The Wildcard

Chapter Twenty One

“So,” I sighed, leaning my head back against the rest as I cradled a Cosmopolitan in the palm of my hand, “The suspense is killing me, here.”

A long, heavy pause was my response – like silence just morphed into a blanket that smothered us both – and my flighty, devil-may-care, grinding on the edge of my seat with horniness attitude of the last few hours just got choked up in its heavy, dank mothballs. I anxiously gripped the stem of my glass, drawing it to my lips in a feigned nonchalance as I finally drew my eyes up and across the vast space that had developed between us in those few moments.

Troubled isn’t an expression that I’d use to describe Cayden very often, he’s so collected and together … and so bloody arrogant at times, that I doubt the word even crosses his mind from day to day, let alone bleeds across his features. Why would he, after all, when he’s cloaked in authority. Even naked he commands respect, and oozes power, that’s a part of the reason why him bare as the day he was born is my favourite sight in the world.

But, right at that minute, it was clear as the light of day. It swept over his features so suddenly and blatantly that my breath caught in my lungs suddenly – the vivid liquid of my Cosmo jerking in its elegant crystal glass as my hand shook at the intensity.

“Cayden …?”

He almost appeared to shake the expression – almost – as he shook his unruly mane and gave me that smug, sexy-as-you-like, lift to the corner of his beautiful mouth. But I’d spent hours of my life swooning over those ice-blue eyes – over the dirty fantasies they promised me, the real emotion that they projected to me in some quiet, fleeting moments, the enigmatic shadows that danced across them – I’d dreamt of that moment when his body would reach a climax inside mine, and replayed over and over again the pure, unadulterated pride and possession that beamed from those icy orbs when he looked at me in those intimate hours.

So when I met his gaze I spotted the torment inside him because, somehow, we’d got to a place where he couldn’t really hide it from me anymore.

“I want to take you somewhere that really means something,” he finally said quietly, his voice grating softly from his obviously constricted throat, “To me, I mean.”

Almost nervously his gaze shifted down to the whiskey tumbler he was rolling between his palms, with his head bowed over the swirling amber liquid he suddenly exuded a vulnerability that struck my body with a sweeping wave of undeniable, cripplingly intense love for this man.

“I need to give you more … I always need to give you more. We can go out for dinner, the theatre, the cinema … fuck it, I’ll even bowl if you want … but that shit, I could do that with anyone, you know? And you could have done it with someone before me … it wouldn’t be one of our memories, it would be generic, and dull – we’d make it our own, but … I don’t know, I guess our story isn’t about candlelit suppers and movie dates … it’s not about glass slippers or walks in the woods…”

I can honestly say I didn’t really have a clue what he was trying to say to me – it sounded hopelessly romantic, yes, but I felt like he was circling and skating around the point and dragging me along behind him all the while throwing rose petals in our wake trying to drum up the romance. It would have tickled me had he not looked so damned fragile and nervous that he was putting me on edge … plus my heart was beating like a jackhammer in my chest with the realisation that this vulnerability – this fumbling around for reasoning – it was all because of me, and I really ought to do something for this gorgeous, charismatic man that seemed to be falling to his knees in a panic for my sake.