Page 31 of Beautiful Rush
Fuck no. I grinned and fed him a lie, just like I’d been doing for months now. I was a smooth liar. Too smooth sometimes. “Beats working for a living.”
He laughed, his head thrown back like I’d just told the mother of all jokes. Then he ordered the redhead to drop her swimsuit bottoms and bend over. She did as he asked. Without batting an eye, she touched her toes, her ass in the air and her murky brown eyes on me. Dmitri smacked her ass cheek with the palm of his hand, the sound shattering the peace and quiet I’d sought out. Once. Twice. Three times for good measure. She wrapped her hands around her ankles to stop herself from toppling over as he continued his assault.
“I’m going to fuck your ass so hard you won’t be able to walk for weeks,” he snarled, fisting his cock.
“Do it,” she moaned, sounding like a B-grade porn star as she fingered her pussy and simulated the sounds of someone in the throes of passion. It was as fake as her tits.
I dove under the water to muffle the sounds of poolside anal, her screams and his grunts that polluted the rarified air of a summer’s day in one of America’s most expensive playgrounds. I swam underwater to the opposite end of the pool, putting as much distance between myself and the porn show as possible. If breathing wasn’t essential, I’d stay underwater until this weekend getaway was over. When my head surfaced, the bleached blonde was waiting for me, topless and holding out a towel, her plastic tits in my face as I levered myself out of the pool and walked right past her.
She trotted after me, tits bouncing and her spiky heels making divots in the manicured lawn. Dmitri’s roar bounced off the glass panes of the French doors as I slipped inside, shutting out the sound and the blonde as I dripped water across the tiled floors of the chef’s kitchen. The air conditioning was set to Arctic temperatures, a nod to Dmitri’s Siberian roots and his glacial heart.
I needed to go for a run and wash my eyes out with bleach. I wanted warmth and sunlight and fresh sea air. Silky-smooth, honeyed skin and whiskey-colored eyes. Pouty pink lips that weren’t collagen-injected. I wanted Keira. With her, I could be Deacon, not Kosta.
11
Keira
Maybe this was what people referred to as the honeymoon phase. Those glorious, golden days when you begin to discover all the little things that make a person who they are. The more you learn, the harder you fall until you start to wonder how you ever got through life without seeing their smile, hearing their voice, and breathing the same air.
Feeling this way about Deacon was not altogether welcome. I didn’t want to fall in love with him. I didn’t want to be like my mother, a bird with clipped wings confined to a gilded cage. Maybe with Deacon it would be different, but I had too many daddy issues to trust my heart to make a good decision.
Anyway, we were just getting to know each other so it wasn’t love. Maybe it was the prelude to love, when you’re falling, and the feeling is so delicious and delirious you don’t try to stop yourself from falling.
Sasha and I had skipped this courting ritual. I’d never experienced that fluttery feeling in my stomach or those feel-good endorphins that flooded my body when Deacon was near me. Sasha was too cold and too cruel, and I was too selfish and too rebellious. We guarded our hearts fiercely and had mastered the art of self-preservation. Back then, we fucked like the teenagers we were, with wild abandon, without intimacy or sweet words or foreplay. Maybe we thought we were too cool for all that or maybe we were not as fearless as we pretended to be. Just two beautiful people with ugly truths and fucked-up lives who were drawn to each other for reasons we never bothered to identify.
Over the past few weeks, I’d been thinking about Sasha a lot, trying to figure out what we had meant to each other and why were drawn to each other. He wasn’t always cold, and he wasn’t always cruel. He had charisma and charm that he turned on and off to suit his needs or on a whim. He was smart, too, with a razor-sharp wit and an insatiable thirst for knowledge. When he wasn’t plotting world domination, Sasha could also be funny and fun to hang out with. Sasha was easily bored and we both had the kind of restless energy that made us feel pent-up, in need of an outlet or escape. We intrigued each other, maybe, but I didn’t love him, and he didn’t love me and that had made it all so much easier.
Losing Sasha crushed my soul. Loving him would have destroyed me.
Which brings me to Deacon.
Three weeks ago, he returned from his weekend getaway with sun-kissed skin that made his green eyes more vivid and his smile whiter. When he knocked on my door that Sunday night, he brought the scent of the sea and his disheveled sun-bleached hair and boyish charm into my apartment and took up residence in my heart like he belonged there. He had come bearing gifts—tubs of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in a plastic grocery bag (our favorite flavors and a dark horse; chocolate and fudge with a marshmallow center) and a fancy shopping bag filled with sea glass nestled in tissue paper. They were all different shades of blue, from dusky to midnight, the same hue of that weird, lonely time before sunrise. I poured the tumbled gems into a glass bowl and set them on the coffee table. We ate our ice cream on my balcony, and he thought it was funny that I liked my grapes frozen but my ice cream soupy. We talked for hours about nothing and everything. He was fun and witty and charming and if I hadn’t known it before, I knew it then. I liked him. A lot. And being with him made me happy.
He told me that he had missed me and when I asked him what he missed about me he said, “Your twenty-three pillows.”
Turned out he did use hyperboles. There were only eight pillows on my bed. So we were both liars.
Two weeks ago, he left a bunch of bananas on my kitchen counter as a joke. I left them there, uneaten, until the skin turned brown and my whole kitchen smelled like bananas before I tossed them in the trash.
Last week, we watched the final innings of a baseball game on TV. I was bored out of my skull. Don’t even ask me which teams were playing. I fed him watermelon sprinkled with salt and chili with a squeeze of lime, introducing him to a whole new flavor sensation. He gave me two orgasms. The baseball game wasn’t so bad, after all.
Now he was standing in my kitchen in faded jeans and a plain white T, looking more gorgeous than any man had a right to. His tan hadn’t faded, and it made me wonder what exactly he did all day. The silver blade of the chef’s knife I never used flashed in a blur as he chopped vegetables for the salad. While he was busy cooking our late-night dinner—lemon garlic chicken and couscous, his specialty—I was busy trying to protect my heart. I imagined his hands reaching inside my chest and massaging the beating organ until he changed the rhythm of my heartbeat.
I told myself that my heart was safe. I wasn’t in love. Maybe a little bit infatuated. And this was not a relationship. But I couldn’t deny that I missed him on the nights he didn’t come over and I wondered what he did and who he was with when he wasn’t with me.
I took a sip of my chilled white wine and stared at the flex of his muscles and the delicious veins in his forearm as he wielded the knife. He caught me watching and grinned like he knew what I was thinking.
So I stared at his face in profile instead and the view was just as glorious.
Jesus. This was bad. So, so bad. And we hadn’t even had sex yet.
Why haven’t we had sex yet?
“Where did you learn to cook?” I was aiming for a diversion and, also, I was curious. I’d never learned how to cook, nor had I ever had the interest. In Miami, we had a chef, Raoul, and a housekeeper, Rosa. When I was little, Rosa was also my nanny. My mother didn’t work. She didn’t cook, clean, or take care of me either. Her sole purpose in life had been to keep my father happy. Apparently, that had been a full-time job.
“My mom,” Deacon said. I knew now that he called Faye Ramsey ‘Mom,’ but sometimes I had to remind myself that he wasn’t talking about the woman who had given birth to him. “She never actually taught us. She gave us free rein to experiment in the kitchen. Growing up, my sister Abby and I cooked dinner once a week. Abby always set out to create a culinary masterpiece. My meals were hit or miss. I was more interested in working on my knife skills.” To demonstrate, he beheaded a red pepper and diced it in two seconds flat.
I laughed. “Show-off. Are you sure you don’t need help?”
