“There. Right there,” she whispered, as he hit some new, perfect spot. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but when his palm came up to cradle her cheek, she opened them again to look at him.
“Jess,” he whispered. Nothing else. Just her name, spoken softly in the heat of passion, his eyes looking down into hers full of unbearable tenderness.
She lifted a hand to his face, too, her thumb brushing against his bottom lip as he raggedly drew in a breath.
Oh, he’d gotten this so wrong. The physical chemistry she and Alex had always had, combined with PaperGirl and Peabody’s connection, wasn’t just having the best of both worlds. It was an altogether new world, one both exhilarating and terrifying.
And it was in that moment that her body unfurled. It was more than sex, more than pleasure. The connection she felt was overwhelming, like nothing she’d ever experienced before, shaking her down to her very foundations. Her eyes stung with tears as his breathing hitched, once, twice, and then he let out a low, animal groan as he fell helplessly into his own release.
They lay in perfect bliss in the hazy aftermath, his breaths warming the side of her neck. His hair was damp with sweat as she dragged her fingers through it. He pressed a brief, soft kiss to her shoulder before shifting his weight off her. His heavy arm fell across her waist, tugging her body in tight to his. His lips kissed the side of her hair and then her temple before he let out his breath in an exhausted exhale.
“That was...”
“My brain stopped working the minute you started taking off those tights.”
She chuckled, nuzzling her face into the side of his neck. “The rest of you seemed to work fine.”
“I guess you bring out my best. Hang on a sec.”
He rolled away to dispose of the condom, leaving her feeling chilly and bare. Conscious thoughts began to trickle back in. She’d just had sex with Alex. Amazing, mind-blowing sex. Wow. Flickers of self-consciousness about her nakedness flared, but before she could reach for clothes or the blankets, Alex lay back down in bed.
“Here.” He worked the duvet out from under them and held it up, making space for her next to him. The sheets were cool and she shivered slightly as she slid down next to him. “Come here.” Without fanfare, he scooped an arm under her shoulders and rolled her onto her side, nestled up against the length of him.
Their whole relationship to each other had just been turned on its head. They were probably supposed to talk, figure things out. But this felt too nice, too perfect. Warm, secure, delicious. Her head settled in on his shoulder like she’d been snuggling with him forever, and his hand found its way to her hair, stroking it slowly and hypnotically. She was gone before she realized it.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Alex came awake to a brutal case of pins and needles in his right arm. When he turned his head on the pillow, the tumble of silky dark brown hair and the small, pale hand curled loosely against his chest brought everything back.
Jess. Here in his bed. Naked.
Holy hell, what a night.
For a long time, he lay still, just absorbing the moment. He’d wanted this—her—for so many years, it hardly felt real. Surely tonight was just a dream, and he’d wake up hard, still imagining her naked body laid out on his bed.
But the numbness and pain in his arm reminded him this was no fevered sex dream. Jess was real. And cutting off the circulation in his shoulder. Gently, he eased out from underneath her, lowering her head back to the pillow. She barely stirred. This day must have been hell for her.
PaperGirl told him she’d been fired from her job. Which meant Jess had gotten fired from the Daily Post. Jess getting fired under any circumstances from any job was inconceivable. She was the hardest-working person he knew. Dedicated and loyal to a fault. Something horrible must have happened. He’d get it out of her later. For now, he’d let her sleep and see what he could manage in the way of food, since they’d missed dinner in the midst of the drama.
Leaving her sleeping, he pulled on some sweats and made his way out into the kitchen. He was bent over, examining the bare expanse of the inside of his fridge when her voice startled him.
“For a second, I thought you’d pulled another runner, except this is your house, so that would have been awkward.”
She was leaning on the island that divided the kitchen from the living room, wearing his DeWitt U Swim Team T-shirt and nothing else, her dark hair in a wild tangle around her shoulders, eyes sleepy and sexy all at once. Yep. This was a fantasy straight from the spank bank. He was still gaping at her when she began to look uneasy, tugging the hem of his T-shirt down over the tops of her thighs.
“What?”
He shook his head, eyes roving over her in wonder. “Just you...looking like this...here. I, um...” Would it be disgusting to tell her how often he’d jerked off to this image? Yeah, too soon. “I might have fantasized about this once or twice.”
Relaxing, she smiled and tucked her hair behind one ear. “Wow, a fantasy is a lot for a girl to live up to.”
He strode toward her, pinning her against the kitchen island. “Trust me, you’re leaving the fantasy in the dust right now.”
He kissed her, her mouth hot and sweet against his. Never before had one kiss been enough to reduce him to shaking lust. Was it too soon to drag her back to bed? Suddenly her stomach growled, answering the question for him.
“Sorry,” she mumbled when he pulled away. “I skipped dinner.”
“Me, too. I was trying to find something to eat, but the situation is pretty grim. I have beer and ketchup. How about a pizza?”
“Pizza’s perfect.” Scooting out from under his body, she hoisted herself up on one of the bar stools along the kitchen island.
He ordered a pizza on his phone and joined her at the kitchen island to wait. “So...” He leaned over to press another quick kiss to her lips before he launched into it. “Want to tell me about what drove you here tonight?”
She was still smiling dreamily at him. “Huh?”
“You got fired.”
In an instant, the smile faded and the spark drained out of her eyes. “Oh...right.”
Reaching out, he tucked her hair behind her ear and curled his palm around the back of her neck. “Tell me what happened.”
She let out a wry chuckle. “It’s all your fault, actually.”
“My fault?”
“No, not really. Um...” She straightened on her stool, putting some space between them in a way that set off a tremor of unease in his gut. “Okay, you’re not going to like what I’m about to say, but here it goes. Three Brooklyn Daily Post stories have shown up on ClickNews in the past month.”
“And? Reporters are chasing the same stories all the time. Sometimes one scoops the other. It happens.” The fact that a ClickNews reporter managed to scoop anybody on anything was mildly surprising, but he suspected they weren’t all hacks. One or two seemed like they might be talented, under different circumstances.
“Yeah, I know. That’s what we thought with the first two. Just bad timing, bad luck. But this last one was Lina’s. Her source was supposed to be exclusive—”
“Sources sometimes lie.” Surely she knew all this. No source was truly exclusive until you broke the story.
“I know that. But there’s more. She’s been working on it for weeks. I helped her with the research. It wasn’t just the source who showed up in ClickNews’s article. Some of her notes and my research did, too.”
“And you think someone at ClickNews stole it?”
“Alex, there’s no other explanation. Some of Lina’s notes showed up word-for-word in your article. There’s a leak. Someone at the Daily Post is passing stories to ClickNews.”
He dropped his hand and sat back, absorbing the information. His instinct was to defend ClickNews. And if it was just the first two stories, there was nothing to this suspicion.
But the third, Lina’s story... He trusted Jess on this one, and if she said there was no way it could have been a coincidence, then—Shit, he had a huge problem.
He closed his eyes and dropped his head back. “Fuck.”
“Do you know who it is?”
“There’s only one person it can be. Chase.”
The buzz of the intercom gave him a few minutes of cover to collect his thoughts. Jess said nothing as he retrieved plates and worked through this startling piece of information.
Okay, so Chase didn’t always have the truest moral compass, but he’d always assumed that was just where his sex life was concerned. He was familiar enough with that sort of moral relativism with his father. But he really hadn’t thought Chase capable of a betrayal like this.
Although the news was a shock, it didn’t hurt as much as he’d have thought. Maybe because his friendship with Chase had ebbed years ago. Yes, he had some great memories of high school and college parties, but they’d largely drifted apart by graduation, and Alex had done nothing to keep it together. They’d only reconnected when Chase called him out of the blue to invite him out for a drink.
Where he casually mentioned Drake’s acquisition of ClickNews. And before that conversation was over, somehow Alex had been offering to put in a good word for him.
It had all been a setup. What a fucking asshole.
Jess tossed her half-eaten pizza on her plate and swiveled to face him. “Okay, you know I’m no fan of his, and it looks bad, but let’s be logical. Are you sure it’s Chase?”
“There’s no one else it can be. The journalists’ pool at ClickNews...” He broke off and let out a scoff of laughter. “It’s a stretch to call them journalists. Some of them are, but a lot of them have no real training. They’re just freelancers we bring on for short stints. It’s something I wanted to change, if... Whatever. It doesn’t matter. The head of the journalism division gathers the stories and assigns them to writers in the pool to work up. Sometimes they run down some info on their own, but the story...that comes from Chase. That asshole.”
That lucky, ungrateful asshole. His shock was rapidly giving way to a roiling fury. How he’d envied Chase when he took over that position. Alex had dreamed of what he could do with that news division. But Dan Drake had different plans for his only child. A stint overseeing the whole site, to learn it from the inside, before he would move on to some other branch of the Drake Media empire. That was his fate.
“So it has to be him,” Jess said. “But who’s feeding him the stories from the Daily Post? Unlike you, he doesn’t have a connection to anyone on the staff. Lina and I know him, but it’s safe to say, we’re not friendly—”
The revelation about Chase had been such a blow that he’d failed to put together the rest of the story. Now he reached out for Jess, taking her hands in his. “Wait a minute. Is that why Mariel fired you? She thinks you leaked the stories?”
Jess nodded miserably. “Yes. To you.”
Another piece of the puzzle fell into place. “Because that woman from your office...she saw us together. She’s the one who’s been giving you a hard time, isn’t she? She’s your dragon.”
Her mouth quirked up in a wry smile. “Right. My dragon. Of course you know all about that. It wasn’t me, but I can’t prove it, and it’s true that I have a connection to someone at ClickNews. So Mariel fired me.” She let out a quavering breath. “It was so awful, sitting there as she accused me of that. Mariel, of all people.”
“This is bullshit!” he exploded in fury. “There was nothing underhanded going on between us. I’ll go in and tell her that.”
Touching his arm, she smiled weakly. “Alex, with all due respect, you’re the one they think I’m leaking to. Your dad owns the website. Mariel’s not going to believe you any more than she believed me.”
“Jess, I’m so sorry that being seen with me has wrecked this for you. This isn’t fair.”
She let out a wry chuckle. “I really wanted to blame you for it. But you didn’t do anything wrong, any more than I did. And I have to admit, my connection to you looked bad. So did all the Twitter stuff, once that came out. I can understand what it must have looked like to everyone at the paper.”
“Lina knows you’d never steal her story that way. Didn’t she defend you?”
Without warning, Jess’s eyes filled with tears. “She thinks I did it,” she whispered.
“Come on. This is Lina. There’s no way she thinks that.”
Jess shook her head. “You didn’t see the way she was looking at me. She doubted me, and that’s just...” The tears slipped free, streaking down her cheeks.
“Ah, Jess—” Her tears wrecked him. She was so tough and still so relentlessly hopeful. This despair didn’t sit right on her.
“Sorry.” She swiped her fingers under her eyes. “Sorry, sorry. I’m sure it’s no fun having a girl burst into tears right after she sleeps with you.”
“Come here.” Grasping her by the elbows, he pulled her off her stool to stand between his legs. He reached up and took her face in his palms, swiping away her tears.
“We’ll figure this out,” he murmured, pressing a kiss first to one cheek, then the other, and finally to her mouth.
“It’s not your problem to fix, Alex.”
“Excuse me? First of all, my fucking former best friend is running stolen stories on my father’s website. This hurts more than you. He’s putting the entire company at risk. God—” He broke off, shaking his head at a memory. “I got him that job.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, I put in a word for him with my dad.”
“Hardly seems like he’d need you for that.”
“What do you mean?”
She shrugged. “Just that he seems like he’s in pretty tight with your father all on his own.”
“That’s recent,” Alex said, although now that Jess had brought it up, Chase had been attempting to ingratiate himself with his father ever since he started working at the site. Seemed Chase had big plans for himself—plans Alex was going to take great delight in crushing into dust.
“Okay, take care of Chase, but what happened to me—”
He cut her off with a brief, hard kiss. “You’re in trouble because I couldn’t make myself stay away from you.”
“Couldn’t make yourself—”
He rolled his eyes. “Come on. If I liked Ému’s coffee that much, I could have hired a barista and set one up in the ClickNews lobby. I showed up every morning because chances were good that I’d see you. I wasn’t always honest with myself about my motivations, but deep down, that’s what I was doing.”
“Maybe I was, too.” Jess ran a hand up his bare arm, her fingertips skating along his skin and setting him ablaze. “The coffee’s good, but not that good.”
“Think how much time we wasted standing in that line and arguing every morning when we could have been doing this.”
“Fighting with you wasn’t all bad, though.”
She caught her bottom lip with her teeth as she glanced up at him. That gesture had always slayed him, and when she aimed it straight at him? Dead.
“No?”
“No. It was kind of...fun. If that makes sense.”
“It makes perfect sense. Being near you always made me feel...”
Leaning in closer, she braced her palms on his thighs. “What?”
“Awake. You made me feel awake, when I didn’t even realize I’d been sleeping before.”
Jess blinked, and Alex reveled in rendering her—for once—speechless, before pulling her closer and kissing her with a slow thoroughness. His hands slid down to explore her luscious little body as his tongue explored her perfect mouth.
“How do you feel about cold pizza?” he whispered in her ear before moving to kiss the side of her neck. Her breath left her body in a long, wavering sigh as her han
ds slid higher on his thighs and gripped him. His cock swelled as he imagined sliding into the warmth of her body again.
“I like it better cold.”
He stood and swept her up in his arms. So small, so perfect, her legs bared all the way to the crease of her thighs as his T-shirt rode up on her. “It might be very cold by the time I’m done.”
Her arms wound around his neck. “Do you promise?”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jess woke to the unfamiliar sensation of someone moving around the room. Then she registered the sheets, way softer than anything the Romanos owned, and the pillow, like a downy cloud under her head. Cracking an eye open, she saw bright morning sunlight leaking in all around the wall of curtains across from the bed. Not a window, glass doors—that was what was behind the curtains.
“I tried not to wake you.” Alex’s deep rumble startled her, as did the bed shifting as he sat down on it behind her. She rolled to her back to look at him. He was wearing a plain white T-shirt and dark pants, his hair wet from the shower. “You can stay as long as you want, but I need to get going.”
Grimacing, she pushed herself upright, holding the blankets to her chest. “Guess I’m not rushing to get to the office this morning. Or ever again.”
“Hey.” His hand came up to cup her face. “This is temporary. We’ll figure it out and get your job back. In the meantime, you might as well sleep in, right?”
She shook her head. “I have to get home. I have a lot to explain to my family. They don’t even know I got fired.” That was a conversation she was dreading, but putting it off wouldn’t make it any easier.
“I’m out of coffee down here, but Lucia’s probably put a pot on upstairs. We can have a cup before we go.”
“Who’s Lucia?”
“My dad’s housekeeper.”
“Your dad...”
The One I Love to Hate Page 19