by Stella Rhys
“You bent her over like that.” I covered my face with my hands, desperate to erase the image of Jackson slamming into Gabrielle, those desk drawers rattling open in a noisy chorus with her moans. “Trust me, I do not want this scene playing over and over in my head! Every time I see it I think, ‘He doesn’t love me. He would never hurt me this bad if he really did.’”
Eyes blazing, Jackson roared at me like an animal. “I love you more than I can fucking say!”
Once he got dressed, he stormed out, leaving me alone in the bathroom, a shaking mess.
Chapter Five
“You’re leaving already?”
Sloane’s question took me by surprise when I returned to the table, which was otherwise empty.
“I – what?”
She took my hand and pouted her doll lips at me. “Jackson said you weren’t feeling well and that you’re leaving now.”
Before I could answer, Jackson returned to the table with Caleb. “Yeah, she’s going home,” he said, casting a steely look at me that demanded I go with it. When I narrowed my eyes at him, he came around the table. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice still hard. “But you and I aren’t going to be in the same room tonight without having some kind of blowup that’s going to ruin this party so one of us needs to leave. I’d go but Caleb would kick my ass and it’s his night. So just do me a favor, Lara, and go home.”
“You’re an asshole, Jackson.”
Jackson looked elsewhere for a second to control his anger. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, I’m trying to save this fucking night. I can’t look at you right now. It’s not an insult – it’s me being fucking in love with you and you hating my guts right now. So please. Just let me blow off some steam with the boys tonight and I’ll see you at home.”
I glared at him for as long as I could without warranting concern from Sloane. “Fine,” I muttered.
And within forty-five minutes – since that was how long it took to say goodbye to our friends – I was in the back of a car, on my way back to the duplex. My mood was sour until Jackson’s driver, Beck, read my mind and asked if I wanted to make a stop at “the little cart.” He was referring to an empanada truck that was generally parked a few avenues away from our apartment. Whenever I found myself in the car without Jackson, I asked Beck to stop there. It was my deep-fried, guilty pleasure – one I didn’t want Jackson to know about. Not that he was the picture of health with his smoking habit.
“Do you want to eat in the car?” Beck asked. “I’ll park.”
“Yes, please, that sounds awesome. They served such tiny little portions at the party,” I laughed.
“That’s usually how those are, right?”
“Pretty much.”
Thirty minutes later, I was back at the duplex and fully sober thanks to the empanadas. But the second I stepped into the apartment, I stopped.
Something was off.
Standing in the doorway, I stared out at the sprawling space. The lights in the open industrial kitchen were on. Had I left them that way?
Clink.
My heart stopped at the sound I heard upstairs. I held my breath, waiting to hear it again. Hand pressed against my chest, I willed my heartbeat to slow down so I could hear something besides its thumping pulse in my ears. Did I imagine that?
Clink.
Christ. Was it a drip in the bathtub? No, this sounded more like something being picked up and put down. Something glass. My heartbeat picked up further as I waited to hear it again. But after ten frozen minutes at the doorway, I heard nothing and began to tell myself that I was crazy. My fight with Jackson had my mind rattled, overactive. You’re imagining things, I told myself. And so I dragged my full stomach and lazy body up the stairs to peel off my dress and draw a bath.
But in my bedroom, I saw a man.
“Oh God.” My cold stomach dropped like a brick as the stranger turned to face me, my diamond tennis bracelet in his hand. I turned and ran. I didn’t stop to look for another second. But a scream ripped from my throat when I felt my knees smash into the ground, my jaw bouncing against the hardwood floor as the strange man tackled me and rasped throaty expletives in my ear.
“Don’t fucking move, bitch! Don’t you fucking move!”
A rough voice. Hands gathering my wrists. A switchblade flicked open right in front of my eyes. On my stomach, I let him press my cheek into the ground, tears pooling under my right eye, the outer lashes drowning in them as he continued to curse. Through the corner of my left eye, I saw him pulling a black ski mask back over his face. God, oh God, what the fuck. Didn’t this only happen in movies?
“Now get up!” Disguised, he yanked me up by my dress. I cried out, dread pitting in my stomach as I felt my body exposing.
“Please, no, no, no – ”
“Walk!” he snarled when my knees buckled, tossing me to the ground only to yank me back up.
“Please don’t hurt me, please, I swear to God I won’t – ”
“Shut your mouth, bitch!”
Face-first, I was hurled onto my bed.
“Head down, keep your fucking head down!”
I did as told. Shaking from head to toe, I laid on the bed, my breath hitched in my throat as I prayed to be wrong about what he might do next. Sobbing, my heart slammed against the mattress, beating so hard my insides rattled. It was painful. I cried and ached to simply lie on my side. All I wanted was to pull my knees to my stomach.
But when I so much as closed my legs, he yanked them back apart by the ankles.
I shrieked. “No!” Kicking, twisting, I fought harder than I had with even Gabrielle. So hard that I found myself suddenly on my back again, my wild arms swiping his mask half off.
Oh shit.
For the split-second I had, I stared. Six foot. Black mask. Birthmark. Sandy hair.
“Fucking bitch!”
And suddenly, I was blind. Breathless. Suffocating, my limbs flailed, bucking against the pillow he shoved hard on my face. Laying on me, he weighed me down, absorbing my fight, killing me slowly I was sure.
But then suddenly, I heard Jackson.
“Get the fuck off of her!”
The stranger lifted from me, I gasped for air. Coughing, choking, I rolled to my side, blinking my vision back in time to see Jackson’s muscled six feet and three inches slamming the man to the ground, going beyond just holding him still. Ripping his mask off, he grabbed a fistful of his hair, yanking his head off the ground only to slam it brutally back down. Once. Twice. Three times before the switchblade came out.
“Jackson!”
I screamed and leapt off the bed, just as the strange man brought his knife down onto Jackson’s back.
Chapter Six
From the full bar of the yacht, I stared out at the turquoise water. Ibiza was exactly what I needed to escape the madness – specifically Ibiza in July. Clear skies, white sand and a low of seventy-five degrees.
Not to mention a hundred foot yacht on which to drink before the night’s festivities.
“Christ, babe. You look fuckin’ good in white,” Sawyer came up behind me as I popped three perfect cubes of ice into a lowball. I snorted as he played with the fringe on the side of my bikini bottom, the smell of seawater and scotch coming off his skin as he peered over my shoulder. “You know, when you and I get married, we’re going to wear these exact outfits down the aisle.”
I finished pouring my Hendricks and tonic before turning around and bursting out laughing. Stretched over Sawyer’s clearly endowed package were skintight, white trunks with aqua blue stripes up the sides. The prankster as usual.
“You’re drunk, Sawyer, and I’d never marry you in that,” I giggled, swatting his hand when he tried to play with the fringe hanging from my bikini top. “Hey. Nice try, buddy.”
Mischief twisted his lips. “Can’t blame a guy.”
“No?”
“Not when you’re as goddamned gorgeous as you are,” he said, leaning in and reaching behind me for a bottle of scot
ch. He grinned as his chest brushed against mine – just enough to cause the slightest bounce. “Oh, fuckin-a,” Sawyer took one look before squeezing his eyes shut and gritting his teeth. He’d always been a charming terror when drunk. “That one I actually didn’t mean to do. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, silly.”
“You know you were always my dream girl, right?”
I giggled. “Sawyer, Jackson’s gonna kill you. You know that right?”
The mention of Jackson’s name plucked the smile from his lips. I frowned, unaccustomed to seeing Sawyer anything but jovial. “Yeah,” he murmured, swaying slightly in his drunkenness. He looked down blankly at the bottle of scotch. “I know,” he said, suddenly somber. “I know a lot of things.”
“Yeah?” I tried to entertain him. “What kind of things do you know, Sawyer?”
His gaze returned to me. “Things that you’d wanna know,” he replied.
My eyebrows pinched. He was serious for once so I set my drink down. “Babe, what’s going on with you today? Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked.
But before he could answer, Sloane burst in from the tanning deck.
“Lara, Jackson’s about to do a back flip off the end of the yacht! Can you please stop him before he splits his frickin’ scar open?” she asked breathlessly before running back out.
Oh God, Jackson, damn you. Squeezing past Sawyer, I ran out as well, mentally cursing Jackson as I did so.
Something in him had changed since the invasion at our duplex five weeks ago. I would have predicted the opposite but he’d grown suddenly fonder of taking risks. Perhaps it was the fact that he’d been stabbed by a strange man who’d broken into our home. Or the fact that he’d grabbed the man’s arm before his blade could sink deeper than two inches. While the man escaped, he’d saved both his own life and mine. And since then, he’d been every kind of unpredictable. A week after the invasion, he booked a vacation for ten to Ibiza. A few days later, he got into a random bar brawl. The week after that, he purchased a four-story townhouse in Greenwich Village for twenty million dollars.
And now, on the deck of a yacht, in front of all our friends, he was on one knee.
“Oh my God.” The voice I heard was not my own. It was girly and breathless and muffled by my hands flying to my mouth as I watched Jackson. Surrounded by his boys, he opened a little, black velvet box. I burst into tears when I saw the actual ring – a single, enormous square-cut diamond on a fine platinum band.
I wish I could have frozen time and gathered myself enough to truly absorb the moment, because through my friends’ cheering and my own tears, I could barely hear Jackson’s beautiful speech about wanting to spend the rest of his life with me. But the most important part, I did hear.
“I will love you no matter what happens. No matter what dramas, highs, lows, trials or tribulations, I’ll be at your side through it all. Proudly. I know these guys tell you all the time but you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Lara. And the only thing you can do to make me even happier is agree to be my wife.”
Through tears, I gazed down at the hopeful smile on Jackson’s impossibly handsome face.
“Lara, will you marry me?”
~
I hated the phrase but making love was what we’d done right after I’d said “yes.” Our gaze hadn’t broken once while he rocked into me. He’d come shortly after I had and as he held me, catching his breath, had murmured my name and his last. Lara Kinsley. He listed every way he loved me as I drifted off into sleep – a bride-to-be’s lullaby. It was the definition of making love.
But this – this couldn’t be considered anything but down and dirty sex.
Naked, I leaned over the railing of our balcony, my head cocked back and my dark waves gathered tight in Jackson’s fist. Another hand groping my breasts, he thrust into me, his lips grunting, muttering filth in my ear. Our friends were down the hall but I couldn’t help my shameless moaning as he sunk into me, occasionally torturing me by withdrawing his hot, hard cock and rubbing its pulsing head against the length of my wetness.
“Jackson, please,” I whimpered as he stroked my clit with his dick.
Lusty amusement curled in his voice. “What’s wrong, baby?”
“Put it back in,” I breathed, moving my hips, desperately trying to fill the void his thick shaft leaves every time he pulls out of my pussy.
Jackson wrapped a strong arm around my waist, holding me still enough to continue teasing me with his smooth helmet. “No. I’m enjoying your squirming.”
“Jackson, fuck me, please…”
“No.”
Moaning with torment, I twisted out of his grip and threw my naked body onto the white chaise. Fine, Mr. Kinsley. Two can play this game. Lying back, I closed my eyes and spread my legs for my fingers, immediately relieving the mounting need he so deftly built up. Biting my lip, I sighed, one hand circling the sensitized pearl between my thighs with one hand, the other roughly fondling my breasts the way I knew Jackson liked. My back arched, I writhed with pleasure at my own touch.
On his heels, Jackson watched, a smirk on his lips as he stroked his cock, still slick with my wetness. “Is this your idea of punishing me?”
I shrugged one shoulder and played tough, eyeing him for all of a second before returning to myself. Arching my back, I reached between my legs with my other hand, sliding one, then two fingers between my wet folds. “Oh… God…” A sigh drifted from my swelling lips. Stroke by stroke, I quickened my pace, my breasts bouncing between my arms as I pleasured myself to the fullest. All the while, I watched Jackson. Vague envy curled his lip as he jerked himself off, his roving eyes watching my hands as they rubbed, thrust, did all the things that he wanted to do.
When he finally caved and stepped toward me, I kicked him away with a pedicured foot on his chest.
“Lara.”
“Keep watching.”
“You’re going to let me fuck you right now.”
I smirked. “Fuck off.”
His jaw flexed. “You’re gonna get it.”
“I hope so.”
He looked angry but I only grinned. Angry Jackson was wildly sexy anyway so stroking, pumping into myself, I moaned, continuing to kick him away from me for as long as I could get away with, knowing well that his cock got harder with every spurned advance. He knew he’d have me eventually. We were us again. Now, his sexual frustration was back to being a game – a delicious, exciting and torturous game.
With my fifth kick, Jackson caught my leg and mounted me, grabbing both my wrists with one hand and pinning them hard above my head. His free hand between my thighs, he stroked me, reveling in my wetness before spreading my legs and entering me.
“Ah… fuck, Lara.” He grunted when I let him enter me halfway before tightening my muscles around him.
“That’s what you get,” I smirked breathlessly, savoring the deliciously tormented frown on Jackson’s gorgeous face.
“Baby,” he pleaded, his lip twitching as I let him in another inch. I grinned, taking too much pleasure in rendering all six feet and three inches of his muscle helpless between my legs. “Oh fuck, yes, thank you, baby,” Jackson groaned when I let him plunge back in me, his jaw dropping as he resumed pumping in and out of me, filling and un-filling me, bringing me closer and closer to the edge. “Christ, babe, you feel so fucking good,” he rasped, on his elbows, his eyes lost in mine. “You make me feel like the luckiest man on fucking Earth, Lara. I love you so fucking much.”
“I love you,” I breathed, thrusting my fingers in his dark blonde hair and pulling his lips against mine. Our mouths crushed against each other, he rocked deeper, harder, sliding his hands beneath my ass and forcing me to cry out as he pulled me so tight I could feel every last hot inch of him inside of me.
As usual, the sound of my orgasm forced his. A savage, guttural moan ripped from his throat as he came, spasms rippling his hard body before he let its weight collapse onto me, once again the security
blanket I had loved for so many years.
Chapter Seven
On our last day in Ibiza, my lips woke Jackson with a warm good morning wrapped around his cock. I reveled in the sound of him rumbling awake and immediately groaning with pleasure. “Oh… fuck, babe.” His blue eyes were electric as he lifted his head to get a visual on the sensation enveloping his morning wood. “Christ, babe, yes…” His fingers raked through my hair, grabbing fistfuls that grew tighter and tighter as I took him deeper and deeper in my mouth. I had woken up hot, eager to please him. I wanted to give my fiancé every last bit of pleasure I could offer. Gripping his shaft, I stroked, my mouth pumping up and down with my hands.
“Fuck, yes. Keep sucking. Just like that,” Jackson grunted, his six-pack flexed as he watched me. When he came, I slid him out and pressed a kiss onto his pulsing helmet, relishing the sensation of his rich warmth pumping in thick ribbons onto my lips. “Holy fucking shit, baby.” Jackson watched with unblinking awe as I licked them clean. “Fuck, baby,” he grinned, catching his breath. “I can’t fucking wait to make you Lara Kinsley.”
When we finally emerged from our bedroom around 2PM, we were greeted with smug, knowing looks from our friends. Caleb laughed at the lazy satisfaction still spread across Jackson’s face. He and Sloane raised their drinks at us while the others loudly clapped. I rolled my eyes and laughed but felt a quick frown pinch my brows when I caught Sawyer’s reaction. He was usually the leader of this kind of mischief but today he simply sat back, stoic, expressionless. When I caught his eye, he looked away and took a long swig of his beer. Where’s my happy Sawyer? What’s going on? I wanted desperately to ask him and prayed that we’d get at least a minute alone at some point in the day, but we didn’t, and I forced myself to brush it off. He’s just in an odd place since he broke up with his girlfriend. It has nothing to do with me.
~
On our first full day back in New York, Sloane organized a dinner in celebration of my engagement. “Wives and girlfriends only, because we need to be able to talk at length about your future wedding dress,” she said.