Panic flared in his features. “Please. Don’t leave.”
“Mom,” Melody called, desperation rising inside of her to get out of there. Before she gave in and let Beat’s presence sink too deep where she’d never get him out. Maybe that was already the case and she was delusional to think she could save herself now. But she had to try. She’d fought so hard to create standards for herself and others. No way she was going to compromise them now. “Mom, when you’re done here, take an Uber back to my place, all right? Stay as long as you want.”
Both women regarded Melody and Beat with troubled eyes.
“Okay, Melody Anne,” Trina said finally.
“Are you sure you can’t stay for dinner?” Octavia asked hopefully. “Surely I can track down some beignets.”
“Another time,” Melody said, throat stiff.
Beat cleared his throat hard. “I’ll walk you out.”
Refusing the offer would have been childish, so she nodded once and moved toward the doors. As soon as she laid her hand on the knob, a wave of reluctance washed over her. She could hear Danielle on the other side, arguing with the network. The cameramen were talking about the best route to take back to Brooklyn. I just want to be alone. At the very least, she didn’t want to be filmed for a while.
Learning the real reason behind Beat’s sudden distance, followed by the emotional curveball of reuniting Steel Birds—actually managing the lofty goal they’d set out to accomplish—Melody was restless and keyed up and needed some time to decompress. The cameras made that impossible.
“What is it?” Beat asked, close to her ear.
Her body warmed, her nipples slowly hardening into peaks. “I just don’t want to be filmed for a while. I want to get away from the cameras.”
Beat hummed in his throat. “There’s a service elevator my mother takes sometimes if she doesn’t want to run into any fans outside. It lets her out in the boiler room and she takes a set of stairs up to the street. You can exit on the opposite side.” He placed a hand on the small of her back and something dangerous inside of her outright purred. “I’ll take you.”
She tipped her chin toward the door. “How are we going to get past them?”
“Us?” He scoffed, turning the knob. “We can do anything.”
Three heads came up when they left the office, though Danielle continued to spit technical jargon at whoever was on the other end of her call.
“Just showing her the bathroom,” Beat said casually, ushering Melody through the doorway.
Melody didn’t miss the suspicious look in Joseph’s eyes, but he let them pass.
Beat’s hand remained at the base of her spine, just above the battery pack, as they walked through the all-white living room and dining room. When Melody guessed they would have hooked a right for the bathroom, Beat surreptitiously glanced behind them and hustled her to the front door instead. Being in cahoots with Beat reminded Melody of the night of the snowball fight when they fooled the cameramen by dressing like Vance and Savelina, and now the center of her chest ached.
Closing the door of the penthouse behind them with only the barest click, Beat took her hand and they jogged side by side past the public elevator, through another metal door, into an industrial concrete room with a different elevator.
Beat pressed the call button and it started to whir, approaching the top floor.
That hand was still on her back, but his thumb stroked sideways over her spine now, making her nipples tingle, her thighs loose. And when he very purposefully turned off her microphone, a wild whirlwind of sound started in her ears.
“I can figure it out from here,” she said, voice thready.
“Mel, please,” he said gruffly. “Just talk to me for five minutes.”
“Eventually I will, okay? But I can’t right now.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I miss you too much to think clearly.”
He made a harsh sound. “You’re going to wait until you stop missing me to talk? If you miss me a fraction of how much I miss you, that won’t happen. Not in a million years.”
The door trundled open. They didn’t move for a full three seconds, then stepped in at the same time, facing forward. The door closed, the elevator beginning to descend. Before Beat even slapped the emergency stop button, she knew what was coming. She sensed he was going to do it—but she still gasped when the metal conveyance ground to a halt.
“Melody, I’m in love with you.” Beat took her by the shoulders, turning her to face him and tipping up her chin, giving her no choice but to stare straight into the storm taking place in his eyes. “I will love you for eternity.”
A sob tried to rip her throat open. “Beat—”
“I hope you know I was lying.” His fingertips left her chin, delved into her hair. “Did you really think I would be upset that you made us official on national television? I would have proposed to you if they hadn’t brought out my father.”
Every word out of his mouth set off reverberations in her breast, like a gong being banged repeatedly. “I knew I was missing something. I knew you wouldn’t hurt me like that.”
“Good.”
“I understand why you cut me off in front of him. You wanted him to leave me alone. But I want you to imagine if I’d done that to you, instead of treating you as my teammate. We could have faced him together, instead of letting him break us apart. You put your walls up and shut me out. It’s the trust, Beat. I need to know you’re not going to . . . to hurt me. That I’m not going to get blindsided every time you want to protect me. Odds are, with all this attention we’re getting, something like this could happen again and I don’t feel . . . secure anymore.”
“What would you have done? If he showed up at your door and pumped you for money to keep my family’s secret?” He paused, intently searching her face. “You’d have paid it and the cycle would start all over again. All I could think about was protecting you.”
“I don’t know what I would have done. But I do know that I would have talked to you about it.” Her voice started to break. “You have no excuse for leaving me dangling for three days. All it would have taken was a phone call. A text. You could have come to see me when the cameras shut down for the day. You didn’t do any of those things.”
“He’s the worst part of my life, Mel,” he said through his teeth. “Now I was bringing it down on your head, too? I fed you to the lion. Being with me was hurting you.”
“No. Being apart is worse. You know it is.”
“You’re right. I do. God, do I fucking know.” He dropped his mouth to her neck, rubbed his open lips up the soft slope of tendons to her ear, kissing the lobe, the space beneath. His big hands lifted to grip her hips, guiding her backward toward the elevator wall. “I haven’t slept in three days. I lock myself in the bathroom and watch you on my screen like an obsessed fan. Maybe that’s what I am.”
Melody’s nerve endings were beginning to shoot sparks, her lungs laboring to draw breath. As soon as Beat’s hips pinned her to the wall, she knew. Resistance was futile. Even her frustration with him, with the whole situation, was making her more desperate for that wild and enduring connection they shared. To feel it everywhere. Bathe in it. She’d gone three days thinking she might never feel it again, starved of it, and now her body wanted to gorge.