Authors: Dc Thome
Tags: #Romance, #Contemporary, #Romantic Comedy, #Romantic Suspense, #Mystery & Suspense, #Suspense
A temporary destiny.
“So,” Lara said, “you’re
not
trying to impress me?”
“Do you want me to?”
Lara noted his wry smile. “I guess
I should be impressed that you thought to bring me here.”
Clay raised his glass to her before
taking another sip of cognac.
“
This
is impressive,” Lara
said as she turned to the seat from the Porsche. “From a 908 Spyder, right?”
“Talk about impressive.” He stopped
short.
“What?”
Clay pointed to his ear. “The
music.”
The marimbas and
horns and the interplay of a man’s and a woman’s voice made Lara nostalgic. She
also knew what came next—and sang it out loud.
Clay had the same idea. They both
laughed.
“I’ve never known any woman who
knew
that
song by heart,” Clay said. “Or one who could tell me where
that car seat came from.” He stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Lara and studied
the seat. She relished the touch of cotton on her bare arm.
“So, this particular seat,” he
said, “came from the car that took Targa Florio in ’60. The owner gave the seat
to my dad, so it’s kind of special to me.”
Lara perked up. She knew about the
annual race through the mountains of Sicily.
“My father was a big racing fan,”
she said. “He took me with him to races and car shows. When I was eight, he
somehow wangled a chance to take a couple of laps at Oxnard
in an Austin Healey.”
“Those are fast,” Clay said.
“I remember the wind blowing through
my hair, the grandstand swirling by in a blur.”
She remembered more than that. She
remembered her father positively glowing through the entire ride. But she also
remembered that, as easy as it would have been for him to have become lost in
the moment, he had offered to let his little girl move the shifter as he
powered down into a turn. Little gestures like that set a standard of behavior
toward females that no other man in Lara’s life ever met.
“Anyway, I look around and see
racing. Football. The
Fast and the Furious
guy,” she said. “But I don’t
see anything related to war.”
“Everything’s related to war. On
some level, at least.”
“One tussle after another?”
“One person wants something.
Another person wants something else. Or maybe they both want the same thing. So
they compete. Do battle. Tussle.”
“Two people can’t want the same
thing and work together to get it?”
“Sure. But there’s always going to
be a third person who feels left out.”
“Somebody wins, somebody loses?”
Lara tapped a New England Patriots helmet. “That’s what it’s all about?”
“Ah, you’re a win-win kind of
person. More?” He held up the Remy bottle.
“No, I’m good.”
Clay poured himself more cognac. A
little less than the first time.
“I have this very rare bottle of
brandy because I outmaneuvered other people who wanted it just as much. All the
guys who signed those footballs over there? They and their teammates got really
big rings. Guys on other teams got a pat on the back. The driver of that car
won a big trophy at Targa; a bunch of other drivers went home empty-handed.”
Lara traced Tom Brady’s signature
on the Pats helmet. “I’ll give you sports and business. But love?”
Christ, I can’t believe I said
the L-word.
“So you’ve read my blogs. You want
to put that on?” Before Lara could answer, Clay slipped the helmet onto her
head.
“It’s so big!” She spun it so she
was looking through the ear hole. Clay laughed and pulled it off.
Lara combed her fingers through her
hair, but one errant lock wouldn’t straighten. Clay flicked it into place.
Lara’s lips curved into a Mona Lisa smile.
“The thing about love,” Clay said, “is that everyone
wants love to be one big ‘happily ever after.’”
Lara thought about how her father had adored her mother,
even after she bugged out for good on Lara’s seventh birthday. She turned away
from Clay. “I don’t know about that. But it doesn’t have to be a
war
.”
“What is war?” Clay grew more animated. “People trying to
get what they want. Jockeying for control. Looking to impose their will on
someone else. That doesn’t happen in relationships?”
Lara turned back around. “Sure, but if they’re honest
with each other—” A surge of guilt shot through her, as though she had touched
an electric fence.
“Forget about war for a minute,” Clay continued. “Think
about…a football game. Football has willing participants who agree to observe
rules and boundaries, and all the various parties are thinking every minute
about what they have to do to gain the upper hand. Sometimes you go for the
quick strike; other times it’s best to go slow and break down the adversary’s
resistance.”
“Whoa! Adversaries? In football and war…but in a
relationship? You actually believe two people in a relationship are
adversaries?
”
“You actually don’t?”
They were in my sham of a marriage.
“I’m sorry, I don’t want this to be
a downer,” Clay said.
Lara knew her aura always got
darker when she thought about her marriage. She could feel it. “No,
I’m
sorry,” she said. “This is all very interesting.”
“I got carried away,” Clay said,
touching Lara’s hand. “Maybe war’s too strong a word. People play games, start
playing for keeps. Playing for pride. They try to get around the rules. Hit
each other hard. Get nicked up. That’s all I’m saying.”
“But, in war, there can be only one
winner.” Lara walked to the open door and listened to the waves. “Or no
winner.”
“You’ve heard of Sun Tzu?”
Lara turned around.
Clay started, “Know thy self—”
Lara finished, “Know thy adversary.”
Clay walked up to Lara. “A thousand battles…”
“A thousand victories.”
“So maybe it’s not such a bad thing, thinking about love
as war.”
Lara held out her glass. “Maybe I would like a little
more of this.”
Clay smiled and took the glass to the bar. Lara sat on a
stool across from him.
“You know,” Lara said, “maybe the adversary you’re
talking about isn’t the other person. Maybe it’s something the two people are
battling in themselves.”
Clay put the snifter in front of Lara. “Like what?”
Lara swirled the glass and watched the contents settle.
“Whatever’s preventing them from loving someone else.” She took a sip of cognac
without looking at Clay.
Clay pursed his lips and tilted his head. “I never
thought of it that way. I might have to rethink everything. Reacquaint myself
with old Sun Tzu.”
Like the part that says, “Secret operations are essential
in war; the army relies upon them to make its every move”?
“Don’t do it on my account,” Lara said. “You have an
image to uphold.”
“Yeah—Clay Creighton, manly man
among men. The kind of guy who gets a bump, spits on it and hustles his ass
back onto the field.”
Lara laughed. “Okay, now I believe
you’re not trying to impress me.”
“Tough guys don’t impress you?”
Lara drank the rest of the cognac
in her glass.
This is actually a lot better than I thought it would be.
“You know,” Clay said, “we don’t have
to be so serious. It’s a big world. We should have plenty to talk about. More?”
Lara put the glass down. “Why not?”
she said. “I mean, Black Pearl.”
* * *
“That’s it?” Gina Wray adjusted her
cat’s-eye glasses and moved papers around to uncover her cigarette lighter.
“You spent an entire night with Clay Creighton, and all you did was
talk
?”
“That
was
the plan,”
Lara retorted. “You said I should leave him wanting more.”
From where she sat, Lara could see the
intersection of Fairfax and Beverly. The bustle of the crowd contrasted with
HardCoreGrrrls, a lean operation with only two employees. After her divorce,
Lara had turned to the online community of women whose ex-husbands and lovers
had, like Kyle, thought The Rotation made it okay to maintain harems. Though
she never went into detail, Gina had clearly been on the frontline of the
relationship wars.
“No, no. That’s good. It’s
just, I can’t imagine too many women spending a night with Clay Creighton without
doing anything more than…” Gina paused to light a cigarette. With her platinum
five-point bob, she looked like a femme fatale from a ’60s spy flick. “I
suppose it would not have been a good idea to have fucked him right there on
that big ol’ overstuffed couch.”
Actually, that would have been a
great idea. Just not at that moment.
Clay was so handsome. So charming.
So adept at making a woman forget about his repulsive Rotation and
testosterone-plagued theories. Lara had started out pretending to be interested
in his globetrotting adventures with the beautiful, the well-heeled and the
marvelous. Every woman knows listening to a man’s stories is a surefire way to
make him believe she cares about him. At some point, though, Clay became truly
interesting.
“The brandy was good,” Lara said.
“He broke out the Black Pearl,”
Gina said. “That stuff’s got to be for special occasions only.”
It could have been the brandy or
the lateness of the hour, but at one point Lara had imagined leaning over to
kiss Clay and unbutton that immaculate white shirt. Her hands had tingled at
the thought of caressing his rock-hard chest. Other things tingled when she
imagined him unzipping her dress, pressing her back into the couch cushions and
working his way from her neck to her breasts with soft, easy kisses. It seemed
so real at the time—and still did. Especially when she pictured Clay over her,
shirtless, his golden eyes gazing into her eyes as he unbuckled his belt. She
could feel her back arch as he held her wrists beside her head and whispered,
“What do you think your next move will be?”
Isn’t it obvious? Let me help
you get me out of this dress.
“Lara?”
“Mmmm…”
“Lara?”
Lara’s nose wrinkled. She smelled
smoke. Gina had moved around the desk and stood looking down at her. “I said, ‘What
do you think your next move will be?’”
“Next move?” Lara tried desperately
to get back into the moment—and resented having to. She could see in Gina’s
mirrored walls a hint of red in her face and neck. She felt a little feverish,
too, and down below, a little moist. “Right,” Lara said to buy time. “All set
up. I’m meeting him for dinner at Rev on Tuesday.”
“At
Rev
?” Gina froze with
the cigarette an inch from her lips.
“That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah,” Gina said. “That’s very
good.”
* * *
Rev was Clay’s newest—and
poshest—restaurant. In the heart of the
The beautiful people are coming
out to play
. That included, of course, women who had the looks to entice
the gods away from Olympus, but Clay could think only of
Lara. It had been that way since he first saw her three days before. It had
been a while since he’d focused on one woman this way.
That she knew so much about what
was important to him—sports and cars and such—made her unusual. But what really
intrigued him was how Lara had challenged him on his theory of love and war.
Clay had always preferred the company of smart women—intelligence was sexy—but
few women had ever challenged him to the core. Except Sushma. But with her it
was business. With Lara, it was an aphrodisiac.
That had happened with only one
other woman, but Clay blocked her from his thoughts as he waited for Lara. He
saw her on the big couch in The War Room. He imagined a merger of their bodies
so powerful it would bring about a merger of their minds, their souls. The
fantasy began with his arm brushing against hers as they admired the seat from
the Spyder and proceeded with her turning to him wearing a wicked smile and
pushing him onto his back, undoing his belt and pulling his pants to his knees.
Straddling him, she whipped off her dress and whisked it playfully across his
chest and face before tossing it over her shoulder. He reached up to fondle her
natural breasts through the lacy bra, before she dispatched it to the floor and
moved close enough for him to reach one nipple, then the other, with his eager
tongue.
He saw them trading places so he
could kiss her lightly all over, maintaining this soft-touch approach as he
continued southward, teasing her flesh with the waft of his breath until he
came to the place between her legs where, to his delight, he would find her
already wet.
And then the scene in his mind
moved to the Upper Deck, where they would be outside, exposed to the whole
world and yet alone in the shroud of the night mist. Lara would lean against
the railing, her hair blown by the same ocean breeze that drove the tiki
torches into a frenzied demonic dance. Clay could distinctly hear the crackle
of flames…a siren calling to him from the rocky shoreline.
“Mr. Creighton?”
“Call me Clay.”
“Sir?”
Oh, for the love of—
It was Turnbow, Fast Lane’s
security chief, on the intercom. Clay went to the control panel by the door and
flicked the switch.
“Turnbow?”
“Evening, Mr. C.”