Dirty Secrets (9 page)

He didn’t say anything, just gestured at her to be silent. She couldn’t hear the report. The anchor was talking, the ticker said something about a murder, and there was a picture of a man in his early thirties or so, who had a Latino look about him. While Alex stared at the screen, apparently trying to lip read the news anchor, Zoey pulled out her phone. She tapped search terms in quickly, and ended up finding the breaking news on a local new group’s Twitter feed. She scanned the article until the report ended, and Alex’s attention drifted back down to the table. His hands were clenched in fists, his knuckles pale. She reached out tentatively, lightly brushing her fingertips over the backs of his hands. He glanced up, as if he were surprised to find out that she was there with him. “Did you know him?” she asked.

He shook his head. He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. “I’ve never met that man in my life.”

She waited, her journalistic instincts kicking in. He had some sort of story to tell her, and he wasn’t going to blab unless she kept quiet. He wasn’t pushing her hand away, and that was actually a good thing.

“He was at my office this afternoon,” he said, his voice so quiet she had trouble hearing him, and she leaned in closer. “Well, not my office. Olivia’s office.” His eyes caught hers. “My mother.” She nodded for him to go on. “His name—she called him Arturo. I thought he was—you know, someone she was seeing. A friend.” He shifted, clearly uncomfortable. “She never said anything. But she would deserve—anyway. I saw him this afternoon. Why is he dead?”

Zoey glanced down at her phone. “The police haven’t released a ton of details yet, but he was a contractor in the city, ran a fairly well regarded company. They’d gotten some good projects from businesses, kept them pretty busy, and making decent money. He was killed in his office. Looks like foul play.”

Alex rocked back like he’d been hit. She didn’t dare to tell him the other details she’d found, and why she’d recognized Arturo’s name, even before she’d started searching on her phone. Not yet, anyway. Not in public.

Alex stared down at his half eaten burger and pushed it away. “I can’t eat this,” he said. “Let’s go.” He pulled out his wallet and yanked some cash out, tossing it down. Zoey’s eyes widened; it was twice what the meal had cost.

“Should we get change? Box up the left overs?”

He was walking, not talking, and he was halfway to the front door. There was a not small part of her that wanted to just let him go. She owed him nothing, and she didn’t know him from Adam, not really.

But it was against her nature to let a distressed person take off on their own in a city like this. He could walk into traffic and be hit by a car. End up with amnesia, starring in some horrible reality show. If she could save anyone from a fate like that, it was practically her responsibility.

She shrugged into her peacoat, and then wolfed down the last bite of her burger, chewing as she hurried after him. Responsibility was all well and good, but she wasn’t sure when she’d next get to taste a burger that someone dared to charge $40 for.

Alex had stopped just outside the door. He had his cell phone out, but he was staring at it owlishly, as if he was utterly drunk. The looks people were giving him were completely disgusting, way out of line for the looks that a guy blocking up the side walk in New York City would usually get. She glared back at anyone who dared to make eye contact with her, and guided Alex back, out of the immediate flow of foot traffic. She took his phone from his fingers and glanced at it. It was similar to hers, although his was the newest model, and hers was a few years old, but it was close enough to work. “Who are we trying to call, Alex?”

He stared off at the cars flowing by for a moment, then blinked, and seemed to come back to her just a little bit. “David,” he said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat, and it came out a little stronger. “My driver.” He pointed at the favorites icon, and she tapped it for him, then tapped the icon to make a call. She held the phone out to him, but he was staring again. She sighed, and hoped for the best.

Someone picked up after the second ring. “Hello, Mr. Blankenship?” The voice had that pseudo-British accent that she’d loved until she’d become friends with Helen, and now grated horribly on her nerves.

“Nope, actually, this is Zoey Gardener. I, um, was having dinner with Mr. Blankenship, and he’s ready to be—picked up now?”

David, thankfully, seemed utterly nonplussed by this conversation. Hell, it might not have been the weirdest call he’d ever received about the illustrious Mr. Blankenship. He got the address from her, and assured her that a car would arrive shortly.

Alex had sagged against the side of the building. She reached out, running her hand along his arm. “The car’s on the way,” she said. “And then we can talk, and you can tell me what’s going on.”

He nodded, his face wooden. She reached up and touched his cheek, feeling the heat that burned through his skin. His eyes focused then, and he reached out, wrapping his arms around her waist and tugging her tight against him. He turned them, pressing her back into the rough brick. Someone whistled as he ran his hand over her hair. His eyes were gleaming with an entirely different type of need as he lowered his mouth to hers.

In a way, it felt like a first kiss. The way her body leapt in response, the way he made a soft sound into her mouth as her hands wrapped around his neck, the way she leaned into him, letting him take her weight. His hands stayed perfectly chaste, wrapped around her waist, but his hips weren’t even polite. She could feel him, impossibly hard, feather light presses against the small of her back making her brush over him, reminding her of what he had, who he was, what she wanted.

It had been a very long time since she’d had a first kiss. Because it wasn’t just about the first time you kissed someone, it was about that feeling that you weren’t just kissing them right now, you were kissing them in such a way that the moment was going to stretch out into the future. It was going to pick you up and carry you along. It was a kiss that said there would be more kisses after this one, and not just kisses. There would be intimacies, there would be give and take. There would be shared secrets and quiet conversations.

She didn’t think it was the same for him. No, she had a sense that he was using her right now, using her to center himself and push away whatever horrible thing was happening in his mind, and she didn’t care. The kiss was what it was to her, and it was absolutely fine for it to be something else to him. She dragged her nails down the nape of his neck as she opened her mouth to him and kissed him back, teasing his tongue with hers, nipping at his lips with her teeth, urging him on until he broke away from her, shaking just a little in her hands. 

“Thank you,” he said, quietly, stroking his hand over her hair again. “I’m sorry. That man—”

“We’ll talk about it later,” she said. “It’s okay.”

“No. No, it’s really not.”

“No, it’s not. But it’s okay that we wait to talk about it.”

He accepted that, and his hands tightened around her, pulling her in for another kiss. This one was quieter, softer, his lips just teasing over hers, light kisses one after another. They lit her on fire, and she had to work hard to remember that they were in public. It had been a long time since she’d wanted anyone this very much.

A crowd had assembled, she realized, as he pulled away again. He threaded his fingers through hers, keeping her close against his side, and she let her head rest on his shoulder. Some asshole whistled through his teeth, calling out that they should do it again, and Alex flipped the guy off with a casual sort of irritation that had frightened her when she first moved to the city. It was utterly unlike her home, where people either smiled in public and then ranted in private, or full on tried to kill each other on the street. There was none of this quiet contempt. It just was not done.

When it became clear that they weren’t going to continue making out on the sidewalk, and that Alex wasn’t going to punch the whistler, the crowd shuffled on. Zoey shivered, just a little, and Alex wrapped his arm around her.

“This isn’t going to be a casual thing, is it?” he asked her.

“I really suck at casual,” she said.

“I’m pretty horrible at serious.”

It stung to hear, but it didn’t make her want him any less. She tried to think of her heart as walled off, quietly blockaded from his delicious hands and tongue and teeth. If she closed her eyes and squinted really hard, maybe it would at least seem like it made a difference. Right up until he broke her heart and left her in pieces.

At least I’ll have a better idea of what I want when he’s done
, she told herself.
That’s nothing to sneeze at, really.
She’d just have to be very careful not to spend too much time thinking of him as anything other than fucking material.

“Maybe I’ll get better,” he said, and her heart did a little skip inside her ribcage.

“Don’t tease,” she said, before she thought better of it.

His arm tightened around her shoulders. She fit well against him. He was taller than her by several inches, enough that she could lean just slightly and slip under his shoulder, but not so tall that she felt overwhelmed by him. Which would work well if she could ever get him to put her up against a wall… She shook her head gently. That was a perfect example of the kind of thought that was dangerous to think. “You’ll find,” he said, his voice a low rumble that was only for her ears, “that I only tease in bed, and only if you’ve been very, very bad.”

“Do you like it when I’m a naughty girl?” She couldn’t stop herself, just like she imagined he couldn’t stop the little rush of air from his throat.

“Oh princess,” he said. And then a long black car pulled up to the curb, and something changed in Alex’s bearing. He walked briskly to the car; Zoey had to move quickly to keep from being towed along like a little kid. He opened the back seat door for her, and she slid in. He followed her, pulling the door shut behind her.

The quiet once the car door shut was nearly absolute. All the noise of the city was shut out, and replaced with quiet music. Classical. Mozart, she was fairly sure. “Thank you, David,” Alex said. “I’m sorry for the short notice. I hope you didn’t have to cut your evening short.”

“I live to serve,” the driver said in a dry tone that made Alex laugh.

“Sorry to do this to you,” Alex said, before flipping a switch that raised a partition between the back seat and the front. Zoey heard a quiet chuckle before the front of the car sealed off, but instead of reaching for her again, instead of winding his fingers into her hair and leaving bruises on her ribs with tight and hard fingers, he opened a cooler and passed her a bottle of well chilled water.

It was such an abrupt transition that she almost retreated. One moment, he was the man who spanked her ass until it stung and kissed her in streets until crowds gathered; the next he was the CEO of a multi-national company that had its fingers in every pie that had been baked in the United States for fifty years. She didn’t quite know what to say, so she went for something totally obvious.

“You have your own driver?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Yes. And a private jet, and a housekeeper. The house in Connecticut has horses. Olivia has a sailboat the size of the Hamptons, but I hate it. I get seasick.” His expression dared her to comment on any of it, and she zipped her lips. She kept herself from making the gesture that went along with the emotion. Barely.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” he said, but he didn’t relax. His gaze shifted out the window. The glass was tinted; they could see out, but anyone looking in would only see their own reflection. “My father was a stingy bastard,” he said. “Olivia donates to a few charities, but none of them—well, they’re all run by her friends, and her donations always seem to come back to her in the form of invitations and jewelry and whatever else. That’s not who I’m going to be.”

“I live in a studio apartment in the Bronx. I don’t have room in my apartment for a desk and a sofa, so I do that thing where I pretend that it’s comfortable to sit on the floor and work on my coffee table.”

His eyes were cold as they turned back to her. “And that’s my fault, because I was lucky enough to be born into a wealthy family?”