He wasn’t looking at her as a friend would. He was looking at her like he wanted to violate the terms of his Meet the Groom contract. He was looking at her like they should push Lucinda out of the car and command the driver to take them back to Brandon’s condo. To his bed.
It couldn’t be. Because he didn’t want her like that. Once upon a time he had, but that had been during another life. When she’d had breasts. And he hadn’t been under a strict contract not to date or have physical relationships outside the bounds of the show. A time when the two of them still believed that they’d burn the walls down around them with the ferocity of their lovemaking. Everything had changed. They knew better now.
She opened her mouth to speak, though she had no words, no thoughts.
“We’re here. Brandon, snap out of it. Straighten your tie,” came Lucinda’s grating voice.
Harper tore her gaze from Brandon and looked straight ahead. Lucinda was kneeling on the seat, glaring at them through the partition. Outside the car, people gathered, buzzing with anticipation of Brandon’s arrival. Cameras flashed. Paparazzi and the media circus.
Brandon poured out of the car, all debonair coolness, then reached his hand back to help Harper from the car, but Lucinda jumped out from the front seat and stepped between them. “Don’t. The press will think she’s with you. The driver will drop us off around back at the service entrance. Whatever you do tonight, do not be photographed with her.”
Then Lucinda slipped into the back of the limo with Harper, shut the door, and sent Harper a withering look. “Nothing can interfere with his perception as America’s favorite groom. All of our jobs at the studio depend on him.”
Brandon opened the door again. “Harper, don’t listen to her. Let’s go.”
Harper shook her head. “Too much paparazzi. I’ll find you inside.” His brows knitted in confusion, so she tapped the corner of her lips and added, “Smile. They’re watching you.”
Inside the club, it was Brandon who found Harper only moments after she emerged from the service entrance into the loud, stuffed club that smelled like spilled grenadine.
Brandon wrapped his arm around her waist and leaned close to her ear. “I didn’t think this was going to be a big event. I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind.”
His frown intensified. “We’re supposed to be celebrating your birthday today. This isn’t supposed to be about me.”
She straightened his tie and smiled. “We’re a team, Brandon. Solid. We had a great day together, so don’t be so hard on yourself about this. I’m really proud of you.”
She kissed his cheek and found herself lingering there, her nose brushing the hair just above his ear, her lips pressed to his skin. His arm wrapped around her. His hand splayed over her back, locking her against him. His breath was ragged against her ear, his body tense as he nestled his face into her hair and neck.
An ache welled up in her, painful and despairing with a stupid, scary kind of longing she’d been trying so valiantly to ignore. Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes with the pressure of the ache—with the despair of being madly in love with her best friend.
The DJ got on the microphone. “Help me welcome Lieutenant Brandon Theroux to the party! This soldier is an American hero, yo. And he’s here partying with us for the rest of the night!”
The club patrons cheered. A spotlight found Brandon and shined down on him as though Heaven was calling him home.
Brandon relaxed his hold on Harper and faced the DJ booth, his arm still loosely curved around Harper’s back.
“Hold up your glasses in a toast to American’s next groom on Meet the Groom. Brandon, man, to thank you for coming out to Club Dante tonight, we have a surprise for you. Or make that three surprises.” A spotlight focused on the main door. The crowd was parted by a stream of production assistants and security workers. Then three gorgeous, leggy women sashayed in, the spotlight beam no match for their gleaming smiles.
“The brides,” Brandon said. “Oh my God.”
The brides. Which meant Brandon was going to get engaged to one of those women next week.
“What the . . .” He prowled forward and snagged Lucinda’s sleeve. “You didn’t tell me they were going to be here.”
Lucinda looked him up and down. “They wanted to surprise you.”
“But I brought my personal assistant,” he ground out, adding weighty subtext to the last two words.
“She can wait in the kitchen with the rest of the staff. Now, smile. This is supposed to be fun and I think it will be if you let it.”
Dresdic strolled to a stop next to Lucinda and clapped his hands together. “This is some night. I love it. Brandon, let’s get you up on stage to greet your finalists.”
Brandon turned and pinned Harper with a scowling look, his jaw tight. “Don’t leave.”
Harper opened her mouth, but couldn’t think of a damn thing to say as she watched Brandon get sucked into the crowd toward the DJ stage.
This wasn’t supposed to be happening. She needed to seize the day and find her bliss. She was only going to live once and she wanted to do so with the verve of someone who’d cheated death. Wasting a night by standing on the sidelines and watching Brandon flirt and dance with three beauty queens, one of which he would be pledging himself to—however short-lived that turned out to be—didn’t factor into her new plan.
Being in love with him didn’t factor in, either. It couldn’t. Because nothing was going to come of it. And as her anguish over that epiphany subsided, she was left feeling pissed that they were back to the same old dilemma of Harper wanting more and Brandon keeping himself at arms-length, even if, this time, his distance was mandated by a contract. Mostly, she was pissed that she was still hung up on an unobtainable guy. She didn’t fucking have time for unrequited love. Life was too short.
The Meet the Groom finalists’ arrival was Harper’s cue to scram. But she refused to sulk at Brandon’s condo alone while he whooped it up because that was no less a waste of her precious time. To the beach, then. Or a different club. Miami didn’t sleep, so there were plenty of fun places for her to go, plenty of sights to see.
“Harper!” Brandon shouted as Lucinda and another production assistant prodded him toward the DJ booth where his prospective brides were standing.
Harper lifted her hand and wiggled her fingers in the most casual, carefree wave she could manage under duress.
She burst out of the doors and into the relatively cool night. She kept moving until quiet descended all around her and the music and shouts of the club were nothing more than muffled background noise, no louder than the engines of the cars that passed.
She walked the crowded street, a line of clubs on one side and the dark ocean on the other. She didn’t want to go to a club where she’d feel old and ugly compared to the newly over-age darlings and models, or get grinded against by sweaty young men, so she pushed on, until a melody floated over the thick, salty ocean air. A piano. Loud. Along with voices singing.
She followed the music to a dueling piano bar and shoved a twenty and her driver’s license at the bouncer collecting the entrance fee.
She slid into an empty seat at the bar between two couples that only had eyes for each other and didn’t seem to notice the music. Good. She could sit and listen and nobody would bother her. The mood of the place was infectiously giddy. Perfect.
Her phone vibrated. She fished it out of her purse. A text from Brandon. Where are you?
She didn’t answer right away. She ordered a drink instead. A double rum and coke. Then she waited for it to arrive as her phone chirped an alert of Brandon’s text every two minutes.
Only when she had her drink in hand and a few gulps gone, did she text him back. At a different club. I’m okay, safe. Enjoy yourself.
His reply was almost instantaneous. WHERE???
She didn’t feel like texting him again. Tucking her phone in her purse, she focused on the old Elton John tune that the pianists were banging out. She joined along with the rest of the bar in the singing of it until the bartender passed again and she stopped to order a second round.
Maybe she’d buy a piano for Locks. Maybe she’d learn to play. Why not? She had the rest of her life ahead of her.
When the chorus came, loud and fast and triumphant, she clapped her hands in rhythm with the beat, sang a little louder, and closed her eyes, succumbing to the joyous crackle of energy in the room. It wasn’t bliss, exactly, but it was close enough to count.
***
Harper didn’t have a key to Brandon’s condo, so she was relieved to find the door unlocked after the taxi had dropped her off sometime after one in the morning. The light was on in the kitchen. From the door, she had a clear view of Brandon leaning against the kitchen counter, still dressed in his dress shirt, slacks, and tie, though the shirt was rumpled and the tie had been loosened and yanked crooked.
“Have fun?” His voice was tight, his tone clipped.
“I did. You?” She forced a smile and a pleasant tone, but there was no masking the breathless quality of her words, not with the way her heart was threatening to burst out of her chest. She kicked off her heels and set them aside.
“No.”
“Oh.”
“Where were you?” he growled.
“A dueling piano bar.”
Pushing off from the counter, he prowled her way.
Harper’s feet planted on his carpet, growing roots. “Your finalists seemed sweet. They’re all very pretty.”
“I don’t want to talk about them right now.”
“Do you know who you’re going to pick? It’s Danielle, isn’t it?”
“Stop talking, Harper.”
“She’d be good for you. Smart, classy.”
His hands seized hold of her cheeks and his face lowered, his lips aimed at her mouth, but she stopped his progress with a hand to his chest. Desperate self-preservation pulsed through her. She loved him too desperately to lose him over a night of temporary pleasure. “This is going to ruin our friendship.”
The fire in his eyes threatened to incinerate them both where they stood. “Baby, we were never meant to be friends.”
Then his mouth descended over hers, aggressive and demanding, and so, so hot.
Self-preservation be damned. She would survive this. She could give her body and heart to Brandon and emerge from the experience just as whole as she’d been before. Heartache wasn’t going to kill her.
She hooked her arms around his neck and clung to his shoulder blades and the back of his head, locking him to her, taking what she needed. Taking her due—all of it this time.
He backed her against the closed front door, rattling it on its hinges. His hands roved over her dress, up her sides, curving with her waist. When his hands fanned out over her chest, as though searching for breasts that weren’t there, he broke from the kiss.
Breathing hard through a clenched jaw, he took her chin in his hands and forced her gaze to meet his. “You faked it with me last time. You’re not going to get away with that again. Not tonight. Not ever.”
Yes, she had faked it. The pressure had been too much and her body had chosen that night, of all nights, not to cooperate. She’d been so angry at him for leaving her, so angry to think that he might be the last man who touched her breasts and yet he didn’t care about her, really. She wasn’t about to apologize to him now.
Then his hands were moving again, around the back of her. His fingers found the zipper of her dress and slid it down. The skin on her back connected with the cold painted wood of the door behind her, evoking a shudder from her body.
His parted lips twisted into a hard smile. He kissed her again, his mouth harsh and demanding, reminding her of the way he’d kissed her on the ice at the Iceplex.
He hands moved to the straps of her dress and pushed them from her shoulders. “I’m not going to stop tonight until I’ve mastered the art of your orgasm, and that’s a promise you can take to the bank.”
His hands gripped her dress at her hips and pulled until the fabric pooled around her ankles. “I’m going to learn how to command your body. I’m going to memorize the way your body moves when you come. I’m going to find out what you feel like against my face and my dick, and what you taste like, in that moment. You’re going to unravel in my bed tonight, over and over again, until I’m satisfied that there’s nothing left about you to discover.”
She hooked her fingers behind his tie and drew him close to kiss him, but he evaded her efforts. He gripped the sides of her panties and yanked them down.
He rocked back on his heel, gazing at her through eyes of liquid fire. She held her chin high and let him look, trying not to think about the last time he’d seen her scars. It was hopeless. Her arms crept inward, her hands moving to shield herself.
Seizing hold of her wrists, he pinned her hands against the wall over her head, hard enough that she gasped. His head bent. He dragged his lips along her neck. “I am going to fuck every inch of your body, including those scars. Those beautiful, beautiful scars.”
Her eyes squeezed closed. She rubbed her cheek against his hair, arousal winning out over self-consciousness. She’d never wanted a man so badly in her life as she did Brandon in that moment.
“Do you understand me, Harper?” he murmured against her skin. “Do you understand what I’m going to take from you tonight?”
She dragged her teeth and lips along his jaw, her body aching with impossible need. “Everything.”
“Damn right I am.” He released one wrist, but jerked the other forward, dragging her to the bedroom like a man possessed.
Chapter Twenty-one
He wasn’t treating her gently enough. Even through the fog of need and anger swirling within him, he realized that he was being too rough, too demanding.
He’d meant to be gentle. When he’d visualized how he’d confess his true feelings to her, he’d pictured himself as suave and seductive, doting. She deserved to be exalted like a queen. But the longer he’d stood in his kitchen and watched the clock while Harper ignored his texts and calls, the more furious he became—not at her, but at the show’s producers for surprising him at the club with the prospective brides. He was still furious that his hands were tied by a contract for another four months while Meet the Groom was edited and aired, months in which he was obligated to pledge his love and commitment to a woman other than the one he needed by his side.
Mostly, he was furious with himself for bungling things so egregiously the last time he and Harper made love that they’d been left with little choice but to recast themselves as friends. No, the correct term for what they’d done before wasn’t making love. Like Harper had so accurately said, they’d angry-screwed, plain and simple. This, what they were going to do together tonight, was making love—if he could dial down his fury and frustration enough to be the kind of lover she deserved.
It wasn’t looking good, though.
He punched the light switch on the wall and the lamp near his bed flickered on. He didn’t want to miss out on a single detail of her because of shadows or darkness. At the foot of the bed, he kissed her again, openmouthed, his tongue greedy. She pulled at his clothes, but he’d get to that in a minute. Right now he had work to do.
He pushed her back onto the bed, then loomed over her, mapping his course over her body while he kicked off his left shoe, then lifted his right foot and worked off that shoe with his hands. His tie and shirt went next.
She watched him through half-lidded eyes, her chest rising and falling with each panting breath. He unlatched his belt and pants, then let them and his underwear pool around his ankles and kicked them aside.
So much to explore, so many places on her body calling
out for his attention. Those soft thighs, her ribs, her navel, her scars. But his decision on where to start was a gimme. No question about what he wanted first. He dropped to his knee next to the bed, pulled her ass to the edge, then peeled her legs apart.
When her body opened for him, all his anger and frustration melted away as he looked at the only pussy he’d ever taste again. A thrill buzzed through him at that realization. This was it. This was her—the one. His dick pushed against the bedframe, instantly hard. He didn’t know a man could get off on something like that, on thoughts about love and forever. The ball and chain. Fuck yeah.
Her hands clutched at the bedding on either side of her hips. He worked his hands under hers until she released the fabric and twined their fingers together. Then he lowered his face and feasted on the sweet, swollen flesh of the woman he loved.
Her body tasted even better than he remembered from the first time. The little cries she made and the way her hips squirmed were like a drug to him and he couldn’t get enough. He learned her body one swipe of his tongue at a time, using her sounds to guide him.
When she turned damp, he released one of her hands, licked two fingers, and sunk them inside her, working them in unison with his mouth in a method not too dissimilar to the one he’d used in the hall at the Iceplex. But this time, they were going to rewrite that story.
“I’m going to come,” she breathed.
He pulled his hand and face away. Not yet, she wasn’t.
Whimpering, she rotated her hips. “Brandon, please.”
He rose, then crawled up her body on the bed, hauling her away from the edge as he moved. His Invictus foot snagged on the bedding. He’d forgotten about that. He rolled to his side and eased it off and set it on the ground along with the sleeve.
His focus snapped back to her. He lowered on top of her, letting her taste her own flesh on his lips. He tipped her head to the side and grazed on her neck and shoulders, claiming each place he touched as his own.
Her hand slipped between their bodies, headed for her pussy. He grabbed her hand and pulled it away. “Mine,” he growled, barely recognizing his own voice. “I’ll make you come when I’m ready for you to come.”
Game Changer Page 28