The Fifth Favor (30 page)

He studied her with such intense concentration, Billie wanted to squirm. But she raised her chin and met his searching stare head-on, waiting for his delayed rejoinder while misplaced excitement left a damp burning between her legs.

After a moment of excruciating silence, Adrian reached past her shoulder and turned the deadbolt on the door, locking them in.

The resounding click shuddered through her, as did the intent in his face.

“You can’t keep me here.”

“No, I can’t.”

“What do you want?”

He stepped impossibly closer, and the warm, familiar scent of his skin, mixed with the lingering smell of liquor, assailed her senses.

“You,” he said starkly. “And not seeing you for the past two weeks has only made you seem like an unreachable fantasy. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep. I can’t remember what my life was like before you were in it.” His voice dropped, the words dredged up from some deep well of despondency within him. “I can’t remember what my life was like before I became a stranger to everyone and everything that used to feel right, and good, and valuable to me.”

She shook her head in denial of the sentiment his words stirred, searched for resolve and found it had abandoned her, replaced by the urge to cry. “But you’ll break my heart, Adrian. You already have.”

“I know.” He looked away, as though he couldn’t bear to see her reaction. “I’ve hurt everyone who loves me. You. Luke. My family, even though they don’t know how I’ve betrayed their honor. It would devastate them.” He dropped his head and rubbed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I hurt everyone who gets too close, and I don’t know who I am anymore. The man I was raised to be would never damage the people who care for him, would never sell his soul to—” He stopped and pressed his lips together as though to thwart the flow of desperation pouring through them.

Billie swallowed. “So you’re an ogre. Inhuman. Black-hearted. What reason, then, can you give me to stay here with you, even for a few hours?”

“Out of pity.” He laughed, but it was a desperate sound, the misplaced humor of a man grasping at threads of a life fast unraveling. Tears trickled down his cheeks and he swiped at them, staring at the palm of his hand as though the moisture he’d wiped from 165

Shelby Reed

his face was something utterly foreign. When he looked at her again, there was little of the old veneer left, the features behind it made all the more naked with pain.

“Please, Billie. Indulge me. Stay for a few hours and let me pretend I haven’t damaged our relationship beyond repair.”

Billie didn’t trust herself to answer. She stood in stunned silence and cursed him for his barefaced anguish, for choosing this moment to let her see beneath the façade; cursed herself for loving such a broken man.

But when he started to move away, her hands reached of their own accord and made contact with the front of his shirt, worn cotton, warm from the heat of his body, and she wrapped her fingers in the soft material and tugged him to her.

He came without hesitation, one step, then two, and when he stood so closely that her nose brushed the base of his throat, his hand slipped between their bodies and closed gently around her wrist to caress it.

“I was too rough. I hurt you.”

Yes
. A million times over.

“I’m so sorry, Billie,” he whispered. “Please believe me. I’m sorry for everything.”

He buried his face in her hair and his hands came up to caress the strands, dislodging them from the elastic band of her ponytail, clinging to her in a way that spoke of need and anguish.

Everything warm and tender within her responded with slow-melting compassion.

She slid her arms around his waist, palms gliding over his back, reading the shudder of his lean body without fully understanding the depth of his injury, only that it was self-inflicted and too grave now to deny. “What’s happened to you, Adrian?”

“Christopher,” he whispered against the curve of her neck.

She sighed. “It’s going to take me a while to get used to it. I don’t know Christopher. I’ve never met him.”

“Then maybe it’s time,” he said.

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Wading through a bourbon-induced fog, he told her the story of his dark descent into Avalon, while intermittent tremors of exhaustion and grief shook his frame and quavered his words. God, he was cold, down to his very soul, and recalling the past he’d so skillfully shoved beneath layers of concrete restraint chilled him all the more.

But Billie gently prompted him whenever he faltered, and in the end he told her everything. Sitting a modest distance from her on the sofa, he recounted how he’d landed a soccer scholarship to St. Michael University right out of high school, and how binding his parents’ pride had seemed to an eighteen-year-old so unsure of his destiny.

Neither Franco nor Sophia Antoli had a college degree, and with their youngest, only boy, they had always pushed the hardest.

Initially, the pressure and coaching appeared to pay off. Christopher had his choice of colleges, and he chose nearby St. Michael to stay close to home. At first it was idyllic.

“But I got injured my sophomore year during a tournament, had knee surgery and lost the scholarship,” he told Billie. “My parents fell into that limbo income bracket where they couldn’t afford to pay my tuition, but they made too much money to receive the financial aid I’d need. They offered me a place to live, but they couldn’t pay for my classes. I started looking for a job. Luke was my roommate at the time, and he was already tending bar at Avalon. Good ol’ Luke to the rescue. He had all the answers.”

He smiled at Billie’s deep, intent frown and shook his head. “He and Azure hardly had to persuade me to come aboard. Getting paid for sex with the most beautiful women in the world was something miraculous to a kid barely twenty. I thought I was in heaven. A thousand bucks a night sometimes. It seemed like so much money. So much pleasure. It was a drug.”

With a sigh, Billie reached for his hand resting on the sofa between them. The suspicion had long ago left her features, and tender concern softened her green eyes to the dappled shade of forest moss. “So you worked your way through college in Azure’s club, and never told your parents.”

“I never told them. It would kill them.”

“It nearly killed you,” she pointed out. “Look at you. Why didn’t you just leave Avalon after you graduated? Walk away?”

“I never had a reason.” His fingers closed around hers, thumb whisking across her knuckles in restless sweeps. “Then I met you, and Luke died. The night you left me at Avalon, I found out he had indeed written a suicide note, but he’d sent it to Azure through the mail. Why he chose her as the recipient instead of me, I don’t know. I’ll never know. All these weeks she kept the note from me. I had no idea it even existed.”

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Billie’s face paled. “But that’s so cruel! Why would she do such a thing?”

“Some sort of bid for control. When she knew I would leave Avalon, she showed it to me—the final straw.”

Billie sat up. “She could get into a lot of trouble for that, Christopher. Do the authorities know?”

“They knew. She was just enough of a bitch to let me drift in the wind for a few days before she told them. Money exchanged hands and bought her some time, no doubt. That’s why they stopped questioning me with no explanation.”

“And what did the letter say? Will you tell me?”

He studied her face with bleary eyes. She was the only person he could trust,
wanted
to trust. No one could hurt him more than he’d hurt himself, not even this woman, who’d stood as the catalyst for his complete undoing.

Absently caressing her slender fingers, he said, “Luke couldn’t live with what he’d become. He blamed himself for dragging me into Avalon, for ruining both our lives. But what he didn’t understand was that I went willingly. I was a grown man, I made my own decisions and when things went wrong in my life, it was because of those decisions. He wasn’t to blame, but he felt he was, and I had no idea how deeply he bore that responsibility until I read his letter.”

His eyes met hers again, stinging with the release of a weighty truth. “But that’s not all. I told you before, he thought he loved me, in a way that disturbed me and twisted our friendship. And he was right to think I wouldn’t have hung around to deal with it. I was repulsed by his attraction to me, by his drug worship and his sordid little penchants—me, no less a whore than he was.”

He laughed, short and humorless; it was either that or cry, and something in him feared if he started he’d never stop. “I rejected him and closed him out, right when I was all he had left. My timing was impeccable. He spent the last hours of his existence in my home with no friends, no love, no purpose. The whisperings at Avalon weren’t all wrong, Billie. In a sense, I did help him over that balcony.”

She edged closer to him and reached to stroke his cheek. “No, Chris. It’s no one’s fault. Look what blaming yourself is doing to you. I’m certain Lucien wouldn’t want this. He wouldn’t have expected you to come undone, too. You and he stand equally mistaken: Lucien, for taking sole responsibility for bringing you to Avalon, and you, for blaming yourself over his death. There are too many shades of gray in this story, and no one’s truly at fault.”

He looked away from her face, knowing the understanding in her green eyes would shatter him. “You believe wholeheartedly in the goodness of people, don’t you, Billie?

It’s one of the things that made me want you, from the moment we first spoke. I wanted what you have by nature. Guilelessness. But I gave mine away, and there’s no going back.”

She started to reply in her sweet, hopeful way, maybe a loving reassurance, something he didn’t merit, and he stopped her with a shake of his head.

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The Fifth Favor

“Please, let me finish. There’s so much—I—Christ, Billie. For the last few weeks, my relationship with you has been the only thing of value in my world, and though you’re still here out of sympathy, I know I’ve hurt you.” His eyelids slid closed and he sighed.

“I hate myself for it. I’ve ruined what we had.”

“Well,” she said quietly, “you certainly did your damnedest. But right now I can’t measure the damage. I’ve missed you too much these past two weeks, and I was glad Rosalie gave me the excuse to see you again. I’m not here out of pity, Chris. I might have a soft heart, but believe me, it’s not that soft.”

He opened his eyes to read her expression, and found remnants of anger warring with compassion in her features as she grasped his other hand.

“You’re one man I’ll never feel sorry for, not even now, when you’ve made an utter mess of your life and you’re drowning in the consequences. I can hate you, rail at you, be confounded and angered by you, and I am. All of the above. But I don’t pity you.”

“Then why haven’t you left?” he whispered, watching her with unqualified confusion and a spark of hope.

“Haven’t you heard anything I’ve said?” She released his hands and clasped his face between her palms. “I’m waiting for you to make it right between us again. Make it right, Christopher. Give me a reason to stay.”

* * * * *

Billie watched his face, the fathomless eyes swimming in anguish and uncertainty, the flush of awareness seeping into his cheeks, and knew she had stepped across the final boundary that separated them…and that it might be the biggest mistake of her life.

It only took a moment for her to realize he couldn’t speak; the same piquant emotions squeezing her throat had constricted his own. He was vulnerable at last, and when his hands covered hers and held them to his fevered face, he was needful, too, and as hungry for her touch as she was to give it.

He drew her back with him against the cushions, the same cushions where, weeks before, he’d broken down every preconception she had about pleasure and sex and desire. She wanted to do the same for him, but it felt wrong. There were no guarantees between them now, any more than there had been that night. Just the danger of heartbreak.

So Billie did what any confused, impassioned woman would do. She kissed him.

She started by brushing her lips against his, once, twice, feeling his mouth soften under hers in response. For countless moments it was the only movement between them: long, slow, gentle kisses, beneath which an inexorable desire began to build, part lust, part tenderness, fed with hunger for the taste of each other.

Even as her excitement grew, she knew there’d be no fervent coupling between them tonight. He was more exhausted than he’d admit, and still intoxicated, and what 169

Shelby Reed

he truly needed was to sleep. She would stay just long enough to see him into rest. She would fulfill her own helpless need to lie alongside him and feel the warm, hard length of his body…and then she’d leave him to finish his recovery on his own.

Tentatively, his hand tugged the tank top free of her shorts and crept beneath to rest on her bare skin with an unassuming, gentle pressure. Waiting for her to make the next move.

“Billie,” he whispered against her lips. “Take me out of this night.”

“I want to.” She drew back to meet his eyes. “Tell me how.”

“I only know one way,” he said roughly. “Put your hands on me. Your mouth. Your tongue. Get on top of me and fuck me.”

The words sliced the air between them, so raw and shameful, she couldn’t respond for a moment. In the heavy, expectant silence, a faint tinge of color seeped into his cheeks. Shame. Billie instantly recognized it and grasped his face in her hands, kissing his lips, his chin. Soothing away his degradation.

Christopher didn’t speak, only swallowed and covered her hands with his, holding them to his cheeks.

“Show me your bedroom,” she said finally, her throat tight with sympathy and sadness.

He got to his feet and grasped her hand to help her up. With her fingers laced through his, he paused by the grandfather clock to address Rudy, who gazed back at his master with somber brown eyes.

“
Soggiorno
,” he told the dog, and Rudy’s tail thump-thumped on the carpet.