“I’m not answering that.”
“Come on, sweetheart,” I urge, resting my hand on her hip. “I need to understand what you’re going through.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re together and what affects you, affects me.”
“We’re new.”
“And that means what? Tell me.”
“Medical bills and other debt.”
“Did your father have life insurance?”
“Not nearly enough.”
Which means the policy was small or the debt was enormous. “Was he good to you before that?”
“He was,” she says, “but that doesn’t feel real. I don’t know the man who left us like this.”
In other words, I’m living in the shadow of her father who she now feels is one big lie. “Let’s talk about rules,” I say, trying to set the solid ground work between us I now know is critical if I want to keep this woman in my life and I do.
“I don’t want anyone to know about us at the office or in a work environment.”
“What about Cat and Reese? They already have an idea about us.”
“Not yet if we can help it. I’d like to have some time for us to figure this out, but I know they do and I can’t lie to Cat any more than you can Reese.”
“Agreed, but if you have to tell Cat, just tell her. I’ve seen how hiding things from her stresses you out.”
“All right,” she says. “How does the hotel work for us in LA?”
“I’d like to say that you get your own room and stay with me or me with you, but not this time. Not when we’ll likely be watched.”
She settles her hand on my cheek. “Thank you. For doing what you said you would and really trying to protect me. Another rule.”
I cover her hand with mine and kiss her. “What would that be?”
“Don’t make my past a big deal. That separates us.”
“We’re talking about the conversation at the apartment?”
“Yes. I had to fight through a few things, but so did you. I had my mother growing up and a father that I didn’t hate back then. You didn’t. And don’t tell me you had money and I didn’t. Money does nothing to ease the pain of loss.”
“I could remind you that money would have kept you in law school and kept you from hating your father, but then, you wouldn’t be here now. And I’m selfish enough to want you here with me.”
“I believe we end up where we’re meant to be,” she says. “We just don’t always understand why until much later.”
“No one knows that part of my life you just repeated except you and Reese, and he knows because he had to walk me off the ledge with my father in college a few times.”
“But you told me the first night we met?”
“We both went places that night that we don’t normally go.”
“Yes,” she says simply, settling her head against my shoulder. “We did.” She smiles, and fuck, it’s a beautiful smile that has my cock hard, and this crazy feeling swelling in my chest. What is this woman doing to me? She snuggles down into the crook of my arm, head on my shoulder, and I shift slightly to hold her just right.
I lay there, holding her, listening to her breathing, the feel of her body pressed to mine, a drug that illogically arouses and calms at the same time. I’m not beyond admitting that my possessiveness with this woman is going places beyond my bedroom. I want to talk to her. I want to win cases with her. I want to hold her. I want to protect her. I want to save her from the hell of medical bills and struggles, and I can. I can make it all go away for her, but ironically, considering every woman before her wanted to roll around naked in my money, my money is partially why Lori left me the first time. I have to use restraint with Lori or she’ll leave me again. Or try.
I won’t let her this time.
***
Lori
I blink awake to the plane shaking and jerk upward, only to have a strong arm and a hard body impede my escape. “Easy, sweetheart,” Cole murmurs, nuzzling my neck, that wicked wonderful spice that forever clings to him invading my senses in all the right ways. “It’s just turbulence. All is well.”
All is well. Yes. In this moment, with this man holding me, all is well. My hand comes down on the light stubble on his jaw. “How long was I asleep?”
He kisses my neck where he’d just been nuzzling it and then I’m fixed in those dreamy blue eyes of his that make me want to sigh and perhaps moan. He’s gorgeous, and by his own declaration, mine, well at least for now.
“Four hours,” he says.
I blink. “What is four hours?”
“That’s how long you slept, actually, how long we slept.”
“I slept four hours?”
“You did. We did.”
“I’m lying on top of you. Can you even feel all of the parts of your body right now?” I rise up on my elbow and reach over to rub his bicep that was I was using as a pillow, partially for him but a lot for me, too. It’s a really nice bicep.
“All of my body parts are alive and well,” he assures me. “The only way I’d be better right this minute would be if you were with me in my bed back home in New York.” He brushes my hair from my eyes. “Lay back down. We can sleep another hour.”
“I can’t lay back down,” I say, as I shift slightly and have a realization. “I have to pee really, really badly.” I try to scoot out of the seat and struggle. Cole hits the button and the seat starts to rise but the plane jerks. I yelp and grab Cole. “Is that normal?”
“Yes. And I promised to save you if the plane starts to go down, remember?”
“Do not even talk about that while we are in the air.”
He laughs, a low, dirty, rich sounding laugh that makes my sex clench, but my need to pee takes over. I kiss him. “Don’t laugh at me.”
“Or else what?”
“I’ll find a way to punish you.”
“I can’t wait. Own me, sweetheart.”
My sex clenches yet again but the effect is quickly ruined. “I have to pee too badly to have any kind of sexy or challenging reply to that.” I turn away from him and climb out of the seat with more of that laugh of his following, but it doesn’t merit a retort this time. I’m on a mission down the aisle, toward the back of the now thankfully calm plane.
I pass a half-moon shaped table, a small sitting area, and then, bingo: a bathroom in a tiny hallway. Maybe private planes aren’t so different from commercial after all. I enter the tiny space, do my business, and then look at the mess that is my hair. My God, it’s everywhere. I glance around, pleased to find a bagged toothbrush and toothpaste and a tiny comb. A little quick work and my morning breath is gone, and at least my hair doesn’t look like a wild animal crawled into it.
I inhale then, the scent of Cole on my skin, and I press my hands to the sink. I love that smell. I love sleeping with him. How has this man become so much a part of my life in a tiny window? I’m falling hard for him and too fast. I need to just deep breathe and enjoy Cole, not fall in love with him.
Right. I can do this.
I open the door and Cole is standing in the hallway, or rather leaning on the opposite wall. The minute he sees me, though, he in fact does stand, leaning forward, his arm on the wall beside me. “Feel better?”
He consumes me that quickly. I smell him, feel him—I can almost taste him, and he’s not touching me. “You’re very large,” I say, because he is, maybe six-foot-three? And he’s broad and tall, but more so, his personality, his energy, his everything, consumes all that is around him, most certainly me.
He narrows those baby blues on me. “Is that bad?”
“There’s really nothing bad about you, Cole Brooks,” I dare to say. “Not yet at least.”
“You’re expecting there will be?”
“Yes,” I say honestly.
“Why?”
“Because then you can’t disappoint me, and you can still surprise me in a good way
.”
“I can live with that,” he says.
“You can?”
“Of course I can. It’s honest, Lori, and my experience is that it isn’t as common or expected as we’d all like to believe. I like honest.”
I think back to him talking about his ex cheating with his friend. He’s been burned, and worse than me in many ways. The plane shakes and I end up flat against Cole, with him holding me. “That was normal, too?” I ask urgently.
“Yes. And we’re back to, I promised to save you, remember?”
Now, he’s not talking about the plane. “What if I don’t want to be saved?”
“Then you can save me, and I’ll protect you.”
“Save you? From what?”
“Apparently, a lot of things I didn’t know I needed to be saved from. And is that normal? Not for me, sweetheart,” he leans in and presses his cheek to mine, his hands suddenly branding my hips, “but then, everything with you is different.”
The plane tremors again and he leans back. “Go buckle up until we’re past the turbulence.”
“Protecting me again?”
He winks. “Always, and that’s not a bad thing.” He turns me toward the walkway again, and leans in. “You just don’t know that yet.” He then smacks my ass hard enough that I yelp in surprise, and he laughs while I hurry toward our seats, with his burning hot gaze on my butt cheek.
I sit down, buckle my seatbelt, and squeeze my legs together, because apparently, that man’s hand on my ass has me aroused. Everything about him arouses me but it’s more than that. So much more with him, but that isn’t where my head is. My head is with his words: You can save me. How can a man like Cole Brooks need to be saved? But then I think about his past and everything I feel when he kisses me and touches me, really think about it. He kisses me like I’m the only woman he has ever wanted. He kisses me like I’m everything and everyone, and there is no one else. He kisses me like he doesn’t care if I know how completely he wants me, in fact he wants me to know. Because Cole is fearless in all he does. It feels good to be kissed like that. It feels really good to be kissed like that by Cole Brooks.
Cole reappears and sits down next to me. “Now I’m minty fresh, too,” he says.
I unbuckle, stand up and walk to stand in front of him. His hands come down on my hips, and one of mine settles on his face. “Cole, I—”
“You what?”
“This,” I say, leaning in and pressing my lips to his, my tongue boldly licking into his mouth. He rewards me with a low rough sound, cupping my head in that controlling, possessive, sexy way he does, and he kisses me back. My knee goes to the cushion beside him, and I’m half on and half off his lap, but I don’t hold back. I sink into the connection, drinking him in, letting him taste everything I feel, and don’t dare name or even try to understand.
It’s a long drugging kiss that leaves us both breathing hard. “What was that for?” he asks.
“That was me kissing you like you kiss me.”
“How do I kiss you, Lori?”
There are a million reasons I shouldn’t say what comes next with a man like Cole Brooks, but it’s honest. It’s how he kisses me. It’s how I want to kiss him. “Without limits.”
The plane jolts and Cole pulls me into his lap, and instead of feeling fear, I laugh, we laugh together, and for the first time in years, I feel limitless. And for the first time since I met Cole, I dare to believe that we might really be limitless.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Cole
The internet on the plane is down, which means I can’t look forward to what awaits us in LA until we actually land. That occurs at five in the morning and while we taxi, my phone pings with messages, while Lori scans the news on hers for any updates we might need.
The first message on my phone is from our Hollywood starlet: My father wants you to call him and my home is a nightmare. I snuck out to the Bel-Air hotel. I’m registered as June Miller. Ask for me there. Your assistant booked your room here as well.
The next message is from Ashley: Starlet at Bel-Air hotel. Now you are too. Warning. There is a Hollywood charity event/party there tonight with your diva movie star hosting.
She’s included the address.
“It’s hard to be thorough on my phone,” Lori says, “but I don’t see much new on the internet related to this case. There are just a lot of tributes from stars and fans for the life lost. The police are being tight-lipped.”
“Of course they are,” I say. “Easier to manipulate us during questioning if we don’t know the facts.”
“Did you ask that security company to look into a suicide history for the deceased?”
“I did not,” I say, “but I am now,” I add, texting Royce: Suicide history of deceased. Him or relations.
He replies immediately, obviously not in bed asleep, with a simple: On it.
The plane pulls to a halt in the hangar and Lori and I unbuckle. The minute we’re both on our feet, I pull Lori to me and kiss her, in her own words, thoroughly, right up until she moans softly, and I know if I don’t stop, I won’t. “What was that for?” she asks, repeating my earlier question.
“Because I can’t do that once we’re on duty.”
She gives me one of her beautiful smiles that really, truly just makes me want to take her to the back of the plane and fuck her. I settle for another kiss before we gather our things and head for the door. Once we’re in the backseat of a hired car, I show her the messages from Ashley and our starlet. “A party?” she asks. “Talk about bad timing, and the diva reference. Is she a diva?”
“She was well behaved with me, but her father was always present and I can tell you that he’s a man of rules, ethics and manners.”
She opens her mouth and shuts it. “I have comments. I have questions.”
I nod, understanding and respecting that my flight attendant story has stayed with her. There will be no conversation in public and right here, in this city, under these circumstances, caution is paramount, or I’d already have my hand on her knee. “Have you ever been to LA?” I ask, changing the subject.
“Never,” she says. “My three flights included Hawaii, when I was too young to remember, and Texas twice when I considered UT for law school.”
“You know my home state then.”
“I was going to ask you about that,” she says. “You called New York home last night. You let go of Houston quickly.”
“I love New York City. I was only in Houston because of the firm.”
“And your father.”
“My father was the firm,” I say. “He was rooted in Houston. I wanted growth. Now we’re growing.”
“You have no siblings?”
“Not that I know of,” I say, “and you already know he had a strong opinion on birth control.”
Her cell phone rings and she scrambles for her phone, and I sense the panic in her, the fear that she left her mother, and her mother is now sick again. She glances at the number on the phone and her hand actually shakes. “Mom? Is everything okay?” She listens a moment, and breathes out in relief that I swear I feel with her. I’ve never felt anything with a woman before outside of momentary lust. But I feel it, right in my gut and my heart.
“We just landed,” Lori says. “We’re good. All is well.” There’s a pause. “His sister. Oh, well, aren’t you glad you asked now?”
I listen to the short exchange that ends with, “I love you, Mom.”
I love you, mom.
Fuck.
I have this crazy, long buried memory of the last time I hugged my mother.
Lori ends the calls. “Sorry about that.”
“Don’t ever be sorry for talking to your mother. That’s me saying that to you personally and professionally.”
Her eyes soften. “Thank you, Cole.”
I reach for her hand and discreetly squeeze it. “I take it the other woman was her new man’s sister?”
&
nbsp; “Yes. She seems happy about it. I just don’t want her to get hurt or to lean on him like she did my father, and crash and burn again.”
And there it is. The wall between us. Her absolute fear of ever needing someone.
The car pulls up to the hotel and doormen open both of our doors. The minute I step outside, I feel the eyes on me, the way I feel the eyes on me when I first enter a courtroom. In that situation, I tune them out, center myself in the job, but here, now, I do not.
Lori joins me as I tip a bellman. The minute we’re clear of him and other nearby ears, walking through the lobby, she returns to the conversation we didn’t have in the car. “If Jerome Knight is such a good man, why did the police have such a hard-on for him?”
I laugh at her remark that she somehow delivers as if it’s ladylike, which is next to impossible. “The cops we took down, the ones that were after him, were actually in on the insider trading and they’d stolen millions from the company on top of that. With the help of Walker Security, we figured it out and went after them, which was Jerome’s decision. He knew they would come at him, but he wanted justice.”
“And they’re still coming.”
“Taking those cops down created a PR nightmare for the department, and trust issues with the public that they’ve done little to repair. Taking down the man who exposed the problem will perhaps create doubt that the problem was even real.”
“And challenge your credibility as an attorney,” she says, as we step into line, but remain a good distance behind the person in front of us.
“That won’t be easy to do,” I say, turning toward her and lowering my voice, “but without question, they want to take me down.”
“They’d need to prove you did something illegal, faked evidence, or something, to that effect.”
“That would be impossible,” I say, “but they have something up their sleeves which could be nothing more than using our client as leverage against her father.”
It’s our turn in line and Lori and I step to the counter. We leave with two side-by-side rooms assigned, and I don’t ask for the adjoining doors I want. “We’re being watched,” I warn Lori.
“I feel it,” she says, “but I thought it was paranoia.”
Dirty Rich Cinderella Story Page 20