by Tia Siren
“Keep going, baby,” he said. “Let yourself go. I can feel how close you are.”
Paige’s fingers clutched desperately at the leather to root herself there. It all became too much. She felt herself come hard in violent shudders that ripped through every inch of her body. Sated, she fell against the leather cushions and pillows while trying to regain her breath.
She came back to when Luke reached down to unzip his pants. Nerves crashed down on her, chasing away that thumping pleasure in her body.
“Luke,” she started, shaking her head, “we can’t do this here. Toby or someone is going to be here any minute.”
That caught Luke’s attention. A wicked grin tugged at his lips.
“You’re right,” he said. “So, I’ll settle for something else in the meantime.”
Wariness filled her when Luke reached into his pants. Her eyes flicked down to take in his hard erection, and she swallowed the thick lump of desire at the back of her throat.
He has every right to walk around the way he does.
She stood stone still, taking in the sheer size of him. The tip of his cock glistened as he reached forward to grab her trembling hand.
“Touch me.”
Paige’s eyes widened at the command. “What?”
“Do it quickly,” Luke said, guiding her hand to his arousal. “I can hear Toby coming up the hallway outside.”
The heat and hardness surprised her as Luke circled her fingers around him. It would never be possible for them to have sex. The size, the length of him. Paige swallowed thickly as Luke guided her hand up and down him in a hurried fashion.
Those nerves faded away as she watched pleasure contort Luke’s face. His head was tilted back slightly as low-throated groans left his mouth. His skin was a simmering rosy red while his hips bucked under her hand’s movement.
“Keep going,” he gritted out, thrusting openly against her hand now. “Keep going, baby. Don’t stop.”
His hand released her wrist to clutch at the couch when his body spasmed with his own orgasm. He let out a sharp cry while he released himself onto her hand and thighs. Paige let go of him quickly as the front door opened, followed by Toby’s voice calling out for them.
Luke lifted his head to look down at her. There was something about this gaze that was different this time around. She couldn’t decipher it though.
Footsteps approached the bedroom.
“Better make yourself decent,” Luke said. “Although, I’m sure Toby’s used to stumbling in on me like this.”
He laughed while quickly zipping up his pants. Distantly, she wiped herself dry with the edge of the blanket that was on the back of the couch before rising to her feet. Her legs threatened to give out from the conflicted feelings rushing through her. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Luke as he wiped his forehead clean of sweat.
“I need to go back to New York,” Paige said. “I need to get back to my dorm to study for my exams I have to make up tomorrow night.”
It was a flat-out excuse and lie to run from the intensity of the situation between them. Luke knew it, too, from the cool look he sent her.
“You don’t have to regret what happened,” he said a bit sharply. “I don’t know the bullshit your parents put in your head—”
Spite filled her at the mention of her parents. “Don’t talk about my parents like you know them, Luke. They are good people who raised and loved me.”
“They filled your head with bullshit. It’s okay to be attracted to someone, and to be with them in whatever way you want.”
“Get out,” Paige cried, rising from the couch to shove him in the chest. “Get the fuck out of my room, you heartless drunk.”
“Luke?” Toby called out, knocking on the door. “Are you in there?”
“Yes,” Luke said. His eyes glittered angrily as he rounded the couch to the bedroom door. He paused before opening the door, giving Paige a look that rooted her to the spot. A long moment had passed between them before he opened the door to step out. Then the door slammed shut, vibrating in the frame, and she heard them walk away and out of her suite.
She let out a trembling breath before collapsing on the side of the bed. There was no hope of escape tonight. Even if a part of her wanted to get behind the wheel and navigate through the blizzard conditions, Luke was right. She was stuck in the lodge with him no matter what happened.
“What have I gotten myself into?” Paige whispered, rubbing at her face in frustration. She had told Luke about one of her biggest scars, but that hadn’t mattered when it came to the magnetic tug she felt between them. She didn’t think of things like that when she was with him, and that unnerved her more than anything.
Rising, she readied herself for bed by slipping into a sleeping shirt. Sleep took her surprisingly fast, and it wasn’t until blankets were being tugged back from her legs that she woke to a completely pitch black room. The fire in her fireplace was now completely out.
Luke’s spicy and familiar cologne filled Paige’s lungs. She lifted her head to gaze him as he slipped into the bed next to her, a mixture of alarm and sleepy confusion filling her.
“Luke?”
Strong arms wrapped around her waist in response. A scruffy and wet cheek pressed up against the back of her neck.
“I’m not trying to do anything,” Luke said. The tremble in his voice disarmed the tension in Paige’s spine. “I just want to lay here next to you. Please.”
She could smell the whiskey on his breath again, but true to his word, he didn’t make any advances. The muscles in Luke’s body relaxed a moment later, and the mattress shifted from the extra weight. He was asleep and snoring within a matter of minutes, one arm wrapped around her waist tightly.
Paige let her head fall back down on the pillow, because it was pointless to try to move away. If she moved, he would wake, and her head already ached from their previous argument. She was still angry with him, though, for his harsh words—even if it had been the alcohol talking.
These were the moments that made it hard to see Luke as any other man. He was the type of man haunted by demons who lashed out at anyone or anything. She also had a feeling he didn’t just sleep with anyone. Ever.
Her heart skipped at the thought.
It’s just an arrangement, Paige. She forced her eyes to close, trying to drift back to sleep with Luke’s strong body curled up against hers in a protective gesture. It’s just a business deal for us both.
Chapter Ten
Luke
Luke felt a warm body curled up next to him when the sound of the snow plow stirred him back from a drunk but surprisingly peaceful sleep. A pair of soft and shapely legs were tangled with his own beneath the blanket. His arm was curled over a slender waist.
Luke forced his eyes open and stared at the back of Paige’s head as snippets from the night before replayed in his mind. He had kissed Paige out frustration after dinner. They had argued vehemently in her room, too, before passion had taken ahold of them both. He had been so close to having her. He could still remember the feeling of Paige’s thighs gripping his hips, the cotton of her underwear rubbing against him.
He hardened just thinking about it. He was surely going to explode if he didn’t find a way to get Paige’s defenses down.
And lying in bed with her, her curled up on her side and only wearing a large sleeping shirt, didn’t help anything.
Lifting his arm slowly so as not to stir her, Luke let that hand slip beneath the hemline of her shirt. A strong back and warm skin greeted his fingertips as he traced the bumps of her spine with a painful longing. Of all the women in the world, this one was the perfect one, but she refused to let him be the one place he wanted to be.
It hit him hard then why he had come stumbling back down the hallway drunk. It hadn’t been over the nightmare of his father. It had been because he’d craved that sense of comfort he found in Paige’s presence at all times.
Luke swallowed thickly at the realization. He had to get h
imself in check before he let things get out of control in this area that was foreign to him. Falling in love was not on the agenda. Staying married was not on the agenda either, and he had a feeling there was a part of Paige that hoped they would remain that way.
I’m going to break her heart by doing this.
For a moment, though, he savored the intimate feeling of Paige’s warm body curled against him as she slept on peacefully, unaware of the torment raging inside him.
He untangled his legs from Paige’s slowly and then slipped out of bed. He ghosted his side and then tucked the sheets and blankets back up over Paige’s shoulder before he left the room to return to his own for a shower. The entire lodge was motionless, as he expected at such an early hour.
Father down the hallway, though, he heard the kitchen staff over the bubbling of freshly brewing coffee as they prepared for breakfast.
His room was still toasty thanks to the now-smoldering fire he had made in the fireplace. The whiskey bottle and glass were still on the table where he had left them the night before. He realized it was a right damn miracle that he hadn’t done something irrationally stupid when he saw the level of the amber liquid. He needed to slow it down a bit. His head even ached from it.
There were five missed phone calls from Alicia, too, when he checked his phone.
“Who is this bitch I see you with all over the papers and tabloids?” she demanded in one voice mail. “This was your big and grand loophole and plan to get your inheritance? What sort of bastard are you?”
“The worse one,” Luke answered, and tossed his phone onto the table with a frustrated sigh.
He let the hot shower water soak every aching muscle in his body. When he finished, he heard the rest of the lodge stirring awake as he walked into the kitchen. Toby was sitting at the breakfast bar with snowflakes dusting his broad shoulders.
“Good morning, sunshine,” he said cynically. “Coffee?”
“Yes,” Luke said, grimacing at the headache throbbing in his temples. “I need some Tylenol too.”
He sat down on the breakfast bar stool next to Toby as one of the kitchen staffers poured a cup of coffee and handed him two Tylenol. He gulped them down with a hot swish of coffee.
“Where is everyone at?” Luke asked, setting his mug down on the countertop. “Did my father’s friends leave yet?”
“Yes. They plowed the roads and left while you were in the shower.”
“What about Paige?”
Toby frowned at him. “She didn’t get up and leave with them, if that’s what you are wondering.”
“That was what I was wondering.” He felt the weight of Toby’s stare on him as he took another gulp of coffee.
“You weren’t in your room this morning,” Toby said slowly. “Please tell me that you two—”
“We didn’t,” Luke cut in, shaking his head. “Nothing happened between us last night. I just—”
He had no explanation for what had prompted him to go straight to Paige’s room for comfort after a nightmare he couldn’t even remember. It had made sense to him at the time.
And she hadn’t kicked him out either. They had slept curled around each other all night long without waking once until the snow blowers.
“Nothing happened,” he repeated again. “That’s all I can think of to tell you.”
“Well, whatever is going on between you two is working. Your father’s friends seem to think that you and Paige have some connection that is once in a lifetime.”
“I’m sure Peter will love to hear that. They only wanted to eat and drink here to see if my relationship with Paige was real.”
“And you made it real by disappearing for a good portion of the night with her. Here.” Toby scooted a pile of stapled papers across the countertop to him. “These are the questions you and Paige need to go over this week.”
Luke flipped through the questions as he gulped down his coffee quickly. He raised his mug to ask for more when the kitchen door pushed open.
Paige froze when she caught sight of him sitting next to Toby at the breakfast bar. Her brown locks were damp from a shower, and she was back in her normal attire of leggings, boots, and a loose gray sweater. Their eyes met. His chest clenched when Paige approached them after getting herself a cup of coffee.
She didn’t want to talk about last night, or at least not a good portion of it. They needed to go over the questions, though, if they had to meet with Peter in a week. Ignoring the awkward tension between them, Luke scooted over onto another stool to give her a place to sit. He cleared his throat when images from the night before replayed in his mind.
“These are the questions we have to go over,” he said, handing Paige a copy. “We should go over them on our way back to New York.”
She glanced down at the questions. “Can we do this some other time? I really do have a lot of homework to do on the plane trip back.”
“We should do them today,” Luke said. “I don’t want Peter finding some hole between us.”
“Fine,” Paige said shortly. “I’m going to have my coffee in the study. Is that okay with you?”
He didn’t know what to make of her abrupt change of attitude. Paige slipped off her stool with the papers in hand, leaving the kitchen just as quickly as she had entered it. Guilt lodged in his stomach when Toby looked at him with a sigh.
“I know you don’t want to hear this—”
“I don’t,” Luke snapped, grabbing his coffee as well. “I need to talk with her. I did and said some shit last night that wasn’t right.”
“Whiskey makes you a mean son of a bitch,” Toby said, shaking his head. “I’m telling you that you need to cut that shit down.”
“I’ll figure it out,” Luke said.
His hands were shaking as he walked down to his father’s old study. It was his study now, but he found himself raising a hand out of habit to knock. Not that it had ever mattered. There had been too many times in Luke’s life that he burst into his father’s study to find him passed out over his desk, in his chair, and even on the floor.
Paige was standing in front of one of the windows that overlooked the back part of the lodge. She turned to look at him as he closed the door behind himself.
“I wanted to talk to you alone,” he said. “About last night—”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” Paige said abruptly. “Let’s just forget about it, okay? You were drunk, and I was upset. Things were said, and we did things we shouldn’t have done.”
“What’s wrong with being close to someone?” Luke asked.
He ran a gaze along his father’s study with a mixture of bitter feelings. A fine layer of dust had covered the bookshelves, and he had a feeling if he pulled out certain books, he’d fine empty shooter bottles—most likely full and unopened ones too.
“I never said there was,” Paige said. She glanced around as well. “Was this your father’s office?”
Luke nodded.
“If you think my drinking is bad, pull out a few books to see what my father used to hide from the rest of the world.”
Paige set her mug of coffee and the papers down on the desk. She pulled out a few books, and three plastic shooter bottles fell to her feet. Sadness filled her eyes as she pushed the books back onto the shelf.
“Do you want to be like your father?”
“No,” Luke said adamantly. “I don’t want to be like him.”
“Not even the rich billionaire part of it?”
“Maybe that part of it isn’t so bad. The other part, not so much.”
Paige gave him a piercing look. “You do realize that you are walking in those same footsteps, right?”
That dark and painful part of him gave a jolt just thinking of all the ways he had turned out exactly like Roderick Turner. They both enjoyed the bottle too much. His heart and insides hurt every single time he woke with the bitter taste of vomit and repulsion in the back his mouth. It was the same feeling that had pushed him to sex. At least that gave him
a better feeling than whiskey.
“You need some help,” Paige said. “I can—”
“I don’t need any help. Try being me for a day, and then you’ll understand why I drink.”
“All I’m asking is for you to tone it down. None of this is going to work if you are going to be a fall-down drunk.”
She retrieved her coffee and the papers. “I’ll see you in the car to head back to the city. I’ll study these questions for the plane ride there.”
She left him standing there motionlessly in the center of his nightmares. The money, the wealth, the power, it had caused all the Turner men to fall. It took a different amount of time for each, but it happened eventually.
Luke reached out to smudge dust off one of the bookshelves. Pulling a book free, he caught a full shooter bottle of amber liquid. He didn’t hesitate in twisting the cap off to let the liquid burn the back of his throat.
It wasn’t his time to fall just yet.
****
“We seriously have to answer all these questions?” Paige asked. She flipped through a packet of questions that Toby had given them earlier.
“Yes,” Toby said, looking up at them both in exasperation. “What’s the problem?”
Luke shrugged his shoulders as he reclined in his seat. He glanced out the plane window at the blur of colors below.
“Some of these questions are a bit personal,” Paige said. “More personal than what Luke really needs to know about me.”
“If you don’t answer them, you’re gambling with Peter.” Toby reached forward to tap her packet. “I know he’ll be asking these types of questions. So, ask Luke a question, he’ll give you an answer, and you do the same.”
Luke grinned when Paige, irritated, looked over at him.
“Fine,” she said. “Where were born?”
“Bismarck, North Dakota,” he responded. “You?”