Indecent Proposal (37 page)

“Is that—”

“Shhh,” she said, and kept pushing him down.

Later
, he thought, they would talk about it later. Because this urgency of hers, this command, it was so fucking exciting. She owned him right now; down to his bones he was hers.

He slid down, pushing her legs out wide with his body. She curled one long, smooth leg over his back and he felt utterly surrounded by her. Cocooned in her softness and her scent and her sleepy warmth. It was sexy and real and home in a way.

In a basic, elemental way.

I belong here. Right here. All my life this is what I’ve been missing. This is what I’ve wanted
.

“Lick me,” she breathed, and he opened her with his fingers, spread the pink lips, breathing over the revealed flesh until she twitched and groaned and arched toward him. “Now.”

He chuckled as he set his mouth on her. Careful and reverent, trying to let her in on his feelings by the way his tongue circled the hood of her clit.

“Harder,” she whispered, arching into his mouth, lifting her hips into his face. “Suck me.”

Oh God
. He sucked her into his mouth, worked his tongue over her clit. She didn’t want soft. She wanted hard. Fierce.

And he felt the answer rise up his blood.

“Use your fingers.”

He slid his hand between them, easing a finger into the damp, clinging heat of her body where he could feel the twitch of her muscles.

“More.”

He groaned against her skin, sliding another finger into her. She arched against the bed, her muscles strung taut. His mouth, his fingers, they were tools put to her use and he fucked her, sucked her, until she was gripping
his hair in her fingers, licks of pain radiating down his skull, across his neck, his back, down to his hips and around to his cock until he felt like he was made of her electricity.

“God … yes!” she cried and groaned and shook, and he held himself still against her. Still so he could feel all of it, every twitch and pulse.

She let go of his hair and he crawled up over her body, nosed away the arms she’d thrown over her face. Her cheeks were pink, sweat rolled down the side of her face, and when her eyes blinked open he smiled down at her, feeling this moment blend into every future moment between them.

“Hi,” he breathed and leaned down to kiss her, but she ducked sideways and then pushed against his shoulder, until he rolled away from her.

His brain was slow and muddy and his body electrified and single-minded, so it took him a second of watching her pull on clothes from her bag at the side of the bed before he caught on that she was leaving.

“Ryan?”

“You were always so worried about taking advantage of me.”

He leaned up to kiss her neck, to cup his hand over her shoulder, but she shrugged away and stood.

“You know what makes what we have not taking advantage?”

She waited for him to answer, but he didn’t say anything until she turned around. Something was happening, some tidal shift, and he had no control over it. And he could see the anger in her eyes, hot and mean, and he braced himself for what was going to come.

Ryan was going to tear him apart.

This is how she felt
, he thought with stabbing premonition,
in that hotel suite
.

“Love,” she spat. “Love makes it all right. It makes
everything we’ve done a gift freely given and joyfully received. And I could have freely given you everything I had, but you couldn’t have received it as a gift. Because you don’t know how to do that. You took advantage of me, Harrison, because you don’t love me.”

He got up on his knees in the bed and reached for her. Luckily, the room was so small she had nowhere to go and he had her hands in his before she could maneuver around the bed.

“Ryan—”

“Now I’ve taken advantage of you. We’re even.” She didn’t have to pull her hands too hard; he let her go. The stack of his clothes he’d set by the dresser got picked up and flung in his face. “Get dressed and go.”

Chapter 28

Ryan sat at the kitchen table, in her old spot. Her ass had left an impression on the red cushion of the seat. But her ass didn’t fit in it like it used to. Nothing fit her like it used to.

This is not my home anymore
.

That man upstairs, he is not my home anymore either
.

It’s just me
.

The baby rolled, as if putting up its hand to be counted.

You and me, kid
, she thought.
That’s all we need
.

She took another sip of orange juice and waited to hear the squeal of the back steps as Harrison came down.

How strange to feel so cold. So … strangely solid, where for so long she’d just felt liquid and weak, as if her center of gravity was constantly shifting, constantly causing her to fall in and out of her own balance.

She pushed away the juice because Nora always bought the kind with a ton of pulp and she hated drinking through her teeth, and she started to work on her to-do list.

Divorce.

Figure out where to live.

Get back to school.

But where? she wondered. She had no interest in going back to New York or in staying too long in Philly.

Which left the rest of the world.

Or Atlanta.

Georgia Tech and the Food Bank.

Atlanta is a big city
, she thought. And she didn’t have to be exiled from what she wanted in fear of bumping into him on the street.

She was tougher than that.

Good lord, what she did upstairs just proved that, didn’t it?

She shook her head, astonished at her own audacity.

The front door opened and then slammed shut and the jangle of keys hit the table in front of the window, and it was the sound of Nora coming home. It had been the same sound since Nora got a set of house keys after Mom died and Daddy started driving the night route.

“Anyone home?” Nora asked.

“In …” She cleared her throat. “In here.”

Nora arrived in the doorway.

Her top was different, a scrub shirt covered in yellow suns and puppies with sunglasses—which while ridiculous on its own, seemed like a terrible sign of a world out of order when worn by Nora. There was something splattered across the front of her blue scrub pants. Mud. Or worse. The morning’s makeup was gone. Her hair, wet or greasy, hung around her face. No sign of the barrette.

“Are you okay?” she asked, knowing there was a good chance her words would get thrown back at her. But there was no way she couldn’t ask.

For a long moment Nora’s face was blank, as if she didn’t understand or hadn’t heard the question, and then she shook, her whole body, just one sharp, short shake. The kind of thing that used to make their mom say “a ghost just walked over my grave.”

And then she smiled. Wan and weak, but a smile all the same.

“Fine. Long day. You alone?” Nora asked.

“Olivia is at school and Daddy’s gone hunting.”

“Hunting,” Nora laughed. “That’ll be interesting.”

Nora hung up her coat on the rack by the back door and poured herself a cup of coffee from the pot.

“It’s cold,” Ryan said, trying to make nice. “You might want to nuke it.”

Nora drank it cold like it was a testament to her orneriness and sat down in her old seat across from her.

“Are you sure you’re okay? You seem …”

Nora glanced sideways at the bathroom door in the corner, her bottom lip caught under her teeth, and Ryan realized Nora was barely holding it together. She pushed aside her coffee cup and reached for her sister’s hands.

At the touch of her fingers Nora gasped. She gasped like she’d been holding her breath all day.

“My whole life is about managing,” she whispered. “Manage doctors, manage patients, manage other people’s grief and anger. And then I come home—” She stopped, shook her head, and yanked back her hands.

“Come home and what?”

“I’ve hated you for a long time, Ryan,” she breathed. “And it wasn’t about Paul, or even the money or hurting Daddy. It was because you left. I spent so long imagining you in New York City, living this glamorous life far away from this place.”

“It wasn’t glamorous,” she said. “It was a studio apartment that smelled like cabbage rolls and a string of jobs I got because of my boobs. And being lonely. Lots and lots of being lonely. Don’t … don’t envy that. You were here. And a part of a family.”

Nora’s lips twisted, the old indication that she was trying not to cry. “I never got a job because of my boobs.”

“It’s because you were hired for your brain. And your boobs are tiny.”

That brought Nora’s head up, her mouth open, the laughter running out before she could stop it.

“I love Daddy and Olivia and I wouldn’t change that … but sometimes it feels like I don’t have anything of my own. I just stepped into Mom’s shoes.”

“Nora, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was such a shitty sister. I should have been here to help.”

“I didn’t win any prizes either. And look at you, Ry.”

She laughed. “Pregnant and alone and back in the Burg?”

“But you won’t stay.” Nora shook her head. “It’s obvious. You’re moving on.”

That wasn’t Nora kicking her out again; it was her sister realizing she’d changed. That Ryan was different, and it was about the biggest compliment she’d ever gotten from her sister.

“Where’s your husband?” Nora asked, blinking her eyes until the sheen of tears went away.

“Upstairs,” she said, wondering what was happening in her sister’s head. What kind of trauma she’d seen to make her so vulnerable. “Getting dressed, and then I imagine he’s leaving.”

“You’re really gonna split?”

“It wasn’t a real marriage.”

“You’re pregnant, Ryan. That makes it pretty real.”

The memory of his face when he’d felt the baby moving against her belly. Those small popcorn pops she still hadn’t gotten used to. He’d been transformed by delight. By excitement.

Leaving would deny him any more of those moments. And deny her the joy of sharing those moments.

“He circles back around me when things fall apart,” she said. “I don’t know what kind of marriage we can make out of that.”

Nora laughed. “Helping each other through the bad times? I’ll take that kind of marriage. Does he treat you bad when things are good?”

She thought of that partnership, the way he held her
hand in front of reporters. Asked her opinion in all those meetings.

“No,” she whispered. “I just don’t know if any of the good times were real for him. In fact, I don’t know what was real between us.”

“Well, he’s here now. Nothing more real than this place.” Nora made a low noise in her throat and finished her coffee. “Want me to get rid of him for you?”

Ryan laughed. “No, I think at thirty-two years old, I can fight my own battles.”

“You love him?”

She nodded, because it was true. The truest thing she had in her life besides the baby. “Not that it matters; I don’t think he’s got it in him to love me.”

“Then the asshole doesn’t deserve you.”

“Simple as that?” Ryan whispered through a throat made thin by emotion.

“Simple. As. That.”

Ryan’s smile gave way to laughter, and the laughter opened her heart up to something so powerful and painful she could barely stand it.

She’d been alone and without love for such a long time her body had gone numb, but it came flooding back.

“I think … we, you, me, and Wes, we got real good at hiding all the things that make us lovable,” Nora said. “All the softness and all the … sweetness, because it hurt when Mom died. Because being soft and sweet wouldn’t put food on the table. We hid those things so well we forgot where we put them. But you got plenty in you that’s lovable, Ryan. I’m sorry I, or Paul or anyone, made you feel different.”

Ryan grabbed her sister’s hand again, clung to it across the old table.

The silence between them was broken by the squeal of the back steps as Harrison made his appearance,
wearing his suit pants and bourbon-stained white shirt. He was scruffy and bloodshot and coming down the steps of her childhood home, where she’d dreamed vivid dreams about love and Prince Charming, and her solid and cold heart was not impervious.

It wanted him. Her stupid heart. Her stupid body—both wanted him. Thank God her brain knew better and was driving this ship.

I am my own damn Prince Charming
.

She’d used him in her bedroom. Used him the way she’d felt used. And she’d tossed him away like he’d tossed her away.

It felt good.

And shitty.

And she didn’t know what to do about any of that.

“Hey,” he said, pausing on the steps when he saw Nora and Ryan.

“Well, hello,” Nora said, putting aside all her strange and sudden vulnerability in exchange for her familiar sarcasm. “You’re not bad-looking when you’re conscious.”

“And clean,” Harrison said, with a shy smile that nearly destroyed her.

“You want some coffee?” Nora asked.

“Badly.”

Ryan sat there like a silent bump on a log, ignoring Nora’s wide-eyed look while Nora went and poured Harrison a cup of coffee and nuked it.

“We’re out of milk. But sugar is over there,” Nora said, pointing to the square Tupperware container on the counter next to the fridge. “I’m afraid the latte machine is busted.”

Harrison ignored the sugar and all of Nora’s jabs and leaned back against the counter, drinking day-old reheated coffee like it was no big deal. Like he did it every
day, when she knew for a fact that he was unnaturally devoted to his espresso machine.

“I’m afraid I didn’t get a chance to meet you properly yesterday,” he said.

“Because you were passed out cold on my couch,” Nora said with a slicing smile.

“Exactly. I’m Harrison, Ryan’s husband.”

Nora and Harrison shook hands. “Sorry to hear about the election.”

“Thank you; there will be others.”

That surprised her.

“Hopefully you won’t lose those.”

Harrison smiled. “Hopefully.”

“When are you leaving?” Ryan asked Harrison, cutting through the bullshit small talk.