Smoke and Sin Read online

  “Zack, I think you should go to bed. Liz is right about that woman you’re seeing tomorrow. She’s really young. You’re going to need stamina to keep up with her,” Connor said.

  “I don’t need fucking stamina and you know it. I’m not touching that girl. Cancel the whole thing.” Zack started out the door, Connor hard on his heels explaining why that plan wouldn’t work.

  “Darcy will be super sad if you cancel,” Gus pointed out. “You wouldn’t want to disappoint that sweet little thing.”

  He wasn’t taking the bait. “Since that party tomorrow night is meant to welcome us to England, you know we can’t cancel. So let’s skip that subject and get to something worth discussing. What kind of stunt were you up to tonight, sneaking away?”

  “Why is Zack acting like a massive ass? You answer my question and I’ll answer yours.” She tossed him a saucy glance over her shoulder as she approached the bar.

  Roman gaped. “Are you kidding me? Connor just dragged you out of one bar and here you are pouring yourself another drink?”

  “Is it hard to be that sanctimonious?” Gus mused as she filled her glass with two fingers of Scotch. “Do you have to shove the two by four up your ass all by yourself or do you have an aide do it for you?”

  “I’m not joking, Gus.”

  “I can leave, if you’d rather. I won’t be near a bar then.”

  “Stop being such a smart ass. Why did you and Liz pull that disappearing act tonight?”

  “What are you worried about, Roman? Two single women painting the town without—gasp—male escorts. I mean, our female minds could have gotten us into all kinds of trouble…”

  “That’s not what I meant. Don’t play coy or stupid. And don’t pretend you’re innocent.”

  She stood there, crystal glass in hand, all those gorgeous curves barely encased by the silk of her cocktail dress. “Of course I’m not. We both know what you think of me. I might as well wear a scarlet A on my chest. And if I keep this scandalous behavior up, I’ll ruin poor virginal Elizabeth.”

  Why did she have to take everything he said or did and twist it in the darkest way? “I didn’t say that. That’s certainly not what I meant. And I’m sorry for what you overheard when you walked into the room. I simply don’t want all our personal issues aired in the press. I hate that.”

  “You’re embarrassed to have slept with me. I know. You made yourself plain years ago.”

  “Damn it, Gus, that is not what I said or what I’m trying to convey. I only insisted that I don’t want someone drafting a chart with lines drawn to show whom we’ve all slept with. If that makes me some kind of prude, then so be it. Hell, the last few years I have been a damn prude.” He needed to get back to the point. “But you can’t take Liz out like that.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s not safe,” he hedged.

  She shook her head, her expression telling him she found his assertion terrifically stupid. “We were two blocks away, talking to Secret Service agents. We had a couple of drinks and some dinner with them. Apparently most of the time we had Connor watching over us, as well. How exactly were we not safe?”

  “Did it occur to you at all that you’re a high-value target?” He had to try something. He couldn’t spend the entire visit running after her to make sure she wasn’t getting into trouble…or Matthew Kemp’s bed.

  She snorted. “No. That did not occur to me. What’s smacking me between the eyes right now, however, is your paranoia. Again, we were with Secret Service agents.”

  He couldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t a part of Zack’s inner circle. If this conspiracy had been going on for as long as he suspected, the Russians would most assuredly have a sleeper agent inside the president’s detail.

  “Is that why you went out, to get close to those boys? Gus, please don’t make me fire them.”

  “Why would you do that? As far as I can tell, they’re perfectly competent.”

  “Yes, but I swear to god if I catch one of them looking at you twice, I will strip his credentials and march his ass out in a heartbeat.”

  Gus slammed down her glass. It clattered against the bar. “Nice. You don’t want me but you damn sure don’t want anyone else to have me, either.”

  That was where she was wrong. “Who said I didn’t want you? I wish I could stop wanting you. I want you every minute of every day, and I have since the moment I laid eyes on you.”

  She shook her head at him. “So I’m like heroin? You know I’m bad for you but sometimes you just need a fix?”

  “I didn’t say that, either, Gus.” He was so tired. Why did they always fight?

  Roman sank down to the seat Zack had vacated and wished he could tell her everything. He’d give almost anything to stop keeping secrets that put him on one side of the fence and her squarely on the other. But he couldn’t do that without risking her safety. The more she knew, the more the Russians might see her as a target. Hell, he’d even settle for telling her that one of the reasons he’d convinced Zack to hire her three years ago had been simply because he missed her so fucking much after all these years. If he did, the way things were now between them, Gus would never believe it. Or she’d laugh in his face. Or maybe they’d fall into bed.

  He wasn’t sure which outcome to fear most.

  Even as he’d fallen in love with Joy, some part of him had ached for Gus. Sometimes he was sure he’d convinced himself he was in love with Joy because she was Gus’s opposite, and if his heart belonged to Joy then he couldn’t possibly still be hung up on his sexy, sassy Louisiana beauty. Because Joy had never once made him angry. She’d never challenged him. He had never yelled at her because she’d never given him a reason to. Joy certainly had never made him want to rip his own heart out so he didn’t have to feel so fucking much for her.

  He was a coward.

  “Go to bed, Roman. You’re tired. You can yell at me again in the morning,” Gus said with a sigh.

  “I don’t want to yell at you.” He debated the wisdom of his words, then realized he couldn’t help himself. “I want us to be friends again.”

  She sank down on the sofa beside him, leaving plenty of space between them. “I don’t know that we were ever friends. I think we were lovers, and I thought we could be something more at one time. But that’s long over. Now, we need to try to be good coworkers.”

  Bland. Boring. He didn’t want to be her coworker. He wanted the right to touch her, make love to her, call her his. So dangerous… “And when we’re not working together?”

  “Then we see each other at weddings and birthdays. We wish one another well.” She shrugged. “We send Christmas cards if we ever find the time to and think about that crazy year we spent together with fondness.”

  “Is that how you remember us? Do you feel any affection at all?”

  A wistful smile crept across her lips before it fell away. “Sometimes, but not often. I usually recall it as a cautionary tale.”

  He didn’t like the sound of that. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  “And yet you did it so well. I think what you truly mean is you never thought I could be hurt at all.”

  “I thought I was one of your many boy toys,” he admitted because they were finally talking about the past. Even more surprising, no one was yelling. “There was a part of me that worried you viewed our year together as nothing more than my turn with you.”

  She stared at him, rearing back for an instant. He felt the heavy weight of her judgment. “Of course. Because I’m something to be passed around, like a joint at a party. All your friends get a hit, right?”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.” How could he make her understand? Everything between them was fucked up. He knew that, just like he knew he probably couldn’t change it. But that was also a year of his life he wouldn’t take back. “I knew you’d been with Mad. I heard the rumor you’d been with Zack, too. I rather thought you were working your way through us all. I know that sounds like I’m some misogynistic prick, but by t
hat time there were women trying their damnedest to do it. Women who viewed us as trophies.”

  “Oh, believe me. I knew some of them. Not a one of you argued with them or protested their ill treatment of you.”

  Because they’d been young and stupid, and he’d never imagined the consequences. “You’re right. Back in those days, they were lovely, and we really only thought about fun while we plotted our futures. I admit I happily sent a few of those women right down the line. But not you. Never you. That should tell you something.”

  “Yes, it tells me you didn’t want to upset Dax by shoving his sister in the same lot with the good-time girls.”

  There it was, the frustration. Why couldn’t they have a straightforward conversation? She never listened to him. She always told him what he must be feeling—and she usually made it some insult he’d never intended at all. This was how their fights started, damn it. Roman was tired of the pattern.

  “No. Listen to the truth instead of inventing your own. I was jealous. Brutally, blindingly jealous that Mad had you first, and when I heard about Zack, I wanted to kill him. My best friend.”

  Her eyes softened and so did the tone of her voice. “You know, I spread those rumors about Zack to save a friend, right? She was a preacher’s daughter, and he would have been very upset to find out the scooter he’d gifted her with on her sixteenth birthday had been used as a prop in the first sexual encounter of the future president of the United States. When the whispers started and everything nearly went to hell, she called me and I saved both their asses.”

  He nodded, thrilled with her honesty. In the past she would have flipped him the bird and told him to fuck himself. That nasty well of resentment inside him cooled from a boil to a simmer.

  “Yeah, Zack admitted as much later on.” Roman couldn’t help but laugh. “He was never any good at physics. If he’d paid attention in class, he would have known that scooter wasn’t going to hold the two of them while they fucked.”

  Gus’s lips turned up in a brilliant grin. “He also should have turned it off. I hear he still has scars on his ass from the scooter taking off and him falling buck naked into the dirt.”

  “Oh, don’t forget the poison ivy he got, too.” He turned to her, their knees brushing. It felt good to sit and talk with her, just be with her, nothing but laughter between them for this sweet moment. “Why did you do it? Why did you take the fall for her?”

  “Well, it was fun to watch Dax make that terrible face he always does when he thinks he’s about to throw up. He goes green. I live for that.” When he raised a brow, she caught his stare and sighed. “Fine. I did it because I didn’t care what other people thought of me. Because I learned at a young age that the people who love me won’t stop, despite the silly antics I get into. They’ll still embrace me even if I don’t conform to what society thinks a good girl should be. And the people who don’t love me don’t matter, Roman. Ally was raised to believe that her father was the be-all, end-all authority figure and there were strict rules she had to abide by in order to keep his affection. By taking the blame, I spared her that lesson…though not forever. She married a man her father didn’t approve of and he cut her off. I believe his crime was being Jewish, and Daddy wouldn’t stand for that. So much for his ‘love.’ I don’t think Ally has seen her father in years.”

  “But she’s seen you.” He could guess. Gus collected strays. She was that person who everyone communicated through because she cared enough to reach out. She kept all her friends together.

  “Of course.”

  Friendship meant something to Augustine. She was loyal and kind. And she was fierce. If she thought a friend was in trouble, she would send in armies to save them. Or Secret Service agents. She’d done that with her brother and Holland. When he’d found out how carefully she’d plotted to watch over Holland, he’d been blown away by the lengths the woman had gone to.

  She was also no damsel in distress. Augustine Spencer waited for no one to save her when she could so competently save herself.

  It used to make him feel small. When he was younger, he’d so desperately wanted to be the one who saved the girl. Now that he was older, he could see how nice it would be to have a woman who didn’t need to cling, who saw a potential disaster and simply handled it.

  God, he wanted to talk to her about what was happening with Zack and the other Perfect Gentlemen. She’d probably be an asset. But he and the other guys had all agreed to keep the circle closed.

  “But you can’t be friends with me?” he asked. “You still talk to people you haven’t seen in years, but we can’t be friendly?”

  “You don’t honestly like me, Roman. You can cast any light you like on our year together, but I know the truth. People who are merely having fun don’t sleep together for an entire year,” she pointed out. “They don’t make up any excuse to see other. They don’t sneak in and out of each other’s beds so often they lose track and can’t remember whose house they’re at. If I’d been anyone else in the world, you would have called me your girlfriend. You would have introduced me around and openly dated me.”

  Was she right? It had only been after she’d left him that Roman wished he had made more of their relationship than writing it off as a year-long hurricane of lust, sex, and anger. No one brought out the fight in him quite like Gus. At the time, that had seemed like such a destructive force.

  “Do you know much about my parents?”

  “Only what Dax and Mad told me. I know they fought a lot. Lots of couples fight. I also know they’re still married.”

  They’d mellowed some over the years. Now his father was retired and they seemed to lead a more peaceful life. “They would fight like cats and dogs, so viciously I was actually afraid they might kill each other.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Was it an abusive relationship?”

  “Only when there was alcohol involved…but that was often. My mom would slap my dad then he would slap her back. And then after more screaming that would rattle the house, they would end up having unavoidably loud sex. In the morning, they’d act as if nothing had happened. They’re better now. Mom doesn’t drink at all and Dad limits himself to a beer or two, but when I’m with them all I can remember is how hard it was to sleep at night not knowing if they would both be alive when I woke up. I wondered a lot about how that cycle started. Did it begin when my father reached out in the middle of a fight and somehow threw my mom off balance? Maybe the next time he did it on purpose. I worry that I learned something terrible from him I never meant to.”

  “Roman, that was forever ago. It was an accident. Believe me, if I’d thought for a second what happened on those stairs wasn’t a mishap, you would have felt my wrath.” Some unnamed emotion crossed her face and he could have sworn he saw a sheen of tears blanket her eyes before she blinked them away. She reached out, patting his arm. “So you’re saying you dumped me because we fought a lot?”

  How long had he waited to have this conversation? “I didn’t dump you at all. I mean, I didn’t intend to.”

  She huffed, an indignant sound. “Please. You were going on a double date with Zack the next night.”

  He’d forgotten about that. How? That was the night he’d met Joy. Yet he couldn’t summon up a single memory of how the introduction—or the evening—had gone. He couldn’t remember her friend’s name or what restaurant they’d gone to. All he could remember about that night was how miserable he was knowing he wouldn’t see Augustine again. “I never intended that date to lead to anything meaningful. I was helping out Zack.”

  “By your own admission, you were auditioning wives, Roman.”

  “Well, I didn’t do a particularly good job, did I? Here I am, all these years later with absolutely no one at my side.”

  She stood up abruptly, her movements stiff. “Yeah, well, you found your perfect woman and you let her marry your best friend.”

  He felt his stomach knot. She knew about that? “I cared about Joy. I won’t lie, but it’s bee
n pointed out to me lately that I had underlying reasons for the attraction.”

  “She was the opposite of me, I suppose.”

  He stood, unable to hold back another minute. He hated the distance she was putting between them. The distance he’d put between them long ago. “Damn it, Augustine. Yes. She wasn’t like you and I was trying my hardest to forget you. I was trying so hard not to remember how it felt to touch you, to have your body against mine, because nothing in my entire life has ever been as exciting as fucking you. Not winning the election. Not running the Oval. Nothing has ever made me feel as alive as you.”

  Her eyes had gone cold. “And no one has ever broken me the way you did, Roman.”

  No one had ever made her feel small the way he had. No one had ever made her feel used. He was the only one who could bring Augustine down, and he hated that. But didn’t she understand he could do the opposite, too? They were older now. He was better able to handle the kind of relationship they’d have together.

  He reached for her. He couldn’t let her walk out on him. Not again. It killed him every single time she left a room because he always felt as if he’d squandered another opportunity to bring her back into his arms again. In persuading Zack to hire her, he’d managed to draw her into his life once more, but she maintained strict distance between. Now he couldn’t let her leave without saying the one thing he should have said all those years ago.

  He moved into her space, letting their bodies brush. “Don’t walk away.”

  “There’s no reason to stay,” she replied. But her words sounded a little breathless. She wasn’t struggling against him and she wasn’t stepping back. Her cheeks had flushed, her eyes had darkened, the color turning deep.

  “There is.” They’d left so much unsaid, undone. It had taken him years, but he’d finally figured out that what he’d had with Gus was good. This might be all he was capable of having with a woman. Moments of pleasure. If he worked it right, they could have a private and a professional relationship, keep the entanglements and the fights to a minimum. “I’m so sorry for the way things ended. I’m sorry for making you feel less than extraordinary because you are, Augustine. You are an amazing woman and I’ve missed you. I’ve missed this. Tell me you don’t feel the same and I’ll let you go.”