We don’t. I can’t. Her weenie-assed date is going to be looking for her soon, and I just got a 911 text from Wilson that one of our clients has been busted for a DUI. He had it in hand for now, but we’d need to meet back at the office soon to put together a statement.
Stolen moments, that’s all we get. But I’m done thinking that Hailey and I can’t happen. We just can’t happen in a healthy, functional way.
Good news is, I do dysfunctional like a fucking pro.
“Cole,” Hailey pants my name as I drag my mouth down her neck. “This is crazy.”
It’s insane. “Tell me to stop, then.”
“Don’t you dare stop.” She sighs and arches her back as I latch onto her swollen nipple and suck her hard into my mouth. The taste of her and the way she jerks against my body drives me crazy. Her dress is soft velvet, and it folds easily in my fist as I pull the fabric up, baring her leg. She’s wearing stockings attached to a garter belt, and as my fingers hit the pillowy skin at the top of her thighs, I curse the fact that I don’t have a condom on me.
I took it out of my wallet, knowing it was the only way to keep myself from fucking her if given half a chance.
Hailey arching her hips into my eager hand definitely counts as a chance, and now I’m hating myself for not being ready for it.
I tease my finger under her garter, savouring the feel of her body bared to me. Her pussy is mere inches away, but as soon as I get there, it’s going to be game over. I’ll be lucky if I remember any of this beyond the animalistic memory of being inside her. Already I feel lightheaded and drunk on the delicate scent of her skin.
I’ve got a reputation as a tough guy. Ex-Navy SEAL, nothing fazes me. But if anyone wanted to undermine me, all they’d need to do is throw Hailey Reid in my tracks. This woman turns me into a simpering idiot. And if she’d have me, I’d give it all up and try to be a better man for her.
Like she knows I’m over-romanticizing this moment, she licks up my neck and sinks her teeth into my jaw. “Having second thoughts, tough guy?”
With a growl, I jerk my head down and capture her smart mouth with mine. She tastes like champagne and innocence and warm, sexy woman. “Just trying to decide if I want you to come on my fingers or my face.”
She whimpers at my words, pressing her face into my cheek even as her lips part and her tongue sneaks out to taste me again. I said them to be rough, to tip her sideways a bit in an effort to regain control over the situation, but it makes me hard as nails that dirty talk works for her.
Willing myself to hold my shit together—and remember to keep my dick in my pants—I slide my fingers up the garter to where the ribbon meets lace. Where her leg meets her hip in a crease I want to get up close and personal with, but we’re in the back of a mostly dark concert hall and time is of the essence.
I find her pussy wet and swollen, and at the first slippery touch, all control disappears. I hike her leg up onto my hip, pressing hand between her hot, hungry cunt and my own hip as I rock my erection against her.
My hand is drenched, but I still start with one finger, gently easing into her. She’s ready and willing, bucking against me, and I slide two in on the next thrust, cupping all of her wet heat in my palm. Her clit bumps against the heel of my hand as I finger her, slow and deep and hard, and with each surge her hitching breath gets more ragged.
Her hand curls around my neck, her grip alternating between tight and fluttery as she works against my body, and my dick is fucking begging me to be let loose. It would be so damn easy to lift her up a few inches, rip open my fly, and sink inside her. She’s tight as fuck around my fingers, she’d milk my cock like nothing else I’d ever felt.
Literally, because it would be the first time I’d ever fucked someone without a rubber.
I need to get my cock away from the soft cradle of her thighs.
Swallowing her moaning protest with one last, rough kiss, I slide my fingers out from her lace panties, replacing that pressure on her clit with the iron rod in my pants—just for a minute, safely on the other side of thin suit pants. I can feel how wet she is against me, and I don’t care that I’m going to smell like sex when we leave or that I’ll need to head out the back exit. Fucking worth it to grind into her just once.
I bring my glistening fingers to our mouths, breaking our kiss just long enough to slide the taste of her over my tongue. She stares at me for a beat, her eyes wide and her chest heaving, and then her mouth crashes into mine, my hand barely getting out of the way in time. She groans into my mouth as I roll my hips and my tongue at the same time, sharing the taste of her.
In my thirty-one years, I’ve had a lot of sex. Dirty, vanilla, familiar, anonymous. I thought I’d experienced it all, but Hailey going nuts as I lick her wetness off my fingers? Hottest thing I’ve ever experienced.
As of this moment, my ill-considered arrangement with Penny needs to be drowned in the Potomac, because I’ve tasted beautiful and I’m not letting her go.
—seven—
Hailey
This is so much better and so much worse than I imagined it would be. My head is swimming and I ache for more of Cole—more of his mouth, his fingers, and that impressive erection I can feel between my legs.
I want that so much, I hurt.
“Fuck me, Cole,” I beg, not caring that it’s stupid. I want him to take me right here, hard against the wall, consequences be damned.
“Can’t.” He kisses down my neck, although kiss is a strangely polite word for the way his mouth is devouring my skin. “You’re going to come on my face, beautiful. And you’ve got to do it fast.”
Before I can protest, he drops to his knees and lifts my left leg over his shoulder. I slam my hands back against the wall, a futile effort to brace myself for the onslaught of sensations.
I’m expecting hard and fast.
I get slow and lazy, and it’s so much better.
It’s like he can bend time to his will, because the world ceases around us. It’s just the two of us at the back of an empty concert hall, me pressed against the wall, Cole between my legs. His tongue licking me like an ice cream cone, and his hand…
Oh god.
Cole’s fingers are heading up the back of my thigh, toward my ass. I arch away from them, because my ass is not my best feature. His hands should be on my boobs, or my calves. I have very nice calves. Curvy, long, and delicate at the ankle. Very little about me can be described as delicate so I take extra pride in how nice my ankles are.
As if he knows I’ve gone into my head a bit, Cole sucks on my clit hard, and that works. I moan and sink into his mouth a bit, relaxing.
And that’s when he slides his fingers between my rear cheeks, just a tease. My face burns because I’m mortified, but it also…
“You feel amazing,” he murmurs against my thigh, pressing a kiss there before covering my sex with his mouth again. This time it’s the hard and fast I expected, and I lose my mind. The most beautiful pressure ever builds in my lower belly, and I stop feeling embarrassed about how good Cole’s fingers feel as they stroke all the nerve endings between my pussy and my ass. I don’t care that his face is wet because of how wet I am, or that I’m panting and whimpering like an idiot as he tongues me to a crashing orgasm.
I blank for a second, a moment of bliss after Cole pushes me into a sensational free fall, and then it’s this pulsing that seems to have no end, like a perpetual motion machine in my womb, each throb rubbing those nerve endings in just the right way all over again.
In the aftermath, as my pussy clenches at the empty air, and the spots clear from my vision, as Cole presses the top of his head to my belly and uses his pocket square to clean me up before setting my panties back into place…in that moment, I think about inviting him back to my place.
A stupid thought. I push it away as readily as it comes, and I tell myself to keep it meaningless. He’s good at sex. So what. I can give him a blow job that would make his head explode, and we’ll be even.
&nb
sp; I’ll get right on that, as soon as all the nerves in my body stop firing off at random, sparkly intervals. It’s like there are a million fairies gallivanting through my body having a freaking May Day celebration.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath as Cole settles my skirt back to the floor and rises in front of me. I don’t want to look at him, although I can’t quite figure out why. It’s not that I don’t want him still. I do.
I reach for him, my eyes still closed. He braces his arms on either side of my head and kisses me, long and slow and deep, as I slide my hand against the front of his pants, up and down his straining cock.
“Open your eyes, Hailey.”
I shake my head.
“I have to go.”
Damn. My eyes fly open. It’s bad form to beg to suck cock, right? “But you—”
“I’m a big boy. I’ll be fine.”
“I don’t mind,” I whisper, gripping him tighter. “I mean, I want to return the favor. You made me feel so good, it’s your turn.”
He presses his hips into my hand and kisses me again. This brush of his lips has a painful taste of finality. “I mind. When you suck my cock, it’s going to be in private.”
When.
Holy shit.
“Go find your date and get home safely.” His words roll over me like gravel. We’re both here on dates with other people. And just like that, the spell is broken.
“Right.” I stare at a spot over his shoulder as I squeeze my hands together, wondering where the hell I dropped my purse. “Excuse me.”
“Hailey.” He says my name like it’s the start of a bigger statement, but no further words come. That’s just fine. There aren’t any words that can excuse participating in cheating.
“Go find your date.” I repeat his words back to him, but where his were accidentally rough, mine are deliberately sharp.
He grips my jaw, turning my face toward his. “She’s nothing to me.”
“She’s your girlfriend, Cole. Your word, not mine.”
“Not anymore.”
“I’m not sure she knows that.”
“She won’t care.”
“That’s…weird. And I don’t care.”
“No lies between us, beautiful.”
I stare at him. At his gorgeous face, the hard lines and piercing gaze. There are so many lies between us already. “Except about your work, right?”
Tension crackles between us. After a beat, he steps back, releasing me. It’s like we didn’t just share a spectacularly intimate moment. I’m frosty, he’s pissed…order has been restored to the universe, and I’m alone again.
Nothing new.
But for the first time, I’m not sure that solitude is better. Cole has the same drama spilling around him that my family does, but walking away from him? A million times harder.
I still do it, though. I’m not an idiot.
— —
I tell myself to stop thinking about Cole’s fingers inside me. His steely gaze piercing my soul as he watches me come undone for him. His taunting words sliding under my skin as I rail against him. My hate should push him away, but it just seems to turn him on, like I’m a challenge he can conquer.
I don’t like to think about how easily that’s proven true. So I need to move on.
It’s been a week. I can still taste myself on his lips. That’s hardly progress.
I make lists of all the reasons I should never see him again. For one thing, I’m Georgetown and he’s Dupont Circle. Actually, more the scuzzy K Street type. Even before the fifty shades of moral gray area behavior, we’re already two very different people.
And there was the girlfriend, or whatever Penny was to him. Some kind of complicated relationship I can’t wrap my head around.
The murder cover-up.
How bossy he is.
But that just leads to a pros list, because he might be bossy in the bedroom.
And he seems to like how soft I am, all over, and my gigantic boobs.
Plus, no matter how hard he drives against my body, how firmly he grips my wrists as he pins me in place and rips pleasure from my body, I know he’d never hurt or embarrass me.
But he’ll always be an enigma, and orgasms—even earth-shattering ones—can’t make up for secrets and lies.
As if the mere thought of amoral behavior is like a Bat signal for my older sister, my phone pings at me. An email from Taylor.
I stare at the screen for a minute. The subject line is blank because she knows if she gives the topic away, I’m less likely to click. Ha. Joke’s on her. I’m not going to click anyway.
I’m not going to delete it. It’ll sit there, forever, a little bolded electronic line to remind me of how far we’ve drifted apart. We’ve never been close, not like the relationship I have with Alison, but this is my big sister. Up until high school, she was my closest friend, by virtue of sharing a playroom.
We definitely don’t share a playroom anymore. Sometimes it feels like we’re not even playing in the same arena.
I tuck my phone back in my purse, slap on a baseball hat and oversized sunglasses, and head for the Metro station. There haven’t been any photographers bothering me in weeks, but covering up is a better-safe-than-sorry plan.
It was good to get back to work this week, and today Taryn and I are going out for sushi at lunch to celebrate my return to normalcy—all I have to do is pretend my scandal-loving sibling doesn’t want to talk to me for some reason.
At the staff meeting, Ellen announces that the budget looks like it might have room for a new hire in the summer. She doesn’t look at me, but Taryn does, and I bite my lip to keep from grinning. I’d be thrilled to keep working at the employment agency after my internship is over.
I’m floating on a cloud as we head for lunch, but it doesn’t last long, because Alison texts me as we arrive at the restaurant. I shoo Taryn inside and take a deep breath before reading the message. Did you get Taylor’s email? Family meeting tonight.
I feel a momentary stab of guilt over the tentative way my siblings tiptoe around contacting me. On the other hand…I did see Taylor’s email and I didn’t open it. So there’s some responsibility for the dysfunction sitting on my shoulders. That uncomfortable fact isn’t easily shook off. Haven’t read it yet. Probably can’t make it.
Alison calls me next. I take a deep breath before answering on the third ring. “Hey. I’m on my way into lunch, so…”
“Don’t hey me.” For a nineteen-year-old, my baby sister is such an old soul. A little mother, always has been. A refreshing change since our actual mother never cared for that role. “This is important.”
“I don’t care. I know that makes me an awful person, but I just don’t.”
She sighs. “Vanity Fair wants to do an article on Taylor.”
“Yep, don’t care.”
She keeps going. “The article is about Washington as the new New York for young adults of privilege, some bullshit like that, and Taylor’s lawyer thinks it would be good if we all cooperate.”
Because my straight A’s baby sister, nose-to-the-grindstone brother, and my own track record of actually working for a living would make our oldest sister look like something less than the horrid slut she actually is.
How I hate that word. Hate myself for using it. But she wears it like a badge of honor, brassing out the media coverage of her indiscrete blow job as if it were any other party girl oops. Would have been less of a big deal if the pants she’d snaked her tongue into hadn’t belonged to the Vice-President of the United States.
“You guys can do it without me. Tell the reporter I’m a massive bitch.”
“You’re not…” Her voice drops to a quiet plead. “Come on, Hailey. There’s no downside to it for us, just an interview. And if it helps show Taylor as a normal girl who was taken advantage of…”
“Alison, you’re barely old enough to even know about what Taylor did, but we both know she wasn’t the victim. I mean, there wasn’t a victim. She had an affair
with a married man. A famous married man. Let her wear that.”
My baby sister doesn’t answer, and for a second, I think maybe she’s hung up on me. She’s quiet, in general, but she has a decent bite when she wants to dole it out. “Go have lunch,” she finally says. “We can talk about this later.”
“Except I’m busy later, rememb—” I huff out a breath as she disconnects the call on me. This isn’t over, I know that, but I shake it off. Crispy spicy salmon rolls are calling my name.
One giggly hour later, I’m back at work and Ellen has left a note on my desk to come in and see her. Taryn gives me a thumbs up as I swipe on fresh lip gloss and brush my hair. Ellen doesn’t care, but I do. It’s about being professional.
She waves me in before I even knock. “How was lunch?”
“Delicious.” I smile. “You wanted to see me?”
“Have a seat.” She launches into some nice things, then pauses and crosses her hands. “I hope you’ll apply for the job in the summer.”
“I will.” I press my thumbs into the palms of my hands, two sharp anchors in reality. Be cool, Hailey.
“And hopefully there won’t be any more drama between now and then, right?” She smiles, but all of a sudden, I’m less enthusiastic. It could be nothing. People say things with smiles on their faces, right? And don’t mean anything by it? I’m talking about normal people.
Because my people don’t. Not my people by choice, but the ones I’m genetically connected to—and fatally attracted to. Those people lie through their teeth as often as they order martinis and put on suits. All with a smile and a trust me glint in their eye.
I smile again, more weakly now. “Would it help if I change my name?”
She laughs, then stops and stares at me. Then laughs again, tipping her head back. “Oh, Hailey.”
Hate F*@k:Part One (The Horus Group #1) Page 5