by Julie Kriss
“I am,” I said. “You could have called, you know.”
It almost sounded like a criticism, and I didn’t mean it to. The butterflies had started in my stomach and I was freaking giddy again.
“I didn’t want to interrupt you while you were working,” Jace said. His deep, almost sad gaze flicked past my shoulder and back to my face again. “Besides, I only have the reception number.”
Right. He hadn’t wanted to call and talk to reception because I wasn’t his counselor anymore. This wasn’t business—it was personal. I felt the giddiness warm up into a slow, pleasurable pulse between my legs. “True,” I said to him. “I’ll give you my number.”
Our gazes locked. Jesus. I could talk to a dozen people a day and say a hundred different things and not remember any of it. Yet every word I spoke with Jace Riggs was laced with meaning. I’d offered him my number, but I’d also offered him my trust and my privacy, and he knew it. For a woman who dealt with men on the edge almost every day, my privacy was my most prized possession; there were too many stories about counselors like me being stalked, threatened.
Jace’s gaze dropped to where I’d dropped my phone in my purse. “Are you busy?” he asked.
He meant, Was that a man you were talking to? Seriously. “That was my mother,” I said. “She asked me to dinner, and I said I had plans.”
Wariness now, just a flicker of it, but it was a common Jace expression. “Do you?”
“I have plans with you,” I said.
He rubbed his fingertips over his chin, rasping them over his beard, his rings gleaming in the sunlight. I’d seen Jace under my office fluorescents, and I’d seen him at night, but I’d never seen him in the sun. He was just as beautiful under any light. “Tara,” he said, my name vibrating through me as it came from him. “Tell me the truth. Am I bothering you?”
This man. This fucking man. “No,” I told him, my voice raw. “You aren’t bothering me. Are you hungry? Let’s get dinner.”
Thirteen
Tara
We didn’t go to Aldi’s, or anywhere expensive. We didn’t even go somewhere romantic. We went to a tiny Greek place five blocks from my office, where the tables were small and jammed together, the food was homemade and cheap, and you could get a bottle of good wine for less than ten dollars. We ordered the wine and split the bottle. “You said you don’t drink,” I said as he poured us each a glass.
“I didn’t mean never,” Jace said. “I just meant not all the time. Tonight I’m driving, though. Luke lent me his car.”
“You don’t have one?”
“Weird for a car thief, right?” It was said with an edge of humor, and he quirked an eyebrow at me. “I sold it to pay my lawyer’s bills before I went in. Now I’m out and I have to get one the old-fashioned, legal way. Luke got a secondhand one through the garage, but it isn’t road-ready yet. I’m working on it.”
This, I could tell, was a subject near and dear to him. His expression almost got soft, like he was talking about a girl he liked. “You love cars,” I observed.
“Cars are my blood,” Jace said, “but we already talked about me. I told you, I’m fucking boring.”
I laughed. “Jace, you’ve had a crazy life. You’re not exactly boring.”
He put the wine bottle down. “I got papers in the mail. They said that I’m not on parole anymore.” His gray eyes caught mine and held them. “That’s you,” he said softly. “Don’t think I don’t know it.”
I felt myself flush. “You deserve it.”
“Still, thank you.” He leaned back in his chair. “So you’re not behind the desk anymore. You get to sit in the hot seat. We already picked me apart. Now you get to talk.”
I sipped my wine. “All right. It’s strangely hard to begin, though. I’m never the one doing the talking.”
Jace just waited, the way I always did in a session, and I took another sip of wine. I’d said it lightly, but I realized it was true—I wasn’t used to anyone expecting me to talk. Kyle was long gone, and as our relationship deteriorated we’d done very little talking. Time with my parents was usually spent with me silent while they talked, which was why I dreaded it. I had work colleagues, old college acquaintances, and almost no friends.
And, now, Jace. Whatever he was.
He’d already seen the worst of me within the first hour of meeting me, so I found myself relaxing. Jace was the last person to judge. I took one more sip of wine for fortification and started to talk.
I told him about my upbringing, about my parents. About how I’d had a good childhood, safe and free from want, but how from an early age my parents had driven me to try and be something I wasn’t. How they used their disapproval and disappointment to try and get me to change my course. How I loved my parents dearly—of course I did—but they drove me crazy every time I tried to talk to them.
Jace listened, interrupting with only one question. “They don’t want you to be a counselor?”
“They hate it,” I said. “They think I’ve wasted my potential. It doesn’t matter how many times I explain that helping people who need it is not wasting my potential at all—it falls on deaf ears. I’ve given up trying.”
Our meals had arrived, and he slowly stirred his spoon through his soup, which was the only thing he had ordered. “I don’t know much about having parents,” he said, “but you’re the only one who can live your life.”
Of course he didn’t know much about having parents. His mother had left and his father was in prison. “I’m lucky to have them at all,” I said.
“Maybe, but being lucky to have them and living your life for them are two different things.”
“Is that what you think, counselor?” I said. My tone was light, teasing. I couldn’t help it—I was flirting with him.
Jace stopped stirring and looked up at me, taking in my tone, and then he smiled a little. A spark of hot mischief lit his gaze, and I felt it all the way from the back of my neck down my spine, between my legs and down them.
“That’s what I think,” he said, his voice a little rough.
I gulped my wine again. It was going to my head, but in the best way: I felt relaxed, happy, immensely pleased by the gorgeous eye candy sitting across from me, the muscled line of his shoulders clear beneath the hoodie that fit him like a second skin. “Do you ever flirt?” I asked him. “Or do you just smolder?”
That spark of mischief again. “I guess I don’t flirt,” he said. “Apparently when I meet a sexy woman, I pick fights with her instead.”
I waved a hand casually. “Bygones,” I said, my voice coming out strangled because I was feeling every word he said all over my skin.
He laughed softly, and I felt that on my skin too. He’d called me sexy. I knew I wasn’t awful, but I hadn’t felt sexy in so, so long—Jesus, I couldn’t even remember. I felt competent and professional and determined, but otherwise I felt numb. I had things to get done and work to do, all of which was fine, but it was like I’d vanished below the waist. Nothing existed down there—except, of course, for the occasional morning fantasy of the man across from me fucking me. And now I was remembering that again, and I had another rush of pleasure.
“Tell me about the asshole you almost married,” Jace said, putting his spoon in his soup.
It was a splash of cold water, but even mention of Kyle couldn’t quite kill my buzz. “Did I say he was an asshole?”
He gave me an innocent look. “You know, I don’t really remember.”
“I didn’t. I said he was very nice, or something like that. And he was.”
“Very nice?” Jace said, his voice low. “That’s it?”
The wine was gone—it didn’t escape me that I’d drunk most of the bottle—and I took a bite of my chicken, which was delicious. “I’m not sure what to tell you about Kyle.”
“Tell me the truth.”
There was raw power in those words; I’d used them on him in session. Why was that? Did we tell each other the truth so rarely in our dail
y lives? Was that what we had to do to get by?
“The truth is that I only sort of loved him,” I told Jace. “He was a decent person. But that isn’t enough for a marriage. I knew it in my gut the minute I said yes, and it only got worse as we started planning the wedding, planning where we would live, how many kids we would have. It was like you just said, the difference between appreciating someone and living your life for them. It wasn’t good enough.” I sighed and scrubbed a hand through my hair. “And there’s guilt in that, because it makes me sound like I think I’m such hot shit. But I remind myself that if I spent our marriage miserable, I’d make him miserable too. So in a way I spared him. And it goes round and round and round.”
Jace rubbed his fingers over his beard, listening.
“And the truth is,” I added, “the sex was terrible.”
Jace went still. His eyebrows rose. I had his full, undivided attention now.
“Terrible?” he said.
“Godawful,” I replied, and it wasn’t the wine that made me say it. It was the rush of truth. Tell me something true, Jace had asked of me in session. Well, he was going to get it. “It wasn’t his fault, or anyone’s, but it was terrible. We didn’t fit. I never orgasmed. It was so bad that I thought for a long time that it was me, that I didn’t like sex, period. That it just wasn’t something I was interested in. And that wasn’t fair to Kyle, so I got good at faking.”
“Jesus,” Jace said.
“And then one night he watched football until late, and then he crawled into bed with me, and I realized I didn’t want to. I just didn’t want to. Not with him. Because there’s a big difference between liking and respecting someone and wanting them inside you. A very, very big fucking difference.”
“I get that,” Jace said.
I put my fork down and stared at him. “Do you?”
“Yeah, I do,” he said. “You’re supposed to see sex as not a big deal. Some guy puts his dick in you, so what? He’s nice, he cares about you, he’s trying to make you happy. Frankly, you’re being too nice about him. He should never have fucked you if you didn’t like it, if you had to fake it.”
“I didn’t tell him.”
“If he loves you, he should know. He should be paying attention. That’s his fucking job.”
Jesus. I wasn’t going to survive this night. I wasn’t. “Kyle wasn’t evil,” I said, though I had no idea why I was defending him. It felt automatic. “He never understood why I was unhappy, why I left. I think he still doesn’t understand it.”
“Then he’s stupid,” Jace said simply. He tapped his temple. “Pick a guy with brains next time, Tara. Doctor, heal thyself.”
I was melting like wax beneath the table. “Tell me something true, Jace,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Tell me why you said you don’t fuck.”
He didn’t even look surprised. He thought it over. “No, I won’t tell you that,” he said.
“Was it true?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I don’t. I’m pretty quiet, and I don’t get a lot of opportunities. But the opportunities I get, I turn down.”
Deep inside me, it was like someone had flipped a switch. I’d been turned on before, high on the crazy feeling of anticipation I had around him. Now I was hot as lava, a serious hotness that almost hurt. I wanted to pry Jace Riggs open and make him tell me everything. I wanted to be the one he didn’t turn down. I wanted to be the one this complicated man couldn’t resist. I thought I was almost there—but maybe, just maybe, not quite.
“Why?” I pressed him. “Why do you turn them down?” Not that I wanted him taking any woman up on an offer. Sitting here now, across from him, the visual made me angry and ill. “You were locked up so long, it can’t be easy to say no.”
He ran a hand through his hair, his long fingers sliding through the soft strands. “This again,” he said. “Everyone thinks going to prison gives you a dick that won’t stay down. Like it rampages out of control or something. My dick goes down when I tell it to. It goes up when I let it. It’s called being a guy with a fucking brain. No one seems to get that.”
“Who has an opinion about your dick?” I asked him, and now I was picturing it—and oh god, what a visual.
“Luke,” Jace answered me, oblivious to the images of him naked that were going through my head. “Friends from before who try to throw women at me. Every guy who knows where I’ve been, basically. And now you.”
“I don’t,” I argued. “I don’t have an opinion about it.”
Jace smiled at me, slow and easy.
“Okay,” he said. “Finish your dinner.”
Fourteen
Jace
We were in my car—Luke’s car, actually, a black Dodge Charger. I’d been at the restaurant with Tara, and we were talking. The conversation somehow became about my dick. We’d switched the subject again, talked about other things, but the topic of sex had hovered over us, smothering us like steam. I’d turned her on, something I hadn’t started the evening intending to do but liked a whole hell of a fucking lot.
But I knew the situation. We weren’t a thing. We could take this farther, push it to its limits, but anything we did would be one night. She was Tara, and I was me. We could fuck, maybe, but she’d be vaguely embarrassed afterward about being with a guy like me. We’d go our separate ways, and Tara would find some other guy to be with, and I’d go home to the guest house and overthink it.
And that was okay for her, maybe. A bad boy distraction for a night after her shitty breakup. But it wasn’t enough for me.
With Tara, it would never be enough for me.
In the meantime, I liked talking to her. She was smart and self-deprecating and sometimes funny. She was vulnerable and raw, and she was tough and capable at the same time, a woman who didn’t let me give her any shit. She could make an insightful comment you’d never thought of in one breath, and a dick joke in the next. She was fucking fascinating.
She’d drunk most of the wine at dinner, too much for her to drive home. So I had to drive her, leaving her car parked at her office for her to pick up the next day. Her eyes went wide at the sight of Luke’s Charger because, honestly, the Charger is a woman magnet. Not that Luke was attracting any women anymore, except Emily.
Even though the car wasn’t mine, it felt good to be driving. Ryan had taught me to drive at fourteen, the two of us spinning around the lot behind Riggs Auto. He’d been fifteen at the time. We Riggs brothers knew cars before we knew almost anything else.
After she gave me directions, Tara was quiet on the way to her place, though it wasn’t an awkward quiet. She looked out the window, her shoulders relaxed against the back of the passenger seat, and she seemed to be thinking something through. I let her work through it.
She lived in an apartment in a low-rise building, a nice enough place for single professionals to live. The front lawn was nicely maintained and there were Corollas and Focuses in the parking lot. I’d just come from prison, then a halfway house in downtown Detroit for cons and addicts. If Tara lived here long enough, she’d probably meet a nice up-and-coming lawyer or a divorced accountant looking to settle down. I pulled into the driveway of Tara’s building and tried not to think about it.
Tara was quiet for another long minute. She didn’t get out of the car. “Jace,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m not going to invite you in, because I already know I’m one of the women you’re going to turn down.”
It was like a stab to the gut, those words. For a second it was so painful I almost closed my eyes. I could picture taking her inside, going to her apartment. Undressing her and laying her on her bed and having her until morning. It would be fire, and we would do fucking everything. And for a little while, she’d be mine.
For a little while.
“I’m not coming in,” I told her.
She blew out a breath. “Okay then,” she said. “I guess I’ll do this here.”
“Do what?
”
She surprised me. She unbuckled her seatbelt and crawled over the gear shift, settling herself into my lap. Suddenly she was everywhere, the smell of her skin, the fall of her hair, her knees gripping my hips. My mind went mostly blank, but I had the presence of mind to push the seat back as far as it would go so she wouldn’t bump her ass on the steering wheel.
She pressed into my lap and I almost sucked in a breath as my cock woke up all the way. I put my hands on her hips, whether to push her away or pull her closer I had no idea. She leaned forward and ran her fingertips over the beard on my jaw. I felt that touch in every nerve of my body.
“Tara,” I said.
“Jesus, Jace,” she said, and then she leaned down and kissed me.
It was fire. She cupped my jaw and our mouths opened, my tongue sweeping inside her as she sucked on me. Her long hair fell over us like a veil, and I could smell her clean shampoo. I slid my hand beneath her shirt and up her back, feeling the dip of her spine as she shivered and kissed me harder. Then I ran my hand back down, over the curve of her lower back, then down over her ass, which I gripped hard, pushing her hips into mine, letting her get the friction of my cock against her.
She gasped and moaned into my mouth. She squirmed and moved her hips, changing the angle, getting the pressure harder and more directly on her clit. I was hard as iron and I pressed her into me again, letting her practically feel the pulse of my blood through the clothes we were wearing. I moved my other hand under her shirt, brushing her waist, her belly, then up to one small breast, which I squeezed hard as she moaned into my mouth again. I brushed my thumb over her nipple through her bra and she made a helpless little sound, pressing her clit harder against me.
I moved my hand out from under her shirt. I kept my other hand on her ass, pressing her into me. I broke the kiss, gently cupped her face, and ran my thumb over her reddened lips, pushing it into the warm heat of her mouth. She sucked on it as I leaned in and kissed her neck, letting my beard scrape her soft skin, sucking her flesh into my mouth just enough to make her wince and squirm again.