It wasn’t.
We were a team, working together toward a mutually agreed on end. And as much as I wanted just to fuck, I wanted tenderness too. I had no idea why.
“Take it all, Olivia,” he said, curling a hand around my neck. “Take everything.”
Licking my lips, I straddled him, felt him steady the solid marble of his erection until the tip nudged against my opening.
His breathing was ragged. So was mine.
“Take me, Gabe. Now.”
In a motion that took my breath, he lifted his hips and slammed into me, his fingers wrapping around my waist to increase the driving pressure.
I cried out, but he didn’t stop. Grasping me tighter, he angled so that he was hitting my G-spot with every thrust and drag. My thighs tightened around his, and I drove him harder and faster, feeling everything, the air on my skin, his fast breath on my chest where I hugged his face to me, the slide of his cock in and out of my slippery wetness.
Heat rushed upward into my face as I sobbed for breath, every nerve and sensation centered and focused where our bodies met in a fierce, driving rhythm. He was getting close, his thrusts harder and shorter, his teeth biting at my skin.
When his fingers tightened on my hips, and he slammed in deep, the waves broke, and I came again, his name ripping from my throat in a strangled cry. He held on, pistoning into me with those quick, deep thrusts again and again.
He roared, his head thrown back with the weight of the sound as he came so hard, I could feel his cock jerking inside of me with every spasm.
Exhausted, I dropped my head down on his shoulder, and his arms came around me to hold me where I was, aftershocks still rippling through me every few seconds. His strong arms tightened around me, and I felt safe. Safe and contented. And fucking tired.
“All good?” he asked roughly, his chest rumbling beneath my ear.
“All good,” I confirmed, feeling sleepy and sated, breathing in the scent of him. Pine and spice and sex.
“I’ll drive you home.”
“No, you won’t,” I murmured, reluctantly leaning back to look at him. “The stranger danger lecture you gave me? Remember?”
Gabe wasn’t even paying attention, I noted with amusement. He was tracing light patterns on my breasts with his fingertips. The man really had a thing for my breasts. And then, I noticed something else. He was getting hard again. And the pattern thing felt really good.
“Seriously?” I asked, desire blossoming inside me again too.
He shrugged those broad shoulders and gave me an innocent look. “I blame you.”
The second time was slower, probably because we were both so over sensitized, and for me, it was more dangerous than the first time. The first was all heat and blazing, consuming fire. The second was languorous and deep, hitting me physically, but tugging at buried emotions too.
When he finally brought me gasping to the peak, following in prolonged dragging thrusts, I was feeling scared for the first time in a long time. I was feeling like this man, and this fling, maybe wouldn’t be as easy to write off as the ones before it.
We got dressed afterward, the only sound in the quiet the humming from the speakers, mostly quiet thumps of bass since I’d turned the music down earlier. I loosened my tangled hair from its braid and tried to comb my fingers through it, only to look up to find Gabe watching me, his silvery eyes expressionless.
“You’re beautiful,” he said quietly.
I tried to play it off. “You’re supposed to say that before you try and get in my pants.”
He moved closer and gently combed his fingers through the length of my hair. Leaning down, he kissed me softly, and my heart squeezed.
“That felt like a goodbye kiss.” I smiled, even though I felt a little twinge after I said the words.
He kissed me again. “In a way,” Gabe replied.
I was pretty sure that meant he was leaving the next day, but that was how I wanted it anyway, I reminded myself.
“Do you need help cleaning any of this up?” he asked, indicating the mess of the bar with a nod of his head.
“No.” I shut the music off and turned out the light behind the counter. The vintage neon clock I’d found at a garage sale glowed, telling me that it was two-eighteen in the morning. “We’re closed on Sundays, and I usually come in for a couple of hours to catch up on administrative stuff. I’ll take care of it then. My bike’s in the back. I’ll lock up behind you.”
Gabe looked at me for a long moment, his gaze unfathomable. “I guess I’ll see you around then.”
“Guess so. Good night.” I sent him off with a wink and a smile, just to let him know I was cool with the whole situation but leaving it short of thanks for a good time. He nodded once and headed out the front door. I locked it behind him, and then headed slowly toward the back.
I didn’t even want to look at the bar. Not the walk of shame, by any means, but… I didn’t know why. Loss? It made no sense. I barely knew the guy.
I flipped off the overhead light. My jacket was in my office and my helmet beside it, the Ducati parked just inside the back door. I wheeled it out into the floodlit back lot, automatically checking the area first, something I always did, but especially vigilantly tonight.
The only creature out there was the skinny stray pit bull I’d named Checkers. I reached inside the back door for the dog food, shook some out into his bowl, made sure he had enough water, set the alarm, and locked the back door. He wagged his tail as I got on my bike.
“Be safe, buddy,” I said to the dog quietly.
Rolling out of the back lot, I saw lights come on from a car parked on the street. The car pulled out when I did, but this time I wasn’t nervous. It was Gabe, following me home to make sure I got there okay.
I didn’t know why that made me want to cry.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Gabe
I merged into the nearly nonexistent middle-of-the-night traffic on 75, heading back toward the MGM Grand in Midtown. Good thing I was way ahead of the morning rush hour because I barely registered my surroundings.
All I could think about was Olivia.
Her scent was still on me, surrounding me, and I was half-hard remembering in flashes the way she’d come for me, those long, pale limbs spread out in complete abandon, her creamy breasts, the sight of her hair streaming over her shoulders like black silk when she took it down to comb it.
I wanted to go back and get her, take her back to my room with me and spend the rest of the night losing myself in her soft heat.
It had been an absolute mistake to have sex with her, and I could see that now. I had lost focus on what I’d come here for in the first place.
But in my mind, I could still see her kneeling at my feet, taking my dick in her mouth. Feel the way her tongue gently rasped against my cock, swirling, teasing—
I slammed the top of the steering wheel with my fist.
Tomorrow. She said she’d be at work tomorrow, and I’d wait outside until she got there if I had to. We were going to talk. I was leaving tomorrow to go back to Chicago, and Olivia didn’t know it yet, but she was coming with me.
Back to business. Joel Cunningham. Devlin Cunningham.
Means to an end.
Focus.
Not caring if I woke him up, I dialed Hunter on my way up in the elevator at the hotel. He picked up on the fourth ring. “Seriously, dude?”
In the background, I heard a giggle.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said wryly. “I was checking in to see if you’d gotten anything on Devlin in the last couple days.”
“Like that conversation couldn’t have waited till tomorrow. Shit. It is tomorrow. Hold on.” I heard him rustling around, murmuring something to someone in the background. Another giggle and then the sound of a door closing. “You know, most people these days text.”
“Hunter.”
A long, drawn out sigh. “No. Nothing new. You know I’d let you know. Why are you calling me in the middle of the
night to ask a question you already know the answer to? What about you? Have you talked to Cunningham’s daughter yet?”
I unlocked the door to my suite. “Stepdaughter,” I automatically corrected him.
“Right. Whatever.” Hunter laughed, the sound loud in my ear. “I know exactly why you’re calling me in the middle of the night. She hooked you, didn’t she?”
I nearly threw the damn phone. “She didn’t hook me.”
“She did too. You drive out of town like hell’s on your heels and then I don’t hear a thing from you until now? There’s no way you’re not tapping that, otherwise you’d be back already. So, what’s she look like?”
“Shut up, Hunter,” I growled.
He laughed again. “I could only find her high school yearbook photo, but she was pretty as a kid. Wait, how much younger than you is she?”
“I said shut up, asshole.”
His laugh was getting louder. “Hey, you called me.”
My hand hurt from gripping the phone so hard. “I’m coming home tomorrow night sometime. Let me know if you find out anything.”
“Just tell me one thing. Does she—”
I disconnected the call. I was going to break Hunter’s nose the next time I saw him, I promised myself, and tossed my phone on the bed. I grabbed a bottle of Maker’s Mark from the mini bar and poured myself a double shot.
There was no way I could fall asleep. I was too keyed up. I settled back on the bed with my whisky and switched on the TV. It was set to CNN where some overnight anchor was rehashing the Cunningham trial. Talk about a reality check. Joel’s face was looming large in HD, his shit-eating grin instantly catapulting me into rage that burned out anything else.
That was the face of a man I once trusted, and I didn’t give trust easily. I turned the TV off, too pissed at him… at myself… to deal with it a second longer. I was such a fool.
I first met Joel at one of his real estate investment seminars. I’d been in real estate for a few years already, flipping houses since my grandpa had helped me buy my first run-down property and taught me how to bring it back to life.
Bitter after a car accident in college ruined my chances at a pro-football career, I’d been completely thrown off course. Football was all I ever wanted.
My grandpa suggested I learn a trade. School was never easy for me, and without football as an outlet for the excess energy I’d struggled with since I was a kid, things were even worse. Grandpa Chester understood what I needed better than I did and started showing me how to do renovations on an old house he insisted we go in on together. After patiently working with me on how to use the tools I would need, showing me how to apply the math I had reluctantly crammed into my brain in school, I was hooked.
I sold my first property after about a year of backbreaking labor, still moving slowly because of my knee injury, and ended up making a whopping forty-eight thousand dollars in profit. Chester refused to take his share, so I used every penny of that to buy another house. This one took half the time, since I was smarter and stronger, and I doubled my profits.
I kept going, getting quicker, hiring on people to help when I could and working solo when I couldn’t. In a couple of years, I had built up a crew of reliable help and was considering expanding my business. Work had taken the place of football in my life, and I was obsessed.
I’d never been much of a reader, but when I wasn’t working, I was researching books on property management as well as investing and business management. I followed blogs, I read the newspaper, and I filed away every scrap of information I could get my hands on.
When I read a book by Joel Cunningham, touted as a guru of real estate investment strategy, I was impressed by his straightforward, no-bullshit style. I signed up for one of his seminars and hung out while he hosted a Q&A. I introduced myself afterward, and he seemed like a good guy. He was smart, charismatic and funny, and claimed to be impressed by my knowledge of the industry. He gave me some tips that I implemented later, and we swapped emails.
Every month or so, I would get a note asking how things were going or a forwarded article he thought I’d find helpful. After a few years, I’d created a business worth a couple million a year. Joel had apparently been following my progress, because he emailed me out of the blue to propose a partnership. I could later see that he’d been cultivating a relationship precisely to do what he had, but at the time, it was just like, “Holy shit. This guy I’ve listened to and admired for years wants to work with me?”
The hard work had truly paid off for me when I could pay Chester back. A house in a nicer neighborhood. A new truck. A vacation cabin in northern Michigan. He reluctantly accepted everything, knowing that I needed to give it to him, but he cautioned me to slow down. To breathe. To take a hard-earned week or two off and decide if a partnership was what I really wanted. I didn’t listen.
Hindsight was a bitch.
Looking back, Ainsley Holdings would have been successful without Joel. But he took over the investment end of the business so I could focus on what I liked, which was buying crap properties and making something good out of them. He even made it easier for me, by urging me to hire Devlin to help interface with the materials suppliers and contractors. He showed me on paper what looked like phenomenal gains while I made neighborhoods transform from derelict single-family home graveyards into thriving communities.
I created a rental division so I could make sure the homes and apartment complexes I was renovating kept reasonable rates for long-term residents and didn’t create gentrification issues, pushing the elderly and poor into even worse living conditions. Simultaneously, I kept the high-end penthouse projects that brought in good profits running and occasionally took on specialized remodeling projects for elite clients, which more than subsidized the less profitable but more humanitarian projects.
Meanwhile, Joel used his industry contacts and Ainsley Holdings’ impeccable reputation to dupe people into parting with cash to finance the next levels of his long-running Ponzi-type scheme. And apparently, on slow days, he amused himself by committing straight-up fraud, reporting three different numbers on each transaction: a high one for me, to keep me complacent, then a low number to the IRS, keeping track of the real numbers for himself and skimming off the cream to pad his own accounts.
Overnight almost, shit went sour.
First, it was the IRS knocking on the door. There were discrepancies in some of Ainsley’s record keeping. Then, it was the FBI, asking questions about investments Joel had been working on, all the way back to the beginning of our partnership. Finally, Joel was arrested and charged with a slew of white-collar crimes, fraud being the primary. Right around the time Joel was arrested, Devlin took off, proving that he, too, was crooked. Then came the trial. The incessant media coverage.
The fallout had been intense. There were audits, lawsuits, and customer losses to weather. I had to completely delegate anything that kept me out of the office for more than a couple of hours. Legal teams and specialized accountants had to be hired, and the PR department expanded. Human resources had to scrutinize the backgrounds and performances of anyone in the company remotely connected to or hired since I’d brought on Cunningham. All while I was bleeding cash and losing my reputation because I’d been an easy mark.
I was blindsided. Maybe not by Devlin, because I’d always privately thought he was a prick, but definitely by Joel. The guy had been my mentor. And dammit, I had been deprived of the opportunity to strangle the motherfucker with my bare hands. One jail sentence did not pay the Cunningham debt back in full, and I wasn’t about to stop looking for Devlin until I found him.
I drained the rest of my whisky and hit the remote for the lights, plunging the hotel room into deep, pre-dawn darkness. Rather than attempting sleep or dwelling on betrayal or reliving erotic scenes of mind-blowing sex, I pushed everything from my mind except vengeance.
Until I had Devlin, I couldn’t afford to lose focus.
CHAPTER EIGHT
L
iv
Sunday was the only day I allowed myself to sleep in, but I finally gave up the fight around seven in the morning and got out of bed, feeling as exhausted after the four hours I’d gotten — as if I’d never gone to sleep at all. I was achy and a little sore after the unaccustomed exercise of the night before, but a long shower soothed my muscles. Unfortunately, hot running water couldn’t shut off my brain. It was going to be a while before Gabe faded from my memory.
I told myself that the best cure for brooding was working. I went to the bar, cranked up some loud music, and set the place to rights. I deliberately thought about other things as I polished the bar. I mentally tallied the beer orders I’d have to make with my suppliers for the week as I straightened tables and stools and sprayed down chairs.
I grimaced as I snapped on latex gloves and scrubbed away the stains on the wood floor that were a grim reminder of the attempted robbery of the night before. I wondered if the addict would get the help he needed in prison, or if I’d be seeing him back in my place sometime a couple of years from now.
I choked back a scream when Freddie yelled out a cheerful “good morning” over the blaring speakers. It had been a testament to my distraction that I didn’t hear him sooner. The man walked about as gracefully as a baby hippo.
“Turn that down, will you?” I yelled back.
He obliged. “What’s all this?” He nodded his shaggy head at the bucket of dirty water. “There a fight last night? And you’re listening to Nine Inch Nails, which usually means you’re brooding.”
“Something like that.” I sat back on my haunches and brushed a sweaty strand of hair from my face with the back of my forearm. “I thought I banned you from The Red Stripe for the next two weeks.”
Freddie pulled out a chair and sat down, scowling. “You’ve never met Rosalie’s mother.”
I had to laugh. The idea that this six-and-a-half-foot tall man could be intimidated by anything was hilarious. Freddie had dark red hair that always needed a trim or it curled around his face. It was the most innocent-looking thing about him. He was just this side of ugly, with a mug that had been battered one too many times during his time as an MMA fighter to ever be called handsome. He had nice blue eyes, but heavy brows, a wide mouth, a big nose and a neck like a bull. Sleeve tattoos covered both arms where they were bared by his black Brew Detroit t-shirt, and his calves under his baggy cargo shorts. To see him and the delicate, pretty, dark-haired Rosalie together still gave me a mild shock.
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