“Stop, stop,” he whispered. “You’re gonna make me come in about two seconds.”
His knees threatened to give out as he tried to ebb the intensity along his shaft. Jillian kept at it.
“Just come, then. I want you to come,” she said.
“Not yet. Come again and I will,” he croaked as she continued stroking him. Shit. His hands bit into her hips as she milked him and this wasn’t at all what he was imagining would happen when he bent her over. He thought he would be the one in control, not her.
“I’m coming now, right now.” She moaned and that moment, that extra-extra tight intensity convulsing around him, sent him over the edge. I didn’t even move.
“Jesus,” he groaned, letting his head fall back in mind-blowing bliss.
Late into the night Jillian, sound asleep, faced him on her side with her breasts uncovered from the sheets. He laid there spent and wide awake. Jealous over her little sighs as she breathed softly in her sleep. Exactly what he wished he was doing.
His thoughts raced with questions, trying unsuccessfully to come up with some answers. How Jillian had managed to wedge herself into his life when he hadn’t had the desire to be with a woman since After Francesca. He hadn’t wanted to use them the way he had been Before Francesca. Although he never figured out the extent of her abuse, his imagination drummed up all sorts of abusive-type scenarios and that had put him off wanting to mess around with women for fear that he would say or do something reckless and unkind – treat a woman the way Tucker had treated his sister.
He watched Jillian’s angelic features, wondering what was so different about her, that had him wanting to be with her all the damn time. Not just this amazing, mind-blowing sex they’d been having since precisely seven o’clock that night, it was her intelligence. Her wittiness and unabashed banter she challenged him with. It was her down-to-earth attitude where she wasn’t afraid to learn things and wasn’t afraid to laugh at herself. He’d dated plenty of women who wouldn’t dare laugh at themselves for a fault they had, but Jillian shrugged off her faults making her imperfectness seemingly perfect.
Those same women would have gotten angry over the undercover stint he’d done, but not Jillian. That was where they were a lot alike. Able to grasp the bigger picture of a situation – seeing that he’d done what he’d needed, not to deceive her, but to gain a deeper understanding of why his off-shoot company was taking losses.
As he gently traced her smooth lips with his thumb, being careful not to disturb her, he thought that maybe it was okay to feel what he was feeling. Francesca would’ve been happy for him. Even though she was younger than he, she had been his biggest mother-hen, always pushing him to settle down and get married, have kids – the whole spiel. Cole remembered one time she finally resorted to dogs instead of kids – find a wife and adopt a dog.
He’d shrugged it off.
Damn.
Why was he thinking about all of this now? Because Jillian fits me. No. He couldn’t possibly know that after one night of the best sex he’d ever had. His life was complicated with work and After Francesca, being with someone couldn’t be this easy, could it? Then his next thought was that maybe, just maybe, it was okay to be committed to someone.
Hell, he didn’t know.
One thing was certain, was that those two previous women he’d brought to his penthouse had never fallen asleep in his arms and spent the entire night with him.
Only Jillian.
Truth be told, it didn’t even bother him.
Sex with Jillian was great. It was so great that it had him thinking about it during a meeting with Deluxe’s production manager for Hypocrisy. One of the fabrics hadn’t passed quality control leaving a major headache for the designer in charge.
Nightmare at work or not, his thoughts were still on the intelligent brunette with her bright good-morning-eyes and perky tits who’d been in his bed all weekend, up until this morning.
She’d gotten a few resumes over the weekend for the part-time position she’d posted and, even though the store was closed on Mondays, wanted to look through them and find a new hire.
He’d dropped her off at her townhouse and neither one of them made exact plans on when they were going to see each other again. But if his dick had anything to say about it, it was going to be soon.
Like lunch time soon.
Cole: Find a hire?
Cole waited a few moments before she responded.
Jillian: Two look promising…aren’t you working?
Cole: Yep. In a meeting now.
Jillian: So…don’t you have to listen or talk? Probably shouldn’t be texting.
Cole: Probably not. But that’s the perks of being the boss ;-)
Jillian: Ahh, pulling the boss card, huh? Had a GREAT weekend.
Cole chuckled as a bunch of fireworks burst across his screen. He glanced up at the group of men and women he was in the meeting with and realized they were staring at him.
“Sorry. Can you guys manage the rest of this without me? I have somewhere I have to be.”
Their eyes burned into his skin as he gathered up his iPad and few notes he had lying on the table. No doubt they were wondering what he was doing. He never walked out of meetings. Let alone laughed out loud while staring at his phone. He was in a good mood and he couldn’t hide it. He didn’t want to hide it.
“Let me know what you guys figure out.” He gave them his most charming smile and headed out of the room without a backward glance.
He tossed his stuff on his desk, grabbed his car keys. “I’ll be out for the rest of the day,” he told Sabrina, one of his secretaries.
“Wait, sir. What about your meeting at two?”
“Cancel it,” Cole said. His steps faltered. Who was the meeting with? He couldn’t remember exactly. Fuck. What if it was important? He should stay. This was completely unlike him.
Nah. The desire to see Jillian was stronger than his desire to work was. A first.
“Yes, cancel it,” he said and picked up his pace, took off his suit jacket and headed out into the brilliant sun.
Once he got to Lacie’s he used the key code and let himself in. He found Jillian sitting upstairs while Elvis crooned on about burning love. Burning Love.
Her eyes brightened and her mouth widened into a dazzling smile. She looked the way he felt on the inside.
Holy shit.
Burning love.
“What are you doing here?” She stood and ran into his arms, wrapping them around his neck.
“I decided to take the day off. Let’s do something.” He smiled, loving the way his heart felt lighter just at seeing her and feeling her against him.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. Let’s go for a drive. Let’s go to the zoo. Let’s go play,” he said. Even that sounded foreign coming off his lips but he didn’t care. Not today. Today was a great Monday morning that held so much potential.
“Let me grab my purse.” He watched her do a few things around the store and helped her lock up.
“Where’ll it be?” he asked in the car.
“How about you show me where Francesca was laid to rest.” She reached out and grabbed his arm—his heart pounded in his chest—and even though it wasn’t something like the zoo, he couldn’t think of a better place to be. Especially when he had her by his side.
Minutes later he pulled into the small cemetery behind the equally small church where his parents and he chose to bury her. The clusters of trees that were long-since planted on the open sides of the building made it hard to tell there was a cemetery nestled behind the turning leaves.
“It’s nice here. Hard to believe we’re still so close to downtown.”
“It is nice. My parents’ bought their plots here too. They did it when they had to deal with everything.” He waved his hand in the air, indicating ‘everything.’ He pulled alongside the little road. There wasn’t much room if another car showed up, which wasn’t likely, but he tried to make room, just in
case.
Gravel crunched beneath their feet as they silently made their way to his sister’s headstone. His chest ached, like it usually did when he came here. It was a different kind of ache though. It wasn’t laced with the general guilt he experienced the second he saw her headstone. It was…sadness. Pure and simple sadness that Francesca was gone.
Jillian squeezed his hand as they stopped in front of the heart-shaped stone and he realized it was the first time he’d come here and the blazing voices in his head weren’t drilling him about what he could have done to save her life. For once, they were at peace. He reached out and brushed a smudge of dirt from the pink stone. The headstone came to his waist and included the standard information along with a color photograph of her. The brown of her hair was interwoven with blonde and even though it had grown out by the time of her death, the short hair was the most-recent photograph they could find of her. A few flowers his mother had planted in front of the stone threatened to cover the photo but it made him happy they were still blooming in full-force even though the weather was changing.
“She’s beautiful,” Jillian said.
“She had the same green eyes as me. It’s hard to tell in the picture.”
“Your eyes are amazing. I feel like they can see into my soul.”
“I can,” he said.
“So cocky.” Jillian touched the headstone and because he was having a full weekend of revelations, he realized at the exact moment Jillian’s fingertips touched the jagged edge.
That she was right.
Even though she didn’t know he felt responsible for his sister’s death, Jillian insisted that Arabella would seek help when she was ready to leave her relationship and he was starting to realize that was true. Especially when Francesca made the conscious decision to hide it from him.
“I’ve been driving myself mad these past two years thinking I could have prevented this from happening,” he confessed.
“What? How could you have stopped it?” Jillian turned her face up to look at him as if she could find the answers on his face.
“That’s just it. I’m beginning to realize I couldn’t have. Being around you and the situation with Arabella, has almost convinced me that I couldn’t have done anything.”
“How long did the abuse go on?” she asked.
“By my estimates, we think about a year before her death. Police records showed she called them about six months before he killed her to report an incident but there wasn’t enough information to do anything.”
Jillian leaned into him, comforting him. “There aren’t any answers for this kind of stuff. I’m sorry that you’ve had to deal with this by yourself.”
Cole went on, like she hadn’t spoken. “He shot her. Luckily, that motherfucker turned the gun on himself because I would have torn him apart.” He pulled away from Jillian’s grasp, not wanting to transfer his anger to her. “You weren’t expecting that, were you?”
Jillian’s lips thinned. “I wasn’t sure what to expect. Classic abuse though. I know because my mom does this stuff for a living. I know about the statistics.”
“She’s not a fucking statistic, Jillian,” Cole said coldly.
“I didn’t mean it that way. I know she was Francesca. I only meant that if an abuser has a gun in the house, they’re more likely to use it on their victims. My mom has taught me a lot about domestic violence. She sees it day in and day out. The worst part is not being able to help. She said it will eat you alive if you don’t understand that victims have to help themselves first, before anyone else can do anything. Well, aside from children. But you know what I mean.”
He released a breath, grasping for the lighthearted feeling he’d felt before this. “I didn’t mean to snap at you like that. It sounds like your mom has taught you a lot.”
“I wouldn’t say that, but I know the basics. Trust me, it kills me that I watch Arabella with that pompous ass day in and day out. He’s changed her to fit his needs. He controls her and she lets him. Until the light bulb comes on…”
Jillian turned back toward the headstone and gave it a gentle pat. “Your sister would be so proud of you to hear about your business endeavor.”
“Yeah, she would. One time, she tried convincing me to build a shopping mall. Not the same, but at least I’m building something.” He reached out and grasped her hand in his before he kissed his other palm and rested it against Francesca’s headstone. “Come on, let’s go. There’s somewhere else I’d like to take you.”
Chapter Fifteen
“So this is it?” Jillian asked as she and Cole stood side by side looking out across a wide-open expanse of barren dirt.
“This is it,” Cole said.
“It’s so hard to believe anyone knows what any of these stakes mean or what they’re marked for. Once when we were little, Arabella and I ran through a site like this and pulled them all out of the dirt. Threw them in the ditch.”
Cole raised his brow. “Bet those guys weren’t happy the next day.”
“Bet not. I feel bad now, looking at all of these. There’s got to be at least a hundred of them.”
“Yep. Maybe more. Anyway, it doesn’t look like much now, but it’s going to be big. Beautiful, too.”
“I can picture it already. Beautiful courtyards with lots of shrubbery, a huge playground, a spa-”
“A spa?” Cole interrupted, that sexy half-grin doing things to her insides.
“You have to have a spa. Especially if it’s going to be women living here. You could absorb most of the costs, couldn’t you?” she asked.
“It’s not in the plans right now.”
“Maybe it should be, Cole. The women that come here, well, they’ve probably gone through much more than you and I can imagine. I think a spa would be nice.” Jillian walked over to a small pile of dirt and scooped some into her hand. She let the granules fall between her fingers while he watched her.
“A spa would be nice, Jillian. I’ll see what I can do.”
She smiled triumphantly and raised her arms above her head and spun in a slow circle, “For Francesca.”
She’d been having the best time of her life this weekend with Cole, even though it was laced with some sadness. To her, this complex was everything that any woman could ever ask for—her sister and Francesca—Cole and his friends were doing a great thing and she’d be lying if she said it didn’t make her heart jump a little harder for the man.
Cole’s warm body came around behind her, enclosing her into his comforting embrace. His breath hit her neck and shivers raced down her spine as he whispered against her. “For Francesca.”
“Thank you for bringing me here. For sharing your heart with me today.”
“I have you to thank.” He gave a dry laugh. “I’ve been carrying around so much guilt. I can physically feel it starting to lift.”
“That’s good, Cole. Francesca would want that. I didn’t know her, but I’d bet she wouldn’t want you living a life of misery and guilt. She’d want you to live, to love, to laugh-”
“To fuck?” he asked with that wicked grin of his.
“Oh yeah, that, most of all,” she said as she placed her lips against his.
Her phone startled both of them out of their stupor. Crap. Arabella’s ringtone. Jillian hated the feeling of dread that washed over her every time Arabella called. It shouldn’t be that way. Arabella was her only sibling. She should feel joy, elation, when Jillian saw her number. Not apprehension.
“Arabella?”
“Jillian? Where are you? I need your help.”
“With what?” Jillian asked. Her sister didn’t sound terrified like she normally did when she was in trouble so Jillian’s nerves relaxed a little.
“I’m ready, Jillian. Really ready.”
“Ready for what?” Jillian rolled her eyes as Cole watched her with a questioning look.
“Ready to leave Derrek. My bag is packed. He’s at work. But, I was wondering if you could come and get me. I can’t carry all this on t
he Light Rail.”
Jillian’s heart surged with relief even though there was a niggling feeling in the back of her mind, that what her sister was telling her, was too good to be true. It seemed so unlike her. First, she never called Jillian unless he was hurting Arabella and second, less than a week ago, her sister had cried wolf. Yes, Arabella was irresponsible, but she had always been strong.
“Why are you leaving? Are you serious this time? Last time you called I freaked out and showed up to get you, and you didn’t even answer your door,” Jillian said and Cole nodded in understanding.
He nudged her toward his fancy car and she shook her head. Not yet, she mouthed. It was classic Arabella. Always wanting Jillian to run to her rescue and then calling it off at the last minute. Excuse me for not wanting to make a big deal out of this.
“Okay, why aren’t you like, super-excited about this? Didn’t you hear me? I’m ready,” Arabella said, sounding annoyed.
“It’s hard to be super-excited. You always change your mind. You’ve given me very little reason to believe you. Look how many times you’ve called me,” Jillian said.
“I know. I know. Don’t be upset. It took me a while, okay? And I know you’ve been doing the toy reviews to save money for me, Jilly Bean, and I’ve been doing a little saving of my own. We should be able to get me a place.” Arabella’s voice was high-pitched, excited, but ready? That was the underlying question.
“I’m with Cole right now. Are you for real? It’s going to be a second before I can—”
“Wait. Cole? Cole who, Jillian?” Arabella’s voice was stern and Jillian could see her standing there with a hand to her hip, tapping her foot expectantly.
“Cole Carrington. Look, that’s a long story. If you want me to come get you, I can. Wait, hold on.”
All Shook Up Page 16
