Gateway to Heaven Page 9

“One of your favorites?” he asked with a smile.

  Megan shook her head in amazement.

  “Inexpert, indeed. You noticed I like Bach, too, huh?” She asked, shaking her head.

  “Only because it’s one of my favorites, too,” he said before he seamlessly segued to a boisterous portion of Jerry Lee Lewis’s Great Balls of Fire. He smiled wider, charmed by the sound of her laughter. He straightened and herded her toward the seating area. “Enough showing off. You’ve got cake you need to get busy and eat, and the coffee is getting cold.”

  Her grin slackened when she saw the two succulent pieces of cake on the tray. “You made that?”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. I had that bakery on Randolph deliver it. It’s chocolate raspberry. I hope you like chocolate.”

  “Now you’ve got to be kidding.”

  She grabbed a plate, sat down and tucked into her cake with no further ado. He sat down and watched her, entranced. When she was almost finished, she glanced over at him in surprise as she sucked a dab of icing from her finger.

  “Aren’t you going to eat yours?”

  “I was enjoying the show too much.”

  Megan’s fork paused halfway to her mouth. She must have noticed his expression of masculine appreciation. She almost set the last piece of cake down in her embarrassment, but took one look at the delicious morsel and thought better of it. She ate it with relish. Christian chuckled.

  “How is it that you manage to make everything about sex?” Megan asked a moment later, half in amusement and half in irritation. She sipped a cup of coffee and watched him eat his cake, if not with as much heat as he’d watched her, at least with a tight focus.

  “Honey, it was you that was doing that.” He chewed and swallowed a bite of cake unhurriedly before he finished. “There’s not a straight male in existence that wouldn’t have gotten hot watching you eat chocolate.” When he saw her chin go up defensively, he made an offensive strike, pointing at her with his fork. “It’s completely natural, Megan. There’s nothing weird about it…nothing twisted. Aren’t you at least a little glad that I find you so attractive?”

  “That’s not what—”

  “Aren’t you?”

  Her stiff posture melted by slow degrees. “Yes.”

  Christian retreated a little, knowing he’d won a small victory. He set down his cake and walked over to the bookcase. When he returned, he handed Megan a brown wrapped package and sat down next to her on the couch.

  “What’s this?” she asked, wide-eyed.

  “It’s a present. For you.”

  “You’re giving me a present?”

  Christian rubbed one of her curls through his thumb and forefinger. “That’s what I just said,” he murmured, distracted by the silky sensation of her hair against his skin. “It’s not a big deal. It’s actually used, but lightly, and only by yours truly. I thought you’d like it.”

  She tore off the brown paper eagerly. The look on her face when she examined the oversized book on Chinese sculpture pleased him inordinately. She began to pour over the pages. He couldn’t recall ever enjoying giving someone a gift so much. “I bought it at this cool English bookstore in Hong Kong. It was at my house in L.A., so I brought it for you when I came back. Have you ever been to Hong Kong?”

  A tiny alarm started going off in his head when he saw her happy expression collapse at his words.

  * * * *

  Megan shook her head in reply to Christian’s question, but she was hardly aware of responding. She was struck dumb by his reference to the fact that he lived in Los Angeles. It was the first time that he’d ever mentioned it. For some reason, his casual reference to the fact that he lived across the country struck her as hypocritical. Anger pierced her awareness, the sharp tip on an arrow of hurt.

  “You’d love the sculpture there. We should go sometime. What’s wrong?” Christian asked slowly.

  “Nothing. Thank you so much for the book. It was very thoughtful of you.”

  “Megan, I asked you a question.” His voice carried a gentle threat.

  Emotion blocked her throat, but she hoped Christian didn’t notice it when she said, “Hilary told me last night that you didn’t actually live in Chicago. You’d never said anything to me about it, so I was sure she must be mistaken.”

  His jaw clenched. “I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret, Megan.”

  She opened the book and flipped through a few pages. “I never said you were.”

  “You’re certainly implying it.”

  “All right. Maybe I was.”

  She saw Christian’s eyes widen slightly in surprise at the anger in her voice. Good, she thought. Let him know that you’re not going to roll over and pant whenever he snaps his fingers.

  “It’s not like you didn’t have the opportunities to tell me,” she accused. “You could have said something when Father Gregory introduced us, or at the American Girl Place, when I asked you about how long you’d lived at 748. Why are you acting so secretively?”

  She noticed that he had the good grace to at least look sheepish. “I didn’t want you to make the wrong assumptions about me.”

  “That’s ridiculous! What kind of wrong assumptions would I make about you, Christian?” she asked, her irritation bubbling to the surface.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he began smoothly. It took her a moment to recognize his rising tension as he spoke. “Maybe the kind of snap judgments that idiots make when they see a ludicrous lie about me while they’re standing in the check-out line at the supermarket. The kind of dead wrong assumptions that people like your bitchy sister and a hell of a lot of other people make without knowing the most basic things about me. And all because certain people have nothing better to do with their lives than to feed their ignorance and lasciviousness with the sleazy shit that the media cranks out to appease their endless appetites. I wouldn’t have thought that you were like them, Megan. But hell, that’s what I get for making assumptions, right?”

  Megan felt like all the blood drained from her head. Her heartbeat began to throb in her ears in the taut silence that followed. She closed the beautiful book that Christian had given her with a calmness she was far from feeling. She’d obviously struck at a very raw nerve without realizing it. Christian’s eyes were blue fire. Not with the desire she’d seen light them in the past, but with pure, unmitigated fury.

  And hurt, Megan realized. It struck her that Christian’s tendency to reveal so little about himself was a protective mechanism against pain.

  His anger seemed to burn out of him almost as rapidly as it had blazed to life. He slumped back onto the couch and rubbed his eyes.

  “I’m sorry for yelling,” he muttered after a half minute of silence.

  “It’s okay. You were mad. So was I.”

  When she turned to look at him he was watching her with weary eyes.

  “I’ve done some things in my life that I’m not proud of, Megan. When I was younger I used to party as much as I breathed. My ‘fuck the world’ attitude almost got me killed more times than I’d like to admit. I was never as promiscuous as the tabloids made me out to be but I was selfish a few times when it came to women. I must have made myself fair game for the media. By the time I grew up…by the time I wised up enough to be worthy of a good woman’s love, the damage had already been done. When the press sprang a big story about my supposed affair with an Italian model that I’d met only briefly at a mutual friend’s party the woman that I just mentioned believed every word of it.”

  Megan just stared at him. She knew there was nothing she could say that wouldn’t sound trite. His misery was palpable. She touched the back of his hand softly then covered it with her own. They sat in silence for several minutes. She knew how different Christian and she were. She couldn’t even imagine some of the things he’d experienced in his life.

  So she couldn’t understand how it was possible to feel so close to him.

  He turned over his hand and returned her caresses. She realized he sha
red in their profound mutual awareness of each other.

  “I should go,” she murmured.

  “Don’t.”

  His soulful one word reply was more than just a request not to leave for a few more minutes and Megan knew it. Part of her wanted to stay more than anything she’d ever wanted in her life. She’d never felt closer to Christian than she had at this moment. The attraction between them was tangible, like an invisible thread that was attached somewhere high inside both of their ribcages, a thread that was shrinking with every moment that passed, pulling tauter, making it almost impossible to resist the inevitable impetus drawing them together.

  “Are you still mad at me?” he rumbled.

  Megan’s hair fell against her cheeks when she shook her head. “Are you still angry at me? For letting Hilary influence my opinion?”

  “No.” His hand slid behind her neck and brought her against his chest. “Just do me a favor and tell me if there’s something bothering you.”

  “I will,” Megan whispered. Now would be the perfect time to express her many uncertainties about them becoming involved. Instead, she pressed a kiss into his chest. She closed her eyelids when she felt him shudder beneath her touch. “I’ll help you clean up before I go,” she offered shakily.

  “Next time. The guest of an honorary dinner is excused from cleaning up.”

  “Really?”

  Megan glanced up into his face when Christian didn’t answer her for several seconds. He looked strained, like he wanted to do something and was struggling not to. He finally replied after taking a deep breath and letting his hands drop to the couch. The absence of his touch was like a pain.

  “You don’t know that rule? The only time my mom ever let Katie, Mary and me off of dish duty was on our birthdays or graduations, things like that.”

  “Katie and Mary? Your sisters?”

  Christian nodded.

  “What are they like?” she asked.

  ”Katie’s a little older than me. She lives in Burr Ridge and has two rowdy little boys, Eric and Nick. Mary is eleven years younger than me, and almost as much of a hell-raiser as I was at her age. Would you like want to meet them?”

  “Yes.”

  He brushed her cheek with warm fingertips then dropped his hand. “Good, I’ll try to set it up for next weekend. It’ll have to be Friday. I’m…busy on Saturday night.”

  “That should be fine,” Megan murmured. Their conversation was casual, but the messages their eyes were exchanging were far from mundane. She was a coward, keepings things so surface, so sterile…so safe with him. Her conversation with Tina earlier today leapt into her mind. Nervousness joined the chocolate cake in her belly.

  “I’m going to leave now. But there was something that I wanted to say before I left. I wanted…to tell you about…that is…” She glanced away and swallowed thickly. Her courage failed her. “…I wanted to thank you for the lovely dinner and the beautiful book.”

  “You’re more than welcome.” His brow furrowed with concern and puzzlement as he watched her. “What is it, Megan?”

  “Nothing.”

  She smiled brightly and stood. She didn’t look back, but she knew he followed her. Her awareness of him was so acute, she probably could have walked straight to him if a room if she was blindfolded and he was as quiet and still as a statue.

  When she reached for the control on the private elevator, Christian’s hand shot out to restrain her before she made contact.

  “Megan—“

  He spun her around into his arms. Part of her had been expecting his touch…anticipating it. She more than met him halfway as they crashed together.

  She kissed him hungrily, every bit as greedy for the sensation of Christian as he seemed to be for her. Maybe it was because restraint had made their desire so distilled—Megan didn’t have enough experience to know. She only knew the explosive impact of that kiss.

  He thrust up against her with slow, rhythmic movements, Megan pressed back with an equal urgency. Their bodies sealed together. She felt his taut abdomen, his heat…his heart throbbing strong and rapid against her breasts.

  She felt the contours of his aroused sex perfectly through the fabric of his shots. She pressed tighter and closer, wanting more of the sensation of him. When he lifted her hips over his tensed thighs and thrust with force, Megan’s eyelids flew open.

  If it weren’t for the barrier of their clothing Christian would be pressed high against the final limit of her womb right now.

  She tore her mouth from his and backed away. His breathing was ragged; his eyes ablaze.

  He could change her forever with this power he held over her, Megan realized dazely. He could transform her. The thought didn’t as much frighten her as overwhelm her, it seemed so...

  …big.

  He didn’t interfere this time when she reached shakily for the call button.

  She looked small and very vulnerable when she got on the elevator alone, pushed the button, and turned to face him. His mind silently screamed for the mechanical door to hurry up and seal off the space between them. After the excruciating wait, he postponed his mounting frustration until he thought Megan would have had ample time to get off the elevator downstairs.

  Then he slammed his fist into the doors hard enough to make a dent in the metal. The jolt of pain that ensued wiped his mind completely clean for all of three merciful seconds.

  By the next morning, the sight of the dent in his elevator doors and the pain in his hand was enough to make Christian cringe with self-mortification.

  Christ, where was his usual considerable self-restraint? He hadn’t done anything so asinine as punching an inanimate object since his father had accused him of being a spoiled, undisciplined brat when he was fifteen years old. Christian had idiotically confirmed the truth of his father’s allegations by punching a hole in the entrance hallway of their home.

  He thought he would have learned his lesson when his dad made him repair the hole he’d punched in the drywall and repaint not only the hallway, but also the entire first floor of their home.

  “Apparently not,” Christian murmured in self-disgust, without even glancing back at the elevator doors when he entered his loft at almost midnight the following evening.

  Jamie Gonzalez and Mike Simone—the two other members of Lasher Down—had flown into Chicago this morning. They hadn’t rehearsed as a band in months. He had to admit that although things had become tense at times between the four of them as they rehearsed at a leased studio up in Lincoln Park, the experience had been nowhere near as negative as Christian had imagined it was going to be. Both his agent and Lasher Down’s manager were ecstatic at the band’s sound and their relative ease in getting along.

  Relative. That was the operative word.

  He opened the refrigerator door and stared inside dispiritedly. Warmth surged through him when he saw the salmon that Megan had insisted that he save the night before. He recalled all too clearly the way Megan had laughed when he’d tried to give her the huge hunk of fish flesh on a plate.

  “It’s too big, Christian.”

  “Well, you’re awfully small, so it should even out.”

  “I can’t eat it all.”

  Christian had rolled his eyes in mock exasperation. “So we’ll throw away what you don’t eat.”

  “No, it’s wasteful.”

  And in the end, Christian had only been touched by the working-class frugality that she’d demonstrated—the same ethic that he’d grown up with and respected even if he didn’t follow it like he should—by cutting the fish, wrapping it up carefully in plastic wrap, and placing it in his refrigerator.

  “You’ll be happy when you open up the refrigerator tomorrow night and have something good to heat up,” she’d told him.

  And the funny thing was, Christian really did imagine at this moment that she’d pictured him coming home, beat and hungry after a long day’s work, only to open up the fridge and find her forethought preserved in plastic for him.
>
  He didn’t deserve her kindness.

  His smile was grim as he grabbed both the salmon and the unfinished bottle of wine from the night before and thumped the refrigerator closed. He hadn’t been too pleased with himself all day for practically attacking Megan by the elevator last night. Christian knew that he could use the powerful attraction that surged between them as a tool to seduce her. It’d been a grueling trial to sit there with her on the couch last night after their little spat and not touch her. Megan was uncertain, but she wanted him, too. Couldn’t he assure her that he was a decent human being at the same time that he loved her, naked and willing in his bed?

  He knew the answer to that, of course. Her level of readiness had to be based on her own agenda, not his level of lust. She was special. He wanted things to be right for her.

  So he was pretty damn disgusted with himself for practically mauling her when she got up to leave. Not that she hadn’t reciprocated. She had…in spades.

  Maybe that made his lack of restraint all that much more despicable.

  He pulled the cork out with his teeth and spit it out like a projectile into the garbage can. The phone started ringing at the same time that he threw the salmon in the microwave and took a slug of wine straight from the bottle. He wiped his mouth on his bare forearm and picked up the receiver.

  “What do ya want?”

  He didn’t feel the need to be formal. Only close business associates, intimate friends and his family had his phone number. He’d given it to Megan, but he doubted that she would be using it after last night. He began to wonder, though, when he heard the long stretch of dead air.

  “Hello?”

  “Nice,” the female voice on the other end said.

  His eyebrows drew together. The wine bottle made a clinking sound when he set it on the granite countertop absentmindedly. “Megan?”

  “Same gene pool, wrong sibling. It’s Hilary. I need to speak with you. You’re doorman is a real stickler for etiquette. He wouldn’t let me come up without your permission.”