His hand gripped her hip and hair hard enough to bruise, sting. “Our truth,” he said. It was tightly frantic, simple, honest, and when she tumbled over the edge, her heart thrumming in her chest, she took him with her. He held her hard as his cock pulsed inside her.
She slumped, curling on her side, refusing to let regret or fear wind into her mind. After a few moments Ryan got up and went into the bathroom. He came back with a wet cloth for her. She cleaned herself up, then pulled on her chemise and panties and drew the wrinkled cotton sheets over her body.
To her surprise Ryan didn’t go back to the room he’d shared with Lily. Instead he crawled over her. Braced on hands and knees, he looked down at her, shadows of the storm in his eyes. Whatever happened, she had been true to herself, and therefore to him. She reached up and touched his lips with her fingertips. The fabric of the night was already straining at the seams; anything more would tear it from top to bottom. “Stay. Sleep,” she said.
“Simone—”
“Sleep,” she repeated. “Whatever it is will still be there in the morning.”
***
When she woke up to sunshine beaming like a relentlessly cheerful relative, she was alone in the bed. Her bag sat just inside the closed door. She washed her face, found an unopened toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, and brushed the night’s film from her teeth, brushed and braided her hair. Then she repacked her bag and went downstairs to find Ryan.
He wore the shirt she’d ruined the night before into jeans and a soft gray T-shirt with PENN on the front. It must be from his college days, because it actually fit his shoulders and arms. He was sitting on the oversize couch, his phone, laptop, and tablet lined up on the glass coffee table in front of him. The television was on, the volume low and indistinct, the news anchor’s lines scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Simone automatically noted Breaking News and Biggest Scheme in History before she stopped at the stairs to the sunken living room and cleared her throat.
Ryan turned around. Bags were under his eyes, the skin drawn tight around his mouth, but somehow he looked relieved. Not like things were better, but the relief of having a secret out in the open. “Hi,” he said.
She should apologize for last night. She’d shoved him, twice. There wasn’t really a name for what she’d done after that, too bald and real for seduction. How should she describe sex like a gauntlet thrown down at a man’s feet, part demand, part challenge, a fit of temper and frustration similar to the ones that caused her to rip the seams from a design, hurl the pieces to the ground, and stomp on them? She looked him straight in the eye. “I should say I’m sorry about last night, but I find that I’m not sorry about last night at all.”
A dry laugh huffed from his nostrils. He looked at her, and for just a moment she saw the wolf lurking in his eyes. “I’m not surprised.”
She flicked a glance at the television screen. In the silence she could hear the anchor’s faint voice. “Last night federal agents raided the homes and businesses of two men accused of running one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history. Thousands of investors all over the world were affected, including a significant number of charitable trusts. . . .”
Of course Ryan was watching the business news, even on a Sunday. Seeing her interest, he turned up the volume, enabling her to hear the list of pension holdings, charities, and investment groups affected. Her family had quite sensibly diversified their investments to include U.S. holdings, and while she had very little that wasn’t wrapped up in Irresistible, both she and Stéphane had transferred some of their investments from France to the United States. “Who?” she said. “Which company?”
“MacCarren.”
Her head snapped around. There was a split second of shock, then the key slipped into the lock and turned, aligning tumblers that had been out of joint the entire summer.
“You knew.”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Months.”
The picture changed on the television screen, automatically drawing her eye. The banner at the bottom of the screen read Who is the Whistleblower? The text scrolled as the anchor and experts discussed possibilities.
The lock opened. “You’re the whistleblower.”
He just nodded.
Stunned, she sat down hard on the top step. “When you said you couldn’t tell me, you weren’t being melodramatic.”
A short head shake.
“How?” she asked, stunned.
He woke up the tablets, tapped the keyboard on his laptop, and looked at his phone when it vibrated. “I entered the wrong account number to execute a trade. When I went back to fix the mistake, it was right down the rabbit hole. Once I figured out what they were doing, I went to the FBI, and agreed to try to get confessions. My cover was that I wanted in on the scheme.”