Chase found himself gaping into the stunned brown eyes of Julie Barnes, the petite blonde who was straddling him, in complete shock. It was late morning, and the sun was quickly rising, blaring into the windows that flanked his king sized bed on either side.
Chase had blessedly woken up to the sight of his cock between this beauty’s pretty pink lips, thrusting in search of her warm tongue while smiling at the pleasant surprise.
He’d picked Lila up from jail less than 24 hours ago. Having spent the rest of the night piecing her house back together while she strutted around in that infuriating robe, it was no surprise that she was still at the forefront of Chase’s mind. In fact, Lila had been so squarely at the forefront of his mind that he’d spent the better part of the morning working hard to get her out. With a little help from his beautiful blonde company, who’d stopped grinding on top of him in mid-swirl, he’d been well on his way.
He was still inside her as he sputtered for an appropriate response, only managing a confused grunt when she threw his royal blue sheets away, leapt off the bed, and began to dress frantically. Being torturously ripped away from Julie’s warmth, Chase’s dick slapped his stomach. The slap sounded angry. Like his penis was aware that he’d cost them both a good time.
“Julie, come on. You’re imagining things.”
She hadn’t been.
She’d been doing a beautiful job showing him a morning of delight and ecstasy. Apparently, she’d shown him so much delight and ecstasy that he’d screamed out the name of the one woman he’d never had, but couldn’t seem to get out of his head.
When he realized this was a fight fought in vain, he fell back on his pillows with a plop, still staring up at the ceiling in dismay.
Julie left the room in a huff, and his brain raced.
Who the fuck is Lila?
He didn’t even know where to begin.
With a deep groan and throbbing dick, he rolled out of bed, stalked across his room and started a cold shower.
--
“Almeida. Whaddup doe?”
Chase nodded to his roommate, Ronnie, as he made his way out of his bedroom, freshly showered. He adjusted the basketball shorts on his hips as he moved barefoot across the concrete floors of their two-bedroom apartment.
Ronnie, the alarmingly tall, skinny, vanilla latte colored starting center for the Harvard Crimson basketball team, was cooking up his famous breakfast dish, eggs and chorizo. Half black and half Mexican, it was a dish that his mother had taught him to make years ago. It always reminded Ronnie of home, and it was delicious.
Since Chase had purchased the upscale apartment with cash from he and his brother’s inheritance, he was happy to offer his best friend the second room at half what it was worth. Ronnie came from a single parent household. Raising him, his mother barely had two pennies to rub together, and she worked three jobs to help pay for his food and housing once he came to Harvard. She always made it a point to thank Chase by stuffing him with her delicious cooking every time she was in town to visit. Her eggs and chorizo had always been his favorite, and Ronnie made a mean duplicate.
“Morning,” Chase grumbled, scratching his bare stomach. He squinted against the bright sunlight blaring through their windows as he stepped into the kitchen, grateful when he opened the stainless steel fridge and successfully blocked it out. “Smells good.”
“Have at it, son. Plenty to go around.” Ronnie smiled proudly, his giant Afro moving with him as he took the cast iron skillet from the stove to the island, spooning the eggs onto two plates. He left the third plate empty. “I was planning on making a plate for your company too, but she just got done storming the fuck outta here, so… More for us.”
Chase took a swig of orange juice straight from the carton, burping.
“What set her off?” Ronnie asked.
Returning the juice to the fridge, Chase closed the door, turning to his friend with crossed arms. “I said Lila’s name.”
“During?”
“Yeah.”
Ronnie chuckled. “Shit...”
“I can’t get her out of my fucking head.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I would fuck the shit out of her, Ron.”
Ronnie chortled.
“She knows it too. That’s why she fights me so hard.” Chase looked deeply pained as he sat down at the kitchen island next to Ronnie, and they began to dig into their eggs.
“You really need to figure out a way to move on from that, my dude. Cause she’s definitely not thinking about you.”
“She’s always thinking about me,” Chase said, between bites. “She just can’t admit it.”
“You’ve been spouting that same bullshit all year. Move on, dude. She is not. Thinkin’. About you.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know her.”
“I know she just got done fucking some dude who showed up in the middle of class the other day. I know that.”
That got Chase’s attention. His head flew up, eggs forgotten.
Ronnie nodded. “Swear to god, man. Dude shows up in the middle of class, takes Professor James out the room, and she comes back ten minutes later hair fucked up, lipstick fucked up, wearing his shirt. Wearing his shit. That shirt was at least five sizes too big for her, my dude. It was hilarious.”
Chase dropped his fork audibly, unable to stand anything about this conversation, but also unable to reel in the curiosity raging around in his stomach. He knew that Lila dated. In fact, she’d dated many guys in the year she’d been in Cambridge. They came and went at various intervals. None ever stuck for too long. That didn’t make it any easier to hear about. “Who was the guy? Does he work on campus?”
Ronnie wasn’t a cruel person, and he wasn’t setting out to hurt his friend, but Chase had been running after Professor James for way too long. Ronnie was only telling Chase about her nailing some guy because he felt obligated to help him move on with his life. Now he was wondering if it had been the right thing to do.
“Nah man,” Ronnie answered, more gently. “I never seen him before.”
“What did he look like?”
He shrugged with a frown. “Some white dude. Tall? Dark hair?”
Chase let his eyes flutter shut as reality washed over him. He reached up and covered his face with his hands.
“What?” Ronnie pressed, suddenly feeling bad. Perhaps he’d gone a little too hard on his friend’s fragile feelings. With all of the pretty young things Chase brought giggling into their apartment every night, Ronnie thought Chase might’ve finally made it to a place where he could move on. Clearly that wasn’t the case, and Ronnie never wanted to hurt his feelings. “You know him, or something?”
“Yeah.” Chase picked up his fork and tried to go back to his eggs, but he just played them against the sharp tines, staring blankly ahead. “He’s my brother.”
--
“Rise and shine, fiancé.” Kelly Hannigan sang into Jack Almeida’s ear from where she sat on the small of his back.
Jack grumbled his response but didn’t open his eyes.
“Come on, babe. You’ve slept the morning and the afternoon away. We’ve got that party tonight remember? I’ve already let you sleep in later than we planned. You haven’t even showered,” she whined, hopping to the floor and swatting his ass. “Outta the bed. I have lunch waiting for you on the table.”
Jack heard her feet slapping against the wood floors of her Cambridge estate—what would soon be their Cambridge estate--as she skipped out of the room. He managed to pull himself into a sitting position on the bed. His feet hit the floor, but he couldn’t stand up. He’d closed his eyes for eight straight hours, desperate to escape the world, but he hadn’t slept.
He looked to the open door of their bedroom, hearing her humming along to the classic music station playing on the radio in the kitchen.
It didn’t make him smile the way it usually would.
He and Kelly had met in Manhattan during a conference for
tenured professors at Harvard. At thirty-five, she was the youngest professor at the conference, and very well respected. Even as every intellectual in the building vied for her attention, she’d almost broken a limb in an attempt to get across the room to Jack, who’d been there at the request of an old client.
They’d gotten to talking, clicked, and the rest was history. After only a month of dating, Jack popped the big question while presenting an even bigger ring, receiving an enthusiastic yes from Kelly before he’d even finished asking. Sick and tired of bouncing back and forth from Cambridge to Manhattan to see each other, they’d finally settled on Jack leaving his Manhattan brownstone, and setting down new roots in Cambridge. Kelly was a tenured professor, after all, it wasn’t as if she could just pack up and move. Jack was a lawyer, so it would be much easier for him to rebuild in a different city than it would be for her.
It didn’t matter that, during his college days at The Harvard Law Review, they’d all deemed him Manhattan Guy. It didn’t matter that he’d been born on, raised on, lived and breathed the island of Manhattan for all twenty-nine years of his life. It certainly didn’t matter that the island of Manhattan was an extension of his bone marrow. It was so much a part of the person he was that he sometimes found himself gasping with longing when he thought of it.
He’d convinced himself Cambridge was the right move.
The only move.
It had only been a week, and he was already rethinking that decision.
He knew the reason.
It had taken him a year to cancel the reservation Lila James always kept in the forefront of his mind. He would’ve bet good money that he’d exercised her from his psyche completely until he’d had the unfortunate luck of looking across the grass at that insipid Crimson event, and seeing her smiling face. His emotional reaction at the sight of her had been immediate, and only intensified when he’d found the nerve to approach her. It was a miracle that he’d managed to bite his tongue long enough to carry on a civil conversation. Never in his life had he been forced to speak through so many walls. Even a bulldozer would struggle to break through.
Even when he’d been inside her in her office, they’d remained. Stronger and more resilient than The Great Wall itself, warning him that the fight to break through to the other side of Lila James was far from over. No, it had only just begun.
Their spat at his engagement dinner hadn’t just sent a hundred more walls flying up between them, it had also slapped a padlock around her pussy and thrown away the key.
He moaned, burying his face in his hands.
Their unfinished business ran so deep but remained unspoken. She’d been right the night before at that disastrous engagement dinner. Jack didn’t know how to do anything but rip her to shreds, all while slicing his fingers bloody in the process. He thought of the look on her face in the hallway of the hotel. The way her knees had been shaking so badly she had to hold herself up against the wall. He thought about being the cause of it and felt paralyzed.
He tried, once again, to stand up. To continue living his life, to refuse her permission to take up another inch of space in his head.
It was only the sound of his cell phone ringing from the bathroom counter that got him up and onto his feet.
“Hello?” he answered, unable to stop himself from rolling his eyes when he realized who was on the other end. “Chase, I can’t talk right now. Can I call you later?”
Jack hung up, almost immediately regretting how short he’d been with his brother. He honestly didn’t feel like he was capable of having a normal conversation with anyone while his mind was running wild the way it was.
Especially not with Chase. His brother wouldn’t have deserved the vitriol in Jack’s voice, the anger. The anger he’d yet to figure out how to control. The anger that he desperately wanted to be misguided, but somehow, he knew wasn’t.
He took the bathroom sink in his hands and attempted to breathe deeply. He had to get the monster eating him alive under control, push the breaks on his raging thoughts, or he wouldn’t be able to focus.
The strings to Dean Martin’s ‘Sway’ wafted into the bathroom from the kitchen. With a grin, he couldn’t help making his way out.
“Babe,” Kelly admonished. “I thought you were showering.”
“You can’t just turn this song on and expect me to ignore it.” Jack made his way into the kitchen and reached out when he was close enough to grab her. He spun her, somewhat clumsily, before tugging her back to him. She had to smile at his awful dance moves, but it quickly collapsed into a frown when she was in his arms once more, looking into his eyes.
It was the first song they’d ever danced to, but something was pointedly different about him today than during their first dance. “What is it, Jack?”
His arm tightened around her waist, but he didn’t respond.
“You’re distracted,” she said. “It’s all over you. It’s been all over you… since the party.” She looked down at their swaying feet, her blonde bangs tumbling into her eyes as she did. “I saw you. I saw you arguing with that woman. I followed you when you ran off the stage. I couldn’t hear what you guys were saying, but… I saw you.”
His eyes narrowed, but he tightened his arm around her waist.
“Who is she?”
He didn’t respond.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
His eyes came back to her. “There’s nothing to talk about.” He kissed her forehead before pushing her away gently, ignoring the small frown that was growing deeper between her eyebrows. “I’m taking a shower.”
Kelly allowed him to sweep out of the kitchen.
She waited until she heard the bathroom door close and the shower water start before she dug her fingers into her hair and nearly pulled it right from her scalp.
5
The next morning in class, Lila was determined to make up for the mumbling mess she’d been the day before. She’d been doing a decent job, until the door to her class opened in the middle of her lecture, once more. Her heart stopped cold, and she wondered just how in the world she would keep herself composed if Jack Almeida stepped through those doors again.
Thankfully, it wasn’t Jack.
It was worse.
Chase appeared at the top of the classroom. He stepped in, caught her eyes at the bottom of the auditorium, and stopped cold. A silent moment passed before he gave an apologetic, borderline uncertain wave, and began making his way down the steps.
His green eyes combed his unfamiliar surroundings with a confident ease. Every young girl in the classroom moved bags, books, and anything else that may have been blocking the seats next to them, freeing up space for him as he moved down the steps.
Lila watched in irritated awe. The Almeida boys and their immediate effect on anything with a vagina never ceased to amaze her.
Chase paid no mind to the girls clamoring to make room for him, and his face swam with relief as he locked eyes with a student Lila knew as Ronnie. Chase took the empty seat next to Ronnie, and the two friends quietly acknowledged each other. The sure smile on Chase’s face wavered when he caught eyes with a blonde girl whose name Lila had yet to learn. Chase gave the blonde a cool wave, and she brushed him off like a bug, tossing her hair over her shoulder with a disgusted scoff before zeroing in a little too strongly on Lila.
Lila watched the exchange, pulled back to attention by the blonde girl’s unwavering gaze.
She cleared her throat. “I don’t tolerate late arrivals, Mr. Almeida.”
Chase’s eyes flew to hers, and his eyebrows rose. An amused smile threatened his lips.
Lila dared him to laugh. She would make him pay if he did.
He didn’t. “I apologize Professor. It’s been a year, and I still get lost in this place.”
“No excuses.”
His eyebrows rose, again.
“If it happens again, you’re not welcome in my classroom. Is that understood?”
The smile was back. “Wow, yeah.”
Chase had the good sense to feign fear. “Understood Professor.”
Lila cut her eyes. “Thank you,” she said, letting her gaze linger just a bit longer before going back to her lecture.
--
“Do you mind telling me what the hell you think you’re doing here?”
Chase pretended to think on that question as he leaned one hip on Lila’s desk, letting his long leg swing back and forth. The class had long emptied out, leaving the two of them alone. Chase stayed behind to inquire about the death glare Lila had been shooting his way for the majority of her lecture that morning.
He held his arms out. “I’m just a poor young man trying to make it out alive at Harvard, but I’m not sure that justifies the tone you’re taking with me.”
“Poor young man? Coming from a guy with a multi-million dollar inheritance waiting for him upon graduation?”
“Alright, retract those claws. Maybe poor man wasn’t the best choice of words.”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea that you be in my class.”
“I completely agree…” He pulled out a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, reading aloud, “…Professor Charles White, is it?” He turned the registration slip towards her, allowing her to read the words.
Lila groaned, snatching the slip. “Professor White was supposed to be teaching this course. He dropped out last minute. Looks like they haven’t gotten around to updating the system yet.”
“I have to say, I’m a little disappointed. I heard White gives easy A’s.”
“You’re not the only one. I can tell most of the students in this class were thinking the exact same thing.” Lila grumbled. “You know, I thought students at Harvard wanted to learn. I thought they wanted to be challenged.”
Chase weighed her words. “You thought wrong. Yeah. That’s definitely incorrect.”
Lila curled her lip.
“All due respect, Lila, I would never choose you as a professor. You might be number one on the Crimson Cuties, but you’re dead last on Rate My Professor. You’re too mean.”
Thunder Rolls (The Almeida Brothers Trilogy Book 2) Page 5