“Are we going to talk about this?”
He almost didn’t ask. He already knew the answer.
He lay on his back, naked in bed with Candy—a new experience for them—with one arm propped behind his head and the other wrapped around her slim shoulders tucking her against his side. She stiffened as soon as the words left his mouth, starting to pull away.
“I don’t—” she stammered.
“Hey.” He tightened his arm around her, drawing her back against him, tension making her muscles rigid. “It’s okay. We don’t have to talk.”
And it was okay. Before he’d been frustrated when she treated him like he was just a sex toy, but he knew better now. He knew she cared for him. Maybe even loved him. Just like he knew it was hard for her to accept more from him. He didn’t know all the reasons behind it—though he’d long suspected it had something to do with her family—but right now he didn’t have to know. He could be patient.
Candy was worth it.
“We’re good,” he murmured against her hair—sandy blonde tonight—until he felt the knotted muscles in her neck and shoulders ease. “We’re perfect.”
* * * * *
Present day…
Ren lay on his back on the bed with Candy sprawled across his chest, letting the silky strands of her hair slip through his fingers. Ash blonde again today. The color of her current disguise.
“Is this your natural color?”
“Hm?” She stretched against him and the feel of her curves moving against his skin would have been enough to get him hard again if they hadn’t already thoroughly exhausted one another. She rubbed her face against his shoulder and sighed contentedly. “Close enough.”
“Do you always wear this disguise when you come to see your family?”
Candy was a chameleon. It was one of the first things he’d learned about her. The way she would disappear into her disguises, playing with people’s minds by changing her image on a whim—often two or three times a week. It felt almost jarring to see her wearing the same look all this week, day after day.
“What makes you so certain this isn’t my real face?”
He trailed a line down her spine. “All of them are your real face, in a way.”
That brought her head up. She rested her chin on top of the hand she rested on his chest, a small frown making a tiny wrinkle between her brows. “How can they all be my real face? I use those disguises to hide who I am.”
“If you say so.”
Her frown darkened. “You think you know better?”
“I just have a different theory.”
“Well? Enlighten me?”
“I think you use each one to show a different side of who you are and every single one of them is a piece of you. Even this one.” He tugged gently at the sedate ash blonde hair.
“This isn’t a disguise,” she argued, but there was less heat in the words, a thoughtfulness in her eyes. “I miss my disguises when I’m here like this. It feels like someone took away my Kevlar and I’m about to walk into a shoot-out.”
“Is that why you wear them?” He’d never asked her that before. Somehow sensing it was a question she wouldn’t answer truthfully, but things felt different tonight. Like there was truth in this pocket of post-coital intimacy and neither of them wanted to shatter it with a lie. “As a shield?”
“I guess.” She rested her cheek back against his chest, so he couldn’t see her eyes anymore. “It started out that way. They made me feel stronger. Protected. Now, I don’t know. It’s like they’ve become a habit I can’t break. Like they’re a crutch and I’m weak for using them, not strong like I used to think.”
“You aren’t weak. I may not know much, but I know that. You’re one of the strongest people I’ve ever met.”
“Am I?” She looked up at him again. “Or am I just good at convincing people I am so they never see the weakness inside?”
He cupped her jaw, running his thumb along the strong, elegant line of bone. “Strength isn’t being unbreakable. It’s standing up again when you fall. You do that. And no matter what I go into with you—whether it’s a security detail or the perils of a family wedding—I know you will always have my back and you will never let me down. Am I wrong?”
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s different.”
“Maybe,” he admitted, not sure what she was getting at.
She sighed, frustrated that he didn’t seem to quite understand what she meant. “I don’t know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“Keep believing in the good in people after a lifetime of everyone wanting to use you. You make it look so easy.”
“It isn’t easy. Seeing the best in people, keeping your rose-colored glasses on when sometimes it feels like the whole world is trying to rip them off—that’s the hardest thing in the world. You just try to do it anyway. Take your little victories where you can.”
She sighed. “How are you so well-adjusted? How did you turn out so well when I’m such a mess?”
“First off, you aren’t a mess.” She rolled her eyes, but he let that one go for now. “Secondly, I had a great foundation.” He traced another lazy pattern along her spine. “My parents somehow managed to keep the fame zoo outside when I was small. It never touched us. I was always secure in the knowledge that I was loved—and that my parents loved one another and everything was going to be okay.”
“But they died when you were so young. Everything wasn’t okay.”
“I know and it was horrible, but in a way I was insulated even from that.” The pattern reversed, traveling up her back now. “I was supposed to be in the car with them, did you know that? My mother liked to bring me along to my father’s gigs so I could hear him sing, but I had a cold that night. A few sniffles. So I wasn’t in the backseat when the paparazzi chased them after the show. I’ve always wondered if my parents would still be alive if I had been. If my father would have driven more carefully. If he wouldn’t have driven at all. If the chase wouldn’t have gotten so out of hand.”
He’d never admitted that to anyone—the way he couldn’t help wondering if his parents would be alive if he hadn’t sneezed. His father never drove high with him in the car.
“I’m glad you weren’t in the car,” Candy whispered.
“Me too. But it’s hard not to wonder. You can kill yourself with what ifs. What if it hadn’t been one of the five days it rained in LA that year? What if the roads hadn’t been slick? What if he hadn’t taken such a twisty road to try to evade the paps?”
“You were so little. How did you find out what had happened?”
“Uncle Javi. My grandparents flew in, but they were living in Miami at the time. It was Uncle Javi who had to identify the bodies and had to come wake me up and tell me what had happened.”
Candy breathed out a curse against his skin.
“I think he’s a big part of why I wasn’t more traumatized. He held me on his lap and told me my parents were angels in heaven, but I was going to be okay because he loved me and Poppy and Abuela loved me and they were never going to let anything happen to me. He stayed with me until my grandparents arrived and we grieved together.”
“No wonder you can never say no to him.”
He stopped tracing. “I say no to him plenty. But he’s my family. And nothing he can do will ever change that.” He studied the moonlight on the wall, seeing old memories there. “He was just as crushed as anyone. My father was his best friend and I’m not sure they were on good terms when he died. But Javi still protected me every way he knew how. I remember the one time I saw him lose his cool—he punched a reporter. Some asshole who tried to show me a picture of the wreck—”
“Jesus.”
“I was too small to understand what I was looking at. My grandparents and Javi had kept me so insulated I didn’t recognize the metal pancake that had once been my dad’s car. But Javi lost his shit. Put the asshole in the hospital—and nearly went to jail for assault, but he told me he’d do it again for me. He was my champion and because he was there, I never felt like I wasn’t safe.”
He flattened his palm over her back, running it down to her hip, but she shifted beneath his hand uneasily.
“I never felt safe. After.” Candy’s words were uneven. Jerky. “Everyone was so relieved that I was back, that nothing had happened to me, but all I could think was that it wasn’t nothing. They acted like because I hadn’t been raped or mutilated, everything was okay, but I was missing for four days and I was so angry at the people who were supposed to protect me. I wanted to scream and scream. What took them so long?”
He wrapped both arms around her, holding her close, and Candy burrowed closer, like she couldn’t get warm.
“Then I heard the staff talking—there was one of the kidnappers who would whisper to me in English, tell me my parents didn’t love me, that they weren’t coming for me, that they were bartering for me, trying to get a better price. I tried not to believe it—they’d gotten me out, he must have lied—but it had been four days. And then I heard the staff. Things I wasn’t supposed to hear, but Scott knew. He’d heard it all too. How they’d tried to negotiate down the price for me. How my parents refused to pay for our nanny’s daughter, who had been taken with me. How they’d lied. To all of us. How do you trust someone after that?”
“Jesus,” Ren whispered.
“Yep. No wonder I’m so fucked up, right?”
He rolled her over until she was tucked beneath him, his body keeping her warm as he cradled her face between his hands. “We’re all fucked up. You’re a fighter. And the strongest woman I know.”
He kissed her before she could argue with him and she kissed him back, hungry, with an edge of desperation that made him feel a little uneasy, like she was smothering her emotions in sex, but he couldn’t deny her. If this was what she needed, he would give it to her. Anything Candy needed.
* * * * *
Candy arched against him, drowning in him, the warmth and heat and rush of Ren. She drew her knees up on either side of his hips, urging him on with every touch and whisper until he sank into her and she closed her eyes, clinging to his shoulders, gasping at the fullness, feeling the pressure of impending climax in every inch of her body, but especially in her chest where her heart seemed to clench tight around a knot of sensation she couldn’t quite let go, no matter how she reached for it as he murmured darkly into her ear and reached between their bodies, touching her—
“Oh, God, oh, Ren, yes.” Her orgasm ripped over her, tearing loose the moorings of her soul and setting her flying… but that little knot remained, tight and tense as he followed her over the edge, groaning his own grateful curse as his muscles went rigid and he jerked against her.
She stroked down the sweat-slick line of his back, thankful for his weight pressing into her, not ready for him to disengage and move away. Until the reminder that she was a responsible adult reared its ugly head.
They hadn’t used anything. Not now and not earlier.
Stupid. So stupid. She had an IUD, but they knew better.
“Have you been tested since Jessica?” She didn’t want to think of him with anyone else, saying the words out loud almost choked her, but if she was grown up enough to sleep with him she was grown up enough to talk about it.
“Clean,” he grunted, rolling off her, and at least he didn’t bitch about her ruining the afterglow. “And I was never unprotected with her. Never with anyone but you.”
He didn’t say he hadn’t slept with Jessica. Just that they’d used protection. Well, what had she expected? They’d been dating for months. The woman was making him dinner. Feeding his freaking dog. Of course, she’d slept over.
“What about you?” he asked as she slipped out of bed to go wash up.
“Clean,” she echoed, before shutting the bathroom door. She didn’t need to tell him that she hadn’t been with anyone since him. That the idea of a one night stand with anyone else had lost all its appeal.
At least she could take comfort that she was the only one with whom he’d ever gotten tested and moved from condoms to birth control. That was something, right? Romance in the twenty-first century.
She was also the only one, besides Max, who knew the truth about his past. Though she’d found that out herself. Would he have told her, if she hadn’t known? He’d said he loved her again tonight—words that hadn’t scared her in the moment, but now made that little knot in her chest ache and her breath come short.
Casual. She needed to keep things casual. Easy. At a distance. He already saw too much of her.
Candy stepped out of the bathroom and pulled on one of Ren’s soft T-shirts before climbing back into bed with him. “That was a beautiful song tonight,” she said, light and conversational as she settled into his arms.
“I thought you might recognize it. First song I ever played for you.”
She twisted to frown at him. “No, it wasn’t.”
“Sure, it was. It was my birthday. You brought over pizza—”
“Oh, I remember the first time you played for me, but that wasn’t the song.”
“Yes, it was. It’s my favorite love song and I’m pretty sure I was trying to get you back into bed after you’d cut me off—”
“You got me,” she reminded him. That night had felt like a tipping point. Not unlike tonight. When everything shifted and she was scared to think about the morning. “But it was Promises.”
“No, it was—” He broke off, frowning. “I might have played Promises,” he admitted. “What can I say? My dad wrote so many great love songs for my mother, it’s hard to keep them all straight when I’m trying to seduce you.”
“Promises isn’t about your mother. It’s about you.”
“No, it was for her,” Ren insisted. “About how she made him a better man and he promised he would be good enough to deserve her.”
“Ren, I’ve seen pictures of your mother. She was kind of famous.”
“So?”
“The second verse? About trying to deserve the faith he sees in those green eyes? Your mother’s eyes were brown.”
Pale green eyes blinked at her in confusion and dawning realization. “I’ll be damned. I must’ve sung that song a hundred times and I never thought of that.” He met her gaze, something unreadable glittering in his. “Thank you.”
She linked their fingers together, resting them on his chest. “Any time.”