by Quinn, Cari
I rose and retrieved a condom from the nightstand, then snapped it on and knelt between her splayed legs. She was still trembling, clearly spent.
Or so she thought.
I drove deep, sending her up on her knees. She moaned and for a second, I worried I’d hurt her. Then she turned her head and shot me a glance through her loosened curls. “Is that all you got?”
Goddamn this woman.
I pulled back and plunged again, forcing her ass in the air. She yanked on the headboard and the bed springs squeaked as I repeated the move, slow and deep. And hard. So hard that every thrust pulled a cry from her throat. I could feel her building again, her pussy tightening around me with every drag of flesh on flesh.
When she came, she took me with her, yanking me into the depths of her need. Making it something we could share. I fisted a hand in her hair as I rode out the orgasm, slamming my hips into her ass and holding, holding while I drained into the condom. All the while wishing it was her I was spilling myself into, with no barriers. Nothing between us but skin.
I threw my head back and drew in great lungfuls of air. My skin was sheened with sweat and I couldn’t catch my breath. Which was probably why I didn’t hear her tears. Not at first. By the time I did, she was sobbing, her head dipped between her stretched out arms.
“Grace. Grace, sweetheart, what is it? Are you hurting?” Panic made me trip over my words as I pulled back and jerked to my feet. I disposed of the condom and returned to undo the tie around her wrists. “If this hurt, you should’ve told me,” My voice was sharper than I intended and she only cried harder.
“I’m sorry. Jesus, I’m sorry, baby.”
I didn’t know what else to do, so I tossed the tie aside and rubbed the circulation back into her wrists before climbing back into bed, I was afraid to touch her, concerned I’d make things worse, but I went with instinct and draped my body carefully over hers. I hugged her tightly and pressed kisses to her hair, all the while whispering nonsense words that probably didn’t make a whit of difference. But I had to do something.
She didn’t push me away, just turned over and hooked her arms around my neck. Her legs tangled with mine and I lowered my forehead to hers, willing her to speak. To tell me what I’d done, and how I could make it better.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you.” It could be the only explanation. I cupped her wet cheeks and smoothed her hair back with my thumbs. “I pushed.”
“No.” At my narrow-eyed look, she amended, “Okay, yes, but that’s what you do. I’m already used to it. It’s comforting in a way.”
He had to chuckle. “Like too tight underwear?”
“More like an underwire bra that pulls you in and lifts you up in all the right places.”
“Hmm.”
“I wasn’t crying because of you. Or maybe I was, a little,” She rubbed her cheeks. “You overwhelm me, you know? In all ways. And apparently when you come really hard, stuff gets shaken loose. Emotions and all that crap.”
“Twice.” I didn’t realize what I’d said until she planted her small fist in my chest.
“You never quit.”
“Yes, I do. Shutting up now.”
She shook her head, smiling weakly even as her eyes became shiny again.
My gut clenched. “Ah, Christ, you need to stop that.”
“They broke into my grandmother’s house.” Her chin wobbled as the tears slipped down her cheeks. In the faint light from the bedside table, their watery tracks seemed way too prominent. She blew out a breath. “I know it’s yours now, but it was hers first. It was ours. She practically raised me. After my parents flaked out, Gram was all I had. She never let me feel the lack. I didn’t have siblings or much contact with my parents, but that didn’t matter. She was all the family I needed. Then she left me.”
When I started to argue, she shook her head. “I know she had no choice. It wasn’t her fault. But I’m still alone. The only thing that was keeping me going was getting my house back—and hating you.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “We see how that worked out, don’t we? No house, and here I am. Doing what, I don’t even fucking know. And now someone has it out for the only thing I have left of my grandmother.”
“You don’t know that. You can’t possibly guess at their motives.”
“No, but I’m almost positive they were there before. There are valuables left in the house, but not as many as there were. After speaking with the realtor, I did a short sale on some—”
“You sold items out of the house I’d bought?” Even when I was trying to comfort her, I couldn’t help being a businessman down to the core.
“The contents weren’t included in the sale,” Grace said stubbornly.
“Depends what contents we’re talking about. According to my agent, I was to receive—” I stopped and directed my gaze at the ceiling. Focus, Carson. “We should go through the house and make an itemized list of what’s left and what’s been sold, see if you can note any discrepancies.”
“I won’t remember everything. My grandmother was a collector, and I was in such a state after her passing that whole days blended together. She wasn’t supposed to go then. She’d just been given a clean bill of health at her doctor’s not three days before.”
“Things happen, Grace. Sometimes the doctors don’t catch everything.” But my mind was whirling.
There were way too many questions lately and not nearly enough answers. I needed some, and fast.
“I know that. I’m not stupid, Blake. I’m just saying that I didn’t expect it. If she’d been sick…if there had been some kind of warning…” She sighed and laid her head on my chest, tracing a finger over the light hair on my chest. Somehow I still wore my shirt. It was a wrinkled mess and twisted on my arms, but still on just the same. “You never said how you knew her. The way you’d met.”
It was easier to give her that than any of the rest. What I’d been willing to do to build my company. The risks I’d taken, the people I’d dealt with. Ones I’d still be working with if not for Annabelle’s intervention.
“She knew my father,” I said vaguely, hoping that would be enough for right now. The rest of the story would be distracting enough. “Through him, she found out about me.”
“What do you mean, found out?” She peered up at me, and her still damp cheeks were my undoing. “Odd choice of words.”
“My father had another family. Several of them actually. He liked to spread it around.” I smiled thinly and stroked a hand over her hair in hopes she’d stop watching me so closely. Those shrewd blue-green eyes could pick me apart, and right now, all my cracks and seams were on full display. “My mother worked for him. She was part of his cleaning staff when he was married to Sebastian’s mother. Sebastian is my older brother.”
“Is he like you?”
“Like me in what way?”
She flapped a hand. “I don’t know. Is he a mega mogul?”
I chuckled. “Of a sort. He definitely keeps an eye on business matters, though he has a right-hand man who handles much of that for him. His preference is to dabble with music. And Wicca.”
If her eyebrow had pitched any higher, it would’ve reached her hairline. “He’s a witch?”
“Supposedly there’s some sort of hereditary bloodline as well.” I waved it off. I had never had much interest in the metaphysical. Yet another way I was different from at least one of my half-brothers. “Not something he tells people, though. You can imagine how that would be received, especially since he lives in Salem. He keeps a low profile for the most part.”
“He sounds fascinating.”
I wrapped a hank of her hair around my fingers and tugged. “You would think so. Damn artist.”
“You’re an artist too. That you hide it doesn’t change the reality.”
Ignoring her, I stared over her shoulder at the windows. The pale pink-gray light of morning was slipping into the room. The sky was growing lighter by the moment.
And I had a woman in my bed,
in my house. She was curled up on my chest, her body soft and warm, her tears still drying on my skin.
There were needs in her eyes. Ones beyond sex that I wasn’t capable of filling.
The muscles in my shoulders tensed. I shouldn’t be doing this. Men like me weren’t meant for cuddling up after sex. Not with all the lies and necessary deflections between us. That we’d eliminated hers tonight didn’t change the reality that she wanted something that was now mine. Or all of the things in my past I wasn’t about to share, no matter how relaxed we were after fucking our brains out.
The longer she stared at me with her vulnerable eyes, the less relaxed I was anyway. I wasn’t the man she was looking for. I didn’t want to be.
Liar.
“Are you close?” She skated her nail over my collarbone and I nearly hissed at the renewed blood flow in my dick. Some parts of me might be searching for sense when it came to Grace Copeland. My cock wasn’t one of them.
“Keep that up and I will be.”
“What?” She frowned, glanced at her hand then gave herself a little shake. “Oh. Sorry. Really? Your collarbone is an erogenous zone?”
“It is when you’re stretched out on top of me.” I spread my legs enough for her to fall into the gap between them and my growing erection nudged her hip. Her lips parted on a sigh.
There, that was better. Keep things in the arena where they were supposed to be. Work. Fucking. Maybe even a kind of uneasy friendship. But no more.
Nothing personal. There couldn’t be.
“Are you close?” she asked again, a moment later. “You and Sebastian.” She slid her gaze back to her finger tracing over my skin. She understood my diversionary tactics all too well. “You and your father.”
“My father is dead. God rest his stupid black soul.”
Her head snapped up. “How can you say that about your own father?”
“Easily. He was a stupid motherfucker who played with things he shouldn’t and got his head blown off. It was no kind of loss, not for any of us. Did you miss the part where he screwed around with his cleaning lady while he was married? That wasn’t the first time either. He did it other times too, but not all of the women got pregnant. That was his MO. He hired women to work for him, and he took advantage—”
I fell silent, but she was already shaking her head. “Don’t. That’s not like this. I came to work for you under a ruse. I never intended to get a job in your company. Never intended to like it. To love it.” The heat thrumming through her voice didn’t do anything but piss me off. I didn’t need her to defend me about anything.
She didn’t know it yet, but I’d done things that were indefensible. I was my father’s son. As much as I might hate myself for it, the facts were the facts.
“How do you know it was the first time?” I asked softly, deliberately pushing her away. She was too warm, and it was too easy for me to curl into her, to confess my whole sordid life story to her in the waning hours of the night. Because I had this sick idea she would understand and not judge. She should be judging me. I didn’t want her viewing my actions in anything but the correct light.
An asshole I might be, but I would never pretend to be someone else.
“I don’t.” Her voice, her expression, hell, even her body had cooled. But she wasn’t moving away. “I don’t know much about you when it comes right down to it, now do I?”
“That’s for the best. For your own good.”
“Yet I let you tie me up a little while ago. Sounds an awful lot like I trust you, which makes me a colossal idiot, huh? If not for the fact that you played my white knight just a few hours ago. You shot a man, and you were protecting me. Lie to yourself all you want. Don’t lie to me, Blake.”
I already have. So many times. That it was getting harder to do meant nothing other than I needed space. She wasn’t the only one who was blurring the lines of our arrangement, and it had to stop.
“He was in my house. Mine, Grace. I might fuck you, I might enjoy the hell out of it, and I might even let you tie up my dick because it gets off your kinky little soul. But don’t mistake what I am. What this is.” I nudged her off me and rolled off the other side of the bed. Staring at the wall, I said words that ripped my throat as I uttered them. “You were my assistant. Now you’re not even that.”
Then I walked out of the room.
It was only when I stepped out on the porch to grab the morning paper that I realized I hadn’t told her about the class. More important than how I’d met her grandmother, that class had been how I’d met Grace. How I’d fallen in love with glass.
And I couldn’t ever tell her, because then she would know how hard it was becoming for me to separate the two.
Four
I expected her to leave. Any other woman would have, probably while throwing a few pieces of expensive statuary at my head. I wouldn’t have blamed her either. I’d been cruel, moments after she’d cried over her grandmother.
What kind of man was I?
Oh, that’s right. I was a blood-thirsty, heartless, ruthless bastard from the streets who’d fought and clawed my way out of them. I wasn’t going to forget my roots and play the role of Grace’s white knight. Not now, not ever. I might delude myself when I needed to come that she belonged to me. That when I had a gun in my hand and her behind me that I would die to keep her safe. But in the light of day, she was just a woman, and I was just a man surrounded by the scattered pieces of a family who barely even acknowledged me and a company that I’d sacrificed everything for to create. I wouldn’t be diverted again.
When she came downstairs around lunchtime in just a short silky robe with her hair loose and wet from the shower—apparently she enjoyed bathing more than once a day—I didn’t even look away from the financial reports scrolling on the TV. She’d probably come to tell me she was leaving, and I had no intention of reacting one way or another. She was free to go. I was having my security people head to the Marblehead house today to fit the property with a state-of-the-art system, so beyond gathering the rest of her things, she wouldn’t be in danger since she would no longer have free lodging there. Her days of sneaking onto the property were over. As difficult as it was, she needed to let go of the past.
So did I.
But she wasn’t about to be ignored. She sat on the coffee table in front of the couch, her bare legs bumping mine either by accident or by design. Then she leaned backward on her hands, the movement enough to make her robe gape. One glance was all it took for me to glimpse the side of her pale full breast, pressed tight to the fabric. Goddamn her.
“I want my job back.”
My fingers tightened around my pencil. I’d resumed studying the figures on the legal pad in my lap rather than ogle her taut nipples outlined by her satin kimono, but that statement brought my attention right back to her. Only to realize she was pulling a Basic Instinct Sharon Stone move and wasn’t wearing any fucking panties. She was sitting in front of me, legs spread but not lewdly so, hair swinging, asking for her job back while she was the next thing to naked. Knowing how it would seem and not caring.
She was using her weapons to play me now, and I’d be damned if I fell right in line.
“I fired you.”
“So you did. It wasn’t for cause. You know I’m the best damn assistant you’ll ever have. No one else can work with your cantankerous ass.” She leaned forward and the kimono didn’t entirely move with her. The material was still far too open, and I had to curl my hands into fists beside my hips to stop myself from ripping it apart to get to the multiple treasures beneath.
Those firm, perfect breasts. That sweet, succulent pussy I could still taste when I swallowed. I wanted nothing more than to sink into the haven between her creamy thighs, even as her knowing eyes sparkled with their witchy secrets.
Witches didn’t scare me. But Grace Copeland’s power over me fucking terrified me.
“I’m not hiring.”
“Oh really? You’re not hiring or you’re not hiring m
e?”
I leaned forward until we were nose to nose. “Where’s your résumé? Written in soap crayon beneath your tits?”
She set her jaw for just long enough that I thought maybe she’d go away and leave me be.
Then she tugged on her belt and the robe fell open, revealing everything I could sketch in vivid detail from memory.
Nice try, Carson.
“Nope, guess again,” she said cheerfully.
I had a voice left. I knew I did, somewhere. I also knew I couldn’t turn away from all her lusciousness spread out in front of me, or else she would win. What, I wasn’t even sure, other than there was a hell of a lot more going on here than her wanting to be my assistant.
“Okay, Ms. Copeland, I’ll bite.” I smiled thinly and aimed the remote at the TV to shut it off. “What’s your angle?”
She fussed with her robe, tugging it together without belting it closed. Why should she bother? Then it would just be more difficult the next time she wanted to flash me and render me mute.
“Angle? Why, I don’t know what you mean. I’m just a dedicated employee, campaigning for her job. I’m willing to do whatever you require.” Slowly, she licked her lips. “You know I don’t have any problem with overtime.”
“Do the words ethical boundaries mean anything to you?”
“Hmm. Thinking.” She tapped a fingertip against her glossy mouth. “Pretty sure you were the one who fucked me brainless in the vestibule of your company when I hadn’t so much as given you a sidelong look. So if one of us has a problem with those, it ain’t me, sugar. Though I guess that’s a family trait, right? Isn’t that what you said?”
The stitch in my side wasn’t the burn from her twisting the knife. It wasn’t, but it sure felt that way. I’d hurt her this morning. Unsurprising, since I’d meant to.
