by Vivian Wood
“What are you doing?” I ask with a quivery breath.
He gazes back up at me, his chestnut hair tousled as his eyes smile. His face follows suit. “Just admiring the view…” He looks back down, beneath the fabric over my thighs. “You…” His deep voice rasps low. “Are so fucking beautiful, Violet.”
He never calls me Violet. And the sound of my name coming off his full, hungry mouth makes me thread my fingers through the thick strands atop his head. He lowers his lips, pressing forward.
Sliding the rest of my skirt’s fabric aside, he crosses the tip of his pink tongue across my clit, strumming, and I collapse the rest of the way against the hardened counters, my back arching as Heath slides inside of my slit with the entire length of that marvelous tongue.
My chest heaves, my body trembling as he makes love to me with his tongue, his lips, his thick fingers, and as he strokes, sinks, and sucks, my body strains, my pulse threatening to pack up and climb out of my climaxing body.
Heath pulls back suddenly.
“No,” he orders, stopping my insane ascent to heaven. “Not yet, gorgeous. When I make you come…” I watch his stare sear up my body as I open my eyes, gawking at him in wonder. “I want your everything. I won’t settle for less…”
Everything? I’m so close to coming apart at the seams that I don’t see how I could have anything else to give.
My bare bottom slides against the smooth granite surface, as he slips one digit inside my wet opening, swirling so skillfully that my teeth break the skin over my sensitive lip.
“Fuck, Heath,” I breathe, stars swinging through my vision. “I don’t think I can give any more.”
“Maybe not. But I can give you more…” he counters. “And more and more…”
His mouth descends one more time, and I know this is the finale. As he flicks the pad of his thumb against my clit, he fucks me with his tongue. Plunging. Plundering. Playing to his heart’s content.
He pumps me over and over with its pink length, and I cry out, my hands holding onto his messy brown mane for dear life.
“Heath!” I scream. “Oh my God… I’m going to… I’m going to…”
He releases his mouth just long enough to say “Come on my fucking tongue, sweetheart” and I do, my body releasing in a blinding, disorienting orgasm that soaks my inner thighs and Heath in the process.
He laps up every drop, dipping his lips to press at the skin surrounding my slippery slit.
I sigh, willing my body to just breathe. I throw my hands above my head—spent, and as Heath stands to his feet, I know I can’t wait. I can’t wait for him to fuck me.
To take that hard cock of his and sink it into me hard enough to send us both into oblivion. He leans forward, kissing me slowly, and with my taste on the edge of his tongue, I suck my own flavor—hard.
Another rush of arousal hits me and as I reach for Heath, to press into him, hip-to-hip, the sudden drum of footsteps coming fast in our direction makes me scream. I drop my hands from Heath’s body as the biggest dog I’ve ever seen rushes at us, nearly knocking Heath over as he jumps up—powerful paws and all, landing a heavy blow on the tall man’s tightened hips.
“Tank!” He shouts, seemingly as surprised as I am. “What the fuck are you doing out of your crate?”
As if the dog can understand him, he tucks a set of dark gray ears close to his head, his sloppy grin shutting as he watches Heath with careful eyes. The beautiful beast glares over at me, and I sit straight up, and as my blue eyes meet his, my racing heart slows…and melts.
He is such a magnificent creature.
“Tank!” Heath cries again, startling the humongous pup. “Get out of here!” He snaps. “Right now.”
“No!” I shout, shocking everyone in the room, including Tank. Straightening my skirt, I slide from the sharp edge of the kitchen counter, standing to my feet.
I hang my hand hesitantly in front of the gorgeous American Bully. He sniffs, as I knew he would, and as he becomes familiar with my scent, I start to smile.
He’s just like my old dog, Espresso.
To most, Espresso was a walking miniature monster. But most wouldn’t look beyond the big exterior to see the lovable ball of fur lying beneath.
Tank licks my hand, and I feel instantly connected to the sturdy-shouldered mutt, my fingers finally reaching up to stroke behind the tiny marvel’s short ears. He grunts in satisfaction, and I sink my fingers deeper, rubbing the skin harder as Heath watches us both in awe.
His mouth hangs open for a second before he closes it suddenly. He gazes over at me.
“This is the meanest damned dog alive.”
I grin at Tank. “I guess he didn’t get the memo.”
“Tank doesn’t like anybody. Least of all, me.”
I crouch, petting Tank with both hands. I glance up. “Then why do you have him?”
He shrugs with an amused grin. “It’s Marilyn’s dog. I’m just holding him until…” He trails off, never picking the sentence back up. His mocha eyes turn sad.
So much emotion in one man. So many surprises.
I stand, brushing my hands off on my skirt as my new best friend sidles up to my exposed leg. Heath stares at Tank in defiance.
“Looks like somebody’s trying to stake his claim.”
I laugh out loud. I gaze quickly at the dog nuzzling near my feet. I look back up at Heath. “He reminds me of someone I know.” I arch my eyebrow, and I realize it is a mistake immediately.
My beautiful boss—God, I still can’t believe it—takes the gesture as a challenge. He starts to walk closer, causing a hungry chill to run over my skin, as he stalks me with singeing cocoa eyes. His hands reach me—pulling, and I let him wrap them around me as his willing victim.
“Is this someone anyone I know?”
I shrug, my pussy throbbing to the beat of Heath’s hovering body. “Maybe. He goes by the name of Sparrow. And he’s arrogant. Irreverent. Totally impossible to work with.”
He nods, a hidden smile peeking beneath his stare. “You forgot one thing about this someone.”
“What?”
“He’s completely crazy about you.”
The revelation makes my stomach tighten, and when he lowers his mouth to meet mine, I know that we’re going to make the greatest love I’ve ever fucking experienced. My body is humming, starving to finish what it’s started.
Until a bumbling sound comes barreling into the silence.
The screech of his ringing phone cuts through my good—or maybe, it’s bad?—sense, and when I watch Heath reach for the bleeping square, his face fixed to the screen, I know our night is over.
He releases me.
“Hello?” He rumbles into the phone, his voice still gravelly with want. “Yes…this is he.” He listens. “Yeah… Yeah, I understand.” He waits. “Are you fucking serious?”
The question catches me off-guard.
A cold distance enters into his eyes as he takes a step back. The room drops a few degrees with that distance, and I stare into his handsome face, trying to decipher the emotion etched there. His dark brows knit together, sewing anger into his features. He walks away, stalking across the kitchen. Shoulders hunched, back arched, he reaches for a coat thrown across his couch, slipping into it quickly.
The words “I’ll be there” fly out of his mouth and before I can move, he’s running—no, sprinting—across the apartment, snatching his cell phone, his words thick and gritty.
“Violet, I need you to grab your things. Get dressed now.”
My heart sinks, and he saves it from dropping to the floor. He clutches my waist. “We have to go. Now.”
“Why? Is Marilyn okay? What about your…?”
“It’s not Mare. Or my dad. It’s the police.” He cuts me off, his smoldering brown eyes on fire. “I need to meet a detective on the case right now.”
“Case?” I can feel the confusion on my face. “Since when has their accident been a case…?”
“Since the po
lice found out that their car accident…” he comments slowly, each word more strained than the last. “Wasn’t an accident at all…”
Chapter Twenty-Two
HEATH
Friday morning
The next morning in the office was pure Hell.
After arriving to New York Police headquarters with Violet in tow, my pulse racing after I pushed the newest driver of my on-call town car service to the brink of insanity, I nearly lost it in the lobby of the station.
A rage I had never known crept its way into my skin, and I stood there, talking to the police, my sense of decorum barely in check as the officers relayed the devastating details to me--careful not to push.
The car was tampered with.
Whoever “they” were.
The line to my dad’s Ferrari’s steel column was deliberately cut—clipped right down the middle, and he’d lost control of the car, the vehicle eventually spinning in a destructive circle that almost left him and Marilyn dead on the spot.
Speaking of spots, the one I imagined in the middle of the tiled floor was the only thing my wayward mind could focus on while the NYPD recounted their fucked-up findings.
Several hours after our visit to the station and on the way to Violet’s house, I earned a Master’s in the thousand-yard stare, my gaze stuck in the middle of windshield glass until finally I found myself sitting outside of her brownstone’s door, the town car driver calling me from the front seat, cutting into my morbid thoughts.
I blinked, my vision blurry. Until Violet reached out and touched my face, her fingers tracing a line across it. Her beautiful blue eyes were worried. And it made me feel worse.
Sliding closer across the seat, she licked her lips, smelling every bit of that sensuous strawberry scent I’d come to know so well.
“Heath…” She hesitates. “Are you alright?”
I didn’t know how to tell her…that nothing was. That the detective’s earlier discovery meant that I was seconds away from losing the only family I ever had.
Not that it was much of a family anyway.
Manhattan nobility never could keep a secret. And the knowledge that the infamous Sparrow father and son were feuding for the last seven years was something that they relished in. Rolled in. Tossed and tumbled in. Like the notorious dirt-diggers they were.
Seven long years.
That was a long time not to talk to someone. The fact that it was my own father just made the reality that much more raw—an open wound I’d never gotten around to healing. Harvard or not, I could never quite understand how the man I’d admired for years could walk away from me.
His oldest heir.
I was still thinking about the father-worshipping boy I’d been when Violet grabbed my attention again in the idling car, her touch disturbingly tender, her voice even more so. I turned to her, closing my eyes slowly before opening them. I met her stare.
“Heath,” she leaned in closely. “Have you heard a word I said?”
I nodded. And the worst words I could have imagined came out of my mouth, driving her away.
There, in front of her home, sitting in that backseat, I’d brought up painful memories—the worst ones between us. I’d yelled, rubbed in Violet’s face the way I left a year ago, my ‘ghost act’ in the middle of the night.
Disappearing without a word was the reason why she hated me after all this time, hated that jerk that left her alone in bed after an unbeatable night of making love.
But now several hours later in my office after my unjust rant, I realize that that’s all I am—an absolute jerk, a shell of my former self, trying to put the semblances of my fucked-up soul together again.
All in all?
It was turning out to be the shittiest Friday I’d ever had. And the sad part is that it isn’t even noon yet.
I take a sip from my mug, realizing that I need a drink—a real one—more than I needed the goddamned coffee inside. My skin is still tingling from spending last night with Violet and I try to drown my nerves with the hot liquid, somehow still smelling her scent on me—the slightly tangy, slight sweet taste of her wet pussy—still on my tongue for the past fourteen hours.
And now she’s mysteriously missing. Taken the day off, I’ve heard.
The legal secretary Emily, who giggles every time I walk by, provides a rock-solid alibi, dragging my mood into a sulk, and I sit behind my father’s infamous oak desk, struggling to concentrate, my mind still stuck on last night—on the new revelations, on my reaction to them, on tongue-fucking my sweet redhead—instead of on the cases right in front of me, the work that waits just ahead.
What I’d said to Violet wasn’t at all what she deserved. But it was all I had.
We never had a true chance. At least, in the relationship sense. And I was smart enough to know that the sexy smart redhead was the type of woman to change you. Get under your skin. Make you want things you knew you didn’t deserve.
Because she was a woman to be deserved. And frankly, I wasn’t worthy enough.
What we’d had, for that one night, was in the past—as sexy as that was. A huge part of me was still remembering. Still reliving. Still regretting… And even now I know one unbelievable night isn’t enough to satisfy my undeniable thirst for her, though I damned sure tried. And I was looking for a repeat as soon as possible.
Despite my best efforts lately, it seems that life—laughing and all—can’t help but get in the way.
Unable to sleep at all last night, by five, I found my way to the gym and to the office before most people awoke. My body continuing to hum several hours later, I inhale the brown lava in front of me, reading the front page of the newspaper, a slow anger working its way under my skin as I stare at King & Sparrow’s sinking stock.
I start with the headline.
FAMILY MAN FINANCIER…OR CAREER CRIMINAL?
Former Manhattan businessman Chris Jackson is seemingly a mystery to all who may know him, an object of much debate amongst both friend and foe.
A self-made man with Midwestern roots, a wife and two children, Jackson seemed the perfect gentleman in both finance and family… Until federal prosecutors arrested him late last year, slapping the serial entrepreneur with multiple charges of fraud and securities law violations.
Jackson is also believed to have embezzled from business partner and foes alike, and reports say that various parties are set to come forward to not only testify against Jackson, but to take him to civil court, accusing him of more accounts of corporate theft…
I re-read the article. For the third damned time.
I can’t stop the thought that this firm—now my firm—King & Sparrow is being connected with the biggest cocksucker of the century, and as I scan the letter, inhaling the smoking cup of hell-hot coffee, I clutch the newspaper roughly between my hands, crushing it between my fingers right before a loud knock sounds at my office door, shattering my solitude.
Shit. I almost spit the java back out. My tongue half-torched by the baking-hot brew, I manage to call out despite the burning, my anger—like the scalding coffee—looking to land on the nearest object in my path. I call out.
“Come in!”
And the door swings open…revealing a ghost. I almost gape.
Jesse Somerset is the best trial lawyer in the damn country…and my best friend from college. The formerly rowdy boy from the Bronx stands in the doorway of my office in a fresh Tom Ford suit, shocking the hell out of me with his clean-cut hair and missing slouch.
He grins at me across the threshold, as if holding a secret he’s glad to have let go. He crosses his arms, as if impatient.
“D’ya miss me, Huncho?”
“Not as much as I missed the money you owe me.” I stand to my feet, smiling. “Get your ass over here, J. Set. And that’s an order.”
I’d heard a rumor, months before I’d taken over the firm, that my Harvard roommate was working for my overbearing father, but it seemed just that… A rumor. It was confirmed when I’d stepped in to m
y father’s position, but my ex-roommate had been working hard—out of a town on an important case. A tough street kid with stellar grades and a rude streak, Jesse Somerset was the friend I’d never expected, a former child gang member with a record and soft spot for beating up rich kids.
I was the trust fund fucker. And he was the boy without a chance.
On the very night of our Harvard graduation, he’d been the one who kept me from drowning in a Jack Daniels bottle; his words of encouragement a salve to my father’s scathing words after I walked away from everything I’d worked for.
My Juris Doctorate. My diploma.
A spot in the Sparrow legacy.
Hugging him now, I revel in the familiar camaraderie of the brother I never had. I step out of his embrace, slapping a hand on his hard shoulder, my face threatening to split in two from my smile.
I look into his green eyes, discovering laughter lurking behind them when he jabs at my shoulder with a quick punch.
“Huncho, where the hell have you been? I’d heard you’d run away to Hollywood to be a star.”
I snort on a small laugh. “The star shit’s a rumor, Jay. Nothing more. The Hollywood part? That’s true. Found a couple of businesses to invest in, a couple of movies to fund. Tried my hand at producing and discovered that I’m actually quite good. Go fucking figure that.”
Jesse shrugs, his green gaze twinkling. He grins slow and wide. “Have you ever not been good at anything you’ve put your mind to? Even Harvard. Before you stepped out.” He scoffs, shaking his head. “You were the only bastard I knew with enough brains to party all night before a test and ace it. You could have sold your services.”
“I almost did.” I cross my arms, reeling back into my memories. “But I figured I was doing enough prohibited shit to get busted. Didn’t want to add too much weight to the stakes.”
“I don’t blame you. Especially with your father being a donor and all.”
I nod. “Wouldn’t want to smear the Sparrow name any more than I already had, right?
He smirks. “Exactly… Which is why I’m glad you’re here. You’ll help us do a lot of good…”