Hook Me Up (Business Of Love Book 3)

by Ali Parker

  “Damn,” he breathed. “I knew you had nice tits, Hails, but I never thought—”

  “Don’t ruin it.” I silenced him with a kiss and held his jaw in one hand. His chin and cheeks were smooth. He’d shaved recently. I could smell his aftershave. The masculine scent had all my senses on edge.

  I began working to roll his shirt up. He helped by lifting his arms over his head. We broke our kiss to let his shirt pass between our lips as I yanked it over his head. It joined my already discarded gray T-shirt and bra on the floor.

  Jackson sat up and wrapped his arms around my waist. I sat in his lap with my legs hooked around his hips and we kissed like we were lovers in a movie scene.

  And for those few moments, I felt that surreal bliss society had been forever telling girls and women they should feel when they were in love. The white noise of my life faded to nothingness and my focus narrowed to a tunnel. The only two things in the world that existed in that moment were me and Jackson. Our lips. Our hot flesh. Our breath. Our heartbeats.

  Outside of us, there was nothing.

  I let myself fall deeper into the dream.

  Jackson lowered me back down onto the pillows. This time, he didn’t stay on top of me for more kisses. He began working his way down my body. He pressed his lips to the side of my neck as he moved lower and lower. Soon, his lips grazed my collarbones and then my breasts, stomach, and hips. As he peppered kisses to my hip bones, he hooked his fingers in my panties. I lifted my ass from the blankets and pillows. He pulled my panties down.

  Jackson pulled them off my thighs, over my knees, and down to my ankles. I kicked them off.

  He pinched his bottom lip between his teeth as he looked at me. For once, he didn’t have anything to say. He lowered himself back down and settled between my thighs.

  As I stared down at his face between my legs, I had a moment of fear.

  Was I really about to let my best friend go down on me?

  There was no going back from something like this.

  My heart did a little hop step in my chest.

  But when his tongue grazed my clit, my worries evaporated. He swirled his tongue over my sensitive clit and worked his way down, tasting me. I shuddered beneath him.

  As sounds started to escape me, I could feel him smiling down there.

  Smug bastard, I thought. But damn him. His smile was contagious. I hid my own smile beneath an arm that I draped over my face.

  Jackson stopped licking and suckling. He reached up and pulled my arm from my face. “No,” he grated. “I want to see you.”

  My cheeks burned.

  His eyes were on me as he moved back down. His licks and flicks had my body trembling, and soon, I was on the cusp of losing control. I closed my eyes. The darkness washed over me and the pleasure tugged at a place deep inside me.

  “Let go,” Jackson said.

  It was easier said than done.

  He slipped a finger inside me, and I moaned. Little stars exploded behind my eyelids.

  “Let go,” he said again. His voice was rough. Strained.

  He pressed up with his finger, right into my G-spot. He sealed his lips over my clit and sucked hard, and just like that, I broke.

  My hips bucked, my toes curled, and a cry tore from my throat. Any self-conscious feelings I had melted away in the afterglow of my climax. Jackson went up on his knees and plunged a hand in his pocket. He pulled out a condom and tossed it on my stomach.

  I picked it up and turned it over in my fingers as he stood up and undid his jeans. “Do you always carry one of these with you?” I asked breathlessly.

  “No harm in being prepared.” He did a little hop step in place as he pulled his jeans off.

  My heart did a frantic pitter-patter in my chest as I realized I was about to see him naked. Sure, I’d seen him practically naked dozens of times over the years of our friendship but never like this. Never rock hard and ready.

  I swallowed.

  He tore his boxers off.

  “Wow.”

  He blinked at me. “Wow?”

  I hadn’t realized I’d spoken. I covered my mouth with one hand and he came back to his knees between my thighs.

  He took the condom from me with a cocky smirk. “Like what you see?”

  “Looks aren’t important. It’s how you use it.”

  He tore open the wrapper and rolled the rubber on. Jackson pushed my legs apart with force and dropped his hips. His cock pressed against my clit and he rocked his hips, rubbing himself against me. “You aren’t wrong.”

  “Don’t tease me, Jackson Smithe.”

  “Or what?”

  Good question.

  I was at his mercy. I wanted him. Badly. Immediately. I wanted him deep inside me and I wanted to make him feel good.

  He chuckled. “Empty threats, Hails. Empty threats.”

  “Just put your money where your mouth is.”

  Jackson pressed inside me. His size took my breath away. I gripped his forearms and he took it easy on me. When I could take all of him, he gave me sweet kisses and we stayed like that, caught up in each other, until I relaxed.

  He thrust his hips and worked hard to hit all the right spots.

  I couldn’t stay in control. I fought the urge to keep my composure for as long as I could but it was a losing battle. He had me on the edge of another orgasm within minutes, and when he flipped me over onto my hands and knees and took me from behind, I lost it.

  Jackson grabbed my ass and pulled my hair. I cried out when he grabbed my hips and pulled me hard against him as he bucked wildly until he too lost control. We both spiraled together toward oblivion.

  When we were done and well spent, he fell onto his back beside me with his eyes closed. I admired the lines of his jaw, his dark brows, and his long eyelashes.

  He cracked open one eye and peered at me. “Well. That was a first.”

  I giggled breathlessly.

  It was a first. A good first.

  After a night like this, could he really pick up and move to New York? Or would he see what could still be here in Nashville and decide to stay?

  Would we look back at this night years from now and smile and look at each other and wonder aloud what might have happened had he moved away? As I lay there beside him, it didn’t seem so crazy. It seemed possible.

  Please don’t go, Jack.

  Chapter 8

  Jackson

  The stage was lit with dozens of bright lights shining directly at me and the talk show host, Sunny Addish. The gleam of the lights on her nearly white blonde hair made it look like it was made of plastic from where I sat in the low-sunken white leather chair beside hers.

  Between us was a short table where two glasses of water sat upon coasters with Sunny’s face printed on them, and before us, stretching upward upon movie-theatre-esque chairs, was the audience. They hummed with conversation about the show.

  The crowd was about eighty percent women. Of those women, I assumed almost all were single—otherwise, they’d have bought tickets for a different Addish Show guest—and it appeared that most were in their mid-twenties to late thirties.

  Sunny sifted through a stack of cue cards in her perfectly manicured hands. She’d been flipping through them for the last five minutes and had apologized for making me sit there silently with her. I understood perfectly that she was memorizing the questions she was going to ask me for the live TV interview, which would begin in less than a minute once the commercial break ended.

  I’d done my fair share of talk show interviews, but up until that moment, they’d all been daytime programs. That wasn’t good or bad, but having some exposure on a station at night would expose me to a whole new can of worms in terms of clients.

  And now that I was in New York and the ball was really rolling, I was ready to meet more people and help them find their soul mates.

  Sunny put her cue cards under her right thigh when the cameraman called a twenty-second warning. A makeup artist hurried out onto the st
age and patted Sunny’s face with powder and then fixed a couple of hairs that were sticking up from static and catching the light. Once she was done, she scurried off.

  “Ten seconds, people!” a loud voice called through the studio.

  My stomach rolled over with nerves.

  “Five!”

  Sunny gave me a charming smile. “Ready?”

  I straightened out my suit jacket. “Ready.”

  She turned toward camera one. The lights off stage went out. A red light appeared over the camera she was facing and the cameraman pointed to her at her cue.

  “Welcome to The Sunny Addish Show,” Sunny said in her upbeat tone. “I’m your host, Sunny Addish, but you already knew that. I have a surprise for you. Today, I’m sitting down to talk with New York City’s new and dare I say very good-looking professional matchmaker, Jackson Smithe.” She turned in her chair, her knees pressed together, and fixed me with her well-rehearsed closed-lip smile. “Thank you for joining me today, Jackson. I’ve been looking forward to this interview since my producers called you up last month. I’m just dying to talk to you about finding love in today’s day and age.”

  I didn’t love the fakeness that came with TV shows but it was the nature of the beast.

  I grinned back. “Thanks for having me, Sunny. I’ve been looking forward to it too. Who wouldn’t want to get a chance to sit down with you in front of a crowd like this?” I gestured out at the in-studio crowd.

  They cheered.TV show audiences were always pretty trigger happy with their applause. People wanted to be engaged. They wanted to be invited to participate and respond, and Sunny’s crowd didn’t seem any different than all the others I’d sat down in front of.

  Sunny waited for the applause to die down. “Tell me, Jackson, did you have a hand in any public figure relationships this past year?”

  My mind immediately went to Kimberly and how I’d set her up with Rick Garrett right when it looked like their relationship was going to fall off the deep end. They’d broken up after being exposed to the public eye and I realized that Kim would be making the biggest mistake of her life if she didn’t at least try to make things work with Rick. Now they were head over heels and enjoying being together while simultaneously not caring about the press.

  I didn’t want to drop Rick’s name on this stage and bring any further attention to one of my best friends, so I just shrugged. “I’ve worked with a couple of big names.”

  Sunny giggled. “Not going to name drop for us, Jackson?”

  “Not tonight.”

  She waved me off with a playful smile. “Oh, that’s just fine. We appreciate a man with boundaries. Don’t we, ladies?”

  The crowd rippled with applause once more. Someone shouted over the noise and asked if I was single.

  Sunny clasped her hands over her knee and pumped her eyebrows a couple of times. “Good question, audience. I think there are a lot of women out there in my audience or at home who would like to know the answer to that. Are you single, Jackson?”

  “The only girlfriend I have is my work,” I said. “It’s hard to find time to date when you’re busy arranging things for clients.”

  “So in other words,” Sunny said with a knowing smile that she turned toward the audience, “you’re single? There’s no special girl out in the world who secretly has your heart?”

  I licked my lips.

  Sunny caught my hesitation. She leaned in close. “Or is there?”

  The crowd hung on her words and seemed to lean forward as well.

  I rested an elbow on the armrest of my chair and ran my finger along my jaw. “Perhaps there could be,” I admitted. “But sometimes people don’t want the same things. And that’s okay. Moving on is part of the process of finding your forever person.”

  “Your forever person.” Sunny sighed and pressed a hand over her heart. “How poetic.”

  “Yes. Well, I don’t spend much time thinking about my personal love life. Right now, I’m enjoying every minute of helping strangers find each other. I’ve hooked up old lovers who lost each other after moving away from the small towns they grew up in. I’ve matched seniors who got married in the gardens at their grandchildren’s homes. I’ve matched billionaires with women who love them for who they are and not because of the size of their bank account.”

  Sunny flipped her blonde hair over one shoulder. “How dashing. You’re like a knight in shining armor, fighting for love.”

  I laughed. “I don’t know if I’d romanticize it that much.”

  “Why not? It’s true. In today’s day and age, it’s difficult to fall in love. If it was easy, I doubt this show would have sold out so quickly. Am I right?” She turned to her audience.

  Yet again, the studio thundered with applause.

  “I’m flattered,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Sunny clasped her hands together. “So how do you do it, Jackson? How do you go about matching a person with their perfect someone?”

  “That’s a loaded question, Sunny.” I hated how I was assuming the role of a talk show guest by saying stupid shit like that. I gave my head a little shake and told myself to be normal, not rehearsed. Otherwise, I’d have people like Kim calling me to tell me I’d made an ass of myself on live television. “There isn’t one right recipe or approach that applies to all of my clients. Each experience is uniquely tailored to them based on their needs. For example, I have a client right now who is a young but very successful man looking for someone who could be his wife someday. He’s accomplished when it comes to business. He’s a homeowner. He has a dog and a balanced social life, and from the outside looking in, one might think he has it all. But he’s lonely. It’s my job to provide a cure to that loneliness by finding the woman he will hopefully spend the rest of his life with. But it’s never as easy as just that.”

  “Tell me more, Jackson.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at the unabashed leading line she used to inject herself into the dialogue. “Well, it’s not just about that one client. It’s also about the woman I’m going to match him with. What is she looking for? What’s her lifestyle like? If I find a woman who checks all of his boxes on paper in terms of what he’s looking for personality wise but she’s living it up with a big nightlife and shift work and what not, they won’t be a good match. The big picture stuff for both of them won’t line up. That’s where I have to be very careful. I run a big risk of matching people who might fall in love but won’t be able to make it work because of lifestyle preferences. That’s where things get really tricky in my line of work.”

  “How do you avoid something like that?” Sunny asked. This time, she seemed genuinely curious, and I doubted that was a note on one of her cue cards tucked under her thigh.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “I have to be patient. Just because someone is my client doesn’t mean I’m going to match them immediately. Sometimes, it takes months. Hell, I’ve had a client I didn’t match until eleven months after we’d had our first consultation.”

  “Did that bother your client to have to wait so long? I’d be way too impatient. I’m the sort of person who needs instant payoff.”

  I chuckled. “You’re not alone, Sunny. A lot of us are like that. This client definitely gave me an earful a couple of times. He didn’t want to wait around kicking rocks. But I told him to keep dating. To keep looking. He did. Lucky for me, I was still the one who found the right woman, not him.”

  Sunny laughed and so did her audience. “How did his story end?”

  “He got married to her two years ago,” I said. “They’re expecting their first baby this Christmas.”

  The crowd swooned in unison.

  “Do all of your love stories have happy endings, Jackson?” Sunny asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Everyone’s life has its own timeline. Some people fall in love when they’re teenagers. Some fall in love when they’re older. Some think they’re in love but realize they aren’t and never were and they’ve already had childr
en of their own who are grown and moved out of the house. The point is, it’s never too late to find the right person and rewrite the story. My job is to make the task easier and to sift through those who might be fun to spend time with but wouldn’t work in the long term. I save people from investing in the wrong partners and I help them put their energy in the right ones.”

  “Sounds like you love what you do,” Sunny said.

  “I do. I always have. There’s nothing more rewarding than finding someone’s happily ever after for them.”

  The crowd sighed as one again.

  Sunny flashed me a charming smile. “I suspect there are going to be a lot of fans waiting to meet you after this. I hope you’re ready to sign some autographs and shake some hands.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Maybe you’ll meet a girl.” Sunny winked.

  I laughed. “Crazier things have happened, right?”

  The crowd cheered. Women called out my name. Their cries sounded far away in my mind as Sunny turned back to the cameras and addressed the audience before we cut to commercial.

  Soon, I’d be off the stage. As I sat there, I thought about Hailey. We hadn’t spoken since I left Nashville. Since we shared that night.

  You should call her, I thought.

  But I realized if she wanted to talk to me, she’d have already reached out. And two weeks had passed since then. Maybe the sex had made things too weird. Maybe she didn’t know where she stood anymore.

  Maybe she wished it had never happened.

  I thought of the way she’d trembled in my hands and how she’d looked at me. I hadn’t regretted it for a second. Not until she started pulling away, of course. Now I felt like there was more than just physical distance between us and I worried that we wouldn’t be able to repair it with me living all the way in New York now.