“It’s right over my apartment,” Carrie adds and looks up at me. “They said the outlook for saving anything in my place is grim. I guess I won’t have any personal items to bring to your place.”
“You’re alive, baby. We have to focus on that.”
“I’m going to take care of a problem,” Gabe says. “Carrie. Put my number in your phone. If you need me, you know how to reach me.”
She reaches for her purse, but she’s trembling too hard for her to open it. I catch her hand. “I’ll do it later.” I look at Gabe. “I got this.”
“I’ll call you both,” he says and then takes off.
“They want me to stay close,” Carrie says, stepping in front of me, shivering and hugging herself as she does. “And we can’t get into your apartment, but it’s cold and I’m so very tired.”
I wrap my arms around her and pull her against me. “I’ll keep you warm,” I say. “And safe. You have a home now with me.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” She nestles in closer to me, but I sense the tension in her reply that I want to drive away. “I want to be there now or just stay just like this wrapped in your arms,” she adds, “but I can’t even do that. I need to call my insurance company. And my father.” Her voice lifts with urgency. “Should I call my father? Why is that my instinct when he’s acting like he is?”
“Deep breath, baby. It’s your instinct because he’s your father, the person who took care of you when you couldn’t, and no matter what, we assume our parents will worry about us. And he does worry about you.”
“Maybe he does. I don’t know anymore, but I can’t deal with him now, though. I just can’t, but I don’t want him showing up here when we have so much going on.”
“Just text him and tell him that if he hears about the fire, you’re safe.”
“Yes. Good idea. I’m not thinking straight. I’ll text him.” She reaches into her purse for her phone, her hands a bit steadier, enough now that she snags it easily, types the message, and then reads it to me. “If you hear about a fire in Battery Park, I’m safe.” She eyes me with uncharacteristic uncertainty, but then, her apartment just burned down.
“Perfect,” I say.
She hits send.
“You’ll have to tell him you lost your apartment eventually.”
“I know, but not now, even if he calls. I can’t handle him pushing me to go there to him. I’m not going there.”
Because she’s staying with me, but I don’t say that, and the divide between her and her father that represents. I just hold her and help her ride out the storm. A storm I feel growing more intense for both of us, as her father doesn’t reply to her message, and I simmer over the idea of my father causing her this pain.
***
Carrie
I’m so cold that I can’t stop shaking.
It’s ten-thirty when Reid and I are allowed back into his building, my building now, but I just can’t digest that at the moment. I’m in emotional overload, and the minute we step inside Reid’s apartment, it’s as if the wind falls from my wings. My knees are weak and my mind is exhausted. My head spins and for a moment I think I might drop. Reid seems to know this, and he scoops me up and starts walking, his strong arms and body warming me. I rest my head on his shoulder and it’s only a minute or so before we’re in his bedroom and he’s sitting me on the bed.
I kick off my shoes and just sit there on the edge of the mattress, a nightstand to my left. “My only photo of my mother was in the apartment,” I say, as Reid sits next to me and shrugs out of his jacket. “I haven’t seen her in years, but it represented a part of my life that made me who I am today.”
“I could tell you we’ll find another or find her,” he says, tossing his jacket on the bed, his hand coming down on my leg, “but I know that’s not what you want to hear. That photo had a special meaning for you.”
I cover his hand with mine. “You understand things I don’t expect you to understand.”
He kisses my hand. “I want to understand everything, Carrie.” His voice is low, gravelly, and yet warm.
I study his handsome face, searching for confirmation or perhaps a lie? Why would I search for a lie? But I know why. It’s not our parents. It’s not business or money. This man affects me, understands me, connects with me, but now, now, if I move in with him, he controls every part of my life. To allow such a thing requires vulnerability and trust. “Everything?” I ask.
“Yes.” He strokes hair from my eyes, the light touch sending goosebumps down my spine. “Everything,” he repeats. “I want to know everything about you. I want everything, Carrie.”
“Everything is so much.”
“Too much?” he asks.
The doorbell rings and his hand falls away, the moment shifting away from the intimacy of the one before it. “That’s Cat. She brought you some things.”
“She didn’t have to do that. I have enough to get by here.” I shiver and Reid walks to the closet, rather than out of the room, and returns with his big navy robe.
He stops in front of me and wraps it around my shoulders, the lines of his face harder now, tension in his voice. “I’ll be right back.” He kisses my head, a tenderness to the act that defies that tension, tenderness I’d once thought him incapable of, but it’s welcomed now. I’m strong, I am, and I’ll come back fighting tomorrow, but tonight, I just need permission to only survive.
He exits the room and I lay back on the bed, Reid’s bed that could be mine now if I say yes to moving in with him. If I say yes.
“Hello, hello!”
At the sound of Cat’s voice, I sit up, wrapping the robe more tightly around me to find the gorgeous, sweet blonde bombshell standing in the doorway with bags in her hands. “I have Chanel and much more. I know someone. She opened her store for me.”
“What? Thank you, but with what money?”
She sets the bags down and settles her hands on her jean-clad hips. “Reid’s black AmEx. He told me to spend an insane amount of money on you. He wants you to feel like you have your own things.”
“I don’t want his money.” My throat constricts. “I don’t want him to do that.” My hand goes to my throat now. “God. I don’t want to be here.”
Cat blanches. “What? You don’t want to be here?”
“No. Yes. I do. I really do.” I go back to my first reaction to Reid’s invitation for me to move in. “Not like this, though. I just don’t want to feel like I forced myself on him.”
“You didn’t. You aren’t.” She sits next to me. “That man wants you here. The way Reese wanted me with him almost immediately.”
I barely know Cat, but I like her, and I just need to say what I feel, to get it out and understand it. “I want to believe that, but our parents hate each other, and it wasn’t that long ago that Reid was an asshole to me. And then suddenly he’s becoming everything to me and it’s wonderful and scary and—he’s in control. Now, here, living with him, he has all the control and it’s terrifying.”
“You’re wrong.”
At the sound of Reid’s voice, Cat and I turn to find him standing in the doorway with his jacket, vest, and tie gone. “For the first time in my adult life,” he says, “I don’t have the control.”
Cat squeezes my arm. “I’ll go. I’ll check on you tomorrow.” She stands and hurries toward the door, and Reid steps back to allow her to pass before walking toward me, and sitting down next to me. His hands come down on my face and he tilts my gaze to his. “You have control, Carrie, in ways I never thought I’d let anyone have control.” His voice is low, raspy. Affected. “And I understand the argument that I might have the control, I do, but it’s you who does. All you.” He rests his forehead on mine. “When I think of you in that building, and how easily you could have died, it tears me apart.” He pulls back to look at me. “Stay, Carrie. I want you to stay, but I’m not going to pressure you. I need you to want to be here. And I hate that the war between our
fathers makes you distrust me and us to this degree.”
I shiver with the impact of his words, and all the emotional punches this night has given me, but there’s so much I want to say to him. I never get the chance. “I’ll run you a hot bath,” he says, and then he’s standing and walking away, as if he shut down, pulled back in some way.
It’s that wall he puts between us, even as he confesses to needing me, that makes me hold back. That’s what scares me. It makes me think there’s more to all this hell around us where he’s concerned than I know. I want to live with Reid, but I can’t live with secrets and lies.
Chapter Sixty-Four
Reid
I walk downstairs, after having started Carrie her promised bath, when Gabe calls, “It wasn’t dad. I’m certain of it. You should have seen his face when I told him Carrie was moving in with you. I also called a friend who works at the fire department to verify what we’d been told. It was a machine in the restaurant and Carrie’s floor is a complete loss.”
I wait to digest that, to feel relief, but I’m not capable of that emotion at present. “Thanks, Gabe.”
“How is she?”
“As expected.”
“Right. I’ll check in.”
We disconnect and I’m standing at the damn bar in the corner of the living room and don’t know how I got there. That doesn’t happen to me. I press my hands on the cushioned counter and let my chin rest on my chest. I just blamed my father for her not trusting me when it was me who was the asshole in the beginning. Me, who still hasn’t told her why because it had nothing to do with her being a West and me a Maxwell. I have to tell her. If I want her to stay, I have to tell her what I’ve never shared with anyone. I have to trust her that much. There’s no escaping that reality and I really don’t want to escape, not if it means losing Carrie, and it might. I push off the counter and grab a bottle of wine and two glasses and head back upstairs.
Carrie’s not in the bedroom so I set the glasses on the nightstand and fill them both before entering the bathroom. Carrie is neck deep in bubbles that smell like my body wash, and damn, I like her in my tub and using my soap, which only drives home the conversation we need to have. Her lashes lift when she hears me enter. “Hey.”
“How’s the bath?”
“Good. It’s amazing how a hot bath can solve so much. Just getting rid of that chill helps so much.”
I sit down on the ledge next to the tub. “Wine?”
“Yes, please.” She lifts her wet, bubble covered hand and accepts it. She sips and nods her head in approval. “Good. Don’t ask the price, right? Just enjoy.” She sets the glass on the other side of the tub.
“Exactly. Gabe called a friend at the fire department.”
“And?”
“It really was a machine in the restaurant.”
Her eyes narrow. “You thought it was your father.” It’s not a question.
“I was plotting his certain death quite literally, yes.”
“I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Maybe I haven’t known his evil to the extent you have, but I saw the intelligence in his eyes. An act that hurts others, that would come back on him, would put him in jail. And then he wouldn’t get to wear his suits at inappropriate times.”
I laugh, and considering my state of mind, only this woman could make that happen right now. “Very true. Very true.” I lean in and kiss her, but I pull back, the laughter fading into my mission, into the truth. “I know I was an asshole to you, but it had nothing to do with the company or our names.”
“Then what? What are you telling me?”
“That’s a complicated answer, but one you deserve.” I lean back. “Enjoy your bath and your wine. We can talk later.” I exit the bathroom and I grab the bottle of wine and my glass before walking into my escape room off the bedroom, where I sit down.
Carrie is smart and intuitive. She knows I’m holding something back. She probably thinks it’s about the takeover, or my intentions toward her father, or even her. But she’s still with me because she also senses how damn much I care about her. I want her to wake up tomorrow morning and make my bed her bed. I fill my glass, trying to prepare myself mentally for this conversation. Fuck. Maybe it needs to wait. Her apartment burned down tonight. Or maybe that’s why it has to happen tonight, so she knows I mean it when I say I want her here.
I’m on my second glass of wine when Carrie joins me, sitting next to me, her body draped in a pink silk gown. She sets her wine glass on the table in front of us and I do the same. She scoots closer, her leg next to my leg, her hand on my knee. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“Never before, but with you, yes. I think you need to know why I am how I am. Or was. You’ve done a lot to change me and even now, at times, I’m not sure that’s a good thing. Embracing that change is going to take a while. You need to know that, too.” I reach for my glass and down my wine.
“We have to do this now.”
I set my empty glass down and look at her. “We do, because I know how this affects me, how it’s shaped me, but you don’t, and that makes you afraid to let your life become completely entwined with mine. And that decision is upon us, Carrie. I want you here and you have to decide if you want to be here with me.”
“I’ll tell you the exact thought I had when you left the bedroom: I want to live with you, but not with secrets and lies.”
“Then I was right. You need to hear this.” My hands go to my knees and I lower my chin to my chest. “When I was a first-year law student, I was dating a girl who was really into me. I wasn’t really into her, but you know, I was young enough to want a convenient fuck.” I look at Carrie. “That’s the truth, as shitty as it sounds, but I’m not holding back.”
“You can tell me anything. I promise.”
I puff out a breath. “I finally decided I had to break it off with her. She said the L-word and I knew that meant that the situation was out of control. I decided that particular night. We stopped in a convenience store on the way back to my place.” I stretch my neck left and right. “It was being robbed.”
“Oh God,” Carrie whispers.
I rotate to face her because I need to own this. “I’ve never told anyone this. Gabe doesn’t know. Not beyond the outcome. Cat doesn’t know at all. No one knows.”
She takes my hands. “I’m listening.”
“The guy had a gun and he was going to shoot the clerk. I yelled and I took a step toward him to try and stop him. He turned and pointed the gun at me and Kelli—that was her name—threw herself in front of me. And she died.”
“Oh my God. Oh my God. Reid.”
“I led her on and she obviously really loved me. And what did she get for it? Dead.”
“And that’s when you considered criminal law.”
“Yes. I wanted to do something to make a difference, but the system is fucked with limitations and I’m sure you know by now, that I don’t do well with limitations. And rolling around in that kind of criminal law hell, wasn’t allowing me to move on. I refocused on corporate law and stepped away from pretty much everyone. I didn’t want anyone caring enough to end up hurt over me. Even Cat. She’s the kind of person who would throw herself in front of a bullet for someone she loves.”
Tears pool in Carrie’s eyes. “The pain and guilt you must still struggle with.”
“I found a place to put it. I don’t think about it anymore except for random moments and yeah, they still gut me. I hated when Cat went to work for the DA right out of school. I knew she was putting herself in the sights of criminals. That’s when she and I really hit a wall. I wanted her with us, where I could protect her.”
“Did you tell her you felt that way?”
“No. I just drove at her like a bulldozer.”
Carrie pushes me against the couch and climbs on top of me, her hands on my cheeks. “Thank you for telling me. I understand so much now.”
“I don’t think you do. I didn’t want to care about you
, but there was something about you from the moment I met you. I knew you were a West, but I didn’t stay away. I knew that would cause us both grief, but I didn’t stay away. It wasn’t to punish you or to hurt you. It was because I couldn’t.” I roll her to her back and lower myself over her. “I can’t, Carrie. Because I love you too damn much.”
“You love me?”
“Yes, baby, I love you. So damn much. I know it’s probably soon to say that, but I’ve never said it to anyone. I—”
“I don’t hate you like you predicted, but I get that now. I love you, too. And, Reid, I did need to hear this. I needed to understand why you were an asshole and why you are who you are.”
“Then you’ll move in with me.”
“Yes. I will. I want to. I wanted to. I just needed—more. And you gave it to me.”
“More,” I whisper. “That’s the word that defines every moment I am with you. I want more. I am more because of you. Do you know what I want the most right now?”
“Dinner?”
I laugh. “Dinner would be good, but how about we eat it in my bed that is now our bed?” I stand up and pick her up, carrying her to the bedroom and laying her on the bed and setting on top of her. “Our bed, baby.”
Her arms wrap my shoulders. “Our bed.”
Our bed and our life. I’m going to marry this woman. She just doesn’t know it yet.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Carrie
I wake to Reid’s hands all over my body, and his thick erection pressed between my thighs, and despite losing so much last night, I feel like I gained so much. I found Reid, really found him, the real man. I found us. We found us. “Are you awake now?” he asks, his breath warm on my cheek, hand cupping my breast, fingers teasing my nipple.
I pant out a breath. “Yes,” I whisper, covering his hand with mine. “I’m awake.”
“Not awake enough,” he says, rolling me to my back, and then the next thing I know he’s between my legs, his shoulders easing them apart and I’m grabbing the sheets as he licks my clit. “What about now?” he asks, those blue eyes brimming with heat and challenge. “Are you awake now?”