The Fifth Favor (35 page)

191

Shelby Reed

“Chris,” she said, “oh, please,” as he held her waist and moved her up and down his shaft. It became a sobbing chant, as rhythmic as the undulation of his body under her; it went on and on until the second orgasm shook through her, and then a third.

One spasm rolled into the next, until ecstasy and lust melded into sweet pain, no longer divisible.

Christopher lunged upright and buried his face between her breasts, his breath coming in ragged pants against her skin. The muscles in his arms bunched beneath her fingers each time he lifted and lowered her, and Billie’s head fell back, her body a vessel for him, floating above him, floating in rapture.

She cried out in protest when he abruptly unseated her. “Wait,” he hissed, holding her at arm’s length with shaking hands. “Wait.”

But primitive need pushed them back together, and Billie didn’t want his skill, his iron restraint, his go-all-night control. She regained her position and wrapped her legs around his waist, so open to him that he slid inside her as though they’d never parted.

“Let go,” she whispered. “For once. Let me do the work. Let me do it all.”

“Billie…yes…” The strangled words wrenched from his throat, and he finally surrendered. Bracing his hands behind him for leverage, he clenched the sheets in desperate handfuls and arched into her like a wild horse bucking its breaker.

Billie clung to his damp shoulders with every ounce of strength she owned. “I love you,” she whispered, seeing the gradual loss of focus in his dusky eyes as his climax began to crest. “I love you, Chris.”

The passionate declaration seemed to shove him into oblivion. His features tightened with the agony of pleasure too great to be borne. “Now, Billie, now—”

As the shudders took him, she covered his open mouth with her own and rode him through his orgasm, absorbing the violent shake of his body, the hoarse sounds of ecstasy, his complete vulnerability as his ejaculation jetted in scalding rushes from him.

And for that sweet, surreal instant, Billie Cort felt like the most powerful woman in the world, the only one who’d ever truly known Christopher Antoli, heart, body and soul.

192

The Fifth Favor

With the gradual return of sanity came the serpentine shadows of dread that passion had held at bay. Darkness snaked around them, stealing Billie’s peace while Christopher remained blissfully, fleetingly unaware.

She tried to shake off the creeping truth, grasped at a few more precious minutes of peace and euphoria, and failed. She had to tell him about the article. She had to warn him.

Somewhere in the spacious condominium, an air conditioning unit kicked on and flooded the room with a chilled draft. Billie shivered and curled closer to Christopher’s still-damp body, aching deep in her soul.

There’s an article, Chris. About you. Neon arrows pointing down at your head couldn’t
make your identity more obvious. If your family sees the issue, they’ll know. They’ll know how
you sold your soul and lost your honor and identity for all those years. Lucien’s name will tell
them…and the words are mine
.

She groped for his hand and laced their fingers together against his flat stomach, loving him, hating herself for her recklessness. Christopher lay in replete, easy silence, eyes half-closed. In the living room, the grandfather clock softly bonged the hour of one. Rudy’s claws clicked on the wooden floor out in the hallway, but he didn’t invade their intimacy with his sweet, mournful presence; the sighing huff and thud indicated his heavy collapse at the bedroom’s threshold.

When Billie at last tried to shift and meet Christopher’s eyes, he held her tight.

“Don’t…move. Don’t go tearing off. Lie here with me. Rest.”

A sigh shuddered from her lips and she tried to relax against his chest. She couldn’t control the trembling that rippled through her, and didn’t trust herself to speak.

Seconds ticked by. Dread tightened her chest, closed her throat, ached in the marrow of her bones like a pervading cancer.

When at last her heart thudded heavily enough for him to read its death-march rhythm against his own chest, Christopher stirred and glanced down at her. “What’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer. He rose over her and pressed her against the pillows to study her. “What is it? What’s wrong, Billie?”

She blinked back a hot rush of tears. “I wanted to tell you before. It’s why I came here in the first place. But you see, I’m too in love with you.” She didn’t care that it came out sounding raw, or that her every vulnerable emotion was written on her face.

“I don’t want this to end.”

193

Shelby Reed

He didn’t reassure her or question her or demand the reason for her unruly emotions. He just stroked her face, his lashes raising and lowering as his eyes searched her features.

At last she drew a breath and retrieved the truth from beneath viscous layers of remorse. “I overslept this morning with you, and missed my deadline at
Illicit
. I owed my editor three stories by nine o’clock, and of course I was completely late getting to the office.” A sigh escaped her lips and she closed her eyes. “In the process of searching my desk for the articles this morning, Nora came across the CD-Rom I’d saved your article on. She read it. Then she pulled up some of my notes, shifted things around, edited the article and sent it off to the printer under my name. All before I could get there and stop her.”

His fingers slid from her jaw and he shifted his weight to both elbows, his frown focused on his hands. “Did you use my real name in the article?”

“No. I told you I would never betray your trust.”

The tension drained from his shoulders and his dark head dropped.

“But Nora used Lucien’s real name in the article,” she added low. “She added details about Luke DeChambeau jumping from your balcony. Adrian’s balcony. Adrian with the dark hair and eyes, who came from a big, loving Italian family and grew up in Bethesda.”

Christopher lifted his head and met her gaze. She couldn’t read his face, couldn’t measure the damage. Adrian’s mask looked back at her, remote and steely.

The sheets rustled and a cool draft of air shivered over her naked skin as he sat up on the side of the mattress. “Do you have the disc in your possession?” he asked, his voice low and even. “I’d like to read Ms. Richmond’s version of your truth.”

“It’s in my purse.”

“I’ll wait.”

Painfully aware of her nakedness, Billie climbed from beneath the sheet, grabbed his T-shirt off the floor and put it on, pulling it down over her breasts as she headed toward the living room. The sofa cushions were still rumpled from their lovemaking, and the sight of the disarray loosened the flow of tears that had built in her chest. Thirty minutes ago on this sofa, they’d been totally immersed in each other, wrapped in love and lust and perhaps for the first time, honest emotion.

That was all over now.

When she returned to the bedroom with the CD-Rom, Christopher had pulled on his jeans without bothering to button them. Wordlessly he extended his hand to her, palm up. She laid the CD-Rom in his grasp, and avoided his eyes when he moved by her toward the room that held the computer.

Down the hall, a door clicked shut. He wanted privacy. He wanted distance from her.

194

The Fifth Favor

Bereft, she closed herself into the bathroom and washed up, unable to meet her own reflection in the mirror. His belongings were scattered over the granite countertop: a Mason Pearson hairbrush, an amber bottle of some expensive aftershave, a tube of toothpaste beside a still-damp electric toothbrush. An unbearably intimate display of his personal effects. She used the burgundy monogrammed hand towel to dry her face and paused to inhale his scent buried deep in the plush terrycloth threads. It was on her skin, the fragrance of his passion.

When Billie reemerged, she searched for her panties through tear-blurred eyes and put them on, her grief sitting like lead in her chest.

Her dress was a wadded mass of wrinkles. Holding it up, she stared at it in dismay and wondered what to do. Damn it, she wouldn’t suffer wearing it through the lobby on some sick adolescent walk of shame.

Retrieving a pair of Christopher’s khaki shorts folded in a nearby laundry basket, she pulled them up over her hips and rolled down the waistband’s excess material to keep the shorts from puddling to the floor. She would just have to go barefoot and carry her pumps under her arm, chin held high, not making eye contact with any passerby…if Christopher told her to get out after reading the article.

Which, undoubtedly, he would.

Billie gingerly opened the first door to the left and found him in a smaller bedroom, seated at a maple desk that faced the door, his attention fixed on the computer monitor in front of him while its purple glow washed the life from his stern features.

Everything commonsensical within her shouted that he didn’t want her intrusion, but she couldn’t just leave without saying something, without expressing how much she loved him, how regretful she felt.

For a torturous eternity she hovered in that doorway and watched the frown lines deepen between his brows as he stared at the computer, his elbows propped on the desk, hands fisted together against his lips.

She never loved him more than at that moment, when he was slipping away from her, a mile for every traitorous word he read.

Finally he drew a breath and looked over the monitor at her. No emotion played on his features, just that glassy impassivity she recognized so well. “May I keep the disc?”

“Of course.” She shifted her weight away from the doorjamb, arms tucked tightly around her waist.

He ejected the disc, set it aside, rose, and tucked the rolling chair beneath the desk.

Perfectly contained, an Avalon automaton…until he wrapped a hand around the back of his neck, as though it hurt him. As though he were wounded.

She swallowed. “I don’t know what to say.”

“There’s nothing to say.” He brought his hands over his face, dark head bowed as if in prayer. Seconds passed. Then his palms slid away and he looked at her, flushed, 195

Shelby Reed

blinking, like a man awakened from a nightmare. “Luke’s family will be devastated by this.”

“Oh, God. I know. I—”

“My sister has a subscription to
Illicit
, Billie. Want to know what’s really ironic? I’m the one who bought it for her, for Christmas last year.
Illicit
and
Cosmopolitan
and
People
.

She reads all that stuff.”

“Chris.” She started toward him, but he stopped her with a shake of his head.

“Please…don’t talk.”

Silence fell between them, so crowded with anguished sentiment that no room remained for spoken words. Then his troubled gaze focused on her figure. “I see you found something to wear home.”

She took a step back as he approached, inexplicable shame climbing up her neck at the blank observation. “My dress—”

“You can keep the clothes, of course.” So composed. So polite. “Toiletries, towels, whatever you need are in the bathroom vanity.”

“I already used them.”

He paused before her. “Did you drive, or do you want me to call a cab?”

“I drove.” She swallowed. “Thank you.”

Two polite strangers, mere minutes after engaging in the most personal act of all.

An awkwardness Christopher had been well acquainted with as Adrian of Avalon. If he’d addressed her as “Ms. Cort” it wouldn’t have surprised her. But he didn’t. He didn’t address her as anything. He looked right through her.

A hollow yearning nestled deep in Billie’s stomach. The universe stretched between them now, and she knew better than to reach for him. His stony features told her he didn’t want the touch of hands, words or sympathy.

“Do you have all your belongings?” he asked.

Everything but her heart. She nodded, stricken.

“Then you’ll forgive me if I don’t accompany you down in the elevator. I have to get ready for the repercussions of this—I have to think of the least destructive way to approach the people this will hurt.” He paused. “I don’t think there is one, do you?”

Restive, she ducked her head to meet his eyes. Their love affair couldn’t end like this, in such a chilled stall of emotion. Billie wouldn’t allow it. Straightening her spine, she said, “Chris, you have to know how much today meant to me. How much
you
mean to me. Making love with you—I felt—”

“You felt guilty,” he said, staring at some distant point over her head. “I understand. All along you knew about the article, and yet you couldn’t bring yourself to spit it out. But you should’ve told me before I put my hands on you, Billie. Before I let down my guard.”

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The Fifth Favor

“Don’t you think I know that?” She twisted her hands together to keep from reaching out to him. “I tried to tell you.”

“You didn’t try hard enough.”

A fresh wave of crimson heat flooded her face and confirmed the truth of his words.

“Would it have changed what happened between us?”

His attention shifted to her face, features tight with insult and anger. “I can’t answer that. I can’t even think right now.”

“Chris—”

“You want me to accept your apology for something that technically wasn’t your doing, right? Then you can walk out of here redeemed, wearing your regret like the uniquely kind-hearted exposé reporter you are. But when that magazine hits the stands, Billie, you’ll forget your remorse.
Illicit’s
going to make a vulgar amount of money at the expense of everyone who loved Luke. His family.
My
family. Me. Nora knows it, and you know it. You knew it when you walked in here this morning.”

She shook her head and covered her face with her hands, her blood gone icy in her veins. She’d expected his dismay, his hurt—but this derision—she hadn’t been prepared, and she didn’t know how to defend herself.

In the wake of her wordlessness, he moved back toward the desk and swiped up the incriminating disc, staring at the light play on its iridescent surface. “You know what kind of ball-busting editor Nora Richmond is. She headed up sleazy tabloids for a decade before she ever hopped on the
Illicit
luxury liner. You
knew
this. You knew it was a risk to leave anything as personal as that article and all its notes in a place where she had easy access. So don’t you suppose, in the farthest reaches of your subconscious, that maybe you hoped she’d find it?”