Addicted (Tempting Book 4)

by Alex Lucian

  Nicholas whimpered in between them, and my fists curled with the raging desire to break his nose. Maybe he’d choke on his blood if I snapped the cartilage badly enough.

  Dave and Taylor traded hushed words and then Dave tapped out a text with meaty fingers. He pinned Ruby with a serious look, but there was affection underneath it.

  “You don’t need to worry about this prick anymore. You got me?”

  “Yeah. Thank you.”

  And then they were gone, practically dragging Nicholas between them. If I thought too hard about what they were about to do, I might have felt bad. But when I looked over at Ruby, who was staring at the closed door like it held some sort of dark curse, that feeling went away.

  I’d have helped, if they’d asked me to.

  “Hey,” I said softly, squeezing my fingers around hers, trying to imbue her with some strength. “Are you okay?”

  Her breathing picked up and her hand shook in mine. “Oh my god, Elias.”

  I shook my head and faced her, sliding my free hand up her arm so I could cup the side of her neck. When I pressed my thumb underneath her jaw, she was forced to look at me. Her lips trembled, and my fucking heart broke. If something had happened to her today, I’d have never gotten over it.

  Never.

  I wrapped her in my arms and shut my eyes against the knowledge that I was fucking falling in love with her. And it changed everything.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  He’d saved me.

  Elias had saved me.

  He was holding me tight enough to make me believe that nothing bad could happen to me, ever again. The harrowing ordeal of the last however long slowly slipped from my shoulders as Elias held onto me.

  I pressed my nose against his shirt, breathing in his calming scent. His heart was pounding beneath my ear, and I found myself counting the beats, one by one, to keep myself focused.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  His arms around me shuddered for a moment and then he said, “Fuck, Ruby.” The raw emotion in his voice made me squeeze my eyes closed tightly. I thought of the state Nicholas had been in when Taylor and Dave had practically dragged him out. Part of me almost felt bad for the state he was in, like I was thinking about it in an abstract way. That part was eclipsed by the fact that Nicholas had ignored every request for him to leave, and that—unforgivably—he’d put his hands on me.

  Seeing Elias pummel him had washed me with satisfaction. And now that the room was calmer, and I was wrapped in the same arms that had fueled those punches, I felt myself sinking into Elias’ touch.

  Pulling back, I leaned up and pressed a kiss to the underside of his jaw. His pulse there leapt against my lips and his hands ran up my back, soothingly.

  He made a little noise in the back of his throat when my fingers climbed up his chest, to hook my arms around his neck as my kisses moved the length of his jaw.

  Heat was spreading through me as my kisses turned urgent, spreading across his neck and down to his chest as I undid the buttons of his shirt.

  “Ruby,” he said, but didn’t make a move to stop me. His hands found my hair and dipped behind, gently massaging the base of my scalp as I freed the last button of his shirt and ripped it open. He was so beautiful, all that ink over his pecs and down his arms. You wouldn’t know just by looking at him, that he was covered in this much ink. I pressed my lips to the sharp lines of a geometric feather, and then glided my tongue along the line of the quill.

  His heartbeat was slowing under my hands, so I slipped my hands underneath his shirt to climb up his spine. He was so warm, so muscular; I didn’t think I could ever not feel safe when I was with him.

  A mix of gratitude and sudden arousal was spreading through me, and I desperately wanted to show him my appreciation, right there and then, in the chaos of the room.

  Gently, I backed him up so he hit the bed and sat on the end.

  Just like I’d done, when Nicholas had advanced toward me.

  The thought slipped past my defenses and I pressed on, willing it to be erased with Elias’ touch. I tore the shirt off his arms and flew it across the room before I stepped back and pulled the side zipper down on my dress.

  It fell in a soft swoosh, and the only sounds in the room were our breathing. His chest was heaving as he looked at me, and I could tell he wanted to say something. But I didn’t want words, I just wanted him to distract me from the shambles of the room.

  I stepped toward him, and my feet brushed up against the phone on the floor. I again thought of Nicholas and I squeezed my eyes tight, trying to forget what I’d just gone through.

  “Ruby,” Elias said, and diverted my attention enough so that I remembered what I was doing.

  Quickly, I crawled up onto the bed and straddled his lap, wrapping my arms around him. I wanted the feel of him around me to make me forget. I wanted to lose this memory in Elias’ arms.

  I planted my mouth on his and kissed him hard enough to bruise us both when his hands came to my waist.

  I could feel his erection pressing against my ass so I ground myself against it roughly. I wanted Elias to be rough with me, for his touch to erase Nicholas’ touch.

  Elias rolled, flipping me to my back on the bed. For a second, I lost my breath, remembering when Nicholas had grabbed my ankle and pulled me down. The thought must have registered on my face, because Elias leaned up and looked at me.

  “What are you doing?” he asked me softly, pushing strands of hair away from my cheek.

  If I talked about it right then, I’d go back to feeling weak, powerless, defeated. I didn’t want to talk to Elias about what had happened. I just wanted to forget.

  So I lifted my arms to encircle his neck and pulled him down so he was kissing me. His touch was gentle—too gentle.

  “Kiss me,” I said against his mouth. I nipped at his bottom lip with my teeth, hoping my rough touch would inspire him to be rougher with me too.

  “You don’t want to do this right now,” he said, but I could tell his body was at war with his mind as his hand slid down my chest, over my bra’s front hooks that held my cups in place.

  “I do,” I said, hooking my hand in the front of his pants and yanking him closer when he tried to move away. “Come on.” My voice was a little pleading, but my hands were hungry.

  “Ruby,” he said on a sigh and tried to move off of me.

  I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled so that I was lifted off the bed, sucking at his lips hungrily, my nails biting into his back. All the things I knew he liked.

  “Stop,” he said softly, but I kept kissing him, pressing my palms against his erection over his pants.

  “Please,” I said and this time I lost the finesse I’d forced into my voice. “Please, help me forget.”

  At that, he pulled away completely, but reached down to pull me up so he still held me, as he had before, with nothing sexual about his touch. “I don’t want to have sex with you as a means for you to forget what just happened in this room.” He pulled back and pressed two fingers to my chin, bringing my face up so that he looked into my eyes.

  “Then don’t think of it like that,” I pleaded. “Just kiss me. Let’s get lost in each other.”

  His fingers glided back from my chin to brush along my cheekbone. “Ruby, I’m already lost in you. But I don’t want our first time—our real first time—to be like this. In this room. I don’t want it to be a distraction, I want it to mean something on its own.”

  The blood drained from my face, very slowly, as I absorbed that. Our first time. What did that mean? Did I even want to know what that meant?

  “Hold on,” I said, prying myself from his arms and tucking into the bathroom. Once the door was closed between us, I slid down the cool wood until my ass was on the cold tile.

  Our first time. It kept repeating itself, an endless loop in my head. It wasn’t our first time having sex—a fact that was incredibly obvious. But then what? Our first time as … what?

  Slowly,
I stood back up and looked at myself in the mirror. My hair was a mess of tangles and curls, my red lipstick was smeared over my lips. I looked like a woman completely lost.

  I’m already lost in you, he’d said. Was I lost in him, too?

  “Fuck,” I said in a horrified whisper. I hadn’t clung to him like an escort seducing her client. I’d clung to him seeking refuge from the nightmare that had just occurred, but I hadn’t once thought about the fact that he was my client. He’d just been Elias, the man I’d wished for when I’d been scared.

  I knew, right then, as I stood barefoot among the items splayed across the floor, that I was falling for Elias. I might have already fallen. He wasn’t just a client to me, and if I was brave enough to admit it to myself, he hadn’t been just a client for a while. Maybe it had happened in Amsterdam, when things between us hadn’t been built on pretense. Everything had felt so natural, so … real.

  “Fuck,” I said again. I could not be in love with my client. Rule number one as an escort: don’t let it get messy. That four-letter word? Was messy—in capital letters.

  I had to get away from Elias. I was a little embarrassed, sure, that I’d tried to seduce him as a way to forget what had happened with Nicholas. But I was deeply, profoundly, horrified that I’d fallen for him.

  I quickly pulled my hair into a ponytail and rubbed a wet washcloth around my mouth until the skin was raw. Reaching into the closet, I grabbed the outfit I’d packed, intending to wear it home the day after Elias and I had had sexual acrobatics all over the room. I couldn’t put myself back in the dress I’d been wearing when Nicholas had touched me. No fucking way.

  A knock on the door was quickly followed by Elias saying, “Are you okay? Come out, so we can talk.”

  There was no fucking way I could talk with Elias about this. If he had even a tiny bit of the same feelings I had for him, we were in deep shit. If he didn’t have any feelings for me, I was in deep shit, all by myself.

  I slipped on the flip flops I’d packed and opened the door, my bag in hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and dragged a hand through his hair. He looked tense, but eager to hash everything out. “Talk to me.”

  Spying my phone on the floor, I scooped it up. I put on my most professional face and said, “Actually, I’m just going to leave.” He looked at me, stunned, and tried to follow me to the door.

  “You’re leaving right now?”

  I nodded, not wanting to say a single word as I kept my back to him.

  “Don’t leave. I’m sorry for pushing you away. It’s not that I didn’t want you, Ruby,” he began.

  “I understand,” I told him. “But it’s best if I leave this room.” My voice was calm, cool, a complete contradiction to how I felt inside.

  “Want to go to my place?” he asked.

  “No,” I said as I opened the door. “I need to be alone.” I wouldn’t meet his eyes.

  “What’s going on, Ruby? Come back, we should talk.”

  “No,” I told him again, still not meeting his eyes as I walked stiffly to the elevator. I punched the down arrow and prayed it would hurry.

  Elias stood in the doorway of the hotel; I could see him in my periphery. And as the elevator doors slid open with a ding, I kept my face forward so he couldn’t see the hurt I wore plainly on my face.

  Back at my apartment, Fletcher meowed for attention from me the second I opened the door. The whole cab ride to my home, I’d thought about how Elias had looked at me as I’d left—confused and desperate.

  It had hurt me, walking away as coldly as I had. But I couldn’t verbally process my feelings, not with Elias and not in that moment.

  Fletcher nuzzled against my neck and purred happily as I scratched behind his ears. I was so thankful to have that white fur ball, the one thing who expected so little from me.

  That’s how it should have been with Elias. Our arrangement had been for my services as an escort. Feelings had been completely off the table, because they were never a worry or expectation in this line of work. And yet, there I was, curling up on my couch in the dark with Fletcher on my lap and a heart that was positively aching. This wasn’t supposed to happen. I’d thought I only needed reprieve from Nicholas, and how he’d affected me. But more paramount was the fact that I’d fallen in love with a man who had, essentially, paid me for sex.

  “Shit,” I murmured and rubbed a hand over the sore spot in my chest. Fletcher pushed his face against my hand, needy for affection, and I rubbed over his soft coat absently as I looked out the window of my apartment, into the dark evening skyline of New York City. Saying goodbye to Elias had momentarily distracted me from what had happened with Nicholas, but now that I was alone, it all crept back in. Wrapping the throw blanket from the back of the couch around my shoulders, I remembered the fear I’d felt, the way I’d shrunken down to almost nothing.

  I turned on the television for a much-needed distraction, flipping through all the channels until I settled on a romantic comedy, something to brighten the dark night.

  One movie bled into another, and by the time I told myself to go to bed, I was bone-deep tired. The emotional upheaval was setting in, and I climbed in between my flannel sheets with a heavier heart than I’d had when I’d last been in this bed. Right before my eyes slid closed, I wondered what Elias was thinking, feeling, doing.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t think about him like that. I couldn’t worry about Elias. I needed to end our business relationship so that we could both move on from this … mistake.

  Chapter Thirty

  “Where to, man?” The taxi driver asked me, giving a mildly annoyed look when he smelled the alcohol on my breath.

  “Millennium Tower on W 30th,” I said, settling into the seat and closing my eyes.

  After a few blocks of fitful starts and stops, I opened my eyes and watched the city sweep past in a colorful blur. It was still barely light out and the streets were packed, like they always were when the weather was nice in New York. Happy people, living their lives, not being in love with an escort. Those fuckers.

  I must have made a disgruntled noise, because the driver looked over at me. “You okay?”

  “No. I fell in love.”

  “Ahh.” He scratched the side of his face with blunt fingers, lifting his eyebrows. “That’s the pits, man. I take it she don’t love you back?”

  I glared at him and he wisely shut up for the rest of the drive to Jack’s apartment. I gave my driver a good tip for keeping his mouth zipped and got a disapproving look from the doorman when I had a hard time walking a straight line through the massive lobby.

  “Jack Waterman. Tell him it’s Elias,” I told him and tried to stay in one spot in front of his imposing desk. How my friend was so fucking rich, I didn’t quite know. I asked once if he had gold bricks stashed somewhere once and he only flipped me off.

  On the other end of the receiver, I could hear Jack’s voice. The doorman smiled. “Yes, sir. I’ll let him up.”

  I rolled my eyes and got another stern look. The elevator opened and I hit the button for the twentieth floor. Jack was waiting for me outside of his door, with an amused expression on his face.

  “Well, well, look what the pussy dragged in.” Then he tilted his head. “Or kicked out by the look of you.”

  “Can I come in or not?”

  He pointed a finger at me. “If your drunk ass wakes up Grace, I’ll string you up.”

  “Deal.”

  I walked in behind him, making sure the door didn’t slam shut. Jack’s apartment was probably twice the size of mine, with a clear view of the Hudson and sparkling city lights from the long line of windows framing his apartment. It would have been a killer bachelor pad, if not for the princess castle in one corner, crayon art all over the fridge and Barbies littering the couch at random intervals.

  “Water?” He asked, tossing me a bottle without waiting for an answer.

  “How about some bourbon instead?”

  “Nuh-uh, no way.
I actually do care about the wellbeing of your liver, and would prefer not to contribute to any alcohol poisoning we’ve got going on here.” Jack sat on the couch and pinned me with a look. I gave him one right back. He bent his brows when I didn’t say anything. “Listen, you’re the one showing up drunk at ten on a Saturday night. That’s only allowed if you actually talk to me.”

  “You’re gonna judge me.”

  “I’ll do no such thing.” His arms spread open like, hit me with it.

  So I did. “I fell in love with Ruby.”

  “You fucking idiot,” he groaned. “You don’t fall in love with a hooker.”

  “Hey,” I barked. “She’s not a hooker.”

  His jaw dropped open. “Dear God, you’ve lost your mind. Does she have a magic pussy or something? Drenched in gold? Does it do your taxes for you? Because that’s the only reason I can see this happening.”

  I gripped the sides of my head when I sat opposite from him on the couch. “If I had any other person I could confide in right now, believe me, I’d be with them. You fucking suck at this.”

  “Dude, this is why you meet women the old-fashioned way. Buy them a drink, hold the door for them and tell them they have a beautiful smile before you go out with them. You don’t slip them an envelope of cash first and expect things to play out in a normal, healthy way.”

  My knee bounced while I stared at him. Why the fuck was I friends with Jack anyway?

  “She doesn’t want to do this forever. She’s so damn smart, Jack.”

  “So you asked her? You asked her to quit her job selling her body to be with you?”

  My teeth clenched together so hard that black spots danced on the outer edges of my vision. “No.”

  “How do you see this playing out, Elias? Honest question. No bullshit.”

  I dropped my head back onto the couch and stared at his ceiling until my eyes dried out and I was forced to blink. Even though the feelings were there, and had been there since before Amsterdam, if I was honest with myself, Jack’s question wasn’t something I’d really thought through.