Pump.
Fuck.
If we were making love earlier, we’re fucking now, and it’s what we both need.
It’s wild, hard, and fast, and it’s not long before my sex is spasming around his thick cock and he’s quaking as he fills me, that condom he claimed we needed nowhere to be found. When it’s over, when we’re both sated and clinging to each other, Eric lifts me off the wall and walks us into the bathroom. He sets me on the white tile of the counter next to an egg-shaped tub and discreetly presses a towel between my legs that I barely register, but he does.
“So much for using a condom,” he says, his hands pressing on the counter on either side of me.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I probably can’t get pregnant again, but if I did—hey—we’d make beautiful babies together, remember?”
“Babies that inherit my family and my genes,” he reminds me.
“Beautiful and smart, like you.”
He arches a brow, amusement in his eyes. “Beautiful?”
“Yes.” I touch his cheek and then let my fingers trail over his jaguar tattoo. “And strong,” I say. “So very strong.”
He catches my hand and squeezes his eyes shut, shadows flickering over his handsome face before he pushes off the counter and walks away. I tug a towel around me, while he pulls on his pants and returns with my phone. He stands in front of me and replays the message on speaker:
Listen to me, Harper. I’m here in the city for you. If anything happens to you, your mother will never forgive me and I love her too much to see her suffer you as a loss. Eric is not a good person. He’s dangerous and anything you think you know about what’s going on, you don’t. Come to my hotel. The Ritz, room 1501. Find a way. I’ll be here for twenty-four hours. Come sooner than later. I worry for you every moment you’re with him.
A muscle in his jaw tics. “What did that message mean to you?”
“That he’s the bastard and I really don’t understand his endgame, unless he’s trying to get me to go back to Denver, where I’m exposed. What does it mean to you?”
He studies me several beats and then to my surprise, he turns away and exits the bathroom. I jump off the counter and ignore my present undress to follow him. I find him at the bedroom window, inky darkness enveloping the city before him, and only then do I realize that he has a mini Rubik’s cube in one hand that he’s moving around.
The cube that allows him to think, to process. To calm his mind.
Maybe he wants space, but I’m not sure that’s really what he needs right now. I walk to my bags, grab a black silk robe, and pull it around me. Once I’m back, I sit on the chair next to Eric and give him his space without allowing him to feel alone. I’m telling him I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.
A good five minutes pass, and then he sits down next to me, dropping the cube to the floor. He’s done with it. He’s found his answers. “What did your father’s message mean to you, Eric?”
“Ten things,” he says. “Twenty. Nothing.”
I notice the ways he speaks in numbers and I wonder if this will be a pattern. If it tells me his state of mind, but right now, I don’t just don’t know.
He looks at me, his eyes troubled, flecks of fire in their depths, but it’s not fire like he has for me. It’s fire like the flames of hell, burning him alive. “If I’m such a damn genius, the man who solves all puzzles, who sees what others don’t, why the hell can’t I figure out what the hell my father has planned?”
I glance down at his arm, at one of the only words written out in letters, not numbers: Honesty. It resonates with me and this moment. Because in this moment, I understand Eric more than I think even Eric understands himself. I know what he thought I’d never figure out, what he doesn’t want me to realize. “You can,” I say. “You just don’t want to.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Harper
Eric digests my words without movement. We remain on that chair in his bedroom, his eyes probing mine, a sea of blackness outside the window that we ignore. A sea of darkness etched in his heart thanks to this family and his father.
Eric is the one who looks away first, his attention shifting to the window that holds no answers, but then, it doesn’t have to offer answers. His mind is where the puzzle of his father’s intent is solved. His mind is the genius that can take him, and us, there, if he so chooses. At least that’s my belief, that’s my gut feeling. Seconds tick by and turn into minutes before his hands come down on my legs and he looks at me, the turbulence of minutes before banked, if not gone.
“Let’s eat,” he says. “You have to be hungry. I know I am.” And with that, he stands up and starts walking.
I don’t move. He just shut down our conversation and shut out his father, and maybe me with him. I’m not offended. I assume that he must need time to process his thoughts and I don’t know what that means for a savant. I don’t know the best way to support that part of him, but it seems that letting his actions guide me until I can have a real conversation with him about it seems smart.
“You coming?”
I twist around to find him standing at the door, peeking back into the room from the hallway. I stand up and face him. “You want me to come?”