His Heart's Revenge (49th Floor Novels) (13 page)

The pressure was too much. It grew almost unbearable, an unendurable weight on his lower back, between his legs. When Alex fingered his hole, Cary’s orgasm hit him all at once, and he pulled back, trying but only partially succeeding in pushing Alex off him. The result was Alex looking up at him and grinning as he wiped Cary’s come off his mouth.

“Good God, man,” Cary said, leaning back against the island because his legs didn’t seem to want to work anymore. “Banking, teaching, forget it. I think you’ve found your calling.”

“You taste good.”

The pleasure those words gave him was like a cut, deep and almost painful. After all these years of animosity—after all these years of
attraction
—to hear Alex say something as simple and honest as “You taste good,” took Cary’s breath away.

Alex rose, the dramatic tenting of his suit pants capturing Cary’s attention. Cary looked down, letting his appraisal be overt, almost leering. “And what are we going to do about
that
?”

Alex waggled his eyebrows. “I’m sure you can think of something. You
are
the clever upstart, right?”

Cary reached out and slapped Alex’s soon-to-be-naked ass and said, “Bedroom’s down the hall. My tender knees can’t take this hardwood.”

The double entendre had been unintentional, but Cary heard it as soon as the words passed his mouth, and when Alex cracked up, so did he.

Then Alex unzipped his pants, took out that glorious cock and spoke the line that Cary had fed him. “Here’s hoping you
can
take
this
hard wood.”

Chapter Seventeen

When Alexander awoke in the middle of the night, there was a sentence inside his head. A thought, fully formed, just hanging out there like it had always been in his brain but was suddenly trying to bust out, to infect his entire being.

Money isn’t everything.

He was aware of it before he was even aware of his physical surroundings, but it only took another instant for him to process that he wasn’t in his own bed. No, he was in Cary’s bed—and Cary’s arms. With Cary’s voice inside his head, repeating what he had so casually said last night:
Money isn’t everything
.

He hadn’t meant to fall asleep. But after Cary had led him into his small, cozy bedroom and up onto his small, cozy bed and given him the best blowjob of his life, it had been impossible to get up and get dressed. He had told himself, as they’d both flopped back against the pillows, lying next to each other on their backs but not touching, that he was just going to rest for a few minutes before leaving.

Somehow, though, here he was, hours later, snuggled up against Cary’s chest, which was rising and falling with the slow, even breaths of sleep. Cary, on his back while Alexander lay on his side curled against him, had both arms wrapped around Alexander. The covers were pulled over them, and the light was turned off. So clearly Cary had tucked them in.

He swallowed a lump in his throat. It was…

Too much.

Not what he signed up for.

Not what he
wanted
.

Fuck. He had to get out of here. Tamping down the urge to wrench himself decisively from Cary’s embrace, he extricated his body slowly, keeping an eye on Cary’s face the whole time. There was enough ambient light—it must be close to morning—that Cary’s sharp jawbone, dusted with the stubble that Alexander found so irresistible, was visible. When he was asleep, Cary looked so much younger than his thirty-five years. To think of Cary’s parents rejecting him after camp made a sharp ping of…something happen in Alexander’s chest. His youth had been no picnic. He’d had none of the advantages Cary had. Except one—his mom, who steadfastly loved him no matter what, no matter who he was or who he was attracted to.

There’s more to life than money.

As he slid out from under the covers and collected his clothes—he would dress in the hallway and then slip out—his hand was drawn to that stubble-covered cheek. It floated there of its own volition, but he forced himself to stop an inch before it would have come to rest on Cary’s skin.

Cary shifted in his sleep a bit, and suddenly he stopped looking so young. From this angle, Alexander was reminded of the man Cary had become.

The man who was in his way.

If Cary hadn’t gone into business for himself, Dominion would already have won Don Liu. Hell, if Cary hadn’t gone into business for himself, Dominion would still have Eleanor Southam.

A wave of self-disgust overtook Alexander. Had he learned nothing in twenty years? Had all that jujitsu, his advanced degree, all his time at the school of hard knocks been so he could sit here and get sentimental worrying that Cary’s parents didn’t love him enough? So he could crumble like a flimsy house of cards when Cary flashed those sweet baby blues?

No.

Cary wasn’t the enemy anymore, at least not personally. But they were still rivals. And in a way, that was worse than enemies. Because when you were at war with someone, you kept your eyes on the prize. When you downgraded to mere rivals, it was too easy to forget what was at stake.

Everything he had worked for. Everything he wanted.

Everything he was.

…

It wasn’t like Cary expected that Alex was going to stay over. They weren’t
boyfriends
. But when Alex had dozed off after yet another bone-crushingly spectacular romp in bed, Cary found himself wanting Alex to stay the night. Hell, he wanted Alex to stay the night
and
the morning. He wanted to wake up with their limbs entwined and have some more bone-crushingly spectacular sex, a shower, and then make some goddamned pancakes. But it was a weekday, so he amended his fantasy. He wanted to wake up, have quick and dirty sex, a shower, and hit the Starbucks drive through before he dropped Alex off at his office.

Either way, though: What. The. Fuck?

He needed to tamp that shit down, stat. He was too smart to get carried away by a fantasy. And even if it weren’t a fantasy—which it
was
—he was too smart to get emotionally entangled with Alex Evangelista when they were battling over the biggest client either of them would see in their entire careers.

So if he was so smart, he asked himself, why had he slipped out of bed and tiptoed around the apartment turning off lights last night? Why did he carefully pull the covers up over Alex before sliding in next to him?

And the biggest
why
of them all: why was he so gutted the next morning to wake up and find him gone?

…

Later that day, Alexander cut out of work early and drove to his mom’s house. They usually had dinner at her place on Sunday nights, but he wanted to see her sooner than that, so he’d called and asked if he could stop by. As he pulled into the driveway in front of the tidy Leaside bungalow, he let himself sink into the familiar, comforting feeling of satisfaction that always overtook him here. He’d tried to get her to go for a bigger house, something grander and more luxurious, but she’d insisted she didn’t want to be rattling around a big empty place. And though he’d objected, she had been right. The two-bedroom brick beauty was perfect for her, and she loved the leafy, family-oriented neighborhood. She functioned as a kind of surrogate grandmother to the little girls next door, and she volunteered at the local elementary school every morning after her daily walk.

The lawn was a little too long, though. He frowned and made a mental note to call the landscapers and have a word with them.

“Alexander!”

She was sitting on the porch swing, and he smiled as he jogged up the steps to the porch.

She patted the seat next to her. There was a glass of her famous homemade lemonade-iced tea mixture waiting for him on the side table. He took a long drink before settling in and extending his arm across the back of the swing and tightening it around her when she rested her head on his shoulder.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said, but as soon as it was out, he knew he’d answered too quickly, too decisively. “Actually, I broke up with David,” he said, hoping that would suffice.

“But you were never really with David, were you? Not really?”

Dammit. Leave it to his mother to be the only one who believed him when he’d always insisted as much. “I’m just tired,” he said, stonewalling because he didn’t know how to answer her question honestly. There was nothing wrong, really, or there
should
be nothing wrong.

Suddenly, he remembered that day she’d picked him up at camp twenty years ago. He’d called her from the office, gone back to his cabin to pack his things, and walked the five miles to the nearest town to wait for her. She’d rented a car—he still hated to think what a dent that would have made in her budget back then—and come immediately. “What’s wrong?” had been the first words out of her mouth then, too. And when he’d tried to deflect, she’d allowed him to. He’d always felt bad, over the years, as he grew older and understood more explicitly how fiercely she loved him and how much she had sacrificed for him, that he’d never told her even an abbreviated version of what had sent him running home early that summer.

“Mrs. E! Mrs. E!”

Ah! Saved by the Wong twins. The identical seven-year-olds came bounding up the street from school, trailed by their dad, who waved as he jogged to catch up with them.

“Emily, Anne!” His mom stood and held out her arms. Both girls bounded into them at once. Then, post-hug, they started looking around the porch. “I can’t imagine what you might be looking for, girls,” his mom said, making an exaggerated show of scratching her head and furrowing her brow in mock confusion. “Are you looking for broccoli? Because I have some inside in the fridge!”

“No!” came the emphatic answer.

“Oh, I know! You must be looking for cauliflower!”

“No, no!”

Then his mom widened her eyes like she’d just been hit with a brainwave. She grabbed a Tupperware that had been sitting next to her in the porch swing. “Are you by any chance looking for…”

“Cookies!” both girls yelled in unison.

“How could I forget that Thursday is cookie day?” she asked, shaking her head and opening the container so each girl could help herself to an oatmeal raisin cookie. His mom was famous for her oatmeal raisin cookies. She always had been.

Alexander loved to see her like this, safe, taken care of, happy. In some ways, despite all his achievements, the fact that he had been able to make enough money for his mom to retire and live in comfort was the thing he was most proud of.

But suddenly an image flashed into his head of her making those cookies in their crappy apartment when he was growing up. She hadn’t make them weekly as the ingredients were too expensive, but from time to time, as a special treat, she’d get out the mixer and make a batch. She always fretted over the fact that their ancient oven overcooked the cookies’ edges. But no one ever complained. They lined up outside the apartment when that aroma wafted down the dingy corridor. She had always seemed to take great joy in handing them out to the neighborhood kids.

Exactly like this.

Money isn’t everything.

When she had finished chatting with the twins and their father, she sat back down next to him and silently handed him a cookie.

He took a bite. Then he said, “You remember that time I called you from camp and asked you to pick me up early?”

“I do. I always wondered what happened.”

“I got my heart broken.” It was the first time he had articulated it like that. It was the first time he had allowed himself to
think
about it like that.

She nodded. “Who was he?”

Alexander blew out a breath. “Just some guy.”

She looked at him for a long time before saying, “All right. But just don’t let it stay broken forever.”

Chapter Eighteen

Cary wasn’t even sure why he was still bothering to text Alex. When Alex didn’t answer the first couple texts—sexy or otherwise—Cary had sent since his middle of the night departure, Cary got the message.

But he kept doing it anyway. It started with the bachelor party they’d talked about briefly. Though he’d tried to respect Marcus’s instructions to keep things classy, some of the other guys had wrested control, and there had indeed been a stripper. A “classy stripper,” one of them said. Equal parts bored and amused, it had taken all of ten seconds for Cary’s thoughts to turn to Alex. So he’d pulled out his phone.

I’m watching a stripper. A female stripper. Send help.

When no reply had been forthcoming, he’d just kept going. When the party moved to a bar called—no joke—Metaphor, he’d texted a picture of it sans commentary.

He continued from there. It wasn’t an onslaught. Maybe just a text or two per day. When things made him think of Alex, he sent a text. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. Everything made him think of Alex, and most of the time, he restrained himself. He knew the radio silence on Alex’s end meant he didn’t want to hear from Cary. Hell, maybe he’d even blocked him. But, oddly, Cary didn’t give a shit. Didn’t care that he was breaching the unspoken boundaries of modern relationships. When someone ghosted on you, you did the dignity-preserving thing and let them go. Well, not him, apparently. Sometimes, he was suffused with a bout of remorse after he hit
send
, berating himself that he was proving over and over again that he wasn’t ruthless enough to succeed as an entrepreneur. That he made things too personal, like his uncle had always said. But it didn’t matter how much he beat himself up, how much he vowed that the most recent text had been the last. He just could not stop.

He even sent Alex a text from outside Don Liu’s house, when he arrived early for a meeting. Part of him was hoping that referencing the source of their conflict-ridden reunion would jar Alex into responding, even if only in anger. But the other, bigger part of him knew it was futile. When Alex wasn’t consumed with thoughts of rage and revenge, which he didn’t seem to be anymore, he was cool and unflappable. That’s what all the profiles of him always said, anyway. And Cary had seen flashes of that. The man who had dumped his boyfriend and felt nothing, for God’s sake. The man who had left Cary’s bed in the middle of the night and disappeared without a word and felt nothing.

Cary still couldn’t stop, though. Because he felt everything.

And so the week preceding Marcus’s wedding passed, full of tuxedo fittings, cake tastings, panic attacks from Rose—and texts to Alex.

“Whatcha doing?” Rose stuck her head into his hotel room an hour before the wedding. He’d left the door ajar because Marcus was supposed to be stopping by with some pre-ceremony liquid courage.

What he had been doing, of course, was texting Alex.

Help! The straight people wedding industrial complex is eating me alive.

He pressed send and set aside his phone. “You shouldn’t be here. Marcus is coming by soon.”

“I came prepared for that eventuality,” she said, gesturing to the fluffy white hotel robe she was wearing. Then she stepped into the room, locked the door, and dropped the robe.

Despite his joking about how weddings were a drag, his breath caught a little. She’d put the Rose Verma touch on the traditional wedding gown. It was long and form-fitted until it started to flare out just below her hips into a cloud of wispy, billowy skirts. And although it was white on top, the white gradually became a pale pink, which in turn became a darker pink, and on down the dress to the bottom, which was a bright fuchsia. Her hair was up in some kind of elaborate up-do. “You are stunning,” he said, and meant it.

“But your family is going to freak out over this dress, right?”

He grinned, “Probably.”

She shot him an answering grin and gave a little twirl, but only ended up caught in her own voluminous skirts, and he had to help her untwist them.

“Don’t you have bridesmaids you’re supposed to be…doing girl stuff with right now?” he teased.

“I do, but I like you better,” said Rose. “If you weren’t always destined to be Marcus’s best man, I would have made you be on my team.”

He found himself oddly moved. “I am on your team, Rose. I’m the captain of your team.”

“Aww.” She tried to lean in to hug him, but her dress got in the way, so she laughed and settled for blowing him a kiss. Then she said, “You remember that later.”

Before he could ask her to clarify, there was a rap on the door.

“Ahhh!” Rose shrieked and scrambled into her robe, though it wasn’t long enough to conceal the pink bottom of the dress.

Cary waited until she was settled before opening the door.

“Keep your eyes up here, almost-husband,” Rose ordered, using her pointer and middle finger to gesture to her eyes.

“Right,” Marcus said. “The bad luck thing. I hate to break it to you, but you already spoiled that when you sneaked into my hotel room at five this morning.”

“It’s bad luck to see me in my
dress
,” Rose declared. “It doesn’t matter if you see me…not in my dress.”

“You’re just making up rules to suit you,” Cary said, gently pushing her toward the door.

“I am, indeed,” she agreed. “Because, really, if you want to be happy, you have to say ‘eff the rules.’” Then she blew him another kiss, aimed a second one at Marcus, and flounced off down the hall.

Cary caught Marcus looking her up and down as she retreated. “Hey,” he said, his tone surprisingly peevish. He hadn’t been kidding about being Team Rose, apparently. “Look
away
from the dress, buddy.”

Marcus did not obey, so Cary shoved him hard enough to get his attention, then took the pair of beers he held and sat down in the sitting area of the room. He popped the top of one of them and passed it over. Then he opened his own and lifted his bottle. “To you, cousin. Though God knows, you should have eloped.”

Marcus clinked his bottle against Cary’s. “I would have in a heartbeat, but Rose didn’t want to.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, the thing about Rose is that she comes off as kind of a rebel—the independent spirit and all that—but in some ways, she’s very traditional.”

Cary could see what he meant. The dress was itself a perfect example of the mixing of tradition and rebellion. “Well, God bless her.” He took another pull of his beer. “And God bless you. You should be sainted for going along with this.”

Marcus shrugged. “Not to get all sage on the mountain on you, but I’ve sort of learned that sometimes, loving someone is about giving in.” He shook his head and smiled. “Not that I didn’t suggest a Caribbean beach wedding about a thousand times. But in the end, it’s more important to her than it is to me.” He chugged the rest of his beer and slammed the bottle down on the coffee table between them. “But also? I didn’t invite my father, so how bad can it really be?”

…

What the fuck was he doing? After Alexander declared himself to the usher as belonging on the bride’s side, he gave some serious thought to following that usher down the aisle and just continuing on past the rows of chairs and out the emergency exit he could see lit up at the other end of the museum atrium where the wedding was being held.

But something made him stay. The same something that had made him come to begin with, he supposed. The week of repeated invitations Rose had sent to his office had worn him down. He found himself curious about the whole Rosemann clan, about this woman who had reportedly been giving the traditional old-money family the vapors. He felt a kind of kinship with her. Even though they could pass in these settings, they were both fishes out of water in this world of hereditary privilege.

But that wasn’t the whole truth. Rose had worn him down, but so had Cary, with his stupid texts. His thoughtful, funny, stupid texts.

Texts that had to stop.

Which was the real reason he was here. To be a man and stand up and look Cary in the eyes and tell him to stop.

Tell him everything, in fact—tell him about the letter Johan had sent, which he was still working on locating. He was confident that it wouldn’t make its way to Liu anytime soon, but he needed to confess. You couldn’t sleep in someone’s arms and stab them in the back at the same time.

Not that there would be any more sleeping in each other’s arms. It was over. They were competitors. Alexander had finally gotten to the point where he could accept that Cary deserved to be in this competition. He was still going to do everything in his power to win it, but this time, when he said, “May the best man win,” he was going to stick out his hand to shake, and he was going to mean it.

And if he held on to that hand a touch too long because it would be the last time he would ever touch Cary Bell, well, it was what it was.

Resolved, he sat and looked around. Rose’s side was definitely outnumbered by Cary’s. Alexander had most of a row of upholstered chairs to himself. He felt the absurd urge to spread out, to somehow try to take up more space, in solidarity with Rose.

A rabbi appeared at the front of the room, and everyone stopped talking. Then Cary came down the aisle. Well, to be more accurate, Marcus, the groom, came down the aisle along with his best man and two other groomsmen. But Alexander couldn’t take his eyes off Cary as he walked. It was kind of funny, actually, because the cousins looked similar. They shared those bluish-gray, intelligent eyes and angular cheekbones. They were both handsome in their impeccably tailored tuxedos. But although Alexander could appreciate that Marcus was a good-looking guy, it was his younger cousin that was making every part of Alexander’s body tighten. His fingers flexed in his lap, buzzing like they
needed
to rub against that nearly shorn head regardless of what Alexander himself wanted. His dick twitched as he remembered the feeling of being inside Cary. Even his mouth felt heavy, providing a visceral memory of what Cary had felt like inside
him
. Realizing he had been holding his breath during Cary’s whole trip down the aisle, he released it, watching both men nod at the rabbi and turn, presumably in preparation for the procession.

Marcus turned and looked up the aisle with a nervous smile on his face.

Cary turned and looked directly at Alexander.

Alexander wondered for a moment if Cary had somehow been able to sense his attraction, if the power of his want had literally drawn the other man’s attention. But that was ridiculous. He had come here to shut all that down. So he met Cary’s look of surprise, which was followed by the slow blossoming of a smile, with merely a nod, and settled in for the torture of watching Cary’s back for the next thirty minutes.

…

Cary tried to concentrate, to do his best-man duties without betraying the fact that he was Freaking. The Fuck. Out. His first thought on seeing Alex was, embarrassingly, joy. Stupid, unhinged, undignified joy. It had only been a week and a half since they’d been together, but seeing Alex in the flesh was a rush, a full-body experience as happy adrenaline flooded through him. But then, taking in the sight of Alex sprawled over two chairs like he didn’t have a care in the world, he started to fret. If Alex was still waging war, this would be a supremely effective way of unsettling the enemy.

He told himself to forget Alex as he watched Rose’s friends Cassie and Amy walk down the aisle. He actually succeeded for a moment when the maid of honor, Hailey, started her slow march, but only because he was trying not to laugh. Hailey’s purple, asymmetrical, half-shaved haircut had not been toned down for the wedding, so maybe Rose wasn’t going to be the Rosemann family’s only target tonight. But as soon as Hailey had taken her place, his agitated mind—and his gaze—returned to Alex and the mystery of what he was doing here.

When the music changed to herald Rose’s arrival, he forced himself to abandon his paranoia and pay attention. Rose and her mother processed down the aisle, and the ceremony began, thankfully requiring him to turn his back to the audience. From that point, it wasn’t as hard to concentrate on the wedding as he would have thought. As Marcus and Rose spoke their vows, he found himself oddly moved. Probably it was because even though he pretty much thought weddings were bullshit, it was impossible to resist the Rose and Marcus show. They were happy, truly happy, and that shit had the power to infect onlookers.

Still, by the time it was over, Cary breathed a sigh of relief. The wedding party had been dismissed, and Rose and Marcus stood at the back of the room, a receiving line of two—“get it over with,” Rose had decreed. Cary hung around a bit, trying to catch a glimpse of Alex over the heads of the crowd, but he’d been instructed to bring a check to the caterer, and to check in with the DJ, so he set off to do his duty, not sure if he was going reluctantly or gratefully. Was he looking forward to seeing Alex or dreading it? He didn’t know. Everything was all mixed up in his mind.

It didn’t matter because when he arrived in the cavernous gallery space that was home to the reception, he was plunged into damage control mode. The maid of honor, she of the purple hair, accosted him immediately. “The vegetarian dinners aren’t what she ordered!” He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do about it, but he nevertheless found himself thrust into the kitchen and into an absurd argument with the chef, who insisted that the asparagus he’d substituted for the medley of sautéed greens Rose had ordered to accompany the vegetarian pasta was actually preferable because it was fresher than the greens. He didn’t know which side he was supposed to be on, and when Rose herself appeared in the kitchen and deemed everything fine, he breathed a sigh of relief and set out to find Alex.

“Come with me to the table,” said Rose, grabbing his arm and halting his progress. “We’re starting the first course, and I need you to shield me from your family.” Sighing, he obeyed, and once he had seated Rose at the head table and Marcus had joined them, he was exhorted to make a toast that would signify the start of dinner. What the hell? Weren’t weddings supposed to be interminably long, drawn-out affairs? Why was this one moving along at such a good clip? But he did as he was told, scanning the crowd for Alex but unable to see much because the DJ’s spotlight was shining on him.