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“It’s an opportunity to make the connections I need, and that was part of our deal, too.”
It wa
sn’t untrue. She’d work that gala hard, and all was fair in love and war, but she had to shove down the notion that she was unfairly manipulating him. She was, after all, her father’s daughter.
He sighed. “As if I’m capable of denying you anything you need.” He reached for her, but stilled when they heard the front door, voices.
“Oh my God, if it’s not here, I’ve lost it!” Mal shouted.
Oh, no. Mallory being a drama queen.
Halsey swore softly and sat up, and Lenny put her hand on his back, over the tail of his alicorn to still him and whispered, “Wait.”
More noise from outside. Mom’s voice, indistinct. Mal yelling, “It’s here. I’ve got it.” Footsteps. Mal again, “I’ll call her.”
Lenny lurched across the bed to grab for her phone to silence it.
Mal outside the closed bedroom door. “Where are you? We’re going for pizza at Speedy Romeo.”
Lenny had pushed her face into Halsey’s arm to stop from laughing. She could feel him shaking from trying not to do the same. More indistinct talking, then the sound of the front door closing and blessed silence.
Halsey said, “Speedy Romeo,” and flopped back on the bed with a groan. He dragged her body over his. “It’s like they knew what we just did.”
They were lucky Mom and Mal were going anywhere.
He took a handful of her hair to draw it back from her face. His was creased in concern. “Was this a mistake?”
Not a mistake, and she was neither stunned nor sorry they ended up in bed. She knew the hollowed-out feeling, the gut wrench of mistakes that could change your life. It was what she’d felt all week after quitting on him.
“We don’t have a future.” It caused a sharp little pain in her chest to say that. “My father is in jail for exactly the same thing you do, and he gave to charity, too.” He’d provided the initial seed funding for D4D, and all of Lenny’s issues keeping it going were the result of that funding going bust. She rubbed a thumb over the wrinkle in Halsey’s brow, erasing it. “But there’s nothing stopping us having a little bit more now.”
Loving him in the now was a gentler, slower affair. What it lacked in grabs and hurried thrusts, it made up for it in the simmering of deliberate pleasure. Without urgency, they were careful with each other but no less strategic. He knew the place on her neck that made her whimper when he paid it attention and the right amount of pressure to apply when he squeezed her breast and when he used his fingers on her clit. He knew she couldn’t help but smile when he kissed her throat.
She knew he liked her tongue in his mouth, to feel her slide on his cock, to tease up that moment when she’d take him inside. He wanted the anticipation as much as he wanted the act. He wanted the varying detail and the finer points of tiny caresses and sweet kisses, held eye contact and the seduction of skin, and with him, she wanted them, too.
In the now they were languorous, a delicious coupling of sensation and trust.
In the future…
There were more important things than pleasure.
There was an Edward R. Murrow quote she’d decorated in her bullet journal: To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. It’s as simple as that.
The newsman was wrong about it being simple but right about everything else.
To make D4D a success and restore the Bradshaw name, she had to be persuasive. To be persuasive, she had to be believable, trustworthy, and beyond reproach. It was a mountain to climb to get back to that place, and she couldn’t do it with a master con artist at her side, even as he’d helped her establish toeholds. While she trusted him to catch her if she fell, he was the opposite of a safety net. He was a free fall into another tangled mess of deceit, lies, theft, and criminal activity.
She could love the man, and oh fuck it, she was falling in love with him, stopped him leaving with kiss after kiss, even under the threat of being discovered by her pizza-satisfied family, but she couldn’t keep him and live the honest life she was trying to rebuild. She had to tell herself that over and over for the rest of the night, and still it was difficult to believe it when she read the morning’s newsfeed to see an art fraud story that named Cookie Jar as having been had.
Justice was an enormous buzz. And it didn’t feel wrong when she was seated beside Halsey in the dark at the gala performance as his hand strayed to her knee.
The Ossovian a capella choir was sensational. Their voices thrilling, magnificent in a way that went to her soul and filled it with hope for the world to be a gentler, kinder, truer place.
When the lights came up at intermission, the theater emptied around them, and they were as entranced with each other as they had been with the singers.
“The way you look at me,” Lenny said. As if he wasn’t quite sure she was his. As if he was counting down to the time when he could get her alone to make sure she was.
“If you mean like I’ve only now learned how to use my eyes? Does it bother you?”
