by Avery Laval
For a moment, she felt too brazen from this vantage, her body poised above him as if it was on display. But when she looked into his eyes, she saw only pleasure at the sight of her, and that let her relax and enjoy the sensation of control. She lowered herself over him and up again, slowly, enjoying the tortured sighs Grant emitted, and driving herself wild with anticipation. When he could take no more, he grabbed her bottom with both hands and took back control of their lovemaking, raising his hips up and down to an ever more frantic pace. Jenna let her upper body collapse above him, and then the tremors began, the frantic pleasure that made her cry out his name twice, then three times, before she felt the waves of relaxation that followed her intense climax. While she shuddered, she felt his body seem to seize under her, and then came the rush of his orgasm hot on the heels of her own.
When they both fell back down to earth, they were in each other’s arms, side by side, legs flush against the other’s, breathing hard. Any doubt in Jenna’s mind was gone—she had done the right thing in coming here, even if their pleasure would only be short-lived. Because whatever this was, this electric current running between them, it was more real than anything she’d ever felt before. Too real to be ignored for the sake of being sensible or wise. Real enough to rush toward with both arms open, to beg for more as long as he would give it, to spend as long as he would let her, right here, inside his embrace, breathless with pleasure.
Hours later, as they lay in bed, Grant running his fingers along the line of Jenna’s hips and up her torso, a realization cut through Jenna’s fogged mind. Her first instinct was to bury it—after all, they were naked, tangled in sheets, spent but not nearly sated—but she knew she couldn’t do that. She had to ask.
“I know I didn’t exactly think things through before we…” She looked for the right words. Saying they’d simply “had sex” didn’t feel right, but then, could she use the words “make love” without him knowing just how much the act had meant to her?
“Fell into bed together?” Grant said, and with a heartsick twinge, Jenna realized that was exactly the right phrase for what they had done.
“Right. I didn’t think it over very carefully before we ‘fell into bed together,’ as you say. But I have my head back now—”
“That’s a situation I can easily rectify,” Grant said, laying a chain of kisses over her shoulders and up her neck.
Jenna shivered from the electric sensation, but forced herself to wriggle out of his reach for just a moment. “I have to know: Why did you wait so long to tell me the truth about my father? It doesn’t make me love him any less to know what was really going on back then. You could have pointed out the truth a long time ago and saved me a lot of anger and guilt.” Not to mention diffused the grudge she’d held against Grant for years.
Grant’s face softened, and he rolled closer to her again, so he could touch her lips softly with his finger. “No. I couldn’t have told you the truth—the full truth—then. Your father was a rash man, yes, but I don’t think he deserved to have his reputation ruined a few weeks after his death, just so I could feel like the nice guy.”
Jenna blinked. “I can’t believe you put his reputation before your own.”
“Not just his reputation,” Grant said softly, moving his hand down to rest softly at her throat. “Yours as well.”
The words rocked her as she realized their truth. The family’s name had remained unscathed, and the company had remained solvent. All because Grant and the board had kept the seedier details of the situation to themselves.
“But why?” she asked. “Why would you do that for me, after all that happened between us?”
Grant rolled to his back and looked up at the vaulted ceiling, his expression unreadable. “After all you’d been through, I didn’t want to take away the belief you had in your father. No one deserves that.”
Jenna heard a hard edge to his voice, and knew there was more to the story than that. That she had no idea what it was only drew her attention to how little she knew him, even after experiencing the kind of passion they’d shared. Well, that wasn’t quite right. Somehow she felt as if she’d known him forever, and yet, there were still so many questions.
“Did that happen to you?” she asked, following the hunch. When he was silent, she added, “You’ve never mentioned your parents before. Why is that?”
“There’s not much to tell,” he said, his voice just a touch more distant than it had been moments ago.
“Of course there is. Tell me.”
Grant set his jaw and looked at her sideways for a moment, before he began to speak. “No mother. At least, not for long. She split when I was five or six. Not one for parenting, I guess. And, in her defense, life married to my father would have been hard.” His voice was matter-of-fact, but Jenna’s heart broke a little at the thought of a young boy coming home and finding his mother had opted out of his life as easily as that.
“Oh, Grant. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. Growing up just me and my dad was great fun. He loved me, of that I had no doubt, and he wanted to show me everything about the world. We went fishing every chance we could, had season tickets for all my favorite teams, and he never missed a game when I was the one playing, either.” Grant’s face was soft, unfocused as he lost himself in the memory. “And he taught me a lot. He knew how to read people better than anyone else I’ve ever met. Could sum a person up in a few seconds, and know everything about them from there on. It was quite a talent.”
Jenna picked up on the past tense he was using. “He sounds like an amazing man. When did he pass on?”
“Pass on?” Grant snorted and propped himself up on his elbows. “Hardly. He’s been in jail for ten years.”
Jenna’s jaw dropped open as she too sat up and pulled the sheet around herself. Grant’s father was in jail?
“Surprise you, did I?”
“I…” she stammered, quickly regretting the way she’d pushed him for information. No wonder he was tight-lipped about his family. “I’m so sorry, Grant. I should have left you alone, not dredged up all these painful issues.”
“It’s not painful,” he said, too quickly. “It was a long time ago.”
“What happened? I mean, do you even know how he ended up there?”
“Of course I know. I put him there.”
Jenna thanked the heavens she was sitting down. If she’d been standing, she would have collapsed in surprise. “Did you just say—”
“I did indeed. So take your jaw off the floor.”
Jenna tried to do just that, embarrassed that her reaction was so out of proportion with his. “But you sound so casual about it.”
“It’s old news,” he said. “At the time, the decision was the hardest thing I’d ever had to do. I agonized over it for weeks. But it was the right path to take, so there’s no point on looking back on it now.” He spoke with that infuriating finality he so often displayed.
“What happened?”
Grant shrugged. “I had just graduated from business school,” he began. “And my father had just started a new enterprise and needed a team of managers to run things. He’d secured millions of dollars in investor funds to serve as start-up capital, and the company seemed enormously promising, even though he’d never hit it big in business before. So I came aboard, along with a few of my best friends from B-school, really brilliant guys who could take the capital and the concept and turn it into a monster force in the marketplace. We all believed so much in the project, and were so energized by the opportunity.”
“But then?” Jenna asked, wondering what any of this had to do with prison.
“But then a few months in, the paychecks stopped coming and I noticed a few curiosities in some of the financial paperwork. I confronted my father about it at the time, but he could explain everything away. And the truth was, at 25, I didn’t really understand the finer points of the investment strategies he’d used for all those millions of dollars of capital. All I knew was that my fa
ther was a bright man and was perfectly capable of handling those details himself.”
Jenna shook her head, confused, and urged him to go on.
“Another month or two went by, and soon, even with my head in the sand as it had been, I found signs of something so wrong that they were impossible to miss. I realized that I had to get a handle on the realities of the situation, so I started digging into the banking statements and records on my own, behind my father’s back. And that’s when I realized what was happening.”
A lightbulb went on in Jenna’s head. “Oh no,” she said, wishing she could change the outcome she felt was surely coming.
“Oh yes. He’d stolen every last penny. The company was a con, an elaborate setup designed to part a few wealthy venture capitalists with millions of dollars virtually overnight, and my friends and I were no more than cogs in the phony wheel he’d built. It had all been an act on my father’s part, and when I confronted him with the truth and told him to return the money, he refused.”
“No!” cried Jenna. “How could he put his own son in such a horrible position?”
Grant shook his head, as if to say he didn’t understand it any better than she did. “He said he knew me, and knew I would never turn him in to the authorities, because he’d done nothing but dupe a bunch of rich fools who got what was coming to them for failing to do their homework. And at first, he was right. I didn’t do a thing, paralyzed with indecision. But eventually, I did the right thing. I reported him to the SEC and the feds, testified against him in court, and sat one row behind the prosecutor when the jury declared him guilty on three counts of fraud.”
“Unbelievable,” Jenna said. She looked at Grant’s hard-set jaw and thought of all he’d gone through, of how hard it must have been to turn in his own father. The idea of it made her want to cry. Her own father had been rash, yes, and he’d risked losing ownership of the company with his overzealous impulses, but he’d never stolen from a soul, much less the very people who believed in his vision. The thought of it would have disgusted him.
“The judge sentenced him to fifteen-to-twenty in a minimum security prison. That was ten years ago, and I haven’t seen him since, nor do I care to.” Grant rolled his shoulders back, as though he were literally putting that time behind him.
“My God. I can’t believe how different you are from him.”
Grant turned his face to hers for a long moment, with a look of what almost seemed like surprise. “Thank you.”
Jenna lay back, taking all this in. No wonder he was such a relentlessly driven man. “You risked everything to go work for him so early in your career. And surely passed up better offers from real entrepreneurs.”
“Yes.” He said, his lips forming a hard line. “I did. But more importantly, so did my friends. I vouched for my father and they all found themselves out of a job with tarnished reputations, just six months into their careers.”
“Of course you vouched for him! He was your father. Surely they had to understand that.”
Grant inclined his head. “Some did, some didn’t. Some of them believed I was involved in the criminal activity myself. But each of them pulled himself out from behind the setback and went on to be successful businessmen. Like Knox Madden.”
“You’re kidding. Knox? Clearly he didn’t take it personally—you guys seem like such good friends.”
“Even better now. So you see, some good came out of it. And I learned a lesson I won’t ever forget.”
Jenna turned to him, curious as to what he’d taken away from such a terrible situation. “Namely?”
“That trust has no place in business. I was blindsided, but think of the people who invested their hard-earned money in my father—that would have been devastating. I won’t ever make that mistake—I’ve never gone into any situation as unprepared as I was back then and I’ve never trusted anyone the way I trusted my father. And I’ve got a million-dollar portfolio to show for it.”
Jenna thought of this and her heart sank. Could he really believe that nothing good could come out of a little trust? A little faith? How would she have gotten through the last six years if she hadn’t had a big helping of blind faith in the face of her harsh reality? “You’re wrong,” she blurted. “You have to trust people to be successful in life. It’s the only way you can ever be close to someone and relax with them.”
Grant’s body seemed to tense up at her words. “I relax knowing I can trust my own judgment,” he said, his voice growing harsh. She was in dangerous territory here, Jenna knew, but she couldn’t stop herself. She had to make him see her point. For there was no sense in denying it anymore: she was falling for him, and the only way he could fall back was if he let himself trust her. Would he ever be able to have faith in her? she wondered. And if not, what was she getting herself into?
She sat up, quickly, letting the sheet drop low on her body, not caring anymore about modesty. “But you’re missing out on so much if you don’t show a little faith in people every now and then.”
He shot her a look so steamy she wondered if he’d heard her, until he said, “I have no intention of missing out on anything whatsoever.” And with that, he circled her waist in one large hand and pulled her from her side of the bed to his, where he seared her lips, then her neck, then her breasts with his fiery kisses. Having no other choice, Jenna arched her head back in pleasure and let the subject drop.
13
Saturday evening and most of Sunday were lost this way, in the heat of lovemaking, and then the intimacy that followed. As they lay exhausted and exposed, their pillow talk morphed into the sort of conversation that might be shared by lifelong friends. Grant found himself struggling to keep Jenna at arm’s length. This was going past seduction, he feared. This was getting dangerous.
It was time, he knew. Time to cool things down. Get on the phone and find her a new gig. Get her set up for Monday. He couldn’t let his impulsive feelings steer him away from the things that really mattered in the long term. Blakely Corp. McCormick. His employees, his suppliers, his customers. His work.
The decision was as good as made when, just then, she finished a languid bath in his big Jacuzzi tub and emerged from the bubbles looking more delicious than ever. All reason vanished from his mind, replaced once again by desire. One more taste of her, he thought. A quiet, menacing voice reminded him, it wasn’t just the taste he was after. It was the bliss in her arms that came after. It was the way she looked at him, propped up on one elbow as he lay flat on his back. Her eyes full of curiosity, mingling with hard-won compassion.
He silenced the voice. Told himself it was sex, just sex. He went to her, carried her back to the bathroom, stood her up in the large glass shower and turned on a warm rainfall shower head above her. He turned his warring emotions into pure sexual energy and locked eyes with her in a way that would tell her: be ready.
She was. She did not whimper and submit when he joined her under the spray of water and used his imposing body to confine her to the marble wall. Instead she looked back into his stare and put her hands on his shoulders, then on his jaw, and yanked, pulling his face to hers, taking his mouth in a fierce, demanding kiss. It was enough. His cock sprang to attention. He reached out of the shower and fumbled to find the condom he’d left on the sink.
“I want you now,” he muttered into her mouth.
In response, she pulled away enough to snake her arms around his shoulders and lift one leg up, twining it around his ass. His mouth went dry. Yes, he thought, and hoisted her up so both legs were wrapped around his waist. This was exactly what he wanted. How could she know? How could she have what she clearly wanted, and make him feel like he was the one in control?
“So take me,” she told him, and tipped back her head so that at the same moment as his cock felt the sweet wetness—partly Jenna, partly the water sluicing between them—her eyes fluttered shut in pleasure not yet delivered, but fully anticipated. He pushed at her entry and finally, meeting a torturous resistance, leaned her bod
y the rest of the way against the marble and used the shower wall as he would a bed. And when, then, at last, her body seemed to pull his shaft into her, he pretended he still felt some semblance of control.
His hands were needed to support her weight. Her arms remained wrapped around his shoulders. Their height difference made kissing almost impossible, and it wasn’t kissing he wanted anyway. He put his whole mind on the thrust into her, the sweet tension of withdrawal, and he thrust again.
How long did that last? Grant had no idea. He felt only her body against his, the shower raining on his back, the water against his calves, the sensation of her thighs clamping tightly against his hips. And the inside of her, the walls of her body welcoming him, his cock receiving delicious friction on every nerve-laden inch. And then, somehow, he felt her squeeze him and was shattered back to her, and looked her in the eyes and saw her raise her eyebrows with just the shadow of a playful smile.
Now? He wanted to beg. And then, damn it all, he heard the words come out of his mouth. “Now?”
She licked her lips, and he took every inch of control he had to slow himself. “Soon,” she said, and he saw that beyond Jenna’s capacity for compassion and curiosity, there was a woman here wrapped around him, a woman making him crazy, who made love like it was something she was born to do.
He would not rush her. That would be criminal.
He slowed his thrusts. He bent his head to her neck, biting her there, sometimes playfully, sometimes this side of rough, and in so doing he changed his angle. Soon it was enough to take her from the brink of control, to drive her toward same need he was lost to. Now she began to give back with her hips, to moan, and the vibrations of those moans were transmitted to his lips through the long sweet skin of her neck.
