I weep, and weep, and darkness takes over.
“…Full hospice care set up. A-S-A-P. Yeah, here, in my condo. Shit, I don’t know. MS, she said, basically terminal. How long? I don’t know. Name is Poe. P-O-E. Harborview Nursing Home in Petoskey, Michigan. I want her here as soon as it can be arranged. Makayla will fly out to be with her for the move. Yes, thanks. Full time, round the clock. Put the nurse up somewhere in the building. If you have to buy someone out to make it happen, then do it. Make sure the nurse is the best. And if there’s any kind of promising treatments, find them, get them.”
I wake up to hear Paxton pacing, and talking. He sees me stir, and sits on the bed beside me.
“Thank you, Victor. Okay, goodbye.” He shoves the phone in a back pocket, and stares down at me. He’s a big, broad shadow in the moonlight. His eyes glitter in the dim light. “You should have told me.”
“I’m sorry. It was too hard. Too scary.”
“It’s taken care of.” He smiles. “You’ll go down early next week and bring her here.”
“You want my sick, cantankerous, meddling mother living with you?”
“Meddling?”
I drop my eyes. Roll over, away from him. “She made me promise to try.”
“Try?” His hand rests on my shoulder.
“With you.” Don’t look at him—don’t look at him.
“So you’re not alone when she…” he trails off, unsure how to finish it.
I nod. “That. And because she could tell that I…”
“You what, Makayla?”
I finally turn over to my back, and stare up at him. I swallow my nerves and use the strength Mom taught me. “She could tell that I like you.”
He grins. “You like me?” A laugh. “As in, you like me, like me?”
I giggle—I’m tired and my dignity is gone. A giggle is all I’ve got, as girly and dumb as it is. “Don’t be juvenile.”
“You said you like me, but I’m the juvenile one?”
I reach for his hand, tangle my fingers with his. “I…I care about you.”
He doesn’t answer for a long time. “I care about you too.”
Our eyes lock. He frowns.
“This changes things,” he says.
I laugh quietly. “You just arranged for my mother to come live with us.”
He nods. His eyes are serious, penetrating, wild. “With us.”
A long, tense, seething silence.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I whisper.
He shakes his head. Our fingers are still entwined. “Me either.”
Another silence.
“Is it why you won’t sleep with me?” he asks.
“Is what why?”
“The money thing. Your mom. The hospice care. Marrying me. You don’t want to sleep with me so it won’t feel like you are…”
“Selling myself,” I finish, and then shrug. “I mean, that’s part of it.”
“What’s the rest?”
“So I wouldn’t fall for you.”
“I didn’t realize that that was a possibility,” he says.
I laugh. “Me either. It wasn’t supposed to be.”
“Why couldn’t you fall for me?”
“Because this is an arrangement. It’s going to end. We get married, you get to where you need to be, and then we divorce. That was the agreement.” I sigh. “If I started liking you, falling for you, it would hurt. And I’ve got enough hurt to cope with.”
“How long?” he asks, his voice tender and quiet.
I shrug, knowing what he’s asking. “I don’t know. I think she’s waiting, somehow.”
“For what?”
We’re in his room, I realize. In his bed. He lies down beside me, cradles me in the nook of his arm and shoulder.
“For me to…” I shrug. “Not be alone, I guess.” A silence. “To know that I’m going to be okay without her.”
“Will you be?”
I shake my head, sniffle. “No.”
“You could…” He starts over. “You could let yourself care about me. Let me care about you.” I hear him swallow hard. “It doesn’t have to be an arrangement. There doesn’t have to be the expiration date.”
I feel my heart hammer like a kettledrum. “Paxton…” I catch my breath. “You don’t want that. You said so.”
“Before I understood who…who you are. What kind of person you are. How much I’d come to…to like having you around.” He hesitates. “I may have changed my mind, a little.”
I grin up at him. “A little, huh?”
He shrugs, endeavoring to look nonchalant, and not at all succeeding. “Yeah, a little.”
“What exactly did you change your mind about?”
He exhales, and it’s shaky—which is, oddly, reassuring. “You. Marriage.” He’s wearing his suit slacks still, and a plain white crewneck T-shirt, barefoot, casual, hair rumpled; he lies on the bed beside me, close but not presumptuously so. “Can I tell you something that may piss you off?”
I let out a small, sharp breath. “Yeah, I guess.”
“You weren’t supposed to be so fucking irresistible. You’re so completely different from the women I normally associate with, and that was on purpose. I couldn’t handle being married to those kinds of women, not even fake married, where I’d probably end up like my parents, having known but quiet affairs.”
“Your parents both do that?”
He laughs. “Oh yeah. Dad’s had the same mistress for twenty years—he’s been with her almost as long as he’s been with Mom, and I kind of feel like he’s actually closer to her than he is Mom.” He lifts a hand in a sort of shrug. “Mom is more complicated. Basically, she keeps a roster of like five or six guys she sleeps with. She’ll see the same guy for, like, six months, a year maybe, and then she switches to the next guy. Then, once that roster of guys has aged out, she finds new ones.”
“Aged out?” I echo, with a disbelieving bark of laughter.
“Yeah, she likes 'em younger—thirtyish. No more than thirty-five, no younger than twenty-five. Once they hit thirty-five, they’re out, and she replaces them. Where she finds them, I don’t know. Not an escort service or anything, I know that for sure because I hired a PI to check.”
I frown at him. “Why? Why would you want to know if your mom is using an escort service?”
“So I know what my political opponents may find out and try to use against me.” Another shrug. “Once I was sure it was nothing like that, I stopped looking. It’s just your average cougar affair bullshit, a rich old lady looking for hot young studs to make her feel desired because her husband is a rich old fart who never really gave a shit about her.”
I cackle in surprise. “Wow. That’s harsh.
He snorts a laugh. “It’s the truth.”
“And you don’t want that?”
He shudders. “Fuck no.” Vehement, disgusted. “Fuck no.”
“Then what do you want?”
A long pause. “I don’t know anymore, Makayla. I really don’t. If you’d asked me three months ago, I’d have said that I want to stay a bachelor. Keep my dating life private, and maybe eventually settle down with someone. I would have said that if I ever did marry someone, it probably wouldn’t be love, but would be more than an arrangement. Just a marriage of…convenience, I guess. Someone I like, someone I tolerate, someone I’m at least moderately attracted to and can stand to be around. So far, I just haven’t found that person.” He sighs. “That’s not true— I really did like Monique a lot. She was beautiful, she was classy, she was smart.”
“But your mother.”
He sighs, and it’s a disgusted sound. “I was a coward about that. I should have fought it. I should have stood up to her better, made it more clear that her not-so low-key racism isn’t okay. It’s something I regret.”
“Thus, me.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t know if that’s true anymore.” He turns onto his side to face me, folding his arm under his head. “Maybe that’s how it starte
d. I mean, you’re not like, black, you know? But you’re also not Caucasian.”
I laugh, and it’s kind of bitter. “Oh, I know. Trust me, I know.”
He blinks at me. “Okay, so there’s a lot of pain in that statement.”
“Black mother, white father. But I grew up in a pretty rough part of Detroit, where I wasn’t black enough to be accepted. My hair is curly, but it’s not like my mom’s, or my friends’ hair. I’m dark, but not dark enough. Then, when we moved up here, I wasn’t white enough to be accepted either. And most of the kids I went to school with had known each other their whole lives, so I was always the outsider.” I sigh. “It was hard.”
“I can’t imagine.”
I shrug, a small roll of my shoulder. “It is what it is.” I wave at him. “Back to the important part of all this.”
“Which is what?”
“What you want. From me, from this marriage arrangement we’ve cooked up for ourselves.”
Paxton doesn’t respond for a long time. When he does, his voice is quiet and soft. “You were supposed to be a safe choice.” He pauses again. “This is the part I’m worried will piss you off. You were the safe choice. Someone I couldn’t see myself genuinely falling for.”
“Because I’m not the appropriate choice. I’m poor, biracial, uneducated, uncultured, unsophisticated.” I laugh. “I’m foul-mouthed, opinionated, stubborn, independent…”
“Beautiful, funny, easy to talk to, fun to be around,” Paxton continues where I trailed off. “Sexy, smart, insightful.” A brief pause, just a heartbeat. “Tempting. Intoxicating.”
“Intoxicating?” I ask. “What am I, cheap tequila?”
He doesn’t laugh at what I meant as a joke. “No, Makayla. You’re the rarest whiskey.” He swallows hard. “You were supposed to be the safe bet, easy to be fake married to, easy to let go when our marriage had served its purpose.”
“But?”
“But now…?” He touches my cheek, a big rough palm ghosting across my cheekbone; thumb brushing through my curls over my temple. “Now I don’t know anymore. There’s nothing safe or easy about you.”
“Well, I’m definitely not easy,” I say with a laugh.
“That’s not what I meant, Makayla.”
I smile at him. “I know. I’m joking.”
“Are you hiding behind humor?” he asks.
I close my eyes briefly, to get away from his piercing golden gaze. “Maybe.”
“Don’t. This is real.”
“It can’t be real, Paxton. It can’t be. I don’t belong in your world. I can’t afford to fall for you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I have abandonment issues, Paxton.” I smile sadly. “My father was a rich white guy, and he abandoned me. He didn’t want me. He didn’t want Mom. He didn’t want us.”
“Thus your ingrained, automatic disdain for me and everything I represent.”
I nod. “Exactly.”
“What if I didn’t abandon you?”
“I don’t know how to trust that. I don’t know how to emotionally get past the doubt. It’s a big hang-up.”
“I mean, I don’t know shit about getting past emotional hang-ups, because god knows I’ve got enough of my own, but it seems to me that they are something we’d have to deal with one step at a time. You don’t just get over this stuff.”
“What if you’re just saying all this to get me to sleep with you?”
He laughs. “Makayla. If I just wanted you to sleep with me, I’d have seduced you already.”
I frown at him. “You say that like…like if you were to decide you wanted me, it would be a foregone conclusion. As if you seducing me was an automatic thing.” I laugh. “Like I’d just drop my panties for you at the first glimpse of that thousand-watt grin of yours.”
He gives me that exact grin, and my heart hammers. “This one?”
I try valiantly to hide my smile. “Yes, that one.”
“It’s more than just the smile, Makayla.”
“Oh?”
“There’s a whole art to it.”
“To seducing women?”
“To seducing stubborn, hard to get women.” He’s grinning, a cat-ate-the-canary grin.
“Is there.” If he’s at all observant, he’ll note the ice in my tone.
“Oh yeah. I’ve got it down to a science.”
“Do you.”
“You doubt me?” Wounded, almost.
“You think, if you turned on the charm and put your moves on me, that I would sleep with you, just like that?”
“I know you’re attracted to me, Makayla.”
“No,” I say. “You know that I’m aware that you’re an attractive person. It’s hard to miss, and I’ve never denied that you are.”
He smirks at me, and my eyes follow the movement of his mouth, the set of his lips, the shift of his eyes. I’m hyperaware of everything he does, in this moment. “That’s true enough, I grant you. But you’re also attracted to me.”
“And that means I have no control over whether I want to sleep with you. I’m physically attracted to you, so I’m just going to lose all self-control, suddenly, and throw myself at you. Like, please, take me, Paxton?”
“Not that you have no self-control. You obviously do, and a shitload of it. But you say it like throwing yourself at me is the most far-fetched notion you’ve ever heard.”
“What pisses me off is the assumption, Paxton. You’re so fucking arrogant and presumptuous. Like, of course I’d sleep with you—if you chose to sleep with me, of course I would. I wouldn’t be able to help myself.”
“So, what you’re saying is, if I did this…” He leans close, and sparks dance up and down my spine, crackling over my lips—all before he makes contact—and then, his lips touch mine, and fire sings through my veins, making me shake all over, making my blood race. “It wouldn’t do anything to you?”
I manage to breathe again, somehow. “Nope,” I lie, popping the P sound.
He smirks. “I see. You didn’t stop me from kissing you, I notice.”
“It was okay. Decent, as far as kisses go.” I’m lying through my damn teeth—it was the best damn kiss I’ve ever experienced, and it lasted a fraction of a second.
I wonder if he can tell.
“Just decent?” He shakes his head. “That won’t do. Can I get another chance? I’m sure I can do better.”
I shrug, faking nonchalance. “Sure. Knock yourself out, champ.”
He laughs. He sees through my bluff, and calls me on it. “Okay. Here we go—I’m gonna kiss you so hard your panties will all but fall off of their own accord.”
His grin is so cocky, so confident, so arrogant and intoxicating and infuriating—he means it. He knows damn well that he’s perfectly capable of doing exactly that.
“You ready, Makayla?” He gathers me in his arms, curls me against his big hard body, his arm wrapped behind my neck and shoulders, the other hand splayed against my cheek. “Here it comes.”
I have plenty of time to push him off. To wriggle out of his hold. To tell him no, don’t kiss me.
I do none of these things.
What I do, irresponsibly, is tilt my face up to his, and part my lips, and close my eyes. Luxuriate in the strong warmth and protection of his arms, and fall deliriously into the wild heat of his kiss. His mouth slashes across mine, and his lips claim me. There’s no buildup, no touch of lips and pause, seek, dance, play—no, this is a sudden and all-out assault. He’s leaning into me, not quite on top of me but nearly, and his tongue assails the inside of my mouth and tangles with my tongue, and I have never, ever, ever even conceived of anything like this. This isn’t a kiss, it’s mouth-sex. Tongue fucking. An oral claim. It’s a kiss that says
YOU—ARE—MINE.
My body is on fire, and the only way to extinguish the flames is Paxton. Yet, the more I kiss him, the hotter the fires burn. I press my thighs together to ease the ache between them caused by this kiss. It goes on, and on. His to
ngue plunderers my mouth, and his fingers brush into my hair, tangling and tugging, pulling, not quite yanking but definitely exerting control over me and this kiss via my hair. He has a double handful of my hair, actually, and now he is above me, hovering over me, his big body blocking out the moon and the starlight and everything, and—where are my hands?
Oh, there they are.
Ripping at his shirt. Pushing it up, and I’m the one to break the kiss just long enough to get the opening over his head, and then I’m seeking his mouth again, demanding he give me the kiss back. And oh, he does. My hands splay on his shoulders—his skin is hot to the touch, and the muscles in his back ripple. He is devouring me—kissing me as if this kiss is required to save my life. As if to stop this kiss is to stop breathing—and honestly, that sounds feasible. I am worried if I don’t get more of him, more of this kiss, more of his hard muscles and firm flesh that I will die of lack, of asphyxiation, of need.
On, and on.
Until I’m gasping for breath and he’s still kissing me.
He breaks away, and he’s panting. I’m gasping, and my core is aching, and my breasts feel full and heavy and my nipples are hard beneath my bra. All of me needs more.
“There,” he whispers. “How was that?”
I don’t have what it takes to play the game anymore. He kissed the attitude out of me—kissed the defiance and stubbornness right out of my system. All that’s left now is pure, raw, unadulterated desire.
Manic lust.
I blink away clouds of hazy confusion—the kiss was so intoxicating that I’m not sure for a moment who I am or where I am.
“Dammit, Paxton,” I whisper.
He smirks, obnoxiously cocky, damningly beautiful; the arrogant, knowing wink is just over the top. “Gotcha.”
“I’m still wearing my underwear,” I manage.
He lifts up, looks down at me. “You’re still fully dressed, as a matter of fact.”
“So, you failed.” I manage to find a tiny bit of sass left somewhere deep inside. “You promised my panties would fly off on their own.”
“All but,” he corrects. “What I said was they’d all but come off on their own.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Important distinction.”
“Still not seduced, though,” I mutter.