R Is for Rebel Read online

  Come to think of it, she met both of the new men in her life that night, there in the warm drawing room: the baby, Lord Heyworth, heir to the dukedom, better known as Wolf, and the impossibly tall, sandy-haired, broad-shouldered American businessman, Eliot Cranbrook.

  At the time, Wolf had given her a long, glassy, drooly look, as if to say: Yes, I am the new best thing around here. Take it or leave it.

  Eliot had given Abby a long approving look, as if to say: I’ll take it.

  She had loved them both instantly.

  Abby tended to love things with an all-encompassing immediacy and a complete absence of ambiguity. Her mother claimed she lacked discernment. Abby preferred to think that she lived her life completely open to all of its possibilities. She didn’t waste her time worrying about imaginary consequences to things that might never happen. She didn’t allow the (usually cruel) thoughts of others to cloud her own optimism or dictate her behavior.

  She loved baby Wolf’s honest egomania: he was the new best thing, after all.

  She loved Eliot’s open humor, how he exuded confidence without a hint of arrogance. He was just as likely to laugh at himself as he was to poke fun at others. Abby had come to think of him as solid.

  As a teenager, it had never occurred to Abby to categorically dismiss the idea of being with a man. Far from it: she was nothing if not open-minded. She just had never wanted a man the way she had wanted Tully. Then, after all their years together, Abby had simply stopped looking at men that way and foolishly assumed that was the end of that. Some part of her mind rationalized: Abby loves only Tully, ergo Abby loves only women.

  Such a pity when we discover our core belief is as solid as spun sugar.

  When the possibility of a physical attachment to Eliot started crossing her mind, Abby kept dismissing it as postbreakup nerves or shallow curiosity of “the other” or something equally dismissible.

  Except lately.

  Lately, the possibility seemed to be crossing her mind like the running commentary at the bottom of the BBC News. Unavoidable. “This just in: Eliot Cranbrook has entered the drawing room wearing perfectly faded blue jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt, and a pair of mirrored sunglasses that make him look like Daniel Craig on a very good day… Breaking now: Riding bareback behind Eliot Cranbrook on horseback now illegal in four counties… Alert the media: Eliot Cranbrook smells like saddle soap and fresh-baked bread and autumn.”

  Worse than the physical pull—which, let’s not mince words, was quite lovely—Abby’s feelings for Eliot were becoming rather menacing, and that was just not on. She was a lover of life, pure and simple. She didn’t go in for menace. She loved riding out onto the grounds of Dunlear at five in the morning in late winter, watching the hoarfrost disappear as the low mist began to burn off and the horse’s steady breathing played an earthy symphony. She planted trees with the gardeners on the estate. She dug ditches. She did not fret.

  When she’d fallen in love with Tully, it had been a whirl of mutual desire and joy. Tender, sweet, passionate for many, many years. Abby was not a second-guesser by nature. Forward momentum, water over the gills, and all that.

  Odd then, that she was standing in the middle of a rusticated stone building in the middle of the Caribbean at midnight with a glass of scotch in each hand, suddenly paralyzed by a whispering fear. Abigail was just beginning to realize that for someone who had always seen herself as a wild thing, she had been, up until now, rather tame in the emotional risk department. She was unaccustomed to the dips and spikes of adrenaline that accompanied nearly all of her thoughts about Eliot. For a decade, Abby had been in a loving, ardent relationship and had never once had a single moment of this creeping feeling of terror.

  Her feelings for Eliot felt dangerous.

  The irony wasn’t lost on her. Abby’s ostensibly wild life with Tully suddenly felt like a misty morning, while a fling with the ostensibly conservative, buttoned-up Eliot Cranbrook felt like a monsoon.

  Was Eliot going to kiss her? Did she want to make the first move? Did she want him to? Maybe just out of curiosity?

  She hated herself a little when she thought of it like that, reducing Eliot to a curiosity. Then she swept away the small guilt with the probably more insulting thought that he wouldn’t much mind how she reduced him if it involved even half of what she had in mind after the kissing.

  The sound of a single, soft, muffled laugh coming from Max and Bronte’s room finally shook Abby from her thoughts and she made her way through the overgrown bougainvillea hedge and carefully down the mismatched stairs. Her rubber flip-flops made a little slap against the heel of each foot as she proceeded, turning this way to avoid a large palm frond, and then ducking under a riotous pink hibiscus that was dropping its nightly blooms. She stepped out onto the sand and saw the outline of Eliot’s strong shoulders and the soft waves of the moonlit sea beyond his silhouette. She kicked off her flip-flops and felt the powdery sand beneath her feet; the faint scent of night jasmine came from somewhere off to her left.

  Her stomach did that slow-motion flip-and-roll again, and her mind embarked on a string of obsessive if-then scenarios: If he turns to look at me over his right shoulder, then he will be a terrible kisser; if he turns toward me over his left shoulder, then he will kiss better than, well, than anything I could imagine; if he puts his hands in his pockets, then…

  It’s just stupid Eliot, she tried to convince herself, but her nerve endings seemed to have a very different opinion. Just look at him! her libido screamed. He’s everything delicious! Abby had to confess that over the past few months, she had fallen into the very sexist and enjoyable habit of Objectifying Eliot-the-Man. It was wrong… but he was so easy to objectify, she rationalized. Those dark, dark blue eyes: sparkling, humorous, dreamy. That leonine hair: caramel brown for the most part, with those golden threads in the sunshine, thick and grab-able, like riding bareback and using the horse’s mane to hold on. Those damned shoulders: like a Bavarian lumberjack from a bloody fairy tale. Everything about him exuded strength. Whatever needed taking care of, Eliot would take care of it.

  Handily.

  She wanted to get her hands on him. She wanted to mess him up a little.

  Who knows how long she stood there staring at (yearning for) his muscled back, thinking giddily that this was going to be the first time she kissed a man. She felt simultaneously—incongruously—way too old to be thinking such a silly thought, and way too young to actually do it… with someone like him. Eliot was a proper grown-up. Abigail didn’t know what that made her.

  He had turned around during that reverie and had walked up to where she stood at the base of the stairs. She never did notice if he turned to his left or right or if his hands were in his pockets or out when he came toward her up the beach. Eliot took the glass of scotch out of her left hand and brought it to his lips. His eyes stayed on hers, closing slightly when the liquid slid down his throat. She stared at his neck.

  “Mmmm.” Then with a slight raising-glass gesture said, “Thanks for that.” He gave her a pat-pat on the upper arm, a typical big-brotherly move that she had recently come to despise, and, without thinking—or deciding to be done with thinking—Abby grabbed his wrist as he started to pull it away.

  She was barely an inch over five feet tall—a sweet little thing, as her father used to say—though she was well accustomed to physical labor and her grip was strong. Eliot was several inches over six feet, ten years older than she was, and she felt the pulse in his wrist quicken beneath her hold. He could have crushed her, but she felt like she was the one crushing him. The night was clear, silent, thick. Their breathing filled her ears: his was becoming shredded, dry; hers was burning her nostrils.

  “What is it, Abigail?” His voice was sure and powerful, but somehow deferential and kind.

  He always called her by her full name, never Abby, or Abs, or Ab, like the rest of her family. She always thought of herself as Abby. It was almost like he was talking to someone else when he spok
e to her. At first she thought it was because he was older and patronizing and domineering and formal and traditional and every other chauvinist epithet she could think of, but lately she had taken to actually looking at his mouth and eyes when he said her full name, and she saw how he took his time rolling the syllables over his lips, as if he wanted to prolong his own pleasure. Or maybe hers.

  Chapter 2

  Moving his hand slowly, with her grip still tight around his wrist, Eliot took a small strand of her black wavy hair between his index finger and thumb, rubbing the silky threads together, as if handling the finest skeins of silk at one of his fabric factories. His voice was raspy when he spoke. “This is probably a really bad idea.”

  Eliot Cranbrook had spent the past six months forcibly dismissing the possibility of ever having this woman in his bed. Initially, he’d heeded Bronte’s warning about Abigail Heyworth’s disinterest in the male species. For a while—even now, if he was honest—it didn’t really matter to him if they ended up in bed; he loved being around her—adored her spark, her laughter, her wit, her fire—whether it was a sexual relationship or not. Of course she was beautiful in that wild, untouched way that he hardly ever saw on the runways in Milan or Paris. But the two of them were also becoming really good friends, and he didn’t tend to have the time or inclination to make really good friends lately. Or maybe never had.

  Whenever someone at a party would say something entirely ridiculous and he thought he was the only one who heard it, he would look up quickly and see the spark of shared amusement in Abigail’s eyes, raise his glass in silent recognition, and look forward to the time that they usually spent going over the night’s foibles. Lately, though, Eliot was slipping. He was starting to want her. He wavered between wanting to seduce her and wanting to preserve the status quo. The seduction would be a quick fix, for both of them; he knew they’d share the same pleasures in bed as they did when he silently raised a glass at a party. They were intimate on some level already. Eliot had spent way too much time—alone—conjuring how the sound of Abigail’s voice would change as it slipped into a lower register in the midst of sexual anticipation or the cry of laughing joy that he knew would accompany her climax.

  On the surface, that scenario was all well and good. Easily taken care of, as it were. But there was another more treacherous thread of longing that had begun to weave into his thoughts about Abigail. He thought she might be the all-encompassing, soul-fulfilling woman of his dreams. The fact that he had never contemplated, much less uttered, words like all-encompassing or soul-fulfilling, especially when it came to a woman, had forced Eliot to concede that the quick-fix theory was rapidly losing traction.

  For someone who bought and sold companies with quick assurance, diving into a proper relationship with Lady Abigail Heyworth made Eliot completely insecure. He couldn’t even imagine how the two of them would talk about it. He smiled as he thought of even using the word relationship in a sentence and having Abigail reply in her throaty, plummy, aristocratic impersonation of her mother, “Oh gawd! Not a relationship!”

  On a good day, Eliot’s life looked like this: Late thirties. Totally satisfied with work. Focused. A success. On a bad day, it looked like this: Pushing forty. A slave to work. Obsessed with business to the exclusion of anything else. An emotional void.

  Intellectually, he knew it would be impossible for any one person to make up for all the missed exits on the emotional highway he’d been speeding along. For nearly two decades, he’d dedicated himself to his career. It was highly unlikely an impish, backpacking sprite still in her twenties was the right woman for that big a job. Their day-to-day lives had about as much in common as the proverbial fish and bicycle. She was the fish; he was the bicycle. In her world, he served no purpose whatsoever. She was fast and fleet. He was mechanical and well oiled.

  She looked up at him expectantly. “Do you think you might kiss me, Eliot?”

  He saw how her cheeks flushed and he listened to the simmering eagerness in her voice. There he was, methodically rubbing her hair between his fingers, but his mind was engaged in some sort of fierce battle. He never would have predicted she’d have to prod him, but he hesitated.

  She was suddenly embarrassed. “I mean, not if you don’t want to—”

  His eyes refocused on hers and the strength of that look stopped her words.

  “Oh. I want to.” But he didn’t make a move.

  A part of him wanted to toss everything else aside. That part of him didn’t care if he was only going to have her tonight, or if he had to start taking random trips to Ugandan refugee camps or organic farms in Australia, or if future visits with Sarah and Devon would be made awkward by this type of flippant transgression. That part of him wanted to satisfy this insane curiosity once and for all. She was just a slip of a girl, after all. He could have any runway model in Paris, any young thing in Milan. Abigail was simply an itch he could scratch. Perhaps the time for chivalrous restraint had passed.

  But in that moment, he realized he wanted a lot more than a roll-around on the beach and a string of casual meetings here and there. His mother’s words rang in his ears: “Begin as you mean to go on.”

  And he meant to have Abigail Heyworth. Not just the flitting, curious, eager imp gripping his wrist right now, but rather the whole woman.

  He tucked the strand of hair carefully away, letting his fingers trace the tender, satiny clamshell edge of her ear as he did so, then—her hold on his wrist still half-guiding and half-restraining his movement—he finally touched the pale, perfect length of her neck with the pad of his thumb. He felt a jolt course through him, then a thick tension settled low in his abdomen: raw desire.

  Her grip tightened on his wrist, as if to protest.

  “You’re not going to kiss me, are you?”

  He let his hand come away from her neck and she released his wrist.

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea. We’re such good friends—”

  “Are you taking the piss? I thought—” Abigail’s face flushed hot with embarrassment. Then fury. “You’re totally into it. I can tell, Eliot. I’m not an idiot. Jesus, just now when you touched my neck, I felt it from my hair follicles to the tips of my toes. And so did you. What are you doing? Are you trying to turn this into some stupid game?”

  “You know I don’t go in for stupid games, Abigail.” He stayed calm, watching her carefully.

  “I know! That’s why this is so infuriating!”

  He took another sip of his scotch.

  “Damn it!” But she was starting to laugh through her anger. “Don’t just stand there and drink your scotch as if we’re running through the postmortem on the wedding. Speaking of which—oh my gawd!—did you see Sarah’s stepmother? What was she wearing?”

  Eliot smiled and put his arm around Abigail’s shoulder, guiding them both closer to the edge of the gently lapping surf and away from all that messy passion. “In the fashion industry, we call it an atrocity.”

  Abby burst out laughing and Eliot smiled wider, as he always did when she gave him the full-blown guffaw. He was relieved he’d averted a full declaration of his feelings, but it was going to come flying out sooner or later. He needed to tread very carefully so he didn’t scare her right the hell off. Hell, he was already scaring himself and he had ten years on her.

  “Oh, everyone thinks you are so good, Eliot, but you really are just as cruel as the rest of us.” The humor faded from her voice and she sighed as she looked at the sea. “We were supposed to have some wild sex on the beach or something, darling. What am I going to do with you now?”

  You’re going to marry me, he thought. “You’ll think of something.”

  “You’re right. I probably will.” She exhaled and looked up at him with a crooked smile. “But I was really looking forward to my first real man kiss. You’re sure you don’t want to step up to the challenge?”

  She was still half-joking, but he could see the fizz of desire just below the surface of her levity. And i
t only made him more convinced that he did not want to be her first man kiss. He wanted to be her last man kiss. He also wanted Abigail Heyworth to want him specifically. He wanted her to want Eliot. He hoped it wasn’t a form of egotism on his part, that need to feel known by her—to be wanted—with all of his goodness and cruelty rolled up together in the bargain.

  “I’m not sure you’re ready for the overwhelming magnetism and power that a kiss from Eliot Cranbrook would provide.” He kept it light. “You need to be prepared for that kind of supremacy.”

  She started laughing again then began air punching and jumping around like a boxer. “Have to get in shape, is that it, darling?”

  God, when she flippantly called him darling like that, it was almost more debilitating than her eager vitality and exuberance. “Yes, darling. Lip exercises. Tongue rolls. Jaw stretches. I want you in top condition.”

  She dropped her arms and looked up at him with a dramatic show of wide-eyed innocence. “You want me, Eliot?”

  God damn her. “You know I do, Abigail.”

  “You’re a nutter, you know that? I basically just told you, you can have me and you said no.”

  “I wouldn’t say that’s exactly what happened.”

  “You’re impossible.” She grabbed his hand and they continued walking along beneath the star-filled Caribbean sky. She squeezed his hand. “But I like you anyway.”

  “I like you too, Abigail.”

  “Oh, come on then.” She was swinging his arm as they walked. “What’s the worst that could happen? Let’s have a pash.”

  “I don’t even know what that means. And a lot could happen!” Eliot laughed. “A lot of the worst can happen!” He squeezed her hand in his to get her attention. “What if you don’t want to be friends anymore? I know it sounds juvenile, but there it is.”