by Lauren Layne
She pushed the thought aside. Ex-boyfriends did not belong in her bedroom. Not here, not ever.
Jake gently laid her back on the bed, giving her head a chance to stop spinning as he eased off her jeans and thong before lying alongside her, running a hand up her side as his lips nuzzled her neck.
“One of us is more exposed than the other,” she said, shocked to feel herself responding all over again as his hand cupped the underside of her breast.
“Imagine what we must look like,” he said, his teeth grazing her shoulder. “Tell me it doesn’t turn you on. You all naked and wanton and wild, and me all calm and reserved and, well … dressed.”
“Think we should change that?” she asked playfully, her fingers finding the button of his shirt.
“Next time,” he said against her breast. “This time I want you like this. Naked, out of control, and mine.”
Grace gasped as he flipped her over onto her belly. He moved closer still, and Grace realized that he’d been right. The roughness of his clothes against her bare skin was almost painfully erotic. He planted damp kisses along her spine, his hands moving briefly over her butt before gripping her hips and pulling her up onto all fours as he moved behind her. She whimpered when he pressed his cock against her, feeling his hardness even through his jeans.
“You want this, Grace?”
“Yes,” she said, her fingers gripping the comforter in anticipation.
“You want me?”
“Yes.”
His hand briefly toyed with her nipple before sliding down her belly and touching her still sensitive center. He swore when he found her wetness and his hand disappeared briefly before she heard the sound of a zipper, followed by the crinkling of a condom wrapper.
His hand came between her thighs, pushing them apart roughly before he moved behind her, positioning himself at her opening.
They both groaned when he entered her, just an inch at first, then another, before he pulled almost all the way out. Then he started all over again, giving it to her inch by inch in a teasing, rocking motion.
“You’re so damned perfect,” he said, his hands finding her hips. With one final thrust, he was all the way inside her.
They found their rhythm immediately, and now that Jake had put the thought in her head, Grace couldn’t stop thinking about the picture they made, her naked on the bed, with a fully clothed man taking her from behind.
She’d never cared much for this position in the past—it had always felt a bit demeaning. But with Jake’s hands all over her body, his words all over her mind, it felt delightfully dirty.
Jake’s thrusts were getting more frantic now, and his hand fondled her ass cheek briefly before sliding around again to her wet center, finding the spot just above where he filled her.
Two fingers circled her then and she bucked and moaned. “Again, Grace.”
“I can’t …”
She’d never been a two-orgasm-a-night kind of girl. She knew Riley’s articles said it was possible, but it never had been for her.
But then she’d never been good and totally taken by Jake Malone, because his fingers knew exactly how to play her, rubbing in smaller and smaller circles, centering on just the right spot, until she was once again on the edge of sanity.
She cried out loudly, her fingers scratching at the covers as though in a useless attempt to keep from losing her mind. The second she clenched around him, Jake swore roughly, pounding into her furiously before he let out a guttural cry as his hips hammered against hers.
When her head stopped spinning, Grace could do little more than slide down until she was lying on her stomach, Jake following her down, his warm weight pressed against her. He pressed a lazy kiss to her shoulder blade before pulling out and retreating to the bathroom, presumably to discard the condom.
She told herself to move. Told herself that lying diagonally across the bed, completely limp and naked and sweaty, was not exactly sex-kitten behavior. But her limbs refused to cooperate.
A sharp smack on her butt, however, had her bolting upright onto her knees as she rubbed the smarting cheek.
“Couldn’t help it,” Jake said, looking devilishly rumpled. “It was a fantastic view.”
“Well, it should have stayed a view. Look and don’t touch, and all that.”
He hooked a hand behind her neck, his thumb rubbing over her cheek as he stared into her eyes. “I like touching.”
Grace blushed, and he chuckled. “A little late to be embarrassed, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart.
“I know,” she said. “I just … it was so …”
“Dirty? Hot? Perfect?”
“Was it?” she asked, grabbing a pillow to cover up her front since the damned man was still clothed and she was still naked. Post-orgasm body confidence only went so far.
“Was it what?” he asked, kissing her.
“Perfect?”
Oh God, surely that needy, fragile voice wasn’t hers.
Grace 2.0’s eye roll assured her that yes, she had sounded that desperate while talking to a veritable modern sex god.
His eyes changed then, going from sexy and playful to a little bit soft. “Yeah. It really was.”
She locked her arms around his neck, pulling him in for another kiss. “A nice line. You should add that one to your permanent repertoire if it’s not already in it.”
He didn’t reply as she took control of the kiss, accidentally-on-purpose rubbing her bare breasts against his shirt. His hands ran up and down her back before going down to cup her butt and lift her against him.
“Hey, Malone,” she said, pulling back and smiling when he groaned in protest at the lack of contact. “You want a cheese plate?”
He did something tricky then, his hands finding the back of her thighs and flipping her onto her back before she realized he’d moved.
“If you really knew men, Ms. Brighton, you wouldn’t have to ask,” he said, his fingers quickly unbuttoning his shirt.
“Ah,” she said, her fingers going to his belt to speed up the process. “As one of Stiletto’s foremost luuvvvv experts, I guess I should have known that men declining sex is a foreign concept.”
“Not necessarily,” he said, pushing his shirt off his shoulders and revealing the ridiculously ripped body she’d known was under there. “But saying no to sex with you is.”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, Grace 2.0 threw up her hands in exasperation as Grace 1.0 melted.
The man really did know his way around women.
Chapter Twenty
“The flowers were a nice touch. White roses. Very classy.”
“They’re her favorite,” Jake said, not looking up from his laptop as he typed the last sentence of his article about the resurgence of Scotch in the cocktail culture.
Cole Sharpe entered the office uninvited. “How do you know what kind of flowers Grace Brighton likes?”
“She told me.”
“Huh.”
Jake looked up at that. He knew what huh meant in guy-speak. He’d practically invented it. He used it most frequently after learning that one of his friends had gotten engaged, was “in love,” or had gotten himself wrapped around some woman’s finger.
Jake snagged his coffee mug off the desk and took a sip while Cole made himself at home. “Go ahead. Get it off your chest.”
“Get what off my chest?”
“Whatever it is you want to imply about me and Grace.”
Cole picked up the baseball Jake had caught at his first Yankees game. Everyone had insisted that it was the luck of a lifetime—first Yankees game and he catches a home run ball.
But it hadn’t felt like luck to Jake. It had felt like a warning.
And so he’d kept it—kept it as a reminder that he was not the settling-down, home-ballpark kind of guy.
Although one wouldn’t know it was any kind of memento from the way Cole was tossing it around like a hacky sack.
“I just heard through that ridiculous website
of yours that you’d gotten her flowers. That’s all.”
“You do know that there wouldn’t be a ridiculous website if you hadn’t betrayed your own magazine—your own gender—and helped her out when she came in here with that whipped-cream coffee drink? It was supposed to be just a little one-time back and forth before we moved on to write the actual articles.”
And soon we’ll be moving on entirely. He pushed the thought away.
“I know that,” Cole said as he assumed a pitcher’s position and pretended to do some ridiculous wind-up. “Just like I know that you know what kind of flowers she likes.”
Big deal.
He knew lots of things about Grace. He knew her favorite flower (white roses), favorite color (green), favorite season (spring), and favorite ice cream flavor (pralines and cream).
He also knew that she talked to her parents every single Sunday at seven o’clock, knew that she would hold up rush-hour sidewalk traffic to give money to a homeless vet. He knew what she looked like when she was wearing nothing but a post-orgasmic glow, knew what she sounded like when—
Enough.
“I’m supposed to know that stuff,” Jake said, growing more irritated with Cole’s baseball antics by the minute. “That’s what this whole charade has been about. Getting to know the other person before they know you. Showing the women of the world that we men aren’t the oblivious one-track-mind heathens they think we are.”
“So then you haven’t slept with her.”
“Nope,” Jake lied easily. He knew there was all sorts of speculation all over that damned blog, but he’d rot in hell before he’d share one detail about his nights with Grace.
Even if he wanted to write about them, he had no idea what he’d say. None.
Because he didn’t have the faintest clue what was going on between them—really going on between them—and he didn’t think she did either.
On one hand, they were both completely invested in the little game they were playing. They were completely at ease spending lunches and coffees and random office visits together to let themselves to be analyzed.
She didn’t even seem to mind when he’d written a blog post of his own on the website noting how Grace, like so many women, was a big fan of the “I don’t care, whatever you want” routine about food and movies, only to sniff in disdain when what he wanted was clearly the wrong choice.
He’d ripped that little female wile wide open.
But had she taken offense? Taken him to the woodshed about exploiting their Thai-no-actually-I-want-Chinese lunch argument?
No. She’d been unfazed.
Just like he hadn’t flinched when she’d blown the whistle on the way he’d noted a hostess’s rather overly ample breasts. He’d meant to be discreet. He thought he had been discreet. He was, after all, a gentleman. But Grace had busted him, and he hadn’t minded in the least.
That’s what they were doing—dating for public consumption. It was like reality TV without the reality. Not quite scripted, but not quite real either.
Except when it was real.
And unfortunately for him, it seemed to be feeling real a lot more often. And for her … well as far as he knew, she was still on her all-men-can-go-to-hell rampage. He wasn’t an idiot. He’d known precisely what that date last weekend had been about.
Grace Brighton spent all day writing about sex, and talking with women who wrote about sex, and yet she’d only ever been with one guy.
So of course she’d want to experiment.
And of course she’d choose no-relationship Jake Malone to experiment with. After all, he’d offered.
So why did he feel so … used?
Hadn’t he been guilty of the very same thing? This was New York. A little casual sex was as routine as takeout.
But this hadn’t just been sex.
It had been hot sex. Really hot sex.
So what? In two weeks you’ll be in a foreign country and Grace Brighton will be happily living the single life.
“Okay, so you know what her favorite flower is, but you’re not sleeping with her,” Cole said.
“Correct.”
“Cassidy told me that he’s rolling you off the project at the end of the month.”
“Yup. Did Cassidy also tell you to come in here and bug the shit out of me, or was that your own bright idea? Don’t you have a locker room to be stalking or a jock strap to be investigating?”
Cole set the baseball down in a completely different spot from where he’d found it and commenced playing with the pen Jake’s dad had gotten him for college graduation. Jake gave up trying to return to his work and snatched the pen out of Cole’s hands.
“So after this month, you’re done with Grace?” Cole asked.
No.
Shit. Where had that thought come from? Shit.
“Isn’t that what I just said?” Jake snapped.
“Excellent.”
“You’re telling me,” Jake said, with enthusiasm he didn’t feel.
“So you won’t mind if I ask her out, then?”
The pen in Jake’s hand suddenly felt a lot less like a nostalgic writing utensil and a lot more like a potential weapon. “You want to date Grace?”
Cole lifted a shoulder. “I liked what I saw when she came up here that day. She’s classy, you know?”
He did know. She was also his.
“She’s not your type,” Jake snapped.
“Maybe not,” Cole said affably. “But isn’t that what dating’s for? To figure it out?”
Damn it. Damn it all to hell. There was absolutely no reasonable explanation he could give for why Cole couldn’t ask her out. All he could do was wait for Grace to turn Cole down.
And surely Grace would turn him down. She had that whole sixth-month plan.
But after the six-month plan? Then what? Cole was good-looking. Richer than sin. And he seemed like the type that wanted babies and a Kitchen-Aid mixer and a tennis club membership someday. Cole wasn’t likely to up and go to Beijing or Reykjavik because he had an itch.
Jake liked Grace. And because he liked her, he wanted her to be happy. Once she was over this whole girl-power single-life phase, she’d want someone who knew how to be a good boyfriend.
She deserved someone who knew a routine beyond love-’em-and-leave-’em.
You could stay.
No. Hell. He couldn’t stay. He didn’t want to be a nobody journalist doing the same thing until he was fifty. He wanted to branch out. Go places.
He wanted fulfillment.
Grace could be fulfillment.
He leaned back and closed his eyes, trying to fight back the traitorous thoughts that kept spilling forward.
Grace wasn’t for him. Grace was … special. And she deserved someone who didn’t eat Cheerios for three meals a day because he forgot to go shopping, and whose track record with women had maxed out at exactly three months and nineteen days before he’d gotten bored.
He wouldn’t do that to Grace.
“You should go for it,” he told Cole, mildly surprised to find that the words didn’t become physically lodged in his throat. “Ask Grace out. If you need any pointers, just let me know.”
“And you’re sure you don’t mind?”
“Yup.” I just want to kill you. That’s all.
“Good. Then I’m also guessing you won’t mind that there’s a scary blonde in the waiting area who’s been demanding to see you. She says you two are involved?”
Jake froze. “Short hair or long hair? Curvy or thin? Or did she have a beauty mark to the left of her mouth?”
Cole raised his eyebrows. “There are multiple possibilities of scary blondes waiting in your office reception area?”
“Dozens,” Jake muttered darkly before going to deal with his baggage.
In a way he was grateful for it—coming face-to-face with one of his many exes was exactly just one of many reasons why Grace Brighton was better off without him.
And right about now he needed that remin
der.
* * *
When Grace was eight, she’d broken one of her parents’ many rules and brought a tennis ball into the house with the bright idea that their new Labradoodle puppy might like to chase it in the foyer.
Instead, she’d accidentally thrown the ball into a vase, sending it shattering to the floor. Seconds after which the still-in-pursuit Labradoodle had collided with some abstract blown-glass sculpture, sending that shattering to the floor.
She’d been grounded for six weeks and had never, ever forgotten the sound of breaking glass.
She just didn’t expect to hear it on the sixth floor of her office building.
Yet somehow she wasn’t the least bit surprised that the origin of the noise was from none other than Jake Malone’s office.
There were a handful of people standing outside the door when she approached with Jake’s breakfast sandwich in hand. She recognized Cole Sharpe immediately, and he gave her a sardonic smile as he tilted his head toward Jake’s office and mouthed, “Train wreck.”
The pixie-cut receptionist, whose name Grace had learned was Melissa, looked torn between horror and laughter, and a handful of other Oxford guys looked fascinated by whoever or whatever was inside.
“You’re a pickle-cocked, womanizing asshat!”
Cole moved away from the door to stand by Grace’s side. “Is he really pickle-cocked?” Definitely not. Grace covered her mouth to smother a horrified laugh. “I couldn’t say. What’s happening?”
“Some scorned woman apparently thought they were headed to the altar, only to hear about your little HeSaidSheSaid adventure.”
“Oh, but that’s just—”
There was a hiss from inside the office. “Don’t you dare tell me that it’s just for work, Jake Malone. You bought her flowers. I read it on the website!”
It took all of Grace’s self-control not to push everyone out of the way to hear Jake’s response. He had bought her flowers. Her favorite kind. And though the gesture had been website fodder, the note had been sweet.
Because I thought of you. Before I thought of the website.
But Jake’s voice was too low for her to overhear.
The woman’s was not. “So when you’re done with this stupid thing for work, then you’ll be done with her and call me?” she said in one of those pouty, cajoling voices.
