She’s slick and soapy and flushed. I want inside her.
Instead, I’m letting her decorate me with bubbles while she figures out what she wants to ask me next.
It’s a sweet torture.
I don’t exactly fit in the tub, even though it’s officially big enough for two, so my arms are up on the sides and my legs are bent.
Poppy’s kneeling in front of me, sloshing water gently. Wet strands of her hair trail over her shoulders and around her breasts. “I just want to be sure that you aren’t pulling a fast one on me,” she says. One corner of her mouth quirks up as she gives me a gentle look. “And I guess by admitting that, I’m saying I trust that you aren’t.”
I reach out and trace one of the dark lines where the end of her hair curls over her sweet, pale flesh. “But you think you shouldn’t trust me. I agree, by the way. You shouldn’t trust anyone.”
“I do, though. There’s something about you. It’s a special kind of madness, how I feel about you. Like I look at you and…”
“And you really see me?” I follow the strand of hair up to her collarbone and onto her neck, where her pulse flutters under my touch. “I feel the same way. I see you, Poppy. And I like you. More than I should. More than is safe. Not because I can’t trust you. I can, and I do. But because you make me want things…”
She grins at me as I trail off. “Is question time over?”
“Not at all,” I say huskily. “Ignore the erection bobbing in the water in front of you. Nothing to see here.”
She takes me in hand, and I groan from how good it feels. “Feels like something.”
“Maybe question time is over after all.”
“Paused.”
“Sure.” I haul her on top of me. I wasn’t talking about sex, exactly. She makes me want a whole lot more than fucking, but this is a good start.
I purposefully left the condoms on the other side of the room so we could talk, so instead of sliding into her, I rock my erection between her folds, sliding her slickness up and down the underside of my shaft. We kiss, hot and hard, and it doesn’t take long for her to quiver and shake in my arms.
I hold her through the first orgasm, then roar out of the water, holding her tight. I grab a towel and wrap it around her, spinning her around to look in the mirror over the wide wall-to-wall vanity.
Where the condoms are.
“Bend over,” I tell her, holding her gaze in the mirror.
She bites her lower lip and does as she’s told, letting the towel fall against the marble first as a cushion. I gather her wet hair, twisting it gently to the side, baring her spine.
Starting at the nape of her neck, I taste her skin, following the vertebrae down her back in a lazy, teasing slide of my tongue. She sighs, a long, groaning exhale, and rocks her hips back against me. I settle my hands there, squeezing her tight as I reach the curve of my bottom.
“Spread your legs.”
Again, she does as she’s told, and my cock throbs.
I find her slick, arousal coating her plump pussy, and when I stroke around her clit, she jolts against me.
Good.
Condom on, I line up behind her and surge forward, sinking fully into her tight heat on the first thrust. Fuck, she feels amazing.
I look at the mirror again, where she’s watching me, eyelids low and mouth all flushed.
That mouth. Fuck me.
I pick up the pace. Hard and fast is how I want it, and when she gasps and rolls back against me, I know she wants it like that, too.
“Touch yourself.”
“Bossy today,” she says, and I grin.
“Do it.”
She does it. And when she does, her cunt flutters around my cock.
“Get yourself off,” I growl. “Make yourself come. Make me feel it.” I slap her ass lightly, then sink my fingers into her pink flesh.
She slaps her free hand against the mirror, urging me on. We stare at each other’s reflections as she rubs her sweet little pussy and I drive my cock into her depths over and over again. When her body tenses up, as she pushes back against me, I lose control and rut against her like a mad man. Deep inside, she spasms hard. Her orgasms pulls my own release, urging me to spill my come deep inside her body. I imagine the condom’s gone, and growl her name with the first spurt.
God. Fucking. Damn.
Even as my cock is still jerking inside her, I wrap my arms around her body and bury my face in her wet hair. Poppy, Poppy, Poppy.
The things I want with this woman are damn scary. Forever kinds of things.
Slowly, we disentangle. I get rid of the condom and grab more towels. I gently sit her on the counter and dry her hair as she brushes my face with sweet butterfly kisses.
“What time do you need to go to work tomorrow?” she asks lazily.
“Seven.”
“Kay.”
I smile and kiss her forehead. “You can sleep in.”
“I need to do some work, so I’ll get up with you.” She gives me a brilliant smile. “And we still have the rest of today.”
“We do.”
“What do you want to do?”
Find out more about how you feel about babies. “Go for a walk. Show you the rest of my world.”
She lets out a happy sigh, and I realize it doesn’t fucking matter how she feels about babies. “That sounds amazing.”
“And I should feed you some lunch, too.”
She laughs. “And now you’re officially perfect.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
POPPY
I SPEND the next week at Marcus’s house, getting used to dating a billionaire who gets up while it’s dark and goes to work as a park ranger because he likes that better.
I’m starting to get that he’s not so much an enigma as a true exception. Sure, he keeps things close to his chest, but he is exactly what he says he is—quiet, steady, and very into me.
Some days he drops me in town when he goes to work, some days I stay here and wear nothing but one of his shirts while I write.
It’s magical.
And early one morning it all comes to an unexpected end with an email from my editor at the Record.
We’re still in bed when I read it.
“Oh,” I say, sitting up.
“Is that a put-on-coffee kind of oh?” Marcus asks as he peers at the clock. It’s five-thirty here, so not insanely early back in Washington.
I shake my head. “No. It’s not breaking news or anything like that. It’s…a job offer of sorts.” I read the highlights of the email out loud to him. I’ve been tapped to be a new part of a team at the Washington Record tasked with compiling long-form narratives about significant events. “It sounds pretty cool. The LA Times have been doing something similar and we’ve talked about it, but it takes a lot of intensive research and time in the field. Huh.”
He settles his hand on the back my neck and rubs gently. “That sounds great.”
I’m sad about saying goodbye to Marcus again, of course, but it’s the kind of writing I want to do. I chew on my lower lip. “And I’ll be able to come back here more often if I’m not hunting for stories of my own on the streets of Washington,” I tell him.
“You don’t need to convince me,” he rumbles. “It sounds like a good fit for you.”
“I’m convincing myself.”
“Ah.” He slides his knuckles along my jaw, then lifts my chin so I’m looking at him. My heart melts when he smiles. “What do you want to do?”
I hold up my phone. “This.”
“Excellent. When do you need to be back in Washington?”
“In three days.”
His eyes go soft. “Perfect. We’ll have time to celebrate properly.”
He rolls me over and wakes me the rest of the way up with a slow, hard fuck into the mattress.
After, I sit on the bed and watch him move around his room naked, getting his uniform ready before we have a shower. He’s all thick muscle and warm skin. Just enough hair to draw the ey
e to the good parts, and a ruthless indifference to being watched.
“Are you watching my ass again?”
Or maybe not. “It’s my favorite part of your body.”
He turns around, his semi-soft, always thick cock bobbing into view, and my mouth goes dry.
“One of them, I mean.”
He laughs and I drag my gaze up to his face. I’m sure I’m blushing, and I don’t care.
“Come here?” I don’t care that it comes out like a plea. He can know how much I want him.
He tumbles on top of me, his weight heavy and welcome, and I steal the kiss I want. Deep, soft, lingering.
“How much of that can we cram into the next seventy-two hours?” I ask when he lets me up for air.
“As much as we need to last us until November.”
“Your friend’s wedding…”
“I was serious about you coming with me.”
In my circles, a wedding plus-one invite is more about appearances than significant feelings, but Marcus isn’t like that at all. He’s serious about a lot more than our next date.
“This is insane, you and me,” I whisper as I crawl on top of him. Our bodies are sweat-slicked and sated, but we fit together just right, and that fires something up inside me. Not just arousal. Something deeper.
A connection.
I don’t care that I smell like sex, that we both need showers.
I like the smell of Marcus on my skin. And from the possessive way he’s buried his face in my neck, I’m pretty sure the feeling is mutual.
“Come with me,” he murmurs roughly. “Don’t over think it.”
“That’s impossible. The overthinking, I mean. Going with you to a wedding sounds really nice.”
“Nice?” He howls. “Death by faint praise.” He rolls me onto my back and gives me an amused smile. “What can I do to elevate it to pleasant?”
I swallow hard. “Well, it’s going to be Thanksgiving…and my family gets together in New Jersey…”
His eyes go wide, and for a second I think I’ve misread him. “Family?”
“Yeah.” Stand your ground, Lisowski. “My parents live in Chicago, but my brothers both go to school on the east coast, so…we do Thanksgiving at my aunt and uncles in Hoboken. I mean it’s going to be awful, of course. But maybe it could be awful for us both. Together.”
He rolls onto his side beside me and rubs his hand over his perfectly scruffy jaw. My heart hammers in my chest as he thinks about it, his brow drawing tight for a painfully long stretch before he shrugs. “Well…that might be nice, too.”
My pulse rockets as I push at his shoulder. “So mean.”
“All’s fair in love and war,” he murmurs, pouncing on me again as we kiss.
War—that’s been us from the start. Tension and sparring and…
Lust. Definitely that, too. An attraction unlike anything else I’ve experienced. Was that the start of love? A connection at first sight, one born out of kismet and chemistry instead of the slow-growth friendship I always expected to be the foundation for love?
That night, we go out for BBQ.
“Revisiting the scene of our first date,” Marcus says, grinning at me.
“Really terrible date. You stormed out and I yelled at you.”
“Yeah, but then you told me you had a crush on me, and all was right with the world. Now eat your ribs.”
I gaze at him happily across the table. Despite the lovely house and the fancy plane, I still can’t quite picture him with his friends. “Tell me about this wedding,” I say, licking sauce off my thumb. “It’s in New York?”
He nods. “At the Plaza. Fancy all the way.”
“You’ll be in a suit?”
He groans. “And a tie. I don’t mind dressing up, but the tie always kills me.”
“I bet you’ll look hot as… you know.”
He laughs out loud. “Say it, Poppy.”
“Hot as…” I lower my voice. “Fuck.”
He winks. “Definitely.”
“You’re terrible. Tell me about your friends.”
“You know about them. You have dossiers on them.”
“Not the official stuff. Tell me what I need to know to make a good impression on them. As your…date.”
“As my girlfriend.”
Now I’m grinning. “Okay. That too.”
“Just be yourself?” He laughs deeply as I mock-glare at him. “Okay, okay! Uh…we all met in Boston. I’m a couple years older than them. Jake and Toby were roommates the first year, in my building, although I didn’t get to know them until the summer. I was a student residence assistant that summer, for the kids who stuck around for summer school. It didn’t take long for me to realize they were a scary smart pair, and by the end of the summer, they had a plan to take over the world. I somehow got tangled up in that. Not that I minded at the time.”
“When did you meet Ben?”
“Two years later? Jake sped through his degree as fast as he could, and he started at Harvard while Toby and I were still at MIT.”
“What were you doing then?”
“Uh…” He gives me a lopsided grin. “A second Masters degree. I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do, basically. And I was spoiled. I had a small trust fund that allowed me to keep going to school as long as I was down with eating a lot of rice and beans.”
“That’s not most people’s definition of spoiled,” I murmur, searching his face.
His expression tightens. “Yeah. But it was still a gift many don’t have.”
I nod. “Right. So you were really a guy they looked up to.”
“Or the guy who was willing to buy them beer. Maybe a bit of both.”
“Bad RA.”
“It was a short-lived career. The first of many.”
“Maybe you’re just a nomad. Nothing wrong with that.”
He scratches his temple. “Yeah. It feels weird when you’re surrounded by hyper-driven people, though. Like Jake—he’s a natural business man. That’s what he’s meant to do, you can just tell.” Marcus’s expression softens again. I really like how fond he is of his friends. “He can solve any problem faster than anyone I’ve ever known. He looks at things differently. Last year, he acquired SwiftEx, and everyone thought that was a terrible move, right?”
I’m not a biz reporter, but yeah, I remember that. And in the last six months, he’s completely turned the business around. “Noted. Never underestimate his ability to see things.”
“Do you know that’s how he met his fiancé? Through SwiftEx? This is good to know before the wedding, although I’m sure they’ll tell the story then, too.”
“Did she work there?”
He shakes his head. “She was a customer. And he went undercover as a delivery driver—which is how he figured out how to turn the company around, by the way. Anyway, she thought he was a relief driver, and they kept talking every time he came to her door…one thing led to another, and here they are.”
“That’s one of those stories you tell the grandkids.”
“For sure. And you’ll love Jana. She’s down-to-earth. I met her earlier this year when I was in New York for a weekend.”
“And what about Toby and… what’s his wife’s name?”
“Cara.”
I nod. “How did they meet?”
“Cara is a Russo. Ben’s little sister. So they would have met when we went to the Hamptons the first summer with him, probably. Or maybe on a weekend into New York. Needless to say, Cara wasn’t on Toby’s radar until recently.”
“And Ben’s still single?”
Marcus nods. “Yeah. And a massive flirt, be warned.”
“Duly noted.”
He takes my hand across the table, and we both stop talking. His face goes serious, the lines that carve out his features deepening as he gives me a solemn look. “You’re going to impress the hell out of them. They’re going to wonder how I ever scored you.”
“What will you tell them?” I try to smile, but f
ail. “That I hunted you down for a story?”
“They already know that.” He takes a deep breath. “This new job. You’re going to have bigger profile. More people paying attention to you. Stay safe, okay?”
I nod. I’m not stupid.
We finish eating, then drive back to his place, a new heaviness hanging over both of our moods.
He brings up safety again once we’re inside. “I was thinking—and tell me if this is overstepping—that maybe I could show you some self-defense stuff. I know you took workshops, but—”
“Yes.” My pulse races.
“Yeah?”
“I’d love that.” I jab at him playfully. “Plus, sparring with you could be hot.”
He laughs. “Not the point I was going for, but…” He grapples with me until we end up kissing. “Okay, yes. Hot. But focus, too. I want you to be able to kick my ass for real. Which means you need to be ruthless and wicked.”
I nod, my ponytail bobbing. Sure. Wicked. I can pretend to be that…
“Your sweet as apple pie appearance is actually an advantage,” he says, reading my mind. “People will underestimate you. Let them.”
I swallow hard. “Got it.”
“Okay, so this is what we’re going to do…”
He takes me downstairs to his gym—more rooms I hadn’t yet explored in his secretly massive house—and walks me through some basic holds I’m already familiar with from the workshops I’ve done. Then he tries to get me to put them together into some real moves, which is tricker.
After he takes me down to the mat two times in a row, he takes my hands in his. “Let’s try that again, and this time, get mad at me. For real. I’m every jerk who has made you feel threatened in any way, shape, or form. Remember, angry assholes expect you to go one way. Go the other. Move in, twist toward them, drop low. Show me that you’re not afraid of me.” He steps right into me, looming big, and he grabs my shoulders in his hands. I can feel how he’s curved his fingers around my body, how he’s digging into my shoulder blades so I can’t run.
And when I tug back instinctively, he sneers at me and tightens his grip to the point of hurting.
I lunge forward, slamming my body against his, then I drop to the ground and roll away, kicking at his legs.
Personal Disaster (Billionaire Secrets Book 3) Page 8