In Flight (Up in the Air #1)(78)

I could see that my words reassured him. He leaned down to kiss my forehead softly.

“Thank you,” he murmured against my skin.

“And we’re getting off track. You owe me a painful revelation. A few of them, actually. Why do you hate alcohol so much?” I asked.

I knew there was something there. I just sensed it. His reaction to seeing me drunk, and his instinctive tensing every time he thought I might drink alcohol, was all just too personal.

He ran his hand up my torso, tracing my ribs.

I gave him a few minutes of silence while he watched me broodingly, and formed his answer.

“I told you about my first guardian when my parents died. He was an older cousin. His name was Spencer, and I despised him. Supposedly, he was a close friend of my fathers. I could see why, right at first. He seemed nice at the beginning, never giving me any rules or restrictions. I was barely fourteen and he would let me have wine with dinner. I thought he was the coolest guy in the world. Until I realized that he was drugging the wine.”

A hand went to my throat at his words. I held my breath for him to continue, knowing with inexplicable certainty that the rest would be bad.

“It took me awhile. I would just have these blackouts. I wouldn’t remember anything after dinner. But there were…signs.”

“I was sore in places that I shouldn’t have been. I had marks on my back, and wrists, and…other places. And Spencer changed. At first it was just something knowing in his eyes. After a time, he started to brush up against me in broad daylight, and I just knew. I just knew that he had done things to me, things that I hadn’t consented to. Not that a fourteen year old can consent to any damn thing.”

Tears filled my eyes for the first time in many years, and my hands stroked him reassuringly. It both broke me, and touched me, that he would share such a thing with me.

He noted my tears, and brushed them from my cheeks almost absently, continuing. “It was just a guess on my part, but I suspected the wine. So I pretended to drink it one night, and let him lead me to his room. He had me handcuffed before I realized what he was doing. But by then, I was helpless. And then I got to experience the whole disgusting thing without the benefit of drugged wine.”

I traced those tiny scars on his wrists, and he let me. He shut his eyes tightly when I kissed them, but he didn’t stop me.

“I think he knew that I wasn’t as drugged out as usual almost immediately, but I really don’t think the bastard cared. He had convinced himself that I was a willing participant, no matter what I said or how I struggled.”

“He didn’t let me loose until morning. That was the longest night of my life. I was exhausted and sick down to my soul, but I still had the gumption to beat the shit out of him the second I was free.”

“He steered clear of me after that. And not even a year later, some angry lover choked him to death. He liked younger men who could overpower him physically. I guess it finally backfired. At least that lover wasn’t underage. It was a huge family scandal. All of my relatives were mortified. But I relished the news.” His eyes had glazed over as he told me the gory details, but they cleared as he finished, and seemed to focus back on me right away.

He leaned down and kissed me when he finished. I returned the kiss desperately. He pulled back, murmuring into my mouth.

“You’re the first person, aside from my therapist, that I’ve ever told that to. I was so ashamed by it all. Does it change the way you see me?”

In answer, I kissed him with all of the emotion that I felt for this damaged soul that seemed, somehow, to match my own. And to complement it in just the way that I hadn’t realized I’d needed so desperately.

We just kissed like that for long minutes. It was a soft and reverent kind of sharing. The type of intimacy that would have made my skin crawl at one time. But it didn’t now. I relished the contact, something having changed inside of me.

He finally pulled back, but only to lift me. “I need you in my bed, Love. Say goodbye to the 4th floor, for now. But we’ll be back, make no mistake.”

He cradled me against his chest as he walked with seemingly no effort to the elevator, not setting me down or shifting me as he boarded the elevator and it rose slowly back to his room.

I nuzzled against his chest. He kissed the top of my head.

He laid me on his bed and made love to me. I imagined it was a lot like being made love to in a forest, the huge, wall-sized window flooding us with sunlight.

He was all tender lover, though even James’s tender lover side had an edge. He pinned my legs down on the bed, parted wide, so that his every hard thrust rubbed my clitoris almost unbearably roughly. He made me come again and again before he allowed his own release.

“You’re mine,” he breathed into my ear afterward. We lay together, entwined. We were on our sides, and he was wrapped around me tightly from behind, a hand laced firmly with one of my own.

“Yes,” I murmured back, and sank into a deep and peaceful sleep.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Mr. Beautiful

I awoke to darkness, disoriented at first, and uncertain of what had awoken me.

“Shh, love, go back to sleep,” James murmured into my ear, rising and going immediately into the bathroom. I heard the shower turn on. I made myself get up.

I went into the closet, putting on my work clothes, since they were the only ones I had. I definitely needed a shower, but it could wait for my hotel room. I had a feeling that if I joined him in the shower now, he would talk me into staying at his place while he went out. I still wasn’t willing to do that.