“My name is Graham and I am a sex addict in recovery for a little over a year,” he began, taking a deep swallow before he deliberately shifted his gaze away from her.
That’s right. He goes by his real name now. Graham Walker.
Pleasure suits him better, Jessa thought, crossing her legs and leaning back against the uncomfortable metal chair as she continued to take in the beautiful male specimen.
“Hello, Graham,” the group said in unison.
She looked around at the faces of the people in the circle. I bet I’m not the only one who is here to get some Pleasure.
“Um . . . uh . . . listen,” Graham began, his face bewildered. “Will you all excuse me for a moment?”
Jessa looked to him as he rose to his feet and focused his attention on her.
“Can I speak to you in private, please?” he asked.
Now the fun begins.
“Sure,” she said, rising to follow him.
Olive reached out to grab her wrist as she neared her. “I bet you two would have the most amazing sex ever,” she whispered up to her, assailing her nostrils with the scent of onions on her breath.
“I think so, too,” Jessa agreed before looking around at the group. She felt reckless, and it was a rush. “Does everyone else agree? Because I plan on doing just that right now.”
A middle-aged woman with curly salt-and-pepper hair smiled and shook her head. “Oh, you remind of me myself. It wasn’t healthy at all, but Jesus, it was fun,” she stressed.
Several group members agreed and began retelling stories of clandestine sexual hookups in odd public places.
“Jessa!” Graham barked.
She walked away, leaving the excited chatter behind as she proceeded through the door he held open for her. The smell of his cologne was warm and spicy, and she inhaled deeply of it. “Tom Ford,” she said, as she looked around at the oil paintings and charcoal sketches lining the wall of the spacious room.
“What?” he asked, adding confusion to the other myriad of emotions flittering across his handsome face.
She glanced back over her shoulder at him. “Your cologne is Tom Ford. Not sure which one, but definitely Tom Ford,” she said, coming to a stop near a large easel right by the windows of the room.
The painting seemed to be of a rose but was actually a woman’s vagina. “Is this mine?” she asked, aroused by the memory of his tongue stroking her to an explosive climax. “You’ve seen it up close.”
“What do you want?” Graham asked.
“You,” Jessa said, raising her hand to lightly stroke her neck. “I am here for you.”
His brows furrowed.
“I want to finish what we started that day at my house in Richmond Hills.”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “I’m out of the business.”
“No business, just . . . pleasure,” she said softly, giving him a little wink at her clever wordplay.
“Please leave.”
“No, not yet. I’m not done with you, Pleasure.”
His face tightened, and she could tell he clenched his jaw.
She turned again and smiled, releasing a breath as she looked at a large charcoal sketch of Jaime’s face. “If you’re so obsessed with her, then why haven’t you two spoken in a year?” she asked. “Does she know you’re living right here in your hometown just a few miles from your mother? Did you invite her to your art show next month?”
“Are you stalking me?” Graham asked, his face incredulous.
“Don’t be silly,” she said.
Graham eyed her critically, remaining silent.
Jessa gave him an alluring smile and began to remove her shirt as she walked up to him. “Just the thought of how good you ate my pussy makes me want to cum. So good,” she whispered over to him. “I could really use a good fuck session. You sure you can’t backslide just once for me?”
He continued to study her face, his eyes never lowering to the sight of her breasts pressed against her lacy bra.
She reached out to stroke his crotch and press a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “My intel tells me it’s been a long time since you got that big dick wet,” she said, impressed by his length even at rest.
He knocked her hand away.
Her eyes lit with anger and she gave him a hard stare. “Now you have boundaries?” she asked, her tone slightly mocking before she turned and bent over at the waist to press her buttocks against his groin.
“Man, get the hell up off me and get outta here,” he said in disgust, instantly stepping back from her.
Jessa turned to him as she reached in her pocket and pulled out the stack of bills. “I was going to make it rain on you after we fucked, but you’re so damn dedicated to your celibacy. So here it goes. There’s more where that came from.”
He remained stoic as the money floated in the air around him. Jessa giggled as she replaced her shirt, but a wave of anger and hurt about her marriage rose quickly, and the giggle turned to a small wail before she pressed her lips closed and covered her face with her hands.
She winced at an all-too-vivid memory of Hammer having sex with her daughter.
Get your shit together, Jessa.
“There is something wrong with you,” Graham told her, frowning as he rubbed his hand over his mouth. “There always has been. Trust me, I’ve seen crazy, and you’re not far from it.”
Jessa dropped her hands from her face as she eyed him, her emotions swirling around her like a tornado. She chuckled. “The only thing crazy about me is my crazy good pussy,” she told him.
He shook his head as he turned his lips downward into a frown. “Go away and don’t come back with your selfish and devious bullshit trying to wreck my life and, in the meantime, jeopardizing the recovery of these people who don’t know you and don’t give a fuck more about you than I do. Get your crazy ass out of here and don’t come back.”
Jessa turned from him, looking around at his artwork again, and her eyes landed on Jaime’s face. It was created with love, and she saw that emotion in the strokes of his charcoal. And it wasn’t for show or to impress, but simply an expression of how he felt for her even during their separation.
She hated it. Her envy was palpable.
This was the love she foolishly thought she’d found in Hammer.
She strode over and picked up a paintbrush sitting in a can of red paint, bringing her arm up across her face as if to deliver a wicked backhand blow.
He reached her in time and tightly gripped her wrist with one hand and jerked the paint brush away from her with the other.
“No better way to work off anger than a good sweaty fuck, Pleasure,” she said, licking her lips as she eyed his mouth.
She so desperately wanted him to stop rejecting her, and it had nothing to do with sexual gratification or making her feel desired. It would take more than rejection from a man-whore to make her feel less than. He was nothing but a pawn. Something to be used toward strategizing a win against a foe.
The loss of her marriage had created a hunger for triumph. He released her and moved away. “I have to get back to the meeting,” he said, dropping the brush back into the can and then wiping the small splatter on his hand away with a cloth.
“Your loss,” she said, turning to walk to the door.
“Stay the fuck out of my life, Jessa Bell, I mean it,” he said, his voice hard.
“Don’t worry, the only use I had for you was your dick,” she assured him, meaning to be low and insulting as she opened the door. “I mean, what more is there to you? You’re just a big, dumb fuck. Not much better than a dildo. Good luck with trying to forget you were—and will always be—nothing more than a dick for hire.”
She slammed the door to his little studio and quickly strode across the floor, dropping her shades back over her eyes. She had failed to seduce him. What a waste of my fucking time.
“How’d it go?” Olive called over to her.
“Fuck off, Olive!” she spat, not sparing her or the
rest of the group another glance as she sped past them and out of the building.
Chapter 15
Same day
The skies were just beginning to darken in color. Late afternoon was transitioning into early evening. The streets were relatively busy with those trying to make it home from their jobs.
Jessa was still working.
It was time to go back to where it all began.
Bzzzzzz . . .
She picked her phone up from beside her on the rear seat. “What?” she said.
“Do you really believe it’s worth destroying my life over an affair?”
“How long?” she asked, her voice soft.
“What?” Hammer asked.
“How long were you fucking her?” she asked.
“Jessa—”
She shook her head. “How long? How many times did you betray me?”
Hammer fell quiet.
“And don’t lie because I already know. I just want to see if you if you have the truth in you,” she lied.
“Jessa—”
“I’m hanging up,” she threatened.
“The night at the restaurant right after she first got hired,” he admitted. “You had on that short gold halter dress.”
Jessa arched her brow as she remembered Lacey—Georgia—still in the bathroom when she left it and ran into Hammer. They had just shared a cigarette, an indulgence Jessa rarely shared with anyone, but the younger woman had known, proving her observation skills.
“Did you fuck her in that bathroom?” Jessa asked, closing her eyes as a vision of it flashed in her mind with heartbreaking clarity.
“Jessa—”
That’s a yes.
Foolishly, she and Keegan had assumed it was the glamour and poise of Charli that had interested him as they watched the two talk during dinner, and all the while it was her daughter posing as sweet and innocent Lacey Adams.
“You came back to that table fresh off fucking another woman, probably still wet and smelling of her juices, not giving a damn that you were in my company,” she said, the softness fading from her voice as it hardened with anger. “How was I so blind to your shit? How did the player get played?”
“I never deliberately meant to hurt you, Jessa.”
“Shut up. Shut. Up. Shut. The. Hell. Up.” She pressed the bridge of her nose with her fingers.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Yes, you are sorry as fuck,” she said with a low laugh that was mocking. “Don’t worry, I don’t have any more questions. I have no more fucks to give about you or your dick. I couldn’t care less whether there were more women. It doesn’t matter. One was enough, and especially the one you chose being my daughter.”
“I will prove to you that I am the man you want me to be.”
She shook her head. “You have already proven that you are the man I don’t want,” she said, reaching into her tote for her cigarette case and lighter.
“No smoking in the car, Ms. Bell,” the driver said, his face apologetic.
“Pull over,” she ordered.
He parked on the street outside a Laundromat, and she immediately climbed out to light her cigarette and take a deep inhale of it. “Let me be clear, Robert,” she said, reverting to his given name. “This marriage is over, and you will not get one red cent out of me. In fact, you better hope my attorney can’t figure out a way for me to take everything you have. I look forward to the day your ass is on a Greyhound bus headed back to Bumfuck, California, with your bitch of a mother—”
“Don’t you ever disrespect my mother.”
“Fuck her.”
“Fuck you.”
Jessa exhaled a long stream of smoke and tucked her iPhone between her ear and shoulder to applaud. “Nice to meet the real you, Robert Young,” she said. “But your mother made me feel like I wasn’t good enough for you. Ain’t that some shit. No, fuck her and them tough-ass, no-seasoning-having chicken feet with the clumpy gravy. She can’t cook and she can’t raise a man right. The little old bitch. Fuck her. Fuck her.”
“You wish your trifling ass could be my mother.”
“I will tell you who I won’t be is Mary, and you’re not Kendu. This ain’t California and that prenup is airtight.”
“Don’t push me, Jessa,” he warned, his voice low and menacing.
“Don’t push you to what? Choke me? You did that. Cheat on me? You did that, too. What’s left?”
“If you think I’m gonna let you destroy my life and just skulk away like some punk instead of the grown man that I am, then, bitch, you just as crazy as everybody say.”
Jessa tossed her head back and laughed from her belly. “Hey, Robert. Come on, be you, motherfucker. Don’t front. You might as well get it off your chest because the sight of you fucking another woman took us to a place where there ain’t no coming back from. I couldn’t care less if you lose your license. I couldn’t care less if you drop dead. Be gone. Deuces. Kick rocks on the way.”
She ended the call.
Jessa took another draw of her cigarette, releasing a controlled stream into the night air as she quickly dialed his mother.
“Hello.”
“Listen, LuBell,” Jessa said, leaning against the passenger door of the car. “I just wanted to clue your ass in on the fact that your son got chickens of his own that came home to roost.”
“Who is this?” she asked.
“You soon-to-be ex-daughter-in-law—”
“Ex? Well praise God,” she sang out. “Hallelujah!”
Jessa arched her brow when she soon heard the clang of a tambourine and foot stomping. “While you celebrating to your God, ask him to send a vision of me walking in on your perfect son screwing another woman. He ain’t shit, and you raised him to be that way.”
The impromptu revival ceased.
“What you say, gal?” she asked.
“You heard me, LuBell,” Jessa said, tossing the butt of the cigarette onto the street and crushing it beneath the pointed toe of her Cardi B red-bottom bloody shoes. “And ask him about that assault charge for choking me. Ain’t you ever so proud, LuBell?”
“Your evil spirit has led my son down the wrong path—”
“My evil spirit told me to do this, LuBell,” she said sarcastically, ending the call.
She looked up and down the length of the street. Her gaze landed on the sign for Premiere Wine and Liquor. Her mouth watered, hungering for not just the taste of alcohol but craving the effects. The anger she clung to; it was the soul-searing pain she wanted to escape. In that moment she understood a little bit better about just why her mother turned to alcohol and drugs to cope. She turned to open the door and retrieve her wallet. “Be right back,” she said before heading down the street and into the store.
She returned with a large bottle of José Cuervo, climbing in the back before she opened the bottle and took a healthy swig that burned her throat as it went down. She gasped with wide eyes. The driver eyed her in the rearview mirror.
“You good?” he asked.
“I haven’t been good for a long time,” she said, feeling her world spin as she took another sip and pointed her finger forward, signaling for him to drive.
The liquor warmed her belly as she looked out at the streets of the community she once called home. When the driver turned the SUV down the road leading to the security gate of Richmond Hills, she was a ball of emotions she had been fighting so hard to squelch during the days since Hammer betrayed her and Georgia revealed herself.
“Hold up,” she said, pulling out her phone to call Renee.
“Why are you calling me?” she asked.
“I have more information on your husband I wanted to give to you,” Jessa lied with ease before taking another sip of tequila with a wince before she capped the bottle and set it on the seat.
Silence.
Jessa removed her compact mirror with lighting and tube of lipstick to touch up the matte red on her lips. She smoothed her hair up into her topknot and checked her b
rows.
“Where are you?” Renee asked.
“At the security gate,” Jessa said, snapping the compact closed.
“Okay,” she said.
“Driver, pull up to the gate, please,” she sang to the beat of Beyoncé’s “Partition.”
He chuckled and nodded, acquiescing.
Jessa lowered the rear window as the vehicle slowed to a stop. “Jessa Bell... or Jordan, either way,” she said.
“Yes, she just called,” he said. “Go right ahead.”
The gate opened.
“Little pig, little pig, let me come in,” she said with a calculating smile, quoting the big bad wolf from “The Three Little Pigs” fable.
With the skies darkening, the lights lining the path leading around the curve to the first house in the subdivision made the view picturesque. She gave the driver directions to Renee’s house, and soon he pulled up in front of the beautiful Mediterranean-style home.
Jessa looked up the street at the house she’d once owned with her first husband. For a moment she allowed herself to wish he had never passed away and left her behind. She had relied on him—perhaps too much—and once he was gone from her life, she had been twisting in the wind ever since.
Did you let me down like everyone else and I just didn’t know it? She pushed aside that train of thought. The very idea of that would push her completely over the edge, and she was clear she was already straddling the line as she welcomed the darkness in her soul that she had ignored over the last few years.
It was Renee who had permitted her entrance to the subdivision, but she focused her attention on Aria and Kingston’s house. “Needs a paint job,” she said, as she picked up her phone from the seat.
She waited. When her driver didn’t leave his seat, she cleared her throat and gave him a pointed look when he glanced back at her over his shoulder.
“Oh. Okay. My bad,” he said, jumping out and coming around the vehicle to open the door. “I didn’t know you changed your mind about the door opening thing.”
“That’s a woman’s prerogative, driver,” Jessa said as she exited, crossing the pristine sidewalk to take the steps leading up to the house.
Mistress for Hire Page 23