by Lucia Jordan
A cop came to stand at the gate to my cell. When he started fumbling with a ring of keys and opening the lock, I got worried that I was about to get dragged off somewhere else.
“You’re free to go,” he said to me.
“What? Why?”
He laughed. “Would you prefer to stay in there?”
I quickly got up and rushed out to the other side of the bars. “No, of course not, sorry. But why I am being released. I thought there was a two thousand dollar bail to post?”
“There was. It’s been paid.”
“Paid? By whom?”
As soon as we walked out into the waiting room and I caught sight of Tim, I was absolutely mortified. Grateful, but still mortified. I literally wanted to die of embarrassment and shame.
“Thank you, officer,” Tim said before he opened the door for me to leave.
“How did you know I was here?” I asked as we walked to his car.
“Kate called me.”
Dammit, Kate. I had specifically asked her not to get Tim involved.
“Thank you for paying the bail,” I said. “I’ll pay you back.”
“Why would you do that?” he asked. “You don’t have two grand, and I don’t need it to be paid back. I’m just happy that Kate called me so that I could come to get you out of there.”
We got into his car, and I was so relieved to be pulling away from the police station.
“Do you want me to take you back to Kate’s?”
“Yes, please,” I said.
“Want to tell me what happened?” he asked. “How did you end up in a jail cell tonight?”
“You mean, Kate didn’t tell you?” At least I owed her for keeping her mouth shut about that.
“No. She said you had asked her not to even call me and that you would be furious at her when I came to bail you out. But that I was the only person she knew who could afford the bail, and she didn’t want you to have to spend the night in jail. I asked her what had happened, but she refused to say. She’s a good friend to you.”
I nodded; she truly was.
“Why did you tell Kate not to call me, Brooke? You know I would have come and gotten you out. I just don’t understand why you’re so mad at me and so distrustful of me that you would rather sit in a jail cell all night than let Kate call me for help.”
“It wasn’t about that,” I said. I felt my face turning five shades of red.
“Then what was it about?”
I sighed and looked out the window. I wished I could crawl under the seat of the car and hide. “It was about what I did to find myself being cuffed and stuck in the back of a cop car,” I said.
Tim looked at me, and I knew that he was waiting for me to tell him. I guess there was no point in keeping it from him because he was going to end up hearing about it from someone anyway. I was confident it would be all over Chelsea’s social media tomorrow. I was just so ashamed that I wished I didn’t have to be the one to say it out loud.
“Chelsea came into the coffee shop tonight,” I started.
“Why? Did she do something to you?” He sounded immediately protective.
“No, I did something to her.”
I really didn’t want to admit to all of this, but as soon as I opened my mouth to explain what had happened, it turned into one hysterical and rambling explanation.
“She was just getting a coffee, but when I saw her, all I could think about was her having her hands on you. Not only had she done it once, but twice. And even after you and I had that wonderful night under the stars. I just lost it; I couldn’t even help it. I threw her latte on her, and then I punched her in the face.”
I sat there teary-eyed and feeling like an insulant child who had just done something really, really stupid out of nothing other than pure, reactive, emotional outrage.
It was quiet as Tim didn’t say anything. When I finally worked up enough courage to look in his direction, I saw a grin on his face that he was trying to hold in.
“What is so funny?” I asked, feeling slightly put-off that he found the awful situation humorous.
“I can’t believe you punched Chelsea in the face,” he said as he lost his ability to hold his laughter in any longer and burst out in a few good howls. “That woman has had that coming to her for years!”
“You think it’s funny?” I asked. “You’re not upset?”
“I’m sorry,” he said as he tried to reign his laughter back in. “I don’t think it’s funny that you went to jail. That part is awful. But I think it’s hilarious that Chelsea finally got what was coming to her.”
“Well, you didn’t seem to think she was that bad when you let her arouse you during that photo shoot,” I said sharply. I didn’t even know why I was so ugly about it. I was just hurt and tired and over all of it.
“I didn’t let her arouse me,” he said. “And I’m really sorry that I didn’t tell you about it…again. I should have. I just didn’t want to make you upset over nothing.”
“Chelsea giving you an erection by putting her hand down your pants in a public photo shoot was not nothing.”
“Agreed,” he said. “That’s not what I mean. What I meant was that it meant nothing to me. Okay, yes, my body reacted to the touch, but that was only because I had been daydreaming about making love to you the night before during the photo shoot in order to pass the time. I got so aroused thinking about all the things I wanted to do to your body that when Chelsea pulled that stunt, all it took was one touch and it just sort of, well, sprang up.”
“Well, then you should have told me about it,” I said as I continued to pout.
“You’re right, I absolutely should have, and I’m sorry. I still can’t believe you punched her.” Tim looked over at me with an expression that I hadn’t seen before. It looked like a mix between disbelief and a happy surprise. “Were you jealous of her?”
“Of course, I was jealous of her,” I said. “She had her hands on you.”
“But we haven’t been together or even talked to each other in like two weeks,” he said. “Max told me that you even went out on a blind date with some friend of Nick’s.”
“I did,” I said.
“How was it?”
“Scott was fine. But I was miserable.”
“Why?”
Ugh, I didn’t want to answer any more questions. I just wanted to get home and crawl under the covers. “Because I only wanted it to be you.”
Tim pulled the car to the side of the road and stopped so that he could look at me fully. “Then, Brooke, why do we keep separating? Why do you keep running away and then not talking to me? Why don’t we just stay together?”
My emotions were out of control after the roller coaster of a night that tonight had been. I practically screamed at him instead of talking. “Because I can’t trust you!” I cried. “Because every time I think you’re actually listening or talking about our relationship seriously, I find some other thing that you’ve been keeping from me. And for some reason, they always have to do with a beautiful woman and your cock. I can’t live like that! I can’t live always wondering if you’re thinking about me because you truly care about me and want to be with me or if you’re thinking about me because you want to have sex. It’s exhausting and upsetting because every time I feel like we’re good, something pulls the rug out from beneath me. And then every time I leave, I feel like I’m going to die without you.”
“Brooke,” he said as he looked at me in quiet bewilderment and confusion. “I don’t know how else to prove to you right now that you’re wrong about me. I care about you so much more than you know, and I want to be with you for every reason, not just one, not just because I love making love to you. If you could just give me one more chance and a little bit of time to prove to you how I feel about you.”
“Funny,” I said. “That’s exactly what Max said.”
“He’s right. I just need you to hold on a little bit longer.”
“Why?”
“I can’t tell
you,” he said. Tim grimaced as if he knew that was not the thing that I wanted to here. “But I promise you that you can trust me.”
“You’ve been preoccupied the last couple of weeks. I’ve heard you haven’t even been to the office and that you haven’t been working on the Spokane project. You’ve stopped trying to call or text me for the most part.”
“I want to tell you everything,” he said, and I wanted to believe him. “But you have to wait just a little longer, and then I’ll be able to show you everything. I’ve been thinking about you this whole time and missing you like crazy. When Max told me that you went out on a date with some guy, it killed me. I wanted to find the guy and break both his legs. I’ve been up at night worrying that you’ll find someone else before I can show you what I’ve been doing, but I’ve been making myself stay the course and wait because I feel like I need to prove to you how I feel, instead of just telling you. That’s the only way that you’ll truly believe me. But don’t for a minute, think that I’ve been too preoccupied to think about you because that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ve been preoccupied because of you.”
We sat there silently in the dark car together for a while. Then, as Tim got ready to start driving me back home to Kate’s apartment, I decided to do something reckless. I felt like I needed to forget about him and stop being in love with him, but I couldn’t do that as long as I was still trying to believe him. I needed to prove to myself that he really was just a playboy billionaire and was just in this for the sex. I had so much built-up sexual angst right now, and I was betting that he did too.
21
Chapter Fifteen (Tim)
The last thing that I expected Brook to do right now, after just being released from jail and sitting in a parked car on the side of the road in the dark while having an emotionally difficult conversation, was to reach over and grab my pants. If it hadn’t been so dark, I was sure that she would have seen the look of shock in my eyes. She unbuckled her seat belt and crawled over to sit on my lap in the car, and I was simultaneously stunned and enthralled. I felt a little bit like this was a test to see whether or not I would resist her for the higher purpose of being a gentleman. But when she straddled me and rocked her pelvis against mine, all of my higher-level thought flew out the window.
God, I had missed her so much. All of her—her laughter, her critical conversation, the way her eyes filled with wonder when she tipped her head back to look at the stars, and yes—making love to her, too. I had been keeping myself away and keeping myself focused on building her surprise and getting her diamond that looked like a fallen star. I had stayed homed-in about all the things that would culminate into a great and wondrous moment in which she would be surprised, and she would see all that I had been working on to prove how much I cared for her.
I hadn’t planned on coming to get her out of jail tonight, and I hadn’t planned on this moment in the car. If it had been anyone else, I could have easily brushed it aside, but not with Brooke. With her, when she touched me, I lost all control. She pushed me past the point that I could resist. If this was a test now, a test of how well I could deny her, then I was going to fail it gloriously.
“What are you doing?” I asked her through panting breaths.
“I’m seducing you,” she said as her tongue slid into my mouth.
She wrapped her tongue around mine at the same time that she wrapped her hand around the swollen mass between my thighs, and I couldn’t do anything but moan from the sheer overwhelming sensation of it. I tried not to move against her, but that failed, too, as I found myself reaching my arms around her and pulling her tightly against my body. I felt her hands twist in my hair as our mouths crashed together in a feverish frenzy. I wanted her so badly that I was shaking.
Brooke lifted herself up from the seat and slid her pants off one leg at a time before coming to sit back down on top of me. I ran my hands up along the inside of her shirt and undid her bra so that I could feel her soft breasts cupped within my hands. This was not an all-night, love-making under the stars kind of moment. This was a moment of heated and impassioned intensity that came from denying each other and trying to stay apart when there was something stronger than both of us pushing us together.
Brooke reached into my pants and pulled me out of my clothes. Her fingers around me made every muscle in my body quiver. I lifted her hips gently and then set her down onto my lap again as I slowly pushed up into her body. I groaned with the feeling of intense and incapacitating pleasure and felt as if I could almost burst inside her with that single motion. Then, I started to move inside of her until she reached down to still my hips.
She lifted my arms up beside my head and held my hands there with hers as she kissed me and took the lead. Her slow and tantalizing movements against me were so deep and so purposeful that I laid my head back and arched my back against the seat as she made love to me.
I may have been older and more experienced than Brooke, but I had never had a woman make love to me like that. When I lost all final control and erupted inside of her, my body convulsed in such an intensely pleasurable way that it nearly hurt. When we were both satiated, she stayed on top of me for a moment, and I held her in my arms and kissed the top of her face as we both tried to catch our breath.
“Was that a test?” I whispered to her.
“Yes.”
“Did I fail it?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t keep myself from wanting you.”
A part of me was truly scared for what she was going to say now. I was worried that she had been right, that I only wanted sex, and that this was over. After all that I was doing and planning for her, this one moment in the car might have ended it all, and I would never forgive myself for not having the willpower to withstand the temptation of her to such a fault that it destroyed a future of being with Brooke.
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “I failed it too.”
I held her for as long as she stayed on my lap, and then when she moved back to the other seat and put her pants back on, I put myself back in my own pants and got ready to drive.
“Where are we going?” she asked once I had the car back on the road.
“To Kate’s,” I answered. “Isn’t that where you want to go?”
“No. I want to go home with you.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
I turned the car around and headed for the house in the mountains. It was dark enough that if we went around the other side of the house, she wouldn’t see the surprise that was almost ready for her. I was glad that she wanted to come home with me. I didn’t want to be another night without her. In fact, I never wanted to have another night without her. I was going to text Max when we got to the house and ask him how we could finish all of the last minute things that needed to be completed within the next twenty-four hours. I didn’t want her to go again without seeing it and seeing how much she meant to me.
As soon as I got on the road to the mountains, Brooke reached her hand over to my lap, and I put my hand on hers. She wove her fingers between mine, and I sighed with a huge release that I had been holding in. We drove the rest of the way to the mountain house in the silent darkness as Brooke looked out the window and gazed up at the stars. I opened the skylight in the car, and the farther away from the city we got, the clearer the constellations became until she was able to spot her favorite grouping of stars again. I smiled to myself, knowing that soon, hopefully, she’d be wearing one of those stars on her finger.
When we got to the house, I parked on the other side so that she wouldn’t see her surprise.
22
Chapter Sixteen (Brooke)
I was so conflicted when I woke up in Tim's bed the next morning. What a stupid thing for me to try to test him with in the car. It didn't prove anything. We both wanted each other and making love to him in the car was deliciously satiating. There was no pass or fail with that because we both craved it.
Tim must have already gotten up because when I turned to look, he wasn't beside me. I heard him talking to someone on the phone in the other room. It sounded like it might have been Max, but I couldn't really tell. I got up and got dressed and ready to leave, although I wasn't really sure where I was going since I didn't have a job to go back to. I also wasn't sure what kind of trouble I was in with the legal stuff.
"Good morning," Tim said as he walked back into the bedroom and saw me putting on my clothes."
"Good morning.” I smiled.
He always looked so good in the morning. His messy brown hair was just slightly messier than usual, and it gave him that sexy, disheveled look like he had just come from making love.
"You're not leaving, are you?" he asked.
"Well, I have to go figure out what I need to do about the jail situation, and I also need to figure out some sort of job because I can't expect Kate to let me live at her place for free. But I guess I can't go anywhere until you're ready to take me back to my car."
He smirked. Tim had forgotten that he had driven us here last night and that my car was still parked in the coffee shop parking lot since before the whole assault incident happened. I was his prisoner for lack of a better word.
"Well, the jail situation is resolved," he said.
"No, I don't just mean the bail," I said, still grateful to him for having paid that for me. "I mean the part about Chelsea pressing charges. I heard her say that she was going to, and I heard the cops talking about it on the ride to the precinct."
"I already took care of it this morning," he said with a smile. "Chelsea has agreed to drop all charges against you. There's nothing further that you need to do. Also, she's paying the bail money back to you, so you can give that to Kate for rent if you'd like."