by Amelia Wilde
“You are right now.”
“I am right now,” she agrees, then sighs. “We haven’t had a chance to talk.”
“You can rest, if you want. I don’t have any news.”
“No? What happened to that nice girl you were seeing? Lydia?”
I can’t remember ever telling my mother about dating a girl named Lydia, but suddenly I’m overtaken by the urge to tell her about Cate.
“Actually, I was seeing a different girl. Her name is Cate, and she’s…” There’s so much to say about her, but I have no idea how much time I have before my mother’s gone again. “She’s incredible.”
“Well, she’d have to be, to be enough for you. What happened to her?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said you were seeing someone. Did she leave you?”
“Yes.” There’s no time for anything but honesty now.
“Why, Jax? What did you do?”
“What makes you think it was my fault?” I try to grin at my mother even as my smile falters.
“I know you.” Her tone is soft but serious.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll admit it. I tried to…” How can I explain this? Every time I tell someone else what I did, I sound like more and more of a psycho. “I tried to have her job changed. It’s a long story, but the stress was eating her alive…anyway, the company she worked for let her go before I had the chance to tell her what my plan was.”
“Oh, Jax.” My mom purses her lips, frowning at me, and I’m newly ashamed of what I did. “I hope you apologized.”
“She didn’t want to hear it.”
“But you need her to.” I can’t hide anything from her. Even now, when her mind is in the process of deserting her completely, she can read my face like an open book.
“I do. I actually—I have something planned for her. I was on my way to give it to her when I heard you’d been brought here. And you—” I give my mom’s hand another squeeze. “I couldn’t leave before I was sure that you were okay.”
“Jax,” she says, looking deeply into my eyes. “Jax, you go to that girl right now and make things right.”
“Don’t worry, Mom. I can go when I’m sure that everything here is—”
“No.” Her voice is full of authority. No question—I got all my best qualities from her. “You go right now. I’ll be fine here. And if I’m not—” She shrugs. “I’m getting old anyway.”
My mom’s eyes are getting heavy. She struggles to keep them open. “All right. Mom knows best.”
“I do.”
I kiss her on the forehead. “I love you, Mom.”
“You…” says my mother, and then she’s asleep.
I turn on my heel. Back to the airport. Getting to Cate is all that matters.
43
Cate
I’m taking a turn holding Gabi while Bee and I discuss my options. She opens and closes her tiny mouth as she repositions her head against my shirt. I’ve never been around babies this new before, and despite how unbelievably tiring it seems to be when they wake you up all night, it’s making me reconsider my commitment to having everything totally perfect before I move on to other life phases.
Of course, when I think about that, my mind goes back to Jax. He’s the one I want.
And I had to go and ruin it.
At least Bee is here to help me figure out what comes next in my life.
“What do you think you’ll do?” she says as she changes Izzy’s fiftieth diaper of the day. “Are you going to go back to New York, or do you think you’ll try somewhere else—maybe out West?”
“I don’t know,” I muse, stroking Gabi’s soft head. “If I go back to the city, I’ll need a job lined up in a matter of days. I have savings, but not enough that I’d want to blow it all staying in my apartment while I look for a new gig.”
“Cate. Come on. Like people wouldn’t be falling all over themselves to hire you.”
One person fell all over himself to get close to me at any cost, and I pushed him away.
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve focused so much on Basiqué that I haven’t really been networking.”
“You don’t need a huge network. You have an incredible resume, and everybody who meets you will fall in love with you instantly.”
I roll my eyes. My sister has a high opinion of me, which is wonderful…but it isn’t a guarantee that I can get my life back on track now that my days at Basiqué are over. I’ll give myself another day to wallow in the uncertainty, and then I’ll snap myself out of it and start the job hunt.
You do learn one thing working for Sandra: how to shove your emotions so far down that they don’t stop you from working sixteen-hour days for months straight. Bee’s right. All I have to do is put the effort in, and I’m sure I’ll find something else.
It won’t be what I want.
Nothing will be exactly what I want, now that I’ve kicked Jax to the curb. Metaphorically, of course. He probably owns half the curbs in New York City.
That’s where my heart is, in more ways than one, but how could I walk to work today knowing that he’s so close, and so untouchable?
“Maybe I’ll check out the west coast.”
“Whatever you do, don’t sound so excited about it.”
“I can’t see—”
A knock at the door interrupts me mid-sentence.
“I’ll get it,” Dex calls from the kitchen, and he makes his way down the hall in a flash. Bee rises from the floor with Izzy in her arms and sways side to side, cooing to her, humming under her breath.
“Uh…hello,” I hear Dex say, and I wonder who it is.
Door-to-door salesmen don’t exist anymore, so it’s probably someone coming by with a gift for the twins. Things have been arriving sporadically since they came home from the hospital—a home-cooked meal here, a box of diapers there. Most people want to help out, but they’re too timid to stay long. And underneath her grateful smiles, Bee’s not looking for too many visitors. She confided that to me shortly after coming home from the hospital. It makes me feel good to know that I’m one of the only people she can tolerate.
“Jax Hunter. I’m here to see Cate…and I have a few things to deliver to you, as well.”
The instant I hear his voice, my entire body lights up. Shivers run from my neck all the way down to my tailbone, and though my arms stay relaxed—I won’t disturb Gabi for anything in the world—the rest of my muscles tense, my mouth dropping open in surprise.
“Dex Stevens. I’d shake your hand, but—” He laughs. “Come on in.”
Then Jax is stepping into the living room, his arms filled with two bouquets of flowers.
“Hi,” he says to me.
I can hardly make my mouth work. “Hi.” The sight of him, God, it’s like the sunrise, the most gorgeous sight I’ve ever seen and ever will see again. “What are you doing here?”
He gives me a half-smile but his eyes stay locked on my face as if he’s trying to figure out what I’m thinking. Nothing. I’m thinking nothing. My brain is a cascade of images—touching him, kissing him, getting fucked by him—and there are no words.
“I came to bring some flowers and congratulate your sister.”
“Thank you so much,” Bee says, a bright smile on her face. “Those are beautiful. Is one for Cate?” Leave it to her to say the right thing.
“You guessed it. Is there somewhere I can put them?”
“Absolutely. You must be Jax, then. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
“And you’re Bee. Cate talks about you all the time.”
Jax follows her into the dining room, and Dex leaps to my side, carefully taking Gabi from my arms. “Your billionaire dude is here,” he says.
“Very helpful, Dex.”
“Are you two going to make up?”
I groan. “Does Bee tell you everything?”
“Yeah. Can you blame her?”
“No.”
Then Jax is coming back into the room, followed close behind by Bee
. He has his hands in his pockets. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him look nervous.
“Cate, I have something to show you. Would you come out with me for a while?”
The heat in my cheeks, the heat in my chest. All the anger I felt when I walked into work on my last day at Basiqué is gone. My heart does a slow turn. “Yes,” I whisper, and when he takes my hand to lead me out, I follow him.
44
Jax
Cate doesn’t say much as she slides into the passenger seat of my rental car. It’s an Audi—the best they could do on short notice at the airport I flew into a couple of hours away from here—but she doesn’t seem to care. She doesn’t say much as I steer the car away from her sister’s house, or when I navigate straight to the main street of the town, which is of course called Main Street.
She doesn’t say much, but she never lets go of my hand.
If she feels anything like what I’m feeling, she’s searching for what she wants to say to me, but there aren’t enough words in the whole world to describe it.
I park the car in front of a storefront between a bookshop and a café. Cate turns to me, one eyebrow raised. “You didn’t come all this way to take me out for coffee, did you?”
I laugh, and some of the tension in my gut eases away. “If you want coffee, we can get some right now. But no, I didn’t come here for that.”
“What are we doing here?”
“You’ll see.”
The storefront has paper over both the huge front windows, blocking the inside from view. Cate follows me tentatively, and when we reach the door and I pull a key from my pocket, her mouth falls open.
“Jax—why do you have a key to this building?”
I lead her inside. I had a crew come in overnight to freshen the space, which is an empty canvas for any kind of business you can imagine. Everything is newly white and smells like possibility.
“What’s that?”
She’s spotted it.
At the back of the room, smack in the middle of the wall, is a single desk. It’s an antique—one of the ones they used to use at the old New York Times offices during the newspaper heyday. I purposefully chose it to be the opposite of the sleek furniture that crowds every inch of the Basiqué offices.
This is a space for Cate.
Dropping my hand, she moves toward the desk, and as she gets closer I hear the tiny gasp that escapes her.
“What is this, Jax?”
She turns to face me, her eyes shining with so much delight I think the room gets brighter. On the desk is a nameplate. I woke up one of my business vendors in the middle of the night to get it made before I flew out of LaGuardia, so it’s been tucked in one of my bags since yesterday.
After I left my mother’s hospital room, I flew to the largest available airport in Cate’s home state and got in after midnight. I debated driving to her hometown in Winthrop Harbor right away, but decided that would look a little insane, so I booked a room at the best hotel in town.
This morning I drove to Cate’s old address in Winthrop Harbor. Sandra Sarzó gave it to me after I dressed her down for the way she handled my request about transferring Cate’s duties over the following months. Lucky for me, Cate’s emergency contact is still her mother, so there wasn’t much of a search to be done. When I showed up at their home this morning, Cate’s father shook my hand and, after several minutes of pleasant conversation that nearly killed me, he let me know where Cate’s sister lives in Beechford.
Which brought us to this building.
I bought it hours after leaving Christian at the club two nights ago.
No matter what happens between us, I’m leaving Cate with the one thing she needs more than anything: security.
The nameplate on the desk reads:
Catherine Schaffer
Editor-in-Chief
“It’s for you,” I say simply.
“The nameplate?”
“The building.”
Cate shakes her head, smiling helplessly. “Why in the hell would you buy me this building in Beechford, Jax?”
I cross over to her and take her hand.
“I shouldn’t have done what I did about your job at Basiqué. That was wrong. I know that now.”
“Jax, I—”
“No, let me finish. You should know that I never intended for you to feel like you didn’t have any options. I had several ideas for businesses you’re more than capable of running, and I wanted to talk about them all with you. When things started happening with my mom, I didn’t get the chance, and then Sarzó—” I let out a frustrated breath. “That’s all irrelevant. The point is, you have options, and one of them is to stay here in Beechford, close to your family, and run your own publishing imprint.”
“What?”
“You told me once that if you could do anything, you’d be in charge of your own publishing house. I’ve been working with my business manager to establish one in your name. It doesn’t matter where in the world it’s located—I can guarantee that people will be breaking the door down to have their work published with you. And you can take it in any direction you want. Books. Periodicals. Internet sales. People are working on it right now to get everything off the ground. All you need to do is run it.”
Cate wrinkles her forehead. “I can’t run an entire company.”
“Yes, you can. If you can survive Sandra Sarzó for a year, you can run any company you want. But you can leverage all of my resources for business advice, if you want to.”
“Why are you doing this, Jax?” She looks up at me, eyes wide, hopeful, anxious.
“Let me show you one other thing before I answer that.” I move behind the desk, open one of the drawers, and pull out the portfolio, opening it and turning it so she can see the papers inside.
“I want you to understand that all of this is yours—no strings attached. These documents are proof that this company and all its assets—which come with startup funds and five years’ worth of salary for you and any employees you hire—belong to you even if…”
“Even if what?”
“Even if you’re done with me.”
She puts a hand over her mouth, and I can’t control the pain in my heart, can’t get a handle on the tightness in my throat. I’ll give anything to her. But I need to know. I can’t wait any longer.
“Are you done with me, Cate?”
One long moment passes.
Then she shakes her head, tears in her eyes.
I hold my breath.
45
Cate
It takes me a second to get the words out because I’m so overwhelmed by the magnitude of everything Jax is saying to me.
“I’ll never be done with you.”
His shoulders collapse as he registers what I’m saying, and then he closes the distance between us and takes me in his strong arms, the motion so powerful my heart nearly stops.
Then his mouth is on mine, his tongue is in my mouth, he tastes like mint and magic and it’s all so right I could scream, I could cry, but instead I kiss him back with everything I have, like there’s no moment other than this one, like this is my only chance.
When he breaks the kiss I gasp for breath.
There’s something else I need from him.
“Will you give me anything I ask for?”
“You know the answer to that,” he murmurs in my ear as his hands tighten on my waist.
“Will you prove to me that I belong to you?”
He pulls back, looking deeply into my eyes. “How should I do that?”
I take a deep breath, then reach for my shirt, pulling it over my head. My shorts are next, dropping to the floor in a crumpled pile of cotton, and Jax watches as I strip off my panties and bra.
Then, slowly, I kneel in front of him.
My hands shake with anticipation.
“I broke our agreement,” I say, my voice soft. “I didn’t follow the rules.”
He instantly understands.
“And you need m
e to correct you?”
“Yes, Mr. Hunter.”
I need it so badly that I don’t know how I survived without him these past days, without our meetings in his office. I don’t know how I kept breathing from one minute to the next when there was no possibility of him possessing me, dominating me, like only he can.
I am desperate for him to take charge.
In my professional life, I need to have the reins…but here, where we are the only two people in the world, I need him to be the man I know he is at his core.
Powerful. Measured. Raw.
He unzips his pants with one motion and frees his cock, which is already so hard it twitches when the air hits it.
“Suck.”
His voice is all authority, all command, and it sends a shiver down my spine.
I obey immediately.
Taking him into my mouth, I go to work as if this is the most important thing I will ever do, circling the head of his cock with the tip of my tongue, dragging the flat of it along the sensitive underside, sucking, sucking, building the rhythm faster and faster until—
He pushes my head away, then shoves his cock back inside his pants.
“To the desk.”
I start to get to my feet, but he holds out his hand. “Crawl.”
My opening is dripping as I crawl across the freshly shined floor to the brand new desk. Jax gets there first, moving the nameplate to the side—it doesn’t matter here, in this deliciously dirty game we’re playing.
“Up.”
I stand.
“Bend over.”
I arrange myself over the desk and spread my legs, lowering my breasts to the cold metal surface and arching my back. My breath comes fast and shallow, the anticipation so strong I can hardly stay still.
Jax runs his hands over the white expanse of my back, all the way down to my waist, all the way down to my ass, and then he cups it in his hands, squeezing, testing. I push back into his grip, wanting more of him, and he responds with a slap to my right asscheek.