Dani walked the length of the second-floor hallway, past the ornately framed paintings and the dust-free sconces lit with cheery clear bulbs. At length, she pushed open the door that she decided must be to Rand’s room. She stepped into a sitting area with French doors at the far end, toward the back of the house. The windows here were also large and barely framed with curtains, offering an unrestricted view over the back of the property as it ran up to the woods. There was some sort of park behind the home, and other estates dotted the skyline, their lights twinkling through the trees, but Dani still had the sensation of being alone in a winter wonderland, a princess locked in a castle. Had Rand felt like this as a little boy growing up in this room?
Or, wait. He said it hadn’t been his childhood room. What, then? The room where he stayed when he came over to hang at Grandma’s house? She looked around with dissatisfaction, wondering if it would even be worth it to paw through the man’s drawers. What did you keep at a family estate, when it wasn’t really your home?
She frowned, moving toward the main room, through the French doors. Rand’s bed was absolutely enormous, but that wasn’t what drew her keen, practiced eyes.
A bureau stood off to the side, almost forgotten in the heavy shadows. Unlike the main chest of drawers with its attendant mirror, this thing looked almost delicate: a tall, narrow chest standing on claw feet. And it was covered with ornately framed photographs.
“Outstanding,” Dani breathed, searching the wall until she finally found a switch for the light that brightened that area. Then she hurried to the chest, unsure how much time she even had. She heard the sharp rise and fall of William and Rand’s conversation far below, and grinned. From the sound of it, she wasn’t going to be interrupted anytime soon.
The collection of pictures featured mostly children, and mostly from the early days of photography, from what she could tell. Stiff little boys and girls with serious faces and uncomfortable-looking clothes, all of them blond and round-cheeked, the same golden good looks apparent even among the grown-ups included in a few shots, as if the adult Winstons didn’t splash too far out of their rarified gene pool when it came time to look for mates. There were a few outliers in the group, but definitely no one in these pictures with the same dark, hawklike features that made Rand’s face so arresting.
Was that why he’d been chosen as the whipping boy of the family, on top of being blamed for his mom’s untimely death? Because he looked different?
“Rich people are crazy,” she muttered. Standing on her toes, Dani realized the collection of pictures was incomplete. Gaps appeared along the far right of the dresser, and the grouping ended with a couple of photos that seemed to have been taken in the seventies, based on the unfortunate clothing choices. A boy who looked an awful lot like Rand stared sullenly at the camera, along with another Winston-perfect blond boy who was distracted by his toy train. Was this dark-haired little boy Rand’s father? And…who? An uncle? A friend?
No, that couldn’t be right. Rand’s father was blond. Dani frowned more intently, staring at the photo. So who was the dark-featured little boy…? And how pissed must dear old dad have been that his namesake looked nothing like him? Genes could be a bitch, it seemed, even in a family wound as tightly as the Winstons.
Surely there had to be pictures to match the gaps in the collection, though. Dani quickly pulled out the topmost drawer, rifling the folded linens as the scent of lavender wafted up. Nothing there, or in the next drawer down. She was all the way to the last drawer when her phone buzzed from the dressing table.
She trotted over to grab her purse, pulling the phone free as she returned to the chest. A quick glance told her it was Erin, and she tapped the phone to answer it.
“I thought you were on a date,” she said.
“We were supposed to be,” Erin said. “Except big-man military hero is passed out on the couch, and trying to move him has proven unsuccessful. I just wanted to tell you that we’re home, and I’ve made dinner, so there’s no need for you to eat something out if you’d rather just come here?”
Dani smiled. Her landlady knew her too well. “You’ll be pleased to know I’ve already consumed homemade pumpkin soup and cheeses I’m sure I can’t pronounce, along with a bottle of wine I know for a fact cost seventy-five dollars wholesale. So I’m good.”
Erin didn’t miss a beat. “Rand cooked for you?” she asked, her voice aghast.
“Perish the thought.” Dani was rummaging through the last drawer now, the phone held between her head and shoulder. At the bottom of a stack of sweaters, she finally found what she was looking for. Excellent. “He asked me to meet him at his ancestral manor, and his minions brought out enough food to feed a small army on platters that might have been actual honest-to-God silver. I’m planning to knock over his kitchen when he’s not looking, just to get the recipes. Everything tasted like heaven.”
“Maybe his pans are lined with gold?”
“You might seriously be onto something….” Dani stopped, her gaze focusing on the framed photo she’d just liberated from the drawer. “Hey, I’ve got to go, though, Erin, okay?”
“Should I expect you home tonight?”
Glancing up from the picture, Dani eyed the enormous bed, then the clock. Her time was Rand’s by her own doing; she might as well accept that. “Not likely, so lock up. And keep a leash on Zander, so if I do show up in the middle of the night, he doesn’t go all military death squadron on me, okay?”
Erin was still laughing when Dani hung up the phone, and she let the device drop to the thick carpet as she brought the picture closer to her face. This was Rand and his siblings, and it might as well be a mirror image of them now. William and Catherine, all smiles and sunny good looks, maybe about ten years old, and younger brother Rand, in his dark suit and tie and crisp white shirt, looking like he had just closed a major deal on Wall Street at the ripe old age of five. He stood too straight, his mouth too serious, staring gravely out at Dani as if he had a secret he no longer wished to keep.
She wondered why the photo wasn’t up with the others. She knew there was bad blood with the father, but Dear Old Dad’s picture hadn’t been banished from the bureau. Peering closer, she realized the photo looked crooked in its frame, and she flipped the picture over and popped the back hinges. When she lifted the backing of the frame away, an additional slip of paper fell out—another photo, this one apparently of a single child, but so heavily marked up that the subject was indistinguishable. She frowned, then looked at the back of the main photo itself. A line was drawn down the page, bisecting the white background unevenly. And in a large, scrawled, childish print, someone had inked “Bad Boy” on the page. Not just once, but over a dozen times, enough to fill the space.
Dani pressed her lips into a thin line, a gasp surging up in her throat. She didn’t have to turn the photo over again to know who was being singled out. Sudden hot tears came unbidden to her eyes, and she quickly reassembled the picture, replacing the marked-up photo, then resetting the back of the frame. When she flipped the picture over again, it did look a little straighter, but she had no stomach to put it with the others. She slid it back into the drawer, then stood, collecting her things and moving again into the sitting room.
How could anyone have made Rand feel so unloved? She refused to believe he’d been that misbehaved. Yes, he didn’t fit the mold of the perfect Winston boy, and yes—far more tragically—his mother had died in childbirth. But how were either of those things Rand’s fault? He hadn’t asked to be born, to be a part of this monstrously wealthy family that in the end had just turned out to be monstrous. Dani drifted toward the fire, sitting down in front of the enormous hearth. And why had he brought her here tonight? Certainly he hadn’t expected her to snoop through his room. She thought about his eyes as he’d asked her to stay. Even with the autocratic snap to his voice, his words hadn’t been an order, exactly, hadn’t conveyed an expectation. They hadn’t even really been an offer.
They’d been a plea of sorts, the closest someone as proud and fierce as Rand had likely ever gotten to opening himself up to someone else, to putting himself out there to be chosen or not, to be taken or not.
To be wanted or not?
“Get a grip,” she muttered, curling herself into the chair. She was just overwrought, making connections based on very little information. Rand had been surrounded by money and power since the moment he’d come squalling into this world. It wasn’t like he was Jimmy, abandoned to fend for himself at the age of five—or even herself. One way or another, she suspected Rand had always managed to get the upper hand.
A sudden sharp outburst below grounded her even more firmly in reality. Once again, she could hear Rand and William arguing downstairs, and the sound of Rand’s voice, so certain, so assured, drew her mind away from long-ago pictures of long-ago little boys, lulling her into a dark and fitful sleep.
Rand stepped into his bedroom, his glance sharp. Nothing stirred inside, but the room didn’t have the sense of being abandoned. Dani was here. His intuition was confirmed as he caught sight of her, asleep in the wingback chair that had been one of the many good memories of coming to his grandparents’ home. It was in honor of them that he’d left this room so undisturbed, though his grandfather had passed and his grandmother rarely visited anymore, preferring her golf friends in Phoenix to the social rounds of Boston. Still, his grandmother especially seemed to have a sixth sense for anything out of place. He could wait until she died to decide what to do with the house that was now in his name.
He crossed over to Dani, careful to remain quiet so as not to disturb her. She lay curled in a blanket, her hair down and soft around her neck, her expression loose and relaxed in sleep. As beautiful as she was when awake, intelligence simmering in every glance, every shift of expression, in sleep she was breathtaking. Her very stillness allowed her face to take on a serenity he doubted she ever experienced in her waking hours, when there was always something to be managed, to be assessed and accepted or discarded on its own questionable merits.
He pondered for a moment what to do. His first instinct—to reach down and pick her up—would probably result in a quick flurry of alarm and even a punch to the face. So instead, he sat on the low coffee table in front of her chair and drew level with her, watching her as she slept.
“Dani,” he murmured.
Her eyes instantly opened and her entire body went rigid. She stared at him, despair and confusion crashing together in her gaze for a brief and shocking moment, before it dissipated just as quickly and she relaxed, leaning back against the chair. She seemed to be pulling herself out of a nightmare, and he gave her a moment, content to watch awareness steal back over her at his sudden proximity. “So, did William decide that the campaign wasn’t lost after all?”
“He’ll live to fight another day.” Rand nodded. “Are you comfortable?”
“You’re not seriously asking me that.” She held up the edge of the blanket, where a neat label was stitched into the seam. “This thing is made out of alpaca yarn. I’ve never even seen an alpaca, but I want one now.” She yawned, stretching her neck as if to work out a kink from her impromptu nap. “You rescue your big brother like that all the time, or is this just a recent thing?”
She asked the question as if she already knew the answer, and Rand stiffened slightly, holding back his sharp retort. Fortunately, Dani saved him from responding. “He’s not spending the night here, is he? Might be kind of awkward if we run into each other in the hall.”
Rand regarded her curiously. Something seemed off about her, but he couldn’t quite place it. “I’ve called a driver for him,” he said. “His home is in Back Bay, one of the other family properties, a little less ostentatious than this one, if you can believe it.”
“Say it isn’t so,” she said, her mouth curving into a smile. In that moment, nestled in his chair, she could have been any woman, from any background. Anything she wanted to be, in fact. That sudden, odd thought shook him, and he tilted his head, allowing his gaze to drift over her face, her shoulders.
Dani arched her brows. “I don’t suppose you’re going to suggest I call up my own driver to take me home?”
“Not exactly,” Rand said, and then he did move forward, leaning in for a kiss. She met him more than halfway. Her lips still tasted of wine, and he pressed in more deeply, wanting to drink her in. Dani let the blanket fall away, and he sucked in a sharp breath. “Probably a good thing that I didn’t opt for the driver,” he said, and she chuckled against him, shivering as he drew his hands along her warm skin. She’d shed her clothes at some point, and now her body was bared to him. He pushed the blanket back but not entirely, revealing her smooth skin bit by bit.
She glanced at him. “You’ve seen me before, Rand,” she said, but her voice was a little breathy. “There’s not much that’s going to surprise you at this point.”
“You’re wrong,” Rand said simply. It seemed like there would never be enough words to describe this woman in her very essence, and nothing in his many years of study that came close. So he contented himself with running his hands along her arms, then shifting them to caress the curves of her breasts, liking—too much—the sudden intake of her breath as she pressed into his hands. “It occurs to me,” he said, “we’ve never made love in an actual bed.”
“Ha!” Dani’s eyes flared wide, and she arched beneath his hands, turning to look at the door beyond. “Well, if my amazing powers of deduction are still working, I suspect there might be a bed in there,” she whispered, sotto voce.
“I think it’s worth investigating.” He stood and drew her up, and she allowed the blanket to remain behind, once again fully unself-conscious under his gaze. It was as if her body was an open book to him, his to plunder and explore. Still, even that seemed a feint to him, hyperaware and suspicious. But just as he was plucking at that thread of a thought, she reached for him.
“I think it’s only appropriate that you dress for the occasion, too,” she said. She deftly unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it out of his trousers, then pressed her hands against his abdomen and closed her eyes, as if savoring the tactile experience of him.
He wanted to take the moment slowly, to enjoy it every bit as much as she was, but the touch of Dani’s fingers on his bare skin ignited his need. He pulled his shirt off, then barely controlled himself long enough to allow her to unbuckle his trousers; she peeled away the rich material and pushed down his boxer briefs, once more freeing his cock into her questing hand. She knelt before him, and Rand’s gaze raked over the narrowing of her waist and the flare of her hips as she leaned forward to remove his shoes, his socks, the quick act of subservience as straightforward as everything else about her. She didn’t think of the move as an act of dominance or submission, he knew, but of simple expediency. Still, seeing her positioned before him like that sent a spike of desire through him, hot and full.
Before he could step out of his pants, her mouth was at his cock again. Despite himself, Rand held his breath, rewarded for his control as the warm, wet tip of her tongue snaked out to run along the head of his shaft. His entire body convulsed as she shifted closer, and she laughed against him, willingly taking him into her mouth as Rand finally let out a long, hissed breath. He was too weak to stop her immediately, but after two long, luxurious strokes, he reached down and eased her back, urging her to her feet.
Her eyes were questioning. “Not to your liking?”
“Very much to my liking. But I’m determined to actually fuck you in a bed this time.” She laughed again, the sound as dark and dangerous as he felt. She moved past him toward the open door of his bedroom.
“I don’t see what the big deal is,” she murmured. “A bed is just a bed is just a bed—even one as enormous as yours.”
“So you did take a look,” he said.
“Just a short one, I promise.”
He breached the doorway as Dani moved farther into the room, her attention apparently absorbed by the massive bedstead that dominated the not inconsiderably sized chamber. He had no idea where the monstrosity had come from, and had no interest in moving it to any future home he might occupy, but he couldn’t deny that the thing had its upsides. And seeing Dani climb up on it now, well aware of the display she was providing him of her body, made the bed his new favorite thing. She looked back playfully as she positioned herself against the mound of stiff pillows that cascaded away from the intricate wood and wrought-iron headboard. “Well, this is fun,” she breathed.
He moved toward her.
Dani clearly had been expecting him, but she wasn’t expecting him to grab her ankles and pull her back sharply, flattening her body on the bed, the plush expanse dipping under Rand’s weight as he straddled her. He slid his body along hers until his cock wedged into the vee of her legs. She was panting heavily already, her hands gripping the sheets, and he felt her wet heat and the beginnings of an even slicker moisture as her body reacted to the sudden intimate pressure of his shaft. She arched up and let him inside her, and he thrust forward, the sharpness of the movement earning him a cry—half of surprise, half of pain, but when he would have withdrawn, Dani ground against him, taking him deeper inside her.
“Make it hurt,” she muttered, and a surging spike of lust shot through him at the unexpected words, all other thoughts crowded out of his mind as he felt her lift herself up against his cock again, urging him to bury himself even more thoroughly inside her.
Rand gritted his teeth as Dani adjusted again, pulling herself to her knees even as her head remained low on the bed, cushioned on the pillows. He grazed her backside with his hand and felt her shiver, the resulting contraction around his shaft narrowing his focus to a pinpoint. It was as if every sensation he was experiencing was heightened a thousandfold—the smoothness of the sheets against his knees, the indentation of the cushioned bed, the tightness of Dani, squeezing around him. Even the air entering his lungs seemed richer, filling up his body with electric urgency.
He pressed his hands against Dani’s upper thighs, using the leverage to drive himself firmly into her even as she pushed back. Her head was turned, her hair wild over her shoulders, and she was panting as well. But her mouth, though open, wasn’t issuing any sounds, and her eyes were tightly clenched shut. It was as if she was giving herself over to the moment, issuing total surrender without saying a word. In the few weeks he had known her he had come to achieve an almost instinctive understanding of her body, if not her requests. He couldn’t always know exactly what she wanted, how she wanted it, but he could figure out the key points. And as he drew his hand over the curve of her ass once more and heard her soft sigh as she rounded herself to fit the palm of his hand, he thought he knew what she wanted here.
Knew it and wanted to give it to her.
Now.