Fifth Avenue Box Set: Take MeAvenge MeScandalize MeExpose Me Read online

  She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of anything.

  Except that Sarah was dead. Horribly. Tragically.

  And that right now, as much as she needed Travis, he needed her, too.

  She watched the numbers of the elevator, watched as they got closer to the ground floor. She didn’t know what would happen between them, because nothing seemed right tonight. Nothing was predictable.

  She’d never been afraid to be alone with Travis before, but for some reason, right now she was.

  But not as afraid as she was of being alone without him.

  Chapter Two

  “The Black Book,” Travis said when they got back into the town car that had delivered them to the party earlier that night.

  “What’s that?” she asked, squeezing her hands into fists and trying not to fall apart.

  They were both on the verge of it, and if either of them gave in...well, they would both shatter completely.

  “A hotel. It belongs to a friend of my father’s.”

  “You don’t want to...go back to the dorms?” She’d been planning on staying with Sarah tonight, but obviously...obviously she wasn’t now.

  “You want to go back to the dorms right now?” he asked.

  She imagined the little space she’d shared with Sarah for the past three years. Sarah had been gone from it for nearly a year, but now it would feel so final. There was no chance she would ever walk through the door again.

  “No,” she said, her voice choked.

  “I don’t, either. I don’t think I can stomach the drive time and...I just want to be...somewhere else. Somewhere new.”

  She nodded slowly. “Are you okay?”

  “Fuck.” He dragged his hands over his face and leaned forward. “No, I’m not okay.”

  She didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know what to say. Didn’t know how to react at all, since her instinct now was to do what he was doing. Folding in on herself. Holding her stomach, trying to keep the pain from tearing her into tiny, irreparable pieces.

  But if she did, she didn’t know what it might do to him. So she just sat there, staring straight ahead, unmoving, while tiny claws stabbed into her heart.

  Travis had never seen life’s ugly side. And she’d been spared a lot of it. But growing up she’d seen in her neighborhood violence, poverty and the kind of depressed desperation that went along with it all.

  She’d learned as a child to shut things off when the outside world went insane. And she realized now that Travis never had. Travis’s life had always been beautiful mansions and social niceties. Weekends spent on the Cape and afternoons on the green.

  He’d seen nothing more than the careful facade laid over the reality of life. Had barely seen down into the machine, to see where the cogs, like her family, like so many others, made things work, seamlessly and beautifully for families like his.

  And he’d never seen those more unfortunate people get ground up in the inner workings of the beast before, either.

  He was kind, his family was kind, and they assumed everyone else was, too. His life was charmed and he assumed that all of life was.

  Travis was brilliant, but this wasn’t the sort of thing brilliance could prepare you for.

  Not that she was prepared. Not in the least.

  She’d grown up in a rough neighborhood, with no father and a mother who was wounded and jaded by life. Her mother had taught her early to never depend on other people...to depend on herself.

  She lived by that. She’d moved through life mercilessly ensuring that she guarded her own interests and her mother’s. She’d made sure she’d carved a clear path out for herself, so that at the end of everything people would look and see that while she’d had a hand up, she’d done the work herself.

  Travis was her friend, but she’d never been in a position where she was forced to depend on him before. But tonight she needed him. Tonight, she needed him to be the one who was strong, because she was already broken.

  “We’ll stay together,” she said finally. “All night.”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes staring straight ahead. “Good.”

  He tugged his tie off and threw it onto the seat, then shrugged off his jacket and put it there, too. Keeping busy, she imagined. And she was keeping busy by watching him.

  When the car pulled up to the curb, she pushed her door open and Travis did the same, neither of them waiting for the driver.

  “You forgot your jacket,” she said, when he shut his door. “And your tie.”

  “I don’t care.” He turned and started toward the entrance to the hotel.

  She stepped up onto the sidewalk, her heels clicking on the pavement as she followed him through the revolving door and into the marble-laden lobby of the boutique hotel.

  They walked up to the counter and she stood just behind him, her heart hammering. An evening that had started out surreal and turned to a sort of unbelievable tragedy was getting even stranger.

  She felt like she was having an out-of-body experience.

  Watching Travis check them into a beautiful hotel. Knowing she was going to spend the night with him in a room.

  Knowing that Sarah was gone and never coming back.

  Beyond that, she knew nothing.

  She didn’t know what would happen once the doors to the hotel room closed. Didn’t know what would happen if they crawled into the same bed together tonight.

  Didn’t know what might happen when she went back to the dorm alone, or back to Sarah’s apartment and found it full of her things, and empty of her forever.

  So she would focus on one unknown at a time.

  The ones that affected her the most now.

  The ones that concerned Travis, a locked door and a bed. That was suddenly paramount in her mind.

  When Travis turned away from the counter, he had a key. Not a card like you so often had for places like this. An honest-to-goodness key that looked like it belonged in a door that led to a dungeon or something.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  She nodded, not sure of what else to say, until they were in the elevator again.

  “What’s going to happen?” she asked. She hated seeming vulnerable, she hated sounding afraid, but she was, and she was too raw to sublimate it.

  “Tonight or forever? Now that Sarah’s gone?”

  “We can start with tonight.”

  He looked at her, the pain in his eyes enough to tear a hole in her soul. She hated this. Hated that Sarah was dead. Hated that she couldn’t even pretend it wasn’t real, because she saw it all reflected on Travis’s face.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Would the answer have been different if I’d wanted a response to the other questions?”

  He shook his head.

  “I thought not,” she said.

  The elevator doors slid open and revealed a long hallway with black doors. “This is a little Twilight Zone,” she said.

  He let out a choked laugh. “Sure is.” He looked at the tab hanging off the key. “We’re at the end of the hall.”

  As they got closer to the room, her throat tightened until, by the time they reached the door to their room, she could barely release the air from her lungs.

  He put the key in the lock and turned it slowly. And she couldn’t help but apply weight and significance to the action. Because it made her think of other things.

  And she was ashamed that it did. That the fact that they were going into a hotel room for the night, on the night when their friend had died, made her think of the possibility of sex.

  But then, maybe that was why she was thinking of sex.

  Because Sarah’s life had ended tonight. Unexpectedly. Shockingly.

  And at the moment, Sydney was more conscious than she’d ever been of the fact that time wasn’t infinite.

  That you couldn’t save everything for later. Couldn’t wait to have everything until after the next midterm. Until after graduation.

  Good sex. Great sex. The kind th
at curled your toes. A chance to act on the attraction that had simmered, deep inside of her, for years, for the man holding the door open for her.

  The only guarantee was tonight.

  What was wrong with living it like it might be the last? Sex was different than needing someone. Lust was different than dependency.

  She walked into the room and looked around. The wallpaper was black satin, velvet fleur-de-lis raised over the surface. There was only one bed, with deep, rich purple pillows and bedding.

  It wasn’t a room that was designed for easy conversation. Not one designed for holding a friend while they grieved.

  It was a room designed for one thing. The one thing that had never passed between them.

  The one bond in their relationship they’d never tried to forge. Because it had always felt too risky. It still did. And she had no idea what they were doing.

  Which fit, because she had no idea what life had just done to them.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and suddenly became aware of the fact that her lips were cold.

  She started to shiver and Travis sat down on the bed next to her, his posture stiff. He didn’t touch her. He sat with a strip of purple duvet between them, the space filling with all of the cold that seemed to be spilling out of her soul.

  And if he closed that distance, she might be warm. But only then.

  “Just...” she said. “Just do what you want.”

  Chapter Three

  For a moment, Travis nearly lost his nerve. He almost moved away from her, almost got up and left. Left the bed, left the room.

  Because everything about that request was wrong. Everything about the moment was wrong.

  Do what you want...

  There was one thing he wanted. One thing he’d always wanted. And taking it now would be...it would be the worst kind of betrayal.

  But he didn’t get up. He didn’t leave. Instead, he pulled her hard against him, wrapped his arms tightly around her body.

  She buried her face in his neck, her tears falling onto his neck. He’d never seen Sydney cry. She was too tough. Too guarded. But she was crying now, weeping like she was trying to cleanse herself of everything that had happened tonight.

  He wished he could do it, too. But there were no tears for him. There was nothing but deep, yawning pain, and a need that he didn’t think could ever be entirely satisfied.

  She shifted against him, turned her face to the side, her lips brushing against his jaw. The soft, sweet contact shocked him, burned him. His heart sped up, blood pumping hard and fast through him, heating up the cold places inside of him. Reminding him that he was alive.

  She put her hand on his face, traced the line of his jaw with her finger. His breathing became labored, his heart raging so hard he thought he was having an attack.

  “Not a good idea, Syd,” he said, giving her a chance. One last chance, because if she took it any further he didn’t know what he might do.

  “No,” she said, “maybe not.”

  He gritted his teeth, his blood pumping hot through his veins, his shaft aching, getting hard. This was not the time for that. Not the place for that, and dammit, he’d made the decision years ago, she was not the woman for this. But he couldn’t stop himself from responding. “Definitely not.”

  “What if there was nothing else, Travis?” she whispered, a temptation he couldn’t ignore. “What if this was all there was? Tonight? This room? You and me. What if it started and ended here?”

  He closed his eyes, swallowed hard, his whole body on fire. “Then I know exactly what I would want to do. But the thing is, there’s more than this night, more than this room, and more than us. More than that...there’s a lot more to us than...this.”

  “There wasn’t more for Sarah,” she said, her words choked. “This was it, Trav. And I’m not going to...to jump off a building, but what I saw tonight reminded me that...that we don’t necessarily have tomorrow. Unless we’re choosing to take tomorrow from ourselves, like she did, I think we all truly believe that tomorrow is going to be there, but we’re just making up stories.”

  He closed his eyes. “Is that all?”

  “Yes. Because until the sun actually rises we don’t really know if it will for us. It’s just...making fantasies for what we hope will happen when the only thing that’s real is...now.”

  “But tomorrow...”

  “Screw tomorrow,” she said, her words fierce. “It’s not...I can’t...”

  He angled his head and closed the distance between them, his lips pressing hard against hers. Cutting off her words, trying to cut off her thoughts, her pain, her desperation. And his own.

  And just like she’d said it would, everything burned away. There was only this moment, this room, this kiss.

  Sydney was drowning. And she didn’t want to come back up for air. This was everything she’d ever wanted. Everything she’d never known she wanted. It was Travis, so familiar, and so wonderful, doing something to her that was completely different. So wild and unfamiliar.

  It was a collision of fantasy and the most stable reality she possessed.

  And it was incredible.

  She curled her fingers around the lapels of his shirt and pulled him closer while his hands roamed over her back, sliding over her curves.

  His palms so big, and hot and masculine, warming all of the freezing places inside of her. She parted her lips and dipped her tongue into his mouth, tasting him, tasting the moment.

  He groaned and she found herself on her back with his body over hers, his kiss deeper now, desperate.

  He moved his hands to her wrists and pushed her arms up over her head, his hold firm to the point of pain. But she found she didn’t mind. It helped drown everything else out. The emotions that were swirling around in her chest, threatening to overtake the pleasure that was trying to carve out a home in her body.

  But that bit of pain pushed the emotion out. Let her focus entirely on the physical.

  On Travis.

  She wiggled against him, wanting to wrap her arms around his neck. But she couldn’t. Because he was holding her down, keeping her captive. She arched against him, her arms still pinned firmly to the mattress.

  She opened her eyes, and saw that he was looking at her, a glimmer of a wholly different kind in those dark depths now.

  She tried to tug free of his grasp, but he wouldn’t allow it. She lifted her head and kissed him again, biting his bottom lip hard.

  He drew back, his expression shocked, but only for a moment.

  “Is that what you like?” he asked.

  It wasn’t. At least, it hadn’t been in the past. But it occurred to her then, with her best friend on top of her, his thick, hard erection pressing against her stomach, that she had no idea what she liked.

  Because with Damon it had all been about him. Vaguely satisfying sex that had been driven largely by the command of his vanilla needs.

  If, when they’d been together, he was in the mood, she capitulated. If he wasn’t, she didn’t pursue it.

  He’d been the more experienced party when they’d gotten together, and so she’d left it up to him show her how it all went.

  “I don’t know what I like,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean...I like this,” she said, looking over at where he was still holding her hard to the bed. “And I liked biting you. But beyond that my sex life has been very missionary position.”

  A smile curved his lips. A wicked smile she’d seen the ghost of before, when he saw a woman in a bar who had captured his interest. When he looked at a woman he was dating.

  But she’d never seen it in full force. And it had never been directed at her.

  All of the ice and chill were gone now. She was on fire down to her toes.

  “Then I’ll give you more.”

  He shifted, releasing one of her arms before gathering it back up again, the fingers from one hand encircled around both wrists as his other hand roamed over her curves.


  “Tonight we can have whatever we want,” he said, his voice rough. “If it’s all there is, then there are no consequences.”

  She nodded, words failing her entirely.

  “Which means we can both take what we want, and never have to answer for it,” he continued, his thumb sliding over her nipple.

  Her breath caught, arousal pooling low and hot inside of her. “Yes.”

  “Tell me what you want.”

  “Make me forget,” she said. “Make us forget.”

  “How?” he asked, a sliver of desperation in his voice now.

  “Make us both feel something bigger than the grief, I guess,” she said, searching his face.

  He released his hold on her and lowered his head, kissing her neck, the hollow of her throat, before moving and scraping her collarbone with his teeth.

  He pressed his lips to the soft curves of her breasts rising up over the bodice of her dress, before moving lower and kissing her fabric-covered stomach.

  He put his hands on her hips and pushed her dress up, just above the waistband of her panties. His chest pitched sharply, dark color slashing across his cheekbones.

  “Damn.” He breathed the word like a prayer. “You’re so beautiful.”

  He traced the edge of her panties with a finger and she lifted her hips off the bed, a sharp shot of pleasure racing through her. “You want me,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You want me to touch you?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “You know.”

  “I do?” he asked.

  This wasn’t the Travis she knew, with an easy smile and a joke for every occasion. This was Travis like she’d never seen him before. Turned on. Hungry. Intense.

  She liked him like this.

  She liked him every way she’d seen him.

  She put her hand over his and guided it between her thighs, pressing his palm down firmly against her. She rocked against him, letting her head fall back as pleasure washed through her.

  He lowered his head, his breath hot on her thigh as he kissed the tender skin there, pressing firmly against her with his palm as he did.