One Night in Paradise Read online

  His eyes glittered and he looked like he might pounce on her. But he didn’t. “I just went home, so that I could get a good night’s sleep. I have to go over some legalese in the contract I’m having drawn up for the deal with Amudee. That’s all.”

  That wasn’t all. She knew it wasn’t all. But she didn’t know what the rest of it was, either, so that didn’t help.

  “And that looks like it’s going to go through?” she asked, looking down at the ring again, the ring she was starting to hate, willing to let the subject drop, for now.

  “Looks like, but nothing is finalized. So we’re still in this until the ink is dry.”

  She nodded. “I know.”

  It was all about the contract to Zack. Last night … she could have sworn that last night something had changed. There had been more in their lovemaking. There had been fun. Their friendship had been in it.

  It had been special.

  Well, today things felt different. It just wasn’t the sort of different she’d been hoping for.

  “I’ll be down in the kitchen,” she said, eager to get away.

  It was going to take a whole lot of cupcakes to make this day feel okay.

  The next few days Zack really did manage to be busy and stay busy. He didn’t stop by her apartment late at night, or any time of day. Her head hurt and her bed felt empty. Which was silly, since her bed had been empty of anyone other than her for twenty-five years.

  It was just the past couple weeks she’d had Zack sometimes. And she found she really liked it, and it wasn’t just because of the orgasms. It was just listening to him breathe. Feeling his body heat so close to hers. Just being with him, finally, finally able to express how much she wanted him. To not have to hold such a huge part of herself back from him anymore.

  She loved the way he made her feel about herself. That he wanted her in a sexy red dress, or yoga pants, or nothing. That he made her feel beautiful. That he made her see things in herself she hadn’t seen before.

  And if she told him that he’d undoubtedly run away screaming.

  Tonight, the contracts remained unsigned and that meant they still had plans to go to the big charity event. Something to do with a children’s hospital. She wondered if that was by design. If it would bother him. Make him think of his son.

  Her heart hurt every time she thought of Zack’s past. Of what that false front of his was created to hide. To hide what he’d been through, who he really was. He had perfected a persona, controlled, light, charming, and even she had bought into it. Not even she had seen everything.

  But she was starting to.

  Tonight was going to feel more like a real date. A public event with just the two of them, not with Mr. Amudee sitting by, watching their performance as a couple. She was dressing up in a dress she’d selected this time. Something between her usual fare and that screaming, sex-on-a-hanger number Zack had picked out for her.

  It was a full-length gown with a mermaid-style skirt that conformed to her body before flaring out around her knees. It swished when she walked, and a halter-top neckline showed her cleavage. And she felt sexy in it. She felt like a woman who was ready to conquer the world. One who could outshine other women, at least for the man she was with. And that was what mattered, anyway.

  She heard a knock on her door and she tried to shove her feet into stilettos, while standing, and fastening dangly diamond earrings. “Coming!”

  She opened the door and all the air rushed out of her body. Zack was a wearing a suit, black jacket, crisp white shirt and a perfectly straight black tie. He was the epitome of gorgeous. He always was, half dressed, all dressed or completely naked. But there was something about a man in a suit.

  It sort of reminded her of his wedding. The wedding that wasn’t.

  “You look … you look great,” she said.

  “So do you. I brought you something,” he said.

  There was something strange about his tone, something formal and distant. It matched his clothing. Cool, well-tailored, nothing out of place. And yet, that in and of itself felt out of place. Zack wasn’t formal with her. Why should he be? They’d known each other for years. They had slept together for heaven’s sake.

  She held her hand out and smiled, trying to make him smile. It didn’t work.

  He took a flat, black box from his jacket and opened it.

  “Oh, my … Zack this is … it must have cost.” None of her words would gel into a complete sentence, everything jumbling and stalling half thought through.

  It was a necklace, a truly spectacular necklace, not the sort you saw under the display case of just any department store. Not even the sort of thing you saw at Saks. It was too unique, too extravagant.

  She reached out and touched the center stone, a deep green emerald, cut into the shape of a teardrop and surrounded by glittering diamonds.

  “I don’t think I can accept this.”

  “Of course you can,” he said, his voice still tinged with that unfamiliar distance. “Turn around.”

  She did, slowly, craning her neck to look at him. He swept her hair to the side and took the necklace from the box, draping it over her, the stone falling between her breasts, the chill making her shiver. He clasped the necklace, his fingers brushing the back of her neck as we worked the tiny clasp.

  “This isn’t … this isn’t a friendships gift,” she said, her voice trembling.

  That did earn her a short chuckle. “Maybe tonight friendship isn’t what I want.”

  His words made her shiver, the sensual promise in them turning her on. The underlying, darker meaning she couldn’t quite grasp making goose bumps break out on her arms. “It really is too much,” she said, turning to face him, her nose nearly touching his.

  He straightened putting some distance between them. “It’s a perfectly fitting gift for a lover. Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” she said, turning his choice of word over in her head. Yes, she was his lover, in the sense that they’d slept together. But there was something in the way he said it, something that seemed cold, when a lover should be something warm. Something personal.

  She touched the necklace, the gems cold beneath her fingertips.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE charity ball was crowded already when they arrived, a sea of beautiful people dressed in black positioned around the ballroom, chatting and eating the very expensive canapes.

  Heads turned when she and Zack walked down the marble staircase and down into the room. Everyone was looking at Zack, because it was impossible not to. She was fully appreciating just how he was viewed in the community now. A man of power and wealth, a man of unsurpassed beauty. If you could call what he possessed beauty. It was too masculine for that, and yet she wasn’t sure there was another word for it, either.

  Pride flared in her stomach, low and warm. All the women in the room were looking at Zack with undisguised sexual hunger. And Zack was with her. Touching her, his hand low on her back, possessive.

  She turned and pressed a kiss to his cheek. He looked at her. “What was that for?”

  “Because,” she said.

  He looked at her for a moment, a strange light in his eyes. “Let’s go find our table.”

  “Okay,” she said, trying to ignore the tightening in her throat.

  There was a table, for two, with place cards set on each empty plate. Zack held her chair out for her and she sat, her heart slamming against her ribs as she read the name that had been written in calligraphy on her place card.

  Hannah Parsons.

  With Zack’s name tacked on to hers, even. Clara felt dizzy. She looked down at the ring. Hannah’s ring. Hannah’s seat. Hannah’s man. She had to wonder if the necklace had been meant for Hannah, too.

  She wrapped her fingers around the card and curled them into a fist, crumpling it and tossing it onto the marble floor.

  “What the hell?” Zack asked.

  “It had the wrong name on it,” she said stiffly.

  “Does it m
atter?”

  That hit even harder than seeing the name. “I suppose not.” She put her foot over the crumpled paper and squished it beneath the platform of her stiletto.

  “You’re the one who’s here with me.” He stretched his hand toward hers, covering it, stroking her wrist. “No one else.”

  She knew it. And in some ways she knew his words were sincere. But there was also something generic in them. There was something strangely generic to the whole evening and she couldn’t quite place what it was or why.

  “Of course.” She looked into his eyes, tried to find something familiar now. Something of her friend. But she didn’t see it. She only saw the man as he presented himself to the world. Aloof, put together, charming. But there was no depth there. No feeling or warmth.

  It was frightening.

  Dinner was lovely, tiny bits of sculpted beauty made to be admired before being eaten. Of course it was marked up extravagantly, because the whole point of the evening was that the charity received donations.

  A woman in a long, flowing dress walked up onto the stage, her air of authority making it obvious that she was the coordinator of the event, and a hushed silence fell over the crowd.

  “Thank you all for coming tonight,” she said. “And for the very generous donation of your time and money to the Bay Area Children’s Hospital.”

  She turned and looked toward their table, a smile on her face. “And tonight, we would also like to give special acknowledgment to Mr. Zack Parsons, who has donated enough money to revamp the entire Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit. Everything in the unit will be state of the art. It will be the best equipped facility in the state of California. There have been major advances in the field of Neo-Natal medicine over the past few years. We’re able to offer hope to babies, to families, who wouldn’t have had any as little as five years ago. And now, we’re able to offer even more. So, thank you, Mr. Parsons.”

  The room erupted into applause and everyone stood. Except for Zack. Except for her. Her eyes stung, her entire body feeling numb.

  Zack lifted his hand and nodded once, his acknowledgment. Her heart broke for him. What a wonderful gift he was giving to so many families. A gift he hadn’t been able to give to himself, to his own son.

  She wanted to howl at the universe for the unfairness of it all. And yet there was no point. And Zack was there, broken, and probably in pain. She could be there for him. It was all she could do. And she would. Because she was his friend. His lover.

  The speaker went on to talk about some more donations and then invited everyone to stay for dancing and an open bar.

  After the applause died away, people started to wander around the room, talking and laughing, some people came to talk to Zack. She wanted to tell them to go away. Because she could feel the dark energy, the grief, radiating from him like a physical force. How was everyone else missing it?

  She didn’t understand how they could miss what was so clear to her.

  “Let’s go.” She put her hand on his, felt his pulse, pounding hard in his wrist. She ran her fingers along his forearm. She didn’t think he would accept loving words, but she could offer him comfort in another way. A way he could accept.

  There was no question where things would end up tonight. No fighting it. They both knew it.

  He nodded once and stood, she stood, too, and went to him, putting her hand on his back. He wrapped his arm around her waist as they headed out of the ballroom.

  Zack’s chest felt too full. Everything felt like too much. The whole day. He shouldn’t have brought Clara with him tonight. It was one thing to sit in a room full of strangers and have them talk about his contribution to the NICU, but it was another to have someone sitting there, knowing why he’d done it. Someone else thinking of Jake. It was hard enough to be alone in it. Sharing it made it seem more real. It made him feel exposed.

  It made him feel like everything, his failures, his pain, was written on him. Something he couldn’t hide, or scrub off no matter how many layers of control he tried to conceal it with.

  Clara saw him.

  When he’d picked her up tonight, he’d fully intended on keeping her at a distance, putting her in her place. A new place. Because he had mistresses, women who were with him for the sole purpose of warming his bed and accompanying him to events.

  He wasn’t friends with those women. He didn’t eat their baked goods, he didn’t know that they wore yoga pants to bed when there wasn’t a man around. He didn’t know that they were insecure about their bodies, or that their favorite band was still that group of long-haired teenage boys that had been so popular in the nineties.

  He didn’t know anything about them beyond what they looked like naked.

  He knew the other stuff about Clara. And he knew the naked stuff. And tonight he’d been determined to focus only on the latter. If he couldn’t keep her as only a friend, and he’d proven he wasn’t doing a very good job of that, then he would have her as a mistress. Because what had happened at her apartment, the way they’d shared dinner, jokes, then made love, him holding her while she’d slept … he couldn’t do that. It was too reckless. To out of his control.

  He had to move her into the compartment he could deal with. And she seemed determined to push her way back out.

  The expression on her face when she saw the wrong card in her spot had been so sad, stricken, as though someone had slapped her.

  And he’d felt it in him. As though her emotion was his. He’d always felt connected to Clara, but this was different. Sharper. Impossible to deny. Beyond his control.

  He should have taken her home. Yet he’d still taken her back to his house. Because he had planned on having her tonight, had been obsessed with it all week. If only to prove that he could sleep with her without having his insides flayed. Sex was only sex. It didn’t have to be personal, it didn’t have to mean anything. It didn’t have to be related to the awful, tight feeling in his chest.

  She was beautiful tonight, incredible in that form-fitting black dress and the gem, enticing in the valley of her cleavage, drawing his eye, tormenting him.

  She was standing by the massive living-room windows, the bay in the background, city lights glittering on the inky surface of the waves. He wanted her. Here and now. A good thing he’d planned for it. It wasn’t spur-of-the-moment, it wasn’t beyond his control.

  He had condoms and everything else he needed. He was in control. He desperately needed the control. He tightened his hand into a fist, steadied it, ignored the tremor that ran through his fingers and skated up his arm, jolting his heart.

  Ignoring the strange tenderness he felt when he looked at her. This wasn’t about feeling, not in an emotional sense. This was physical. It was sex.

  “Take off your dress,” he said.

  She reached behind herself and unzipped the gown, letting it fall to the floor. She wasn’t wearing a bra, only a small triangle of lace keeping her from being completely bare. That and the necklace, the emerald heavy and glittering between her breasts.

  She reached around to remove it, her breasts rising with the action, pink tipped and perfect.

  “No,” he ground out. “Leave it on.” A reminder. A reminder that she was the same as every other woman he’d ever been with. The exchange of gifts, jewelry, that was how it worked. It was invariable, it was safe. It was unchallenging.

  She dropped her hands to her sides and he walked closer to her, loving the way the moonlight spilled silver over her pale curves. The way the deep shadows accentuated the dip of her small waist, the round fullness of her hips and breasts.

  She was a woman. There was no denying it. And he was starving for her.

  But he would wait. He would draw it out. Because he was the master of this game. He was always in charge. He had forgotten that sometimes over the past few weeks, had allowed her inexperience, the nature of their friendship, to change the way he approached it.

  Not now.

  She’s a woman. Only a woman. The same as any other
.

  No. Not the same. His mind rebelled against that thought immediately. There had never been a more exquisite woman, that much he knew for certain. There had never been a figure, not since Eve, better designed to tempt a man.

  She was the epitome of sensual beauty, more seductive simply standing there than any other woman could have been if she’d been trying.

  Clara.

  Her name flashed through his mind, loud, a reminder.

  No. He didn’t need it. He wasn’t thinking of her. Only of his own need and how she might fulfill it. He would pleasure her, too, as he did all of his lovers. But it wasn’t different. It couldn’t be different. Not again. Not after that night in her apartment.

  “Turn around for me,” he said. “Face the window.”

  She obeyed again. She was like a perfect hourglass, the elegant line of her back enticing. He walked over to her, extending his hand and tracing the dip of her spine. She shivered beneath his touch.

  “Do you like that?” he asked.

  “I’ve liked everything you’ve ever done to me.” Her voice, so sweet, a bit vulnerable. Not a temptress.

  Clara.

  He put his hands on her hips and tugged her back against him, let her feel the hard ridge of his arousal, the blatant, purely sexual evidence of what he wanted from her. Her indrawn breath, the short, sweet sound of pleasure that escaped her lips, let him know that she was tracking with him. Important.

  He would never do anything she didn’t want.

  He put his hand on her stomach, soft, slightly rounded. He liked that about her, too, that she was so feminine, curved everywhere. Absolute perfection.

  He cupped her butt with his other hand, her flesh silken beneath his palm. “You’re beautiful,” he said. She leaned back against him, her head against his chest. Her slid his hand up to palm her breast, teasing her nipples as he continued to stroke her backside.

  He gripped the side of her panties and drew them down her legs.

  He move his hand back behind her, moving it forward, teasing her slick folds before parting them and sliding his fingers deep inside of her. She gasped, spreading her thighs a bit wider to accommodate him.