by Lexi Blake
“I consider this a proper thank you,” she replied. “I’m surprised you had time to think about me with all those women coming in and out of your place.”
He winced, kissing her belly button and letting his tongue play there. “That was me sliding back into bad behavior.”
She shook her head. “No apologies. I don’t hold that against you, Javi.”
They hadn’t been together then. Now they were. “You truly are perfect. Do you know what I thought about most? I thought about how you would taste. I thought about getting my mouth right here.”
He covered her pussy with his mouth and had to hold her down when she nearly came off the couch.
This was what he’d wanted to do, hold her down and make a meal out of her. He moved between her legs, making a place for himself. He settled in and spread her labia gently, not wanting to miss an inch of her flesh. He glanced up her body, loving how her head was thrown back in pure ecstasy.
He eased a finger inside her while his tongue worked her clit. Tight. She was going to grip his dick like a vise. He wouldn’t last long once he was in there, but he could make sure she was primed and ready to go over the edge with him.
He curled a finger inside her, every ounce of his focus on her response. He wanted to learn exactly how to touch her, how she liked to be licked, where she needed him to suck her softly or pull her flesh into his mouth with purpose.
They would have plenty of time. After Rafe came home, he would be able to settle his brother in for the night and then sneak over here to be with her. Having her close would be a godsend.
This was how he planned to spend his nights. Right here between her legs. He sucked on her clit and he was glad the storm was loud because there would have been no way their neighbors didn’t hear her screaming out his name.
He came up on his knees and stroked himself, rolling the condom on. There was no reason to wait. He could take her and start this out right.
“You’re gorgeous everywhere, aren’t you, Leones?” Jules wrapped her legs around his waist. “And you’re every bit what was advertised.”
A little alarm rang through his system, but she pressed her pelvis up, sliding her pussy along his cock, and he let the thought float away. All that mattered was getting inside her. This was what everyone had talked about. When it was right, it was easy to sink in and give over.
He pressed inside. She was tight, but so wet he needed little force. Still, she held on to him and he eased his way, thrusting in and pulling out in short bursts. He took her inch by inch until she had all of him. Her nails dug into his back, the pain lighting him up as he thrust with purpose. He let himself go because he could feel she was close again. He pressed his body into her, rotating and hitting her clit with every powerful thrust.
Her eyes went wide as she came again and Javier fucked her hard. Every bit of his focus was on one thing, bringing her as much pleasure as he could before the inevitable happened. Her head fell back and she moaned again.
He couldn’t hold out any longer. It was too good. He felt the tingle at the base of his spine and then he was the one who was shouting over the storm. Pleasure coursed through his body and when he was done, he fell against her, completely weak.
Her hand stroked down his back as he came down from the high.
“That was exactly what I needed,” she said with a husky chuckle.
It was what he needed, too. He cuddled close and realized how long he’d waited for this woman. He’d thought it would be hard to deal with, but Eric had been one hundred percent correct. When the woman was right, giving in was easy.
Javier laid his head on her breast. Pretty breast. “When I’ve got some strength again, I’ll move us to the bed and prove that you haven’t had everything you need yet.”
“I’ll hold you to that,” she replied.
That was exactly what he was counting on.
Chapter Three
Javier woke up to the warmth of the sun on his face. He blinked in the early morning light and remembered what had happened the night before. He’d been warm. So fucking warm. Jules had curled herself around him and he’d slept like a baby.
He took a deep breath, loving everything about her scent. She smelled like citrus and sex. Shampoo and…well, him. He’d pretty well marked her the night before and he wasn’t unhappy about that.
After he’d made love to her on the couch, he’d shifted them to the bedroom, candles and all because he’d been serious about being able to see her. He didn’t want to miss a single look on her face. He loved how expressive she was. She gave it all away. Her eyes widened when he sucked on her nipples or slid a finger over her clit. She gasped and shuddered when he curled his long finger up inside her. Jules didn’t hold back, and that was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen.
He rolled over and reached for her. This was how he wanted to start the morning. He would make love to her again and then they would plan the day. He had to meet with Chef, but other than that, he was hers all day long. He could meet with Chef and decide on the line assignments, and then maybe he would take his girl out for lunch and to the movies. Anything she wanted to see.
“Hey, baby,” he started.
“Do you need coffee before you go?”
He sat up because that hadn’t come from the other side of the bed. “What?”
Jules was standing at the end of the bed, a mug in her hand. It was obvious she’d been up for a while since it looked like she’d showered and dressed and done her hair. She wore gym clothes, but they somehow made her look all prim and proper, and that made him want to sex her up again.
Was she nervous? She hadn’t had a relationship since her divorce and it didn’t seem like her marriage had been hot in the sack. It was reasonable for her to be a little shy after a night of super-dirty sex. He needed to put her at ease, let her know it was okay to lounge around in bed with her lover. He gave her a smile. “You’re up early, sweetheart. Why don’t you come back to bed and when we’re through, I’ll make you some breakfast?”
“I already ate,” she said, her tone brisk. She set the coffee on the nightstand. “I wasn’t sure if you used cream and sugar, but they’re both in the kitchen. I folded your clothes and they’re ready for you on the dresser.”
Whoa. What was happening? He took the coffee. “I like my coffee plain. This smells wonderful, but I kind of thought we would spend the morning together.”
“I thought you spent Monday mornings with Chef.”
Ah, that was the problem. She was trying to make things easy on him. That was sweet of her, but he didn’t want easy. “He’ll come by for a few minutes, but he won’t stay for long. He’ll eat breakfast if I have some made, otherwise he’ll head home. He spends Mondays with Grace and the kids after he’s worked out. It’s no big deal.”
“Well, I spend Monday mornings with Lance,” she said with a nod. “And he gets cranky if I’m late.”
Lance? Who the hell was Lance? “You’ve got a date?”
She shrugged. “Sure. If you call PT a date, then I’ve been dating Lance for about six weeks. Then I’ve got a session with my shrink to make sure I’m handling life all right. It’s all part of the lose-a-limb, work-at-Top package. I gotta get going. Busy day. You’ll lock up on your way out?”
Lock up? He stood, going after her. “Jules, I thought we could spend some time together.”
She grabbed her gym bag as she opened the door. “Like I said, busy day. But thank you for last night. I needed it.” She glanced back inside, her eyes going wide. “Jeez, Leones. I told you where your pants were.”
“If I’d taken the time to put my pants on, you would already have been gone.” It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen everything anyway. He stood in the doorway because he was kind of worried if she left she might keep walking. He wasn’t sure what the hell was happening. “We need to talk.”
“Oh, dear.” Mrs. Gleeson was standing next to Jules, holding the leash to her little yappy dog. “Javier, you seem to have lost yo
ur clothes.”
Javier grabbed the raincoat Jules had hanging by the door. It managed to cover his junk.
She smiled up at him. “Or perhaps the whole place is going au naturel. I brought up the prospect at the last residents’ meeting but that damn old man on four shut me down. You know clothes really do hide our truest selves. There’s a beautiful community I go to sometimes in Colorado. You should come with me. You would love it there.”
“You should put on some clothes,” Jules insisted. “And there’s nothing to talk about. We’re cool. Now I have to walk Mrs. Gleeson down. Her daughter picks her up on Mondays and they go to lunch.”
“Perhaps Laura can come here this time,” Mrs. Gleeson offered. “After all, there’s a show up here. And you know my Laura is divorced. She needs to start dating.”
“Javier doesn’t date,” Jules explained, starting down the hall. She was really leaving.
What the hell had last night been? He thought about going after her. He could grab his pants. But he stood there staring as she walked down the hall.
“Morning, Chef,” Jules said as she walked past Sean Taggart to get to the elevator.
“Morning, Jules.”
Mrs. Gleeson lingered, watching Chef stride down the hall. He was pretty sure she was watching Taggart’s butt.
Taggart stopped in the middle of the hallway. “I like the look, Javi. But that’s not your apartment.” Chef looked down the hallway where the elevator doors had closed and then back to Javi, one brow raised. “You and Jules?”
Javier couldn’t remember the last time he felt so oddly exposed. Yes, he was standing there with a yellow latex rain slicker covering his willy, but the thing with him and Jules was new and apparently confusing. “The power went out.”
“It apparently didn’t go out of your dick,” Chef said. “Jules got some coffee in there?”
“Yeah.” She’d walked out on him. “She thanked me. What does that mean? She thanked me and told me to put on pants.”
Chef stared at him for a moment. “No woman ever asked you to put on pants before?”
“They usually demand that I take them off.”
“If you want me to talk to you about this, you’re going to have to put on pants.” Chef walked through and immediately found the coffee maker. “So this is seriously the first time you’ve ever had a woman walk out on you after you…you did spend the night, right?”
He grabbed his pants from the bedroom. He shouldn’t talk about this. Sean Taggart was his boss. Sean didn’t need to hear about his damn love life. “I came over because our power went out. I thought she might get scared.”
Taggart had a mug in his hand and he was glancing around Jules’s apartment with curious eyes. “You know she was in the Navy, right? You think a Navy vet gets scared of the dark.”
But she had been. He could remember how soft his whole soul had gotten when he realized she was starting at every clap of thunder. By the time he’d been done, she hadn’t noticed the weather at all. “She lost her hand during a storm, or rather she began the process of losing it. I think the thunder bugs her.”
“So you fucked her calm?”
“Hey, don’t talk about her like that.”
Chef stopped, looking him over. “I didn’t mean any disrespect to Jules, Javi. Trust me. After a day of running after an overactive kid, taking care of a baby, and waiting to find out if her oldest is being deployed, I had to fuck Grace calm.”
Yeah, and he would bet Grace hadn’t told her husband to put on his pants and lock up when he left. “Sorry about that. What’s on the menu for the week?”
Chef took a sip of coffee. “I emailed you the menu. I want to give Drake a shot at taking lead one night. I think Eric is going to lose his sous chef. Lodge is sniffing around. That club of his lost its executive chef. I want to start prepping Drake to move over to Fort Worth. The line chefs over there are good, but they’re too green to take the secondary role. Are you sure you don’t want to talk about it?”
Julian Lodge was a rival of Big Tag’s, though Javier also thought they were somewhat friendly. When the two men got in the same room it was a little like two sharks circling, waiting to see if one would bite first or if they would both laugh and trade stories about their kills. It looked like Lodge was about to take a nibble.
The next softball game was going to be a ton of fun. Not that Lodge would play softball, but he would sit in the stands in his perfectly tailored suit and boo Big Tag.
“Of course I want to talk about the menus. It’s my job.” While Chef had been talking, he’d pulled up the menu. “Drake is great with duck. He can take the lead Thursday.”
Chef was grinning. “He should be great with duck with a name like that, but I wasn’t talking about the schedule and assignments. I was talking about what happened with you and Jules.”
He was starting to think the thing with Jules hadn’t gone as well as he’d thought it had, but he didn’t want to burden his boss.
“Javi, who you going to talk to about this?” Chef asked. “Who would you normally talk to? Because you probably should talk about it or you could screw it up. Do you want this woman? I’ll totally back off if this was one more hookup, but the look on your face as she walked away kind of told me it’s not.”
“I would talk to Rafe,” he said quietly, missing his brother more in that moment than he had since the day he realized the brother he’d known was gone and might not come back.
“Can you talk to him?”
Javier shook his head. “No. When he’s sober enough to listen, he’s too bitter to do anything but spout crap about how his wife left him. I have no idea how Sonja held out for as long as she did. The last thing he’s going to want to hear about is how I hooked up with a woman from work.”
“Was that all it was?”
All he had to do was shrug and say yes and Sean would believe him. He would get back to the task at hand. And Javier would still be confused about what had happened. “No. I like her.”
Sean shook his head approvingly. “She’s a likable lady. She’s only been in town for a few weeks and she’s already volunteering to help out her fellow wounded vets. I like a person who throws herself into the community. You know she recently divorced.”
“Not that recently.” He didn’t think she’d been mad in love with her ex.
“Still, I think it takes a while to get over something like that. Have you really honestly never had a woman turn you down?”
“Of course I have. Not lately. Though Kristy ran as fast as she possibly could.”
“I heard you went back to your previous dating style after that didn’t work out.” Sean sat down at the kitchen table.
“Yeah,” he admitted. “I went a little crazy for a week or two after Rafe showed up.”
“You think that Jules didn’t hear about it? Didn’t see the women parading in and out or see you doing the walk of shame?”
“I couldn’t leave Rafe. I had them over here.” He sat down across from Sean, some of the words penetrating his brain. “You think she knew those women were there for sex?”
“Did they look like they were cleaning your apartment?”
In miniskirts and high heels? “Shit. She doesn’t take me seriously. She thanked me.”
A grin split Sean’s face. “You’re lucky she didn’t slip you some cash and ask if you needed referrals.”
The thought made him shudder. “Are you saying she used me for sex?”
“Wow, you sound like a prude for once. This is fun. I don’t get to do this with my younger brothers anymore. They’re all married and settled. My stepsons aren’t even close to needing relationship advice. I didn’t realize how long it’s been since I had to walk some dipshit in my family through how to deal with a woman.”
Javier put a hand on his chest. “Well, I should be your Disneyland then because I don’t know what I did wrong. I showed up on her doorstep. I brought her wine. I was very careful with her. I even told her she wasn’t like the
other women.”
“And she should believe you, why? That sounds like a great line to use.”
“But it was true.”
“How did you prepare her for this encounter?”
He wanted to go there? “Well, I gave her a starter orgasm first.”
Sean held out a hand. “Not physically. How did you soften her up? Take her to dinner? Bring her some flowers just to brighten her day? Help her out at work?”
“I told you. I brought wine.”
“You have never worked for a woman in your life, have you?”
“I work hard,” Javier argued. “Do you know how fit you have to be to spend all night pleasuring a woman?”
“Do you know what it means to bounce a sleeping infant in your arms for four hours straight because if you don’t keep the rhythm up he’ll wake up and your wife is utterly exhausted?”
“No, but I don’t have kids. I don’t have a wife.”
“And you never will if you think the only thing a woman needs from you is an orgasm. You have been playing around with party girls. Jules is an entirely different class of woman and no, she’s not taking you seriously, but you haven’t given her a reason to.”
“I make sure I sit by her when we eat.” Javier tried to defend himself, but he was starting to see Sean’s point. “I make sure she gets to pick before Declan and Linc eat everything in sight. They’re like locust.”
“If you want her to believe she’s different, treat her differently, and no, sleeping over doesn’t count,” Sean pointed out. “Getting your ass up before she wakes up and ensuring that she has coffee and a decent breakfast, well, that’s a good start.”
How had he gone so wrong? “I really like her.”
“Good. Show her. Words are too easy. She needs to see that she’s different.”