Melody watched, incredulous, as the former enemies huddled together to discuss their plan, leaning into each other’s sides, uproarious laughter erupting between them, as if thirty years of vitriol and anger had never happened.
She and Beat had done the impossible.
They’d reunited Steel Birds.
They’d gained everything in the process—friendship and love and personal growth. But they’d lost it all, too. For one brief, shining moment as she watched the two legends re-form their once-in-a-lifetime bond, she wondered if her pain might have been worth the outcome. Maybe. Yes? But when Beat moved to stand in front of her, her confidence in that answer slipped and scattered.
Nothing was worth this.
Loving him so deeply and having to live without him.
“Melody, can we talk?”
There was nothing more enticing than the idea of being alone with Beat somewhere. Retreating to their own little world where they were the only inhabitants and the rest of the planet was inconsequential. But pretending the hurt he’d caused wasn’t a sharp, lingering thing would only make it worse. He’d promised her that night in her apartment to be truthful with her, always, no exceptions. They’d come so far where his trust was concerned. But at the first opportunity, he’d gone back on his word. He might have done it for noble reasons, to protect her, but she didn’t want to be protected when they could be a team, instead. She was stronger than that now. “I think it might be better if I go.”
Panic flared in his features. “Please. Don’t leave.”
“Mom,” Melody called, desperation rising inside of her to get out of there. Before she gave in and let Beat’s presence sink too deep where she’d never get him out. Maybe that was already the case and she was delusional to think she could save herself now. But she had to try. She’d fought so hard to create standards for herself and others. No way she was going to compromise them now. “Mom, when you’re done here, take an Uber back to my place, all right? Stay as long as you want.”
Both women regarded Melody and Beat with troubled eyes.
“Okay, Melody Anne,” Trina said finally.
“Are you sure you can’t stay for dinner?” Octavia asked hopefully. “Surely I can track down some beignets.”
“Another time,” Melody said, throat stiff.
Beat cleared his throat hard. “I’ll walk you out.”
Refusing the offer would have been childish, so she nodded once and moved toward the doors. As soon as she laid her hand on the knob, a wave of reluctance washed over her. She could hear Danielle on the other side, arguing with the network. The cameramen were talking about the best route to take back to Brooklyn. I just want to be alone. At the very least, she didn’t want to be filmed for a while.
Learning the real reason behind Beat’s sudden distance, followed by the emotional curveball of reuniting Steel Birds—actually managing the lofty goal they’d set out to accomplish—Melody was restless and keyed up and needed some time to decompress. The cameras made that impossible.
“What is it?” Beat asked, close to her ear.
Her body warmed, her nipples slowly hardening into peaks. “I just don’t want to be filmed for a while. I want to get away from the cameras.”
Beat hummed in his throat. “There’s a service elevator my mother takes sometimes if she doesn’t want to run into any fans outside. It lets her out in the boiler room and she takes a set of stairs up to the street. You can exit on the opposite side.” He placed a hand on the small of her back and something dangerous inside of her outright purred. “I’ll take you.”
She tipped her chin toward the door. “How are we going to get past them?”
“Us?” He scoffed, turning the knob. “We can do anything.”
Three heads came up when they left the office, though Danielle continued to spit technical jargon at whoever was on the other end of her call.
“Just showing her the bathroom,” Beat said casually, ushering Melody through the doorway.
Melody didn’t miss the suspicious look in Joseph’s eyes, but he let them pass.
Beat’s hand remained at the base of her spine, just above the battery pack, as they walked through the all-white living room and dining room. When Melody guessed they would have hooked a right for the bathroom, Beat surreptitiously glanced behind them and hustled her to the front door instead. Being in cahoots with Beat reminded Melody of the night of the snowball fight when they fooled the cameramen by dressing like Vance and Savelina, and now the center of her chest ached.
Closing the door of the penthouse behind them with only the barest click, Beat took her hand and they jogged side by side past the public elevator, through another metal door, into an industrial concrete room with a different elevator.
Beat pressed the call button and it started to whir, approaching the top floor.
That hand was still on her back, but his thumb stroked sideways over her spine now, making her nipples tingle, her thighs loose. And when he very purposefully turned off her microphone, a wild whirlwind of sound started in her ears.
“I can figure it out from here,” she said, voice thready.
“Mel, please,” he said gruffly. “Just talk to me for five minutes.”
“Eventually I will, okay? But I can’t right now.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I miss you too much to think clearly.”
He made a harsh sound. “You’re going to wait until you stop missing me to talk? If you miss me a fraction of how much I miss you, that won’t happen. Not in a million years.”
The door trundled open. They didn’t move for a full three seconds, then stepped in at the same time, facing forward. The door closed, the elevator beginning to descend. Before Beat even slapped the emergency stop button, she knew what was coming. She sensed he was going to do it—but she still gasped when the metal conveyance ground to a halt.
“Melody, I’m in love with you.” Beat took her by the shoulders, turning her to face him and tipping up her chin, giving her no choice but to stare straight into the storm taking place in his eyes. “I will love you for eternity.”
A sob tried to rip her throat open. “Beat—”
“I hope you know I was lying.” His fingertips left her chin, delved into her hair. “Did you really think I would be upset that you made us official on national television? I would have proposed to you if they hadn’t brought out my father.”
Every word out of his mouth set off reverberations in her breast, like a gong being banged repeatedly. “I knew I was missing something. I knew you wouldn’t hurt me like that.”
“Good.”
“I understand why you cut me off in front of him. You wanted him to leave me alone. But I want you to imagine if I’d done that to you, instead of treating you as my teammate. We could have faced him together, instead of letting him break us apart. You put your walls up and shut me out. It’s the trust, Beat. I need to know you’re not going to . . . to hurt me. That I’m not going to get blindsided every time you want to protect me. Odds are, with all this attention we’re getting, something like this could happen again and I don’t feel . . . secure anymore.”
“What would you have done? If he showed up at your door and pumped you for money to keep my family’s secret?” He paused, intently searching her face. “You’d have paid it and the cycle would start all over again. All I could think about was protecting you.”
“I don’t know what I would have done. But I do know that I would have talked to you about it.” Her voice started to break. “You have no excuse for leaving me dangling for three days. All it would have taken was a phone call. A text. You could have come to see me when the cameras shut down for the day. You didn’t do any of those things.”
“He’s the worst part of my life, Mel,” he said through his teeth. “Now I was bringing it down on your head, too? I fed you to the lion. Being with me was hurting you.”
“No. Being apart is worse. You know it is.”
“You’re right. I do. God, do I fucking know.” He dropped his mouth to her neck, rubbed his open lips up the soft slope of tendons to her ear, kissing the lobe, the space beneath. His big hands lifted to grip her hips, guiding her backward toward the elevator wall. “I haven’t slept in three days. I lock myself in the bathroom and watch you on my screen like an obsessed fan. Maybe that’s what I am.”
Melody’s nerve endings were beginning to shoot sparks, her lungs laboring to draw breath. As soon as Beat’s hips pinned her to the wall, she knew. Resistance was futile. Even her frustration with him, with the whole situation, was making her more desperate for that wild and enduring connection they shared. To feel it everywhere. Bathe in it. She’d gone three days thinking she might never feel it again, starved of it, and now her body wanted to gorge.
“I hear what you’re telling me,” Beat said, grazing their lips together, his eyes zeroed in on her mouth. Tortured. “You need complete trust or nothing at all. A partnership. Full disclosure always. I’ll give that to you. I need to give you that.”
“I want to believe that.”
“Please.” He captured her mouth and her neck went limp, requiring his hand to cup the back of her head. He held her up, while his lips opened over hers, slanted, then took her with long, devastating strokes of his tongue. “Believe in me again, Mel. I’m so fucking sorry.”
“I know,” she whispered, kissing him back hungrily. “I know you are.”
“I’m your boyfriend. Fiancé. Soulmate. Call me all of them. Or just one. I’ll take one.”
The ache that had burdened her for the last three days swelled up like a life raft, pushing her ribs out from the inside. All the time she’d spent doubting herself, staring at her phone and hoping it would ring, the emptiness. If he’d trusted her the way she trusted him, they would have avoided it all. “I can’t right now.”
He growled brokenly against her mouth. “Maybe I’ll make you say it.”
Her intimate muscles contracted, leaving wetness behind. They were a mile into dangerous territory now. Past the point of no return. His erection was thick and ready between their bodies and her stomach cradled it, rubbing side to side. Unconscious, desperate moves of a woman in love, even when she’d been wronged. “Maybe I . . . want you to try.”
Beat moaned above her head, his hands raking down her breasts, squeezing them roughly in his hands. “You’re not taking me back,” he rasped, dipping his head to lick her hard nipples through her thin sweater. “But you’re going to let me fuck you?”
“Yes.”
“Are you trying to hurt me back?” he demanded against her mouth.
“No. No.”
“Of course, you wouldn’t. Not my perfect Melody.” His kiss was filled with longing, his hands trailing down the front of her body, fingertips tucking beneath the hem of her skirt to raise it up, up and over her hips. “Although I would let you, wouldn’t I? I would beg for whatever you’d give me. Love, pain, forgiveness.”
“I don’t know when I’ll be able to offer those things. And this isn’t going to solve anything,” she whispered, her fingers wrestling with his belt. She unfastened the buckle, sliding free the button of his pants and dragging down the zipper over the bulging crotch of his briefs. “But I can’t help wanting to feel close to you.”
“I’m going to get so close.” His mouth was back on hers, kissing her feverishly, his fingertips diving past the waistband of her panties, parting her flesh with his middle finger, finding her clit in one stroke. “There’ll be nothing but us.”
He would get close. He would, but it would be a temporary fix.
And she was starved for that fix.
“Now,” she gasped against his mouth. “Now, now, now.”
“God yes. But only because you’re wet enough.” He boosted her up against the wall with nothing but a roll of his hips, hooking his index finger in the material of her panties and dragging them to one side. “I take care of you. That’s what I do.”
“No, Beat. That’s not how it works.” She wrapped her thighs tightly around his waist, her body shaking with the anticipation of being filled. Feeling that hardness invade her, give her pleasure, use her. Fuck her. “We take care of each other.”
She could see the moment it all clicked for him, a line forming between his brows, his hands pausing in the act of guiding his shaft between her thighs. At the outset of their relationship, he’d kept the blackmail a secret, then the identity of his father. He’d locked her out. The night of the snowball fight, he’d promised to change. He’d felt changed. But he’d fallen back into his old pattern. Refusing the trust, to burden anyone with his problems. After all the progress they’d made, of course this would be a blow to Melody.
Beat’s breath raced in and out as he pressed himself inside of Melody and bucked home—hard—snapping his teeth against the curve of her neck. “I love you so much, Mel. I’ll never lock you out again.”
Her back slid up and down the wall with every thrust, her fingers digging into his shoulders to balance the quickening deep in her sex. “Beat. Beat. Beat.”
“That’s the name of your soulmate.” His mouth found hers and shredded her final thread of rational thought, kissing her like it was the first time. Or last time. She couldn’t be sure; all she knew was that her heart climbed high in her throat and she clung, thighs scrambling higher around his waist. Her tongue tangled with his greedily, her body an inferno for this man she’d become addicted to and robbed of in such a short span of time. “You hear my name in your sleep, Peach, the same way I hear yours.”
“Yes,” she whispered, opening her knees and leaning back slightly, craving the sight of him entering her, thickness into slick, hard into soft, best friend into lover, soulmates blurring into one. “I always will.”
Beat’s eyes flashed. “You always will, because I’ll be in bed beside you, whispering it in your ear, Melody.” He bared his teeth against her mouth. “I’ll be moaning it while I lick between your legs. I’ll call it out loud when I walk through the front door every night.”
Images were bombarding her, reviving the hope that had withered during their separation. She wasn’t quite ready to embrace it, to trust the happiness that came along with it, so she focused on the raw throb that increased with intensity every time his hips punched upward, slamming her buttocks into the wall of the elevator, his beloved fingers leaving bruises where they gripped her thighs and hips.
The words “I love you” were razing the inside of her throat. They wanted to be set loose so badly. She couldn’t yet, though. She couldn’t speak that truth until she could commit to him, to trying again, completely. To do otherwise would be cruel.
Distract yourself.
“Deeper,” she whispered. “Get it deeper.”
He let out a muffled roar into her shoulder, hooked his elbows beneath her knees to draw them higher and dialed the rhythm up to eleven. Based on the way she elevated even farther against the wall, she guessed he was going up on his toes to grind into her. The image of that made her clench uncontrollably, his name turning into a hoarse chant coming from deep, deep in her throat, her thighs starting to quake.
“God, I would love to get you pregnant someday, you know that?” His voice was rich and guttural in her hair, his mouth planting kisses on her hairline, her cheeks. “I haven’t stopped thinking about it since we talked about having kids. I want to be the man who makes it feel right for you. I want to take the good inside of you and double it.”
“Beat. Please.”
“Am I going too far? Good. Soak me into your bones the way you’re in mine.”
That was it. She lost her footing on the balance beam and went crashing down to the ground without a harness. “I need you so much. I need you so much.”
His sturdy frame started to shake, a choked sound leaving him. “Melody.”
They climaxed like two asteroids colliding in the sky, sending rubble and debris in a hundred directions. She whimpered and tightened her thighs, twisting her fingers in his hair and bearing down, accepting the pleasure for all it was worth, glorying in the flooding sensation he let loose inside of her. She felt the slick wetness that pooled with her own while her soulmate’s body jerked violently against her, moaning brokenly into her neck as if he hadn’t released in a hundred years. It felt the same way for her. Urgent and consuming and mind-blowing.
The orgasm took so much out of her that she collapsed as soon as it ended, her limbs turning to dead weight. But Beat, even in his own state of depletion, compensated to hold her upright, his arms going around her like twin vises. “Shhhh, Melody,” he whispered against her temple, kissed it reverently. “Everything is going to be better now.”
The organ in her chest squeezed painfully.
It would be so simple to stay in those arms forever. To forget the zombielike state he’d left her in after the Today show. She’d been a soaring bird one moment and roadkill the next, and the wound was still too fresh. She hoped she wouldn’t need to nurse it forever, but if that was the case, so be it. Her responsibility was to herself first and she couldn’t let her relationship with Beat heal around her broken bone. She needed to set it first or nothing would ever feel right.
“You’re still leaving, aren’t you?” he said, sounding almost dazed.
After a second, she nodded, holding him tighter. “Christmas Eve is only two days away. I’ll see you then.”
He didn’t seem capable of responding, though it took her several tries to extricate herself from the death grip his arms had around her. Once she accomplished that feat, she pulled her skirt back down. Leaving after what they’d just shared felt extremely wrong, so wrong that she could barely lift her finger to press the button that brought the elevator back to life.
It moved downward sluggishly while her pulse beat seven thousand miles an hour in her chest, her head demanding she do the right thing and go home, get some perspective, while her heart screamed at her to turn and run back into his perfect arms.
In the end, her mind won.
“The crazy thing is . . .” he said behind her, almost to himself. “In the end, it was fine, wasn’t it? I guarded this secret like it would set the world on fire. I don’t know what’s going to happen with my father—maybe it will burn his world down. I don’t know. But . . . it’s out there now. The truth. And everything is still standing. The show goes on. Everything just carries on. She didn’t even look at me any differently than she always has.”
“Love doesn’t come and go that easily, Beat. You need to believe you can lean on it, even when you have to lean really hard.” Melody swallowed the lump in her throat. “I think maybe the people who love us want to be tested and leaned on sometimes, so they can show us how much we mean. Expressing love and trust is a gift to the person who receives it.”
His chest dipped and expanded. “I’ll give those things to you, Melody Gallard. Every day. If you let me back in.”
“When,” she whispered. “When. You’ll have to trust me on that.”
Beat sucked in a breath and nodded, falling back against the elevator wall to watch her leave through bloodshot eyes.
