by KB Jacobs
“You are so strong and resilient,” she whispered, her voice a brush of breath across my battered body. “Yes, you have scars, but they show the battles you’ve been through and overcome. They make you even more impressive than you were before. Most of us hide our scars on the inside like they’re something to be ashamed of, but they aren’t. They show we survived. They’re badges of honor.”
She’d ravaged me at her front door but had stayed carefully away from my pulsing cock because this wasn’t sexual although we were both turned on. No, this was about connection. Every single section of my skin felt alive, brought to life by her touch—and dare I hope—her love.
“Alex,” I pleaded, my voice a broken, strangled sound. I didn’t know what I was pleading for...relief? More? Love?
But she knew. She stepped back and methodically stripped off her clothes, her gaze never leaving mine. When she was completely naked, she gave me a barely there, almost imperceptible nod.
I swallowed thickly and then let my gaze drop. Her body was perfection...high tight breasts, and curvy womanly hips above long toned legs. At the juncture of her hips and thighs, her sex was barely camouflaged by a neatly trimmed dark thatch that glistened in the low light with her arousal.
My dick pulsed at the sight. “I need to taste, to touch. Please.” I would get down on my hands and knees and beg if she wanted. Hell, that would just put me closer to where I wanted to ultimately be.
She nodded, and I grabbed her hand, pulling her toward me. I devoured her with a slow, sensual kiss. Then I turned her so her back was to the door and dropped to my knees. The first taste of her was exquisite. Her natural musky scent mixed with her floral perfume was stronger here, and it made my mouth water. I licked slowly between her folds, working my way up to that tiny bundle of hooded nerves. I pulled the skin away from her clit, exposing the tight swollen little bud, stroking and sucking.
She moaned and grabbed hold of the top of my head as her legs shook.
I took that tiny nub between my lips and gently sucked as I slid a finger into her creamy core.
“So good.” She groaned. “More. Please.”
I added another finger and flicked my tongue over her clit.
Her muscles tightened, and she wailed out a moaning version of my name as she came.
While she trembled with aftershocks, I kept hold of her hip with one hand, propping her up. I grabbed my jeans with the other and fumbled to get the wallet out of my pocket. Finally...success. I had a condom in hand. I made quick work of opening it with shaky hands, suiting up as I stood and sheathed myself in her wet sex in one smooth move.
I groaned as her tight heat closed in on my swollen shaft. She felt better and better. Every. Damn. Time.
I stilled, letting her adjust to the size of me.
Then she wrapped her legs around my hips, gently riding up and down my cock, using her core to drive me fucking insane. She kissed the worst of my scars on my chest right above my nipple and instructed, “Love me, Damian.”
I lost it and hammered into her, putting every bit of out-of-control emotion into the power of my thrusts.
She met every surge with me, her heart in her gaze until it became too much. Her eyes slammed shut, and she arched her back as her orgasm took her.
I had no choice but to fall over the brink with her. My balls clenched and my dick surged, releasing spurt after spurt of cum into the condom.
My legs lost their strength, and I fell to the floor with her in my lap. We lay there panting, trying to recover.
I got my first look at her cabin. “Wow, Alex.”
“I know. That was...amazing.” Her voice sounded husky and wrung out.
“It was,” I agreed. But it hadn’t been the sex I’d been talking about. Her cabin was a complete pit, clothes thrown everywhere, books toppling over on the floor, cushions flung about.
I turned to her with a frown. “Were you robbed?”
“No.” She snorted. “I lived eighteen years in a home that had to always look like the cover of a decorating magazine. I don’t have to live like that anymore.”
I nodded and said slowly, “That makes sense.” As we sat there, I looked closer at the chaos in front of me.
The room was undoubtedly a messy disaster, but there wasn’t a speck of dust or a crumb anywhere. If she lived like this, she lifted the piles periodically to clean underneath them.
She’d said we all had scars, but most people were able to hide them.
Suddenly, I began to see that she might have more scars underneath that perfect façade than I’d ever imagined.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Alex
I climbed up the stairs to our new office space with an extra pep in my step that had nothing to do with the extra large coffee from Coffee Haus in my hand. Melissa was already at her desk, typing away at something when I walked in.
“Good morning,” I sang out, my voice sounding overly chipper even to me.
Melissa pushed back from her desk and crossed her arms over her chest. “Is it now? Would that have anything to do with your date with Damian last night?”
“We had a perfectly lovely evening.” I plopped into my chair and propped my feet up on the desk. “We went to movies, ate the best popcorn in Colorado, and then went home.”
“Yeah?” Melissa stood and leaned against her desk, lifting an eyebrow at me. “And whose house did you go to?”
“Damian’s mother is still in town,” I chastised with mock concern. “My house of course.”
Melissa sat back in her chair, laughing. “I’m surprised you could find the bed in that pig sty.”
“Who said anything about using the bed?” I winked at her and took another sip of my coffee.
“On that note, I’m just going to run downstairs and talk to Harlan about these invoices.” She jumped back out of her chair, waving a small stack of papers as she dashed to the door.
My phone rang from my pocket, the only thing that saved Melissa from me running after her with more details about last night. And there were plenty of details considering how very little sleep Damian and I got.
I hit the call button without looking. “Hello?”
“Alex, my sweet girl.” A soft breathy voice crooned into the phone. “I need you.”
“Mom? Is everything okay?”
My heart rate sped up. My mother never called me. Never. In the six months that I’d lived in Aspenridge, I was always the one who called her. Dutifully every Sunday to say hello and confirm that I wasn’t homeless yet, a prediction she’d made at least monthly since I decided to quit working for her and dad.
It wasn’t that my mother didn’t love me. She just didn’t exactly love having a child. I’d known for as long as I could remember that my birth was never part of her grand plan for stardom. By the time I was five, I could recite word for word the story of how she was passed over for the lead in Silence of the Lambs because the director didn’t think a new mother could handle the psychological toll of the role. It didn’t help that Jodie Foster went on to win an Oscar for the part. To this day, the woman kept a blank spot in her award cabinet for where the Oscar she thought she should have won should be.
“My love, I simply can’t take it anymore.” Her desperate whine brought my attention back to the call.
I resisted rolling my eyes. “What’s the problem, Mom?”
“Your father is making a mess of things again, and my new assistant is useless.” She sucked in a deep breath.
I could picture her perfectly. She’d just wrapped filming on next summer’s attempt at an Oscar, so she wouldn’t be up and dressed yet at this hour. Probably lounging in bed, swathed in a satiny robe over expensive silk pajamas. One hand delicately holding the phone to her ear, the other bringing a long stem cigarette to her pursed lips like a 1920s flapper.
“Mom, you’ve only had this new assistant for a week. How could she possibly have messed up already?”
My mother sighed deeply as if I was missing something obvious to anyone w
ith half a brain. “Your father let his indiscretions get a little too public last night, so I asked her to write up a press release to distract the useless media. It’s garbage.”
I let out a sigh of my own, but kept it soft enough that my mother couldn’t hear. The press release was probably more than fine. I’d personally hired this assistant, and she came highly recommended with a bachelor’s degree in public relations from UCLA. My mother wasn’t upset about the wording of a pointless press release, but it would be useless to argue.
The reality was my father liked to dally with younger women. The media had stopped paying attention years ago, and my mother was more concerned with what the ladies at the spa would think than the actual infidelity. But she sent out these press releases anyway, convincing herself that this was the only reason her husband’s affairs weren’t front page news on every tabloid across the country.
“Why don’t you send it to me, and I’ll fix it up, okay?”
“Oh, Alex.” My mother sighed and took another drag from her cigarette. “What in the world would I do without you?”
Besides win an Oscar? “Of course, Mom.” One of these days, I would tell my parents I was done playing clean up like a member of the staff instead of just being their daughter. But today wasn’t that day.
“Oh, and your father wanted me to pass along his appreciation. He got a lovely phone call from that producer friend of his. He and his wife were absolutely charmed by you at dinner the other night.”
I cringed. My father’s producer friend ended up being a sixty-five-year-old man with wandering hands and a droll wife. Dinner had been long and exhausting. “Glad I could help.”
My mother launched into a story about her latest spa trip, but I tuned her out. If I wanted to hear about women with too much money complain about how cold her masseur's hands were, I’d watch some bad reality TV.
Melissa walked back into the office and shot me a questioning look.
“Listen, Mom, I’d love to talk more, but I’m at work. I need to go.”
She stopped mid-sentence as if she didn’t want to talk about her spa trip anymore than I wanted to hear about it. “Right, how is the little brewery thing going?”
“Good, Mom.” I couldn’t hold back the eye roll any longer. “Actually, we’re doing really well, which is why I’m so busy. I’ll talk to you on Sunday, okay?”
“Okay. Bye, dear. Kisses.”
The line clicked off, and I tossed the phone onto my desk. Conversations with my mother were always draining. My computer dinged with an incoming email from Valerie, Mom’s soon-to-be-ex assistant. I scanned the press release, and as expected, it was perfectly fine. Still, I’d tweak a word or two and send it back. Mom would call me a genius and beg me to come back and work for her.
“How is her majesty?”
Melissa knew Brittney Boone-Nichols, AKA Mom, by reputation only. Mom never once came to visit me in college, claiming that she didn’t want her star power to detract from my college experience and steal the show away from me. Dad had come a few times, though he spent most of his visits on the phone or complaining about Mom.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Melissa nodded and set her papers down to give me her full attention. “Shoot.”
“Are your parents still in love?”
“Of course,” Melissa answered automatically before sinking back in her chair. “I mean, they don’t run around shouting ‘I love you’ and pinching each other on the rear, but they’re still married, right?”
“Right.” Except my parents were married, and I’m pretty sure they’d never been in love. At least, not with each other.
In fact, that was the kind of love I saw all the time...fake, false, plastic, in name only. As a kid of Hollywood, I’d seen it all—the trysts in backrooms, the groping in the kitchen, the lies told every day in the name of love and marriage. It was never real.
But if that were the case, what would happen between Lake and Walsh? Melissa and Anthony? They were all so happy and thought they were in love. Were they all doomed to unhappy endings?
Hell and fuck—was I? Last night, I’d asked Damian to love me. I wasn’t made for love, but I couldn’t imagine a future without him anymore. My blood froze in my veins.
I glanced at the calendar. Somehow the time had flown by. Lake would be back from her honeymoon in three days, which meant Damian would be heading back to Denver in less than a week. I rubbed at my chest. It hurt to think of him leaving here to go back to an empty house where there wouldn’t be anyone to drag him out to a movie theater just to watch old movies and eat popcorn. It hurt even more to think that maybe he would find someone else to do those things with.
But maybe that was a good thing. Because Damian was the kind of guy who deserved to have someone. And not just for amazing sex against the front door. He deserved a forever someone. I’d decided a long time ago that could never be me. I’d just never expected to meet someone like him—someone that tempted me to risk more, to risk giving him my heart. Would he accept it if I became brave enough to risk giving it?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Damian
Alex had left earlier for Naked Brews. I entered my house through the back door since that was easier after coming from Alex’s cabin. I wasn’t looking forward to talking to my mom after my walk of shame, but I had been pretty sure that we both had known I wouldn’t be coming home until morning when I’d left for my date the night before. And after the fantastic ending to the night, I wasn’t even the slightest bit sorry. There had been some rough spots, but last night had been the best of my entire life.
But when I arrived, the house was quiet. “Mom?” I called out.
No answer.
I checked the room she’d been staying in. Her bed was made, but no sign of her. In fact, the only way I could tell she’d been there this morning was the slightly damp towel in her bathroom. She must have had an early appointment.
Not that it was that early. After our late night, Alex and I had overslept this morning. I’d promised to head into the brewery after I checked in on mom. Plus, I needed a shower that involved applying the lotion to my burns to keep the skin as healthy and pliable as possible after the damage.
I was three steps up the stairs when the doorbell rang. I turned. Mom had probably forgotten her spare key.
But when I opened the door, it wasn’t my mother. It was someone I couldn’t see because they held a huge overblown bouquet of white lilies and red roses that hid every part of the person from the waist up.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah,” a muffled masculine voice said from behind. “I have a delivery for Alexandra Nichols.”
Because of the way our cabins were situated, hers slightly back from mine and virtually hidden by trees, this was a common mistake. She wasn’t there to accept the delivery anyway. “She’s already gone to work. Let me take that from you, and I’ll sign on her behalf.”
“Thanks, man.”
We shuffled the flowers. Fuck, they were heavier than they looked. I took them into the kitchen and set them on the counter with a frown. Who had sent those?
Then I went back to the front door and signed the delivery notification. I looked on the print out but didn’t see the name of who ordered them. I tipped the guy and then closed the door behind him.
When I turned back into the room, the sweet smell of flowers had already permeated my house. It was like visiting a funeral home. Although, when I looked at the bouquet again, that was exactly what the arrangement reminded me of...a massive arrangement that family members sent to assuage their guilt for not traveling to attend the funeral.
I circled the end of the counter where the vase sat, looking at the flowers from every angle. There was a card on one of those little sticks, poking out from a cluster of red roses.
I shouldn’t snoop. That was a given, but the card was right there. I nimbly pulled it out of the fork of the stick.
“If it’s sealed, I’ll put it ri
ght back,” I said to my guilty conscience. The tiny envelope flap popped up, and I grinned.
With a casual glance around my empty cabin, I slipped the card out of the envelope and looked at it.
My darling Alexandra,
Our night together was only the beginning. I look forward to exploring our mutually beneficial affair in the coming days.
Until then...
Yours,
Daniel
The air whooshed out of my lungs like someone had sucker-punched me in the gut. I read the words over and over again, but there was no mistaking their meaning. Alex was seeing someone else.
Mom had warned me, but I hadn’t believed her. She’d said Alex would break my heart.
I just hadn’t believed it would happen so quickly.
But the hope that Alex had gifted me with last night refused to die. I couldn’t be imagining the depth of connection between us, could I? There had to be another explanation. Something I didn’t know. I was an adult. If she did have another man in her life, I deserved an explanation. We’d never promised exclusivity. I’d just assumed. I could see the mistake of that now.
Regardless, I needed to man up and ask her directly. Then if she was seeing someone else...
Fuck.
I rubbed at my face, the stone settling low in my belly at the thought. She was mine. I needed her to agree to that. Screw the shower. I snatched up the keys to the house and headed toward my bike. I needed to talk to Alex. Now.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Alex
“Hello?” a feminine voice called out from below the office.
I glanced up from staring aimlessly at my computer screen, trying to make sense of how I moved forward from here. I might love Damian, but could I trust him with my heart?
Melissa looked up from her spreadsheets. “Are you expecting anyone?”
“No.” I shook my head and double-checked my clipboard. “The construction team finalized their work yesterday, but the painters aren’t coming until tomorrow. I added an empty day in the schedule just in case.”