by J. Lynn
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped, thrown off-balance. I struggled to breathe as Brock left what remained of the space between us behind. He towered over me, so close that his right leg brushed against my left one.
“It has nothing to do with me being your boss. Us working together isn’t even a drop in the damn bucket of our life,” he said. “You don’t want to answer the question, because you know there is none.”
“That’s not true,” I swore, and then stiffened as he pried the open wine bottle out of my hand and placed it on the small table beside us. “What are you doing?”
Placing both of his hands against the wall, on either side of me, he leaned in and lowered his head so we were nearly eye to eye. “Tell me one thing that excites you about him.”
“Why?” I whispered, my chest rising and falling sharply as my gaze dipped to his mouth.
“Because I want to know . . .” One of his hands left the wall and curved over my shoulder. I shuddered, and his head tilted to the side. “I want to know why, after what happened between us, you’d actually go out on a date with another man.”
My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in every part of my body. Senses overwhelmed, I had no idea how we’d ended up here, him slipping his hand down my arm, to my hip. I had no idea how his other hand was suddenly on the other side of my waist. All my being zeroed in on the warmth of his hands burning through the thin dress. A sharp ache hit low in my stomach, throbbing and intense.
“Jillian?” he said my name in this soft way that did crazy things to my brain cells, melting them together like they were nothing more than butter.
I wet my lips. “He’s nice. Grady is really nice.”
“Nice?” His hands glided up my sides, and my body reacted without thought. My back arched and my breath hitched as he lowered his mouth to my ear. His breath was hot against my skin as he said, “You don’t want nice. Nice doesn’t excite you.”
My hands found their way to his chest. I pushed at him at the same time my fingers curled into the front of his sweater, holding him in place.
“I’m sure Grady is a nice, little man,” he went on, and his hands were on the move again, one coasting back down to my hip. The other stayed over my ribs and each swipe of his thumb brought him into contact with the lower swell of my breast. “I don’t have anything against him, but if he excited you, if he brought this very same blush to your cheeks?” His hot mouth coasted over said cheek. The coarse hair of his jaw elicited a sharp gasp from me. “If he excited you, if you were really into him, then I wouldn’t have ruined your date. You’d be with him right now. And I sure as hell wouldn’t know what it felt like for you to come.”
I wasn’t sure that logic worked, but my mind seemed to have checked out, because it was all about the way I felt. A languid heat invaded my bloodstream. The throbbing increased in certain areas of my body. My breasts grew heavy and achy, and those feelings only intensified when I felt his breath on my lips, turning my blood to molten lava.
His lower body leaned into mine, and my breath came into short inhales as I felt him against my belly, thick and hard. Holy crap, there was no denying that, no hiding his reaction. Sharp arousal loosened and tightened my muscles all at once. Our mouths were now lined up perfectly, his lips so close to mine.
I’d never felt anything like this before.
Never.
Brock was going to kiss me, and this time, it would count.
And I wasn’t going to turn my head away.
I was thinking Brock wanted to do a hell of a lot more than kissing.
Realizing that, knowing I would let him kiss me and I would ultimately let him do whatever ever he wanted to me, cleared some of the fog from my thoughts.
What was happening here?
It had only been, what, almost two months since we’d reentered each other’s lives? Two months after years of no contact—years of my life falling apart and his living something like a Forbes success story? He’d even gotten engaged and broken up, and he . . . had broken my heart. But now he was back in my life as my boss, my freaking boss, and I was barely beginning to figure out who I was.
My fingers flattened against his chest. “What . . . what are we doing?”
Brock stilled, and for a moment I wasn’t even sure he was breathing or not. Then he shifted slightly, resting his forehead against mine. “I . . . I really don’t know.”
That bitter mixture of disappointment and relief swelled once more. Swallowing hard, I pushed against his chest even though I wanted to say screw it and climb him like a damn spider monkey.
“But,” he rasped, and then the hand at my back slid to my hip, gripping it. “But I do know, Jillian, that I want you.”
Chapter 21
Brock wanted me.
He’d actually said those words. It wasn’t my imagination or wishful thinking. Nor was it something I made up in my head after reading between the lines. He’d just said it, and I could feel that he wanted me, and that alone did funny things to my body.
The hand at my hip tightened and the one under my breast stilled. His forehead was against mine, and when he made this raw, masculine sound of need, a shiver worked its way through my body. He pressed in, forcing my back flush against the wall.
He wanted me, but was it six years too late?
Based on the way my body had responded to his with him barely touching me, I was going to say no, it wasn’t too late.
But was it wise to even indulge the idea? That was the question.
He shuddered and then I felt his lips press against the corner of mine, the side that didn’t move right due to the nerve damage, and I gasped at the contact, my body flashing cold and then hot.
I blindly turned my head toward his and his lips brushed over mine, a soft sweep as gentle as a breeze. There was no pressure behind it, and the kiss we’d shared in the middle of the night had been a whole lot deeper than this, but this soft touch of his mouth undid me in a way no other kiss had ever done before.
Brock pulled away just an inch and our gazes connected and held. He then took my hand and pulled me away from the wall. He led me to the couch, and when he sat, he pulled me down so I was in his lap and my legs draped over his. Feet dangling, my heels slipped off and fell to the floor.
Startled by the sound, Rhage dove off the arm of the couch and scurried down the hall toward one of the bedrooms. Or maybe he was heading for the hallway bathroom. Rhage had lately taken to sleeping in the sink in there for some reason.
But I quickly stopped thinking about the weird cat.
My heart was pounding erratically as Brock kept one arm around my waist, securing me in place as he lifted his other hand, catching my hair and tucking it back behind my ear. He tipped my chin up, and his gaze searched mine and every inch of my face.
“I don’t know what is happening,” I blurted out.
“Me neither.” He cupped my jaw, moving his thumb just below the scar.
“That’s reassuring.” I placed a hand on his chest, needing a bit of space between us. He dropped his hand, but he didn’t let me out of his lap. “This is . . . this is crazy.”
“Crazy can be good,” he replied, one side of his lips kicking up.
“Or crazy can be the kind of crazy that ends really badly,” I reasoned, trying to grasp onto sanity. “We just can’t do this.”
“And why not?” His other hand fell to my bare knee. The contact caused me to jerk in his arms.
I thought there were plenty of reasons why. “We . . . we work together, Brock. If we do this and it blows up in our faces, we have to keep working together. I can’t let my dad down,” I said. “I . . . I can’t let myself down.”
“Why do you think it will blow up in our faces?” His question sounded genuine. “Do you think that I would be here if I thought it would hurt you in the end?”
I stared at him, wanting so badly to believe his words, but I never thought he’d hurt me as badly as I’d allowed him to before. “Why?” I asked.
“Why now, after all this time?”
“It . . . it just changed. I don’t know exactly when it happened,” he said, voice rough as sandpaper. “If it was the night I saw you at the restaurant, or your first day at work, when you cocked major attitude at me. That wasn’t the Jilly I knew, and it threw me through the damn loop, because it was fucking hot. I don’t know if it was when you hugged me after that dinner, because that was the Jilly I knew, but you didn’t feel like her in my arms.”
I couldn’t think, could barely breathe, as his words washed over me and his eyes closed. The hand on my thigh slid all the way up, over my stomach and then my breast, and a ragged sound left me as his palm grazed the aching tip, but kept moving until his fingers circled the base of my neck, his thumb resting against my wildly beating pulse.
“Or maybe it happened before I even saw you again,” he said, appearing to be talking to himself, but that statement didn’t make any sense. His eyes opened and shone like polished obsidian. “Maybe it was seeing you finally relax and laugh the night we went out with your friends. It could’ve been falling asleep with you lying against me. Hell, what we did that night had a lot to do it with it.”
My gaze searched his tense, strained features.
“It could’ve been all those minutes and more, but I knew that morning, when I woke up and found you hiding in the bathroom, that I wanted you. And there wasn’t a damn day that went by that I didn’t think of you, Jillian. I should’ve told you that the first night I saw you.”
Air halted in my lungs.
“I always wondered about you, about what you were doing, how things were going for you . . .” His eyes opened and they were dark. “I wondered if you found someone. And I asked about you—I asked often.”
“What?” I breathed.
“Your mom . . . she kept me, well, informed. You didn’t know that?”
I hadn’t. A burst of anger lit up my chest, because Mom really shouldn’t have been keeping Brock up to date on my life, especially without telling me.
“I knew when you dropped out of college. I knew when you got the job at the insurance firm,” he explained, and my lips parted on a sharp inhale. “I knew when you started dating someone. I also knew you never brought him home to meet your parents, so I knew it couldn’t be that serious.”
Holy crap.
Thunderstruck, the anger gave way to surprise. “Why didn’t she say anything to me?”
“I asked her not to. I was . . . I was sure you wouldn’t want me to know any of those things. You had made it clear the last time we had talked that you didn’t want me in your life.”
A twinge of regret blossomed in my chest. It had been that last holiday I spent with him and my family. “You . . . you brought her to the house.”
I think that was what broke me the most about Brock back then. The girl he’d been flirting with, the girl he’d ditched me for, wasn’t just some one-night stand who was forgotten the moment he walked out. It was the girl he ended up getting involved with. It was the girl he finally settled down for. It was the girl he proposed to.
He turned his head slightly, looking away as if he couldn’t go eye to eye with me. “I wasn’t thinking.”
A knot formed in my throat as that night came rushing back. It had been the Christmas after everything had happened and Brock had come to Christmas dinner. He hadn’t come alone. Roughly four months after he’d broken my heart and my life had literally imploded, he’d brought Kristen to my family dinner, and I . . . I’d lost it.
Face still practically a wreck and healing, my mental state nowhere near stable, I’d come downstairs for one of the rare times to join my family, and I could still remember it like yesterday.
I’d made my way into the large dining room, my weary gaze tracking over the familiar faces, and I’d seen Brock first. He’d been staring at the door, and for a moment, I thought maybe he’d been waiting for me, looking for me. Although he had dealt a death blow to my emotions that night at Mona’s, tiny seedlings of hope had formed in the weeks afterward during his visits.
But then I’d seen who he stood next to, and seeing her, knowing that he brought her to the dinner, meant she was important to him. No one-night stand. No drunken hookup. He’d never, ever, brought a girl to my parents’ house.
Kristen was his girlfriend. Not me. Never me.
I’d pivoted right around and went back upstairs, managing not to flip my shit in front of my entire family. It hadn’t mattered, though. They all knew. And that mortification and raw hurt from the night at Mona’s had resurfaced in a messy explosion of emotion.
Brock had come after me like he had a hundred times before then, like he hadn’t the night at Mona’s.
He’d come to my bedroom, and I’d yelled at him. I was pretty sure I called him a “selfish, conceited whore” at one point and I’d told him that I never wanted to see him again. I’d said other things, terrible things, and I could still see his face and the shock that had been etched into his features. The pain I didn’t want to see, and especially the guilt I didn’t want to acknowledge.
It was like almost dying all over again, but looking back, I knew it hadn’t been all his fault. He shouldn’t have had to live his life worrying about hurting the kind of feelings I had for him. It wasn’t fair to him, and that had taken a whole lot of soul searching to realize—painful, brutal soul searching.
His thumb massaged my pulse, tugging me out of the past. “Jillian?”
“I’d . . . I’d overreacted. I mean, I was . . . fuck,” I said, letting it all out. “I was jealous. I was so jealous, Brock, because I wanted to be her. I’d lo—” I cut myself off as tiny bundles of nerves formed in my stomach. I pulled so his hand was no longer touching my throat. “I just wasn’t in a good place.”
“Don’t take the blame for this,” he told me.
“I’m not. Well, I’m taking partial blame for the . . . the fuckery known as us.” Desperately needing space to think about this clearly, I slipped out of his hold and off his lap. Standing, I thrust the hair back from my face and moved until the back of my legs touched the coffee table. “I was young and—”
“And I didn’t want to see what was right in front of my face.” He scooted to the edge of the couch and stared up at me. “I just wanted you to think of me like you would a brother.”
Uncomfortable of where this conversation was going, I edged away from the coffee table, moving so I was standing in front of it, my back to the TV. “Brock—”
“But I knew that wasn’t the case. I wasn’t a fucking idiot.”
I stiffened.
His hands hung between his knees. “And I wanted to just think of you as someone who was like a baby sister to me.”
“You did. You didn’t once treat me like I was anything other than that.”
“I told you. I couldn’t let myself. You were six years younger than me. Now? Not a big deal. Then? Not to mention jailbait, but your father would’ve murdered me. Hell,” he grunted, a wry grin on his lips. “He still might kill me. You were too young and I was . . . I was too caught up in my own head. All I had were my dreams—be this big UFC star. Get a shit ton of endorsements. Work hard and party fucking harder, and you—”
“I didn’t fit into that,” I said without an ounce of bitterness, because I hadn’t. I’d been a little girl compared to him, full of silly dreams and hopes.
And there was a part of me that still felt like her sometimes. That I could be easily swept off my feet again, sucked back into Brock just when I was finally, finally starting to live my life.
“But I always knew,” he said, lowering his gaze. He let out a ragged breath. “I fucking knew how you felt.”
Crossing my arms across my chest, I shivered. I didn’t know what to make of that confession, what to make of any of this. A huge part of me was in shock. When you’ve spent a good part of your life wanting something and then another decent chunk of your life accepting you’d never have it, to now have it seemingly within reach was hard
to comprehend.
I glanced over at him, and my stomach dipped in the most pleasant way. What would it be like to be with him, with our past no longer between us, and just now? My skin flushed with sweet anticipation, but at the same time, a part of me held back.
A part of me wanted to run screaming for the hills.
“I just . . . I really need to think about this. I mean, I don’t even know what you really want, if you just want to get laid—”
“If I wanted to just get laid, I’d already have someone in my bed right now. That would be easy.”
“Wow,” I muttered.
“I’m not saying that to be an ass. It’s true, but I don’t want that. Obviously.” His jaw tightened. “If I just wanted that, I wouldn’t be here.”
I bit down on my lip. “So . . . what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I want you,” he said. “That is what I want, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I have no idea, but I’m sure as fuck not going to deny what I feel and want just because it may turn out to be shit.”
Except if it turned out to be shit, we had to face each other every day, and if it turned out to be shit, how would we really move past that a second time? How could I?
Taking a deep breath, Brock rose from my couch and approached me. I eyed him warily as he walked around the coffee table and stopped in front of me. Before I knew what he was doing, he cupped my cheeks in his large hands and tipped my head back.
“Walking out of this apartment is not what I want to be doing.” He lowered his mouth, stopping a hairsbreadth from mine. “What I want to be doing is taking you back to the bedroom, stripping you bare, and fucking every single doubt from your mind.”
Oh goodness.
“But I get it. You’ve got to wrap your head around the way things are now,” he went on. “I’m going to give you that time. All right?”
“Okay,” I whispered back, because what else was I supposed to say? His mouth was so close to mine, and I was absolutely thrown through a loop.