I reached out and grabbed her hand. "Of course I believe in luck. Luck led me to you."
Chapter Thirty
Charlie
Did I believe in luck?
I believed in hard work. I believed in keeping my head down and being a good example to my son.
But I also knew that it was only chance that had made me a mother in the first place. When I found out I was pregnant, my former bar friends winced. "Ooh, bad luck, " they'd say, glancing down at my swelling stomach like it was a contagious disease.
But my mother, never the most stable force in my life, took the moment of my pregnancy to step up for me in ways she never had before. And then Malcolm was born and everything in the universe narrowed down to that moment when I looked into his sleepy little eyes and knew that he was the only thing that mattered was being his mom.
And wasn't that lucky?
And then that morning a few days ago when my foot slipped off the brake and I rolled into traffic and literally collided with the man now kissing my hand. It was pure chance that I ran into him and not into the path of an oncoming eighteen wheeler. It was total luck that he didn't want to exchange info and go after me for insurance.
It was total luck that he turned out to be the one thing that I needed most.
Wasn't that lucky too?
Jameson opened his mouth like he was going to say something more, but I stood on my tiptoes and pressed my lips to his. "I'm super glad I ran into you," I said with a wink.
His grin was slow and triumphant. "So you admit it. You hit me."
"I did," I nodded, looking down and laughing. "But, you know, I've been trying to make it up to you."
He grinned and brushed his fingers along my cheek. "You're doing an okay job of it."
"Just okay?"
He shrugged and grinned, letting his eyes drift down. "Well, I mean you're wearing clothes..."
I socked him in the arm and he laughed and then clapped his hand over his mouth when it came out too loud.
Malcolm looked like he was finally finished gorging himself on night-cheese. "Come on, Little Prince," I told him, as I stood up from my chair and lifted him into my arms. "Party time is over. Honestly, you're spoiled rotten."
He responded by reaching up and grabbing my nose. Off to the side, I heard Jameson chuckle and say something about kids these days.
"Uncle Jameson's right," I told Malcolm. "It's the middle of the night, and you need to get back to sleep."
"No," Malcolm said in a petulant little grunt.
"Yes," I said. "Come on little boy, I don't care if you don't go to sleep, you're going back in your crib."
I hefted him onto my hip and turned to mount the stairs, waiting for Jameson to follow back in step with me. But when I didn't hear him get up, I turned and looked back over the railing into the kitchen. "Are you coming?" I called.
He sprang up from the chair as if I lit a match underneath him. "You want me to?" he asked eagerly.
I took a deep breath. There was something so endearingly boyish about him. For all his manly confidence, for all his swagger and his prowess in bed, there was something just like a wounded little boy inside of him. And maybe it was the maternal side of me that was falling, and falling hard, maybe even harder than the horny, insatiable part of me. "I mean," I teased, cocking out my hip and striking of supermodel pose with my son jamming his finger in my nose. "If you want to."
The slow spread of his grin was like the sun first rising over the mountain. "Yeah," he drawled in a voice filled with dangerous promise. "I want to."
I looked on my son. "Okay kiddo," I said. "Time for bed for real."
This time, Jameson's step fell in behind me, and I could hear him chuckling the whole way up the stairs.
"Here we are," I whispered as I pushed the door open to the tiny bedroom at the top of the stairs. Inside, Malcolm's nightlight glowed in a pattern of stars on the ceiling and the noise machine whirred its white static. "You feel better now that your tummy is full?"
"School bus," he replied, settled down onto the crib mattress.
"The school bus will go by in the morning. You can watch it with MomMom." The thought of the morning made a faint rush of panic flash through my veins. Jameson had to leave in the morning. It was all going to be over soon.
"Mama loves you," I told Malcolm in strangled voice, then bent over to kiss his downy head. "You have sweet dreams about that school bus."
"School bus," he muttered sleepily and then rolled over and jammed his thumb into his mouth.
"Wow," I heard Jameson say softly from the doorway.
I stood back up again. "What?" I whispered.
He shook his head as if to clear it. "Come here," he said in a strangled whisper.
Chapter Thirty-One
Jameson
I closed the door as softly as I could before turning to her and yanking her shirt over her head.
"We can't wake my mother," she whispered frantically as my lips closed around her pert little nipple. That breathless gasp only got me going even harder.
"Then you'll have to be quiet," I told her, nipping that tight little bead before drawing it up into my mouth. When her breath quickened, I slid my fingers down and growled to feel that her panties were already soaked through. It was the quick work of a second to have her pants puddled on the floor where I kicked them out of the way impatiently.
"I wish," she groaned, arching against my hand. "I wish we could turn on the light." I felt her fingers brush against my face as if she were trying to memorize my features via touch. "I liked seeing you."
"I liked seeing you too," I told her truthfully, then grabbed her hand and moved it down. She deftly undid my belt, letting my pants fall over my hips. When her little fingers closed around my cock, I swear I felt her body heat up underneath me. "But then again, I'll fuck you any way you'll have me, sweet thing." Backing her towards the bed, I kissed a line down between her breasts, stopping for a moment in my downward travel to swirl my tongue along the outside of her pretty little navel. She fell back with a gasp, making the springs squeak. "Don't worry," I promised, taking a quick detour over to the side to press my lips to the place where her stretch marks were. "I've already memorized your body. So even if I can't ever watch your face as you come again, I'll still feel it."
As I said that, my tongue found her clit. I heard her scream stifled way back in her throat and then she thrashed over to the side, burying her face in the pillow by the sound of it. The taste of her, that honeyed sweetness, was something I would never tiring of having on my tongue.
Never.
"Jameson," she choked out in a strangled whisper. "Can you be quiet if we..."
"If I fuck you?" I hissed. "I make no promises, sweet thing."
"You can't wake her up."
"She knows you're a grown woman, right?" I teased, flicking my tongue inside of her and drawing out a low moan.
"Of course," she hissed, rising up off the mattress to meet my greedy tongue. "She knows. But she doesn't sleep well. Insomnia's a side effect of the meds she's on and..."
She trailed off into a stifled groan, but her words still echoed, banging around in my head.
For a moment I felt like a complete shithead. Her relationship with her mother, that strange mix of love and obligation was something entirely foreign to me so I had assumed that she was just afraid of her mom catching us when she insisted we be quiet. But it wasn't fear I'd heard just now. It was care. Concern. A deep and abiding respect for the woman who raised her and whose roof she still lived under, sharing in the raising of her son. It was something I couldn't understand, but I could....
Was it envy? That wasn't the right word. It was that same sort of nostalgia for something I'd never had. I'd been having it since the moment I'd met her. I'd felt it acutely when I stood there in the doorway and watched her settle her son to sleep.
How could I want something so badly when I'd never even been aware it existed until just now?
I kissed
her calf and then pushed myself up on my knees to press myself against her. The need for her, as overwhelming as it always was, was different all of a sudden. I didn't just need to be inside her. I needed to be with her. I needed to be joined.
I needed to be a part of her life and if I couldn't be that then I was going to join us for as long as I possibly could.
"Slow, sweet thing," I murmured as I slipped inside of her. Her heat was overwhelming and it was all I could do to hold back once I'd sunk in all the way. "You want me to be quiet? This is the only way. If I fuck you slow and deep, like this."
She shuddered underneath me and I could hear her agonized breaths. I was agonized too. The need to drive myself into her as hard and as fast as I could, that instinct to possess her completely still hovered, poised just outside the limits of my self-control and waiting for me to slip up and start fucking her the way I wanted to.
"Jesus," she whispered, then her breath caught in a stifled yelp. I felt her thrash again, delighting in the way her pussy clenched against me, trying like hell to draw me in faster and harder. "Please..."
"Please what?"
"Oh god, please fuck me harder, I can't..."
"You want me to be quiet, sweet girl. Fucking you like this, ah..." I felt my throat catch, that coil of fire starting to snake in my belly. "Jesus, you're too good, Charlie..." I fell forward, burying my face in the pillow, my lips against her ear. "Come for me, sweet thing," I begged. "Come around my cock right now because I'm going to start yelling if you don't."
"I just, fuck!" she hissed, and then her voice caught in something very much like a sob. The feel of her lips nibbling and then biting down on my shoulder, her teeth sinking in so hard I thought she might break the skin but I welcomed the sharp sting because there was no way anything in the world could feel as good as I was feeling right now, it had to be fucking criminal. It had to be a sin.
"Fuck!" she shrieked and then gasped at how loud she was, thrashing and then I heard her teeth squeak against the fabric of the pillowcase just as her pussy throbbed around me.
"Oh shit," I breathed, awestruck at how I could just feel her shattering all around me, the sharp gasping breaths as she arched into me and I clung harder, squeezing her against me as I came harder than I'd ever come in my entire fucking life.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Charlie
I've never slept in a bed with anyone else.
You might think that's crazy. How could I be twenty-four years old and have managed to avoid sharing my bed with a man? And the truth was, there was one guy who'd been in my bed all night, but he called me "Mama."
And he didn't take up nearly as much space.
As first when Jameson settling his bulk around me, I was convinced I would never be able to relax. This was too strange, sharing my bed with a man. It felt strangely more intimate than what we had just done. It felt like I was letting him in much more than I had intended. But with his arms around me and the sound of his slow, regular breathing in my ear, I knew that there was no way I was going to get up and stop this. I was drunk. There was no other explanation. If you can get drunk on a person, on their touch, on their sounds, on the way they look at you, even when you can't see them in the dark, then I was flat out inebriated, the kind of drunk that lands you in jail overnight for public intoxication.
The way his body fit against mine. He was warm. So warm, like a huge, comforting radiator. His warmth seeped into me, much deeper than my skin, penetrating right down to my heart. My shocked, bruised and tentative heart was thawing so fast it hurt and I fell asleep before I knew it.
But morning came far faster than it should have and with it the sound of birds outside of my window. Specifically one persistent and very annoyed blue jay directly outside.
The sound of its screeching jerked me awake and as soon as I saw Jameson's sleeping face near mine I froze in place so as not to wake him.
But he needed to wake up.
He was leaving.
And there was nothing I could do about it either. Would he be back? Could I ask that of him?
"Jameson?" I whispered.
"Hum," he said, shifting his arm so that it flopped over my waist and pressing his lips to the side of my neck. "Morning sweet thing," he said, inhaling deeply.
Then he sniffled and pulled back and I giggled. "I told you," I said. "Once my hair gets ahold of something...."
"I'm gonna sneeze," he said, sniffling again, then turning to muffle it in the pillow while I giggled all the while. I couldn't seem to stop giggling even though my heart was breaking in two.
"What were you saying?" he whispered once his muffled sneezing fit had subsided.
"You're leaving today, aren't you?"
He froze. I could actually feel the heat drain away from his skin as he laid there like a statue. The early morning sunlight was pouring in through my window, illuminating his faraway eyes. "I am," he said.
"Could I...come to your place?" I heard myself say. Where had that come from?"
He winced. "I'd love that. But I don't really have a place," he said.
"What does that mean?"
"I travel around so much," he explained, shifting his weight to look at me. "Right now I'm renting a furnished place in the building where my office is, but..."
"But?"
He did a sort of one-shouldered shrug. "I was starting to get bored with it so I was talking to my real estate agent - "
"You have your own real estate agent? Who just... works for you?"
"Well, when I need a place in a new city - "
I kept interrupting him. I couldn't seem to stop. "You just buy places in new cities whenever you feel like it?"
"Or I rent them."
"Jesus." I paused and bit my lip and then decided to just ask. "How rich are you?"
The corner of his mouth quirked. "Why do you think I'm rich?"
I rolled my eyes. "Because my brain works," I sniped. "Because you handed five hundred dollars to my sitter like it was a nickel. Because you keep eating at Indigo like it's a Pizza Hut. Because you're doing something with Granger Development and it's pretty clear they want you more then you want them.
The other side of his mouth quirked and he smiled. "I guess there's really no getting things past you, is there?"
"How rich?"
"You mean how much do I have in my wallet? Or my bank account?"
"Bank account."
"A lot."
"A million?" I could see his throat tighten. "More or less?" I demanded.
"In my personal bank account, right, yeah I'd say a million." He glanced over at me and I tried like hell to keep my eye from twitching. "More or less. I don't keep track of it, that's my accountant's job. But - "
"There's always a but," I said, sighing a little.
"It's a bit more if you're talking about my company -"
"Yeah, what the hell do you do?"
"Investing," he replied. "A little bit of everything. Angel investments, venture capital, that sort of thing."
"Like I know what that is." I sounded sullen and I didn't want to.
He noticed and turned all the way to me. "Look, yeah. I have a lot of money. Why does it matter to you?"
I blinked. "Because when I was thirteen my dad died and with him went the stable income." I sat up and slid off the bed. "My mom couldn't ever hold down a job for long, even though she tried. So we got by on handouts and her disability until I went to Lou's Diner and started working under the table at fourteen. And even though I've worked every day of my life since then, I've never had more than five hundred dollars to my name at any one time," I said in a rush.
"Okay," he said slowly, guardedly. He sat up and stretched and I waited with my heart thudding in my temple. We were silent for several moments before he finally, slowly, said, "Do you think you don't deserve more than you have, Charlie? Is that it?"
"Of course not," I hissed.
"I'm not sure about that."
"Well what do you know, Mr. Money
bags?"
"I guess not much," he said and he sounded hurt and I hated it and I hated myself but he was leaving me and I needed him to be hurting like I was hurting too.
"Charlie, I'll come back as soon as I can," Jameson finally said.
"You mean as soon as your job pays for it."
"I do have a job, Charlie. I have an entire company I built up that depends on me doing my work." He moved closer to me.
"You don't get to do this," I whimpered in a shuddering breath. He pulled me to him and I hated how I sagged into his arms. "You don't get to walk in and out whenever you want. Not after I was getting over you."
"Were you getting over me?" he asked, pulling back my hair so that I was forced to meet his gaze. "Were you really?"
"Goddamit," I swore.
"Answer the question, Charlie."
"Fuck you and fuck your games."
"This isn't a game. Not for me. The second that my assistant said we needed someone back up here..."
"Oh, so your assistant sent you?"
"Charlie."
I hated how out of control I was feeling. I just kept thinking back to the moment before I first ran into him - literally - and how I was just getting my life on track. How things were finally, finally getting fucking easier, and as I thought about it, the rage about everything boiled up inside of me. "Not because of me," I seethed. "You didn't come back because I'm here."
"Charlotte," he hissed, yanking my hair tighter. "Look at me." He cupped my chin tightly. "Yes," he said slowly, enunciating every word. "I did."
I swallowed and stared him down. "I never asked for that."
"You didn't have to. It's written all over your face."
"Oh yeah? Well, I'd hate for you to have to work so hard discerning mixed signals so how about I be amply clear?" I shouted, stepping back. I raised my middle finger and jammed it in his face. "Don't go thinking you know what I want. And don't pretend I'm expecting anything more from you. I know what this is."
At Any Price Page 12
