The revelation makes my stomach tighten, and when he lowers his mouth to meet mine, I know that we’re going to make the greatest love I’ve ever fucking experienced. My body is humming, starving to finish what it’s started.
Until a bumbling sound comes barreling into the silence.
The screech of his ringing phone cuts through my good—or maybe, it’s bad?—sense, and when I watch Heath reach for the bleeping square, his face fixed to the screen, I know our night is over.
He releases me.
“Hello?” He rumbles into the phone, his voice still gravelly with want. “Yes…this is he.” He listens. “Yeah… Yeah, I understand.” He waits. “Are you fucking serious?”
The question catches me off-guard.
A cold distance enters into his eyes as he takes a step back. The room drops a few degrees with that distance, and I stare into his handsome face, trying to decipher the emotion etched there. His dark brows knit together, sewing anger into his features. He walks away, stalking across the kitchen. Shoulders hunched, back arched, he reaches for a coat thrown across his couch, slipping into it quickly.
The words “I’ll be there” fly out of his mouth and before I can move, he’s running—no, sprinting—across the apartment, snatching his cell phone, his words thick and gritty.
“Violet, I need you to grab your things. Get dressed now.”
My heart sinks, and he saves it from dropping to the floor. He clutches my waist. “We have to go. Now.”
“Why? Is Marilyn okay? What about your…?”
“It’s not Mare. Or my dad. It’s the police.” He cuts me off, his smoldering brown eyes on fire. “I need to meet a detective on the case right now.”
“Case?” I can feel the confusion on my face. “Since when has their accident been a case…?”
“Since the police found out that their car accident…” he comments slowly, each word more strained than the last. “Wasn’t an accident at all…”
Chapter Twenty-Two
HEATH
Friday morning
The next morning in the office was pure Hell.
After arriving to New York Police headquarters with Violet in tow, my pulse racing after I pushed the newest driver of my on-call town car service to the brink of insanity, I nearly lost it in the lobby of the station.
A rage I had never known crept its way into my skin, and I stood there, talking to the police, my sense of decorum barely in check as the officers relayed the devastating details to me--careful not to push.
The car was tampered with.
Whoever “they” were.
The line to my dad’s Ferrari’s steel column was deliberately cut—clipped right down the middle, and he’d lost control of the car, the vehicle eventually spinning in a destructive circle that almost left him and Marilyn dead on the spot.
Speaking of spots, the one I imagined in the middle of the tiled floor was the only thing my wayward mind could focus on while the NYPD recounted their fucked-up findings.
Several hours after our visit to the station and on the way to Violet’s house, I earned a Master’s in the thousand-yard stare, my gaze stuck in the middle of windshield glass until finally I found myself sitting outside of her brownstone’s door, the town car driver calling me from the front seat, cutting into my morbid thoughts.
I blinked, my vision blurry. Until Violet reached out and touched my face, her fingers tracing a line across it. Her beautiful blue eyes were worried. And it made me feel worse.
Sliding closer across the seat, she licked her lips, smelling every bit of that sensuous strawberry scent I’d come to know so well.
“Heath…” She hesitates. “Are you alright?”
I didn’t know how to tell her…that nothing was. That the detective’s earlier discovery meant that I was seconds away from losing the only family I ever had.
Not that it was much of a family anyway.
Manhattan nobility never could keep a secret. And the knowledge that the infamous Sparrow father and son were feuding for the last seven years was something that they relished in. Rolled in. Tossed and tumbled in. Like the notorious dirt-diggers they were.
Seven long years.
That was a long time not to talk to someone. The fact that it was my own father just made the reality that much more raw—an open wound I’d never gotten around to healing. Harvard or not, I could never quite understand how the man I’d admired for years could walk away from me.
His oldest heir.
I was still thinking about the father-worshipping boy I’d been when Violet grabbed my attention again in the idling car, her touch disturbingly tender, her voice even more so. I turned to her, closing my eyes slowly before opening them. I met her stare.
“Heath,” she leaned in closely. “Have you heard a word I said?”
I nodded. And the worst words I could have imagined came out of my mouth, driving her away.
There, in front of her home, sitting in that backseat, I’d brought up painful memories—the worst ones between us. I’d yelled, rubbed in Violet’s face the way I left a year ago, my ‘ghost act’ in the middle of the night.
Disappearing without a word was the reason why she hated me after all this time, hated that jerk that left her alone in bed after an unbeatable night of making love.
But now several hours later in my office after my unjust rant, I realize that that’s all I am—an absolute jerk, a shell of my former self, trying to put the semblances of my fucked-up soul together again.
All in all?
It was turning out to be the shittiest Friday I’d ever had. And the sad part is that it isn’t even noon yet.
I take a sip from my mug, realizing that I need a drink—a real one—more than I needed the goddamned coffee inside. My skin is still tingling from spending last night with Violet and I try to drown my nerves with the hot liquid, somehow still smelling her scent on me—the slightly tangy, slight sweet taste of her wet pussy—still on my tongue for the past fourteen hours.
And now she’s mysteriously missing. Taken the day off, I’ve heard.
The legal secretary Emily, who giggles every time I walk by, provides a rock-solid alibi, dragging my mood into a sulk, and I sit behind my father’s infamous oak desk, struggling to concentrate, my mind still stuck on last night—on the new revelations, on my reaction to them, on tongue-fucking my sweet redhead—instead of on the cases right in front of me, the work that waits just ahead.
What I’d said to Violet wasn’t at all what she deserved. But it was all I had.
We never had a true chance. At least, in the relationship sense. And I was smart enough to know that the sexy smart redhead was the type of woman to change you. Get under your skin. Make you want things you knew you didn’t deserve.
Because she was a woman to be deserved. And frankly, I wasn’t worthy enough.
What we’d had, for that one night, was in the past—as sexy as that was. A huge part of me was still remembering. Still reliving. Still regretting… And even now I know one unbelievable night isn’t enough to satisfy my undeniable thirst for her, though I damned sure tried. And I was looking for a repeat as soon as possible.