“No, no, no.” I undo my sex-ready position and stand.
“Hey.”
I go to him. “Let me.” I want to be in on this with him. I kneel in front of him, wrapping my hand around him, marveling at his cock.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“I love the shape of you,” I whisper, “how you’re slightly wider than round.” I kiss him and he groans. “I love this vein here.” I trail the side of him with my fingers.
“Mia,” he gasps. “I’m not an art exhibit.”
No, he’s something better. He’s undiscovered territory, wild and exotic, yet achingly familiar. So perfectly him.
I lick the underside, and it jumps. I do it again, reveling in the salty, musky maleness of him, and then I press my cheek to it.
“Mia.” His voice sounds strained.
I put him in my mouth, feeling the whole shape of him with my tongue and lips. I wrap my hand around his thick root and explore him. I don’t want to stop.
With other guys, I try to stage manage. Maybe set the scene with flower petals and candles. Or juice things up with breathless oohs and aahs, but Max and I are beyond that. We’ve been through a war together.
I pull him from my mouth and kiss just his tip.
Suddenly he’s out of my hand. He kneels in front of me. “You’re too slow,” he whispers.
“You’re too perfect,” I whisper.
“You’re too hot,” he says, watching my eyes.
A condom wrapper crinkles at the edge of my awareness.
My heart pounds. We’re kneeling face-to-face in this empty studio space in the middle of the city, me and my enemy who I know like the back of my hand, and all the walls are coming down.
“You’re too terrifying,” I finally say.
The light flooding in the windows is a faint dot of white in each of his eyes. “So are you,” he says.
I kiss him. I press into him because I want my chest against his, because my heart feels raw, like there’s a hole there that can only be plugged by his chest.
“Mia,” he rumbles into the kiss. He stands, pulling me up with him, never once breaking the kiss. I fling my legs around him and kiss him. He holds me aloft, kneading my partly-silk-clad butt cheeks.
“You’re gonna make me come again.”
“That’s the plan.” He whirls me around and we cross some expanse of floor—three feet or thirty feet, I have no idea. He sets me on some sort of surface.
My head lolls back.
“Look at me,” he rumbles.
I look at him as he puts himself at my entrance, sliding his condom-clad cock around, picking up juice. “Your enemy of yore is gonna fuck you now and it’s gonna be unbelievable.”
“Please,” I beg.
He pushes a little ways in, stretching me. “God, it already is unbelievable.”
I grab handfuls of his shirt, holding him, rocking with him.
His gaze falls to my lips. He leans in, nips my lower lip, just softly.
I suck in a shaky little breath, trying to be quiet about it. I don’t want him to know how he shatters me. How much power he has over me. How much I want this.
“I love when you do that,” he says.
“What, when I breathe?” I joke. “You need to get out more.”
“I love when I touch you, and you try to act like it’s nothing.”
“Are you calling me a bad actress?”
“You’re a great actress—you know you are.” He pushes in deeper, rocking gently, in and out. “But when you secretly melt like that, you have no idea how sexy it is. It’s a gift,” he whispers. “Something only for me.”
My eyes drift closed as he moves deeper, filling me fully. The shock of him so thick inside me makes me shudder with pleasure.
He rocks into me again, breath erratic. He’s fucking me. Owning me. It’s beyond anything.
My hands are all over his chest, hungrily smoothing over hot skin and cool shirt. I push his shirt off him. I kiss his sweaty chest, learning the shape of his shoulders with my palms.
I’m the queen of the cats, plundering the catnip storeroom.
“Max—”
“What, baby? Anything.” He does me slowly, grinding against my pussy. “Anything.” He says the word in time with the roll of his hips. “Anything. Anything.”
“Like that,” I say.
He replies with nonsense into my ear. The music of his voice is familiar, but this is a new key.
I can feel him quickening, lost in a primal rhythm, old as the hills. “Anything.”
I grab his thumb and press it to my clit. “Right here,” I say.
“God that is so hot.” He does my clit while he fucks me. “Like that?”
“Faster,” I gasp. He’s grinding me and rubbing me. I’m lost in us.
An orgasm explodes over me, white-hot behind my eyes. I grip his arms as he cries out, a pleasure-pain sound that feels so Max-ish, I want to die.
He stays in me a long time, forehead to mine.
I bring my palm to his cheek. “Max,” I say.
“Oh my god, Mia,” he finally says.
Neither of us say anything. There’s just the sound of our breath and the press of our sweaty foreheads together.
And then I just laugh.
“What’s so funny?” he ask.
“Us,” I say.
“Right?” He pulls out. “We deserve an award for…I don’t know what.”
“My mind is too offline to think of what.”
“Here.” He whips a monogrammed hanky from his pocket and shoves it into my hand.
“I could just use…a paper napkin.”
“I insist.”
“It’s monogrammed.”
He rips it from my hand and swipes it between my legs. “And now it’s the most fucking perfect hanky in the world.” He tosses it in a nearby garbage can.
“Is it too perfect for the world, and that’s why it must die?”
He rolls off his condom and gets rid of that, too. “Yes.”
I pull myself together…as much as I can with ripped undergarments. “What is this place?” I ask.
“It’s my favorite place in the world. It’s where we create and design.” He sits on a couch and pulls me down onto his lap.
“Tell me,” I say.
He tips his head sideways. “That whole side is the design area. And photography studios take up the whole floor up there. Behind us are illustrators.” He explains his concept of this place. How he fought to make it happen.
I slide my hand over his whiskers. I love the force of him. The confidence of him.
He brushes back my hair. “I'm going to make Parker apologize. Delivering sandwiches to me? That was so out of line. You must’ve hated it.”
“At first.”
“But you launched right in, taking no shit.”
I should talk about the book here, but I don’t know how to start it. “You don’t have to make Parker apologize,” I say.
“He thought I’d get a kick out of you turning up with sandwiches. That’s not okay. You’re not entertainment.”
“Dude, it’s my whole goal in life. To be entertainment.”
“You know what I mean. And while we’re at it, Mia. The way things happened after the summer of Oklahoma!?”
“Please. Can’t we leave what happened in high school back in high school?” I press my fingers to his lips. I don’t want to think about the worst day of my life.
He pulls down my hand. “When you did that whole spaghetti-on-your-shirt pratfall? I just want you to know how excruciatingly aware I was that I screwed up. Freezing like I did.”
“That’s what happened? You froze? I never imagined…”
“I froze, Mia.”
“I thought you were amused.”
He shakes his head. “I was consumed with the fear that I might do the wrong thing. Was I supposed to help you? Would that bring unwanted attention? Would you be embarrassed for me to get in your face? Don’t
forget, until the Shiz I was homeschooled. I had no friends until the Shiz. And zero exposure to girls. Until you. Though that’s no excuse. And then your friends rushed to your side, and god, I felt like I was watching myself make it worse and worse. Every passing moment, it became a bigger screw-up, more impossible to undo, to explain. And then you looked over at me, crushed and angry. And I knew it was too late.”
Something melts inside me. I was so mortified, I’d barely seen him. “You tried to apologize later.”
“And you told me to fuck off in front of everyone.”
“I felt so humiliated, I couldn’t think straight. All I could hear was that laughing. Running out of there with spaghetti all over the shirt that I’d worn to impress you. I was just so embarrassed.”
He takes a curl in his fingers, knuckle brushing my cheek. “You hate that.”
“You tried to apologize twice. Why didn’t I believe you? Don’t answer that. I thought you thought you were too good for me.”
“That would never be a thing,” he says.
“And then I went around ruining your dates. I was so angry, but I also didn’t want you with anyone else.”
“I didn’t want you to be with anybody else either,” he says. “But you were a more creative date ruiner. The Max Robot impression you put on YouTube?”
“Yeah, well let us not forget the Mia laugh song and dance. It was both brilliant and diabolical. And my accent—the highlight of your day was in pointing it out when I slipped up. You hated it.”
He takes my hand. “I loved your accent. I loved your laugh. I would hunt for the Jerseygirl in your words. I would hunt for that girl.”
“Nobody wanted that girl.”
“I wanted that girl.”
My heart skips a beat. Max kisses my finger.
“You turned all cynical after,” I say. “So sullen and cynical.”
“I suppose it was my natural state,” he says. “It was how I was before that, so…” he shrugs. “It was my default. Except for that summer. It had been a hard few years.”
I sense worlds in his pause. A story—something sad. A place he doesn’t want to go, and I want to respect that. I give him a smile. “And you are still ruining my dates.”
He seems to snap back from wherever he went. “I hated you walking in there with him. I hated him putting his hands on you.”
I probably shouldn’t love that. I definitely shouldn’t want to climb all over him for it. “Your shirt has no buttons,” I say.
“I have an extra here.”
“Do you have extra women’s underwear.”
He kisses my cheek. “Sorry.”
“I don’t know how this works where we’re not enemies,” I say.
He slides his hands to my heart, resting it there on my chest. It’s the most intimate thing he’s done to me yet, because I know he can feel my heart pounding. And there’s no fucking to take away the attention. I feel naked to him, bare to him. “How it works is that I’m in your corner,” he says, “and I always have been.”
18
The last thing you want is a woman you can’t walk away from.
~THE MAX HILTON PLAYBOOK: TEN GOLDEN RULES FOR LANDING THE HOTTEST GIRL IN THE ROOM
* * *
MIA
Kelsey’s still sleeping when I wake up the next morning, which I’m relieved about, because I don’t know what I’m going to say to her.
But I need to say something.
What happened between Max and me feels beyond words, but he still wrote that book that screwed up Kelsey’s life.
I shower and make coffee and scroll through my phone. There are texts from Ryan from last night. I read through them thinking about what Max and I were doing at 10:10 when Ryan wanted to know if we found any clues, at 10:50 when Ryan sent a shot of him and the intern in front of a double hydrant.
Max and I went back to the party a little later. Max had an avalanche of duties, and I found Ryan and thanked him for bringing me. Ryan was only slightly disappointed that I was leaving; he was having fun with the intern.
I find a New Year’s Day yoga class. All the coffee in my belly hasn’t helped me figure out what to say to Kelsey, but maybe yoga will center me, and the teacher today is a hard one.
I pull my winter coat over my yoga outfit and head out with my mat, walking the three blocks to class.
The teacher instructs us to leave the world behind and be on the four corners of our mats, but it’s not easy. Every inch of me feels suffused with Max. I slide my finger over my bottom lip between poses, remembering how it felt when he nipped me there. The heaviness of his hands on my thighs. How he sounded when he came.
How it works is that I’m in your corner.
I lie on my mat after class, energized and serene. I want to see him. I feel like a stowaway on a forbidden ship, but I just do want to see him. I text him on the way home, and a second later, it rings.
“Max,” I say. “You’re up.”
“I’ve been up for hours,” he says.
“I forgot what an overachiever you are.”
“So how fast can you get ready to go out?” he asks. He wants to go to New Year’s tea at The Plaza.
“I’ve never been to The Plaza,” I say. “I’m more of a hoagies and Dunkin’ Donuts gal.”
“You’ll love it. They have lots of tiny sandwiches for you to apply your expert opinion to.” There’s a smile in his voice, and of course I say yes.
I pop back home to face Kelsey. Instead I find a note.
Where are you? DETAILS! BBL.
I write, out to lunch! And I scribble a heart. I’m so afraid to tell her about Max. I tell myself I’m going to talk to him about the book. Do my due diligence.
I Google the dress code at The Plaza. It says smart casual, but elsewhere I see a suggestion for party dress, and I’m all about that. I pull a pink party dress out of my closet and some fun black shoes with pink around the edges, and I’m walking onto the street at 11 sharp in my fuzzy short coat.
My belly flip-flops when catch sight of Max in a black overcoat, next to his even blacker town car. He smiles the half smile, opens his arms, and I go to him, a magnet to a lamppost.
He holds me and kisses the top of my head. “Hi,” he says into my hair.
I crane my neck up at him. “Hi.”
He opens the door for me and I slide in. He slides in after me and closes us into the dark, warm back seat.
“How are you?” I say as the car starts moving. “Actually, did you notice we hadn’t seen each other in ten years that day I delivered the sandwich, and we didn’t ask each other how we were?”
He touches my hair. “You want a rewind?”
“There’s stuff I’d replay. From last night,” I say.
“What parts?”
I slide in closer. I never had such an irresistible need to be close to somebody. “Oh, you know what parts.”
He smiles. A small crinkle around the edges of his eyes—how did I never notice that?
I straighten his lapel. “Of course, I knew what you were up to the last ten years, being that your picture is everywhere.”
“That’s not really my picture.”
“It’s your face.”
He puts his arm around me and pulls me closer. How am I so comfortable with him? “I knew you were delivering sandwiches. I know you’ve been working. Congratulations on the reviews for Sir George and the Dragon. That one in the Times that specifically pointed out your stage presence?”
“You read the reviews?”
“I went to it. You were the best thing in it. I’m not just biased. Everyone saw it.”
I pull away. “You went to a show of mine?”
“Mia. I went to all of them. That I was in town for.”
He was out there all that time? In my world? I’m reviewing every show in my mind. What did he think? “You’ve been going to my shows.”
“Is it so hard to believe?”
“Well, I didn’t hear about it.”
&
nbsp; “I wore a hat.”
“You know, a hat doesn’t disguise your face. God, you were at them? I can’t believe—”
He puts a finger over my lips. “You were amazing,” he says. “And when you played Missy Bee in Glenda Rayborne Girls? That solo?”
I grin and pull away his finger. “God! Right? That solo!” It was the least flashy solo, but the range it demanded was madness, and I was proud how I nailed it, night after night. Not a lot of people noticed. Only the musicians.
“I was on the edge of my seat for you,” Max says. “As soon as the progression started, I knew you were going to end up on a sustained high C. You made it sound easy.”
I love that he noticed, that we have this language in common, even though he quit music. “Thank you. I’ve been working like a dog preparing for the Anything Goes revival.”
“That’s going to be huge.”
“I’m going out for the part of Reno Sweeney.”
“Mia,” he says. “God, yes. It’s so you. And your dancing is right there with your singing and acting. You have the trifecta now.”
“It’s gonna be brutal choreography, but I’ve been working so hard on it. My roommate Kelsey is a dancer and we do trades. I’m helping her level up on her acting and singing and she’s helping me level up on dancing.” This is the place where I should bring up the book. But the car is stopping, and the door opens as if of its own accord, but of course it’s a driver.
Max gets out and extends a hand down to help me out. I take it, and he pulls me up to meet him. I feel fully like a princess now. He kisses me and introduces me to his driver, Kenneth, who seems happily surprised about the introduction.
“Hi,” I say.
Kenneth nods. “Miss.” It’s such a small thing, Max introducing me to his driver, but it feels like he’s bringing me deeper into his world.
The place is glorious inside, all potted palms and towering French windows that flood the place with natural light. The place is a full white tablecloths and chandeliers explosion.
Max sets his hand on the small of my back as the host leads us to our table. Guys I’ve dated never touch me there unless they’re being ironic or playing it for a joke. Like everything’s just a joke.
Breaking the Billionaire’s Rules Page 15