the applause died away, people started to wander around the room, talking and laughing, some people came to talk to Zack. She wanted to tell them to go away. Because she could feel the dark energy, the grief, radiating from him like a physical force. How was everyone else missing it?
She didn’t understand how they could miss what was so clear to her.
“Let’s go.” She put her hand on his, felt his pulse, pounding hard in his wrist. She ran her fingers along his forearm. She didn’t think he would accept loving words, but she could offer him comfort in another way. A way he could accept.
There was no question where things would end up tonight. No fighting it. They both knew it.
He nodded once and stood, she stood, too, and went to him, putting her hand on his back. He wrapped his arm around her waist as they headed out of the ballroom.
Zack’s chest felt too full. Everything felt like too much. The whole day. He shouldn’t have brought Clara with him tonight. It was one thing to sit in a room full of strangers and have them talk about his contribution to the NICU, but it was another to have someone sitting there, knowing why he’d done it. Someone else thinking of Jake. It was hard enough to be alone in it. Sharing it made it seem more real. It made him feel exposed.
It made him feel like everything, his failures, his pain, was written on him. Something he couldn’t hide, or scrub off no matter how many layers of control he tried to conceal it with.
Clara saw him.
When he’d picked her up tonight, he’d fully intended on keeping her at a distance, putting her in her place. A new place. Because he had mistresses, women who were with him for the sole purpose of warming his bed and accompanying him to events.
He wasn’t friends with those women. He didn’t eat their baked goods, he didn’t know that they wore yoga pants to bed when there wasn’t a man around. He didn’t know that they were insecure about their bodies, or that their favorite band was still that group of long-haired teenage boys that had been so popular in the nineties.
He didn’t know anything about them beyond what they looked like naked.
He knew the other stuff about Clara. And he knew the naked stuff. And tonight he’d been determined to focus only on the latter. If he couldn’t keep her as only a friend, and he’d proven he wasn’t doing a very good job of that, then he would have her as a mistress. Because what had happened at her apartment, the way they’d shared dinner, jokes, then made love, him holding her while she’d slept … he couldn’t do that. It was too reckless. To out of his control.
He had to move her into the compartment he could deal with. And she seemed determined to push her way back out.
The expression on her face when she saw the wrong card in her spot had been so sad, stricken, as though someone had slapped her.
And he’d felt it in him. As though her emotion was his. He’d always felt connected to Clara, but this was different. Sharper. Impossible to deny. Beyond his control.
He should have taken her home. Yet he’d still taken her back to his house. Because he had planned on having her tonight, had been obsessed with it all week. If only to prove that he could sleep with her without having his insides flayed. Sex was only sex. It didn’t have to be personal, it didn’t have to mean anything. It didn’t have to be related to the awful, tight feeling in his chest.
She was beautiful tonight, incredible in that form-fitting black dress and the gem, enticing in the valley of her cleavage, drawing his eye, tormenting him.
She was standing by the massive living-room windows, the bay in the background, city lights glittering on the inky surface of the waves. He wanted her. Here and now. A good thing he’d planned for it. It wasn’t spur-of-the-moment, it wasn’t beyond his control.
He had condoms and everything else he needed. He was in control. He desperately needed the control. He tightened his hand into a fist, steadied it, ignored the tremor that ran through his fingers and skated up his arm, jolting his heart.
Ignoring the strange tenderness he felt when he looked at her. This wasn’t about feeling, not in an emotional sense. This was physical. It was sex.
“Take off your dress,” he said.
She reached behind herself and unzipped the gown, letting it fall to the floor. She wasn’t wearing a bra, only a small triangle of lace keeping her from being completely bare. That and the necklace, the emerald heavy and glittering between her breasts.
She reached around to remove it, her breasts rising with the action, pink tipped and perfect.
“No,” he ground out. “Leave it on.” A reminder. A reminder that she was the same as every other woman he’d ever been with. The exchange of gifts, jewelry, that was how it worked. It was invariable, it was safe. It was unchallenging.
She dropped her hands to her sides and he walked closer to her, loving the way the moonlight spilled silver over her pale curves. The way the deep shadows accentuated the dip of her small waist, the round fullness of her hips and breasts.
She was a woman. There was no denying it. And he was starving for her.
But he would wait. He would draw it out. Because he was the master of this game. He was always in charge. He had forgotten that sometimes over the past few weeks, had allowed her inexperience, the nature of their friendship, to change the way he approached it.
Not now.
She’s a woman. Only a woman. The same as any other.
No. Not the same. His mind rebelled against that thought immediately. There had never been a more exquisite woman, that much he knew for certain. There had never been a figure, not since Eve, better designed to tempt a man.
She was the epitome of sensual beauty, more seductive simply standing there than any other woman could have been if she’d been trying.
Clara.
Her name flashed through his mind, loud, a reminder.
No. He didn’t need it. He wasn’t thinking of her. Only of his own need and how she might fulfill it. He would pleasure her, too, as he did all of his lovers. But it wasn’t different. It couldn’t be different. Not again. Not after that night in her apartment.
“Turn around for me,” he said. “Face the window.”
She obeyed again. She was like a perfect hourglass, the elegant line of her back enticing. He walked over to her, extending his hand and tracing the dip of her spine. She shivered beneath his touch.
“Do you like that?” he asked.
“I’ve liked everything you’ve ever done to me.” Her voice, so sweet, a bit vulnerable. Not a temptress.
Clara.
He put his hands on her hips and tugged her back against him, let her feel the hard ridge of his arousal, the blatant, purely sexual evidence of what he wanted from her. Her indrawn breath, the short, sweet sound of pleasure that escaped her lips, let him know that she was tracking
