Determined to hold the tears inside until I got up to my place, I rushed the last block home, pulling out my key as I made to race up the stairs. But when I reached the bottom, I stopped short.
There, huddled against the cold, sat Blake.
Chapter 16
Rhona
“Rhona!” Blake said, rising to his feet. “I was afraid I’d missed you.”
How was it that he was more gorgeous every time I saw him? Even now, his face red and his body shivering with cold, his eyes sparked like two chips of ocean ice under a blazing dawn. He was freezing. I should let him inside.
But wouldn’t that signal forgiveness? I was used to the weather by now. It wouldn’t kill me to keep him out in the cold for a few more minutes; besides, the symbolism appealed to the surge of emotions rising up inside of me. Fury, pain, desire and longing all swirled together in a confusing tangle in my chest, and I breathed against them, burying them down below my voice where he wouldn’t be able to hear them.
“Blake,” I said coolly. “You came.”
“I would cross more than oceans for you,” he said earnestly, his voice quivering; with cold or emotion, I couldn’t tell.
“Save it. I have something to say to you, and I want you to listen.”
He nodded, his eyes shining.
I swallowed, looking away, forcing myself to ignore the urge to take him in my arms and tell him that everything was okay, that all was forgiven, that I could forget it all if he would just kiss me. I couldn’t do that to myself, and I wouldn’t.
“I feel used,” I began, my voice harsher than I had intended. “I was used. By you. How could you have done that, Blake? You manipulated me into feeling something for you, manipulated me so well that even now…”
I bit my tongue against finishing that sentence. Now was not the time for a confession, but for an accusation. I squeezed my eyes shut, focusing only on the hurt I needed to express.
“You made me care about you,” I continued in a softer tone. “You took my virginity. All of that, only to turn around and sell me out for the sake of some tawdry advertising campaign.”
My eyes flew open with rage, and I glared daggers into him.
“How exactly do you expect to be able to explain that away, Blake? How do you come out of this as anything but the villain, and how can I possibly be expected to forgive you?”
He looked like he was on the verge of tears, and I hated him for making me feel sympathy for him in that moment. I wanted to be angry, I needed to be angry, and there he was pulling on my heart again. I pressed my lips together, inviting him to speak with a sharp gesture.
“You’re right,” he said, his voice breaking on it. “You’re as right as you are wrong.”
“Just what the hell does that mean?” I exploded.
“It means I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Rhona. I never should have even considered turning our fledgling relationship into an advertising campaign. It was beyond wrong of me. But…”
“But?! You’re really going to try to excuse this, aren’t you?” Fury made my hands tremble and my throat tighten.
“No,” he said firmly. “No excuses. You never should have seen the campaign, Rhona. Not like that.”
“How could I have missed it?! Billboards ten feet tall all along every major highway; was I supposed to drive with my eyes shut?”
“No, Rhona. Please, listen. The agency made a mistake. The campaign was never supposed to launch without your approval. I was going to talk to you about it, I was going to wait until you were ready, until we were both sure that we wanted each other. It was never supposed to go out like that.”
I didn’t want to believe him. Every hurt feeling in me screamed that I shouldn’t believe him, but there was one tiny fact which made the whole thing undeniably plausible.
“Patty Shade,” I sighed.
“You know her?” he asked, startled.
I nodded. “She used to work with me. My team spent so much time babysitting her enthusiasm that we never got anything done. I don’t know if she just forgot about the paper chain, or if she just didn’t care, or…”
“She told me she got excited,” he said with a shadow of annoyance. “And she figured…”
“She figured, she figured! She always figured!” My explosion wasn’t wholly directed at Patty, though she deserved it. It was directed at Blake and her and myself and the whole situation. Because even after that explanation, it wasn’t enough. Even after his apology and confession, it wasn’t enough. I was still too hurt, too angry, and that knowledge left me feeling lonesome and miserable.
“To be fair, I do a lot of figuring of my own,” Blake said softly as he pulled his phone out of his parka. He tapped on the screen for a moment, then looked back up at me.
“For all of the mistakes that were made, mine and those of the agency, they don’t diminish the fact that I’ve spent the last six years regretting how I treated you the first time around.”
“And your regret is supposed to change my mind?” I asked, as hopeful as I was acidic.
“My suffering is on my own hands,” he said, shaking my head. “It’s all my own doing, and I do not intend on making you responsible for it. I needed you to know it, so that you could contextualize the effects of it.”
He turned his phone to me and showed me strings upon strings of computer code that I couldn’t understand. For a moment, I thought his phone was broken; but this code was far too complex for something as simple as a phone screen or a webpage. With a furrowed brow, I asked him a silent question.
“This is Matchmakr,” he told me. “The guts of it, the synapses and stardust.”
“Why are you showing me this?”
“Because it’s the only way I know how to tell you what happened all those years ago. I was a wreck for weeks after standing you up, Rhona. I knew I’d made a mistake, but I had no way to make it right; I didn’t have your address or your last name, and you had blocked my number. All I had were all of the wonderful little intangible factoids about you, a sense of your personality, a slice of your psychology. And trust me, Rhona, all of those little pieces kept me up nights. I hated myself for throwing it all away.”
“So you buried yourself in code to forget about all of it?” I asked, not really understanding where he was going with all of this.
“Oh, how I would love to tell you yes. See, that’s a normal person’s reaction to something like this, to throw themselves into work and force themselves to move on. I don’t know if you’re ready to hear the whole of my insanity, but I’m kind of out of options, so I’m laying my cards on the table.”
I related to that little preamble far more than I wanted to let on in that moment, and I relaxed all of the anger and judgment out of my expression, giving him space for his confession.
He chuckled and cleared his throat, obviously nervous. Without knowing what he was trying to say, I couldn’t very well make it easier for him, so I waited. The Icelandic chill was beginning to seep through my coat, but I still wasn’t ready to let him in.
“All those little wonderful intangibles,” he began again. “I used them. I wrote this whole program, bottom to top, for two years with one goal in mind: to bring us back together.”
“How did you figure that?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me.
“Well I wrote the algorithm in such a way that if you ever signed up with the program, it would match us, based on things like shared beliefs and ways of looking at things and complementary upbringings… All the little things that I found so comfortable about you that first date. Everything you ever told me was preserved, crystal clear in my head, and I used it all just to see if there was any chance at all for us to start again.”
I inhaled sharply, stunned.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it was sort of an invasion of privacy, and all the time I was working on it, I didn’t really believe it could work, but it did! It really, actually did! Do you know that the app was on the market for four whole
years before you signed up?”
“Four years,” I repeated dizzily. “You waited for four years just for me?”
“I wrote the whole thing just for you,” he said earnestly. “It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense for me to do that and then not wait faithfully, would it?”
“No, I suppose not.”
Thoughts and feelings tumbled through my head in a confused jumble, and I frowned at the steps as I tried to make sense of it all.
When I finally did, I couldn’t help but laugh. Blake cringed, but he didn’t move away; he just looked at me, waiting for me to say something.
“This is the billionaire thing all over again,” I said softly.
“What do you mean?” he asked, confused.
I smiled at him in disbelief, shaking my head. “Why do you do this to yourself?” I asked.
He shook his head with a confused little shrug.
“You didn’t tell me you were a billionaire, even though that would seem to be an ace in your hand.”
“I didn’t want money to cloud the issue,” he said, his ears turning pink. “I wanted you to get to know me again…not my money.”
“That’s commendable,” I said. “But this, you wrote this whole program, spent two years on it, just for me? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He coughed out a little laugh and shifted uneasily on his feet. “I mean… To some people—most people, I imagine—creating a revolutionary matchmaking service with the hope of finding someone again might look, well, a little intense?”
“Hi, I’m Rhona,” I said wryly, holding out my hand. “I live and breathe intensity. I am intensity incarnate.”
He laughed, taking my hand. “Nice to meet you, Rhona. I’m Blake, the idiot.”
“A genius idiot,” I teased. “I can’t believe you did all that for me. Wouldn’t it have been easier to look me up on the internet or something?”
“Have you ever tried finding someone online with nothing more than a first name and a location?” he said helplessly. “Besides, this way, I had the whole algorithm compatibility confirmation, which was nice.”
“Is it really a confirmation if you’re the one who wrote the algorithm?” I asked, raising a brow.
“It does have a 95% success rate,” he said with a cocky grin.
That damn grin. It was my last straw, and I could no longer help myself. Every hurt feeling melted away in a wave of consuming desire, every emotion I had stuffed away and tried to ignore rushed to the surface, and before I knew what I was doing I had pressed myself into his arms.
“Kiss me, idiot,” I told him.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said eagerly.
His lips were ice cold for the first second, but heated instantly at my touch. He drank from me like a man dying of thirst, his arms wrapped around me like a vice, vibrating with his intention to never let go. I let the sensation sweep me off my feet, until I suddenly remembered something that he would absolutely love.
Pulling away for the merest second, I murmured in his ear. “I’m so glad you came. The northern lights are best enjoyed with company.”
“I say we go enjoy them, then,” he replied before crushing my mouth with his own once more.
Chapter 17
Rhona
Moments later, we were upstairs in my corner apartment. The huge curve of windows which had felt so cold to me only days before were now a warm smile, shining the city lights up to kiss our bodies as we bared them.
Clothes flew and melted away, propelled by the rekindled heat of our passion, and soon we were tumbling onto my wide, soft sofa, locked in our embrace.
“God, I’ve missed you,” he murmured into my neck as he kissed it.
“I’ve missed you too,” I confessed. “Way more than I should have, and trust me, I punished myself soundly for the transgression.”
He paused in his attentions, looking up at me with worry written all over his face. “You aren’t going to punish yourself for this, are you?”
“No, darling. You’re forgiven.”
“You forgive too easily,” he said affectionately, kissing my face and moving his hands over my body.
“I could work on holding grudges if you like,” I said slyly.
“No, no, I think a six-year grudge more than proved your point. A well-deserved grudge,” he amended quickly with an awkward laugh. He sobered immediately, gazing into my eyes with a soft, serious look all over his face. “Are we moving too fast?”
“I don’t think I can move any slower,” I sighed, writhing beneath him. “I want you, Blake. I need you, now.”
A brief grin broke his smolder for an instant, and then he was back on me again, hot mouth and firm hands molding my body to his demands.
I was afraid for a moment that knowing what to expect would take something away from the experience, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. The familiarity of his touch only increased my pleasure, and the longing in his eyes fulfilled my soul.
I wanted to please him the way he had pleased me the first time, when I had been too unsure of myself, too overwhelmed by the newness of his naked embrace to take charge. I wasn’t unsure anymore, emboldened by my experiences alone in a strange place, spurred by my desire to blow his mind the way he’d blown mine.
Biting my lip, I took his hands and pushed them away from me, following them with my body to topple him onto his back. Blake didn’t even pause in his attentions, using his new position to his advantage, burying his face in my breasts.
Gasping with pleasure as he kissed along the soft flesh, seeking out my erect nipples with his twirling tongue, I straddled him. Sliding along his hot, hard sex without granting him access, I teased him with a slick, gyrating dance of my hips. His groan of desire sent fire racing through my core, building and softening into a molten lust which drizzled over him as I moved in time with his nibbling, suckling kisses.
Pressing against me, silently requesting entry, he looked up at me with those smoldering eyes. Sliding down, I denied him that entry, taking his mouth in mine as I pressed my hot belly against him, grinding against his body as I explored him with searching hands.
He groaned, tangling his fingers in my hair as my mouth joined my hands, tasting his chest. He was like sweat and sunshine; California in the shape of a man. He was home, and I couldn’t get enough.
Blake’s breath went ragged as I flicked my tongue over one nipple and then the other, playing with the little sunburst of hair which grew there. Testing, I scraped my teeth along his abs, punctuating with gentle kisses. He was panting, his skin slick with lusty sweat, his breath spicy and sweet.
My heart pounded with nervous anticipation as I swept my tongue over his hip, sliding my hands down his thighs. His breath was quick, his eyes and lips dark with lust and something else; a desperate hope, a barely contained desire. He wouldn’t push me, but he so clearly wanted me to do this that it sent a thrill down my spine.
Tentatively, almost timidly, I pressed my lips to his velvety-soft skin. He gasped, rippling another thrill over my skin as I stuck my tongue out to get my first taste of him. It was like nothing I had tasted before, and I loved it. In that instant, I was addicted. I needed more.
Blake’s moan was almost a whimper as I traced my tongue around the throbbing head, letting the salty-sweet essence of him tantalize my taste buds. He whispered my name on a shuddering breath, encouraging…begging. Curious and wet with excitement, I wrapped my lips around him. He pulsed in response, and I moaned with desire.
He moved, taking my hands in his, placing them where he wanted them. One wrapped around his throbbing shaft, the other cupping the butterfly-soft balls of heat beneath. Groaning, he fell back as I began to stroke and fondle.
I felt more powerful in this moment than I had ever felt before. I made him twitch and moan under my attentions, gasp and sigh, lurch and grasp my hair in his strong fingers.
“You better stop,” he choked out. “I’m never going to last if you keep going.”
I decided that I
was okay with that. With an endless night stretching out before me, I redoubled my efforts, finding a steady rhythm around him. Blake tightened in my hand as he swelled in my mouth, and with a ragged breath he spilled into me, hot and powerful down my throat.
Condensed Blake. His scent, his feel, his taste, all contained in that swallow of his essence. Faster than any alcohol, it intoxicated me, making my head light, my body buzz.
He shuddered beneath me with a whimper that was almost a moan, and I released him. Eyes heavy with lust and lips swollen with effort, I grinned up at him.
“Wow,” he breathed. “Where’s your bedroom?”
Giddy and giggling I grabbed his hand and took him through the house, where my room was illuminated with a strange sort of greenish-purple light. I squealed as he lifted me off my feet and tossed me onto the bed, then laughed as he dove in after me.
“You’re unbelievable,” he told me as he touched my face tenderly. “You’re perfect.”
“Then take me,” I murmured. “And never let me go.”
He did, enthusiastically. Mouth to throat to breasts, he sent waves of pleasure over me with his lips, teeth, and talented tongue. Molding the soft curves of my breasts in his hands, he twirled his tongue around my hardened nipples, firing electric shocks through my core, melting me.
Attending to them until I was near-sobbing with pleasure, he suckled and scraped, twirled and twisted. Heat pulsed between my hips, aching, screaming for release. Nerves fired, whipping my spine into a rippling dance, grinding my body against his hard, slick core.
He growled as he moved down my body, tasting the soft skin of my belly, pressing his strong hands firmly over my curves. I was helpless under his touch, limp and trembling, tense and hot, a slave to his attention.
I moaned as he breathed volcanic air over my swollen, wanton center, then whimpered as he bypassed it, turning his head to kiss the tender flesh of my thigh.
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