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It meant she was upset, and he couldn’t comfort her. “You were just assaulted. You’re angry, hurt, and chilled. You’re disappointed in me, and you have a right to be.” It meant he needed to think about what he said next because he couldn’t afford to be impulsive. “We should go back.”
They walked along the shore the way they’d come, collected their gear, and went on to the pool house, Fin wearing his coat. They didn’t speak. He didn’t try to touch her because if he did, the only impulse would be to risk it all with her.
Without Fin, he had a great life. High uncertainty, but big rewards. He was a bad guy who did good work; redirecting money from worse men to causes that made the world a better place. He didn’t feel guilt. He was proud of the work he did. Mom’s albatrosses were his willingly and yet for all that, he ached for an incandescent slice of something all the way honest and real with a woman he cherished—with Fin.
She spoke when the grass became a pathway to the pool house and they were almost on the blue glow of the pool itself. “Alex wanted everyone to see what he was doing. He wanted to hurt you as much as me.”
He nodded, and she took a step toward him. “And he did hurt you. It’s in your voice and the way you don’t know what to do with your hands. You’re not okay, and you do care about me.”
He reached for her because he couldn’t not. She came into his arms with a moan, and his blood started coursing again. “More than it’s safe to say.” There was salt spray on her skin and in her hair, and as his arms closed around her, he felt her body mold to his.
“In the morning, I want to take Paris’s money. I want to take Alex’s, too. Tonight, I want you to hold me while we fall asleep.”
It was the very least ease he could give her.
They went hand in hand to their assigned bedroom, and Cal felt a violent kind of satisfaction when he locked the world of brutal entitlement out. He used the bathroom while she unpinned her hair. Then they swapped. While her shower water ran, he changed into sweats and a T-shirt and channel surfed waiting for her, waiting for his brain to come up with answers. But he couldn’t think past his duplicity and rage, Fin’s hurt and confusion, and how he’d brought that disaster on. She reappeared with a cloud of steam, her hair brushed out all around her shoulders and faded kitten print pjs washed soft and shapeless.
She pulled at the leg of the shorts that went almost to her knees. “Sexy huh?”
He didn’t have it in him to joke. His money would buy her lace and silks and satins, but naked would be all the riches he would ever want.
“Get in the bed.” He turned the TV off, ditched a bunch of decorative pillows, and pulled back the covers.
She crawled over the bed from the foot and flopped on her back. He got in beside her, lay on his side looking down on her. “You want to spoon or cuddle?”
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Her answer was to put a hand to his shoulder and push and keep coming at him until he was on his back and she was where she wanted to be. Head on his shoulder, leg hitched over his thighs, hand on his hard, black heart.
He didn’t hesitate to hold her there, to kiss the top of her head, and was grateful she fell asleep easily. An hour later, when she rolled away, he got up, took a room key, and locked her in as he left.
It was two in the morning, and the party in the main house had wound down. No one was interested in a sun lounge by the pool. He made himself comfortable and waited for a sense of clarity to hit. In that bed inside the house was the woman he wanted to be with more than he wanted the use of all his limbs. It was the complication he could no longer avoid. He wasn’t going to let her go, but he was a Sherwood and that brought with it obligations and constraints.
His first obligation was to protect the family and its business. That came above all else.
It meant he could casually fuck his way across the entire country, but other than find a steady partner from one of the other alliance families, that’s all he could do. He couldn’t get close to anyone, love anyone sincerely, without also deceiving them as to who he was.
And he cared too much for Fin to keep cheating her.
At four in the morning, the pool lights turned off. He could hear the sea. He could almost feel the gears in his brain clanking. He couldn’t make Fin his without telling her the truth. He couldn’t tell her the truth without breaking a sacred oath to the family. And he couldn’t ensure she was safe and happy either way.
“For fuck’s sake,” he told the moon. He’d never felt anything like this before. He was in love with Finley Cartwright, and they were a lie. He didn’t know what to do about that, and he had no idea what she wanted from him other than sex.
He was a con artist, one of the best in the business, and that meant he was a master storyteller, but he couldn’t puzzle out a simple boy-meets-girl, boy-falls-for-girl plot to save his own life. Fin didn’t believe sex would change things between them. Why couldn’t he think that way?
He looked up at the house, not a light in a single window. Like the night, it had no answers for him. What weighed on him was how offensively coldhearted he was. How much of an unfeeling monster that made him and how unlikely it was he knew how to be in love, how to care for another person, or that by breakfast, Fin would want to know him.
Since he was paralyzed by indecision, all his studied cunning and superior manipulation skills having deserted him, rats on a sinking ship, perhaps that was best. Let her decide. It was like the toss of a double-sided coin or a shell game, and he would be the patsy and let her win however she wanted to play.
Dawn came on in a slow break of vibrant color at the edge of the horizon. Pink inside gold inside blue. Cal’s eyes felt like buckets full of silt, gritty with lack of sleep, and his neck and back ached from sitting propped up for too many hours.
Fin came, still in her cat pjs, with her hair pillow wild, as the sky turned the color of a glorious bruise. “How long have you been out here?” She looked out at the sea and mumbled, “It’s beautiful,” through a yawn.
“Can’t compete with you.”
She made a rude noise. “Cal Sherwood, so smooth he spends the night in a sun lounge instead of a comfortable bed with a hot woman in kitty pjs.” She yawned again and then shoved his leg, climbing onto the lounger with him, slotting herself into his side, her head on his shoulder, her thigh over his, her hand on his heart.
All the unquiet tension in him went still. It felt like he’d come home, and he put himself entirely in her hands. “What do you want from us, Fin?”
