"Tell me how much you want me," he demanded, his voice low but just loud enough to be heard over the sound of running water.
Natalie's eyes fluttered open as her head craned forward to see James on his knees. His fingertips grazed up and down the smooth skin of Natalie's thighs.
"You know I do.”
"Tell me you love me," he said, the last word a murmur between Natalie's thighs as he nestled his face against her sex. Natalie parted her legs as he kissed the delicate folds in the apex of her thighs.
"I do. I love you." Natalie cried out as his velvet tongue swept inside her warmth with the skilled ease of a practiced lover. Muscles constricted and released as his tongue worked within her, every velvety stroke igniting her from within. Natalie held her breasts in her palms, squeezing the flesh through the spaces between her fingers in search of ever more sensation. Her calves threatened to burst with angry heat as the tension between her legs built.
"I love you," she whispered again, her voice hoarse with need. Her hands moved from her own breasts to the head between her legs, tangling into the dark locks of James’ drenched hair.
Her eyes opened at the sound of the shower door opening, and Natalie whipped her head to find Audra, naked and smiling, as she stepped in to join them.
“Just in time, I see,” she said. James stood, his erection springing at the movement, and took as step back from Natalie. He turned and grabbed for Audra’s neck as he kissed her, deeply and openly. “Hmm,” Audra moaned when he pulled away. She winked at Natalie and said, “You do taste as good as you look.”
James took Natalie’s hand and gently encouraged her away from the wall and into Audra’s waiting arms.
“Did you miss me?” Audra asked, her voice thick like honey. She pressed her lips to Natalie’s and slipped her tongue between the parted opening, lavishing her with the secondhand taste of her own arousal. James tugged at Audra's hips from behind, pulling Natalie against his chest as he rested against the shower wall. Audra’s hand travelled down Natalie’s front side until it reached her center, cupping her intimately.
“You ready, baby?” James asked. Natalie turned her head to look back at him, but noticed it was Audra to whom he directed the question. Audra smiled and lifted Natalie’s hands with her own, bending her forward as James gripped her naked hips from behind. He teased her entrance with the soft tip of his erection before nestling it between the flesh of her opening and thrusting deep inside her. She moaned, shuddering a the full sensation of him while Audra gently pushed her torso back so it was resting against James’ chest once again. James’ hands slicked over her ribs to her breasts, fondling them between his strong fingers.
In front of her, Audra crouched down to her knees and caressed her hands up Natalie’s thighs. She kissed her way across the expanse of Natalie’s stomach and down the invisible path from navel to mound. Her tongue parted her from the front and licked across her clit as James moved inside her from behind.
‘Fuck, fuck’, she moaned and writhed as both Audra and James made love to her. Two sets of hands each kneaded, fondled or otherwise squeezed her full breasts, pushing her further towards climax.
“Yes. Yes,” she breathed. Her eyes opened from the dream to find James beneath her, his erection skimming against her opening as he kissed her breasts and shoulders.
“Good morning,” he whispered against her lips. She was naked, straddling his hips in the bedroom of the Garden Suite, sweat beading on her neck and in the gentle space beneath her breasts. She was fully aroused, and a mere arch of her hips away from having him completely inside her. He was heart-stoppingly handsome there, tan and naked against the zillion-thread count sheets. The five o’clock shadow he was sporting just the night before had grown, and the way he looked at her - eyes wanting and full of love - could have actually stopped her heart.
“Good morning." She lifted up and arched her hips forward, then back with him, crying through held breath as she took him inside her. He held her hips as she rocked against him, staring at him intently, never once removing her eyes from his as they made love again. I love this man, she thought. She moved quickly atop him, a moan escaping her with every thrust. She grabbed his hands and held them in her own, squeezing tight as she came around him, wordlessly and intensely. He followed a moment later, and in that moment she felt her heartbeat align with his pulse as it echoed inside her.
When she had calmed enough to move, she arched forward and felt him slip out of her before she came to a rest beside him. She brushed her cheek against the rough stubble growing along his jaw and breathed in his scent.
“I don’t think I realized how much I missed you until this very moment.” She kissed the soft, delicate space between his jaw and ear, and let herself open to the emotions that flooded her, body and soul.
“Right back at you, Harlow.”
The taste of mint on his tongue distracted her from every other thought spilling into her heart and mind. “Did you actually get up, brush your teeth and get back into bed?” she asked, propping her head up on her hand beside him.
A faint blush of pink heated his cheeks. “Not exactly. I had to pee, so I figured why not freshen up, too?”
The smile that split Natalie’s face felt like a welcome relief. “Mmm-hmm. Speaking of which…”
“No!” he protested as she pushed herself up from beside him. “I like having you in bed with me. I want to savor every moment of it.”
“You will be savoring a lot more than you think if I do not go to the bathroom right now,” she playfully warned him.
“Fine!” He let her go, laughing as she climbed out of the bed and headed straight to the bathroom to relieve herself. “So where are you taking me for brunch this morning?” he called out from the bedroom. “You are ten thousand dollars richer so I am expecting something very nice.”
Natalie washed her hands and stepped back into the room, stopping for a moment to admire James’ naked form. “That’s funny. You must be broke after buying the Bugatti.” She raised her eyebrows as a smile perked her lips. “And that house.”
James leaned back against his arms folded behind his head. “So it’s like that, Natalie?” he teased her.
“You know, I am actually considering buying a house myself.”
“Is that so?”
“Mmm-hmm. And thanks to your little bet yesterday I have an additional ten grand to put towards the down payment.” She walked to the wardrobe and pulled out a few items of clothing for the day.
“I am happy for you, Harlow. No one deserves it more.”
“So when you said everything here is comped for me, you meant brunch, too, right?” she teased him. James stood from the bed and crossed the space of the room until he was behind her, and placed a kiss on her shoulder.
“Absolutely not.” He tapped her behind with his hand before heading into the bathroom. “Want to save some water and shower together?”
She dropped the clothing items in her hands when the image of her in the shower with both James and Audra came to mind. The dream was so vivid, so realistic, she could practically feel the steam from the hot water on her face.
“Nat?” he called out when she did not reply.
“I need to check in with work,” said in the direction of the bathroom. “I will jump in after you.”
“Suit yourself.”
Natalie slipped into the shirt she wore the previous evening and grabbed for her phone on the dining table. There were two missed calls from Joe and a few text messages from Quinn, but as she went to unlock the screen it was Audra’s incoming call that distracted her.
“Hey!” she answered a little too brightly. “How is your emergency?” She scrunched her eyes at the less-than-stellar choice of words. Audra sighed from the other side of the line, and Natalie knew her emergency was either not going well at all, or a lot worse than she had let on.
“I am on the plane now readying to fly back to McCarran. I need to talk to the both of you when I get there.”
Natalie folded her legs beneath her as she sat on the couch. Audra sounded… stressed was the only word she could think of. More stressed than what could be considered normal. Did she know about her and James? Had someone at Serpentine seen them together and called Audra? Would someone actually do that?”
“Is everything okay?” she asked, hoping to keep Audra talking in an effort to assess what she knew, if she knew anything at all.
“I am not sure. I really do need to talk to James. Are you guys at brunch right now?”
“No, actually we were just getting ready to head out. Do you want us to wait for you?”
“No, it’s fine. I grabbed some Starbucks before I boarded the plane. Don’t wait on my account. Just text me where you will be and I will meet you.”
“Okay, well I think we are going to Sugar Factory. It’s at Paris.”
“I know,” Audra said, sounding distracted. “I will see you in about an hour and a half, okay?”
“Yeah, sounds great. Have a safe flight.”
“I love you, Natalie,” Audra said, hanging up before Natalie could even respond. Not that she knew what to say. Then again, she had never truly reciprocated those words to her, so it wasn’t like Audra was expecting it.
“That Audra?” James asked, startling Natalie out of her post-phone call daze.
“Um, yeah. She is going to meet us at brunch in about an hour and a half. She needs to talk to us.” Natalie stood and glanced at James, who was sopping wet and wearing nothing but a towel, feeling a growing sense of both guilt and fear.
If he was worried, he did nothing to show it. “Oh. Well I left the water on for you so you should get to it.” James reached out for her hand as she brushed past him on her way to the shower. He wrapped his arms around her waist after pulling her in close. “Hey. Everything will work itself out,” he said into her ear. He kissed her cheek, the tender moment of affection only punctuating what worried her the most.
Natalie took a deep breath, but instead of nodding, found herself shaking her head. “We were in this room,” she began.
“We were in this room?” he repeated.
“When I found out I had slept with a married man. And now here we are again, only now I am the one who cheated.”
“Nat-“
“I am not looking to have a discussion, James,” she interrupted him. “I am just stating a fact.” She peeled herself out of his arms and headed straight for the shower to wash off the night before.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It was difficult for James to eat and relax while Natalie was so obviously disconnected from him and their surroundings. Rather than eat her eggs Benedict, she pushed them around on her plate with her fork, only taking small bites once in a while.
“Frankie is adjusting well to the new lifestyle,” he pointed out, hoping to jumpstart a conversation to take Natalie out of the thoughts that were so obviously bothering her. “All she can talk about every day is going to the beach. I think she has already forgotten about summers in the Hamptons.”
“What are we going to tell her?” Natalie sighed, finally saying something.
“About the Hamptons?” he joked. But the look of confusion on her face told him she was not listening to him, and was talking about another ‘she’. “Audra?”
“Yes, Audra! She is going to be here soon and we are going to have to tell her something. She is going to be devastated.”
“Natalie, I think you and I both know that Audra has been expecting this conversation. Maybe not today or this month even, but she has known it would one day come.”
Natalie’s face fell, and it about broke his heart. “Am I really such a foregone conclusion?” she asked, her voice trembling with emotion. “I never, ever wanted to hurt her!”
“Hey, nobody thinks of you that way,” he said, grasping for her hand across the table. “Maybe it would help if you and I figured some things out first , before she finds out?”
“Figure what out?” she asked sullenly.
“Us. I told you last night that you still loving me changes everything.”
“You just moved your entire family cross-country into that house. What changes? You are not going to abandon your children, James.”
“No, of course I’m not.”
“And it isn’t like one night together fixed all the reasons why we ended our relationship in the first place!” she continued, her voice rising higher and higher.
“All the reasons, Natalie? Because I recall just the one.” He hated to bring it up, knowing that it could likely hurt her. But that one reason no longer existed, and in his mind shouldn’t be a factor now.
Natalie slouched back in her seat and dropped her hands in her lap. “It wasn’t just the pregnancy, James. You wanted me to quit my job at Brighton so that I could date you openly.”
“Yet another reason that no longer applies, Nat,” he pointed out. “Besides, you didn’t quit.” He tossed his napkin on the table and leaned back in to his seat, coffee in hand.
“No, I was fired because of my relationship with you.”
“And you turned around and launched an even better agency,” he contended. “Are you now going to bring up the fact that I offered to support you after you were fired? Because you declined that offer and still went on to do well for yourself. So that reason no longer counts, either. Let’s see, what else was there?” He straightened again and leaned his elbows on the table. “I asked you to move in with me and you declined, citing - if I recall correctly - that you didn’t want to be my ‘Stepford girlfriend with no personal autonomy’. From where I sit, Natalie, you didn’t make any sacrifices for us, yet consistently asked me to. You said you wanted our relationship to mean more than just sex, that you could not figure out who you were when you were with me. Do you know who you are now? After all these months?”
“Jesus, are you two still fighting?”
James looked up into the chestnut brown eyes belonging to Audra, who stood over their table with a rather pitying look on her face.
“No. We kissed and made up last night, didn’t we, Natalie?” he grunted. From across the table Natalie’s eyes went wide, but she recovered quickly before smiling up at Audra.
“We are just settling an old matter,” she said. “So what is going on?”
Audra slid into a vacant space beside Natalie, and set her purse down between them in the booth. “Have you heard from Joe at all?”
James rolled his eyes and bit down on his bottom lip to keep from saying anything.
“He has called once or twice but I have not spoken with him yet. Why? What does Joe have to do with anything?”
“You should probably give him a call,” Audra said, an undeniable warning in her tone.
Natalie shot a glance at James before standing up from the table, purse in hand. “Excuse me,” she said before stalking off. James watched her retreating figure, wondering himself what exactly was going on. When he turned to Audra, there was a grave expression in her eyes, like she was dreading the next words to come out of her mouth.
“Audra? What the hell is going on?”
She opened her mouth and inhaled deeply, and he noticed then that her eyes were bloodshot. Had she been crying?
“I wish there was an easier way to tell you this, James,” she began. It was becoming increasingly more difficult for him to maintain any semblance of patience. But whatever it was she was about to tell him, it was obviously difficult, and he could refrain from losing his cool, for her.
“Your father has been acquiring Fitson stock. A lot of it.”
She might as well have told him that an alien life was discovered on the moon. "What the hell are you talking about? My father only has five percent.”
“Right, which you gave to him from your own shares when he agreed to come on board when you went on leave. But I am guessing he never mentioned to you that he has been buying every bit of stock he could find not already owned by either you or me.”
What the- “What are you
saying?”
“James, as of last night your father has majority ownership of our company.”
No, it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. It wasn’t even possible!
From the periphery of his vision he saw more than a few heads turning in the same direction, and when he looked up he found the object of their attention: Natalie, red-faced and charging to their table at a remarkable pace. She slammed her hand on the table, the cell phone once clutched in it taking the brunt of the damage, and looked at both him and Audra with murderous rage.
“Why in God’s name is Fitson trying to acquire and seize control of my company?”
Natalie picked her head up from her hands and inhaled deeply, willing her body to relax into the luxurious armchair inside the Garden Suite at Eden. “Explain it to me again, but this time try to remember that I do not have an MBA from an ivy league school like the two of you do.” She looked pointedly at James, then Audra, waiting for one of them to speak first.
“It's really very easy,” Audra spoke up from her seat opposite Natalie. “James and I each split 75 percent, a majority share of Fitson; an even 37 and a half percent for each of us. The other 25 percent is open to anyone, but mostly for employees.”
“If that is true, then how does Jackson own 45 percent?” Natalie asked. She could barely hold back the frustration in her voice, but even then she knew it paled in comparison to what Audra and James were going through. She was not the only person in the room whose company was being threatened with a hostile takeover.
“Our half of the majority is ours to keep and give to our family,” Audra continued. “The idea was - is - to keep the majority interest in the hands of our family. When James married Celine she received five percent. Five percent was likewise given to Frankie and Colin each upon birth.”
Unbidden Love (Book Five of the Bidden Series) Page 18