by Chloe Hawk
Jeffrey reached his hand up to hail a cab, and a second later, he was herding me into the back of it. But then Jeffrey’s phone rang, and he answered the call, stepping away from the car for a moment.
“I’m sorry, Avery,” he said when he returned, speaking to me through the window. “I have to handle something back at my office.” He reached into his wallet and pulled out a bunch of crinkled bills, then leaned down and mumbled something to the cab driver. “He’ll take you to the station to fill out a report,” Jeffrey said to me. “I’ll call you later.”
Don’t bother, I wanted to say, again marveling at how someone so successful and rich could be such a complete ass. It was just another reminder of how unfair the world could be.
But before I could say anything, the cab was pulling out onto the street, leaving me to watch Jeffrey getting smaller in the rearview mirror as we left him standing in front of the restaurant.
***
An hour later, I’d filled out a police report and given my statement to a detective, although the police didn’t seem too confident I’d get my purse back. They acted like this was a run-of-the-mill occurrence. And when you added that to the fact that I hardly had any money in my purse, they seemed completely unmotivated.
Cole, however, didn’t think it was a common occurrence at all.
I’d asked the police to call him for me as soon as I realized I wasn’t going to back to the office on time. They’d let him know what happened, and twenty minutes later, he came storming into the station.
I watched him as he stomped up to the reception desk, but I’d been done for a few minutes and had been sitting in the lobby waiting for him.
“Cole,” I called.
He turned, his eyes blazing with fury. He crossed the lobby and looked me up and down, his eyes lingering over every inch of my body. I felt that familiar heat course through me, the same turned on feeling I got whenever he was close.
He took my hands and turned them over in his, checking me for marks. “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you hurt?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I’m not hurt.”
He continued inspecting me, pushing my hair back from my face, running his finger over my cheekbone, like he wasn’t going to believe I was okay until he saw it for himself. But as soon as he was satisfied I hadn’t been harmed, his whole demeanor instantly changed.
“I told you not to leave the office, Avery,” he said. “What the hell were you doing?”
“I went to lunch at Ride.”
“You went to lunch? What the hell were you doing at Ride by yourself?”
I bit my bottom lip, wondering if I should tell him I was with Jeffrey. Talking to Jeffrey was yet another thing Cole had told me not to do. But he hadn’t told me why. And if he was expecting me to do what he said, then he needed to at least tell me the reasons for his rules. It was only fair.
“I wasn’t by myself.” I jutted my chin into the air, daring him to get mad. “I was with Jeffrey.”
He didn’t say anything, and his silence permeated the room until it had somehow taken over – even the soft murmur of voices coming from the back of the police station and the keystrokes of the receptionist typing away on the computer seemed to have stopped. It wasn’t that the sounds had actually come to a halt -- it was that I was so strongly anticipating what Cole was going to say that everything else had ceased to exist.
But he stayed quiet. He didn’t yell or freak out, or do anything that gave even the slightest indication he was angry or upset.
His face went completely blank. His jaw twitched and his eyes burned, but then the light burned out and his eyes, too, went blank.
And then, after a moment, he turned and walked out of the police station.
I ran after him, pushing open the door and spilling out onto the sidewalk.
He was already a few paces ahead of me, his legs so long that each of his strides equaled two of mine.
“Cole!” I called.
I started after him, the crowd swallowing me up as I went. When I finally caught up to him, I reached out and touched his back.
He turned to look at me.
“What?’ he demanded.
“What?” I repeated.
“Yes,” he said. “What? What could you possibly say that is going to make the fact that you left my office in the middle of the day to hang out with Jeffrey after I specifically forbid you from doing either of those things, be okay? Because I’m really interested to hear.”
His voice was laced with heat, his tone daring me to come up with an excuse that would please him. I imagined this was how he’d gotten to be so successful, how he’d been able to build his company from the ground up. I thought about him yelling at his employees in the boardroom, demanding the impossible from them, what the consequences would be if they didn’t do what he asked.
I thought about him looking at Kalia like this, demanding she please him, and bitter envy singed my body. I hated that I was jealous of her, hated that I didn’t like Cole demanding things of anyone but me. It was completely twisted and fucked up. And yet, his expectations of me, as crazy as they were, felt somehow comforting, almost like he believed in me and thought I could be something more than what I was.
“I’m not your prisoner, Cole,” I said.
“No one said you were.”
“You didn’t have to! You told me I had to stay in the building, even during lunch.”
“That’s what you agreed to.”
“To be your prisoner?”
“No,” he growled. “To do what I say and live by my rules.”
“But you won’t answer any of my questions.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I’m not okay with that.” I crossed my arms over my chest.
“Then you shouldn’t have agreed to it.”
“I didn’t know what I was agreeing to when I agreed!” I sounded like a child, but I didn’t care.
Cole closed his eyes and took in a deep breath through his nose. “Avery,” he said. “Do you understand what it feels like to be worried about you? The burden it is to keep you safe every second of every day?”
“I never asked you to do that,” I said.
A woman passing by jostled into me, and I tottered on the heels I was wearing and stumbled a bit, trying to regain my footing. Cole reached out and grabbed me around the waist, his big hands making me feel tiny. He pulled me toward him, his chest crushing into mine. He smelled like mint toothpaste and expensive cologne and a laundry detergent that I recognized as the one I used at home. I breathed in his scent, my body on fire.
“You okay?” he asked.
I nodded. He’d pulled away from me a tiny bit, but his face was still only inches from mine, his lips soft and full.
Kiss me, I thought. I want to taste you. If you kiss me, if you slide your tongue into my mouth and take me, I’ll do whatever you want. I promise.
For a moment, I thought he actually was going to kiss me. Desire flashed across his face, and I saw him fighting it, saw him trying to tamp down what he was feeling. I wanted to tell him not to, that I was feeling it too, that I didn’t care that we were out on the street in front of everyone, that he should do whatever he wanted to me.
His hand tightened around my waist, his grip strong, almost as if he was holding on to me as an anchor, waiting for his urge to pass before it pulled him under.
After a minute, he released me.
He began walking down the street.
“Where are you going?” I asked, once again trying to keep up with him.
“To my car,” he said.
Sure enough, his car was parked against the curb a few feet away. He unlocked the car and opened the passenger side door.
“Get in,” he commanded.
I got in.
A second later, he slid into the driver’s seat next to me. He started the car and the engine purred, just loud and smooth enough to drown out the street noise around us.
&
nbsp; We just sat there for a moment, not saying anything.
Then, finally, his hand moved from the gearshift and onto my knee. His touch was unexpected, and I almost gasped out loud as his fingers pushed the bottom of my dress up just the tiniest fraction, his index finger tracing a lazy pattern on my skin.
I felt myself instantly start to get wet, and I thought about how he’d taken me in that closet at the party, shoved his fingers up inside of me and made me come.
“Do you know what it does to me when you don’t do as I say?” he asked.
“No.”
“Do you know how it feels when I can’t find you, when I have to worry about you?”
“No.”
“It drives me fucking insane, Avery.” His fingers inched up slower, his hand at the top of my thigh now. “It drives me insane thinking about you with him, where I can’t protect you.”
“You can’t be with me all the time, Cole. It’s not realistic.”
“I have to try,” he said. “Because the thought of anything happening to you…” His hand moved higher on my thigh.
“Nothing’s going to happen to me, Cole,” I said.
“You’re right,” he said as his fingers found my panties. I was already wet, and I only got wetter as he traced the outline of my pussy through the thin strip of material. “Because I’m going to do whatever it takes to protect you. Even if you think it’s crazy.”
He grabbed my panties and pushed them over to the side. The cool air-conditioned air of the car hit my bare skin. Cole forked his fingers and spread my pussy expertly with one hand.
His other hand reached up and took my chin, turned my head until I was looking at him.
“But you have to let me,” he said. “You have to let me keep you safe.” The pad of his thumb brushed against my clit, and a soft moan escaped my lips.
“You like that, baby?” he breathed into my ear, his breath hot on my skin. “You like when I touch you there?”
“Yes,” I moaned as he finger went inside of me just a tiny bit.
“Then you have to do what I say, do you understand, Avery?”
“Yes.” I leaned back on the seat and closed my eyes, aware of the people passing on the street. Cole’s car windows were tinted, but the thought of what he was doing to me when there were so many people just on the other side of the glass filled me with excitement.
“You should have called me right away,” he said, his finger pushing further inside of me. He was leaned over the seat, his lips just millimeters from my skin. “I was going out of my mind, thinking of all the horrible things that could have happened to you.”
His finger was all the way inside me now, his thumb still swirling lazily around my clit. My breath came in short gasps as he varied the pressure from light to heavy and back again.
“I’m sorry,” I said, knowing it was what I needed to say if I wanted him to keep touching me the way he was. “I wanted to call you. But my phone was gone. It won’t happen again, Cole. I promise.”
His fingers stopped moving. “What do you mean your phone was gone?” he demanded.
“It got stolen.”
“I thought your purse got stolen.”
“And my phone.”
“Your phone was in your purse?”
I frowned, thinking about it. Had I put my phone back in my purse after Cole had texted me? Or had I just turned it off? “I’m not sure. It might have just been sitting on the table.”
He pulled away from me, his body language changing from one of sensuality to one of frustration and anger. He started the car, and then pulled out onto the street, joining the flow of traffic.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I yanked my dress back down and readjusted my panties. A throbbing need was still humming through my body, like an itch that needed to be scratched.
“What’s wrong,” Cole said, “is that Jeffrey Adams stole your phone so that he could try to get information about my company.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, shaking my head. “Why would he steal my phone to get information about you?”
“Because your phone is hooked up to my server,” he said. “And now he’s had access to it.” We were stopped at a red light now, and he slammed his fist against the steering wheel. “Dammit, Avery,” he said. “You need to listen to me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, feeling the tears fill my eyes. “But can’t you just call and have my phone turned off?”
“I’ve already done that,” he said. “But who knows how long they had the phone before that happened.”
I swallowed, leaning my head back against the car and taking a deep breath. How could I have been so stupid? Of course Jeffrey would have had some ulterior motive, some gross plan for how he could take advantage of me. It had been ridiculously naïve to think I could go to lunch with Jeffrey in order get information about my stepbrother. Cole was right. I should have listened to him.
I thought about the fight those guys had gotten into, how they were well-dressed and eating at a trendy restaurant. Men like that would have never gotten into an argument over something as stupid as who was going to pay for lunch. Most likely it had all been staged ahead of time, just so they could create chaos and make off with my phone.
I thought about Jeffrey leaning down, whispering in the ear of the cabbie. He was probably telling him to take the long way to the police station. Jeffrey knew once Cole found out my phone was gone, he would turn it off. But he’d made sure he’d had just enough time to get whatever it was he was looking for.
I’d been stupid.
But still.
It didn’t give Cole the right to treat me the way he was treating me, giving me the cold shoulder just because I’d made a mistake.
A few minutes later, Cole pulled up in front of a large building. All the buildings in Manhattan were large, but this was a tall skyscraper with mirrored windows that stretched seemingly endlessly into the sky before tapering off into a point.
We both got out of the car and I followed Cole into the lobby of the building.
“Cole Buchanan,” Cole told the security guard at the front desk. “Here for Slipp Studios.”
The security guard didn’t even bother to check Cole’s ID, didn’t even bother to give either one of us a visitor’s badge. He just immediately let him through. I realized, once again, that Cole didn’t live in the same world as everyone else. He got special treatment, special privileges, because he was rich and famous and gorgeous.
We stepped onto the elevator, and Cole pushed the button for the top floor.
“What is the photo shoot for?” I asked.
“An ad for my app,” he said shortly. He was leaning as far away from me as he could get, his shoulder against the other side of the elevator. I was relieved he was speaking to me, but at the same time, I was upset he was still obviously mad.
His phone rang, and he pulled it out of his pocket.
“Buchanan,” he barked into the phone. He listened intently to the person on the other end of the line. “Did they get anything? Okay… Okay. Thanks.” He ended the call and slid his phone back into the inside pocket of his suit.
“Was that about my phone?”
“Yes.” He didn’t offer anything else. I was thinking about whether or not I should press him on it when the elevator doors swung open and we stepped out into Slipp Studios.
The studio took up the entire top floor of the building and was a completely open space. It was bright and airy, with light hardwood floors and beams of sunlight streaming through the floor-to-ceiling windows. There were backdrops and lighting equipment set up in each corner of the room, and against the far windows was a long white table filled with a spread of catered food – fruit and veggie platters, smoked salmon with bagels and flavored cream cheese, and fancy-looking pastries. Little bottles of orange juice and sparkling water peeked out of a bucket of ice.
There was a group of women huddled around a sliding rack full of clothes. One of them had curly red hair and
a camera slung around her neck. One of them was tall and lithe, with dark chestnut brown hair, flawless skin, and rosebud lips. The other one was Kalia.
When she saw us, she came running over.
“Where have you been?” she demanded when she saw me. “We were supposed to get here early to help them set up and approve Cole’s wardrobe!”
I opened my mouth to defend myself, but Cole talked before I could.
“She was with me,” he said, his tone making it clear that Kalia should drop it, that no further explanation would be given.
“Fine,” she said, her eyes darkening. “Well, I’ve gone through the wardrobe and approved it myself. I narrowed it down to two options. They’re waiting for you in the back.”
“Thank you,” Cole said. As he walked by Kalia, he squeezed the top of her arm gently, in a gesture of thanks. Jealousy once again burned through my body, bitter and searing. But underneath that was a tiny bit of shame.
Kalia had been here, helping with Cole’s photo shoot, and I’d been running around behind his back, attempting to dig up information on him. I felt awful.
Kalia turned to look at me. “You might be Cole’s sister, and you might not be taking this job seriously, but I’ve worked hard to get where I am, and I’m not going to let you screw it up.”
“Stepsister,” I corrected her.
She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why do you keep saying that? Do you have a thing for him or something?”
“What?” I asked, a little too loudly. Panic rose in my throat. The last thing I needed was for Kalia to find out I’d been hooking up with Cole. Not after Gordon had called the police, acting like Cole was some kind of brainwasher who was holding me against my will.
Kalia shook her head. “Never mind,” she said, obviously dismissing the idea that Cole could ever be interested in someone like me. “Just make yourself scarce until the photo shoot starts, all right? Don’t talk to anyone, don’t touch anything, and don’t act all wide-eyed around the model, okay?”
I opened my mouth to fire back a retort, but I decided to keep quiet instead. Nothing good could come from fighting with Kalia, and I didn’t want to cause Cole any more problems.
