by Claire Adams
“Did you happen to forget about the part where things were under half a foot of water?”
“No! I didn’t! I’m here right now, actually. I figured you would’ve come by at some point. It doesn’t look as bad as I thought it was going to be. Most of the equipment is actually okay. Well, the mats are trashed, but that doesn’t surprise me. I don’t think this flood has to be the end of business.”
“How about the fact that you were embezzling money?”
“I wasn’t embezzling money! It’s all going to be paid back!”
“It doesn’t matter if you were planning to pay it back or not!” I said. “The fact of the matter is, it wasn’t yours to take to lend out to your boyfriend. Listen, Kelly,” I said, “we should talk about this later.”
“Want to meet me at the gym this afternoon?”
“Uh . . . no. I can’t today. I’ll give you a call soon, though, okay? And we’ll set up a time to get together.”
“Are you sure everything’s okay, Isla? You’re being kind of weird—”
“Everything’s great. I’ll talk to you soon, okay? Bye.” I hung up before she could say anything else.
Levi came over and held out a bowl of strawberries. “Morning, sunshine,” he said. “Rather, afternoon.”
I took a strawberry. “Afternoon? What times is it?”
“Almost twelve-thirty.”
“Shit! Are you serious? Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“What is the first rule of vacation? The first rule of vacation is that you get to sleep as late as you want.”
“Oh.” I took a bite of the strawberry. “Mmm. These are good.”
“There’s a little farmers’ market a few blocks away. I made more coffee.”
“Thanks. I will definitely need some.” I followed him into the kitchen and he poured me a cup.
“So,” he said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop or anything, but . . . you were being kind of harsh, don’t you think? On the phone just now?
“You think I was being harsh?”
“A little bit, all things considered.”
I stared at him. “She took money out of our business account to give to her boyfriend. I don’t even know if he’s her boyfriend; she hasn’t known him for that long. Why? What would you do in this situation if you had some sort of business and you thought your partner was just taking money for themselves? Just be fine with it?”
He shrugged. “It’s hard to say.”
“Right—because you’ve never been in a situation like that. Where you’ve actually had to work hard to achieve something.”
I cringed inwardly. I hadn’t meant to say that last part, even though I thought it was true. It’s not like he had a business of his own that he was running, yet anyway. Maybe he’d realize that things could be a little more complicated when he finally went into work at BCM.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that last part.”
“It’s fine. Just because I have a trust fund, though, doesn’t mean I don’t have some other things going on, you know.”
“What do you mean?”
He gave me a mysterious look, to which I took to mean he was completely bullshitting me. He didn’t have anything else going on, other than a seemingly insatiable need to have a good time.
He pulled me toward him. “I’ve been wanting to do that since we got here. Let’s just drop all this business talk for now, okay? We’re here on this beautiful island together and I want nothing more than for you to enjoy yourself. Do you think you can do that?”
He had slipped his hand underneath the bottom of my tank top and was running his thumb lightly against my hip bone. I set my coffee down on the counter and put my arms around his neck.
“Yes,” I said. Nervousness was trying to muscle its way in and paralyze me, but I ignored it. I looked him right in the eye as he leaned closer to me.
“Now,” he said, his face less than an inch away from mine, “the last time we tried to do this, it didn’t go exactly as planned. So let’s give it another shot.” He brushed his lips against mine. “Mmm,” he said. “You taste even better than those strawberries.”
I let my eyes close and kissed him back. He slid his hands up my shirt. I wasn’t wearing a bra and he squeezed my breasts gently as we kissed. I could feel my breathing getting heavier as our kiss intensified, his tongue entwining with mine, running lightly over my teeth, our mouths both open wide, pressed against each other.
I could feel his cock pressed against me and I reached down and squeezed it through his shorts. He groaned softly and started to roll my nipples between his forefinger and thumb. I stopped touching him and unbuttoned his shorts and pushed them down. He pulled my shirt off and we separated from the kiss long enough for him to get the shirt over my head. He took his own shirt off and led me out into the living room, where the door to the terrace was open and a warm breeze was blowing lightly across the room.
He took me over to the couch and had me stand there while he pushed my shorts all the way down to my ankles, then my underwear.
“Sit down,” he said.
I sat on the couch and he kneeled in front of me, pushing my legs apart. He kissed a trail up my right thigh, all the way to my pussy, and then he started to lick me slowly. My breath caught in my throat and I bit down on my lip, trying not to cry out.
Now was obviously the time. I was supposed to laugh at his cock or kick him in the balls, but what I had failed to take into account was the fact that, once we got started, I might not want it to end so abruptly.
And I didn’t.
I wanted him to keep doing exactly what it was he was doing. In fact, I never wanted him to stop.
I closed my eyes as he started licking my clit, sliding one finger into me, then another. The feeling was intense, this roller coaster, swirling feeling in my stomach and pelvis that kept getting stronger and stronger. But it’s like I could tell it wasn’t going to reach its full peak unless I had more of him inside of me; his fingers weren’t enough. My whole body felt like it was pulsating.
He stopped, suddenly, and I opened my eyes. “Very nice,” he said. I shifted on the couch so I was lying down, and he lowered himself on top of me. He kept himself supported on his forearms as he moved his pelvis, first to the right, then a little to the left, and then I felt the head of his cock sliding into me. I held my breath, waiting for the pain, but there was none. There was just this delicious sliding feeling, this wonderful feeling of being perfectly fulfilled as he slid all the way in. It didn’t hurt at all, and I exhaled as he started to move slowly. I reached down and grabbed his ass, felt those smooth muscles flexing and relaxing. He kissed my collarbone and then my neck and I ran my hands up his back, digging my nails in as the sensations started to build. I arched my back and felt him go in even further, and I cried out, even though I was trying not to. I could no longer help the noises that were escaping from my mouth, the same way I couldn’t control what I was feeling anymore, either. Levi was moving faster, his breathing heavier, his own eyes closed, his brow furrowed. The faster he moved, the more incredible the feeling was inside of me; it felt like a rising tidal wave that kept going higher and higher until finally, it crashed, the pure, perfect pleasure of it cascading all over me. I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him to me as closely as I could, and he kept moving his hips, faster and faster, his breath heavy, a low growl building in his throat until he let out an anguished-sounding cry and yanked his hips back, pulling his cock out of me completely, his come spurting out onto my abdomen.
I knew I should have had him put a condom on, but I hadn’t cared right then; all I had wanted was to have him inside of me. He got up and went to the bathroom and came back with a towel that he wiped my stomach down with. Then he lay next to me, exhaling loudly.
“There’s probably a million cliché things I could say right now, so I won’t,” he said. “I’ll just leave it at wow.” He kissed my shoulder and ran his fingers through my hair.
“I can
totally agree with you on that,” I said, my body still buzzing with that delicious feeling.
21.
Levi
The second rule of vacation is that when you can spend the entire day fucking, you do it.
Isla and I didn’t end up leaving the house that day; she got up late, but after we had sex, we went back to bed and had more sex. Rest and repeat. We paused to get some food delivered around ten o’clock that night, but that was it.
Now that’s the kind of vacation I’m talking about.
But the next morning, Isla was up early the next morning to go for a run.
“You’re on vacation,” I said.
“I know.” She had on a pair of tight running shorts and a pink Lycra tank top. Damn, she looked good.
“So that means you should come back over here, let me take those clothes off of you, and get back into bed.”
She smiled, a little dryly, it would seem. Hmm. Usually such charms would work wonders, but not with her, at least not right now.
“It really doesn’t have anything to do with me being on vacation, or needing a break from it. It’s sort of like something I have to do. And besides, we were in bed all day yesterday.”
“Are you complaining about that?”
“Certainly not. But running—it’s something I just have to do. I haven’t been as good about it lately, but I need to do it.”
“You know, if you were talking about, say, I don’t know, cocaine or something, instead of running, people would be saying you needed all sorts of help.”
“If this is your way of trying to talk me back into bed, it’s really not working.”
I yawned and stretched. “But there are few finer things in life than getting to lie in bed with the sunlight pouring through the windows, knowing that you’ve got the whole day ahead of you to do whatever you want.”
“I won’t be gone that long. You’ll probably still be in bed by the time I get back.”
And she flounced out of the room.
I rolled over onto my side, my head sinking into the goose down pillow. Okay, I’ll be honest—I’d never had a woman be so nonchalant with me before. Any other girl would’ve been back in that bed with me two seconds flat if I asked. But Isla was . . . a little ambivalent, actually. Not last night, of course, but now, certainly. I wasn’t particularly bothered by it, though. Not at all, really. If anything, I found it to make her all the more intriguing. Made me want to try all the harder to really entice her, to make her wild with desire for me. Not just when I was in the middle of fucking her, but all the time. Enough so I could just look at her from across the room and she’d return my gaze with a hungry, insatiable look of her own.
I could’ve dozed for hours, drifting off into that half-sleep, half-awake zone where dreams and reality seemed a little too intertwined. In the dream, Alfie was there. He’d bought Ibiza, he said. He’d bought it and he was asking me to leave.
“But I love it here,” I told him. “I can’t leave.”
“You have to,” he said. “It’s mine now.”
I opened my eyes and forced myself up. That dream was, if anything, a sign that I just needed to get this talk with Alfie over with. I sent him a text, and he responded right away.
I’ll swing by, he wrote. I’m not too far away.
I glanced at the clock. I didn’t know exactly when Isla would be back, but I didn’t want her to walk in when I was having the talk.
OK, I typed back. I don’t have that much time, tho.
U got a hot date? he asked.
Something like that.
I tossed the phone down and pulled on some clothes. Alfie was knocking on the door less than five minutes later, and he strolled in, smelling faintly of cigarettes and some sort of botanical perfume. He probably hadn’t been to sleep yet.
“Busy night last night?” I asked.
He grinned. “Always is, mate, always is. Spent most of the night down at Sway, had a grand old time. Missed seeing you though—we figured you’d be around. I wanted to introduce you to the lovely Celeste.”
“I was a little busy myself.”
Alfie looked around. “Am I interrupting something?”
“No, no one else is here at the moment. Here, why don’t we sit down? There’s something that we needed to talk about.”
“Right,” he said, looking pleased, like he’d been anticipating this chat. Did he somehow guess what I was going to say? Was he actually happy about it? I hadn’t expected him to be thrilled, but if he was going to take the news graciously, well, that just made it all the easier for me. I smiled, feeling encouraged.
“So,” I said. “You know that I’ve appreciated being in business with you all these years.”
“Likewise, mate. It’s been going better than I ever thought it would. I mean that.”
I took a deep breath. “There’s no real good way to put this,” I said, “so I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m going to have to stop . . . this.” I gestured vaguely around me.
Alfie gave me a confused look. “What?” he said, which came out sounding more like, Wot.
“What I’ve been doing here,” I said. “What we’ve been doing here. I’ve got to stop.”
“Why?”
“Well . . . you know that my dad died.”
“Right. I figured if anything that would make you feel a little more free about things. You never came out and said it, but I could tell there was a part of you that was afraid your old man would find out what you were up to out here. You don’t have to worry about that anymore.”
I shook my head. “That’s not it. I mean, maybe on some subconscious level you’re right, I don’t know, but, I can’t keep doing this. When I get back to New York, I’ve got to get down to business. I have to get serious about shit. I have to put on a button-down shirt and cover this up.” I pointed to the tattoos on my forearm.
Alfie looked truly perplexed. “What are you talking about? A button down shirt?”
“My dad left his business to me. Which means I’ve actually got to show up.”
“You can’t just sell it?”
“I’m not going to sell it.”
“But you don’t know anything about running a business! At least not one like that.”
“What do you mean?”
Alfie shrugged. “Don’t think I didn’t look your dad up online,” he said. “Bassett Capital Management. I wanted to check it out. See what you were all about. You didn’t look me up at all? I don’t have my own website like that or nothin, but I got a Facebook.”
“Uh, no, Alfie, I didn’t look you up. And we are friends on Facebook.”
“Only because I sent you that request though. So you mean you wouldn’t be friends on Facebook if I hadn’t sent you the request?”
I stared at him. “Are we really having this conversation right now? Who the fuck cares about Facebook?”
“You’re right—that’s not really my point. My point is that I do know a little something about your history, even if you’ve chosen not to share that with me. Don’t get freaked out—it wasn’t like I was being a stalker or anything.”
“You sure? That sounds a little stalker-ish.”
“You mean to tell me that if some bloke you barely knew wanted to bankroll an illicit operation you had in mind, you’d just go for it? You wouldn’t give a toss who the guy was or where the funds were coming from? That sort of thing might work for you, mate, but I needed to know at least a little bit.”
“Then you shouldn’t have looked up my dad’s company, because up until recently, that really didn’t have anything to do with me.”
“I’d say it had plenty—it’s not like that money was yours.”
I took a deep breath. This wasn’t the conversation I wanted to be having, It was pointless what Alfie thought of me or where I got my money from anyway, since we were no longer going to be doing business together.
“It’s yours,” I said. “I’m giving you my share of the business. I mean, it�
�s not like it’s even that formal, it’s not like we own stock in it or something. You’re the CEO now, man. The sole CEO. It’s up to you. And you can bring on whoever else you want, you can shake things up, or you can keep everything how it is, which seems to be working just fine.”
Alfie shook his head. “It’s not, though, actually. That’s why I thought you wanted to talk to me. Because you’d heard.”
“Heard what?”
“That we’ve got competition. There’s this chemist in Rotterdam who has apparently managed to make something virtually identical to Lush, but with zero comedown effects. The people who have taken it have confirmed this. And it’s bloody cheap! There’s no way that we’re going to be able to compete with that, unless we can get the stuff off the market. And to do that, we need to flood it with Lush, at a cheaper price than what they’re pushing. We need to move about three times what we’re currently doing.”
I nodded. “Okay, well, it sounds to me like you’ve got it all figured out. I have all the confidence in you, Alfie. You’ve always done a stellar job; it really hasn’t had anything to do with me.”
“It’s had everything to do with you,” he said. “You’re the bank.”
“But you’ve made plenty,” I said. “You’re living pretty comfortably, aren’t you?”
“I’ve gotten used to a comfortable life, yes. But I’ve also made some bad investments. Now is not a good time for you to bail, mate, is what I’m trying to say.”
“Maybe get yourself a partner, then,” I said. “Someone’s who’s good with money.”
Alfie did not look pleased with my suggestion, but I knew he just needed a little time to let the idea settle.
“It’s going to be fine, Alfie,” I said. “You’ll see. Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t know when Isla’s going to be back from her run, and I’d rather she not walk in on us having this conversation. She doesn’t . . . she doesn’t know anything about it, and I’d like to keep it that way.”