“What?” I ask.
“I was just thinking how frustrating it is that I could solve your money problems. I could write you a check today that would set you up for life, and it wouldn’t mean a thing to me. But you wouldn’t ever let me do that, would you?”
I look down, guilt blossoming inside me. No, I wouldn’t just take his money, but apparently I’d consider using him and tricking him for the check Alec was offering me. I ultimately decided not to go through with it, but it doesn’t excuse me for considering it. Worse, I haven’t told Chris or my sisters about the offer. But that’s going to change. “There’s something I need to tell you,” I say suddenly. “Alec offered me a hundred thousand dollars to get you to write the manuscript.”
Chris’ face clouds with anger, his fists tightening around his knife and fork until his fingers turn white. “When?” he asks through gritted teeth.
“After the morning at your parent’s graves,” I say. “After I tried to get you to write it the first time.” It’s important he believes that. If Chris thinks Alec’s offer came sooner, it would paint our past in an entirely different light--one that would make me look like a shameless con artist.
He laughs slowly, humorlessly, shaking his head and looking down. He sets his knife and fork down, throwing his napkin on his barely eaten steak and fixing me with a glare that could melt steel. “It makes sense now.” The tone of his voice scares me. The lightness that had started to show is entirely gone now, evaporated. I can almost see him moving back behind his walls of anger and hatred before my eyes. “I kept trying to figure out why you seemed so different, why you didn’t seem to care about me or my money. You seemed different because you were the biggest liar yet, that’s all. You were playing me the whole time.”
“Chris,” I say, pleading. “Just please let me explain.”
“Why?” he asks. “So you can make an even bigger ass out of me? Congratulations. You did what so many people wish they could’ve done. You pulled one over on me.” He laughs again, but there’s poison in the sound. “You even made me like you. All this,” he says, gesturing around the room. “It’s embarrassing how excited I was to bring you here. Fuck.” He stands up, walking a few steps away from the table before turning around again, eyes burning with anger. “I’m not even—”
“Chris!” I say, throwing my napkin down and standing so fast my chair screeches against the floor behind me. “Listen. To. Me.”
He clenches his jaw but stays put, mouth closed.
“If all that was true, why would I have just told you about Alec’s offer?”
Pause.
“Because you thought he’d tell me eventually.”
“Why would he? He knows you better than most people do. Would you ever write the manuscript if you knew he was trying to bribe me to make it happen?”
A hint of doubt creeps into Chris’ face. “No,” he says finally.
“You said you wanted everything. Just one night. You wanted complete honesty. Well here it is. He made the offer after we talked at your parents’ graves. After. And yes, I considered it. We barely keep the lights on and Amelia’s trying to go to some beauty school that costs fifty thousand dollars. So I thought about it, and I used it to help convince myself I should give you another chance. But I told him I wasn’t going to do it. It felt wrong, and no matter how many times you told me to fuck off, I couldn’t use you like that. Okay?” I say, feeling my own anger rising that he’d jump to so many conclusions about me. “And no. I wouldn’t take your money, either, because we’re making it with what we have. It’s not worth doing things I’m not proud of to be more financially comfortable.”
The doubt in his face is still there, but just when I think he’s about to apologize, he turns to leave. “This was a mistake. All of it. I’ll have a plane ready for you in the morning to go back to the States.”
My ride back to the hotel is lonely and confusing. To add insult to injury, my body still aches for him. It doesn’t matter how hurt I am that he wouldn’t believe me. He started to wake something in me that I doubt will go dormant again.
I thank the driver he sent to pick me up, and head to my room, thankful I don’t run into Alec in the lobby. The vague threat he made still looms in my mind. It’s hard to think about anything other than how quickly what Chris and I were building crumbled. I’m even more ashamed about what we did together now that he seems ready to cut me off without a thought, and send me home like a guest who overstayed her welcome.
I peek around the corner to my hallway cautiously, not wanting to run into Chris before I make it into the safety of my room. But just as my head sticks around the corner, I see Lydia walking toward me. She stops short, giving me a concerned look.
“Hey,” she says softly. Her tone tells me everything I need to know. She knows Chris is done with me. I’m guessing she just came from his room and got his version of things. I’m guessing she will want to deck me if she believes his side of what happened.
“Uh, hi,” I say. “I was just going to my room.”
“Listen, Chris is pissed,” she says. “For all his macho bullshit though, he’s got a tender side. I think whatever happened just bruised his pride.”
“He didn’t tell you?” I ask.
She laughs. “No. Chris barely tells me anything. I’ve been trying to get him to let me into his life for a long time now, and it was only when our parents died that he’d even talk to me a little bit.”
“Well, his bruised pride means I’m flying home tomorrow morning. So it was nice to meet you,” I say.
She tilts her head. “He’s sending you home? What the hell happened? I’ve never seen him so into a girl before. I can hardly believe he’d—”
“It’s complicated,” I say, feeling so tired I’ll probably fall asleep before my head hits the pillow. The last thing I want is to try to defend myself to Chris’ sister. Whether I decided I couldn’t take the money from Alec or not, Chris is right to be mad that I even considered it. I just hate that he doesn’t believe that my offer to help finish the manuscript came before Alec ever spoke to me.
“Well, look,” she says. “I may not know my brother as well as I’d like, but I know one thing. Right or wrong, he feels like everybody he’s ever known or cared about eventually turns out to be a liar or a user. If he seems callous, it’s just that he doesn’t want to let anyone else in who might turn around and hurt him again.”
“I find it hard to imagine Chris getting his feelings hurt,” I say.
“I doubt he’d call it that,” she admits. “But he cares more than he lets on. I don’t know what happened between you two, but his first reflex is to push people away. Try not to take anything he said personally. Maybe just talk to him one more time, see if you can get through to him.”
“And what if the thing he’s mad at me for is true? What if he has a right to be mad?”
“Then explain to him that you’re not the first person in the world to make a mistake and he needs to get over it because he cares about you. I know he does.”
I smile a little at that. “I appreciate it, but I have a feeling he won’t want to see me right now.”
“Try him,” she says. “If he’s going to send you away tomorrow morning, you have nothing to lose, right?”
“How about the last of my self-respect?” I ask with a small laugh.
She grins. “Self-respect is overrated. When you’re eighty and retired, do you want to be sitting on a beach somewhere, alone and disappointed with your life, saying, ‘well, at least I still have my self-respect’?”
I blow my hair out of my eyes and try to mentally brace myself for what I’m going to do. I nod my thanks to Lydia, who smiles and heads down the stairs, leaving me to walk what feels like ten miles instead of ten feet to Chris’ door.
I lift my hand to knock, but the door opens before I can.
He’s standing there in just a white undershirt and jeans, hair a mess and eyes hard. He looks straight out of a scene from a movie, s
exy, angry and all kinds of bad news. It’s the kind of moment that deserves a picture so people can look back at it years from now and wonder if a man so incredible ever really existed and what it would’ve been like to be the focus of those eyes.
“I heard you two in the hallway,” he says.
I open my mouth to speak but can’t find any words worth saying. How much did he hear? What do I even say to that?
“Get on my bed,” he says.
I have to stare at him for several seconds before I can confirm I heard what I thought I just heard. “Your bed?” I stammer. “Wh—”
“On. My. Bed.”
There’s no arguing with a voice like that, with eyes like that. I’m moving to the bed before there’s time to think of disobeying. I get up on the bed and sit in the center, legs self-consciously crossed so I don’t give him a view up my skirt, even though he’s had plenty of that tonight.
He considers me, pacing side to side while following me with a simmering glare, no words are needed to tell me he’s trying to figure out what to do with me.
What to do with me? Why am I so sure that’s what he’s doing? Why does the thought fill me with dark excitement? I came to his room to apologize or to do something to set things right. I don’t even know what, I never would’ve guessed it was me who’d feel the need to apologize.
All I can do is watch him pace in front of the bed, anger boiling off him like heat.
“You know what pisses me off the most about all this?”
I shake my head.
“Nothing changed. I said what I said after dinner. I sent you away. Told you to get the first plane out of here in the morning. Then I left you there and realized they were just words. Just fucking words.”
He moves closer to me, gripping my chin and looking down into my eyes, jaw clenched. “Why do I still want you?”
“Because you know it’s not true. The things you assumed,” I say. “You know—”
He presses his mouth into mine, pinning me back against the bed and moving on top of me, driving his knee between my legs. I’m swallowed up by him, the scent of him, the feeling of his hard body against mine, and how soft and small his touch makes me feel.
He tastes like sin and smells like sex, like every inch of him was painstakingly crafted to drive me beyond all rational thought and reason. His tongue is hot against mine, teeth tugging at my lip in a way that is so hungry it makes my skin prickle with goosebumps.
His hands are rough, fingertips pressing angry red lines into my skin as he gropes his way up my dress to find my tits and squeeze, sucking in a breath full of satisfaction when he finds the hard points of my nipples.
His knee is a lightning rod for my attention though, drawing my focus to the heat and throbbing sensation between my legs. I rock my hips upward, gripping his firm ass with one hand and his broad back with the other as I use him to pull myself harder and harder into his knee. I’m so desperate for release that I don’t even care what he thinks of me, or the moans that are already spilling from my lips.
I fumble for his belt, pulling it away and throwing it to the ground even as he lifts up my dress. Our bodies are a tangle of hungry hands and heat where our skin collides. He strips away my dress and might as well throw my doubts and fears to the ground along with it, because I’m in too deep to stop now--way too deep.
He’s shirtless now and wears nothing but his underwear, giving me my first in person view of his bare chest and abs. A thin sheen of sweat coats his body, highlighting every curve of his abs and the sharp V of muscle pointing down toward his groin. He’s absolutely mouthwatering. I grip his pecs, running my fingers down the rack of abs and digging my fingertips along his skin, leaving red lines in their wake.
He hisses through his teeth, still fixated on my breasts that are now freed of my bra and completely bare to him.
My eyes wander down to his gray underwear, where I can see the huge outline of his erection pressing against my panties. A warm surge blasts through me to think his cock is so tantalizingly close to my entrance.
“I want you inside me,” I whisper through clenched teeth, fingertips digging into the back of his neck as I pull him down, craving the taste of his mouth again.
“You’re going to get more than you can handle,” he growls. He grips me by the shoulders and flips me over like I weigh nothing, straddling the back of my thighs. I feel him shift slightly and see his boxers fling to the ground beside the bed. He’s apparently in too much of a hurry to take my panties off, because he grips the elastic on one side of them yanking the fabric to the side, exposing my pussy. He pulls them so roughly that I’m sure they will be ruined, but I couldn’t care less.
I expect him to slide himself into me, but instead I feel him push his body back, chest and shoulders weighing my legs down and his big hands gripping my ass. I realize what he’s about to do a moment before I feel the scruff of his beard between my legs. The sensation of his warm, wet lips meeting my sex overwhelms any possible hint of self-consciousness I might have had in this position. I spent the last few hours getting wetter than I ever have in my life I fingered myself for him, came all over my hand and haven’t had a chance to shower, but he’s driving his tongue into me like he’s starving and my pussy is the sweetest thing he’s ever tasted.
It’s sexy in the dirtiest way, and I’m loving every second of it. I can’t help but clenching my thighs tight, squeezing them around his head and arching my hips to push myself against him. He’s not shy about exploring me with his mouth, and his tongue doesn’t just dip into my entrance or flick across my clit--it strays up and to my ass. The first time he licks around the tight ring of my asshole. I tense up, completely mortified and too embarrassed to even think about what that must be like from his end, no matter how good it feels for me. But he shows no sign of hesitation. In fact, he’s gripping me so tight it tells me he’s turned on by what he’s doing and that I have nothing to feel ashamed of.
It’s the strangest, most liberating feeling.
He makes me feel so sexy. He went straight to the most intimate, vulnerable place on my body and is showing me that he’s hungry for me, ready to devour every last inch of me and love every second of it.
I squeeze the sheets so tight my fingers hurt, but I barely feel it. My breathless moans are muffled by the sheets, but sound after sound escapes me. I’ve never been noisy in bed in my life--not that my unfortunate experiences with Ryan were even remotely close to what I’ve already experienced with Chris. Chris’ tongue is sliding between my legs, dipping into my core and curling to caress my walls in a way that has my mouth forming a silent “O” of surprise, demanding my thoughts stay in the present.
He has an uncanny ability to sense when I’m about to cum, because I quickly realize he’s not going to let me until he’s ready. I lose track of how many times he brings me to the brink of orgasm, constantly introducing new tricks to keep me feeling like I’m on the longest rollercoaster on earth. He does something with his tongue that feels like he’s making it swirl while he works his fingers between my legs to rub my clit. He slides his thumb down between my cheeks and works it into my virgin ass, making my entire body tense around him. He even does something with his lips, kind of like he’s humming, but it sends vibrations through his entire tongue and electrifies my core, making me belt out my loudest moan yet.
“Please,” I gasp, turning my head so he can hear me clearly. “Please just fuck me.”
16
Chris
“Please just fuck me.”
Her voice drips with a soul-crushing need, like she’d trade every last thing she’s ever owned or cared about in this moment just to have my cock inside her, to feel her walls tighten around my shaft.
“I’m not just going to fuck you,” I say, gripping her hips and lifting her ass up, forcing her on her knees where I can see her glistening pussy and her tight ass waiting for me. “I’m going to devour every fucking inch of you.”
I grip the base of my cock a
nd drive it into her pussy, not bothering with niceties like taking it slow or easing myself in. I push into her impossible tightness, letting out a low, primal sound as her tight, scorching hot walls close in around my length, squeezing me so perfectly.
Her breath is ragged now, and she gasps my name in an unconscious way that isn’t meant for pleasing me or trying to be sexy. Every moan is real and guttural, sending chills down my back.
I bring my hand back and slap her ass, watching as a faint red mark appears in the shape of my hand. All my old habits, the tricks and moves I’d use rise up and fall back down in my mind, feeling ingenuine. For some reason, none of it feels like it would be right. It would cheapen this experience.
I squeeze her hips tighter, driving her body into me like a fucktoy until she’s so wet I can hear the squelching sound of my cock inside her along with the slap of my hips against her ass. It feels good. So fucking good. But it doesn’t feel right. I need more.
I flip her over by her hips in a quick motion, only pulling my cock out of her for a few seconds to get her in position before I drive myself back into her. I grip her knees and pulling her closer to me so I can enjoy every last inch of her. She’s watching me with those sexy brown-green eyes, long eyelashes, and a thoughtfulness that takes me off guard.
I squeeze one of her tits, rolling her nipple gently between my fingertips while I pound into her, still battling a strange, confusing sensation that sits at the back of my head--like I’m doing something wrong, missing something.
I lean down over her, my chest pressed to hers and stare into her eyes while I fuck her, so close that our breath mingles together. The act ignites a new kind of fire inside me, something warm and real, more than just lust. I press my hand to her cheek, kissing her and letting my cock slide out of her pussy.
I grin against her lips, feeling her own part into a smile.
“Do I have to beg for it back?” she asks throatily.
Hate at First Sight Page 33