by Lux Miller
“Why would a man who got you off twice be so eager to leave?”
Sighing out loud, I tug on a tank top then snatch the phone off the bed. “I have no idea. He was counting down the time to midnight.”
Carter’s voice suddenly becomes serious. “You said Uncle Gio is involved in this? What if he offered the guy protection for the rest of the night? You know how to the letter he is with his wording. What if the guy paid him for the chance to have sex with you?”
I wrinkle my nose up, but the thought does make me stop in my tracks for a moment. I glance at myself in the mirror and sigh. My long blonde hair is mussed up from last night’s romp and the subsequent hours of dancing. My makeup is smeared and I look like I might be kin to a raccoon with the way my smoky eye has gone from sultry to scary.
“Then he got his money’s worth. I think there’s more to it than that, though. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I have to find this guy, Carter. It wasn’t just the sex. He kissed me… and when he did, it felt like the freaking the Fourth of July lit up inside me.”
Carter laughs, “That’s called a spark, little sis. It doesn’t happen often, but how are you going to track him down? You know Uncle Gio won’t discuss business with you.”
I pull on a pair of dark-wash skinny jeans and groan. “While that’s true, it’s MY business he’s messing with. He hooked me up with a strange man and didn’t bat an eye when I showed up in the bar in a pair of panties and a coat with a ripped dressed and a single boot. If I didn’t know better, I’d suspect he knew exactly what he was doing.”
Carter clears his throat, then responds, “While I agree with you, you know Uncle Gio’s never going to talk. Neither will any of his men. His secrets will follow him to the grave, no matter who they’re about.”
I wince as I gather up my unruly hair and throw it into a ponytail. “I know Carter, which is why I’m going to take matters into my own hands.”
He coughs indignantly on the other end. “And how are you going to manage that? Have sex with every man in SoHo and see who makes your toes curl?”
I can’t help but laugh at Carter’s ridiculous solution. “No, doofus. I have more dignity than that. Maybe not much, but I have another idea. Mr. Mysterious was wearing the boots at the party. Anybody could have seen what they looked like outside, but only the man wearing them would have seen what’s on the inside.”
Carter clucks his tongue, “But anybody who is anybody that has worn a pair of Uncle Gio’s shoes would know that he stamps a pair of clock hands inside them.”
I nod as I slip my feet into my favorite pair on Converse shoes. “Exactly. Nobody else would know about the stamp because the only person who’d know that Uncle Gio helped him… is him.”
TWELVE
Eli
Despite my early start, it’s already blazing hot by midday. The sun is glaring down at me like the angry sun in Super Mario Brothers. It’s just waiting for me to let down my guard, and then it’s going to slap the shit out of me. It’s not like I really have a choice though. Pierce Rogers expects the outdoors gardens around his SoHo penthouse to be pristine, no matter what the weather is like. You’d think someone who is hellbent on living in the concrete jungle would have little use for a gardener, but the man owns nearly every green space within a five miles radius of his apartment building and guess who gets to maintain them? Yeah, this guy. I do the work, Rogers takes the credit and cuts the check, and Trevor gets paid. It’s a never ending cycle.
Today, I’m working on a small property about a mile from his penthouse. Truthfully, it’s one of my favorite properties that I work on. It’s serene, despite being smack in the middle of the city. It’s just big enough that you can get lost inside and drown out the noise pollution of uptown New York. It’s taken me years, but through careful cross-pollination, I’ve managed to create a rose plant that produces blooms nearly twice the size of normal red roses.
It was an old forgotten project of Trevor’s that I started working on when I was first learning the ropes from him. I didn’t tell him about it until I’d already succeeded in producing the same result more than once. Now, they’ve begun to regularly produce blooms up to three inches long with a two inch diameter. I took cuttings of the successfully blended plants and essentially cloned them naturally. Now, the entire garden is full of enormous red roses that are quite the talk of the town.
Pierce Rogers sells them for ten dollars a stem, and Trevor gets a cut of four dollars a stem. You’d think the bastard would kick a small portion of that to me, but Trevor isn’t one to share the wealth. He says I’m lucky he lets me live in his house as it is and that he’s being generous by giving me a couple hundred dollars a week. And he reminds me daily how ungrateful I am of his generosity and that he should’ve kicked me out the day I turned eighteen. Of course, I know he’s full of shit. If he kicked me out, who would do all of his work for him? I should’ve left on my own a long time ago, but I barely have two nickels to rub together and Trevor has assured it stays that way. I barely have enough money to eat. I’d never be able to afford a place in New York. It may be torture living here, but at least it’s a roof over my head and a couple hot meals a day.
Despite the relative peace the garden offers, it offers no protection from the sun above. It’s the first of November, and it must be eighty degrees out. It’s far too hot for any New Yorker to be remotely comfortable, but the extra-long summer has been great for the roses. They’re thriving throughout the garden. Blooms that are almost as big as my hand are scattered in droves among the greenery. That’s the big issue with roses - the thorns. A skilled gardener like myself knows how to avoid them, though. The bees don’t care too much for them, so that’s a gardening hazard I can largely avoid. The one thing I can’t avoid if I don’t get out of the sun is heatstroke. It may only be eighty out here, but I’m pouring sweat anyway.
I yank my t-shirt off and use it to mop up my forehead, then drop it onto the bench beside me. Everything has gone swimmingly well this morning, but I can’t seem to keep my focus in the here and now. I keep drifting back to last night. It feels like a dream because it’s hard for me to believe that I had sex with Ashley Rogers. And not just sex - good sex. Fantastic sex. Mind-blowing sex. And I’m probably ruined for every other woman I’ll ever have sex with, because I can’t imagine how any woman will ever measure up to-
“Ashley!” I jump up off the bench as I see her approaching me. She’s flanked on both sides by men that I instantly recognize as private security guards. They’re plain-clothes and are supposed to be blending in, but their stiff posture and shifty eyes make them stand out like neon signs.
She gives me a small smile and a slight head nod. “Your stepfather said you’d be back here. Everybody but my father knows that Trevor doesn’t do any of this. When are you going to stand up to him and tell him to shove his head up his own ass?”
I swallow, my throat parched as I attempt to throw out words. I don’t know if it’s the heat, the fact that the woman I’ve dreamed about for years is standing in front of me, or the fact that I had sex with that woman last night and I’m the only one who knows about it, but words fail me. I open and close my mouth like a fish.
She smiles and sits down on the bench beside me. She cuts her eyes over at me, and she’s not hiding the fact that she’s appreciating my muscles. Years of manual labor have left me strong and broad with thick muscles cording my back and arms. Finally, I manage to find words, though they’re not what I’d hoped to say to her, “We all have our dirty little secrets, Ashley. I’m Trevor’s... “
She shakes her head at me. “Eli, what does Trevor have on you? What could you have possibly done to let him treat you like this?”
I clear my throat and jump up off the bench. I get three steps away from her before she grabs my hand. Yelping in surprise, I whirl around to face her. I don’t know what kind of look is on my face right now, but’s probably a mix of sheer terror and panic. My heart is thundering in my chest as she pul
ls on my hand and stands up off the bench.
She stands up and steps against me, watching my expression closely. She opens her purse and pulls out the boot I left behind in her hotel room the night before, and my eyes grow as wide as saucers. Coughing slightly, I joke around. “You came all the way out here to the East Side to show me a boot? It’s a nice boot, but what use would I have of one boot?”
Ashley snaps her gaze up to mine. “I suspect you’d put it with the other one that you managed to get on your foot last night before you bailed…”
I shake my head quickly and take several steps back from her, stuttering, “I… I, uh… I don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you’ve been outside in the sun too long. It’s scrambling your brain like an egg. Pretty things don’t do well in the heat...”
Ashley points down at my feet which are currently caked in mud. “So you’re going to tell me that if I put this boot on your foot, it wouldn’t fit?”
Shivering, I shake my head and laugh nervously. “I don’t know why you’re carrying around a gaudy leather boot, but I think you’re maybe projecting something onto me that you want me to be, but that I’m not. I’m just a humble gardener that toils the lands for a living. I couldn’t afford a boot like that with a year’s salary…”
Ashley nods and presses her body against mine. The muscles in my abdomen contract as she slides her dainty hand onto my side. “Eli, do you know what these boots are made of?”
Nodding quickly, I point at the boot like it’s obvious. “Leather… anyone can see that…”
She laughs and slides her hand from my side to my stomach, and my dick lurches in my pants. I close my eyes and will it to behave, reminding myself that Ashley Rogers is off-limits to someone like me. Sure, last night happened, but that was a fluke. It’ll never happen again.
I gasp as she scrapes a perfectly manicured fingernail down the ridges of my abs, twisting the tip of it through the thin patch of hair that starts just below my belly button and descends into my pants. “And do you know what kind of leather?”
Shrugging, I spout off the first word that comes to mind. “Italian…” I freeze as I instantly realize my mistake, and Ashley’s grin widens.
She drops the shoe onto the bench behind me with a knowing grin. “Precisely. And they belong to my uncle, so whoever borrowed them… he expects to get them back as a pair. They’re one of a kind and very expensive. He even installed a tracking device in each one. It’d be terrible for something to happen to someone clumsy enough to lose one.”
I take an enormous step back from her, and the backs of my knees crash into the bench. She follows me and pushes me down so that I”m sitting on the bench. I hold up both hands. “Okay, okay. I have the other one. I’ll return it to your uncle. Just tell me what to do with it.”
Ashley turns to her guards and waves her hand at them “You can go. Give me twenty minutes. The gardener and I need to have a little talk.”
The guards give her a curt bow and disappear back up the pathway. She looks back at me and takes a step closer to me, straddling my knees. “So where were we? Oh, yes… the other shoe... “
I nod, swallowing hard. “I’ll give it back to you, I swear!”
She leans over me, and her intoxicating scent assaults my nostrils. Groaning, I shift on the bench underneath her as my dick bulges against the inside of my jeans. Ashley licks her lips and sits down on my lap. My eyes widen as she scoots up my lap until my erection is straining underneath her. It’s taking everything in my power to keep my hands on the bench where my fingers are white-knuckled from gripping the metal so hard. “So you do have the other one?”
I blink as my mind ping-pongs around with thoughts. “Yes! I have it! Just tell me what to do…”
Ashley leans in closer to me, her minty breath warm on my face as she replies, “Kiss me.”
My heart lurches in my chest at her words, and I know I’ve heard her wrong. I nervously slice a hand through my hair, pushing the sweaty locks out of my face as every inch of my body quivers with a mix of anticipation and fear. “What?”
Sliding her hands onto my cheeks, Ashley looks at me, and as our gazes meet, I can see that she’s not joking. She brushes her thumbs over my cheekbones, and I’m frozen to the spot as she speaks, “I have been searching all morning for you, Eli. I must admit, I’m a little surprised that my Prince Charming is you. I didn’t think you had the gall to pull off something like what happened last night, but if you have the other shoe, it must be you. Is it you? Were you the one last night?”
I can’t find any words to force through my lips. All I can manage is a slight nod, but it’s all the confirmation she needs. She groans and presses her lips to mine, and all of the warring thoughts in my mind are wiped blank. At this moment, I no longer care about Trevor finding out, about Pierce Rogers finding out… I don’t care about anything right now except the bolt of electricity that jolts through me, straight from my lips to my dick. And the fact that Ashley Rogers is about to become the reason I risk losing everything...
THIRTEEN
Ashley
Energy sizzles through my entire body the moment my lips touch Eli’s. Never in a million years did I suspect he would be Mr. Mysterious. In fact, I only dropped by here because of an off-handed comment my uncle made last night. When my search elsewhere proved uneventful, I looked for the “boy who could make you bloom.” It was the only clue Uncle Gio would give me. He can be pretty cryptic sometimes, but that one wasn’t all that hard to figure out - once I realized he didn’t mean Trevor, but Trevor’s extremely handsome twenty-year-old stepson.
There’s no denying the chemistry between us. I’d call this an impossibility, but it certainly explains why Trevor’s card was used to pay for the room. I jerk back away from Eli. My hand flies to my lips as I gasp in surprise. “Holy shit. It really is you… which means…”
I glance down where I’m sitting on his crotch. There’s no arguing that he’s happy to see me if the rigid bar of steel in his pants is any indication. Then something dawns on me. “You knew… you knew the whole time…”
Eli opens his mouth to say something, but quickly shuts it and nods simply. He looks down, avoiding my gaze as he rests his hands on my hips. As he drops his head in apparent shame, his thick, dark hair falls into his face, and I know without a doubt that he’s Mr. Mysterious. I brush the long locks out of his eyes and slide my hand under his chin, forcing him to look up at me. “Why, Eli? Why’d you hide behind a mask just to get in my pants?”
Embarrassment blooms across his cheeks. He inhales sharply and exhales the breath slowly. “Would you have ever given me a second glance if you knew who I was?”
My first instinct’s to respond that of course I would. I mean, Eli isn’t a bad looking guy. His bone structure is classic, and his bright blue eyes are a stark contrast to his wavy, dark hair and tanned skin. He’s my age, tall, and built like a horse from years of hard work… and so far beneath my social station that my father would have a coronary that I’ve even approached the man. Of course, I wouldn’t have given him a chance. The only problem is, I already did… and if the dampness between my legs is any indication, it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to walk away from him than it should be.
He nods, a knowing look marring his handsome features. He slices a hand through his hair, and it falls stylishly back into place. But his actions indicate he’s nervous. In fact, I’d say he passed nervous the minute I sat down on his lap and began grilling him. He shifts under me and gently pushes me off his lap. With a look of longing sadness, he stands up off the bench, gathering his shirt and tools. “I should be going,” he murmurs.
I glance over my shoulder to make sure that nobody is watching us. To my utter surprise, nobody is. For once, my father’s lackeys have listened to me and given me my space. That, or they’re creepily hiding out in the bushes. If they are, they’re about to get one heck of a show.
“Wait, Eli… you can’t go…”
He gla
nces over his shoulder at me and shakes his head sadly, “Princess… I’m not even allowed to breathe the same air as you. To think that I could ever have…” His gaze rakes down my figure, and I shudder as every nerve ending in my body responds to the hunger in his eyes. He continues as his eyes meet mine, “...any part of you… it’s crazy talk. Your father would have me drawn and quartered… and Trevor, he’d probably try to kill me. Literally…”
I close the distance between us and grab hold of his hand. “You already have, Eli… let’s not play games and pretend that last night didn’t happen. Just because neither of us ever imagined it would, doesn’t erase the fact that it did… or… that I want it to happen again…”
Eli groans and the sound dives straight to my core. I squirms as dampness moistens my skimpy panties. His piercing blue eyes are dark with desire as he turns back to face me. I tug his hand and catch him off-guard. He stumbles against me, and my insides alight at the collision of our bodies.
