Jackhole: Paging my fake fiancée. Please come and rescue me from Julia’s drunk cousin. At the south bar.
I might have updated his contact info around that half-hour mark.
Jackhole: Missing my date. Want to dance with you again.
Jackhole: Looking for you. Text me if you get this.
He’d been looking for me.
He wanted to dance with me.
“There must have been a delivery delay. I’m sorry, Jack, I checked earlier and didn’t see anything.” I need to buck up and pop for a better provider. Biting my lip, I peer up at him. “So nothing happened with Danni?”
“You’re serious.” Storm-gray eyes slide over my face, lower, before coming back up, tugging a reluctant, slow churning awareness along with it.
“She’s been making her interest clear all day.”
Jack’s mouth quirks. “Has she?”
Perfect, all this guy’s ego needs is another stroke. But after those texts, I feel like maybe I owe him this one. “With the flirting and touching. The boobs and the flask.” I shake my head, knowing I’m going to regret owning this. “The porn-star lip-licking thing right before you guys disappeared.”
Jack nods, the hitch of his mouth going higher. “And you just assumed…”
“I assumed.” Glancing away, I catch sight of Danni just inside the ballroom doors. She’s talking to a couple of girls, but I can’t miss the way she keeps tracking Jack.
This is too much.
Jack catches my chin with the crook of his finger, then drops both hands to loop at my waist. “You abandoned me in my hour of need, Laurel.”
“For the record, I’m here now, and Danni’s still watching you. If I’m reading that catty look right, she’s trying to decide whether I’m a serious threat to her plans for the night, or just a temporary delay she needs to wait out.”
Jack’s brows push up, but to his credit, he doesn’t look away.
“That so?” Despite his solemn tone, there’s a playful glint in his eyes.
“It is.” My eyes drop to his mouth. That bottom lip. “Fair warning, Jack,” I murmur. “This is damage control, so make it count.”
Sliding my hands up the front of his shirt to where his bow tie hangs loose around his open collar, I catch the ends in my hands and slowly reel him in. Jack’s eyes are hot on mine, and when our lips meet in that firm press, his hands tighten at my waist.
His tie slips free of my grasp, and I run my hands over the heavy planes of his chest, pressing into that unyielding resistance and then splaying my fingers wide as they coast over his broad shoulders and neck. I should stop. Danni doesn’t matter. Only I’m drunk on the power of being in the driver’s seat. Of giving Jack a taste of his own medicine with those careful touches that don’t cross any real boundaries, but always seem to leave me feeling like my defenses are left in shambles.
And God, having my hands on him.
I don’t want to stop.
My fingers slide through the short hair at the back of his head, stroking softly through the brush.
A rumble sounds from low in his chest, warning me, enough. But I’m tired of Jack making the rules and drawing the lines.
Melting further into his body, I twine my arms behind his neck.
His hands haven’t moved from my waist. No soft touch to my jaw, no slow drifting contact up my arm. No fingers playing with the ends of my hair.
I miss it. I want it.
Against his lips, I murmur, “Jack Hastings, is that the best you can do?”
13
Jack
For weeks, it’s taken everything I have to keep hold of the short leash I’ve given myself with Laurel. Closed-mouth kisses with a single carefully chosen touch: Her hair, her arm. My thumb along that sexy bit of collarbone.
But this time, Laurel is the one with the point to make.
Having her hands on me was so fucking good I don’t know how I managed to keep from backing her to the nearest wall and taking her mouth like I want to take the rest of her.
Like it’s mine.
Somehow, I kept a grip on my restraint. But now she’s inviting me to play outside the lines. Her lips are parted, barely a breath away. Her eyes meet mine, and I’ve never seen anything like the mix of challenge and heat in them.
She wants more—and Christ, I’ve wanted more from this woman than I’ve been able to have for my whole life.
Is that the best I can do? Not even close.
“Fair warning, Laurel,” I say, our eyes meeting, holding.
Her breath fractures, warm and sweet against my lips, and I can’t wait a second longer. I sink in, angling my head one way and then the other, needing this kiss to go as deep as she’ll let me take it.
I thrust past her lips, cradling her jaw in one hand while I crush her hair in the other.
She quakes against me and then, tentatively, almost shyly, her tongue follows mine.
The softest stroke.
A gentle rub.
Her moan meets mine, and we stop. Our eyes lock, and in the next second, we collide again. We’re devouring each other. The hands I’ve worked so hard to restrain are everywhere, rushing down the cut of her waist, closing hard around the rise of her hip. She’s pressed against me like she hasn’t been since we were seventeen. Her arms around my neck, her fingers curling into the longer hair at the top of my head, tugging.
I can feel her everywhere.
Her breasts, her belly. Her thighs.
My arms tighten possessively, and rising above the need to take more of what she’s giving me is the stronger, more primitive need to do it where no one can see her but me.
Tearing away from her perfect wet mouth, I stare at her, the tension pulsing hot between us, making my skin itch and my muscles bunch.
“Time to go, Laurel.”
It’s the kind of dictate that should have her eyes narrowing, her stubborn chin rising in challenge. But for once, this woman who has been fighting me for as long as I’ve known her doesn’t fight me at all.
She wets her kiss-swollen lips and takes my hand.
Laurel
The elevator doors shush closed behind us as we spill into Jack’s apartment, his jacket and my purse hitting the floor.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” I gasp as he skims my dress up my thighs, hips, and higher. He pulls it over my head and, leaving me in only my heels and silver matching bra and panties, tosses it aside.
Stormy eyes rake over me, before meeting with mine. “It means something.”
No. Not this time. This is about feeling good for a night.
Before I can argue, he kisses me again, growling as his tongue plunges slick past my lips, fucking into my mouth when I wrap my legs around him.
He easily lifts me, and my ass hits some conveniently stationed, narrow entryway table and my shoulders meet the wall. Strong hands squeeze my thighs, holding them open as he rocks into me, rolling his steely shaft over me.
My inner walls clenching from the contact. “Jack.”
There’s a question in the hazy recesses of my mind… something I want confirmed. Agreed to. Understood.
But the only answer Jack gives me is the crush of his mouth, the hot thrust of his tongue, and the possessive grasping hold of his big hands over my ass.
Good enough.
I pull at his shirt, marveling at the fact that he isn’t naked already. That after the way the air charged between us on that terrace, we didn’t spontaneously combust into a pile of shredded clothing and hot friction. That somehow we made it into a car and across the few miles from the Wyse to Jack’s place, and then actually into the apartment before reason burned away completely.
Tearing at the buttons down the front of his shirt, I spread the fabric wide. And stop. Blink. Gape at the hard-packed perfection of the taut skin and ripped muscles that make up Jack Hastings’s bare, hot chest.
I swallow, tracing my hands over the slabs of his pecs, my thumbs migrating toward the tight, masculine nubs o
f his nipples.
Jack groans, and my eyes flick back to his.
“Your body isn’t terrible,” I manage, but the words come out sounding decidedly awed and breathless.
Not quite as unaffected as I was going for. But I’m not sure who could be unaffected by the way Jack looks.
The corner of his mouth hitches, and the way he looks at me makes something inside me still and then start to hum.
Then he’s back at my mouth, kissing me like I haven’t been kissed since I was seventeen.
Only this time, I know exactly what I’m getting. This time, I’m in control.
That full bottom lip teases my mouth, and my hands go to his belt, his fly. His cock strains against the layers containing it, and I can’t help but curl my hand around the thick shaft between us and give it a testing stroke. One he likes very much, based on the string of obscenities he utters in my ear before pulling back to brush my hand aside.
My pouty protest dies on my lips when he rubs the backs of his knuckles over my panties, then hooks his fingers beneath and pulls them aside.
I still, anticipation winding tight inside me.
And then he’s there… stroking over the bare spread of my sex.
“So fucking wet for me, Elle.” He runs his fingers front to back before pressing one thick finger inside me, groaning as he pumps it in and out.
“Jack!”
“You feel like silk.” His mouth is at my ear, his breath ragged as it washes down my neck. “Fucking everywhere I touch you.”
There’s a reverence to his tone that undoes me, has me handing over another piece of that control I meant to keep, and then arching into his touch so he can take some more.
Another thick finger presses in with the first, the decadent stretch stealing my breath even as that heady tension builds within.
“That’s it, Elle.”
My legs have started to shake where they clutch at his waist. I’m so close. So close.
His thumb eases toward my clit, slowly massaging my slickened, sensitive flesh. His fingers moving in and out. Closer. Him. Me.
“Look at me, Laurel.”
My eyes snap to his, locking in place as his thumb finds home, and when those two thick fingers find a spot inside me that has me seeing stars… he rubs.
I shatter beneath the intensity of his blazing eyes, coming undone as his nostrils flare, falling apart from a touch so good I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to trash-talk his ego again.
Withdrawing his hand from between my legs, he brings his fingers to his mouth and, still watching me, licks. Closes his eyes and groans. “Christ, Laurel, your pussy tastes so fucking sweet.”
It’s so hot and dirty, I whimper at not having him inside me.
Eyes darkening, Jack pulls out a condom and tears it open with his teeth. He’s got it rolled on in seconds and then he’s there, angling his thick shaft so it’s notched against me.
I’m trembling, trying to tip my hips into him. But it isn’t until I meet his eyes again that he gives me what I’m waiting for.
Inch by inch, he pushes in, pulls back, and then pushes in deeper still.
“You okay?” he asks between gritted teeth.
Jack is a big guy and the stretch is intense, but I nod quickly. “So good. Are you?”
A short laugh huffs free and he closes his eyes, dropping his forehead to mine. “Yes. More than okay, actually.”
Maybe it’s the sound of his laugh, but my body relaxes, easing the way for him to sink in completely, filling me like I’ve never been filled before.
Jack starts to move. Slow, steady strokes that rub and tease my need higher and higher with every pass.
“Don’t stop,” I plead, nearly losing my mind from the sexy sensory overload I’m getting. From the intensity of Jack’s eyes on mine. From the need in his grip on my thighs. From the way I nearly detonate every time he sinks home… holds… rocks… and then slowly, agonizingly pulls out to start the process again.
I always have to tell the men I’m with what to do, but with Jack, good God, I’m going to come again in the next stroke if he—
“Jack!”
He groans as I clench and spasm around him, coming so hard he has to remind me to breathe when the waves of pleasure keep crashing against me.
“I fucking love it when you say my name.”
“Jack,” I sigh, threading my fingers through his hair.
I’m wrung out from my orgasm, my muscles weak, my brain foggy. Sensation rushes through me, warm and tingly, intensifying as Jack continues his methodical assault on my senses.
Only he’s done with this table and gathers me closer, carrying me still wrapped tight around his body.
He walks us down the hall and up the stairs to his bedroom. And when he lays me back on the bed, he catches one of my legs behind the knee and hooks it over his arm to hold me open to him as he spears into me with long, breath-stealing strokes. “You want it like this, beautiful?”
“Oh my… yes!”
He increases the tempo and drive, pounding into me with each stroke. “Or like this?”
I’m halfway back to that peak already. Breathlessly, I cry, “I want it all.”
His mouth curves, and he catches the hand with his ring on it, locking our fingers together. Eyes intense, he answers, “So do I.”
The look in his eyes makes me nervous. It makes me want to press a hand to his chest and ask him to explain just exactly what he means by that. But then he’s kissing me again… and I can’t think about anything else.
14
Jack
This doesn’t change anything.
She’s said it twice. But lying with Laurel naked and draped across my chest, her dark hair falling like cool silk over my heated skin, I don’t think she’s right.
This changes everything.
Because now I’ve had the one thing I thought I never would. The chance I’d have sworn she wouldn’t give me again. And I’m grabbing hold with both hands.
Her skin is soft beneath my palm, and all I want is to pull her up and hold her against me. But before that can happen, I need to get rid of the rubber.
One more stroke along the bare expanse of her back and I shift from beneath her. “Give me a second.”
Laurel collapses into the space where I’d been, her satisfied purr making me want to crawl right back over her, nose the hair from her shoulder, and lick that so-very-sensitive spot while I take her from behind.
Rubber first.
Then round two.
I’m quick cleaning up in the bathroom, but not quick enough, it seems.
“Really?” I tuck the corner of the towel at my waist and step back into the bedroom I hadn’t vacated more than a minute ago. Empty. What the fuck?
I’m halfway down the stairs when Laurel’s head pops up from where she’s bent over, slipping her foot into her heel. Fully dressed. “In a rush?”
She smiles, her slender brow arching at me. “That was really fun. Just what I needed.” She stands and brushes the hair that was fanned across my shoulder from her face. It’s smooth and straight… even after being pinned up in that twist thing through half the day and then rolling around in bed with me for the last hour.
“I don’t bring many women back here,” I say, crossing my arms as I lean on the banister. “Most of the time I’d rather hit a hotel or her place. But no matter where we end up or how short term our involvement might be… I never take off before the sheets have even had a chance to cool.” I give her a pointed look. “It’s not polite.”
Laurel glances away. “What do you want me to say?”
That she’s not going to leave and that I’m not the only one who sees the potential for something amazing between us. “That you’ve never had better. Never had bigger.”
She laughs like I knew she would, and I catch her hand, walking us into the living room, where I sit back on the couch, pulling Laurel in to stand between my knees.
She doesn’t fight me, but I can see
she’s closed herself off already. Her expression is shuttered, her body tense, and I hate how different it feels between us. This isn’t what I want.
Hell, if I’m being honest, it’s never really been what I wanted.
Resting my hands lightly at her hips, I brush my thumbs over the shimmering fabric of her dress.
“Jack,” she says with a nervous laugh, her hand moving toward mine, but then stalling in the air before dropping to her side.
“Laurel, we should talk.” It’s cliché, but in this moment, it works.
I don’t want her to leave, and after what just happened between us, it would make sense to lay down some clarifications. Only I don’t really want to talk either. I don’t want to fight. And something tells me Laurel isn’t going to be down with what I have to say.
Not without some convincing, anyway.
She wets her lips and smooths back the hair that’s perfectly in place.
Nervous.
“I know this seems like something I might make a big deal about. But don’t worry, I’m completely aware of what this is and what this isn’t.”
I can feel the slight jut of her hipbones beneath my thumbs and the notable lack of panty line beneath my fingers. It’s distracting as fuck, but I need to keep my head in the game, or a minute and a half from now, she’s going to be riding the elevator down to the ground floor.
I give her an easy smile. “I’m not worried.”
Not the way she thinks, anyway.
Another graze of my thumbs and she leans into my touch just that much. I take it for the victory it is and decide to push my luck a bit more by pulling her another step closer and letting my hands ghost over her hips and ass. Down to where her short dress meets her thighs.
My pinkies graze below her hem, and the combination of that soft bare skin and the catch of her breath has my dick already twitching beneath my towel.
“I—I should go.”
“Mmm. I’m thinking you shouldn’t.”
A tiny furrow digs between her brows, and her eyes shift to my hands moving up and down, bringing her dress higher with each pass, inching it up and up—
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