The Fiancé by Stefanie London
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Daniel
FORTHEREST of the opera, Ava is riveted. When Don Giovanni kills the commendatore, she gasps and reaches for my thigh. I managed to resist the temptation to draw her hand up higher, because that is for later. I want tonight to be about her enjoyment, of both the carnal and cultural variety. So I hold her hand until intermission, and when we head to the bar area for a glass of champagne, I listen to her talk at length about what a horrible character Don Giovanni is.
When we make our way back to the balcony, her copper-flecked eyes are dark and tempting. The second we’re inside and the lights dim, she leans over and kisses me with such force that I seriously consider pushing her to the floor and taking her right then and there.
Soon.
After the second act is over, we blend into the well-dressed crowd and make a slow exit from the opera house. I hold her hand as we take the steps, the length of her dress gripped in her other hand.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to witness a character die since season four of Game of Thrones.” She shakes her head. “I mean, what a tool!”
The comment earns her a snooty look from an older woman draped in diamonds who walks slightly ahead of us. But Ava is undeterred.
“A moral to the story, indeed! I mean, he treated those women like a game. They were nothing but objects to him.” She tilts her face up to me and I can’t help but smirk at the angry glitter in her eyes. “Don’t you think? Getting dragged to hell by a statue of your murder victim hardly seems enough. I want a sequel.”
“A sequel?” I chuckle.
“Yes, Don Giovanni Suffers in Hell for All Eternity. It’s got quite a ring to it, I think.”
Another woman turns around and nods. “Hear, hear.”
I slip an arm around her waist and run my fingers over the beading of her dress. It feels disarmingly easy, being with her. And it’s one thing I never expected at all: fun. Ava has a sense of humour that calls to me, she’s unafraid to speak her mind and she holds her own against me...something I don’t encounter very often.
The crowd moves slowly, and eventually we make it down the last few steps to where ushers hold open the doors. We’re among the last to leave. A warm, balmy breeze skates over us. It’s easy for a fraction of a second to think this is a night out between lovers.
But a set of flashes goes off right in our faces, and I hit the hard ground of reality with a spine-jolting thud. I knew the PR team was going to have something planned, some kind of media presence. After all, the point of being with Ava is to be seen, even if I prefer everything we do when no one’s watching.
“Who’s this lovely lady?” A man with a British accent holds his phone out, and another man beside him has a camera pointed in our faces. There are a few others, with cameras and smartphones pointed in our direction. The other theatre guests are looking at us to see what the commotion is. This isn’t real news, just a bunch of tabloids and gossip websites looking for clickbait opportunities.
“Is she your fiancée?”
A stone settles in the pit of my gut and I wonder if this whole thing is a giant mistake. I feel Ava seize up beside me, drawing closer—which might make it look like we’re a team, but I feel how uncomfortable she is.
You dragged her into this.
“Yes, Ava and I are engaged.” I sound stiff. Like a robot doing a poor imitation of a human.
After everything I went through with my parents, I’m an intensely private man. That’s why I’ve resisted Ava’s questions and why I’ve always resented having to court the media. It makes me feel like a piece of meat. Like nothing is truly mine.
And worse, now I’m spreading that awful experience to a sweet, joyful woman who did nothing worse than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“Does this mean you’ve broken things off with your brother’s wife?” A burly man with a French accent steps forward, his phone in one hand.
“I’ve never been in a relationship with Lily Moretti.” The words come out through clenched teeth. “Now, if you’ll excuse us—”
“How do you feel about getting married to a man who’s sleeping with his brother’s wife?” The British guy steps toward Ava, blocking her path.
Ava’s eyes flick to me and for a moment I’m worried that she might be intimidated by all this. But instead her gaze is hard and glittering. She’s furious and it radiates off her in glorious waves.
“No comment,” she says, meeting the man’s intense stare.
“Do you need his permission to speak, love?” The guy chortles, egging her on. “Are you his puppet?”
Now even more people are watching. Passersby pause on the street to watch the sordid affair. Heat blooms in Ava’s cheeks.
“How dare you.” She balls her hands by her sides. “All we wanted was a romantic evening out, and you’re trying to ruin that by perpetuating false rumours so you can sell advertising. It’s despicable.”
No, I’m the despicable one. My team set this up. I knew what we’d face, and I allowed her to walk straight into shark-infested waters. None of the men before us look even remotely admonished. Why would they? They’re soulless creatures. Relentless vultures.
I need to get her away from this.
I’ve made a terrible mistake. Marc will never believe me, and the press won’t let go of the affair because it’s more salacious than anything else I can offer them. Maybe I’ve reached the point of no return... I’ll never live this down. And all I’ve done is make Ava suffer.
My hand tightens around hers, and I attempt to lead her down the steps. But she digs her heels in. Literally.
One of the cameramen smirks. “False, eh? That’s not what people say.”
“Even in the face of all these lies, Daniel is still trying to walk on with his head held high. He’s still trying to repair the relationship with his family that you have all damaged.” She’s almost vibrating with anger. I try to move her again, but she yanks her hand out of my grip. “And if you have any idea what we did in our balcony seats tonight, you wouldn’t be questioning where his loyalties lie.”
Fuck. That is not something I need hitting the internet.
Australian Business Mogul Has Raunchy Sexcapade during Opera Show.
“Ava,” I growl, grabbing her hand again. “That’s enough.”
I drag her through the crowd, shirtfronting the British man on my way through. He gives a satisfying oof when my shoulder connects with his chest, bumping him out of my way. Yeah, it’s a caveman move but I need to get us both out of here, before my darling “fiancée” tells the world any more about our sex life. The tabloid mongrels follow us, shouting for more information, wolf-whistling Ava and asking if I’m good in bed.
Thankfully, our car is waiting right on the side of the road and I yank the door open before the driver has even made it out of his seat. Bundling Ava inside, I slam the door shut behind us, cutting the sound off with a harsh bang.
“You shouldn’t have taken their bait,” I say as the car pulls away from the curb. “It’s only feeding the beast.”
Ava leans back against the leather, her dark hair looking a little wild from the mad dash. Strands fall around her face in soft, springy curls. As if she wants to torture me, she reaches behind her head and pulls out a pin that sends the rest of her hair tumbling around her bare shoulders. The black silk and beading on her dress shimmers, enhancing her perfect shape and parting over one thigh, where the split reveals a shapely leg. I’m immediately reminded of how the fabric parted for my hands not too long ago.
“Why should they have the last say?” she asks indignantly.
“They print the words. They always have the last say.” I narrow my gaze at her. “Especially when you allude to the fact that I used our private balcony for something other than watching the opera.”
“But it’s true, isn’t it?”
“Sometimes the truth is more dangerous than the lie.”
I’m starting to realise that. Because the lie here is that I feel nothing for Ava, that this is a means to an end. That she’s a glorious distraction from the shitstorm that is my life. But the truth of it—the truth of this passionate woman who knows what she wants and isn’t afraid to wear it on her sleeve—is far more complicated.
And if there’s one thing I don’t want for my life, it’s more complications.
“But the lie is what put us in this position. One lie brings another, they breed like rabbits.” Her gaze drifts to the window, where lights flicker as we drive by. They play against her skin, mingling with the moonlight to make her look even more goddess-like and ethereal. “Isn’t the truth simpler?”
“Maybe for someone like you.”
She raises an eyebrow. “For someone like me?”
“Someone who doesn’t have to worry about being in the spotlight.”
“Ah,” she says with a bitter laugh. “A social peasant.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“But it’s what you meant. I’m beneath you in all this, someone you’ve dragged up from obscurity to plunge into your glittering world for the sake of selling the lie.”
“Is that what you really think, that you’re beneath me?”
She snorts. “Let’s face it, Daniel, this dress cost more than my tertiary education and the last time I was in France, I lived on bread and black coffee because it was all I could afford. You may not think of me as being beneath you, but I am.”
“The only way you’d be beneath me is ifyou wanted me to fuck you in that position. That’s it.” I drag a hand over my face. How she could even believe the bullshit coming out of her mouth? “Otherwise, we walk on the same ground. I do not view you as less than me simply because you don’t come from money. That’s the kind of classist shit my father believed in.”
“How would I know what you believe—it’s not like you tell me anything real. The second I ask questions you clam up harder than a toddler who doesn’t want to let go of his toy.” She shakes her head. “And I don’t care what you say, there is no way you would have noticed me if we didn’t end up in that closet together. I wouldn’t have even registered on your radar.”
“No,” I admit. “You probably wouldn’t have.”
Hurt splashes across her face like red paint. But my answer isn’t what she thinks.
“The fact is, I haven’t looked at any woman in more than a year. And that’s not by chance.” I watch curiosity flicker in her eyes, like embers warming in a fireplace. “After my dad left, my mother...”
I swallow, but it feels like I’ve got a peach pit lodged in my windpipe. There are so many things I’ve never told another person, so many things I’ve bottled up for years and years so that they ate at me from the inside, corroding who I am. What I want.
“I found my mother passed out on her bedroom floor, unconscious in a pool of her own vomit. She’d taken a bottle of sleeping pills and chugged god knows how much vodka...” I still remember the smell of it—the sticky, acrid scent of the puke mixing with Chanel No.5. The sight of all the pills half-dissolved. “The alcohol saved her, because she threw everything up before it had a chance to work.”
“Oh my god.” Ava’s eyes are wide, almost cartoonish. “That’s...horrible.”
“I called an ambulance, but we had to keep it quiet, because the media would have had a field day. We told people she’d fainted and hit her head in the shower.”
“Sometimes the truth is more dangerous than the lie.” She echoes my words.
“I didn’t even tell Marc.” I protected him, like always. I shielded him, bore the brunt of my family’s fucked-up nature and let my own shoulders sag under the weight of it. “The thing I never understood was that she didn’t once try something like that while she was married to my father and he was screwing anything with tits. Him leaving her was what pushed her over the edge. She wanted him to stay, even if it meant he broke every vow they’d made to each other.”
Ava scoots over to me and I have to fight my instinct to push her away, to put up the walls. She’s here because of all this—because of my views on relationships, because of my family’s inability to trust one another. I owe her an explanation, at the very least.
Even if sharing these dark parts of my history makes me want to find the nearest bottle of whiskey and numb myself until I can barely stand.
“You didn’t have to tell me all that,” she says, putting a hand on my arm. “I know you prefer to keep things private.”
“You said I never told you anything real, so there you go.” My eyes meet hers and she’s so close. Too close. I can count the freckles on her nose and feel the heat of her body infusing mine. She’s thawing me, this woman. Breaking down my barriers and cracking open the shell around my heart.
She’s under my skin.
Sometimes the truth is more dangerous than the lie.
“You’re not beneath me, Ava. Can you promise not to say bullshit like that ever again?” I cup the side of her face. I want her again, my body calls to hers in pulsing waves and my cock grows hard. Blood rushes in my ears as I anticipate her touch.
“I don’t know if I can promise that,” she whispers. “Maybe you should keep my mouth busy so that I can’t say anything at all.”
Christ. This woman...
“You’re insatiable.” I lean forward to kiss her, but she presses a finger to my lips, halting me. If I was any harder, I’d be at serious risk of damaging these tuxedo pants beyond repair.
“That’s not what I meant.”
Ava fists the length of her dress in one hand and slides off the back seat, dropping to her knees at my feet. I’m in sensory overload. She looks up at me with sultry eyes, long lashes casting shadows on her cheeks. Thank god the partition is up between us and the driver, because in this moment she’s mine and I’m not sharing.
She reaches for my zipper and slowly draws it down, then I raise myself up so she can pull my pants and jocks down, exposing me. I never thought I’d be in this position—stuffy tuxedo jacket on top, junk out. If those gossip website vultures could see me now...
But the only thing I care about now is getting Ava’s lips around my cock.
Ava runs her fingertips up and down the length of me, teasing me. Is this payback? Whatever it is, I let myself be lost in it. She presses her lips to me and draws me in, sliding the swollen head of my cock so far back I’m sure I bump the back of her throat.
“Bloody hell, Ava.” I burrow both hands into her hair, controlling the bobbing motion of her head. It’s pure, unadulterated bliss.
She closes her lips around me, sucking, flicking her tongue, and her hand grips me with thumb and forefinger around the base of my cock. Hot wetness consumes me. It’s everything. My ass clenches and I thrust into her mouth, letting out a soft groan. I’m sure the driver can hear us. But it’s impossible to stay quiet. Ava’s nails dig into my thighs and a sharp spike of pain bleeds into the pleasure, blurring everything.
With each flick of her tongue, each tight stroke, I get closer. Too close. Pressure builds at the base of my cock and I feel the familiar pull of an orgasm sneaking up. But when I try to pull back, she holds me tight, the snug ring of her mouth sending dizzying shock waves through me.
“Ava,” I pant. “If you don’t let go...”
She pulls me out of her mouth and licks the underside of my dick. “I know. I want you to.”
I groan. “Seriously?”
“Yes. I want you to come in my mouth.”
Her lips are on me again, her hand working me in wet, smooth strokes. I widen my legs and let my head roll back, my hand tightening in her hair. This woman. This up-for-anything, daring, sexy woman...
The second I get her back to that villa, I’m going to bend her over the nearest surface and hike her dress up. I’m going to tear that silky underwear with my teeth and then I’m going to fuck her senseless.
“Oh god.” I’m so close. She sucks on me, tongue flicking, and when she bobs her head back down, driving me all the way to the back of her throat, I’m done.
I send my release into her mouth, jetting in hard spurts until a sense of relief and calm and utter contentment washes over me. I drag her up, needing to have her in my arms in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time.
Maybe ever.
I don’t just want her, I need her.
This is the dangerous truth.