She stared at him, her confidence slipping away. “Go?”
He jerked his head toward a door with an anchor etched into the wood. “In there.”
She gazed at him uncertainly. “I don’t…”
“Forget it then.” He shrugged and started to turn away.
“No! I’ll go.”
And she did. Just like that. Without asking anything of him, she followed him into the first stateroom.
A half-dressed couple sprawled on the double berth. They lifted their heads to see who’d barged in.
“Beat it,” Bram said.
They scrambled from the berth.
She should have gone with them, but she didn’t. Instead, she stood there in her leopard-print dress and platform sandals with corkscrews tightening her carrot hair and watched the door close behind them. She didn’t ask why he’d developed this sudden interest in her. She didn’t ask what value she placed on herself to follow him like this. She simply stood there and let him press her to the door.
He splayed his hands on each side of her head. His thumbs slipped into her hair and snagged on a curl. She winced. He angled his head and kissed her with his mouth open. He tasted of liquor and smoke. She kissed him back with everything she had. The stubble on his jaw abraded her cheek. His teeth bumped against hers. This was what she’d wanted, for him to see her as a woman instead of as a kid he had to rescue from scripted jams.
He snagged the hem of her dress and pushed it up. She wore a frail pair of bikini panties, and the zipper on his jeans scraped her bare stomach. He was going too fast for her, and she wanted to ask him to slow down. If he’d been anyone else, she’d have pushed him away and told him to take her home. But this was Bram, her home was half a continent away, and she let him slip his fingers into her panties and touch her however he wanted.
Before she knew it, he’d gotten rid of her panties and pulled her to the berth. “Lie down,” he said.
As she sat on the side of the bed and felt the boat’s engines vibrating through the thin fabric of her dress, she told herself this was what she’d been dreaming about. He shoved his hand in his pocket and pulled out a condom. It was really going to happen.
Despite the cabin’s air-conditioned chill, her skin was damp from nerves. She watched him kick off his jeans and tried not to stare at his penis, but it was fully erect, and she couldn’t look away. He peeled his polo shirt over his head revealing a bony chest with threads of pale blond hair. She studied the ceiling as he pulled on the condom.
The bed was high, and he didn’t have to reach far to slide her hips to the edge. She fell back on her elbows, and the skirt of her dress bunched beneath her. He hooked his hand under her knees, splayed her legs, and stepped between them. His expression was intent, his eyes smoky as he gazed down at her. She was helplessly open, and she’d never felt more vulnerable.
He slid his hands down the back of her thighs to her hips and angled them upward. More of her weight shifted onto her elbows. Her neck ached from the awkward position. She smelled latex from the rubber, she smelled him- the beer, the tobacco, a hint of another woman’s perfume. His fingers dug into her bottom as he worked himself inside her. It hurt, and she winced. The boat lurched, pushing him deeper. Her head bumped against the wall as he began to thrust. She tilted her neck, but it didn’t help. He ground into her. Again and again. She looked up at the perfectly symmetrical bones in his pale face, the diamond shadows cutting across his cheeks. Finally, he began to shudder.
Her elbows gave way, and she fell back. Moments later, he pulled out and dropped her legs to the carpet. They were so stiff she had a hard time drawing them together. He went into the tiny attached bathroom. She pushed her dress down and told herself this could still turn out all right. Now he’d have to see her in a new light. They’d talk. Spend time together.
She bit her lip and managed to stand up on her shaky legs. He came back out and lit a cigarette. “Later,” he said. And the door closed behind him.
As the lock clicked, all her fantasies about him shattered, and she finally saw him for exactly who he was, a crude, self-centered, egotistical ass. She saw herself, too-needy and stupid. Shame took her to her knees, and self-hatred smoldered in her chest. She didn’t know anything about people, about life. All she knew was how to make stupid faces into the camera.
She wanted vengeance. She wanted to stab him. To torture him and kill him and hurt him as he’d hurt her. How could she ever have imagined herself in love?
The following season was agonizing. Unless they were filming, she pretended he was invisible. Ironically, her awful tension led to a powerful on-screen chemistry, and their ratings grew. She surrounded herself with her friends in the cast and crew or studied in her trailer-anything to avoid him and whichever of his foulmouthed cronies was hanging around the set on a particular day. Her hatred froze into a mass large and solid enough to protect her.
One season followed another, and by their sixth year on the air, Bram’s antics had begun to chip away at the ratings. Drunken parties, reckless driving, rumors of drug abuse. The fans of good-guy Skip Scofield weren’t happy, but he ignored the warnings from the show’s producers. When the sex tape surfaced at the end of season eight, it all came crashing down.
As sex tapes went, it was fairly tame, but not tame enough to obscure what was happening. The press went wild, and no amount of spin control could repair the damage. The network brass decided they’d had enough of Bram Shepard’s antics.
“Damn it!”
She jumped as Bram appeared. It took her a moment to reconcile the oversexed youthful jerk she remembered with the healthy, full-grown jerk walking toward her. He wore a matching hotel robe, and his hair was wet from his shower. More than anything, she wanted to avenge her eighteen-year-old self.
He looked uncharacteristically grim as he gave the robe’s sash an extra tug. The clock registered two, which meant this miserable day was already half over. “Did you happen to spot any condoms in the trash?”
Hot coffee splashed her hand, and her heart stopped. She rushed into the bedroom and began searching the trash basket, but she only found her panties. She dashed back out into the living room. He pointed his coffee cup at her head. “You better tell me you’ve been tested since the last time you slept with your scumbag ex-husband.”
“I’ve never nailed a pool boy in my life.”
Bram was notoriously heterosexual, but considering his hedonistic nature, she figured that was merely an oversight.
He went on the counteroffensive. “I keep my engine in top working order, and I happen to be clean as a whistle. But then, I never slept with Lance the Loser and whatever candy-ass boys you replaced him with.”
She couldn’t believe this. “
“And I’ll bet anything, you’re still in them. Thirty-one years old. Have you been to a shrink?”
Thanks to her father’s overprotection, she’d only slept with four men, but since Bram had been her first so- called lover, and, apparently her last, the overall total hadn’t changed. “Ten lovers, so you can keep the tramp trophy. And I’m also ‘clean as a whistle.’ Now get out of here. This whole thing never happened.”
But he’d been distracted by the food cart. “They forgot the Bloody Marys. Shit.” He began taking the covers off the serving dishes. “You were an animal last night. Your claws in my back, your moans in my ear…” As he sat, his robe fell open over a muscular thigh. “The things you begged me to do to you.” He speared a chunk of mango. “Even I was embarrassed.”
“You don’t remember any of it.”
“Not much.”
She wanted to beg him to tell her exactly what he did remember. For all she knew, he could have attacked her, but somehow that didn’t seem as horrible as the notion that she’d willingly given herself to him. She felt woozy and sank down at the table.
“You called me your wild stallion,” he said. “I’m sure I remember that.”
“I’m sure you don’t.” She had to figure out what had happened, but how could she get him to tell her what he knew? He began eating an omelet. She tried to settle her stomach with a piece of hard roll.
He reached for a pepper shaker. “So…you’re on the pill, right?”
