Luca folded his arms over his chest. “’Sorry, but I have an appointment in Dallas,’” he said tonelessly. “’I checked—there’s a phone number for a cab service in the directory on the desk. And thanks for your help.’”
Her mouth opened, then closed. The color in her face heightened. Good. He was glad her own words made her uncomfortable.
“As I said, the note was perfectly acceptable.”
“Finding a note instead of the woman I’d just made love with was a little… disconcerting.”
“Sex.”
“Excuse me?”
“We had sex. We didn’t make love.”
“That’s an unusual distinction. Most women—”
“I am not ‘most women.’ I have a healthy attitude toward sex. Actually, it’s the same attitude men generally have. I find sex pleasurable, but I don’t see a point in confusing the needs of the body with society’s need to pretty it up by clouding it with supposed emotion.”
Luca stared at her.
“Do you really believe that? That emotion and sex are separate things?”
“I know it.”
“Then I feel sorry for you, bellissima. Emotion is, or should be, the best part.”
“You misunderstand. There’s emotion in sex, of course. Pleasure, fulfillment, satisfaction… All of that is part of the experience.”
“The experience.” Luca smiled tightly. “An interesting choice of words.”
“You miss the point. The act of sex… I have nothing against the experience, but—”
“Is it always the same for you? What you call ‘the experience.’”
Where was this conversation going? And why was she letting it happen? This was far too intimate a topic to discuss with a man who was still little more than a stranger.
“This is a foolish discussion.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, I do. Asking me these questions—”
“Why do you turn away from me? Am I getting too close to some sort of truth?” Luca grasped Cheyenne’s shoulder. “Look at me. Look me in the eye.”
“Leave me alone!”
“No. I don’t think so.”
His hand tightened on her. She was sitting close beside him. A long lock of dark, silky hair lay against her cheek. One move, and he could press his mouth to it. He could do more. One touch, one kiss was all he’d need to shatter that wall she’d built around herself. She would go into his arms and he would make her admit that sex was more than a man and a woman seeking carnal pleasure.
A horn blew, and the car stopped short. Cheyenne gasped, reached down and grasped her foot.
“What’s the matter?”
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“Dammit, woman, don’t lie to me!” Luca leaned forward. His hand swept over hers. “Did you hurt your ankle?”
“No. It’s my foot. The quick stop… I must have dug my toes into the carpet, and there might be a little cut or something on the bottom of—”
In a series of swift motions, Luca switched on one of the rear compartment lights, turned her toward him and lifted her foot into his lap.
“Let me see.”
“That isn’t necess—”
“Your foot is bleeding!”
“It’s just a cut.”
“When did it happen?”
“I don’t know. A little while ago. And it isn’t a big…What are you doing?”
A foolish question.
What he was doing was wrapping her foot in a pristine white handkerchief he’d pulled from his jacket pocket.
“Aldo,” he said over the intercom, “we need a hospital.”
“Are you crazy? We do not need a hospital! When I get home, I’ll wash it and put a bandage on it and—”
“When was your last tetanus shot?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
“Aldo. The Mt. Sinai emergency room,”
Cheyenne clucked her tongue. “I don’t need a tetanus shot. I had a booster last year, before we did a shoot in Belize. Would you please let go of me? I do not need your help.”
“Shut up, McKenna.”
“Goddammit! You cannot talk to me this way. You cannot order me around. You are not in charge of me. I am in charge of me, and—”
Luca silenced her with a kiss.
“It’s time you relinquished authority to someone else,” he said in a low voice. He kissed her again, and when the kiss ended, he looked deep into her eyes. Then he told Aldo that they were not going to her apartment.
They were going to his.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Luca said she couldn’t walk.
“Not until I’ve cleaned that cut and made sure there’s no glass in it,” he said as he carried her from the car, past a doorman who greeted him as if he was accustomed to the sight of one of the famous building’s most famous residents marching through the doors with a woman in his arms, past a concierge who showed the same bland reaction.
A private elevator took them to Luca’s duplex.
“You can put me down now,” Cheyenne said.
He didn’t answer. Instead, he carried her up a winding staircase, through an enormous bedroom and into a huge marble bathroom.
“Stay there,” he said, lowering her carefully onto a chaise longue that faced a handsome fireplace.
“Really, Bellini, if you’d just point me at the washcloths and bandages…”
“Cheyenne. Do not move.”
“I don’t take orders. Not from anyone.”
He bent down and kissed her. Lightly. Gently. She wanted to slap him…or maybe just to wind her arms around his neck.
Sweet Jesus, he was confusing the hell out of her. Why was she letting him behave this way?
Nobody was in charge of her except her.
She’d taken her life in her own hands when she was thirteen.
No more enduring Mama’s drunken rages. You get out here, goddammit. You show your face or when I find you, I’ll beat the shit out of you, girl!
No more enduring the upswings that invariably followed. Sweetie, you know I didn’t mean it. Gimme one more chance, baby, and I swear, it’ll never happen again.
And no more being nice to…to Mama’s ‘friends.’
Come say hello to the nice man. He wants to give you somethin’ pretty. See? Oh, come on, baby. Sit on the nice man’s lap. You’ll have fun. And then Mama’s voice taking on a knife-sharp edge, her hands digging into Cheyenne’s shoulders as she pushed her forward. You do what I tell you, Cheyenne. Go on. That’s it. That’s Mama’s girl. That’s the way.
And it had been ‘the way,’ first with what Mama called having fun, then with much more that that, and it had gone on for what had seemed a very long time, until one day, one terrible, awful day…
But something good had come out that day.
Foster care.
It wasn’t paradise, but it was lots better than what had come before. She’d worked hard, graduated high school at sixteen and decided to move to New York.
How to get there evolved through trial and error.
She hitched to a town that was a flyspeck on the map and landed a job washing dishes and sweeping up at a horrible little café where flypaper hung from the ceiling and roaches the size of salamanders scurried along the counters. She had no working papers, but nobody asked any questions—and that was a lesson in itself.
After a few weeks, she moved on, working from town to town, café to café, alwa
ys heading east toward the Big Apple.
It took months. But, at last, she got there.
Except, New York wasn’t paradise, either.
In fact, it was a nightmare.
Big. Loud. Dirty. And it turned out you did need working papers or, at least—because she’d always looked older than her years—I.D. Best of all, a social security card.
She got herself a grubby room, not in Manhattan but in Queens, and a job waiting tables in a grimy hole-in-the-wall where nobody asked for her I.D. and nobody spoke English except her and the kid who mopped the always-filthy floors.
His name was unpronounceable; everybody called him ‘boy,’ but Cheyenne felt bad for him—he was the first person she’d met who seemed worse off than she was—and she learned to say his name or, at least, to come pretty close to saying it.
One day, he whispered to her that she could do better than this job.
“I don’t have any I.D.,” she said, and he winked.
A week later, she had a social security card and a driver’s license. A week after that, she had a job waitressing in a busy coffee shop off Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and one day a guy handed her a tip and his business card and told her to give him a call.
He was gay. Anybody could see that, which was the only reason she hadn’t slugged him and had, instead, said “What for?”
“Because,” he’d said pleasantly, “your hair is a disaster, you need somebody to teach you that slapping on lipstick is not the right way to do your makeup, you have to drop maybe ten pounds, but your bones are good, so is your height and maybe, just maybe, I can turn you into some kind of a model.”
Her life had not been the same since that moment.
Professionally, she’d reached the top. Until recently, anyway, when the idiots who ran the world she now lived in had decided she’d gone too far in taking over, but really, how could you go too far when you knew what was best?
Her personal life? As far as she was concerned, it was fine.
People said she was closed off, but that only meant she chose her acquaintances with care. Why wouldn’t she? They said she didn’t trust anyone. Yes, and what fool did?
As for men…
Men said she was difficult.
They said she was a control freak. Or that maybe she had OCD. Or maybe it was something else. The bottom line, they said, was that she didn’t understand relationships.