Shivers of pleasure raced up and down her body knowing that she had put Ben into a frenzy of passion and then satisfied him.
She leaned forward resting her forehead on his shoulder.
Several seconds passed as they waited for their breathing to calm and their bodies to stop quivering and contracting.
“Wow,” she finally said.
“Yeah.”
He pulled out and let her slide down until her feet touched the floor, then cupped the back of her head and kissed her deeply, then hugged her close, her cheek against his chest. He ran his fingers through her hair and she felt tenderness from him in sharp contrast with the way they’d just gone at it.
“I’m sorry our first time was like this.”
Startled, she pulled back and looked up at him. “You are?”
He grinned. “Not as much as I should be.”
“Why should you be sorry at all?” she asked. “I’m not.”
His fingers ran through her hair again. “I won’t say it can be better because that was damn good, but it could be more romantic.”
He looked abashed and she wanted to kiss him for the sentiment, but she had a nagging suspicion that the reason behind the sentiment was something they needed to talk about.
“I liked it,” she said, moving back. “I don’t need a lot of romance.”
He shook his head. “You’re going to make those boots look even better than I imagined. But I promise I am not going to take you like this again.”
Oh, that wasn’t good. She stepped forward again, earnestly. “I want you to.”
“I know I said I wanted to dress you like this, but I know this isn’t you.” He lifted his hand and cupped her cheek, a tender look in his eyes. “And I like you, Jessica Leigh.”
He tripped her heart in one second and then made it plummet to her toes the next. He liked her. But he thought this wasn’t her. They might have a problem here.
“Ben, I am okay with this. Really okay,” she insisted.
“I’m glad I didn’t shock you,” Ben said with a self-deprecating grin.
“Ben, I—”
“Jess,” he interrupted. “I’m not exactly sorry. But you bring out this side of me that makes me think of red thongs and deep thrusts and being naked all the time. Even in the middle of surgery.”
Whoa. Well, she hadn’t known that. It was probably inappropriate to feel smug about that.
“Ben—”
“But I can control myself for your sake,” he said quickly, as if thinking she was going to protest the naked-all-the-time bit. “We can play out your fantasies, too,” he said. “If you want rose petals all over the bed, or to make love on a private beach, or under the stars, whatever. And you can wear whatever you want,” he added with a sheepish grin. “I’ll find you attractive in anything.”
Dammit, maybe she didn’t want to be ho-hum attractive. Maybe she wanted to be ball-busting hot. And, it may very well shock Dr. Torres to know that she already knew how to do that.
She stepped close, took his face between her thumb and fingers and forced him to look at her. “Ben, I love that you marched in here, stripped me down and took me up against the wall. Got it? I love that you were that out of control. I was too.”
“But maybe you’ll like…”
“Ben, stop. I already know what I like. I’ve had rose petals, I’ve had fancy dinners and champagne, I’ve had the attempts at romance. Soft music and silk sheets aren’t what great sex is about.”
Ben had paused in the midst of tucking himself back into his pants and zipping up, apparently speechless.
She reached into the red Tease bag and pulled on the itty bitty black T-shirt that didn’t even cover her belly button and the hot pink skirt that fell to mid-thigh and tied on one hip.
“You weren’t a virgin?”
She looked at him, balanced precariously on one foot while she put her other foot into the first black hooker boot.
“No.”
Jessica watched him process that information. “How not-a-virgin are you?”
“Very not-a-virgin,” she admitted.
He thought that over as well. “Do you have any clitoral warming gel?”
Her eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“They make this gel that warms up with friction and it goes…”
“Yeah, I get the idea. But no, I don’t have any.”
“Oh.” He looked a little disappointed.
“But I know where we can get some.”
Ben practically threw Jessica into the driver’s side of his truck. It was either that or back her up against it, hike that skirt up and start all over again.
Lord, he’d thought he was going to explode. She’d made him crazy enough when she was sweet and serious. This new side of her—that liked having sex in semi-public places and wore hooker boots like they were custom made for her—had made him redefine everything he’d previously believed about lust.
The not-a-virgin information was new, but he found that he was not completely shocked. Jessica exuded a sexual energy that spoke of a confidence that went deep. The fact that she had some experience behind it made sense too. He was, however, jealous. Jealous of the man, or men, who had experienced the Jessica he had just discovered. Of course, those men were clearly idiots. None of them were still around and Jessica Bradford was not a woman a guy let walk away easily.
That realization should have made him stop cold. And panic. But…it was true. Jessica was the whole package and any man should want to have her in every way a man could have a woman.
“How many guys?”
He didn’t care. Not really. She was all his now and he knew, could somehow tell, that any intimacies with other men had been less than stellar. And she responded to him like he’d never had another woman respond. It was addicting. He wanted to make her respond over and over, in different ways, various positions…
“Only two,” she said. “But with John—”
She stopped talking abruptly.
There was silence in the car for nearly twenty seconds.
“John?” he prompted. Oh, he was definitely going to hear about John.
“John Shepard,” she finally said.
Ben waited for another ten seconds, but she didn’t elaborate.
Fine, he did care about the other men. But it wouldn’t change how he felt about her. And he was sure he’d find some way of never again thinking about another man touching her. Eventually
“Who is John Shepard?” There was something in her voice, and her face, that made him certain that him knowing about John Shepard was important.
She sighed, then said, “My greatest rebellion.” She smiled, but didn’t seem truly amused. She also didn’t go on.
“You don’t think I’m going to let that go, do you?” he asked.
She took a deep breath, then glanced at him. “No, I know you’re not going to let it go.”
“Tell me about John-boy.”
He was going to be patient and laid back about this. He was. Ben settled back in his seat. He even crossed his ankles. Though he couldn’t quite convince his stomach, which twisted, and his heart, that pounded, that he was nonchalant.
“John Shepard was someone my friend Marcy introduced me to,” Jessica said. “He was worth sixty million dollars when I met him.”
Ben didn’t respond with the holy shit that crossed his mind.
“And he offered me the chance to travel the world with him.”
“And you took it.” He sounded bitter and realized that crossing his ankles and leaning back in his seat didn’t help him feel even a little laid-back.
She looked at him. “Yes. For ten months. Parties every night. Only the most exclusive clubs and resorts. Posh hotel rooms. Shopping and eating and anything I wanted. No holding back, no guilt, no regrets. It was the exact opposite of what my father wanted from me.”
“Just a shot in the dark, but I’m guessing John wasn’t interested in your views on world disarmament policies.”
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“He was mostly interested in making everyone who’d ever doubted him, especially his ex-wife, see that he was better off and happier without them.”
“And a beautiful, spirited young woman who wanted to piss off her dad was perfect.”
Jessica shook her head. “I wasn’t trying to piss my dad off. I was trying to convince him.”
“Of what?”
“That I was serious about rejecting the lifestyle he was forcing on me. Humility, poverty, sacrifice, chastity. All of that.”
Jessica snuck a look at Ben. He looked like he couldn’t quite decide on one emotion. He was frowning and his jaw looked like it was clenched, but he seemed to be pondering something.
“So,” she went ahead with the point she’d been thinking of keeping from him indefinitely: that she was a hypocrite. “While you were in Africa making the world a better place, I was spending enough on manicures and shoes to fund your entire project.”
And she wasn’t exaggerating.
Ben nodded, watching the road in front of them intently. But he didn’t look at her.
He was disappointed. She gripped the steering wheel and bit the inside of her cheek. She had expected it. She was the one who kept insisting that he was a good guy under all the rebellion, and a good guy would not approve of her time with John, and more especially the motivation behind her time with John.
“And what did John expect in return for the nice nails and fashionable footwear?”
Ben’s voice was low and had a note of danger to it, like challenging her to give him the truth, knowing he wouldn’t like it and knowing that she wouldn’t like his reaction.
She licked her lips, not daring to look at him as she answered. “The rules were simple. Always look great and always be available.”
“What did being available mean?” he pressed.
“It meant that if he had a party to go to and I wanted to go to a show, we went to the party.”
“Dammit, Jessica!” Ben finally snapped.
She jumped but still resisted looking at him. She couldn’t stand seeing the judgment in his eyes.
“Did it mean being available for sex too? Did you sleep with him?”
She felt Ben’s eyes on her, hot, angry and determined. She knew he would want every detail from her and not hesitate to push until he got it. He was used to drama and trauma. In his world there wasn’t time for gently asking for clarifications. He had to storm in, take control and demand details and explanations.
“At first.”
Ben muttered something under his breath that she did not want him to repeat so she could hear it more clearly.
“Not very often,” she said, instead of leaving it alone like she should have. “And it wasn’t very good.”
“The sex with John the billionaire?” Ben asked in a tone that made her seriously consider not saying another word about John Shepard. Ever again.
“Don’t you dare even think the word prostitute,” Jessica said in warning.
It was nothing she hadn’t thought of herself but she couldn’t let Ben think that it was that simple. It had been about rebelling, about showing her father that she would make decisions on her own whether he liked it or not. The money had only allowed her to be more dramatic about it.
“You object to the term?”
“Emphatically.”
“Was that before or after the shoe shopping?”
She gritted her teeth. She knew how it looked. She understood. But it still pissed her off. “Do you think that I am the type of person to have sex with someone for money?” she asked.
“How about for manicures?”
Jessica had nothing more to say. Her time with John had been what it had been. It had been strangely simple and terribly complicated at the same time. She still felt like crying when she thought about Ben assuming the worst of her, though.
Total silence stretched between them, thick with disappointment and bitterness.
Which further irritated her. Where did he get off being judgmental? So he’d saved lives and spread the word of God in a third world country. He wasn’t perfect, either.
“Why are you so disappointed anyway?” Jessica finally demanded. “It’s not like you’re my father, or my minister, or John’s ex-wife.”
Ben was scowling at the road in front of them when she glanced at him.
“Because I’m jealous as hell,” he muttered.
“You’re…what?” she asked, glancing at him again.
“Jealous.” he said. “I’m thinking of all the things that Johnnie got to do to you and I want to do him bodily harm. Then I want to take you home and do everything ten times better and harder and deeper and…”
“Okay,” she said quickly as every inch of skin started to burn. “I’ve got the point.”
He looked over at her. “I’m serious.”
She reached forward and turned up the air conditioning. “I know.”
He was jealous. That was much better than judgmental.
“You don’t have to try too hard,” she told him.
“What do you mean?”
“What I said before. The sex with John wasn’t all that great.”
“I want to try too hard,” he said, almost under his breath.
“Fine with me,” she said. “But I want to be sure that you understand how things were with me and John. I was inexperienced enough to not know what I wanted or what I was missing. And he quickly figured out that spending time with a girl half his age isn’t as interesting as it’s built up to be.”
Ben didn’t speak at first, but Jessica felt his outrage slowly building as her words sunk in.
“What do you mean half his age?”
She swallowed. She was pretty sure it was going to get worse before it got better. “John was forty when I met him.”
“And you were twenty?” Ben demanded, pivoting in his seat.
“Nineteen. He threw me a huge party for my twentieth birthday four months later.”
“What in the hell were you thinking?”
“Hey!” she shot back, her index finger up in front of his face. “It was legal. It was consensual. He didn’t mistreat me. He was good-looking, charming…”
“Rich,” Ben spat.
She gave him a frown, then had to look back at the road. “Yes. Rich. I already admitted that his willingness to spend money on me and my whims was a main attraction.” She took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “I saw the world, did everything I’d ever imagined…”
“I’ll bet a few things John imagined too,” Ben said acidly.
Jessica pressed her lips tightly together. She was used to this reaction, but it stung more from Ben. Especially when he was intent on doing plenty that she disapproved of. He should understand her desire to break away from the pressure of living up to her father’s expectations. Wasn’t breaking away from pressure what Ben was all about lately?
Still, she felt the need to explain, somehow, that things weren’t exactly as he was picturing them.
“I was his trophy. He liked having me on his arm and didn’t mind having me in his bed, but there comes a point in ten months of being together almost twenty-four-seven where you have to talk. That was where things fell apart.”
She looked over at Ben but it was getting harder to read his expression as they headed farther into the residential area south of the city, where the street lights glowed with a softer rosy light than the bright yellow of the main business area.
“And when you can’t talk to each other, you don’t get to know each other or like each other,” she went on. “That makes the sex…blah.”
“Blah?” Ben repeated. “You’re telling me that you didn’t enjoy the sex because you didn’t know him well enough?”
He sounded disbelieving, like she was just trying to make him feel better.
Well, she wasn’t. This wasn’t about Ben.
And suddenly Jessica got mad.
Things had been about Ben for the past few days. She’d been tr
ying to help him, support him, make him see his potential, build him up. But this wasn’t about how Ben felt about her past. If he didn’t like it, somehow couldn’t accept it, or couldn’t get over it, then too bad. She couldn’t change it and she didn’t need him to make her feel bad about it. She’d spent plenty of time beating herself up about it without any help from him.
She frowned and took a hard right turn. “Look, we weren’t in love. We weren’t even friends. When we did spend time together it was almost always with other people, so when it was only the two of us, we went through the mechanics of sex and then went to sleep. It was just something else to cross off my to-do list every day. I never even had an orgasm with him.”
Ben had been frowning at the spot on the road in front of the car that was illuminated with the headlights. But her last sentence made him jerk his head around to stare at her.
“You never what?” he demanded.
She scowled at him. She didn’t want to badmouth John to her new lover, but it was too important for Ben to understand what her relationship with John had been, and what it had not been.
“I never had an orgasm,” she repeated.
“Did he know?”
“I faked it.”
His frown darkened. “Why?”
“Got it over with faster.”
She could hear Ben grinding his teeth together.
“You won’t be faking it with me.”
She nodded. She was sure she would never need to, but she had a feeling Ben would know if she did. “I know.”
“I mean it. I won’t have it. If there’s something you don’t like, you tell me.” He sounded very angry. “If there’s something else you want, or something you want different, you tell me.”
“You’re upset that I faked it with another man?” she asked. “You should be glad I didn’t enjoy it!”
“I should be glad that you gave yourself to a man who couldn’t even give you an orgasm and who you couldn’t be honest with?” he asked. “I should be glad that you had this long-term, physical relationship with a man you couldn’t even talk to?”
“You would have rather had me be madly in love with him and have multiple orgasms every night?” she snapped.
A few seconds of silence followed and then Ben replied, sullenly, “I don’t know.”
Just Right: The Bradfords, Book 1 Page 22