The Millionaire (14 page)

“Look at me,” he said, his eyes serious.

She took in his perfect form. She’d seen his chest before, his strong arms and that corrugated stomach but now, holy hell, now he was bare and buffed and simply beautiful. His long hair shone in the overhead light, his arms hung at this side, and she let her eyes wander from the defined curve of muscle at his hip all the way down to his semi-hard cock.

“Come here. I want to show you something,” he said roughly.

He stood his ground and Ellie did as he asked. When she was within his reach, Chris reached for her hand again and covered his left elbow with her fingers.

“I’ve got a scar right there. I cracked it when I was twelve. Cooper, my younger twin brother, challenged me to a race down the long driveway of my parents’ house. I came a cropper and had a cast for six weeks.” He moved her fingers to his left cheek, low on his jawline. His beard was soft under her touch. “Under here. A guy in a bar tried to glass me. I ducked, just not quickly enough.”

“There’s a scar there, too?” she murmured, caressing the growth.

“That’s why I keep the beard.”

“Where did that happen? Somewhere in Russia? The Middle East? Africa?”

A smile curled his lips. “Right here in Sydney. Outside a bar in Darlinghurst.”

“Oh,” she smiled back.

“And if you look down at my right knee, you’ll see another one. I was in a helicopter crash in the mountains in the north of Iraq.”

“You were what?” Ellie’s heart began to pound.

“I was with the UN, covering a delivery of aid to refugees in the area. Luckily, we were just about to land.”

He moved her hand to the top of his left shoulder. She felt his muscles move and tighten under her touch. And then she felt something else. At the very top of his back, a long scar, jagged and raised. She met his eyes and there was a question in hers.

For a long moment, they stood in silence. Ellie let her fingers wander over the mark on his skin, gently, slowly, discovering him.

His sapphire eyes dropped to his feet. “I was shot in Afghanistan. An American medic pulled the bullet from my shoulder. Said I should keep it as a souvenir. I didn’t.”

Ellie wrapped her arms around him and held on. She pressed her cheek to his chest and felt one of his hands hold her head to him. She kissed the muscles of his chest, right about the place where his heart was. As she pressed her lips to his beautiful skin, she felt his heartbeat thudding, and then sprinting. She kept her lips on him, breathing him in, his scent, his strength and his pain.

“My biggest scars aren’t the ones on my body, Ellie. I carry mine around in my head. There are things I’ve seen that… that I can’t unsee. They rise up to hurt me every now and then and the last time it happened, when I was in Moscow, I had to get as far away from the memories as possible. And Sydney’s almost as far away from Russia as you can get.”

Ellie didn’t move, could sense the importance of his confession.

“I had nowhere else to go. That morning at One Mile Beach, when you recognised me coming out of the water? I was still trying to hide from everyone. That’s why I snarled at you.”

“Sorry I blew your cover.” She pressed her lips to his chest, breathed him in.

“I’m not afraid of your scars, Ellie.”

“But I’m afraid of yours. Why do you do it? You could have an easy life. Why are you going back when it hurts you so much?”

He held on to her tightly, squeezing the air from her lungs. “I tried to help someone once, here in Sydney, but I couldn’t. He died, forgotten, helpless in a laneway from an overdose. There’s pain everywhere I look, Ellie.”

How could she convince him that if he looked hard enough, he would find love, too?

“That’s all you’ll ever see if that’s all you’re ever searching for.”

“I don’t see that when I’m with you.”

Ellie looked up into his eyes, let her gaze drift to his mouth. “That tongue of yours…”

“Uh huh.”

“Is it done talking?”

Chris’s mouth found hers, teased and tasted and took her. She opened up to him, took his kisses and gave them back with everything she had. He tasted like wine and sex and how she wanted him. Not just his mouth or his lips. She wanted him inside her and around her and under her and next to her.

When she could bear to drag her lips from his, her own grazed and tingling, Ellie pulled him to the bed.

‡

E
llie spread her
legs for him and Chris dipped his head between her thighs before setting her off like a firecracker. It was even better the second time, and she was damn well hoping there would be a third sometime soon to see if he could go for a trifecta. She was on such a hair trigger from simply being with him, being naked in his arms, feeling his cock pressed up against her, from the gentle way he’d spoken with her and shared her pain that she came to orgasm in what seemed like half a second.

And then Chris was protected and on top of her and she wanted him there, needed to feel his weight and strength enveloping her, pushing hard inside her, crushing the air from her lungs. She ran her nails up and down his back and grabbed two handfuls of his perfect ass as he pushed and bucked and came.

When he was spent, he disappeared for a minute and Ellie pulled the gray sheets over herself. She stared at the ornate plasterwork of the ceiling and tried not to think about anything but the sensations overwhelming her. A giddy excitement was mixed with a brain-thudding post-orgasmic high. She didn’t know when she’d ever felt more alive.

“Thought you might need a refill.” Chris padded across the room with a fresh bottle of wine and two new glasses. He poured them half full and got back in bed next to her, settling in close and lifting an arm so she could move into him.

With her head on his chest, her palm flat on his belly, she signed and relaxed. And realised that not once during sex had she thought about covering up, about hiding, about how much of her skin was showing and what he would think. It gave her a kind of peace.

Chris didn’t say a word. He simply held her, nudged a thigh closer to her and she moved one of her legs across him. When he kissed the top of her head and stroked her hair, she wondered what it would be like to fall asleep like this and wake up in this same position every day for the rest of her life.

“This is a beautiful house.”

“It’s not bad,” he replied.

“A little smaller than where you grew up, where your brother challenged you to that bike race.” Ellie felt the chuckle in his chest and she traced a finger up his abs, over his pecs and his neck and into his hair, his beautiful golden hair.

“I’ve barely been in the country the past ten years, but it’s nice to come home to something vaguely familiar when I’m back. To my mouldy toothbrush and some daggy old T-shirts.”

When I’m back.

“Do you come home a lot?”

He stopped stroking her hair. “No, not a lot. The house is empty most of the time. Cooper stays here, too, when he’s in town, which is almost never.”

Ellie moved out of Chris’s embrace and shifted on top of him, crossing her hands on his chest and resting her chin on them. She liked the way he spread his legs apart so she could nestle against him, the warmth and softness of his belly and his cock, which,
hang on a minute
, wasn’t quite so soft anymore.

“We don’t have long, do we?”

He shook his head. “It’s what I do, Ellie. It’s what I love to do. Although it’s getting harder and harder.”

She pressed her hips to him suggestively. “I damn well hope so.”

“That to. I meant there are some things about Sydney that I’ll miss.”

“You mean me?”

He chuckled. “Always with the questions. Yes.”

“I understand your job. Probably more than any woman you’ve ever met. What’s it like, coming home?”

He looked into her eyes and played with her hair. “It’s usually a long flight with a couple of crappy movies and a loud talker in the seat next to me, who I want to seriously throttle by the time we land.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it.” She lowered her voice, because it was a serious question and she wanted a serious answer. “After all you’ve seen and done, how do you settle back into this… this everyday life?”

“It’s a headfuck most of the time, I have to admit. To go from slums and refugee camps one minute to sunny Sydney and my family…”

“So how do you cope with it? How do you get your head out of all that…”

“Tragedy?”

“Yeah. All that sadness.”

“By getting as far away from it as possible for as long as I can.”

“Is that why you were surfing at One Mile Beach?”

“Fuck surfing. I distract myself with sex. Specifically with a woman like you.”

He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her, hard and urgent and Ellie didn’t forget he hadn’t answered her. While she pushed herself back up to sitting and opened up for him, slid onto his cock, and rocked with him, she filed it away to think about later and then stopped thinking at all.

*

Ellie was woken
by the sound of an unfamiliar ringtone in the darkness. As she roused, not entirely sure of where she was, she blinked open her eyes.

“What is it?” she mumbled automatically, sleepily.

The bed moved underneath her, and she saw the shape of Chris’s back in the dim light as he stretched over to grab the phone he’d left on the bedside table. “I got this,” he said. “Malone.” He sat on the edge of the bed, hunched, listening to a muffled voice down the line. “I’ve got my tickets. Can you email that all through to me? Yeah, two weeks.”

Ellie didn’t want to think about what those words meant. She wanted to hold on to him, to savour this night with him, however short it might turn out to be. She moved across the bed and sidled up to him, pressed her lips to his back, tasted salt on his skin. He swapped his phone into his left hand and reached around for her as he turned, his hand on her back, tracing lines with his fingers as he listened. Her head was on his pillow and she could smell him there, his scent on the warm cotton.

“I’ll be in touch. Cheers. You, too.” He was still for a moment. Ellie slipped an arm around his waist, wanting to be wrapped around him, to keep him where he was before he caught another plane and flew into danger and away from her.

Chris put the phone back on the table and turned to her, lowering his body over hers, pressing himself against her. In the dark, he kissed her nose, each cheek and then her lips, as if he was tasting every part of her all over again. As if he was committing the taste of her to memory.

“Where’s the job?”

He sighed and she felt his chest expand against her breasts. For someone like Chris, there would always be another job, another disaster, another war. She knew that. Had known it from the very beginning. Had known there was no point in trying to hold on to someone like Chris Malone, someone who wouldn’t be tethered.

“Bangkok.”

“Oh.” It was all she could say. Ellie knew that if she opened her mouth something inappropriate would burst out. Something wholly inappropriate like, “Don’t go.”

Instead, she said, “It’s your job, right?”

He rested his forehead on hers, closed his eyes. “Yeah. But it’s not for two weeks. I’ll be here for the charity ball.”

Two weeks. She would have two more weeks with him. And deep down, she knew that if that was all a man like Chris Malone could promise, she would take it.

“I’m glad,” she said. “I’ve been dying to see what you look like in a tuxedo.”

Chris laughed and crushed his lips against hers, wrapped his arms around her, and swept her up in a tight embrace.

‡