Knock-knock. Knock-knock-knock.
April stood outside Finn’s apartment door, knocking for the third time.
After the disastrous family breakfast, she’d been completely off her game at work. Answering the phone all wrong. Snapping at poor Clara for, well, being Clara. Signing off on one of Smith’s nutty staff morale ideas, she’d nixed a half dozen times over the past eighteen months.
But fixing all that was tomorrow’s problem.
This evening’s problem was bigger. It pertained to the fraying of the fabric of her actual life. Somehow, in the past weeks, all the neat and tidy had been tipped upside down. She’d become the mean sister. The back-chatty daughter. She’d put worry in the eyes of her landlady. She was the girl everyone was talking about at work.
None of which had ever happened until she’d signed up with the Cinderella Project—
So why wasn’t she banging down Hazel’s door?
Knock. Knock... bang-bang-bang!
“I know you’re in there, Finn! Joe told me so!”
Thankfully, the at the security desk had remembered her and let her in the lift. “He never has ladies over,” he’d said behind a whispering hand. “Just so you know.”
If Joe hadn’t let her up, she was so wound up she might have scaled the building. Such was the extremity of the urge to see the man.
Extremes. Urges. Her mother would have a field day with the internal workings of her mind.
April lifted her hand to knock but the door sprang open, momentum propelling her through the doorway. She pulled herself about an inch short of her intended victim.
Finn. Naked, bar a skimpy white towel wrapped around his waist. Hair dripping into his eyes. Blue eyes. Not altogether happy blue eyes. Belonging to naked – nearly – Finn. Right up inside her space.
“April,” he said, a hand reaching out to stop her from ploughing into him. He sounded exasperated. Well, sure, she’d just forced him out of the shower with her infernal knocking after promising she was all fine and dandy about them spending just the one night together.
“What are you doing here, April?”
Good question.
“I could pretend and say I’m here to ask how the contract’s going if that made you feel better about things, but that would be lying.”
A muscle worked in Finn’s cheek. “Would you like to come in?”
“Sure. Thanks.” April tucked her hair behind her ear then scooted around his glorious, wet, near–nakedness, pretending to be more interested in his glimpse views of the harbour.
The apartment looked different in the late afternoon light. Emptier. Sadder. Even though it wasn’t yet exactly the home she hoped it could be, her place was at least filled with flowers and colour and books and light and clutter.
But now was not the time for distractions. She had things to say. She spun on her heel, hair flicking around her head—
To find Finn’s gaze slinking from her fitted Wonder Woman t-shirt to her tight, red jeans. So she’d gone home and changed before charging over there. She needed back up. Fierce back up. If Wonder Woman couldn’t do it, nobody could.
“Eyes on mine, buddy. I have things I need to say and I need to know you’ve heard them.”
Finn’s mouth jerked. He licked his lips and did what he was told.
Which meant she had to keep her eyes on his too. Not easy when he was wet. Naked (nearly). And Finn. “I’ll give you a minute to put a shirt on.”
“Second time you’ve asked me to do that,” he said, not moving an inch.
Okay so his chest muscles might have moved. Twitching one after the other.
“It’s distracting.”
“I don’t care.”
Her breath hitched when his towel slid an inch down one hip. “No need to be rude.”
“Coming to my apartment without invitation, somehow conning my security guy into letting you up in the lift, then banging down my front door isn’t rude?”
She held a hand up in front of her and closed one eye so she could see his face but nothing else. “We’ll get to that. My turn to talk, remember.”
He readjusted. Through the gaps between her fingers the towel flapped open. Half a second at most. Still, she got a load of thigh, knee, more. Her mouth went dry.
“You kissed me,” she croaked. “The other day.”
“I did a lot more than that.”
She flushed. Inside and out. But she was not to be distracted.
“I mean at the car. You kissed me. Like you meant it. Like you didn’t want to let me go. I know you said all the words necessary to make me believe it was a one-time thing. But your words don’t match your actions, Finn. Your words don’t match your eyes. Your words don’t match the way you touch me. The way you look at me. The way you kiss me.”
His eyes grew dark. The muscles in his neck tightened. His nostrils flared. And he white knuckled the towel.
She dropped her hand and took a step closer. “You still want me, Finn. And I still want you. If this lasts another night, another week, another month, for me, that’s better than walking away simply because you’re scared.”
“You think I’m scared?”
There. That flash of male pride. The heat of it burned holes in his guard. Giving her a way in.
She shrugged. Took another step closer. “I think you’re scared of something. Something you’re hiding. Something you’re avoiding. Something you don’t want to talk about. And I want you to know that whatever it is, I can handle it.”
The guard was back. She stopped moving. Stopped breathing.
“What do you want from me, April?”
She put her hands to her hair. “I want you to stop calling me April in that voice of yours. It’s like warm honey running down my spine and it makes my mind melt. I want you to put a shirt on so I can think straight. Then I want answers.”
“I don’t have any answers you’d want to hear.”
“Bullshit. You, my friend, have all the answers. You hold all the cards. You have me so worked up I’m resorting to figures of speech.”
He laughed. More of an outshot of breath through his nose, but still it was a warming. A softening. A new way in.
And then he took a step towards her. His words came slow, steady, determined. “I told you what I wanted from you, April. What do you want from me?”
“I want to know who you are.”
“Anything else?” he asked, his voice like liquid fire.
“I want to know why you have such a beautiful apartment and refuse to furnish it.”
“That all?”
He was close enough to touch now. She could feel the waves of his magnetic pull, tugging at her skin like a million tiny hooks.
“I want to know why when I Google your name there’s nothing. It’s as if you don’t exist.”
“You want to be my Facebook friend?”
Her hands went straight to her hips. Wonder Woman pose. Talk about body language. “Seriously? That’s all you got out of that?”
Nothing. The man gave her nothing. When all she wanted from him was everything.
Dammit. Damn him. Damn it all.
April took one final step and slapped Finn on the arm. Then the chest. Her hand slid off the wet planes. So she went at him with a fist. And once she’d started she couldn’t stop.
And he let her. He stood there like a big, meaty wall and let her pummel him. What the hell was wrong with the guy?
She hit until she ran out of puff. Till she couldn’t remember why she’d even started. Then her fists uncurled and her palms rested against his chest. Her forehead followed, sinking into the safety of his shoulder.
His skin was warm. Damp. He smelled like big, clean male. He felt like home.
“I’ve had a bad day.”
“I can see that.”
“I had a fight with my sister. I lost it with my mum. I made mistakes at work because I couldn’t keep my head on straight. I’m lying by omission to my boss who’s only ever been nice to me. I don’t like how it feels.” And here was the kicker. “I wanted to feel better. So I came here.”
She fully expected him to stay silent. To pretend she hadn’t said what she’d said. It wasn’t what they were about, after all.
Instead, he nodded. And something snapped inside of her. Her feelings poured through the crack like water bursting through a broken dam.
Her voice was husky as she said, “You say I make things feel simple for you. Well, for me, you make my life feel real. Like it’s finally happening, right now. It’s not just dreams or hopes or plans or wishes on fairy dust. Or looking back and making sure not to make the same mistakes. But now. It’s scary. And I love it. I know it’s not what you want to hear. But it’s the truth.”
Time slunk by. Long, slow beat after long, slow beat.
“I’m such a fool.”
“You’re not a fool.”
She looked up, into his eyes. Such beautiful, deep, secretive, sad eyes. “I’m not?”
He shook his head.
Knowing she was about to step over a great big line she’d drawn in the sand when her father had walked out on their family, a line that put her solely in charge of her own destiny, April let go. She let go and she felt herself fall. Deep, spiralling out of control. It was like every urge to be a little bit bad she’d had over her whole life contracted into one giant explosion of experience.
It was transformative.
Thus transformed, she lifted up onto her toes, placed her hands on Finn’s face and pressed her lips to the edge of his jaw.
Tipping his head the other way, she kissed just below his other earlobe.
She could feel his heat, his breaths, the solid thumping of his heart.
She could also feel his resistance. He was still fighting against letting go. Maybe he always would. His will was stronger than hers. Meaning the moment he dropped the towel, letting it slide to the floor with a swoosh and drew her into his arms she could have cried.
A sigh melted through her body at the contact. At the knowledge that the only thing between her and all that beautiful skin was a Wonder Woman t-shirt.
Pulling his head to hers, she covered his mouth with her own.
It felt like a lifetime since she’d last tasted him, leant on him. It felt like all she’d ever done. Like she could go on doing so for a million years more.
Kissing, kissing, kissing, she went with him as he backed her against the couch.
His mouth moved to her cheeks, her neck, pushing her hair from her face so he could kiss her all over.
No way was she going to cry, but emotion welled in her, so thick and fast, it had to spill out of her somewhere or she might just explode.
Then he was on his knees, lifting her Wonder Woman shirt, lapping at her belly. Shoving her jeans down so he could graze his teeth over her hipbone. She gripped his hair, sinking her fingers into the wet strands.
Her button went pop. Her zip went scrape. Then he turned her slowly, kissing the hipbone he’d bitten a second before. Kissing the curve of her backside. Running his lips back and forth over her lower back as he slowly, slowly pulled her jeans over her—
Finn gripped her by the hips and tilted her backside to the nearby lamp.
Seemed he’d found her tattoo.
She twisted. Stretched so she could see the words “To the Bitter End” scrawled on her coccyx. All it needed was an arrow to be really obscene. Thankfully, being a redhead, her tolerance to pain wasn’t up to scratch and she’d stopped the tattoo artist before she could go all the way.
She closed her eyes tight while she awaited his reaction. When it came it was a doozy. He burst into laughter. Laughing so hard the beautiful sound rocked the room. Laughing so hard he let her go.
She spun to face him, her eyes flying open; any and all arguments flying out of her head at the sight of him in all his naked glory. Kneeling before her. It was amazing she could get a word out at all.
“I was eighteen. Wouldn’t have dared get one till then. I’m the good sister, you see. My mother calls such lapses in judgement my ‘little rebellions’.”
“What do you call it?” he asked.
“A motto. Of sorts. I’m not much one for giving up.”
“You don’t say.” His eyes clouded as they ran over her t-shirt, her bare belly, her jeans halfway down her hips. Then he tugged her to the rug, and balanced over the top of her. She helped, wriggling herself free. Panting. So ready for him she ached.
And when he resumed his kisses down her body she slammed her eyes shut to contain her emotions. Not all that easy as his tongue dipped into her belly button. His teeth grazed her hipbone. His chin nudged her thighs apart and he went to town.
As the world dipped away, sensation spiralling and tightening and coalescing into such sweet, tender heat it tore her apart, she knew. She was in so much trouble with this guy. Deep, deep trouble.
With a sigh that shook her to the core, she welcomed trouble, she owned trouble; for though she’d tried so hard to live a life without trouble, she was her father’s daughter too.
April stared at the ceiling of Finn’s lounge room; one arm flung over her eyes, the other lying across Finn’s sweaty chest, a couch cushion lodged under her left knee as she struggled to find her breath.
Finn ran a finger up and down her wrist. And while it tickled like crazy she was too exhausted to protest. Or move.
“Hungry?” Finn asked.
“Famished,” April said, her voice scraping against her throat.
“Hmmm. Me too.”
When Finn didn’t move, April thumped him on the chest. Growling, he curled into a ball. But she knew it was all an act. She’d never met anyone more mentally tough. Or more thumpable. She thumped him again, her attempts as chastisement bouncing off his muscles like a pillow off a trampoline.
Gathering the tattered remains of energy, she moved the cushion out from under her and turned to face him. He really was the most beautiful man she’d ever met. He was going to be the absolute undoing of her if she didn’t at least try to save herself.
Meaning she needed ammunition. Reminders of why he was so bad for her. “Temporary” wasn’t cutting it. “Illusive” hadn’t done the trick. She needed something big, something that would cut through the fugue of desire and stick.
Which was why she decided the time for unearthing had come. “So where’s your tattoo, big guy?”
“What makes you think I have any?”
“Please. You have tattoo written all over you.” So to speak.
“I’m a respected businessman.”
She snorted. Real ladylike. But it only made him grin.
“I’ve never met any man I’ve considered less respectable.”
His eyes narrowed. “Who else have you dated? Men of the cloth?”
Dated? Did that meant he now considered them dating? Word choices were telling, even if the teller didn’t mean for them to be. April blinked hard, trying to squeeze out her mother’s voice.
“You may know how to turn on the charm, Finn Ward, but you are a predator. Like a shark who’s come out the other end of rehab for an addiction to eating people but still enjoys a raw steak.”
Finn rolled to his side, took her cushion and used it as a pillow. He looked into her eyes. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”
“It’s all there. All in your eyes. The scars on your body. The way you keep yourself separate. The things you say and the things you don’t. You just have to bother to look.”
“Most people don’t bother to look.”
“Their loss.”
He ran a finger over her eyebrow and down her cheek, his hazy gaze following all the way.
His voice came out quiet, almost as if he was talking to himself. “I’ve never met anyone like you.”
“You bet your life you haven’t.”
The intensity remained in his eyes, only now it was tempered with heat as his big hand pushed her hair away from her face so he could look. And look. And look.
April swallowed. Tried to come up with something pithy to ground her, to take away the feeling that she was falling, tumbling, with nothing but an abyss at her back.
Instead she said, “Tell me something true.”
“You’re a fan of confessions, aren’t you?”
“Here’s why.” She pushed him back onto his back and shuffled to lean her forearms and chin on his big chest. “My mother wrote a book about me. It hit bestseller lists in Germany, Croatia, and on the New York Times.”
“That’s... random. What was the book about?”
“It’s called The Truth Will Set You Free.”
“Of course it is.”
“Mmm. She’s a psychiatrist, see. A dedicated one. She thought she had life figured out. Then Dad left, messing up everything she thought she knew about the world. And it was either crumble or make a new kind of sense. She spent the next few years moulding my sister and I into the kinds of women who’d never be so sideswiped. She encouraged Erica’s wildness and my self-control in an effort to see which personality type survived tragedy best. And she put her results into a book.”
Finn’s jaw twitched. “You’re making that up.”
April shook her head. “All true. Your turn.”
“You do remember I didn’t fall for this the last time you tried it.”
“Of course I do. But we know one another a little better know. Biblically. Surely that counts for some softening of the Finn Ward steel.”
A smile lit his eyes. She rolled hers.
“Not soften then. Mollify.”
He breathed out hard. “So you want to know something about me. Something I don’t normally talk about. Is that how this goes?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never done this before.” She’d never had to.
Her brand of enthusiastic questioning always yielded results. And most people actually liked talking about themselves. Finn was not most people.
Finn glanced at the ceiling, no doubt praying for patience. A muscle worked in his jaw. His arms bunched so tightly new veins began to pop along their lengths. Could this really be that hard for the guy? That hard to give up even a tiny piece of himself to her?
Not yet ready to give up, she said, “Okay. Here’s how a professional goes about it. Believe it or not, I was a hellion as a kid. Always climbing trees I wasn’t meant to, digging holes in other people’s yards looking for treasure, following stray dogs down the street without telling anyone where I was going. Dad was sure I was born without fight or flight instinct. I think it was closer to the truth to say I just felt safe. My mother was so protective. My father so relaxed about everything. Their yin and yang were my comfort, my buffers against fear.”
She played with the golden hairs on his chest.
“I was twelve years old the day I’d set my Hello Kitty watch to wake me up one night – a meteor shower was going to be at its most visible around two in the morning. I climbed out the window. Was straddling the bow of a tree when I saw them. My dad, and a woman who wasn’t my mother, leaning against a car under a streetlight on the other side of the road. Kissing. I got such a shock I fell out of the tree. Broke my collarbone. Turned out he’d been seeing this other woman for years. He stayed over three nights a week when he told mum he was travelling for work.”
She breathed in. Breathed out.
“He left us the day after I fell out of the tree. Left the other woman too. As if he didn’t want her unless he wasn’t meant to have her. Now he lives like a perennial bachelor.”
April paused, trying to piece the torn fabric of her memory together. “I remember the night as pitch-black. No moonlight, making that streetlight extra bright. It must have been a clear night or the meteors wouldn’t have been visible. But I can only recall feeling scared for the first time in my life. And completely in the dark.”
Finn stilled her hand, pressing it against his heart. Saying nothing. The guy was a hell of a listener. She’d give him that.
“Mum practically went catatonic, disappearing into her study and into herself. Erica – who’d always been daddy’s girl – became caustic, brittle. Since then, she’s turned self-destruction into an art form.”
“And you?”
Her? In trying to prove to Finn how easy it was to share, she’d gone deep – choosing a subject she actually didn’t talk about much, even though it was always lurking at the back of her mind. She swallowed down the lump in her throat and forged a smile.
“It became my job to hold us all together. I’d bring mum tea. Tidy up after Erica. Hug them whether they wanted me to or not. Set the table so they had no choice but to have dinner together every night.” April picked at a knot of cotton on the cushion behind Finn’s head and thought about always feeling like the meat in the Swanson girls sandwich. “That hasn’t changed.”
“Explains the not giving up thing.”
“Mmm. I guess it does.”
“Explains more than that too.”
Her eyes swung to his.
“It wasn’t your job to hold them all together, April. And it wasn’t your fault.”
April sniffed in a breath. For all her self-awareness, that was something she preferred not to dwell on. “It was my fault. My dad had told me about the meteor shower, you see. Had even tapped the side of his nose, like it was our little secret. And I went along with it, even knowing Mum wouldn’t approve. Thing was, he’d wanted to be caught. I was simply the device to get the job done. If he’d only told the truth, said he’d fallen out of love with my mother, fallen in love with someone else, it would still have been awful, but it wouldn’t have been as awful as it was.”
“You really believe that?”
“I wouldn’t say it otherwise.”
Done, dusted, emotionally wrung out, April climbed over the top of him, straddling the guy, a thrill of pleasure shooting through her as she felt him respond. “I’m tougher than I look, Finn. I have a cool head in a crisis. And I understand human frailty. So if you ever decide to tell me what’s going on with you, I can take it.”
With that she leaned down to kiss him.
When his hands stole around her back she lifted her mouth an inch from his. “Your turn. Tell me something you’ve never told another living soul.”
For a second she thought he might. That all the allusions would be brought to light.
But then he tipped her over, braced his impressive weight over her. Then he looked into her eyes and said, “Here’s a truth you can take to the bank. I don’t want to see you get hurt. I don’t want that so much it hurts. Everywhere.”
April’s heart stuttered in her chest. For she’d never imagined, not in all her hopes and dreams, that she’d be on the receiving end of a confession like that.
“So don’t hurt me,” she said and pulled his mouth to hers.
Finn watched April sleep the sleep of the just.
He, on the other hand, did not. He sat on the edge of his bed, feet pressed flat into the cool floor.
Somehow he’d convinced himself that beneath April’s dewy skin and ingenuous gaze, beat the heart of a wild girl. That her frankness, the tough talk, and impressive tenacity were the hallmarks of a desire to shock.
Until the moment she’d come right out and told him how tough she was. Then her bravado had turned to glass and he’d seen right through her. Right to her big, soft, beating heart. Full of hope and trust. Ready to forgive even the worst transgressions. Ready to forgive him before she even knew what he could possibly have done.
He didn’t want to see her hurt. That much was true. But he feared it was already too late.
Only this time it wasn’t his father he was worried might hurt her. It was him.
“April?” He skimmed her hair from her face. “April?”
She stirred, her arms stretching over her head, the sheet dragging down over her breasts.
He bent down and kissed the side of her breast. “Wake up.”
He lapped at her nipple with his tongue. “Wake up, April.”
He grazed her nipple with his teeth. “Wake up, sleepy head.”
“I’m awake.”
He lifted his head. Her eyes were open, though only half mast. The quixotic grey lost within her dilated pupils.
“You’re dressed,” she said, her voice croaky. “What’s the time?”
Finn glanced at the clock beside his bed. “Not quite two.”
“Is there a fire? An earthquake? An alien invasion?”
Finn shook his head.
“Then what’s with the waking up?”
Finn brushed a lock of hair from her cheek. “I have a confession.”
“Right now?
“Right now.”
“Does this have anything to do with why you were hunched over that empty glass of scotch the day we met?”
He nodded.
“Okay.” April dragged herself to sitting.
Rubbed fists into her eyes. Swallowed a yawn. Fluffed her hands through her hair as if waking her scalp might wake her brain. Then realised she was stark naked.
“Shoot. I need to be dressed for this.”
Leaning half out of the bed, the sheet falling away from her gorgeous backside, she grabbed one of his t-shirts from a chair by the bed and slid it over her head. “Okay. Hit me with it. Every dirty little nuance. I can take it. I promise.”
She crossed her lean legs and bunched the sheet into her lap. His shirt was so big the neckline fell off one shoulder. And she looked at him with that deeply earnest attention only she could pull off.
What was he thinking? He should never have opened his mouth. There was still time to come up with an easy lie.
But in the quiet of night, her moonlit shadow cast across his crumpled sheets, her whole being wide open, waiting, trusting, he heard himself say, “Once upon a time I did have a tattoo.”
She blinked. Hard. He could see the questions piling up behind her eyes. Saw her fight to hold them back. To simply let him talk.
“My father made me get it on my eighth birthday.” Finn shifted a knee onto the bed, rolled up the cuff of his track pants, and showed April the scar hidden beneath the grown-in hair. “I had it removed. Laser. Years back.”
April edged closer; ran her fingers through the hair; gently, soothing. “What was it?”
“The family crest.” It had been a Joker holding a gun to his own head.
“Eight?” She gulped. “That can’t be legal.”
He shot her a look. Getting a mate to tattoo his eight-year-old was a regular Tuesday evening for dear old Dad. What he said was, “My father is a bad man.”
She breathed out hard through her nose, her eyes narrowing, as if she was measuring if she had what it took to take him the guy on. “How bad?”
Finn laughed. Then shook his head. He needed it to be clear. So that he could be clear.
“He’s currently serving twenty years for some of the bad things he did. Drugs. Aggravated assault, Armed robbery. And those are the ones for which he was caught.”
“What about the rest of your family?”
Her hand curled around his ankle. Such a little thing, she was, with the protective instincts of a lioness.
Already smarting at having picked at the edges of the bandage he’d worn for so long, he tore it off in one fell swoop. “My mother died when my little brother, Bradan, was born. Bradan died on the same job that put my father away.”
“Oh, God. Oh, Finn. I couldn’t possibly... I had no idea.” April shuffled closer still, till her knees pressed against his.
That was all he’d planned to say. Spilling those words was like slicing himself open and showing off the wound. But as she sat there, her big soulful eyes trying to draw away his pain, to help share the load no one had ever tried to carry for him before, the rest just tumbled out.
“It was summer. I’d hit the state library – partly for the air-conditioning, partly because I knew he’d never look for me there. Turned out he had eyes all around. He found me, pulled me into the stacks, and told me to be at a certain spot at a certain time; he needed me and my car for his getaway. Biggest job of his life. If he pulled this off, he’d never have to score again.”
Finn didn’t need to close his eyes to see it like it was happening right in front of him. To smell the stench of sweat on his father’s clothes. To feel the pummelling of his own heart.
“I told him I’d heard it all before. I told him where he could stick his job. I told him I was leaving. I had a scholarship to Melbourne Uni. I was going to be something. He’d never see me again. I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t tell him I was taking Bradan with me. That I’d already enrolled him in a new school the next year.”
Finn swallowed, his throat parched.
“I should have known better. My father smelled like he hadn’t bathed in days. His pupils were like pinpricks. His grip wasn’t human. And he had a pistol poking out the back of his jeans. By then he was shouting. Who did I think I was? I was a Ward. Scamming was all I was built for. Only way I got into uni – feeding admissions a whole lotta horse shit. And he was right. My application was so full of lies and holes it was the greatest scam a Ward had ever pulled.”
Finn stretched out his fingers. He was clenching them so tight they had started to cramp.
“He tried to muscle me out of there. I managed to get a punch in. Right in the eye. Should have known he’d have a knife. He lodged it so hard in my shoulder the blade broke. Cue ambulance ride—some stranger at the library called it—public hospital, dodgy surgery.”
April sat silent, still in a way he’d never seen her. And she soaked in his sorry tale like a sponge. That was the last thing he wanted. But, now that he’d started, he had to get to the other end.
“Later on I found out Dad had walked into Bradan’s science class and dragged him out. Dad’s crew were high as kites when it all went down. Bradan had so much ice in his blood stream it was a miracle he’d been able to drive. The coroner said he was already on the ground, likely passed out, when he was caught in crossfire. He was fourteen-years-old.”
Finn ran a hand over his face. It felt tired. Like silly putty left out in the sun too long.
“I don’t have a family, April. At least I’ve lived that way for fifteen years. Until a few weeks ago, just on New Year, when I was contracted by my father’s lawyers. They want me to come in. Make a statement on his behalf to the parole board. They want me to help set him free.”
April’s voice was slick and sharp as steel. “That’s a hell of a thing to ask.” A beat, then, “What are you going to do?”
He wanted to say nothing.
He wanted to say run.
But looking at April – this resplendent siren propped up on his bed, all fierce and gorgeous and ready to take on the world – he knew it was no longer that simple.
She was a living, breathing example of how life wasn’t static. It didn’t warn. It didn’t wait.
His life was coming at him. Full bore. Unless he came at it first.
“What are you going to do?” she asked again, her voice soft, husky, as familiar to him now as his own.
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“Finn?”
He shook his head. He was done. He had nothing left.
April leaned forward and pressed her hands to his knees. The oversized shirt she wore tipped and he could see all the way to her belly button. She saw the direction of his gaze. Tipped a tad more. “Hey,” she chastised, though there was a husky not to her voice. “This is serious.”
“So’s that view.”
With a laugh she climbed into his lap. Then grabbed a hand and slid it up her top till it cradled a breast. “Better?”
“More than I can possibly say.”
More laughter. Raw and sensual and free. She knew exactly what she was doing. Distracting him. Giving him the chance to regroup... after hounding him into tearing himself apart.
He could hold that against her – the way she’d made him face things he’d had no intention of facing. Yet, in his hardest hours, she’d also given him laughter. She’d given him light. She’d given him sanctuary.
She placed her hand over his – the hand still over her breast. “I’m so sorry, Finn. Sorry for what you’ve been through. And sorry that you don’t know how you are supposed to feel about what happens next. But I’m not sorry it sent you to the bar that night. Thank you for telling me.”
She leaned in and kissed him. First on the tip of his nose. Then at the edge of his mouth. Then on the lips. A gentle touch. A sweet touch. A silent confession. A promise he’d never let her keep.
“Now you know why you need to go,” he said, sliding his thumb over the tip of her breast. “Leave. Don’t look back.”
She shuddered. Pure response. “Why’s that again?”
He swirled his thumb over the tightened peak until she gasped in a breath.
“I’m not a good man. I’ve done bad things in my life. I’ve hurt people who relied on me. And hard as it is to admit it, if it meant survival, I’d do it again.”
Her eyes flickered between his, slowly, drugged with desire. “Did it ever occur to you that I’m not as good as I seem?”
“A blue tattoo doesn’t cut it.”
She shifted on his lap, making contact where it counted. The breath shot from his lungs. Her smile was triumphant.
“I flashed a teacher to distract him from checking my friend’s homework when she forgot to do it.”
She rocked against him. His hands moved to cup her bare, naked backside.
“Um, I sold Mum’s favourite designer heels on eBay so I could buy a concert ticket.”
Her hands slid over his chest, curling against his skin, dragging at a hair or two until he winced. Then she lifted, shifted, rocked again. He swore beneath his breath as stars burst behind his closed lids.
“I wore leather boots to work once, and told everyone they were vinyl.”
Finding a sweet spot, she sank her knees into the bed, her backside splaying in his hands, her breasts pressing against his chest. Then she sank her teeth into that sweet spot between shoulder and neck till he cried out in the most perfect pain.
She licked the tender spot, then breathed her way up his neck.
With her lips touching the edge of his ear she whispered, “I know you like to think I’m all sugar and spice, that it appeals to you in some primal way. But this assertion that you’re not good enough for me?”
He groaned as her hand slid between them, down his chest, and into his pants.
Holding him hostage, she leant back and looked him in the eye. “You are not merely the result of your crappy childhood. You are the result of everything you have done to overcome it. That makes you one of the good ones.”
With that, she pressed him back on the bed, freed him from the limiting constraints of his track pants and sank down over him until he was buried inside of her. Bare to the hilt.
Hair tumbling over her shoulders, liquid smoky eyes caught on his, she rode him. Her face turning flushed, her eyes drunk with desire, biting her lip to stop from crying out. Every hitch of her breath sent shards of pleasure right through him until he lifted bodily off the bed, wrapped his arms around her and came inside her. The release plundered him, reaching deeper than anything he’d ever felt before tearing free like a cataclysm.
Then she gripped him, inside and out, her thighs clutching, her head rolling back as she fell apart, quaking and shuddering for an eternity. The entire planet seemed to hang on a breath. Her hair spread over his back. Her mouth dragged across his shoulder.
When her head lifted, her eyes catching on his, her wild beauty washed over him like a balm.
Through the haze came a singular thought. Trust. That had been the ultimate act of trust. And right in the moment where he felt like he could reach out and touch her soul...
She lifted herself away from him and crawled off the bed.
The loss of her touch felt akin to losing a limb. He could still feel her in his arms and the knowledge it was an illusion was the worst kind of psychic pain.
“Don’t,” he said, his protective instincts too strong to let him finish the thought. Don’t go. Don’t leave. Stay.
Such a small word; it still had a hell of a kick back, ricocheting through him like a stray bullet, punching holes in his defences along the way until he felt bruised, shaken, like his essence was bleeding out of him a gallon at a time.
She turned, pausing with the button on her fire-engine red jeans not yet snapped.
Her hair was wild, her eyes smoky. Emotion poured out of her as surely as if she was bleeding them too.
Then she shook her head. “I may act like it sometimes, but I’m not a total masochist. You were right in the first place, I should go. Your security guy let me park in your spare spot in the car park below so you stay here.”
“Of course he did. He’s smitten.”
Her smile was fast and bright. Unprepared, it hit him in the chest; straight through one of the bullet holes, a flaming arrow, dead centre.
She tucked it away, then looked around for her Wonder Woman shirt. No luck she rolled the corner of his t-shirt into a knot, and grab her shoes.
Then she leant a knee on the bed and pressed a kiss to his cheek. Her lips warm and light. And the flaming arrow burned brighter, raining hot sparks all over his body.
Then with a quick backward glance, and a sigh, she was gone.
He heard his front door click.
Then he lay back on the bed. Arms out. Sacrificed.
As the flaming arrow burned itself out, Finn was left feeling hollowed out. But not hollow. Like he’d gouged the story of that day from the deepest, darkest recesses of his being, and now he was empty. Now he was clean.
He’d only felt that way once in his life. The day his father had been found guilty and put away for more years than teenaged Finn had then been able to fathom.
He’d been nothing but shell that day. So light he felt he’d float right out of his body.
Instead he’d walked out of the courtroom with nothing but the rucksack he’d taken with him that day, paid cash for a bus ticket to Sydney, and started a new life. Free for the first time.
Finn closed his eyes and remembered; letting the soporific effect of the memory slide through him like barbiturate. Dulling everything in its path. Taking every other feeling – good and bad – right along with it until he was blissfully numb.
Numb but for the echoing truth that all it had taken to feel that good was simply walking away.
As April rode the lift from Finn’s high apartment to the ground floor, she fell against the corner; all her earlier chutzpah flying out of her in a rush as her knees completely gave way.
Had that all really just happened? Had she just broken through the impossible Finn wall and then pushed him to the bed and had her way with him and then left?
Yes. Yes she had.
Who was she?
Not the good girl she’d always tried to be, that was for damn sure. She’d ridden him bareback for heaven’s sake! What had she been thinking? Nothing. Not a damn thing. She’d been existing on pure instinct.
But then again, she didn’t feel bad either. Not a single bit.
Finn had told her his truth. Not his whole truth, of course; she was smart enough to know that people rarely revealed that even to themselves. But a hard truth.
And she’d done that. She’d brought him there. The spirit of Florence Nightingale flowed through her veins. And they’d ridden the high of the catharsis that came of his confession.
With a deep breath, she looked up, caught her wavering reflection in the brushed metal of the ceiling. Her hair was a mess. Her feet were naked. Her t-shirt was his.
And from nowhere felt like she might be about to cry.
For the life of her, she couldn’t get any kind of picture in her head as to what might happen now.
Finn’s life was more than complicated; it was spectacularly dangerous. And it was solitary. He’d had to be. To protect himself. To protect those around him. He’d not said anything to make her believe different.
For the first time she truly believed that if she refused to heed his warnings and clung to what they had, one day she would wake up and he would be gone. And she’d be devastated.
The lift binged and she flinched.
April walked out into the dark car park feeling edgy. Like her blood was rushing too close to the surface of her skin. Because she felt like she was in the most serious kind of trouble.
Problem was, it also felt like she was really living for the first time in her life.