Reckless Hearts: A Billionaire Romance (18 page)

Owen finished with me soon thereafter, the look of pleasure so good it was painful on his face delighting me.

I started climbing off of him, but he held me down, our bodies still joined together.

"Not yet. I'm not done with you yet." He grabbed the tie, still around my neck, using it to pull me forward into another kiss. He tasted sweet.

His kiss was like fire on my lips, hot enough to ignite me and then leave me smoldering all in the space of a single breath.

"So you think you're the boss of me now?" I said, that post-orgasmic bliss wrapping me in its warm and comforting blanket.

"I don't think anyone could ever be the boss of you. Not for long, at least," he said, his eyes searching my face, taking in the rosy glow of my cheeks. Those eyes of his looked so clear.

"Maybe that's what you like about me," I said. I pushed my hips down against him and he groaned. A renewed tingle of desire started in me, and I wondered if maybe he wanted another go. I wouldn't stop him if he did.

"Maybe," he said.

I thought that might be close to the mark. We were too opposite. He liked control over everything. I hated being controlled.

Maybe that was what drew us together. He wanted to tame me, to see if he could bend me to his will. I found the idea of giving myself over so totally arousing. Maybe somewhere inside I wanted to be tamed. Except I didn't at the same time.

I ran my hands over his cheeks, then down his shoulders, following the hard lines of his body down his arms, liking the warmth of his skin against my palms. A warmth and flush to him caused thanks to yours truly.

I could get used to this. I could get used to him
, I thought. It was an idea that scared me. It was an idea that I tried my hardest not to think, not to consider. Because it was dangerous.

Because behind it were certain feelings I'd been telling myself to ignore and dismiss for years now. Feelings that I knew would just get in the way of my goals and dreams.

I searched his eyes, wondering if maybe those same feelings, that same idea, lurked behind them. I wanted to ask, but I didn't afraid of what the answer might be. Or might not be.

Or that maybe he would look at me and tell me again that I asked too many questions and never gave enough answers.

You had your fun. Now it's time to be done with it. Once more can't hurt, remember thinking that? So prove yourself right.

"What now?" I said, "Where are you taking me?"

We parted then, cleaning up and getting dressed as best as we could manage in the back of the limo. From the way the car vibrated and hummed along beneath us, I thought we might be on a highway. I looked out the window, the trees on the other side of the tinted glass a dark blur.

I sat on the other bench seat across from him, my back to the window that separated our section of the car from the driver. I thought about joining him, but I didn't.

"Somewhere special. It shouldn't be too much longer now."

He pressed an intercom button, "What's our ETA?" He ran a hand through his hair, straightening it out a little more. If it weren't for the flush to his face I might have thought that what we'd just done hadn't happened. Well, that flush to him and the achy soreness inside of me.

I didn't know how he could compose himself so quickly. I still felt like a quivering bowl of jelly.

The driver's voice piped in through a speaker disembodied and sharp. "20 minutes, sir."

Owen nodded, pleased by the news.

"20 minutes to where?" I asked.

"You're just going to have to wait and see. I know you love that," he said, smiling at me.

"You like torturing me far too much," I said.

"I enjoy it, yes. But I think you're the one who can't get enough of it."

"That's bull."

He spread his hands to indicate the car. "Really? You're here, aren't you?"

I couldn't argue with his reasoning. I kept thinking and talking one way, but my actions betrayed me time and again. For all my blustering about being through with all this, through with him, I kept seeing him.

He hadn't forced me into this limo. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I went of my own free will, and what did that say about me?

M
ore questions I didn't want to answer, so I resorted to asking some of my own.

"You know, I still don't know your last name. What is it?"

"You never checked? I told you the information's out there for whoever wants it?" He raised an eyebrow at me.

"I've been busy," I said.
Look! He's amused by all this. There's no way he feels anything like you feel. It's all a game to him.

"Would you believe it’s Peabody?"

"No way. That can't be it."

He watched me across the cabin, letting it sink it, a dead serious look on his face. Then he grinned, the transformation from sincerity to joking sudden. "You're right. It isn't."

"Then why did you...?" I said, wanting to give him a kick in the shin.

"Because I knew it would get to you."

"What is it really, then?" I said, ignoring his last remark. No one before him could 'get to me' as well as he could, and we'd only known each other for a few weeks now. It wasn't fair.

"Ashton."

Owen Ashton.
I considered it. The name had a nice sound to it. Maybe it was the touch of assonance, that almost repeated O sound. A good, solid name. I don't know why he hid behind that Mr. X thing when he had a name like that.

"Not such a bad name," Owen said, again sensing my thoughts, "But not a particularly mysterious one."

"I think you've overrated mystery and its usefulness."

Owen opened a small cooler built into the limo. Wisps of cool mist drifted up out of it, and the foil-wrapped neck of a champagne bottle poked through that fog.

"You're wrong there," he said. He unwrapped the bottle. He popped the cork out with one thumb, catching it before it could ricochet around the cabin with his other hand. It sounded loud as a gunshot in that enclosed space.

Little curlicues of mist slithered out of the opened mouth of the bottle for a moment before he also produced a pair of flutes and filled them. Not very much, maybe a mouthful or two in each. He handed me one without asking if I wanted it.

"How am I wrong?" I said, twirling the stem of the flute between thumb and forefinger gently while I watched the bubbles climb and roll their way up the inner walls of the glass.

"You're here because of that mystery, for one. Don't tell me that your curiosity about the enigmatic
Mr. X
didn't draw you to that speech." He tilted the glass beneath his nose a little, smelling it but not sipping from it yet.

I started to say that he was wrong, that it had been my friend Jennifer who dragged me (literally) to it. But then I thought that maybe I wouldn't have let her if there hadn't been a little wonder lurking inside of me.

I thought about masking my feelings by sipping from my glass, but that seemed wrong. Like I wasn't supposed to until he did.

"Arguing with yourself again?" he said. We went over a slight bump and the champagne in his glass sloshed but didn't spill. "Trying to tell yourself that that couldn't possibly be the case? That you're above that sort of thing?"

I shrugged. I couldn't deny it, and for once my smart mouth didn't want to weigh in on the matter.

"There's this cliché I hear sometimes. Usually in sentimental movies," he said, "It usually goes something along the lines that love is the great equalizer. Kings and paupers feel it. You're probably familiar with it. But they tend to say it as though it is the only equalizer, aside from dying, maybe. It isn't.

"Everyone loves a good mystery. Everyone. They're absorbing, engaging, and the best mysteries, I think, are the ones where the answer was right in front of you all along."

"Like the mystery of Owen Ashton, enigmatic billionaire CEO?" I said.

Owen raised his glass, "To mystery."

I raised mine as well. We sat a little too far apart to clink them together, and I didn't want to lean in for fear of the limo hitting another bump and sending the bubbling liquid all of the place.

We drank. It was sweet and dry and gone before I realized it. He took my flute and put it, as well as the opened bottle of champagne, back into that cooler.

"Have I impressed you enough yet?" I said.

"Do you think so?"

"Well, I have figured out your mystery. The one you're so fond of."

He shifted in his seat, throwing his arms on top of the back rest so that he took up most of the space. "You think so?"

"I know your name now."

"Anyone with an internet connection can figure that one out. I know that many have, as a matter of fact."

I leaned forward. "I'll bet. Do you know what I think? I think you wanted to share. You wanted me to know. Maybe you're getting tired of it, or bored. Or lonely. It must be pretty lonely up there at the top, isn't it?"

He regarded me, and I couldn't read him. Not right away. He cracked near the end, though, and I thought I caught a glimpse of something. It wasn't his usual amusement. It was deeper than that.

And it made me want to know more. Maybe there was something to his little toast to mystery and its appeal.

I didn't get the chance.

He leaned over to his left so that he could glance out the window. It still looked like the same blur of trees to me, but I guess it wasn't.

"Here we are," he said, pre-empting the thin beep that signaled a message from the driver.

"We've arrived, sir," the driver said.

"And where is here?" I said, vectorization kicking in as the limo slowed. I could start making out individual trees now. Pines, mostly. They thinned, though, and quickly, giving way to a leveled filed of grass and then a tall chain link fence.

The limo stopped. I wished that the window between us and the driver was open so that I could see what that fence guarded. As it was, I could only see the paved road, with its rows of trees on either side, down which we'd come.

Outside, steel shivered as a gate slid open, the sharp sound of the metal shaking muffled by the car. We drove through and I watched that gate slide shut. There was no one manning it, which meant some sort of remote entry.

"What is this place?" I asked. I looked out the other side and saw a long paved strip. The whole area was fenced in, the trees kept a good hundred feet or so back from the perimeter.

"My airfield," he said.

The limo turned then, showing the rows of hangars, and a stubby control tower back in the corner were some pumps for fuel.

The sun glinted off the corrugated steel of the hangars. Some of them were small, not a whole lot bigger than a car-and-a-half garage. Others were gigantic, the double doors in their tracks twenty feet high or more.

We pulled up by the control tower. This time, Owen let the driver get out and open our door for us.

"We're going flying?" I said. A primal fear clenched in the pit of my stomach. Every time I'd been on a plane I needed to take a couple pills that had names ending in -
pam
or -
ium
.

There was something about being away from the ground, hurtling in a metal tube, that got to me. And don't give me any of that crap about flying being safer than driving, either. I don't care.

"I never said that," Owen replied.

Perhaps seeing my discomfort, he came up beside me and put his hand against the small of my back. It did help. He turned me away so that I wasn't looking down that long runway (which seemed to me then like staring down the barrel of a gun) until we faced the closest, and the smallest, hangar.

"We're at an airfield. What else could we possibly be doing here except going flying?" I wondered if this was some trick. Owen was something of an adrenaline junky. That was obvious from the way he thrashed that Corvette and the Jeep before it.

There had been a glint in his eyes each time, too. Like he was daring fate to make something terrible happen.

Was he going to make me go skydiving? Or hang gliding? Or who knew what.

I didn't care how hot his kisses were on my mouth, or how much I liked being with him. If any of those options turned out to be the case, this was it for us.

"Wait here," he said. He left me standing by the control tower, a light and cool breeze whipping through my hair. I shivered and wrapped my arms around my ribs.

Then I heard an engine start. I turned and watched the limo drive away, stopping at the gate and then going through after it opened. The gate closed behind it.

We were all alone out here, I knew.

Something clanked, then shuddered. Turning around, I watched the hangar doors slide open. It was black inside, the daylight not pushing in far enough to see anything. Longer in there than I figured, I guess.

Then a pair of bright, bluish-white headlights winked on from within.

"That's not a plane," I muttered, relieved and confused.

Owen pulled out of the hangar in a grey BMW sedan, the engine purring docilely beneath the rake of the hood. He pulled it out alongside me, that raked nose of the vehicle pointing down the runway.

I started opening the passenger door, but he shook his head. Then he killed the engine. Then he got out, holding the key.

"Are we going somewhere?" I said, wondering why we'd driven all this way just to pick up a car. It was a nice car, I gave it that. But still just a plain old car.

"Down to the end and back, if you can manage it," he said, tilting his head towards the end of the runway to show what he meant.

He tossed the key over the car. Out of reflex, I reached out and snatched it from the air.

"Good catch."

"You want me to drive?" I said.

"If you can."

"Just because I can't speak German doesn't mean I can't drive a German car," I said.

"Be my guest," he said, smiling while he opened the door.

I saw why he smiled when I sat down in the bucket seat. In the foot well, the car had one too many pedals. And the stick on the floor had a little map of numbers on it and an R instead of the shifters I was used to, those being ones with D and R.