Heat, wicked and delicious, twisted inside her, peaking her nipples. Every part of her ached to be closer to his big body and she tightened her legs so she could grind against him with each thrust, needing more. More pressure. More everything.
“Harder.” The plea fell from her lips, and the answering shift of his muscles as he drove into her with more force blurred the edges of thought until all she could do was feel him. Feel the power they’d unleashed between them.
He’d always done this, pushed her so high, so fast, it made her head spin. She was dizzy with lust and it was so good. So damn good. Then he lifted his head and seized her mouth, and the sharp throb and catch of her inner muscles caught her off guard.
No.
Her imminent pleasure was edged with panic as Viv dragged her right hand down from where it had accidentally ended up tangled in his hair, and shoved it between them to touch herself, working her clit to ensure that later, when she remembered this devastating lapse in judgment, her climax couldn’t be traced back to his kiss, but to her own fingers.
Because she wouldn’t give him everything. She couldn’t. Not again.
And yet, as pleasure swamped her, consumed her, it was his name she cried out, drowning in the intensity. Wes dropped his forehead to her shoulder and gave in to the same pulsing drive that had caught her in its maelstrom. He swore as his hips jerked with his own release. The low, guttural curse imprinted on her brain.
Somewhere at the edge of her consciousness, she knew everything was different between them now, but with her eyes closed his body felt the same, and Vivienne let herself stay there a moment, clinging to memories, as she dragged air into her lungs and settled back into her body.
He lifted his head as her feet touched the floor, and the scrape of his beard against her jaw vanquished the haze of nostalgia and catapulted her back to the present.
Because the Wes in her head didn’t have facial hair.
The Wes in her head didn’t exist anymore.
Viv loosened the arm she’d anchored around his broad shoulders, and his fingers dug into her waist for a moment before his touch disappeared altogether.
He pushed a hand through his disheveled hair and set to work on the buttons of his shirt as Vivienne slipped her arms through the sleeves of her dress and pulled the top into place, readjusted the skirt so it covered her thighs.
Less than an hour alone with him, and this had happened. It was a tale as old as time—an addict and her fix. Six years of personal growth down the tubes, and all she had to show for it was an orgasm.
The soul-melting kind that erased time and space, leaving her wobbly kneed and desperate for more.
God. She needed to get her clothes back on before she begged him to do it again.
“Could you...?”
She turned her back to him, glancing over her shoulder in question. He finished tucking his shirt in before giving her a brusque nod, stepping forward to tug her zipper back up.
Vivienne made a swipe to move her long hair over her shoulder and out of his way, momentarily forgetting she was currently rocking her sleek, angled bob.
The past version of her, the one with long hair, didn’t exist anymore either, she reminded herself, ignoring the rasp of her zipper and a thousand memories of other times his big, capable hands had skimmed the curve of her spine...before moving on to more interesting places.
Wes stepped away from her, bending to pick his suit jacket up off the floor. She faced him as he pulled it on.
He frowned, reaching out to tip her chin up and to the left.
“I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
Vivienne shook her head, dislodging his finger and tucking her hair behind her left ear. It wasn’t completely a lie. She was fine, except for the lurch of her heart when he touched her, but that was entirely of her own doing. Romantic residue that she should have put out of its misery long ago.
Wes’s eyes shuttered in the space of a blink. “I should have used a condom.”
His words were a jarring crash back to reality.
It was silly to be upset by them, to have wished, for just a brief, foolish second that he’d say something dreamy and quixotic instead.
Vivienne straightened the seams of her dress and notched her chin up, brushing off the bleak reminder that they weren’t lovers anymore. Just people who’d given in to baser passions. Strangers. To counteract that weakness, her tone was brusque and businesslike. “Is there anything I should know?”
His head snapped up at that, brows drawn together, and his eyes turned to blue flame...not lust anymore. Anger. “You think I would’ve—” He cut himself off, shook his head. “No.” The word reset his expression to neutral, like he’d flipped a switch. “I’m clean.”
“Same. And I’m protected,” she added, hating that she’d lost control. Despite her IUD, it bothered her that she hadn’t learned her lesson all those years ago. Despised that he still held the power to override her better judgment. That she still liked it when he did.
He gave a curt nod.
She ran her hands over her stomach, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from her dress, hating the sympathy clench of her abdominal muscles over the tragic consequences of the last time one of their fights had devolved into a bout of vertical-surface rage sex.
The doomed pregnancy that had heralded the end of them. And Wes didn’t even know.
Guilt gnawed at the lining of her stomach, acidic and vile, as it always did when she remembered her own cowardice.
She should have told him. Should have told him before there’d been nothing to tell.
Wes’s gaze remained steady on hers as he fixed his collar. It felt for a moment like he could see into her soul, read her darkest secrets and most painful memories. She dropped her eyes, in case he could, and busied herself with retrieving her handbag from the floor. But when she stood up, she could still feel the weight of his stare.
“What?” She wished the question had sounded defensive at least. Not so...searching.
Wes dropped his hand to his side, shook his head like he was clearing the lingering cobwebs of a dream. “Nothing. You just...you kiss different now.”
She wanted to ask how. To tell him that he did, too.
To understand exactly why he’d met her mouth with an edge of desperation that she’d been compelled to match and what it meant that kissing him still made her weak in the knees.
Her fingernails dug into her palm around the leather handle of her purse, just enough pain to bring her back to reality. “That’s a pretty nuanced take on a hate fuck in an elevator.”
“Yeah. I guess I’ve grown as a person since we were together.”
The wry answer brought her head up, but Wes had already moved to the control panel so Vivienne couldn’t gauge his expression. Within seconds, everything was back in place, and the elevator had resumed its course. The bell dinged as the car drew to a smooth stop on the thirty-seventh floor.
CHAPTER THREE
HAD SHE ALWAYS lived this damn far from the elevator?
The tastefully bland hallway felt never-ending with Wes following along behind her. Especially when they both smelled like sex. Amazing, animalistic sex. It was almost enough to make her forget that they’d broken up years ago. Or that she’d just picked him up from his unjust stint in prison.
Almost, but not quite.
Her pace slowed as they approached the last door on the left, just as it always did since that day, a little over two months ago, when she’d walked down this hallway, blissfully unaware that her life was about to change. That her security panel had been overridden, and a nondescript envelope was waiting for her on the other side of the door her mysterious visitor had left slightly ajar.
She’d had a brand-new door installed the next day, complete with a dead bolt and a chain lock, as well as a state-of-the-art security camera in the foyer, in ca
se anyone managed to bypass her upgrades. Too little, too late, of course. Her life had already been irreparably thrown off course when she’d curiously ripped into the manila packet.
No, not then.
A moment after that, when she’d decided to follow the neatly typed instructions that accompanied a thumb drive with the Whitfield Industries logo emblazoned on the side of it and a copy of the medical records detailing the lifesaving surgery she’d underwent in the dangerous wake of her ectopic pregnancy that would be made available to interested parties if she failed to comply.
The realization that she was being blackmailed turned quickly to panic in an instant, and she’d doubled down on the same decision she’d made years earlier, when she was a scared, pregnant twenty-two-year-old bound for law school. Installing the program on one of Whitfield Industries’ computers had seemed so much easier than letting Wes back in her life in any capacity.
And now she had to deal with the consequences of her cowardice—forced proximity with the man she’d been trying so hard to avoid—ironic though they might be.
Vivienne stopped in front of her condo and glanced over her shoulder at her court-appointed houseguest.
Whatever he saw on her face made Wes haul up short. He lifted his hands in surrender, hanging back to give her more space, unaware that inside, she was crying out for the comfort of his arms around her, for just a moment where she could set down her burden and rely on his strength to hold her up.
But that was solace she didn’t deserve.
Viv let the misinterpretation stand, accepting the extra distance between them as her due as she stepped up to her access keypad.
She automatically angled her torso to block the numbers from his view—a move he’d taught her—but she realized the pointlessness of it a moment later. After all, he’d built his fortune on testing for weaknesses.
“What did I tell you about using your mom’s birthday as your passcode?”
Her shoulders drew tight at the rebuke. “That I might as well not lock the door at all.” There was a liberal amount of snark in her voice as she parroted back part of the lecture he’d given her when they’d first started dating.
Which pissed him off, just as she’d intended. “It’s a—”
“—top ten guess,” she finished, shoving her key in the lock with way more force than was necessary.
“Top five if the thief did the barest amount of research on me,” she added, just to goad him. “I remember, okay?” Then the heat left her voice and the dead bolt disengaged with a twist of her wrist. “I just miss her.”
The words stole all his righteousness, and she heard him sigh. “Habit,” he said, by way of nonapology.
She stole another glance over her shoulder, watching him drag a hand down his beard.
“It’s none of my business.”
“No. It’s not.” Vivienne pushed the door out of her way, dropping her keys into her purse so they wouldn’t give away the tremor in her hand. This had all seemed so simple when she’d embarked on her plan to get him out of jail. Now that he was here, there was nothing simple about it. “Are you coming in?”
He started, as though he hadn’t realized he still hadn’t crossed the threshold, as though maybe he was having second thoughts about doing so. Which was fair enough. Because when he finally stepped into the foyer, closing the door behind them, it felt like the whole world had shifted.
Wes was here.
He reset the dead bolt with a thunk.
Slid the chain into place with a rattle.
Ominous sounds that sealed their fate inside these four walls. It hadn’t turned out well for them the last time they’d cohabitated. And as she’d proven moments ago, being alone in confined spaces with this particular man had never resulted in her most brilliant decision making.
“You’ll have to sleep on the couch.” The words fell out of her mouth like a challenge, blunt and abrupt. “I turned the spare room into an office.”
Wes just nodded.
His subdued acceptance made her feel churlish, and she did her best to sound conciliatory. “Make yourself at home. I’m just going to freshen up.”
“Sure. Yeah.” Wes’s gaze had migrated up to the pinhole in the crown molding, where she’d had the camera installed post-envelope. Figured that’s where his attention would go. Work had always been the first thing on his mind.
“Motion sensor, or constant feed?”
“Both. Motion alerts come straight to my phone.”
When his blue eyes met hers, she could feel his silent approval at that particular security upgrade, and the fact that it warmed her, even now, set off a different kind of alarm in her brain.
How in the hell, after everything they’d been through, could she still care what he thought of her choices?
It took everything she had not to run from the room at the realization.
She counted her steps to keep the strike of her heels against the hardwood floor even, though she granted herself the concession of using the main bathroom, because it was closer than her en suite, and because she was afraid her knees might give out with the effort of appearing unconcerned if she had to fake it for even a second longer.
She slammed the door shut behind her in her haste for privacy. Once it was locked, Vivienne blew out a breath and set her purse on the counter.
Get your shit together, she lectured herself.
Leaning forward, she met her own eyes in the mirror. Her pupils were large, her hair was mussed, and her lipstick was smeared.
She looked like she’d just been ravaged in an elevator.
She lifted her hand, restoring order and precision to the sharp angle of her bob.
It was just sex with the ex, she assured herself.
No big deal.
Digging into her purse, Vivienne pulled out her small makeup case and extracted a travel pack of makeup wipes and her signature red lipstick, laying them with precision on the marble countertop, as though she was about to scrub for surgery, rather than tackle the faint crimson stain that had migrated outside her lip line.
Tugging one of the disposable cloths free, Viv set about restoring the cool, controlled facade she was known for.
She’d curated a very precise version of herself in the years since they’d been Wes and Viv, but today was the first time she’d considered how much he’d changed, too. With his expensive suit and his fancy watch.
All the trappings of his success, so different from the boy she’d known, and yet...
He still had this way of sucking up all the oxygen in the room, dominating her thoughts without even trying. Hell, the aftereffects of him were still fizzing in her blood. Not that she was surprised. That body of his had always affected her like a narcotic.
Even the first time she’d laid eyes on him.
God, he was beautiful. So intense that she couldn’t look away.
A tiger in a room full of hyenas. Or more accurately, a man in a room full of drunken frat boys. She’d be surprised later that night, over tacos and tequila, to learn that he was a mere two months more experienced with being twenty than she was, but in that moment, he’d seemed so mature and so above the frat party that Jesse Hastings had all but begged her and her roommate to attend. And the way he’d filled out his white T-shirt and worn jeans hadn’t hurt, either.
She’d never believed in instant lust before that night. She’d seen plenty of hot guys who hadn’t affected her beyond the clinical acknowledgment of their good-lookingness.
She’d never been desperate to taste any of them.
Mesmerized, she watched him survey his surroundings as he lifted the red plastic cup full of foamy keg beer to his mouth. Frat party booze was cheap and utilitarian, the path of least resistance to drunkenness. Even in the awful lighting—a bunch of neon beer signs and some bargain-basement, light-up disco ball provided by the
delusional frat brother with visions of DJ stardom in his future who had cranked up the bass to teeth-jarring levels—she was entranced by his throat, the bob of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed, and the way his tongue darted out to catch the remnants of the foam that had dotted his upper lip.
Something warm throbbed to life between her thighs.
Then, as though he sensed her single-minded fascination with him, he turned his head, and their eyes met with a jolt of instant attraction that, a split second earlier, she’d thought only existed in the dirty-sexy romance novels she favored when she could afford to take a study break.
Viv dropped her gaze immediately, heat washing over her skin at being caught staring like some perverted stalker. As much as she wanted to blame the burn on embarrassment, it wasn’t just that. Beneath the fabric of her short, flirty red dress, her nipples had drawn tight so quickly that it hurt. In the best possible way.
Composing herself, she ventured a peek at him, relieved to find the full weight of his attention remained on her. Whatever the undeniable force that had sprung up between them, he wasn’t immune to it either.
Something dark and hot slid through her as he started toward her. He walked with the loose-hipped ease of someone who was comfortable in his skin, and the crowd seemed to part for him as he drew closer. Vivienne couldn’t help but notice that there was none of the boastful swagger of a college jock in his approach. Just quiet, determined confidence.
Bam! Lust-struck.
She was thoroughly seduced before he even reached her.
“Seven out of ten.” Viv raised her voice to be heard over the thudding bass.
He quirked a brow at the assessment.
“Your approach could use some work. Most guys would have brought me a drink to break the ice.”
“Are you here with one?” he asked. His voice was deep and sexy.
“One what?”
He leaned closer under the guise of being heard over the music, and his breath on her jaw was like the lick of a flame. “One of those guys who would have brought you a drink?”
Guilty Pleasure Page 3
