Page 48 of Power Play

She’d pushed her sunglasses up on her head and when she met my eyes I saw again how pretty they were. Gray, like smoke. Like silver when the light hit them. They were eyes that kept you guessing. Kept you coming back for more. That’s what I thought in Nashville.

This girl, I’d thought, I’ll do anything she wants me to.

I shook my head and remembered, or tried to remember, she’d made a fool of me. Seduced me so her father could take advantage of me. But sometimes when I looked at her, the memory didn’t stick. And instead I found myself remembering other things. How tight she’d been. How unaware of her own beauty. Her own appeal.

“Why did you sleep with me that night?”

“What?” she gasped.

“It’s a fair question,” I said. “I’d already emailed my accountant your dad’s information. He was going to get my money either way. So why take it that far? Why fuck me?”

Why destroy me like you did?

She turned her head away and dropped her sunglasses back over her eyes. Sealed behind that fortress.

Tess bounced up and Kit took the rings from her, before Tess dove back into the water.

I didn’t think she was going to say anything, until she did.

“You’re right. It is a fair question.”

I waited for more.

“Are you going to answer it?” I asked.

Tess popped out of the water.

“Tess,” Kit said. “Stay with Liam. I need to go to the bathroom.”

And then Kit Barrington ran away. Again.

12

Kit

In the bathroom, I looked at myself in the mirror. My cheeks were still pink from Liam’s question. My chest heaving. My skin. All this skin. What was I thinking being so naked in front of him?

He wanted to know why I’d done it. Why I’d gone to bed with him. Because he thought everything about that night had been a set up. That I’d been a honey pot sent by my father to seduce him out of his money.

None of it was true.

Why did I fuck him? Why did I take that chance on a man I’d just met who looked at me as if I was the most beautiful woman in the world? Who was sweet and funny and never once made me feel like I was prey. Or that he was looking for an easy score, and his mission had been to get me into bed. I’d had those encounters before and I’d always run in the opposite direction.

What had made Liam different than any man I’d ever been involved with before was howsimpleit had all been. Effortless. Real. It just happened and I had no control over it at all.

That incredible connection, like being tied to another person with electricity. His first kiss? I still dreamt about that kiss. Five years later, I woke up at night wet and trembling remembering that kiss.

The way he made me laugh? That was the last night I’d laughed like that. So hard my stomach hurt.

He thought it was an act when it had been the most genuine emotional connection of my life. I couldn’t tell him that though. He had absolutely no reason to believe me. All he knew was, he came out of that bathroom and I was gone.

The next day the news broke and all of Liam’s money was gone.

He didn’t know how I’d sprawled happy and giddy on that bed one instant before grabbing my purse to check my phone. He didn’t know about the twenty panicked texts from my Dad. Or the way I put on my dress so I could step out into the hallway and call him back.

He didn’t know that my innocence and my college dreams and my entire sense of self were destroyed that night.

And I would never tell him.

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