by Kara Chase
Chapter Fourteen
Vivian
The moment I hear the key sliding into the lock and then the door swinging back, I can’t stop my heart from jumping inside my chest. It starts racing fast and my knees grow weak as I hear Lucien’s voice.
Did I really miss him this much?
God, why the hell do I feel so thrilled about the fact that he’s come home? Maybe it has to do with the fact that we kissed the last time we were together?
Oh, that definitely has to do something with it.
See, ever since he left the apartment, grumbling about getting an attorney, I haven’t been able to think about anything else.
I simply can’t shake him off my mind. Sure, I dragged my ass to work this morning, but I was barely able to concentrate. And that’s a first for me, you know?
From my first day at Harvard to, well, yesterday, I’ve been the most laser focused person in New York. You don’t get to be one of the most feared corporate lawyers in the country just because you’re pretty. No, I gave all my tears and blood to get to where I am today.
If I’m in this penthouse right now, that’s because I’ve never let any man distract me from my goals.
But ever since Lucien stepped into my life, I spend my days in a walking daze. It all worsened after yesterday.
That kiss. God.
How can I forget the way our lips connected? The way his body felt when pressed against mine? That hardness of his growing against my inner thigh?
I swear to god, I don’t think I’ve ever hated anyone as much as I hate Edwin Snodgrass right now. If it weren’t for that pretentious fat asshole, Lucien would have been mine right there and then.
I would have buried my fingernails deep into his muscular chest, force him to go down on the floor, and I would ride him until every single muscle on my body was on fire. But no, Mr. Condo Board President had to come and interrupt us.
Can’t I ever get a break?
Sure, I know I probably shouldn’t be this into Lucien, but what do you want? It’s not like I can control my body—seriously, it feels as if every single fiber of my being yearns for him.
I need to find out just how much pleasure he can give me. And, just between us, I’m pretty sure it’ll be an insane amount of pleasure. The kind that makes your juices run down your legs, and makes you go into a coma for a whole week.
Just my kind of pleasure.
I strut to the middle of the living room and flashing him a grin. He has a frozen look on his face, his eyes on the exercise bench and our Nora Roberts books.
“You arrived just in the nick of time, by the way,” I tell him, smiling. “We were just discussing about how most men really aren’t worth our time and energy.”
He looks up. For a few seconds, he simply stares into my eyes, an expression of disbelief on his face. Then, with his arms folded over his chest, he allows his gaze to roam over the six women I brought up to the apartment today.
They’re not exactly my friends—more like acquaintances from my time at Harvard—but they all jumped at the chance to drink expensive wine for free at the most exclusive location in New York.
And really, who can blame them?
All of them are either divorced or single, and you really don’t have to spend a lot of time trying to figure out why. They either have some serious hangups about men, or have allowed themselves to let go in a ridiculous way.
I mean, just look at Trina; she was just bemoaning about the fact that men never give her the time of day...and she’s sitting on my couch, stuffing herself on ice-cream as if the apocalypse is tomorrow, and she’d have to go without food for two decades.
Not to mention that she smokes a pack a day—that kind of shit will ruin your skin in ways you won’t even believe. Trust me, if you want to look like an old hag by the time you’re thirty five all you gotta do is pick up a serious cigarette addiction.
As my gaze returns to Lucien, I find my heart sinking for a second. He looks tired of all the bullshit and for a moment, I almost think that he’s going to give up on the apartment right here and now. I can already imagine him throwing his keys at me and bolting out the door with a “fuck it, I’m tired of this bullshit.”
But that’s exactly what I want to happen.
Right?
“Now this,” Lucien says, his lips slowly curling into a smile as he looks at the woman gathered in the living room, “is what I like. Coming home to a house full of beautiful women.”
What the fuck? Is this how he’s going to play it?
“Oh, stop it,” Trina says, waving away his words. “I know men, and their flattery doesn’t work on me.”
Even though she’s trying to be dismissive, I’ve noticed that she hasn’t blinked even once after Lucien stepped inside the apartment. In fact, I don’t think any of them did. They’re staring at him as if they’ve just seen a man for the first time, and I almost feel afraid for Lucien.
Who knows what a pack of desperate women might do to a man like him?
Hey, I’m a lawyer; I’ve seen some weird shit go down.
“Flattery?” Lucien asks Trina, one hand on his chest as if she’s offended him, or as if he doesn’t even understand his words.
“Whatever do you mean?”
He moves right toward the couch where she’s sitting with Ellen, another of my former Harvard colleagues, a divorced woman, and three times at that, all before hitting thirty -five.
Almost casually, Lucien plops himself down on the couch, right between Trina and Ellen.
“What are you ladies drinking?” he asks them, with that damned smile of his slicing across his face.
He reaches for the bottle of white wine sitting on the coffee table.
Looking at each one of the women, all of them now circling him like a pack of hungry hyenas that just spotted a fleshy carcass, he starts refilling their glasses.
I stand there, just taking in the scene with my mouth hanging open. These women, all cold-hearted bitches, are giggling at each of Lucien’s joke as if they were high school girls suddenly receiving the attention of the team’s quarterback.
What the hell is happening?
Not exactly sure on what I should do, I turn around and make a beeline straight for the kitchen, with the excuse that I’m going to get some more wine.
Well, shit, my plan is backfiring.
I was supposed to piss Lucien off—not to have him bantering with these women. I hand-picked the biggest men-haters I knew, and still, here they are, completely over the moon with Lucien Parker. I thought that they’d hate an asshole like him, but they’re eating right out of his hand.
Collecting my thoughts, I close my eyes for a few seconds and take a deep breath.
Alright, Vivian, you can do this—don’t let this asshole get to you, I command myself.
I know he’s trying to play me, and I won’t let that happen. All I have to do is go back to the living room, direct the conversation to how bad all men are, and all the women will follow suit. That has to piss him off.
Maybe I’ll get them to start talking about our Nora Roberts stories—or better yet, a Nicholas Sparks novel...
Lucien ought to love that.
Confident that my plan is as perfect as it could ever be, I return to the living room. My heart immediately starts to drop as I hear a wave of raucous laughter, all the women in the room giggling like crazy at something Lucien said.
When I get there, bottle of cold white in my hands, my jaw almost drops to the floor as I see Trudy has removed her shirt. She’s on her bra now, laying back on the couch, while Lucien pours some whisky into her belly. As he does this, Trina leans in and does a body shot right out of Trudy’s exposed belly.
The other four women are around them, clapping their hands and jumping up and down like idiotic bimbos on their first frat party.
“Hey, Viv,” Lucien calls out to me, waving the bottle of whisky he has on his hands. “Care to join the fun?”
He flashes me an evil grin. O
ne that says I win this round.
“These friend of yours want to do some shots, and then we were thinking about playing some strip poker. What do you think?”
Motherfucker.
He thinks he can foil my plan and not expect me to respond?
Well he has no idea, babe.
This war has just started.
Chapter Fifteen
Lucien
Now I’m not usually a man who tosses and turns at night. I usually sleep the deep sleep of someone who’s done a whole fucking lot of work during the day and is exhausted from working, playing, fucking, and ruling the world. The next day holds promise, and I’m sleeping because I’m going to wake up refreshed and make it my bitch.
But tonight?
Tonight, I lie on my bed, restless. Sleep is as far away from me as a Made-In-USA tag in a Chinese sweatshop. I swear to fucking God. There’s no way I can sleep with images of Vivian fucking Sweet running through my head.
Yeah, I managed to come in and be that guy in high school that those poor ladies never got to show them any affection.
It was harmless fun for them. And you know what? If it made the broads feel good, then that’s fine by me. I don’t feel bad showing them a good time and giving them some good memories of a man that they can take with them while they’re all alone in bed.
The fact that it got Vivian seething with anger was worth it, too.
Hell, who the fuck am I kidding? It was the best part.
I knew as soon what was going down as soon as I walked in and saw the six of them doing their man hating bit.
Vivian tried the pink on me. I countered with motherfucking Pink Floyd and scotch.
She tried the sex. I came right up on her space, and we kissed.
And now that little woodland creature is scared.
My, my. How the tables were turned. Sure, I needed to get away for a bit.
But I think it affected Vivian just as much—if not more.
So, what did she do?
She tried the oldest trick in the book. She tried to bring in some of her compadres that aren’t so lucky with women.
Too bad she didn’t realize one thing.
That book that she tried the trick from?
Not only did I already read it—I fucking wrote it.
Thankfully, I can be an easygoing and charming motherfucker when I try to be. I can smile and clean up and say just the right things to get any woman swoon.
Chalk it up to an alcoholic foster parent—the only one I could look up after my dad died.
Always off cheating on his wife. When he wasn’t drinking, he took a shining to me. Seemed to revel in telling me all of his sordid exploits he engaged in behind his wife’s back—fucking the socialites who rode in his limo.
I got the expensive taste in women from him.
From my foster mother who cried herself to sleep every night I got the rule to never fucking lie to a woman. Never hurt her by telling her something you wouldn’t be able to do. Never fucking lead her on.
I make it a point to tell every lady I’m about to bang that I’m not the relationship material they’re looking for.
They’re not going to rescue me.
They’re not going to fucking save me.
Now the problem is Vivian. Fucking. Sweet.
All night after the ladies finally stumbled out of the apartment, she’s been keeping my cock rock fucking hard.
She stripped down to some boy shorts and put on a sports bra and said she had to “clean.”
Bullshit.
I seriously doubt she had anything to clean. Mostly, it was bending over and wiggling her ass in front of my face as she swept and tried to dust.
I know she was making this shit up because I saw her wiggling her ass at me as she picked up a napkin and began to use a duster to dust the hardwood floor of the living room.
I may be a dude. I may be a billionaire. I may even have my head up my ass, if you still don’t like me.
But even I know that you don’t use a duster on the floor, at least, not the same duster you use on a shelf.
Hell no.
You use a blower.
Right? Like those leaf blowers? I never actually see them in action, since I don’t clean my place myself—I mean, for a man with my stature, that’s beneath me.
But still. I’m pretty sure you use a leaf blower.
But despite all that shit, Vivian has it down to a science—more or less. If I can make women feel things they could never possibly feel with any other person, Vivian’s just as capable.
But she does it in a much more fucking insidious way.
See, first, she gets all angry and shit with you.
Then she takes off her clothes, and she fucking tempts you. She shakes her ass around and rubs her tits all over you till you can’t think of anything else in this whole world except her.
Except you’re already fucking angry as fuck at her because little miss perfect expects everyone to get out of her way and bend to her every desire.
Like why should I fucking give up this apartment just because she’s always wanted it? Fuck no. What about what I always wanted?
Where the fuck is that consideration?
See, but that’s her plan.
She’s going to strip down and let you look and salivate at that ass. The one that’s so tight and springy that you could bounce a quarter off it.
Where you put your dick in the middle of her ass cheeks, and you’re in fucking heaven.
See, once she’s done her best to tempt you, then she starts fucking taunting you.
“See anything you like?” she asked as she was dusting the floor.
“Yeah, I do,” I said back to her. “You.”
“You think you’re going to have me?” she asked back.
“I always get what I want,” I said back smoothly.
“Think you’ll get me?” she shot back with a smile.
“You think you’ll get me?” I retorted.
It was a fair question.
She paused and looked at me. She arched her eyebrows.
“You think I want to?”
“I think you’re trying to find out how you can get caught,” I shot back. “I think you want to be pinned down.”
“I chew up alphaholes like you for breakfast, Lucien,” she said with a grin.
I could tell those were fighting words.
“You’ve never seen one bite back before then,” I told her.
“Oh, I’ve never seen a bigger asshole than you, no,” she countered.
“Yeah, it’ll be pretty fucking stretched out after I fuck you in it,” I say with a smirk.
That brought her up short.
She paused, unsure of what to say.
“You’re disgusting,” she finally said.
But come on; I wasn’t believing that shit.
She was standing there, her eyes looking wandering, her hand absently twirling her hair as she looked at me.
She was thinking what it would feel like to have my giant fucking cock inside of her. What the tip of my cock would feel like as it pushed into her and split her open.
It was banter all night long.
“You want me,” I said at one point where she insisted on using a broom to clean the fireplace mantle. I sat there and watched her get on her tiptoes.
“I do not,” she said out loud. “You’re a disgusting asshole of a man who thinks women are just pieces of meat that he can slobber over.”
“You want me to slobber over you though, baby,” I said with a smirk.
Keep it up, bub, is what I was thinking. Fuck her. Get her to leave the apartment.
Was I thinking that?
Or was I using the apartment as a shield to get close to her?
“Besides,” I remember her telling me, turning to face me and putting two hands on her hips. “I have a friend coming tonight.”
I remember my heart freezing at those words.
Who the fuck?
What the
fuck?
She had a fucking friend? Coming to our apartment?
“What is she here for?” I asked, trying to be smooth.
What the hell had gone wrong? Where was the old Lucien Parker who didn’t a rat’s ass who came over where?
“He,” Vivian said, putting emphasis on the gender. “He’s a he. And he is coming to help me celebrate the new apartment.”
“This place?” I asked. “That I bought?”
“That I bought, too,” she shot back. “And yes…he’s going to…”
“What?” I interrupted her. “Is he going to fuck you?”
I remember there was a quiet pause. And then in her eyes, I saw that this in that battle, I’d lost to her.
“A lady doesn’t kiss and tell, Lucien,” she said with a malicious smile. “Better luck next time.”
And now I’m lying on my bed with my hands under my head, wide awake and staring at the ceiling. I can’t get what happened out of my head. It’s like every interaction with her goes on replay when I’m alone or doing nothing.
I am so fucking wound up over this girl.
Fuck.
I should just go tell Vivian and get this all out in the open.
Tell her I’ve never been in this situation before.
And that’s when I hear it.
A doorbell.
I hear voices at the door—Vivian talking to someone else.
This must be her fucking gentleman caller. I
hear her footsteps on the floor—and I’d know it’s her anywhere.
It’s like she actively tried to avoid areas that would mask sound.
She wanted me to hear. And so
I hear her door open, and I hear Vivian laughing a bit—a giggle.
I can’t believe she’s doing this.
She was fucking serious.
She’s bringing another man into the fucking house.
But that’s not the worst part.
Fuck sleep. There’s no way I’m sleeping now.
