“I don’t know,” she said, but she knew she was lying.
She did know.
She was falling for him. Deeply, irrevocably, she was falling for Harrison.
But she wanted to be free, not tied to anybody or anything.
That’s what she wanted, she told herself again, but she didn’t convince even herself.
“I do know what I want, Leigh. I want you. I want you to trust me, and accept that I’ll always be there for you. No matter what, I’ll always be there for you. I need you to know that I love you, in so many ways. That will never change. You will always be more important to me than you know, Leigh.”
Leigh looked at him, and finally, she smiled.
He hadn’t asked anything of her – except herself.
And Leigh had figured something out.
She wanted to give him all of herself.
So she offered him all of what she was, and invited him to take.
Chapter 10
“Show me,” she said, her eyes lighting up as she watched him.
He made as if to move away.
But she gripped his hand, and looked at him.
“Show me. Make love to me in your bed. Show me that you need me. I want to show you that I need you, too.”
He nearly groaned as she kissed him, her lips so fierce and demanding that he couldn’t help but wrap his arms around her and take everything she offered.
“Are you sure?” he asked, when they broke apart.
She nodded.
“I am. As sure as I can be,” she told him, and her lips were on his again, moving over his persuasively. Her tongue slid silkily over his, tempting and teasing him into taking what he needed, too.
He didn’t know when his hands took over and started undressing her, but he felt her smooth, soft, rich skin under his hands and he realized that she was undressing him, too. He shrugged out of the last of his clothes and smiled as she growled, pulling him onto her and turning, pressing him down into the bed.
“I want you,” said Leigh, and her words were as fierce as her eyes.
She kissed his face, covering every inch with her soft, sweet lips. Her lips moved down to his neck and kissed, softly, but she was needy and greedy now.
She moaned as his hands drifted down over her back, until he cupped her bottom and squeezed.
She shivered as she felt his fingers slide between her legs and find her so wet and hot for him. She trembled as his fingers, firm and sure, explored those wet, swollen, intimate folds, finding that little hard nub of pure pleasure and touching it, over and over again.
She growled deep in her throat again as her teeth latched onto his neck, sucking and pulling at him until she felt his fingers slide deep inside her, demanding that she respond to him, right then.
She cried out in delight as she felt him inside her, and she moved with him, slowly, steadily.
“You feel so good,” she whispered as she kissed her way down his body.
She kissed his nipples, one after the other, before sucking one into her mouth, softly. She let her teeth graze over it and reveled in how it made him gasp.
But his fingers were still so steady, still moving deep in and out of her, until she was nearly out of her mind with need.
She didn’t want him to stop. But she kissed her way down his body, down his belly, and she felt his fingers slide out of her. She kissed his hips and felt him tremble, and she loved that she could do that to him.
It meant more.
Everything meant more now, because she knew she had opened herself to him in ways she had never done before.
When she kissed his hard manhood, licked the tip of him, swirled her tongue around his head and made him throb for her, she gloried in how he needed her.
She needed him, too.
“Leigh, please!” gasped Harrison.
She knew what he wanted, and she gave it to him, wrapping her lips around his cock and sucking softly. She used her tongue on his tip and tasted him, salty and full of desire.
She licked him up and down his shaft, moaning softly as she felt his body shudder under her.
She moved, bobbing her head up and down, until she felt him begin to tense, ready to release.
But she wasn’t ready for that.
She straddled him, her hand wrapped around him to keep him steady, and waited, poised.
His eyes found hers and she held them, long and steady, before she took him deep inside her.
She started moving, rocking on him, her hips grinding against him slowly and steadily before going faster and faster.
“Oh yes!” cried Harrison, and she started riding him, hard and fast.
She felt his hands on her breasts, covering them, touching her and giving her even more pleasure. His fingers were on her nipples, stroking them softly and pulling at them. She was desperate for more when he rose up and took her nipple into his mouth and started sucking it softly.
She cried out again in pleasure when he switched his attentions to her other nipple, but she didn’t stop. She moved, driving him on and on, and she took, needing more and more.
There was a light in her eyes, a warrior’s gleam, as she pushed him down, making it clear that she was taking control again.
“I’m taking you,” she told him, and Harrison could do nothing more than to let her take whatever she wanted.
He had never seen a sight more glorious than Leigh, letting herself go and taking whatever pleasure she wanted from him. He wanted to give her all of the pleasure, and more.
She cried out as she rode him harder, and harder, driving them both up higher than they thought they could possibly reach.
Leigh felt his hands searching for hers and their fingers interlaced. She held on to him as she rode him, hips pumping, moving together, until their moans and gasps were all that could be heard except for the sounds of their joined bodies moving together.
Leigh drove them, harder and harder, intent on that destination that they both needed. She knew she was driving him nearly past endurance when his body tensed, and she felt him trying, struggling to hold on because he needed her to take her pleasure first.
And she would.
She bent over him, taking his lips in a long, irrevocable kiss as she felt him shatter and climax inside her, with her, and she melted over him, liquid and lax, as their bodies drifted down from that mad scramble, together.
*****
Leigh felt like she couldn’t take it any longer. She had had the most awful week of work she had ever known, and it looked like it would never end.
What could she do?
Her ten days would be done in three days, and Harrison just told her that everything would be sorted out. She didn’t know what he was doing, but mostly because she hadn’t asked.
She wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.
But strangely, she felt like she was at peace. For once, her career didn’t feel like it was all she had. It was important, of course it was. But she wouldn’t fall apart without it. She wouldn’t be nothing without it.
She would still have Harrison, and she was beginning to feel like she might even be happy, at the end of the day.
Maybe she really had changed.
Her phone rang. She smiled, despite the bad day, when she saw that it was Harrison.
“It’s done.”
She was a bit nonplussed.
“What is?”
“I’ve found out what happened, applied judicious pressure and made sure that everything’s taken care of. You should get called in and get an official apology soon. What you do after that is up to you.”
Leigh gripped the edge of the table as if it were her lifeline. Was this really happening?
“What did you do? What’s going on?”
He hadn’t told her much. He’d just told her that he would take care of it while she got on with work, because she had more than enough to worry about already. She didn’t need more stressful things to worry about.
It had grated, lettin
g go of the wheel like that, but she’d recognized that he was right. Trusting him made it a lot easier than she thought it would be, too.
So she had let him handle the matter of finding out the truth. But she hadn’t thought he would decide what to do after that without asking her.
“I found out the truth and got my lawyers to get in touch with your boss, with proof, letting him know that you would be well entitled to pursue legal action against them for undue harassment. What you do is up to you.”
“Harrison, I haven’t a clue what’s going on!”
“Didn’t you check your email? You were so tired last night that I let you sleep as late as I could. There was no time after that to talk about it.”
That took the wind out of her sails a bit. So he hadn’t just gone over her head without keeping her in the loop.
And she hadn’t checked her personal email.
“Give me the gist,” she demanded.
“It was Slimy Willie, as you call him. He took the report with him, compromised it, and couldn’t get it back in time to keep it from being discovered. He then altered internal reports and logs to make you look responsible.”
So it had been that simple, had it? And her bosses had believed that she could be so irresponsible, despite her excellent track record.
For a wild moment, Leigh just wanted to chuck everything to the wind and give up.
She stifled that impulse.
“My lawyers are on a conference call with your name partners right now. You should be called in soon, and they should crawl pretty abjectly. You have the upper hand, Leigh. You can do whatever you like.”
As soon as she put the phone down, she was called in, right on cue.
Leigh walked into the conference room used only for the most important of clients.
“Ms. Wells, it has been brought to our attention that…”
“You screwed up and decided to screw me over. Now you want to cover that up with polite, formal speeches,” interrupted Leigh, angrily.
Coleman had the grace to blush.
“Ms. Wells, we owe you an apology. We’re quite aware that you were not treated fairly. Now that all the information has come to light, we see that we were mistaken.”
Trask looked ashen, as if somebody had punched him.
She supposed she could understand that.
“What would you gentlemen like me to do about this now?”
They were taken aback. They hadn’t expected her to ask that.
“Your decisions will be yours, Ms. Wells. If you would like to resign, we’ll make sure that the severance package is more than adequate.”
Trask sounded stiff.
“Your plan is to ask me to resign, bribe me to be quiet, and keep William on with the company?”
“William Trask has been fired,” said Coleman, shortly.
Leigh considered the men in front of her, the men she’d thought held her future in their hands. But now, she realized, they were afraid of her and what she might do.
What would she do?
She would do what she’d set out to do, she realized, and she would be the one to figure out the solution to the problem of the report. She would turn this into her victory.
“The report – I have a way to make it admissible.”
She was prepared. She gave them their solution, and she made it clear that it was her own. She saw the relief, and felt the power in it.
“After this case, gentlemen, I shall be resigning. I’ll take my LSAT, and I will go to law school.”
Nobody looked particularly shocked. She wasn’t shocked, either, when Coleman called her to his office later.
“Ms. Wells, I owe you an apology. Personally.”
She nodded.
She agreed that he definitely did owe her an apology.
“If you need help with your college applications, I’d be happy to help. If you choose to come back to us after you graduate, there will be a spot here for you. I’m well aware that you might choose not to, but you should know that you will have the option. You have an exceptional mind and great tenacity, Ms. Wells. I’ll be sorry to lose you.”
She nodded, hesitated before plowing ahead.
“Thank you, Mr. Coleman. I appreciate that. I’m not going to plan so far ahead at the moment, but it’s good to know.”
She left, feeling lighter than she had in a long time. She appreciated how Harrison had handled it, too. It would’ve been easy enough to make it seem like he had become her savior, but it looked like he had played it all very carefully. Nobody had mentioned him at all.
She didn’t know how he had found out, but she was so grateful that he had.
She had a lot to be grateful for, she realized.
Now, it was time to set one more thing right.
It was time to stop lying, even by omission, to her parents.
*****
“What!”
Leigh smiled at her dad, serenely.
“Daddy, I know it will take you some time to get used to the idea, but we are very happy together. I wouldn’t have told you about it unless I knew it mattered. It does matter, and we plan to stay together. So you should know. I’ll understand if you want us to stay away from you for a while, so you can think it over.”
Martha leaned closer to her.
“Leigh, he’s your brother!”
Leigh shook her head.
“No, he isn’t. He has been one of my closest friends, for all my life, but he was never my brother. Not even my stepbrother, really. He knows me better than anybody else in the world, Mom. You know how things ended with Carl. Would you ask me to give up the one person who knows me and understands me for the sake of some kind of propriety?”
“It’s not right,” said her father abruptly.
“But Daddy, I’m happy. You can’t change this. I want to believe that you wouldn’t want me to change this. I want to believe that you understand how this matters to me. I want to believe that my happiness means enough to you that you’ll see things from my point of view. And Harrison is happy, too. You saw him last time – you saw how happy he was. Have you ever seen him like that before?”
They hadn’t.
Leigh hadn’t expected that first time to go well, but it hadn’t gone as badly as it might have, she decided as she finally left, after an hour spent with her parents.
She dropped by Harrison’s place – which was beginning to seem more and more like her own, too, now, especially since she’d started bringing plants by and he had surprised her with free rein of his far larger terrace.
“Surprise,” she said, and he pulled her into his arms, kissing her long and softly.
“You’ve been up to something. I can feel it,” said Harrison, with a wry grin.
Life with Leigh was full of surprises.
She laughed.
“Well, remember how you handled my problem at work for me?”
He nodded.
“Well, I did something I know you wanted. Without asking you. But it’s something that had to come from me, so don’t be angry. I wanted it to be a surprise, because I thought you really wanted this.”
They sat down, and Harrison was wary.
“I told Mom and Dad.”
He stilled.
“They took it well, all things considered,” said Leigh, getting nervous.
“You told them?”
She nodded.
“Without me?”
She shrugged.
“Well, Dad would’ve punched you. You know that.”
That was possibly true, Harrison had to admit.
“Why did you tell them?”
Leigh smiled softly.
“Because I love you, and I don’t want any more secrets. I want no secrets, Harrison. I love you, and I want everybody to know that.”
Harrison’s hands were on hers, gripping hers so tightly that she wondered if he even knew how strong he was.
His grip loosened when she winced.
“Say that again,” he demand
ed.
“I love you,” she told him, and found herself wrapped in his arms, held so tightly that she thought he might never let her go.
“You love me,” he murmured, finally, against her cheek.
She smiled as she held on to him, too.
“Is it a good surprise?” she asked, her voice muffled against his neck.
She felt his breath tickling her as he laughed.
“Oh, it’s the best ever. But I think we should give them a few weeks to get used to the idea.”
Leigh pulled away and grinned.
“Mom looked like she might come to terms with it soon enough. Dad will take some more time. You know, it does help that you never called them mom and dad. Things would’ve been a bit more awkward if you had.”
Harrison grinned, but quickly turned serious.
“You do know that I’ll have to go and see Samuel soon, and possibly get punched in the face. I can’t even hit him back.”
Leigh shook her head.
“He won’t. They want you to be happy as much as they want me to be happy, Harrison. They will come to terms with it.”
*****
Over the next few weeks, so it turned out. Martha was the first to reach out, as Leigh had expected. The conversation started out stilted, but it wasn’t too bad.
Martha came into the city and met them both, and while it was a bit stiff, they soon loosened up.
“This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be. And both of you do look happy,” said Martha, finally.
Leigh smiled.
“You know, Mom, I remember overhearing a conversation between you and Harrison’s mom, a long time ago.”
Martha’s eyes misted as she recalled what Leigh was talking about. Leigh realized, immediately, that she had struck the right note.
“You said that it would be wonderful if Harrison and I ended up together. You said we’d fit well together.”
Martha nodded, a faraway look in her eyes.
“I know. I thought things changed too much after that. And mothers say things like that all the time. We want our children to be so happy that we plan entire happy lives for them. But we know that we can only do so much. We have to let our children do the living.”
“You’re letting us live, Martha. We’re choosing well. You knew it even then.”
Martha nodded slowly and a little sadly.
This Was Meant To Be: BWWM Romance Page 11
