Give It All (12 page)

“Important decision time.” Raina stood beside Duncan before her open cabinet, a wide variety of spirits lined up. “You’ve got your own personal bartender for the night. What are we drinking?”

“What did your father drink?”

Oh dear, was this going to be some kind of overdue-mourning sad sacks’ party? “Middle-shelf whiskey.”

“That’ll do, then.” He shut the cabinet and headed to the guest room, where Raina had left the bottle in question atop her dad’s dresser.
Her
dresser. Or perhaps Duncan’s dresser, if only temporarily.

“TV?” she asked when they met in the den.

He shook his head. “Music.”

“No opera.”

“Perish the thought. Fetch us two glasses.”

He left the bottle on the coffee table and came back with the turntable. Raina cast it a nervous glance and set tumblers beside the bottle.

“I’ll let you pick the album.” He took a seat on the couch. Astrid immediately claimed his lap, then meowed irritably when he crowded her, leaning forward to fill the glasses.

Raina cued up a John Denver LP. She joined her tenants after changing into soft cotton lounge shorts, officially off duty for the evening.

“Cheers,” Duncan said, and they tapped tumblers.

After a taste, she asked, “Which one of us is all this drinking for, anyhow? The grieving daughter or the man on the brink of professional ruin?”

He shrugged and took a sip, wincing as he set the glass
primly back on the wood. And not just who—she wanted to know what the ultimate aim of all this was. For one or both of them to sob or laugh their guts out? For Duncan to get Raina drunk enough to share some dirty laundry he could use to counterextort her and get his freedom back? Good luck to him—small-towners knew better than to bother getting attached to their secrets. Raina had precisely two that she preferred to keep quiet, and no way in hell she was sharing either with Duncan, wasted or not.

Though, thinking about it, Raina suspected there was a very good chance this vice-fest was just a means for them to wind up surrendering to a different kind of debauchery. One that had been growling at both of them for weeks, demanding indulgence.

“Tonight,” Duncan said, taking another sip, “is merely about two wrecks getting drunk enough to find their troubles amusing—instead of depressing—for an evening.”

She nodded. “Cheers, then.” The whiskey was already working, reigniting her faded buzz. She curled into the corner of the couch and propped her feet on Duncan’s thigh. It might’ve been a flirtatious move, except she wasn’t sure how distasteful he found feet. He seemed unbothered, casting her toes a curious, passing glance, before returning his attention to the purring cat.

“Sooo,” Raina sighed, the liquor making her feel warm and slow and lazy; easy, just like John Denver’s voice, crooning about country roads. “I want to know things about you.”

“Such as?”

She swirled her drink and sat up a little straighter. “I dunno, everything. I mean, two days ago I thought you were one thing. Now I know you have OCD, and a cat. And you like opera. And you won’t talk about your parents.” He stiffened in an instant, and she waved her hand. “Don’t worry. I won’t bother asking. But man . . . What do I want to know? Everything. Like . . . how old were you when you got laid for the first time?”

“Will you be answering all of these questions yourself?”

She smiled. “Will you be admitting you want to hear my answers?”

He nodded.

“Okay, then.”

“Okay, then,” Duncan agreed. “I lost my virginity when I was seventeen.”

“OCD doesn’t keep you from getting your rocks off, then?”

His smile was slow and wicked. “Sex is one of a very few things in this world that I prefer dirty, Ms. Harper.”

His words flushed her, and she held her own smile back, licking her lip. “Call me Raina.”

He shook his head.

“Too personal?” she asked. “Too close to acknowledging that maybe we’re friends?”

“I believe you owe me an answer to your own question.”

“Fine. I was fifteen.”

His eyebrows rose a fraction.

She laughed. “There’s not much to do in Fortuity. Most of us start fucking just to pass the time before we can get our drivers’ licenses.”

“Who was it?” he asked. “Anyone I know?”

“Anyone you know, meaning what? Miah? Or one of the Grossiers? No. A boy I went to high school with. He moved away ages ago to work on an oil field.”

“And how was it?”

She frowned thoughtfully. “It was . . . efficient.”

He laughed—the second of those rich, thrilling chuckles she’d been gifted. Christ, she’d pay five bucks a pop to keep hearing that noise.

“He got better,” she offered.

“Did you love him?”

“No, probably not. But when you’re fifteen, lust will pass for it.”

“What about Miah?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yeah, I loved Miah. I still love Miah.”

“But you’re not with him.”

“And you’re sneaking way too many questions in, Mr. Prosecutor. Who was
your
first?”

“A woman from my apartment block.”

“A woman?”

He shrugged. “She seemed like a woman, anyway. Older than me, but not scandalously so. Maybe twenty.”

“How very statutory.”

“She was a clerk at the liquor store across the street. She seemed very . . .
dangerous
.”

“And
dangerous
is your type? I find that surprising.”

“My life hasn’t always looked as it does now.”

She sipped her drink and waited, feeling as if she was on the cusp of something interesting and not wanting to scare it away. When he didn’t go on, she prompted, “How so?”

He spoke to the cat, stroking its rising back. “I wasn’t raised posh. I grew up in East London, which isn’t what you’d call genteel.” He met Raina’s eyes. “Though I wouldn’t say my grooming and manners are a lie—I worked very hard for them. But I wasn’t born into my inflated sense of entitlement. I earned it.”

“Huh. So your parents aren’t Lord and Lady Welch of Snobbington-upon-Thames?”

He shook his head. “Unless I’ve been greatly deceived, no.”

“When did you decide to better yourself, or however you think about it?”

“When I was young—ten or so. I threw myself into my schoolwork. Then when I was accepted to Cambridge, I put the next phase of the plan into motion. Refined my accent, began investing in my appearance.”

She smiled. “Very calculating. Very you.”

“I thought of it as a reinvention, not a deception.” He smiled back.

“And when did you come to the States?”

“For law school, when I was twenty-one.”

“That seems young.”

“I finished both secondary school and university early. I saw little attraction in lingering in England any longer than I needed to.”

“And you’re a U.S. citizen?”

“I have been for twelve years, yes.”

“Why California?”

He shrugged. “The weather, primarily. The ocean.”

The distance from your past,
Raina mused, wondering if she had it right. “Do you miss England?”

“Not for a moment.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“It’s clammy, and gloomy, and terrifically classist.”

“You seem pretty classist.”

“I am. But that doesn’t mean I want to surround myself with a load of miseries like me.”

She smiled. “And that’s not your real accent?”

“I’ve been speaking this way since university. I’d say it’s mine.”

“But what did your old one sound like? Tell me you’re a Cockney, please.”

He sipped his drink. “No comment.”

“You get more British when you’re angry, or wasted. Do you sound like a cabbie when you’re, like, about to come or something?”

“Good God, you’re crude.”

Raina threw her head back and laughed, officially drunk. She sighed giddily, grinning at him. “Yes, yes, I am. But apparently that can be overcome. You want to be my Henry Higgins? Train this wayward bar owner to pass for royalty? Dress me up all frilly and respectable?”

He didn’t reply right away, sipping and looking pensive.

“What?”

He spoke to the cat again. “There was a time when . . . There was a time when I did want that. To dress you.”

Her eyebrows rose. “What in? An evening gown? A leather catsuit and nipple clamps?”

“Something classic.” He eyed her thoughtfully, assessing. “A sheath, perhaps. Knee-length. Black, maybe lace. Tame that hair. Tone down the eye makeup.”

“You want to give me a makeover?”

“Wanted to, yes.” He drained his glass. “But I’ve since grown accustomed to you, to paraphrase a certain professor of phonetics. Tattoos and bra straps and all.”

She sat up straight, bracing her elbow on the back of the couch. “You wanted to
Pretty Woman
me.”

“They were passing impulses.”

“Yeah, they better be. I should be insulted . . . except that sounds exhausting just now, so I don’t think I’ll bother.”

“Good. I appreciate the pardon.”

She studied him. “Did you ever get around to taking off my fancy new clothes, in these daydreams of yours?”

He studied her right back, then leaned forward to refill his glass. Raina held hers out and he topped it off as well. “Would you like the honest answer to that question?”

“Yes.”

He cleared this throat. “No, I didn’t take your fancy new clothes off, in my fantasies.”

Disappointment cooled her like a cloud. “Oh.”

Duncan smiled. “I fucked you on a barstool, with the dress pushed up around your hips.” He sipped his whiskey while lust snaked the length of Raina’s body like a sizzling fuse. She wouldn’t have expected such a reaction, given the image, but overthinking things wasn’t her bag.

“Did you, then?”

He nodded, a glimmer of that very un-Duncanish grin still curling one side of his lips.

“I guess you didn’t bother putting panties on me, then.”

“They’d only leave a line.”

“I bet you watch, like, the classiest porn there is. Does
Masterpiece Theatre
make skin flicks?”

His smile was tight, demure. “I don’t watch pornography.”

She snorted.

He took a drink. “You don’t believe me?”

“Well, you’re a human, A. And B, you’re a male human. That makes it a two hundred percent probability.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“What do you jerk off to, then? Do you have a better imagination than I’d guessed?”

“I’m touched you bothered guessing.”

She squinted at him. “No, really. You must use
something
.”

For a split second’s pause, she could read his thoughts:
What do
you
use?
But he simply said, “I don’t masturbate.”

She didn’t even laugh. “Bull.
Shit
, you don’t.”

“Very, very rarely.”

“Do your meds make you not care, or . . . ?” Oh shit, did his meds make him impotent?

“I suppress those urges.”

Thank fuck for that.

“The energy’s better spent on practical pursuits,” he added.

It sounded nuts, yet she’d never once suspected this man would waste said precious energy on lying. “Good God, when’s the last time you came?”

“I’m not a nun, Ms. Harper. But weeks, easily.”

Weeks.
How many?
Since before you met me?
Christ, she wanted to imagine she’d inspired him to give in to those needs.

“Better you than me,” she said with a shrug. “I bet I’d make it three days before I murdered somebody.”

He didn’t reply, silence reigning for half a minute. And with every second that ticked by, Raina’s body seemed to warm by a degree.

“Something’s going to happen,” she said slowly, narrowing her eyes at his mouth. A handsome set of lips, wide, with a deep and dignified bow in the upper one. On the lower one he had a scar, from Tremblay’s pistol-whipping. Usually it was a smudge of lighter skin, but now it was dark. Those lips, normally the subtlest pink, flushed . . . From the sting of the liquor? Or a spike in this stoic man’s pulse?

“Happen?” he prompted, too innocently.

“Something’s going to happen between us. Something biblical. Tonight.”

Pale eyes regarded her calmly above the rim of his glass. “Such as?”

She shrugged. “Fucking.”

“You make it sound like a storm we ought to prepare for.”

“Time will tell.”

He took a drink. “Shall we simply commence said fucking at an appointed time, or would you like to progress via the usual protocol?”

“Protocol?”

“Kissing. Petting.”

She snorted. “Petting?”

“Groping, fondling, friendly game of grab-ass,” he clarified, and Raina laughed. “Hit a few bases before you rush me headlong across home plate? Before I become just another notch in your lipstick case?”

“I don’t wear lipstick.”

“I’m glad.” He smiled, attention dropping from her eyes to her mouth. “Unless that means you don’t plan to remember me at all.”

She bit the inside of her lip, the gesture purely reflexive. “You want to kiss?”

He took another drink, Adam’s apple working; then his gaze rose to meet hers. “I believe I do.”

Raina took his glass, setting it with hers on the table, and the cat hissed its offense as she tossed it toward the far cushion. Duncan grabbed her ankles, hauled her legs across his lap. They leaned in as one and then paused, mouths mere inches apart. Those calculating eyes took her in, just as hers did the same . . . Those little lines she’d grown so enamored of—proof that this man felt things. And his stubble, evidence that his perfect image was a fleeting, demanding illusion. She touched his jaw, the near-blond bristles soft and rough at once.

Suddenly the kiss could wait. She was touching him. Touching him in a way she’d never imagined he might let her—in a tender, curious way she’d never guessed she’d offer.

He touched her in turn, pushing her hair back, tracing her ear with smooth, cool fingertips. He touched her like a man examining a finely cut gem—with fascination, as she’d never been touched or admired before. But she wanted so much more than this clinical approval.

She put her lips to his, surprised at their warmth. Surprised at how they parted, and how they knew at once how to flirt with hers. He pressed his thumb to her cheek and cocked his head, wasting no time in the shallow end. Deeper, hungrier. His tongue stroked hers and the room was burning, this cold-blooded man searing her skin, drawing her breath short.