His fingers found her entry just as his morning wood plopped out of his boxers. She caught it before it could hit his stomach, sitting up and easing it inside.
She caught his tortured expression over her shoulder. “This is all it takes to tame you, Aries?”
His tightly closed eyes and downturned lips were answer enough as she sank down on his dick.
When he buried his hands in his hair, his eyes still closed tight, lips releasing soft, breathy moans, she laughed and began a fast, determined bounce.
He’d lasted for hours the night before, but that morning she got him there in minutes, screaming the whole way.
***
“You’re going to kill me, woman,” Jack whispered after they’d woken up for the second time that morning—which was quickly approaching afternoon. Stirring in the sweaty remnants of their morning lovemaking, neither was in a hurry to roll out of bed and acknowledge the world. “I can’t get last night out of my mind for two seconds.” He shifted his head on the pillow they shared, smiling lazily. “The way you moved on that piano… Jesus…”
“Only because I had good music to move to.”
His eyes danced across her face. “You were just… elegant.”
She chortled, accepting his fingers as they clasped hands. “No one has ever accused me of being elegant.”
“You can’t mask elegance under a crop top and red leather pants,” he whispered, letting his smiling eyes run a race across her face. His fingers played against hers. “It’s inherent. The straight back. The long neck. The strength…” He took a deep breath. “The strength that you don’t have to boast about, because it speaks for itself. That’s real elegance, and it radiates from you.”
“I’m nowhere near as strong as you think I am. How strong can someone be that’s running this hard, and this fast, away from their life?”
“Tell me,” Jack said. “Tell me what you’re running from. You already know mine.”
“A homicidal blonde bride is your easy answer, Jack, not your real answer. I still have no idea what you’re really running from.”
“But you’ve got an inkling. I don’t even have an inkling about you.”
“But you slept with me regardless.” She squinted at him. “You slut.”
He laughed heartily, making his smile bloom and his nostrils flare.
Her eyes fell to his lips, taking in the genuine happiness, and how it made him ten times more gorgeous than he already was.
“You should be a model,” she said, squeezing his hand. “No wonder you’ve gone viral.”
“Please don’t remind me.”
“Just a stone cold fox. The hottest guy I’ve ever nailed, by a long shot.”
“You’re the fox,” he beamed. “What’s amazing is that you don’t even know it. If my little brother were here, he’d be hard at work trying to take you away from me right now.”
“So your brother has a thing for the sistas, too?”
“I think my brother has a thing for anything that’s mine.” Jack thought about that, licking his lips. “Or maybe it’s the other way around.”
“Ahh…” Nina sat up, intrigued, cradling her head. “See; now I feel like we’re getting closer to what you’re really, really running from. Has your brother made a habit out of stealing your girlfriends?”
“Like I said, maybe I stole her from him.”
“Her? So just one girl.” She shifted. “The woman you left in the pews at your wedding? Lila?”
Jack released her hand and plopped onto his back, staring at the ceiling. “When my parents died…Chase was only thirteen. It demolished him. He loved our mother very much, and if it had been up to him, he would’ve gone with her. I took guardianship of him so he wouldn’t get put into the system, but I couldn’t handle his indignation. He was so, so angry.” Jack met her eyes, and when she nodded, he continued. “I wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine myself. Probably in worse shape than he was. How could I help him? I couldn’t even help me. So I drowned myself in work and found someone who could. I hired Lila to tutor him in the classes he was failing, and to watch over him when I pulled long hours. That’s what I hired her for, but now I know the real reason I went looking for Lila. It’s because I was afraid to face him.”
“Why would you be afraid to face Chase? The one person who understood exactly what you were going through?”
“I made Chase give him the keys.” Jack’s voice went vacant.
Nina sat taller, frowning. “The keys? You made him give who the keys?”
“He didn’t want to. He begged… he begged me… but I wouldn’t hear it. I couldn’t.”
Nina’s eyes widened, she took his bicep in her hand. “Hear what Jack?”
But Jack was in another world, gazing ahead. “All the anger I had before they died, the anger he always worked overtime trying to squash… it was like I transferred it all to him. It was the most selfish thing…” His voice broke. “The most selfish fucking thing I could’ve done.” He met her eyes. “I guess I really am an Aries, huh?”
“I don’t understand, Jack. Why would you blame yourself?”
“I made him hand over the keys, doll. He didn’t want to.” Jack’s voice rose.
When he suddenly sat up, Nina jolted and reached for him, but he was too fast, standing from the bed with his hands covering his face.
“You know what?” he asked, moving toward the bathroom. He turned his head just enough to give her a view of his eyelashes. “I can’t talk about this.” He quickly corrected himself. “I don’t want to talk about this.” A long silence passed before he turned just enough to meet her eyes. “Okay?”
Nina, still curled into a ball in the middle of the bed, nodded, eyes still wide. “Okay, Jack.”
“I’m gonna go and take a shower; then we’ll figure out what our next steps are.” His eyes grew serious. “We need to get back to New York.”
Nina took a deep breath.
Jack finished. “Back to the real world.”
16
When Jack finished his shower, they switched places without a word. Nina rushed through hers. She knew it was time to get home. Her divorce trial was coming up, and there was no more room for fun and games.
She stepped out of the shower and brushed her teeth in record time, pulling open the door of the bathroom.
Jack looked toward the door, where the steam from her shower was escaping, and met her eyes. His smile was back to normal. Not reaching his eyes. Not genuine. The freshly dry-cleaned slacks the maid had dropped off fit him like a dream, as always, and his fingers trembled as he worked each button of his crisp white shirt together. Even after five days of madness, he was still wedding ready. Still a complete picture.
The news played on mute on the TV screen in front of him.
He nodded toward it while buttoning his cuffs.
“Guess who called off the strike?” he asked, his smile growing.
That smile was real. Nina was able to spot it in an instant now. The real ones always sent her stomach turning inside out.
She looked away. “Unbelievable,” she mumbled, crossing the room to her own clothes. Her pants and top were both from Forever 21 and didn’t require anywhere near the kind of delicate care Jack’s did, but she still couldn’t help a smile as she pulled them out of the bag hanging from a hook on the closet door.
She dropped her towel and dressed while watching the news with Jack. When she looked at him, a blush hit her cheeks when she saw he wasn’t watching the news, but her. His fingers froze on his cuffs as he gave every inch of his attention to her.
She shuffled into her pants. “What are you looking at, Aries?”
“You.”
She cut a look at him and drummed up all the courage she could manage to say her next words. “Did you mean what you said to me last night?”
Jack’s eyebrows jumped, but his brown orbs remained hooded, showcasing his fight to keep himself from removing the clothes she was working to get on.
; She responded to the question in his eyes, understanding that a man was only physically able to listen halfway when there was a half-naked woman in front of him.
“You said…” She snapped her bra into place, pulling the straps up her arms. “That once we get back to New York, you wanted to be with me.”
Jack frowned, only able to finish buttoning his cuff when she got her black cami over her head.
“I said that?” he asked.
“You did. Right before you finished. And being the wily sex goddess I am…”
He looked away from her with a laugh.
Her stomach flipped again before she continued. “I’m well aware than a man has the tendency to say all kinds of things when he’s on the verge of an orgasm—”
“I meant what I said.” His eyes met hers.
Nina stood tall, playing her fingers together, and held his eyes. When the intensity ebbing between them became too much, she tucked her curls behind her ear and turned away from him, hurrying across the room to her purse.
“We should really get going,” she said, her voice and eyes hurried as she dug through her bag. “We’ve still got to get these chips cashed. I have a feeling all the flights are going to be sold out. If they are, we’ll get a rental car. If we get on the road right now and hightail it the whole way, we could be back home in less than 48 hours…” She gasped when she turned to face him and found him closer than he had been a moment before, eyes deep with feeling as he approached. She stepped back, running into the table she’d forgotten was behind her, nearly knocking it to the floor. She turned away from him just in time to keep her bag from falling, but her eyes were back to him in an instant.
He nodded upward. “And you?”
“M-me?”
“Did you mean what you said? Last night?”
“Well, apparently, men aren’t the only ones with a tendency to forget what they’ve said when they’re on the verge of an orgasm. Because I don’t remember—”
“You said; it’s yours, Jack.” His voice lowered. “It’s always been yours…”
She shook her hair out of her eyes. “Of course I meant it. And I think you’ve always known it.”
He shrugged. “So what do we do?”
“What we’ve always planned to do.” Her heartbeat picked up. “We get ourselves home to New York, and we say goodbye.”
With all the will she could manage, she turned away from him and stepped out of his hold; reclaiming her bag. She felt the heat of his body close behind her as she dug through it but, thankfully, he didn’t touch her again.
She knew if he did, she’d be a dead woman.
A few minutes of riffling around in her bag sent the small frown on her face deeper until she was full on cringing. Soon, she upended the bag completely, emptying the contents onto the table. Tampons, make-up, keys, everything, spilled out, clanking down on the table. She sifted through it.
When Jack’s hand came around her waist, she wasn’t sure if it was his touch or the dread coursing through her that made her gasp.
“The chips,” she said, in response to his squeeze. She upended the bag a second time. A few pens and a runaway gum wrapper-tumbled out. No casino chips. “Oh my god, the chips.”
Jack came up next to her, his voice ever calm. “When is the last time you—”
“Saw them?” she cried, giving him a pained smile. “Why, why, why do people ask that question? If I knew the last place I saw them…” She took a deep breath when she realized she was panicked. “Before we went downstairs to have dinner, I put them right here. They were right here.” She jabbed her fingers into the zippered pocket inside her bag.
Jack ran his fingers over all of the items she’d dumped onto the table. He upended mini-tampon boxes, popped open concealer cases and sent nail polish bottles rolling in every direction, all with a steady hand.
“How can you be so calm right now?” she shrieked, shoving her fingers into her hair, eyes big.
“Because overreacting is not going to solve anything.” Jack snatched up her bag as she did that very thing, overreacted, and looked through it himself. When he concluded that the chips, sure enough, weren’t in the bag, he upended it the same way she had moments before.
Nina paced all over the room, mumbling manically. “You were right, Aries. You were completely right. I’m Hurricane Nina. The karmic gods are following me, and they want to see me suffer!”
Jack peered into the bag, holding it open as wide as it would go. “Maybe there’s some kind of hole—”
“There’s no hole,” Nina screamed, catching his amused eyes. “And I swear to god if you smile right now, I’ll kill you.”
Jack’s smile vanished, but not because of her threat.
He pointed to the hook on the closet door.
Nina’s eyes followed his pointed finger, and when she found their empty dry cleaning bags, still hanging down from the hook, she looked back at him with fury clouding her gaze.
***
The only view in the hotel that topped the penthouse’s was Mr. Flynn’s. His office was grand, with dashes of solid gold finishes and a view of Los Angeles County that belonged on a postcard.
Perched in his leather office chair with his elbows cradled on the arms; Mr. Flynn held out his hands with a kind smile.
Neither Nina or Jack returned his smile, instead giving him the deepest scowls they could muster from where there were perched on the edge of their seats on the opposite side of his desk.
“They took it,” Nina insisted for the million time since they’d sat down. “It had to have been your dry cleaning department. No one else had access to our room last night but them.” She cocked an eyebrow. “No one that we know of anyway.”
Mr. Flynn cocked an eyebrow of his own. “I hope you’re not insinuating what I think you’re insinuating, Miss Grammio.”
“I’m insinuating that if the pretend-they-don’t-speak-English, shady ass, thieving ass employees in your laundry department didn’t take those chips out of my purse, then you did!” Nina took a deep breath when she felt Jack’s hand cover her knee from the seat next to her. She shot him an apologetic look.
“We agreed you were done talking for today,” Jack whispered.
“I’m so angry,” Nina replied, jamming her eyes shut when he tightened his hold on her knee. She knew what that hold meant. Shut the hell up and let me handle it.
So she did.
Mr. Flynn, leaning so far back in his chair it looked close to toppling over, gave Nina a pained look. The two burly men standing on either side of him shifted as if Mr. Flynn had given them both a signal, one that was undetectable to outsiders.
Jack and Nina looked back and forth between them, eyes wide. Their gazes shot back to Mr. Flynn as he spoke.
“First you insult my employees,” Mr. Flynn breathed, his tone low and slow. “Then you insult my hotel… Then, worst of all, you question my integrity…” He pushed the beds of his fingers together, shaking his head with a squint. “I cannot allow this.”
“ ‘I cannot allow this’,” Nina mimicked, squinting and pursing her lips while pressing her thumbs and forefingers together. A moment later, her face sobered. “This bullshit Scarface act you’ve got going might scare every other idiot who’s been through the doors of this office, but it doesn’t scare me, Don Corleone.”
“Jesus, Nina,” Jack breathed, widening his eyes at her.
“Well one of us has to speak the hell up,” Nina said, motioning to Mr. Flynn. “You’ve had every opportunity to jump in here, Aries. Any day now would be great.”
“Just for the record, Don Corleone and Scarface are two completely different references. Tony Montana was Scarface, and Don Corleone was The Godfather. So your metaphor doesn’t really… work. Just saying…” Jack’s words slowed to a stop when she looked about two seconds from clawing his eyes out.
“Do you realize we have just lost forty-five thousand dollars, in less than twenty-four hours?” she asked. “Has growing up a spoiled lit
tle rich boy desensitized you toward money so much that you can’t even appreciate how fucking angry I am right now? If you were in my shoes, you would be crushing skulls!”
“Nobody wants to crush anybody’s skull,” Jack said, speaking specifically to the massive men on either side of the desk. “She’s just a little emotional…”
“I know it was you,” Nina spat, her eyes going back to Mr. Flynn. She jammed her finger at him. “I’ve heard about this hotel. It’s been all over the news for years. You’re bleeding money every single day trying to keep this shithole in operation. You were never going to let us walk out of here, were you? I doubt you’d let anyone walk out the door with the kind of money we won last night.”
“That’s a very serious accusation,” Mr. Flynn said.
“You can take my very serious accusation and shove it up your ass. And stop whispering like that. You sound like an asshole.”
“Nina, are you trying to get us killed?” Jack grumbled.
She moved her accusatory eyes to him. “I told you. I told you we shouldn’t have taken that room. I told you these guys were hustlers. I told you, Aries. But nooooo, the Greenwich pretty boy needed his five star room. He needed his Egyptian sheets and his Evian shower. Now we’ll never get home.”
Jack leaned an elbow on his chair, covering his mouth just in time to hide his smile.
But Nina saw it in his eyes. “Are you seriously laughing right now? This is all a big joke, right? Because you don’t have to worry about where your next meal is coming from, or how you’re going to pay rent, or how you’re going to continue living your life with any shred of dignity intact. You don’t have to worry about any of that, do you, Jack?”
Mr. Flynn sat taller, making his leather chair squeak.
Jack and Nina snapped their heads toward him with stunned eyes, as if they’d forgotten he was in the room.
Lightning Strikes (The Almeida Brothers Trilogy #3) Page 21