The winning defense, p.27
The Winning Defense, page 27
“We’re going home,” I said, but I paused as I got to the doorway. “I don’t ever want to see you again, you or your daughters or anyone else in your whole awful family. Stay out of my way, and don’t think you can retaliate against Ray, either. If you try to hurt him, I’ll come down on you so hard you’ll wish you’d never been born. Just like you wish that for me.” Then Deacon and I got into the new car and left.
“It’s ok,” I told the baby. “We have each other and you have Ray, too. Now it’s definite that I’ll come with you when you guys move. Won’t that be fun?” He couldn’t see that I was crying since he faced the other way, and I kept my voice very steady and cheerful. “It doesn’t matter that I failed so utterly, that Warren Wilde is getting away with everything. It doesn’t matter that my mother didn’t want me. It wasn’t other people keeping us apart after all, I guess. But no one is going to keep me apart from you, so don’t worry about that.”
He didn’t seem exactly worried, but he didn’t seem exactly fooled by my act, either. Neither was Ray when he came in a few hours after we had.
“Deacon already ate,” I said, smiling. “I did, too. We had a great day! How about you?”
“Hi.” Ray stared at me and frowned, then bent to his nephew. “Hi, bud. You already had your dinner? Is that why you have that spinach gut?” He picked up the baby and kissed his tummy and they talked together—Ray talked and Deacon listened. I did his bath while Ray ate also, a large amount. He must have had a hard workout because he had emptied one box, then another, and was working on what looked like a third when I presented him with a clean baby needing to say good night. And then I hid upstairs for a while rather than coming back down. I wasn’t quite ready to face everything, including the memory of his kisses the day before, including the conversation I’d had with Warren Wilde and Lyle today.
“I saw on the monitor that you put him in the crib a while ago. What were you doing, standing on the stairs?” Ray placed the last pan into his dishwasher.
“No.” I’d been standing outside of the bedroom door.
“I wanted to tell you that I got another call from Warren.” He glanced at me and I only nodded. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“I guess I am.”
“I sure was, because I’d told him that he had to talk to you himself but apparently he can’t face that. Instead, he wants me to tell you that he’s sorry, that chicken S-word. I have no idea how he stared down guys like me when he played.”
“He really apologized?” I asked.
“Really. And he said that Camdyn would like to talk but she’s going to leave you alone like you asked her to. He wanted you to know that none of this is her fault in any way. I don’t think he’s lying now, but honestly, I don’t know. He’s an a-hole of the worst kind. He’s not the type of person I want around Deacon and I don’t know what Hidalgo is thinking, allowing him to be with his kids.”
“I bet they watch him pretty closely.”
“I’m probably going to be a pretty big a-hole about the people in Deacon’s life,” Ray commented. “I’m going to watch everybody. I’ll probably do the same for you. Yeah, I know that I will. I hate seeing all this.”
“All this?”
“You, hurt by everything. I told Warren that if he messed with you in any way, I’d make him wish that he’d never been born. Selfish prick.”
“I told him the same thing about you,” I said. “Not the selfish prick part. I threatened Wilde against retaliating against you because of me.”
“You did talk to him? And he called me to have me apologize?”
“Lyle set it up today, I think to protect Camdyn. It’s not worth repeating what Wilde said,” I answered, but then I did repeat it, almost word for word. “He tried to explain everything away but he did take some responsibility.” I shook my head. “I kept telling myself that it was all because of him. It was easier when it was because of him and Camdyn.”
“It was due to Warren, in a way. He should have stepped in and acted if he was the only sober adult who knew what was happening.”
“Maybe he was, but he’s not to blame. The answer is that my mother didn’t want me.” Ray didn’t say anything and I nodded at him. “Yeah, that’s what it was. It’s a little hard, like, it’s a little overwhelming to think that no one ever has. I’m not trying to be melodramatic and whiny. But it felt so much better to be able to blame the Wildes instead of her, to believe that she did love me but she had to leave. You know, that Warren made her abandon me at the hospital and then Camdyn prevented her from finding me later. I’ve been trying to keep thinking that it’s their fault, but I can’t.”
“It’s not true that no one wants you.”
“Really?” Hope rose in my chest as I waited for him to respond.
“Deacon wants you,” Ray said. “He needs you all the time. He depends on you for everything.”
Oh. Right, that was wonderful, and I nodded. “I really love him, too. I hope your offer about me coming with you to your next team—I hope that offer still stands.”
“It does.” He looked relieved, and stopped rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“Good.” That was settled, then, and everyone’s feelings were clear. I went upstairs and carried down the boxes I’d left on the landing to stack them at the front door. “These are my files of information on everyone,” I explained. “I’ll bring it to work tomorrow to shred. There’s a lot of really personal stuff in here and it would be bad if it fell into the wrong hands.”
He stared at me. “Are you trying to be ironic?”
“I meant somebody who would really act, someone who really would do something terrible to them, because I don’t know if I ever could have,” I said, although it was hard to own up to being such a failure. “Even in Texas when that guy laughed in my face and told me that I knew I’d wanted it and I’d been leading him on, even then it was hard…not very hard,” I admitted. “But still, it wasn’t like ruining his life came easy to me.”
“He deserved everything he got and a lot more.” Ray put his arm around me and I leaned against him.
“After meeting Camdyn, I’m not sure I could have followed through with my plans for her.” I sighed. “You were right. I am a terrible grifter.”
“I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” he told me, but I wasn’t so sure. I started for the parking lot to put the boxes into my new, beautiful car, and that reminded me of how lucky I was. I had the car but more importantly, I had Deacon, and I had someone who helped me lug boxes and let me cry on him and liked it. Maybe I was a terrible grifter, but maybe he was right and it didn’t matter as much anymore.
But that night, instead of going to sleep, I found myself descending the stairs again and standing in front of Ray’s door, watching the faint play of light under it. I stood for what felt like hours before I raised my hand and knocked.
“Come on in.” He was in his usual place, shirtless and resting against the pillows to watch football clips. “I’m prepping for the game.” He patted the spot across the bed and I walked around to that side. “See how the running guy got past the other guy? I won’t let that happen.”
“I think you mean the running back,” I corrected.
“Is that what they’re called?” He looked over at me. “Can’t sleep?”
“No.”
“You feeling sorry that you’re not nailing Warren Wilde’s A-word to the wall?”
“I don’t know how I feel.” I squirmed restlessly. “Disappointed, I guess. Angry and sad. Useless! What am I supposed to do now, just wait for a higher power to pass judgment and punish everyone?”
“Maybe nobody will get punished. Maybe the best revenge is that you’re winning now.”
“That’s what Lyle said.” I moved around again.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“I don’t know!” I snapped. Everything seemed confused and tangled in my mind—my goals were unclear for the first time in years, and here was this kind of naked guy next to me who was probably going to be a large part of my future, and he’d kissed me and I had no idea why.
I sat up and looked over at him. “I don’t know,” I repeated. But I crawled across the bed as I said the words, and then I knelt close enough to his bare chest to feel the heat coming from his body.
“Hi,” Ray said. He put his arm around me, tucked against my thigh and with his hand resting somewhere near my butt.
“Remember how earlier, you offered to be that guy?”
“Come again?”
“Remember,” I said, punctuating it by tapping his chest. “You said, ‘Don’t go off and find some rando and sleep with him in his apartment where he lives like an animal with no yoga studio. I’m right here and I want to sleep with you.’ That was what you said.”
He smiled, the shark one, and it made me shiver. Not because I found it scary anymore but because I found it attractive. Very, very attractive. His hand moved and settled right on my butt. He squeezed gently.
“Is that what I said, that I wanted to sleep with you?” he asked, and I nodded. “I do. Are you taking me up on that offer?”
I didn’t answer, which was Rule 3, but I wasn’t thinking about the Rules. My mind focused on the way the warm skin of his chest felt beneath my palm and the way his fingers were kneading and rubbing me. I shifted, pressing back into his hand, and then I leaned forward and let my breasts rest on his chest. I leaned more and let my mouth press against his.
That was all it took. Ray flipped me over onto my back and held himself above me. Before I had time to breathe again, his mouth crashed against mine and he kissed me for real, with lips and tongue too, with his body rubbing against me. He kissed so hard and deep that I may have forgotten to breathe and I was dizzy—no, not from a lack of oxygen, though, but from being overwhelmed. I was overwhelmed by his kiss and overwhelmed by Ray. I shuddered in a huge gasp when he pulled away.
He looked down at me, his dark eyes glowing and the shark smile shining. “Tell me what you like.”
“I don’t know.”
His smile faded. “You don’t?”
I shook my head slightly. “I never much—there’s not a lot I found to like.”
“But you want to do this?
I did. I wanted to feel him close to me, I wanted him linked with me in the way that joining our bodies together might accomplish. “I do.”
“Then let’s find out what you enjoy.” He pulled my—his—sweatshirt up and off. “You don’t put on anything under these?” I shook my head. “You’re walking around with no shirt, braless, when you wear my clothes?”
“Usually.”
“Will you keep doing that? I’ll see you and I can imagine…”
“It’s not for your fantasy life,” I told him. “It’s for my comfort. Bras suck.”
“Suck,” Ray said, nodding. He bent his head and did, suckling a spot on my neck below my ear.
“Oh.” I breathed in and out as his mouth moved around my neck. “Oh…” My nails scratched up his back.
“So that’s something you enjoy.” He bit me gently. “If there’s something that you don’t like, tell me.”
“I do like that. A lot.”
“I like that, too,” he said. I’d moved my hands down to tug at his boxer briefs so I could feel all of him. “Yeah, let’s take care of that right now.”
Both of us were naked in less than a second, and Ray’s fully nude body now pressed against my fully nude one. This had been what I’d wanted—exactly this warmth, this contact. I arched to increase it and he kissed me.
“We’re moving,” he said, and flipped us so that I lay on top of him. Then he lifted me and positioned my limbs, adjusting my knees on either side of his ribs and placing my elbows on either side of his head. That put my breasts directly in line with his mouth.
He took advantage of that proximity. “Oh,” I sighed again, because he was licking and suckling first one nipple and then the other. I pressed toward him, rocking, and his hand slid up the back of my thigh. I tried to move in a way that would get that hand even higher.
His mouth came off my breast. “Why are you wiggling like that? Are you ticklish?”
“No, not really. Here,” I suggested, and showed him exactly where I wanted his fingers to touch me.
“Let me get in a better position to access that spot,” Ray suggested, and we rolled again, making me laugh like I did when he floored the accelerator in the Rasant. His head picked up and he smiled back at me. “That’s a nice sound.” His hand now moved up my inner thigh and I moaned. “That one, too.”
I touched him back, palming his erection, rubbing up and down as he found my clit. He bit my neck again and I held his mouth there and then we kissed, out of control and both of us moaning. He moved his fingers inside me and I felt my body freeze and then shake and I came, my arms wrapped around him. He kissed me again and rolled to his side away from me, and I attached myself to his back, my leg flung over his waist.
“Right now,” I said urgently.
“I’m working on that—oh, Chloe, fuck,” he groaned, because he was working on a condom but I was working on climbing over him to try to meld our hips together. He picked me up and I sank down on top of him, taking him deep inside me. I shuddered and Ray said my name again, then we found a rhythm, moving together, and he touched me, massaged my clit and I held his shoulders as pleasure rolled through me once more. It was harder and faster than before, so complete and shattering that I was flying. Ray arched his hips and I felt him come, too, and I closed my eyes as my body trembled.
When I opened them, he was looking down at me. We’d rolled yet again, it seemed, and he’d gathered me up against his chest. I could feel his heart pounding and he still panted, and I snuggled myself closer. This was perfect. This was what it felt like to be wanted by Ray.
“Chloe?”
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No. Sleep in here,” he said, and I nodded. Deacon was ok in the room by himself and I was very good where I was.
“Was that what you needed?” Ray asked.
I put my palm on his cheek and he turned to kiss it. “That was it exactly,” I said.
He nodded, but he was looking at me so intently, like I hadn’t answered right. “What?” I asked.
“Was that just about you needing someone? Anyone?”
The truth came right out of me. “No,” I said. “It was about you. It was about me needing you.”
He smiled, his nice teeth gleaming in the darkness. “Good. Keep that up.”
I didn’t know how I would stop myself now. “That night you told me not to go home with some bar guy, you also said you were with other women when you travel for games. A lot of other women.”
“That was what I said,” he agreed. “That was me lying to you.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “There’s only one woman.”
“Me?”
He nodded again.
“Good.” I cuddled against him. “Just remember that there’s a lot of information in your dossier that I can keep instead of shredding. You don’t want me on your bad side.”
He laughed. “I’ll have to work on keeping you happy and satisfied.” He did, for the rest of the night.
Chapter 16
“Chloe. Chloe?”
I looked up at Barb. “Hi. Yes?”
She laughed. “You’re out in left field. It’s nice to see you smiling like that.”
I wore the same smile this morning that I’d gotten after I’d slept with Ray for the first time. I had smiled again after the second time, too, and the third, the fourth, and the fifth. I’d smiled when Deacon and I had left the house that morning and Ray had kissed us both. He’d walked us to the parking lot and after I’d put the baby in the seat, I’d smiled more and he had kissed me again, pushing me back against the side of the car and lifting me so that our hips had ground together and—
“I think we all know what puts that look on a woman’s face,” Eloy said, and Jeri announced that she was pretty sure he didn’t have any clue about how to achieve that.
“I have something for you,” Barb told me over the noise of their argument. “It was in my mom’s stuff and I found it last night. She kept all kinds of mementos from the people she sewed for. Lots of them gave her things, like if they went out in clothes she’d made or altered, they’d save the gift basket from an event or the program or something like that. Soleil Riordan used to give back the actual outfit. She didn’t like to wear things twice.” She handed me a small shopping bag. “Here.”
I opened it and found a mound of deep blue fabric, and when I shook it out, a dress unfurled. “What is this?”
“She wore that to the party when Warren Wilde retired from the Woodsmen. It was a huge, huge deal. So many people were going to wear orange, you know, so Soleil chose this.” Barb rubbed the cloth between her thumb and middle finger. “It was her favorite color, and she liked to stand out.”
“Blue was her favorite color?” Barb nodded but then I shook my head. “No, I don’t want this. Why are you giving it to me?” I pushed it back into the bag. “You should give it to Camdyn.”
“She inherited all of her mother’s stuff. I thought you might like to have one, special thing. Soleil looked like a princess in this,” she said, smiling. “You’re taller, but you’re about the same size. This dress has a big hem that we could let down if you wanted to wear it.”
“Why would I…” I stopped and looked at her, not willing to give anything away (Rule 5) but feeling like it might be much too late for that.
“I mean, after that day when I talked about your accent and Eloy started blabbing about how much you look like Cam, it was pretty obvious that you were some kind of relation.”
“We haven’t told anyone,” Eloy added, and I realized that he and Jeri were listening now. “Kaori doesn’t know.”
“What do you think you know?” I asked carefully.
“You wondered if my mom had altered Soleil’s clothes for both her pregnancies,” Barb reminded me. “She didn’t do that, but I think that after Soleil had Camdyn, she was being very careful about how much she shared with people. She blabbed a lot of dumb stuff, but big, important things? She kept those to herself. Like who Camdyn’s father was. Like that she was dying. She knew she was for a while but no one else did, not even Cam.”
