Most Eligible Bastard: an enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy

by Annika Martin

  I need him so bad, I’m shaking. “You have to go back.” Sweat trickles down my spine. “Please.”

  “You’re even hotter begging like this.”

  I grip the rail. “Please.”

  His mouth is near my clit again—I can tell by the heat of his breath. He holds me in place, traps me with his hands and mouth. I’m his prisoner.

  Finally his mouth is back on me again. He feasts on me. I whimper and squirm.

  Hot, determined fingers dig harder into my ass as he licks me into a frenzy. The world begins to dissolve around me.

  When he sucks the bud of my clit into his mouth, my breath goes shallow. “Oh,” I say. One short, sharp word.

  He gives it another pull and the pleasure crashes over me, crashing and breaking over me like a wave. Explosions of surf and pleasure and white-hot light.

  My head falls back against the wall panel. My breath saws in and out. He’s stopped the licking but his mouth hovers there, like he can breath in my ecstasy.

  He moves up my body to stand in front of me. I’m shivering, shaking.

  His hands cradle my cheeks as he rains kisses over my face. “We’re going in there, baby, and I’m going to strip you naked and fuck the daylights out of you. I’m going to fuck you like there’s no tomorrow. You good with that?” He kisses me again. Again.

  His words drug my veins. Good drugs, wild and intoxicating. My mind is thinking yes, and then I'm whispering it. Yes, yes, yes, to the rhythm of his kisses.

  He pulls back, studies my eyes.

  I mouth his name. Long and slow, I mouth it. Hen-ry.

  He exhales raggedly. His hands are on me. He’s picking me up. I scream as I’m whirled around. He carries me through his place, past low lights. Past furnishings. Kitchen. Walls. Hall. Into a spacious bedroom.

  He throws me down on the bed. I scoot back a little, and he crawls right over to me and grabs my legs, yanks me under him. “Where’re you going?”

  I like no past or future. I like no roles. He goes to work on the pearly buttons, fingers trembling. “I never feel like this,” he says, suddenly serious. “I never feel this messed up. Your skirt was an engineering problem I should’ve understood, but I felt like…a bear. My hands like a bear.”

  “I liked it.”

  “I’m serious. You’re all I could think about, all these weeks.”

  “Me, too,” I say. “I watch you. I try not to want you,” I say.

  He growls with satisfaction when he hits my camisole. “Fuck, you always have these under there?”

  “Kind of,” I say.

  He yanks the cups down so they’re under my breasts. “You need to be dealing with that skirt right about now. I need it the fuck off you.” His voice is sluggish with lust and desperation.

  I unhook and unzip my skirt as he tongues my breast. Then he makes me take the rest of my clothes off.

  I’m naked under him, just like I imagined, but he’s not playing his part. I’d imagined hot, arrogant Henry in his beautiful suit, crassly using me.

  Instead he’s skimming his hand over my skin, like he’s learning me. Mapping me. Enjoying the me I hide under the court clothes. Enjoying Vonda.

  It’s too much. Too much vulnerability.

  “Henry.” I reach up.

  He grabs my hands. Kisses a finger. Keeps them clasped in his. “Shh.”

  He runs two fingers under my breast, a whisper of a movement that nudges it up just slightly. “I love you right here.” He slides his palm down over the curve of my belly. I quiver to his touch. “And right here.”

  Stop talking, I think.

  Fingers roam over my hip, pressing, printing. “Here.”

  He nudges apart my legs. My heart jumps into my throat, knowing what’s coming. He trails a lazy finger over my mound. I arch up when he makes contact with my clit. Steely eyes holding mine, he plays with my sensitive folds.

  “You are so beautiful.”

  He’s not just printing me, he’s seeing into me. All the possibilities, the hidden things. Like the Moreno hotel. He sees beauty where everyone else sees rubble for a landfill.

  I whimper. A strange sound to my ears—misery mixed with utter pleasure.

  “I’ve got you, baby.”

  All this time I thought the worst thing that could happen would be me being exposed as Vonda.

  I was wrong.

  The worst thing that can happen is the possibility that he might love Vonda.

  I rip my hands from his grip and pull him closer. “This is hardly fair. You with all the clothes.” I reach down to his cock, grab the bulge, fitting my fingers around best as I can with his pants still on.

  I know when I get it feeling right, because he growls. I pull, erasing everything he’s doing. I bite his ear, taking back control.

  “Not. Fair,” I say.

  “Fair is for judges.” He rises up over me and undoes his belt, looking at me naked under him. He yanks it clear out of the belt loops, all hot and crass.

  The tender mood is gone.

  “I plan to be totally unfair with you. I’m going to exploit every advantage. I'm going to keep you naked underneath me and fuck you until you’re screaming my name.”

  “Uh,” I say.

  He presses my hand to my sex. “Do yourself, baby. Get yourself ready.”

  “I want you to.”

  He gives me a stern look. Bossy, stern Henry hasn’t quite left his CEO self behind. I’m feeling better now. I slide my fingers between my legs. He unbuttons his shirt, gaze heavy on my skin. I get up a rhythm.

  He strips off his shirt, revealing a muscled chest. He tosses the thing aside, then rips off the rest of his clothes, gaze never leaving my fingers. “You don’t know how hot you are.”

  “Come here,” I say. I need him to cover me.

  He’s fumbling in his bedside drawer. A thrill sparkles through me. I turn on my side and slide my palm up his thigh, like a smooth massive pillar, up toward his cock, which juts out hard, thick and veiny and beautiful in the moody shadows of the room.

  Henry’s cock is beautiful, like him.

  “Didn’t you have a job you were supposed to be doing?” he growls.

  “I have a different job now.” I take hold and he groans. “A lateral move,” I add.

  He groans again as I slide my hand around his rock-hard cock. “…gonna kill me,” he mumbles.

  I sit up and lick up the side. “There might be a graze of teeth involved.” I swirl my tongue around the glistening head, salty and smooth.

  With a strangled cry he has me on my back. He’s tossing the condom wrapper. He’s rolling it onto himself with quick, efficient movements, gaze never leaving mine.

  “Fuck me,” I say. My words sound breathless. My entire being feels like it’s in suspension, waiting for him, craving him.

  “You sure?” he asks, sliding his head to my clit with the help of his thumb, which gets me reeling, almost setting me off.

  “I’m sure.” I buck my hips, urging him on.

  He presses me back down, pinning my hips to the bed as he glides himself around on me with perfectly tantalizing pressure.

  He’s rubbing my clit harder and more mercilessly, zeroing in on the most wildly tickly parts of me.

  I make a little begging sound. I’m moving under him, rhythmically, like he’s already fucking me,

  I let out a breath as he pushes into my swollen sex, huge and thick.

  “Holy shit,” he says, voice full of wonder.

  My blood races. Everything is spinning out of control. Being joined with him is too much truth, suddenly. Truth hiding a painful lie.

  “Henry—”

  He kisses the line of my jaw and starts to move inside me. “We don’t have to think of anything,” he says. “Just concentrate on me moving inside you. How hard you have me. What you do to me…” He seems to lose his train of thought here. “How fucking good…” He drives on, driving us upward, stoking the flame of us.

  His skin glistens with sweat.
Hard planes of muscle. A shiver of hair on his belly when I put my hand down there.

  I’m on top awhile, then he’s on top. Then it’s me against the headboard. Every new thing seems to be the best idea ever.

  “I want to memorize every sound you make,” he says. His glistening biceps bulge as he moves over me. Hot, hard flesh. The smell of sweat. Breath sawing. “Everything is new with you. Every way I feel is new with you.”

  “Me, too,” I whisper thickly.

  “You’re close,” he says, and he begins to move slow and steady. He changes his angle, seems to swell inside me, stretching me. It’s painful and good at the same time.

  His eyes burn into mine. The intimacy of it sears.

  Then he’s hitting my clit, and I’m spinning away. “Henry, please! More.” I grab his hair.

  He goes harder. “Pull it, baby. Take what you need.”

  I cry out as an orgasm tears through me.

  He presses his face to my shoulder, stilling, shuddering inside me, coming with a small guttural sound.

  When we’re done, when he’s out of me, he cages me with his arms. “You are so fucking beautiful,” he says.

  I slide a finger down his cheek, then run it back up, down and up, loving the feel of his face, his whiskers. I think he likes when I touch his face almost as much as I do. Or maybe because I do.

  “I was going to take more time,” he says. “I had a plan.”

  I smile.

  “I mean it. I want everything perfect for you.”

  “You were supposed to leave your CEO role behind, remember?”

  “Sorry,” he says.

  “Don’t be. You make me feel like one of your people. You’re so beautiful with your people. They’re so lucky.”

  “You are my people.”

  I swallow and press my finger to his lip, trace the pillow of it. I couldn’t talk even if I wanted to.

  He kisses me again, and I’m in heaven on the cool sheets below him.

  Twenty-Five

  Vicky

  I shower while he makes phone calls about the Ten.

  I dry off and put on one of his soft, beautifully made dress shirts. When I wander out of the bathroom, the smell of garlic and cheese hits my pleasure center full blast.

  I find him cooking. Shirtless. Bare feet. Jeans hugging his hips just so.

  “What are you making?”

  He turns. His eyes go dark. “What are you wearing?”

  I give him an innocent look. “This?”

  He swears and turns back to the stove. “Alfredo sauce. And I’m at a critical point in this operation. There’s wine breathing. Why don’t you pour us a glass.”

  It’s breathing. He’s so fucking nerdy about doing everything perfectly.

  I pour two glasses and go back. Set his by the stove top.

  “You have to add the cheese to the sauce so slowly,” he says, adding a microscopic amount of cheese to the pound of melted butter and heavy cream he’s been stirring slowly and methodically. “So slowly.”

  “It smells amazing.”

  He adds another micro amount, and another, and another. “Most people don’t do it like this.”

  But Henry does.

  I set down my wine and put my arms around him, making contact with the muscles and hard planes of him.

  “You are so going to ruin dinner.”

  I kiss his back. “I’m trying not to.”

  “Trying.” I can hear the smile in his voice. “Trying is not doing.” He flicks off the stove, smashes a lid onto the pan and turns. “Look at you,” he says, advancing on me.

  I back up. “Look at me what?”

  He reaches out but I move just out of his grasp and turn. And run. His place is huge and you can run in it. I make it to the living room.

  Rough hands grab me, turn me around to face him. He grabs the shirt and rips it open, then pushes me down to the couch.

  A condom appears. We fuck furiously, hands grasping, teeth grazing. His hot weight pins me.

  He pulls up my leg to get deeper.

  I hold his hair, taking him, pain and pleasure mingling.

  He smashes his sweaty forehead to my chest when he comes. I stop pulling his hair and just kiss it, coming down from my orgasm and enjoying his.

  I kiss his hair as he comes. He’s everything.

  He flops over at my side.

  He gets this serious look. “It was never like this.” He slides a hank of my hair through two fingers, with an expression like it’s the most amazing hair he’s ever felt.

  “Me, too,” I say.

  He seems to like that. He watches me with such warmth and affection. It feeds my soul. “I'm glad,” he says. “That was unbelievable. I wanted to do everything to you.”

  “You kind of did.”

  “Oh, hardly.”

  “Oh, hardly.” I smile. “I love to feel you come inside me. I love how your body feels.”

  “I love how you breathe,” he says. “Sometimes you just breathe and I want you.”

  I kiss him on the nose.

  “And that biting thing…”

  “Yeah?” I smile.

  “Yeah,” he says. “And that wet finger thing.”

  I narrow my eyes. “What wet finger thing?”

  “You know. The touch.”

  I furrow my brow, trying to think what he means.

  “When you lightly touched my asshole with your wet finger? It was…hot.”

  I frown. God, was I in that much of a fugue state? “I wasn’t doing anything like that.”

  “You just touched it, really lightly.”

  I study his eyes, trying to figure out if he’s joking or what. That’s when Smuckers jumps up and runs over the back of the couch, looking down at us, tail wagging, tongue hanging out. “Oh…” I say.

  “What? What’s wrong?” He follows the direction of my gaze, and a look of horror comes over him.

  Horror.

  I snort and smash my face to his chest.

  “So not funny,” he says.

  “It’s a little funny,” I say into the sweaty pillow of muscle on his chest.

  “Fuck off, Smuckers!”

  I’m just laughing. “I honestly don’t know if that clinches your Most Eligible Bastard status or destroys it,” I say.

  “Don’t even,” he says, rolling on top of me, caging me.

  I snort. “And to think I imagined you didn’t like dogs.”

  “That has to be the last joke you make about that.” He leans down, biceps bulging

  I frown. “The last? Isn’t that a little extreme?”

  He kisses my neck. “I mean it. Or I might retaliate in the most excruciating way.”

  “I might like it,” I say. “But okay. Last joke.”

  Twenty-Six

  Henry

  It’s after seven by the time we sit down to eat. I pour the wine and watch Vicky pick up her fork.

  “You think the sauce survived?” she asks.

  “I know it did.” I set down the bottle and stand behind her, rest my hands over her shoulders. “I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised with this dish.”

  She looks up at me. “You just think you’re Mr. Awesome.”

  “Kind of.” I kiss her cheek.

  “I’ll be the judge of that.” She swirls the noodles in the sauce. “The talent portion of Most Eligible Bastard contest,” she jokes.

  I lean in closer. “I do believe I aced the talent portion of the contest earlier tonight.”

  “Hmmm,” she says. “Good point.”

  She slips the forkful of fettuccini between her pretty lips.

  A sheen of pure wonder creeps into her gaze. “Oh, my god,” she says.

  “What’s that?”

  She gazes back up at me, brown eyes sparkling. “Parmesan garlic taste freak-out.”

  I sit down. We eat. A lot. She actually has seconds, like the best date ever.

  After dinner we take Smuckers out, strolling around in search of dessert.
We decide on a bag of warm baklava from a food truck. We take it into Central Park and sit on a bench, feasting while we watch an extremely acrobatic man dance to a fiddle and a snare drum.

  Vicky makes exactly zero jokes about what I’ll refer to as The Smuckers Incident. In fact, she doesn’t have to; all she has to do is look at Smuckers and then look at me with an utterly innocent expression, and the joke is in the air.

  “Fuck off,” I growl.

  “What?” she laughs. “I can’t look at you guys now? My two fave guys?”

  “No, you can’t,” I snarl.

  I’m not mad. It’s fun. It’s all fun with her, like the best kind of escape, the way it was at Southfield Studios, us hiding from the world and carving out our own zone of simple pleasure inside the larger, more complicated real world.

  She leans against me. Whatever hesitation she had about us being together before seems gone.

  What was it?

  She’s an enigma, but I don’t mind. The more layers of her I peel away, the more I like her. The more I want her.

  I put my arm around her. She snuggles closer and something in me warms.

  It’s strange sitting in the park with Vicky. And it strikes me as strange that it would strike me as strange…until it occurs to me that every activity in my life fits into one of two categories: seduction and business.

  Sitting in the moonlit park fits into neither. It’s just nice.

  How did my life get so unbalanced? Even my beach house in the Hamptons—I use it to entertain clients or I don’t use it at all.

  It’s not there for pleasure, and I certainly never take women up there—I don’t like to give them the wrong idea, which is that our short-term hookups might not be short-term hookups.

  “Hey,” I say. “What are you and Carly doing for Labor Day weekend?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Nothing special.”

  “You want to get out of the city? I have a beach place in the Hamptons.”

  She sits up, seeming alarmed.

  I brush a strand of hair from her eyes. It’s so sexy when she wears it down. “What is it?”

  “Well…” She stares at a crushed Pepsi can, shining in the grass. “With everything so crazy…”