Crave

by Z. L. Arkadie

  Jamison was sitting on the sofa, arms extended across the top of the seat, when I dashed into the living room. He rose to his feet. “I love your style.” His eyes sparkled and danced approvingly.

  Whereas I was super casual and laid-back, he had a pair of heather-gray chinos, a navy blue cable-knit sweater, and dress shoes. I would have advised him to wear something less dressy, but I knew that what he had on was Jamison’s version of casual.

  “Same,” I said, beaming back at him. And I meant it. The way his trousers cuddled his thighs and his package gave me shivers of desire that were not typical of me.

  I stood immobilized as he walked toward me and wrapped me in his arms. I drifted into his embrace as his teeth gently seized my bottom lip before he softly sucked it into his mouth. It was a sensual start to a head-spinning kiss.

  Then he looked down at my chest and flicked my nipple. “No bra?”

  My lips formed a naughty smirk. “Uh-uh.”

  He inhaled sharply. “Come on. Let’s stay in, baby.”

  I swallowed and took a moment to recover the strength in my legs and to let my mind find focus once again. “I can’t,” I whispered.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m on a tight schedule.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows. “An heiress with a tight work schedule. That’s a new one.”

  I tilted my head to study his expression as I asked him, “How many heiresses do you know?”

  Jamison tilted his head back to chuckle. “Not many but enough to know you’re different from the rest.”

  What am I looking for? Deception? Dishonesty? Cruelty? Vulgarity? All of the above? Those were traits I often suspected belonged to men who’d attempted to court me in the past. But I’d made a commitment to think differently so that I could open myself up to healthy new experiences when it came to love.

  I kissed him quickly, deciding to not scurry up the path of questioning him about other heiresses he could be involved with until he had done something that proved he was a preppy playboy who banged more than one girl at a time. I took him by the hand. “Let’s go, assistant. We’re late.”

  Jamison tugged me against his barrel chest and tongued me long, hard, and deep. As usual, his kiss made my panties moisten, my head spin, and my body crave more.

  “You’re not playing fair,” I whispered once our lips parted so that we could get air.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Then it’s working.”

  He was right, but I shook my head. “Nope.” I tugged him toward the door. “Let’s go.”

  I sighed. Jamison was driving at a snail’s pace, but I knew it was because he was intent on keeping us safe. I remembered Dale driving us in the snow numerous times, speeding like he was possessed by the road-rage demon. When I asked him to slow down, he’d bark that he was from Michigan, so I shouldn’t question how he drove in the snow. He’d totaled two very expensive cars and, by the grace of God, hadn’t caused himself or anyone else serious bodily injury. So far, my observations were telling me Dale hadn’t changed. For Eden’s sake, I hoped I was wrong.

  “And you really have no work to do today?” I asked Jamison.

  “No, I’m recouping.”

  “Recouping from what?”

  Glancing at me with a smile and displaying his killer dimples, Jamison winked. Just then, my cell phone rang, and I reached into my bag to answer it. The caller was Claudia, an artist who made custom light fixtures. I’d left her a message the previous day.

  Claudia was emailing the tech team a catalog of her new light fixtures so that images could be processed and used with the app. “I call them wall crawlers,” she said.

  Then I asked how she was doing. Her parents were getting a divorce after forty years of marriage. Neither was involved with anyone else.

  “My mom said we did our duty. It’s time.” Claudia’s laugh was mixed with the gurgling sound that accompanied sobbing. “I don’t know why I’m upset. They’re seventy-five and always lived and spoke to each other like they were robots.”

  I glanced at Jamison. He smiled at me. If we were ever together for forty years, each day would be new and exciting. I just knew it.

  Claudia and I agreed to talk about her parents and how she really felt about the divorce later, but first, I would call her if my client was interested in any of her pieces. We ended the call, but before I could put my cell phone away, it chimed again with a call from Alex. He and Alana would be boarding a flight to Denver that was sure to take off soon. When my phone beeped a third time, I turned to Jamison to apologize. I would have rather spent our time in the car talking about us. The state of our future together hung in the air. My phone rang a lot, but I remembered how Jamison’s phone used to ring ten times more than mine had. I found it odd that a man who used to be so busy wasn’t busy at all. I feared Jasper had done something to ruin his business.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, seeing that the caller was Jada, my sister-in-law.

  Jamison raised a hand graciously and whispered, “No problem.”

  Jada spoke in a rush. She was home for the week and wanted to know if I cared if Jane and Ollie flew from New York to Montecito with Spencer that night, and I would spend the weekend with them all at the estate. There was no way I was going to turn down that deal. I would be able to visit my two nieces and nephew plus see Jada and Spencer at the same time.

  As soon as I hung up, I could feel the tension in the air. It was a reminder of the animosity that existed between my family and Jamison’s, and it was going to be a high hurdle to clear. We both chose to leave the obvious unspoken. Since I already knew Alana and Alex were on their way, I turned off my cell phone.

  As soon as I put my device in my briefcase, Jamison took my hand and kissed my knuckles. “So, your ex-boyfriend… you don’t talk about him much.”

  I groaned, rolling my eyes. Whenever I thought about running into Dale, a knot formed in the pit of my stomach, which shouldn’t have been the case. “I try not to linger in the negative. I mean, I hated him for a long time for being my first bad experience with love.”

  Jamison stretched his neck as he rubbed his jaw. I could tell he wanted to know more but was respecting my boundaries.

  I sighed, choosing to open myself a little. “I never told anyone this, and it wasn’t in the book but…” I smashed my lips together.

  “You don’t have to explain anything to me, babe,” he said.

  I inhaled sharply and held my breath. He’d referred to me as “babe.” I meant something to him. I decided to take a chance and trust him. If he deceived me, my heart would shatter into a million pieces. I would be bitter and swear off love forever. But that was if he deceived me.

  “I used to…” I sighed. What I was about to say seemed so horrible. “When I was younger, I wanted to be bad. I hated the rules. I hated people who followed the rules. My brother was a chemist, and he made a drug. I tried to manipulate him into making more so I could distribute it. He wouldn’t. So—I used my own chemist. Dale was the middleman.”

  Jamison cleared his throat. I could feel him growing tenser by how tight he was gripping my hand. I imagined he knew about the charge leveled against Asher when we were eighteen. Jamison’s father had tried to use it against us. But I was confessing that my brother wasn’t the criminal—I was.

  “You know you can hurt me with this information,” I said.

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Bryn.” He sighed. “And my father already tried.”

  I sniffed. “I know.”

  “Why did you tell me that, anyway?”

  I took a deep breath. “Because you wanted to know about what drew me to a guy like Dale. At our core, we were similar. We liked being bad and breaking the rules and getting away with it.”

  Jamison kept a neutral look on his face. He pointed to Eden’s gate, which was open. “The house is to the right?”

  I coughed to clear the frog out of my throat. “Um, yeah.”

  I fixed my eyes on Jamison, trying to imagine what
he was thinking. He turned into the driveway, and the gate starting closing behind us. Eden was expecting me.

  “I have a question.” He glanced at me with a sexy smirk. That was a good sign.

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you still bad?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. Being bad was about the angry, wounded girl sticking it to authority figures for disappointing me. So no, I’m not bad anymore. I guess I’ve grown the hell up.”

  He grunted thoughtfully.

  I frowned. “Why the grunt?”

  Jamison was still smirking. “I can mount an argument against your last claim.”

  “Against what part?”

  “When you were talking to Jada, you never mentioned you were with me. We both know why. Also, I still believe you flout the rules, because you know the rules don’t make us more mature—they’re made to control individuality.”

  I could feel fire in my eyes as my pussy throbbed. “The fact that you know that makes you twice as sexy.”

  Jamison stopped the car before I could instruct him to turn into the garage. We both leaned in for a hot and sensual kiss.

  Chapter Ten

  Bryn Christmas

  Eden met us as soon as we entered the main floor from the garage. “Oh wow, oh wow,” she said as if the sight of Jamison had caught her off guard.

  I pointed my hands at Jamison as if I was presenting him to her. “Behold, our assistant for the day, Jamison Cox.”

  We both must have looked flushed. We’d made out in the staircase leading to the first floor. Jamison had shoved his hands down my pants, and his fingers made their way along the area above the crotch of my panties.

  “Shit, you’re wet,” he whispered as he rubbed me off until orgasm ignited in my pussy.

  I tossed my head back against the wall and sighed. “Ha!”

  Fortunately, Eden hadn’t heard me. But the sight of Jamison made her fan herself. “He’s my assistant too? What can I tell him to do?”

  Chuckling, I wagged my finger at her. “Not that.”

  “Well, then, welcome to the process, Jamison Cox,” Eden crooned as she ran a hand through her long dark hair. The look in her eyes was noticeable. She would flirt with him as much as possible. But unlike with Dale, I wouldn’t have to worry about Jamison sneaking off and screwing her when I wasn’t looking. He was my first healthy pick, which meant he wasn’t that kind of guy.

  “She finally got here? It’s kind of late,” I heard Dale say. He turned a corner at the end of the hallway and walked toward us. His glare was fastened on Jamison, and Jamison’s was locked on him. Dale stopped next to Eden. “And who are you?”

  “He’s our assistant,” Eden replied.

  “Who are you?” Jamison asked.

  “I’m…”

  We waited for Dale to answer. I was curious to know what he would refer to himself as. He reached out to shake Jamison’s hand. “I’m Dale Rumor.”

  Jamison shook his hand. “I’m Jamison Cox.”

  The two men continued to appraise each other. The moment was just as horrific as I’d imagined. My past and present were colliding.

  To put a stop to the awkwardness, I clapped my hands. “Okay, enough with the formalities. Let’s get started.”

  Unlike the day before, Dale lurked and even offered his input. We started in the sunroom, where we tried out several of Claudia’s light fixtures, which had been successfully loaded into the app. It had dawned on me, during our first day of work, that Eden’s theme would be Let there be light. I shared that with her, and she loved it. I tried to avoid eye contact with Jamison. He kept staring at me as if the mere sight of me was making him hot.

  Dale would ask me loads of stupid questions to get my attention. For example, he kept weighing the value versus the price of a fixture, as if he ever cared how much shit cost. I wanted to yell at him to stop behaving like his father, Jim, who was a cheap asshole with a lot of money.

  Eden was too distracted by our work and Jamison to notice what Dale was doing, or at least, that was how it seemed. She viewed the videoed version of the crawling lamp fixture, which was shaped like a spider with a thousand tentacles, each six feet long, that spread across the ceiling. “I think this is the one, Bryn. I mean, what do you think, Jamison?”

  Dale pressed his lips together so firmly that they could have gotten stuck in a permanent frown.

  “I like it,” Jamison said.

  “What the fuck, Eden? And how much is that thing, anyway?” Dale asked.

  Eden turned to me, waiting for me to answer the question.

  “Eleven thousand dollars, but my customers receive a twenty-percent discount with this particular vendor.”

  “For a fucking light?” Dale groused.

  I shot Dale a look of warning. He didn’t give a damn about interior design. He was merely there to make it hard for me.

  Instead of piping down, he made his way across the room and knocked on a partition made of smooth black polished pebbles, which separated the floor-to-ceiling windows. “And what about this? Instead of an overpriced spider, maybe we should talk about what to do about this. It looks like something from the 1970s, and there’s too much of it all around this fucking house.”

  I opened my mouth to say that the home was newly built, and the rock wall was modern and chic, and Eden and I had decided to keep all of it, so he should just leave the fucking room already. I wouldn’t have said the last part of that, but I wanted to.

  “Or do you not have the resources to make some real change around here? You say that you’re part of CFI, but you seem mom-and-pop to me.”

  I was speechless. He was attacking my credibility. For some reason, tears pooled in my eyes.

  “Enough already,” Jamison boomed with authority.

  Dale sneered at Jamison. “Aren’t you the fucking help?”

  Eden gasped and shoved her hands on her hips. “Dale, what’s wrong with you?”

  I rolled my eyes, disappointed that it had taken her boyfriend insulting my… boyfriend, or whatever Jamison was to me, for her to address Dale’s behavior.

  “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just asking a question,” Dale said.

  She crossed her arms. “Well, the wall is staying, so get over it.”

  “But you don’t even like the wall. You told me that. You said it needs to go, and we can make it all glass. I agreed.”

  “Well, I changed my mind, Dale.”

  “Why?”

  I frowned at Jamison and shook my head. Dale had finally melted down, and it was only day two. I wasn’t surprised. The presence of my hunkier sidekick seemed to have set him off.

  “Babe,” Jamison said.

  “Babe?” Dale and Eden said at the same time.

  Her finger shifted between Jamison and me. “The two of you are a couple?”

  Dale laughed with an edge.

  Jamison maintained laser focus on me. His shoulders were back, posture steady. “Does she know?” he asked me.

  I knew what he was asking me. I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

  He nodded sharply. “Tell her.”

  I chewed on my lower lip, contemplating what he was advising me to do.

  Jamison glared at Dale as if he wanted to rip his head off. “Because this guy is milking the fucking moment. And he’s not going to stop until she knows. That’s my expert advice, babe. Tell her.”

  “Until I know what?” Eden looked genuinely confused.

  Dale’s mouth fell open as he stared at me like a lost puppy. I wished he’d said something to her the night before. I wished he weren’t so duplicitous. But I had tomorrow and then the next day and so on to come back and finish my job. The longer I waited to tell Eden the truth, the more I would be at Dale’s mercy.

  “Eden, we need to talk,” I said.

  “Okay,” Dale said, shaking his hands with frustration. “I’ll go. I’m leaving. Okay?”

  I focused on Jamison, and he nodded, encouraging me to continue. I inhaled deeply and
then slowly let it out. You can do this, Bryn. Jamison was right to lead me up the path to exposing the truth. It had to be done.

  “Dale and I were in a long relationship together.”

  Eden’s frown intensified. It was as though she were trying to process every syllable I had spoken. “Relationship?”

  “I’ve known Dale since high school, and I was shocked to find him here. I’m sorry I didn’t say something yesterday. It was just awkward, and him being here took me by surprise.”

  “Dale?” Eden said, pointing out of the room, and stomped off.

  He sniffed at me and then followed her.

  Jamison walked over and wrapped his arms around me. “Good job, babe. That was brave of you.”

  I gazed deep into his eyes. “Was it?” I said quietly.

  Jamison planted a tender kiss on my parted lips. “Very.”

  That one soft kiss led to the next and then the next until we were engaging in a scintillating and hungry kiss. We’d lost our heads, forgetting we were in my client’s house and I’d just informed her that her loser boyfriend used to be my loser boyfriend.

  Eden cleared her throat. Jamison and I whipped our attention in her direction. She was grinning as if all was well in her world. “That was hot, by the way.”

  My eyebrows pulled. “Is everything okay? We can end the job, and you wouldn’t have to pay for the work we’ve already done.”

  Her hand shot up. “No way. I’ve been waiting too long for this, so let’s just…”

  A cell phone rang. I knew it wasn’t mine because the ringtone sounded like one of those old bulky landline telephones. Jamison jumped as he released our embrace and dug a phone out of his pocket. I tried to sneak a peek at the name of the person who was calling, but the way he held the device prevented me from seeing.

  “I have to take this.” He planted another quick kiss on my lips and then walked swiftly out of the room, leaving me and Eden alone. It was the moment I’d dreaded.