a large spread of photos and hotel information about the Mediterranean when she’d been putting together some possible destinations for Selena’s honeymoon. Desiree had never been to Greece. She loved France, had enjoyed a trip to London, and had vacationed in Mexico every summer during her school years. Now, looking at Nicolai’s bar, she recalled the open layouts of most of the Greek restaurants she’d seen in the pamphlets. Large rooms crowded with big tables, pale stone walls, and a cool, comfortable mix of textures: smooth linen, gritty walls, worn floors, alcoves filled with green plants, and above it all, that brilliant blue sky.

He wouldn’t have to change much to make the bar more inviting. She knew a great artist who could paint a mural on the long wall to keep it from being so stark. Adding a few smaller tables might make it seem more inviting to couples. They could tone down the dreary front windows by adding some trim, put in a few outdoor light fixtures to give it a kind of patio feel, and fake plants didn’t require any maintenance but added a lot of atmosphere.

Define whatever.

The answer hit her like a freight train. “I like texture and color and contrast. I want to maximize space and see a theme tie two completely unrelated areas together. I like to walk into a room and let it tell me every little secret about the person who lives there.”

“So is it really about shopping?”

She thought about preselecting color swatches with Selena’s wedding planner to keep her sister from biting the poor woman’s head off. Of remodeling their geriatric butler’s quarters so his arthritic knees didn’t bother him so badly anymore. She remembered designing her brother’s kitchen to suit his bizarre culinary style. “No, it isn’t about shopping.”

“Then what is it about?”

“I’ve spent my whole life pretending to be exactly what everyone wants me to be.” She wandered toward the piano, brushing her fingers over the sleek black finish. “When we were little, our clothes had to be perfect. Our rooms were completely devoid of toys you could really play with. It was like being stuffed into a mold. As I got older, I realized there was a way to balance style and comfort. Over the years I’ve been redefining my space, making it fit me. Sometimes I like doing the same for other people too. But real life doesn’t always allow that. I feel like I’m being pulled in two directions at once.”

“So when push comes to shove, which direction will you choose?” He stood up, stepping away from the piano.