Pride (In Wilde Country Book 1) (12 page)

“The experience.” Luca smiled tightly. “An interesting choice of words.”

“You miss the point. The act of sex… I have nothing against the experience, but—”

“Is it always the same for you? What you call ‘the experience.’”

Where was this conversation going? And why was she letting it happen? This was far too intimate a topic to discuss with a man who was still little more than a stranger.

“This is a foolish discussion.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, I do. Asking me these questions—”

“Why do you turn away from me? Am I getting too close to some sort of truth?” Luca grasped Cheyenne’s shoulder. “Look at me. Look me in the eye.”

“Leave me alone!”

“No. I don’t think so.”

His hand tightened on her. She was sitting close beside him. A long lock of dark, silky hair lay against her cheek. One move, and he could press his mouth to it. He could do more. One touch, one kiss was all he’d need to shatter that wall she’d built around herself. She would go into his arms and he would make her admit that sex was more than a man and a woman seeking carnal pleasure.

A horn blew, and the car stopped short. Cheyenne gasped, reached down and grasped her foot.

“What’s the matter?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“Dammit, woman, don’t lie to me!” Luca leaned forward. His hand swept over hers. “Did you hurt your ankle?”

“No. It’s my foot. The quick stop… I must have dug my toes into the carpet, and there might be a little cut or something on the bottom of—”

In a series of swift motions, Luca switched on one of the rear compartment lights, turned her toward him and lifted her foot into his lap.

“Let me see.”

“That isn’t necess—”

“Your foot is bleeding!”

“It’s just a cut.”

“When did it happen?”

“I don’t know. A little while ago. And it isn’t a big…What are you doing?”

A foolish question.

What he was doing was wrapping her foot in a pristine white handkerchief he’d pulled from his jacket pocket.

“Aldo,” he said over the intercom, “we need a hospital.”

“Are you crazy? We do not need a hospital! When I get home, I’ll wash it and put a bandage on it and—”

“When was your last tetanus shot?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”

“Aldo. The Mt. Sinai emergency room,”

Cheyenne clucked her tongue. “I don’t need a tetanus shot. I had a booster last year, before we did a shoot in Belize. Would you please let go of me? I do not need your help.”

“Shut up, McKenna.”

“Goddammit! You cannot talk to me this way. You cannot order me around. You are not in charge of me.
I
am in charge of me, and—”

Luca silenced her with a kiss.

“It’s time you relinquished authority to someone else,” he said in a low voice. He kissed her again, and when the kiss ended, he looked deep into her eyes. Then he told Aldo that they were not going to her apartment.

They were going to his.

CHAPTER SEVEN

L
uca said she
couldn’t walk.

“Not until I’ve cleaned that cut and made sure there’s no glass in it,” he said as he carried her from the car, past a doorman who greeted him as if he was accustomed to the sight of one of the famous building’s most famous residents marching through the doors with a woman in his arms, past a concierge who showed the same bland reaction.

A private elevator took them to Luca’s duplex.

“You can put me down now,” Cheyenne said.

He didn’t answer. Instead, he carried her up a winding staircase, through an enormous bedroom and into a huge marble bathroom.

“Stay there,” he said, lowering her carefully onto a
chaise longue
that faced a handsome fireplace.

“Really, Bellini, if you’d just point me at the washcloths and bandages…”

“Cheyenne. Do not move.”

“I don’t take orders. Not from anyone.”

He bent down and kissed her. Lightly. Gently. She wanted to slap him…or maybe just to wind her arms around his neck.

Sweet Jesus, he was confusing the hell out of her. Why was she letting him behave this way?

Nobody was in charge of her except her.

She’d taken her life in her own hands when she was thirteen.

No more enduring Mama’s drunken rages.
You get out here, goddammit. You show your face or when I find you, I’ll beat the shit out of you, girl!

No more enduring the upswings that invariably followed. S
weetie, you know I didn’t mean it. Gimme one more chance, baby, and I swear, it’ll never happen again.

And no more being nice to…to Mama’s ‘friends.’

Come say hello to the nice man. He wants to give you somethin’ pretty. See? Oh, come on, baby. Sit on the nice man’s lap. You’ll have fun.
And then Mama’s voice taking on a knife-sharp edge, her hands digging into Cheyenne’s shoulders as she pushed her forward.
You do what I tell you, Cheyenne. Go on. That’s it. That’s Mama’s girl. That’s the way.

And it had been ‘the way,’ first with what Mama called having fun, then with much more that that, and it had gone on for what had seemed a very long time, until one day, one terrible, awful day…

But something good had come out that day.

Foster care.

It wasn’t paradise, but it was lots better than what had come before. She’d worked hard, graduated high school at sixteen and decided to move to New York.

How to get there evolved through trial and error.

She hitched to a town that was a flyspeck on the map and landed a job washing dishes and sweeping up at a horrible little café where flypaper hung from the ceiling and roaches the size of salamanders scurried along the counters. She had no working papers, but nobody asked any questions—and that was a lesson in itself.

After a few weeks, she moved on, working from town to town, café to café, always heading east toward the Big Apple.

It took months. But, at last, she got there.

Except, New York wasn’t paradise, either.

In fact, it was a nightmare.

Big. Loud. Dirty. And it turned out you did need working papers or, at least—because she’d always looked older than her years—I.D. Best of all, a social security card.

She got herself a grubby room, not in Manhattan but in Queens, and a job waiting tables in a grimy hole-in-the-wall where nobody asked for her I.D. and nobody spoke English except her and the kid who mopped the always-filthy floors.

His name was unpronounceable; everybody called him ‘boy,’ but Cheyenne felt bad for him—he was the first person she’d met who seemed worse off than she was—and she learned to say his name or, at least, to come pretty close to saying it.

One day, he whispered to her that she could do better than this job.

“I don’t have any I.D.,” she said, and he winked.

A week later, she had a social security card and a driver’s license. A week after that, she had a job waitressing in a busy coffee shop off Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and one day a guy handed her a tip and his business card and told her to give him a call.

He was gay. Anybody could see that, which was the only reason she hadn’t slugged him and had, instead, said “What for?”

“Because,” he’d said pleasantly, “your hair is a disaster, you need somebody to teach you that slapping on lipstick is not the right way to do your makeup, you have to drop maybe ten pounds, but your bones are good, so is your height and maybe, just maybe, I can turn you into some kind of a model.”

Her life had not been the same since that moment.

Professionally, she’d reached the top. Until recently, anyway, when the idiots who ran the world she now lived in had decided she’d gone too far in taking over, but really, how could you go too far when you knew what was best?

Her personal life? As far as she was concerned, it was fine.

People said she was closed off, but that only meant she chose her acquaintances with care. Why wouldn’t she? They said she didn’t trust anyone. Yes, and what fool did?

As for men…

Men said she was difficult.

They said she was a control freak. Or that maybe she had OCD. Or maybe it was something else. The bottom line, they said, was that she didn’t understand relationships.

Wrong.

She understood them, all right. She understood that women were expected to acquiesce to whatever a man wanted, in bed and out, and that was so not a problem because early on, she’d discovered that what she wanted from men, in bed and out, was to go her own way.

Especially in.

She was human. She had needs. Every now and then, she fulfilled those needs. With men who liked her attitude and if they didn’t, so what? She didn’t see them again. In fact, that was the best way to treat sex. As a basic need. As a one-time thing.

She never went back for more.

She looked up as Luca came through the door carrying a small basin and a washcloth. He’d discarded the jacket of his tux and loosened his tie. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled back, exposing his forearms: muscular, tanned, and lightly dusted with hair.

How could a man look so masculine and so beautiful at the same time?

Her belly tightened.

No.

She never went back for more. One man, one woman… That wasn’t her thing.

So how come she’d had sex twice today, okay, almost twice today, with this man, a man she didn’t even like?

The question was jarring. That he was kneeling before her, reaching for her foot, was even more jarring.

Cheyenne jerked her foot away.

He reached for her foot again. She tried to pull it back, but he was stronger and instead of letting go, he propped her heel on his thigh, tilted her foot and peered at the sole.

“It’s a cut,” he said.

“Thank you for that brilliant diagnosis, Dr. Einstein.”

He looked up, a smile playing over his lips.

“Better that than Dr. Frankenstein.”

She almost laughed. Good thing she didn’t. Laughing would have been a big mistake.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to clean the cut,” he said as he wrung out the washcloth. “Your foot is dirty.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You try walking on a Manhattan sidewalk and see how clean your feet will… Hey!”

“Does that hurt?”

“Yes, it hurts! Stop pinching me!”

“I’m not pinching, I’m squeezing. I want to be sure there’s nothing stuck in the cut. Gravel or glass, maybe.”

“I can check for myself,” she said, tugging her foot free of his hands, grabbing it, angling it, bending over and peering at the cut.

She looked up.

“It’s bleeding,” she said.

And, just that quickly, the floor tilted, the room spun and the world turned grey.

“Hell,” Luca said gruffly. He caught her by the shoulders and she sagged against him.

“I’m fine,” she said in a tiny voice.

“Yes,” he said, even more gruffly. “I can see that. Take a deep breath. Again. And no, do not try to sit up, dammit! Keep your head down.”

She did as he’d said. What choice did she have? If she sat up, he’d win the argument over who was and who wasn’t in charge.

But, God, she felt like a fool. Such a ridiculous thing, to go woozy at the sight of blood. She wasn’t a coward, and only cowards reacted to things like that.

She shuddered.

Luca felt it happen, the delicate tremor that went through her, just as he felt the soft exhalation of her breath against his throat.

His arms tightened around her. He held her that way for a long minute, her body warm in his embrace, her heart thudding against his heart.

Then he frowned, drew back and he held her away from him with the impersonal concern of a good Samaritan—which was, after all, his part in this scenario.

Why would it be anything more?

She was not a woman who expected tender gestures, nor was he a man to offer them.

“Better?” he asked, his tone brisk.

She nodded, but he doubted if that was true. Her face was pale; he suspected she was only now reacting to what had happened on the street. Delayed shock, or something close to it.

For a heartbeat, he almost drew her close again. Fortunately, logic overcame that flash of inexplicable foolishness.

He set her back on the loveseat and got to his feet.

“I’ll get a bandage for your foot. And a cold compress.”

She nodded. What was the point in arguing? The best thing to do was regain her strength and get the hell out of here.

She was tired. That explained everything. Tired from the endless day and the long walk that had grown more and more wearing as the neighborhood went from busy and upscale to less crowded and more commercial and then to the last couple of blocks where everything inside her shouted,
You’re a fool! Such stupid pride! You should have accepted a ride home. At least flag down a cab and once the driver gets you to your building, tell him he’s just going to have to wait five minutes while you go inside and get his fare.

But before she could, those men had stepped out of the shadows and she’d prayed she could tough it out and then, like a miracle, Luca had appeared.

The truth was, she’d have been in deep trouble without him. She hated knowing it, hated admitting it, even to herself. She wasn’t made for the pathetic, damsel-in-distress routine. She absolutely hated it. The sense of helplessness, the admission that she was powerless….

Luca was back.

He knelt before her again and swept the hair away from the nape of her neck. A cool cloth replaced the brush of his fingers.

A small sigh escaped her throat.

“Good?”

“Good.” She hesitated. Then she looked up at him from under her lashes. “Sorry about that,” she said, hoping she sounded contrite and even a little embarrassed, the way anyone might after the foolishness of a near-faint over a bit of blood.

He shrugged, all business as he slathered an antibacterial ointment on the cut, then covered it with a bandage.

“Blood has that effect on some people.”

“Yes, well, I don’t usually—”

“And you’re reacting to what happened earlier. It’s only natural.”

His certainty infuriated her. They had come into each other’s lives only hours ago. What gave him the right to make decisions and now judgments on her behalf?

“Enough,” she snapped, grabbing the cold pack and tossing it into the sink as she rose to her feet. “I’m out of here.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He clasped her shoulders. “You’re in no condition to go anywhere.”

She glared at him. He glared back. Then his expression softened.

“It’s not a crime to accept help, Cheyenne.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said… And then, to her horror, tears filled her eyes.

Luca muttered something, reached for her and gathered her into his arms.

This was surely the perfect way to end an evening. First, come close to fainting. Then, come close to a complete meltdown.

Not very good ways to impress a man.

Not that she wanted to impress this man.

Not that she’d ever wanted to impress any man.

Accept me on my terms or leave me alone. That had always been the standard by which she lived.

She shut her eyes.

What was wrong with her today? She wasn’t herself at all. She hadn’t been herself this morning or this evening, and certainly not now.

“It’s all right,
cara
.”

Luca’s voice was low, almost hypnotic. The feel of his arms around her was comforting. She wanted to stay in his embrace, let some of his strength seep into her bones.

“Cheyenne.”

She felt trapped. Felt the walls closing in. Her eyes flew open. She pulled back, jerked free of him. The room swayed a little, but she fought hard not to show it and she succeeded.