Untamed: (Heath & Violet) (Beg For It) (34 page)

“Want to come in
you,” he growled, thrusting up into my pussy with a long, strong
stroke. I cried out in surprise and pleasure. He gripped my hair in
his hand and held it as he fucked me, my breasts pushed up against
the wall. I spread my palms out against the tile as he worked me, one
of his hands sliding along to my front and down to my clit. He
stroked me as he thrust, teasing me to the brink. I felt so possessed
and dominated, yet so loved as he gripped my hair, holding me fast,
forcing me against the wall and fucking me.

“Yes, yes,” I
pleaded, feeling my orgasm build, build then crash over me as he
thrust in and came, exploding in me deep.

He was so gentle
afterward, washing every inch of me, kissing my glistening skin. He
wrapped me in a soft towel and insisted on carrying me to the bed.

“I can walk.” I
laughed as I wrapped my arms around his neck and very much enjoyed
being held in his arms.

“I work you hard,
baby,” he murmured, still holding me in his solid, muscular arms
against his massive chest. “The least I can do is take care of you
after.”

“Oh, you take care of
me, all right.” I couldn’t help laugh again, giddy. Multiple
orgasms did that to a girl.

At some point we
drifted to sleep, and then at some point the next morning I drifted
awake, my head still resting on his bare chest, listening to his
heart beat strong and true. And I realized, all at once, I trusted
this man. I trusted him completely. It didn’t matter what he had or
hadn’t told me about his past. What mattered was him, who he really
was inside, and that man I knew I could trust with my life.

“Morning,” he
murmured, wrapping me in an embrace.

“Is it?” I asked.
The shades were drawn tight over the windows.

“Late morning. But
we’re not in a rush. We’ve got the room tonight, too, if we want
it.”

I smiled. I liked this
whole rockstar brother thing. “Heath,” I began, wanting to talk
about his family, but still wary. I didn’t want to jeopardize this
delicious intimacy, but we still did have a lot to talk about and
sort out.

“I want you to know,”
I started, “I trust you. And I respect that you didn’t tell me
about your family. I don’t feel like you lied to me.”

“Good.” He pulled
me even closer.

“But I am curious.”
I lifted my head and looked at him. “I feel like I know you but I
don’t know you. And I want to know you.”

“That’s a lot of
know yous,” Heath teased.

Good, teasing meant he
still felt relaxed. “So you’re really…” How did I say filthy
rich without coming out and saying filthy rich?

“A Kavanaugh,” he
confirmed. “My father was a billionaire and he left it to us, his
children.”

I shook my head,
believing but not believing at the same time. “So many guys would
be bragging so hard about that. They wouldn’t shut up about it.”
I’d sat through evenings with guys bragging endlessly about far
less.

“What’s the point
in that?” he asked. “Then you end up surrounded by the kinds of
people who want to hear you brag nonstop.”

“Right.” He had a
point. “I remember you saying you’re not close with your family.”

“I’m not,” he
agreed. “None of us are close. Except the past couple weeks have
been interesting.” And he started talking, exactly the way I’d
hoped, telling me about seeing his mother and his older brothers. He
had a younger sister, too.

“Wow, I can’t keep
track of everyone.” I was so used to thinking of him on his own. It
was strange adjusting to the thought of him as a constellation in a
busy universe.

“Me, too,” he
agreed. “I haven’t even mentioned my half-brother. The one who
almost put my mother in a mental hospital when she found out about
him. I just met him a year ago.”

I shook my head,
marveling at the complexity. At times growing up, just my mom and me,
I’d longed for a big family. But I’d pictured it like the Von
Trapps, everyone wearing matching clothing and singing in harmony.
What he described sounded much more messy.

“Oh, and about a year
before my father died he re-married and she had a son, so I guess I
technically had stepbrother. But I literally never met him.”

“How’s that
possible?” That stretched even my imagination.

“Our parents eloped.
And he’s always overseas in some kind of top secret military
operation.”

“Ooh, like the kind
where they’d tell you about it but then they’d have to kill you?”
Talk about scandal. My reality TV instincts buzzed in delight.

“Something like
that.” Heath looked at me, slightly wary.

“Sorry, this all just
sounds like a movie,” I admitted. “It’s hard to wrap my head
around it.”

“Yeah,” he sighed.
“It’s hard for me, too. I don’t exactly have a ‘casual
conversation’ family. It’s part of why I don’t usually talk
about them.”

I calmed myself down.
He didn’t need me squealing over the craziness. He needed me to
listen to the facts, but more importantly to his experience of it
all.

Happily, he kept on
talking, just the two of us lying together in bed. He told me about
growing up in a whirlwind of nannies and private schools, about never
seeing his parents and then getting shipped off to his grandmother in
England when his parents split up. He told me about his attempts to
navigate the cutthroat rich kid culture in boarding school and then
in an Ivy League college, until he finally quit it all.

“Best decision of my
life,” he told me, explaining how he’d walked away, right before
graduation, choosing to go live on that plot of land in Watson.

I winced. It reminded
me. I hadn’t meant to, but I’d ruined it, his solitary,
off-the-grid life.

“What’s wrong?”
he asked, sensing my tension.

“I’m just thinking
how I’ve ruined everything,” I admitted.

“No, no you haven’t.”
He pulled me up against him, kissing me gently. “These past few
weeks, I’ve been thinking. When I first headed to Watson, I needed
to pull away, set out on my own. But maybe its time to let my family
back in a little.”

“Yeah?”

“Things are different
now, without my father. I’m not glad he’s gone. But now it is
easier, I guess.” He explained how much his father had disapproved
of his choices, how forcibly he’d tried to push him into the same
CEO corporate mold. “Now, I guess I don’t feel like I have to
fight so hard to be my own man. I can just…be it.”

I smiled against his
chest. “Funny, I was just thinking about how it’s time for me to
stop fighting my way up whatever corporate ladder is put in front of
me and instead figure out what I really want to do with my life. Who
I really want to be.”

We snuggled some more
as I told him about my lunch meeting the other day, the ideas I was
having about what to do next. I’d been so excited about the show
I’d wanted to do in Watson. I wondered if there might be an
opportunity to do something like it, something real and creative and
engaging instead of exploitative.

“You’re going to do
something great. I know it,” he assured me, kissing my hair. Lying
there in his arms, I really believed I would.

And I hadn’t even
looked at my phone yet to see the text waiting for me, inviting me to
a meeting with a new network.

Heath

I headed back up to
Watson after another week and a half, and another week after that
Violet came up, too. It felt so good to spend time with her again up
there, where I still felt most at home. And what was incredibly cool
was the fact that there were two reasons she was back in Vermont.

The first and clearly
best reason was that she wanted to see me. I couldn’t get enough of
her and apparently she felt the same way. We’d had our fight back
in February, spent our time apart, and now both of us were holding on
to what we had together with fierce protectiveness. Seeing as how
tough we both could get, I’d give our relationship a pretty good
chance at survival.

But the second reason
Violet was back up in Vermont was to get video footage to pitch a
concept for a show. And not the show that Fame! had in mind. This was
a new network. Violet had a friend in the city who apparently knew
everybody. She was the type of person who had the exact opposite
instincts as me. Where I’d see a crowd and turn away quick, this
friend of Violet’s would plunge right in and three hours later have
a hundred and fifty new best friends.

Violet had made the
most of her new connections, wining and dining, lunching and
brunching, and each time she talked with someone new she circled in
closer and closer around what it was she wanted to do. It was so fun
to watch her do it, too. I didn’t go along with her to any of the
meetings, but I got to hear about them as she came back with shining,
excited eyes and talked rapid-stream about all her new ideas.

I did my own work of a
sort in the city, meeting with my oldest brother Colt and then some
of the artists I was getting to know. There was a lot we could do
together, and I finally felt open to giving it a try. It was worth a
shot, putting all our work together on a website, marketing it to
niche customers. Colt hooked me up with people who knew all about
branding and targeting and all sorts of other actions that sounded
vaguely violent but the way they talked about it got even me
interested.

Once I returned to
Vermont, I didn’t try to force things with my friends and
neighbors. I let things take their own, natural course. Vermonters
were slow to warm up and not overly fond of change, two of the many
reasons I felt right at home among them. But it didn’t mean my
re-entry into Watson as Heathcliff Kavanaugh, heir to a couple
hundred million, would be smooth.

My buddy Dave took
things in stride, dealing with the new reality by giving me plenty of
shit. “Guess you’re buying,” he liked saying to me whenever I
came by his bar.

Sometimes he called me
MB for moneybags. Sometimes Richie Rich. Either way, I preferred it
to the way he’d been looking at me the day he’d stopped by my
cabin, like I was an alien from another planet. If he was harassing
me, it meant he still thought of me as a friend. That was the New
England way.

In early April the guys
down at the brewery decided to throw a party. That was also the New
England way. No one complained too much about winter in Vermont. It
was a given, an accepted part of life in our part of the world. But
once spring came, you realized just how much you’d been missing the
sunshine and all the green. People came out of the woodwork, blinked
their eyes, and wanted to party.

On the night of, Violet
came out of my bedroom twirling in a flippy dress that ended
mid-thigh.

“Too much?” she
asked, as if any man in his right mind would ever say no to seeing
his woman wear that dress.

“Don’t you dare
take that dress off,” I told her, rising to greet her in more ways
than one.

“I could change into
some baggy jeans,” she said, teasing me now. “Maybe some
sweatpants?”

“Wear that dress,”
I told her stern, catching her in my arms. “Until I take it off
later.”

Everyone was at the
party, because that was how Watson rolled, all the residents hanging
out from ages eight months to 80. They’d strung up some little
white lights in the patio area and a local band was playing bluegrass
tunes. Violet did some dancing. I did some sitting, shooting the shit
and drinking beers with some guys, which suited me just fine. I had a
great view of the dance floor.

When the band took a
break, someone hooked up an iPad to the speakers. Bruno Mars came on
and like some kind of a flash mob, Violet and Helga and a bunch of
other women flooded the dance floor and shook it in a crazy routine,
laughing the whole time. I only had eyes for Violet, though, watching
her all flushed and relaxed and having the time of her life.

“So she’s back,”
Harriet said, coming to join me. “With another idea for a show?”

“Yup,” I agreed,
still a couple of years away from earning my official Vermonter’s
card, granting me the right to say “a-yuh.” I’d get there,
though. You had to have goals in life.

“But a different
network?” Harriet asked.

“I think it’s
called Explore? Something like that.”

“How do you feel
about all of it?”

I turned to her. Nice
of her to ask. She’d been a little frosty with me when all the shit
had hit the fan a couple months ago. But she seemed to have gotten
over all that. Especially since new opportunities had opened up for
her, our shop, and all of the artisans in the area courtesy of my
brother, Colt, and his extensive team of marketing geniuses.

“I’m good,” I
assured her, eyes back on my girlfriend.

She kept on talking
shop with me, wanting to check in on this or that detail about our
new web retail presence. I still didn’t follow all of the
ins-and-outs of it, but I had been amazed at what some high-quality
web design and marketing could achieve for our small, locally-owned
and operated businesses. Colton had been right, which, I had to
admit, he usually was about a lot of things. With some niche
outreach—I was still figuring out exactly what he meant by that,
but it seemed like matching up interested people with stuff they’d
like—we were all seeing our visibility and sales climb rapidly.

It all dovetailed
nicely into Violet’s latest pitch. She’d met with a bunch of
people in New York, but the meeting that had gone the best, where she
felt like they instantly got her concept and ran with it, was with
the Explore Channel. She was developing a concept with them for a
series of half-hour shows called
Love
Your Local
featuring the best of local spots all over the
U.S. and their food, art, people, music.

I thought she had a
great idea on her hands and so far the network executives seemed to
agree. They were giving her a ton of creative discretion. The first
place she wanted to film? Watson, Vermont.