“How are we doing over here?”
“Just fine,” Angelo smiled. “She’d like to try some things on.”
“Ooh, great! Right this way.”
I shot Angelo a questioning look as the blonde hurried across the floor.
“Just to see how they look,” he explained.
The dressing room, swathed in various shades of pink, held tan stall doors and soft seats for waiting.
The salesgirl pushed the closest stall open. “Go right ahead. Let me know if you need anything.”
She walked slowly away, making sure each step caused her ass to sway.
“Be back soon,” I told Angelo, going into the dressing room.
I shut the door and turned around to take off my top, thinking I’d try on the red push-up bra first. At least that one would be a practical buy. I needed more form fitting bras I could wear with blouses to work.
The door abruptly opened.
“Hey!” I howled.
Angelo slipped in and shut the door behind him. “I wanted to see. You’re going to need a second opinion.”
I made a face at him in the mirror. “Oh really?”
“And I’m going to say so far so good...” He closed the distance between us with one step and came to press himself against my back.
“Angelo,” I softly chastised, before falling quiet. With his hands on my stomach and his mouth on my neck all thoughts of protestation left.
“We shouldn’t...” I whispered, but it was really no use.
“You have to take this off first,” he whispered into my ear, unhooking my bra for me.
It fell to the floor and he took my breasts in both hands. I watched in the mirror as he massaged and kneaded them, pushing the nipples in between his fingers.
I bit back a moan. Any minute now and that salesgirl might be back. And what would she say when she looked under the stall and saw both mine and Angelo’s feet?
On cue, two women began talking a short distance away.
“And that would look great with your skin tone,” the clerk said.
I opened my mouth to tell Angelo to get the Hell out of the stall, but he’d already begun undoing my pants and pushing them down my legs. I let him continue. The desire in me burned badly enough that I made a decision. It was already too late to turn back. We might as well hurry up and see this thing through to the end.
Angelo spun me around and covered my mouth with his. I parted my lips, eager for the taste of his kiss, only vaguely noticing the zipper sound as he undid his pants. Working deftly, he pulled my panties down and grabbed my legs by the knees, holding them up. His tip pressed into me, breaking down any prior hesitations I had about making out and full-on fucking in a dressing room.
The conversation outside droned on and on, the women saying words I didn’t even understand anymore. Angelo thrust up and into me, creating a pool of warmth and pleasure in my core.
My head fell back and I swallowed a moan. Angelo’s nails dug into my ass. His breath kissed my neck.
He pushed his palms against my hips, driving me further down onto him. Pleasure overwhelmed my senses, exploding out until a powerful climax shook my world. I trembled against him. The way he bit and sucked my skin took me to new heights.
Angelo moaned against me as he pulled out and turned me around. With my bare ass against him, we both faced the mirror.
A little whimper left my lips. Holding me tight once more, he entered me. I squirmed, still sensitive from that wickedly potent orgasm. Angelo’s thumb brushed my clit, setting a rhythmic circle of movement there.
I did as he instructed and watched as he pounded me. With his face set in grim determination and a bead of sweat sliding down his temple, he was the hottest I’d ever seen.
I came a second time just as Angelo’s tensed through his own release.
He growled again, and wrapped his arms around my shoulders, kissing my hair.
I squirmed from underneath his embrace and snatched up my clothes.
“Just like that?” he asked, pretending to be hurt.
I gave him a saucy look. “I’ll give you round two when we get back to the house. For now, I think we need to focus on getting out of here before we’re caught.”
“Afraid of marring your squeaky-clean record?”
“Shut up,” I hissed, though I couldn’t help but smile.
After getting dressed I snatched up the armful of lingerie I’d come in with. “I’ll go out first. You come out after about a minute.”
“Sure.”
I shimmied out the stall and closed the door firmly behind me.
“Everything fit all right?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin. The blonde salesgirl stood about two feet away.
I swallowed hard before speaking. Could she smell the sweat, pheromones, and secrets on me? “Yes. I think I’ll get it all.”
“Great! We can go to the counter and...”
The stall door behind me opened up and Angelo came out, pulling his jacket on. The sales girl’s mouth fell open into a perfect little o.
“They fit,” he smiled at her.
“O… Oh,” she stammered, her cheeks turning hot pink. “Gr… great.”
“It is great,” he coolly said.
She swallowed hard. Spinning on her heels, she scurried from the dressing area.
I shot Angelo a look. “Not fair,” I whispered. “She’ll be fantasizing about you for weeks.”
He grinned. “Whatever it takes to make sure she doesn’t report us.”
Angelo
Sweet darkness wrapped around me. I turned my cheek into the pillow and pulled the blankets up tighter around me. This was the best part of any morning: those few moments right before you fully woke up, right before thoughts of the day snuck in.
Paige squirmed next to me and kicked my leg. I edged over towards the side of the bed to get out of her way.
The bed began shaking.
“Wh-what?” I groggily asked, sitting up and reaching for the table lamp.
A high, piercing scream filled the room at the same moment light flooded it.
“Paige!”
She bolted upright, gasping for air.
I grabbed her shoulders. “Paige! Are you awake?”
Her wide eyes stared at me, but whether they really saw me or not was a mystery.
“Do you need your inhaler?” I asked.
“My… my...” She looked around the bed in confusion, and then she shook her head.
“All right.” I relaxed my hold on her shoulders. “Are you okay?”
“I...” Her bottom lip trembled. “My parents. I saw them.”
I smoothed down her hair. “It was just a dream. It’s fine now.”
Her eyes still frantically scanned the room. A shiver ran down my back.
“Lay down,” I said, half because I needed to appease myself. “Come here.”
She let me put my arm around her shoulders and bring her back down into the pillows to nuzzle against my chest.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No,” she whispered.
“Okay,” I soothingly said, rubbing her shoulder. I could make a pretty educated guess on the content of the dream. “Let’s go back to sleep.”
Gray light poked in through the space between the curtains, making it way too early an hour to be up during a vacation.
“I can’t,” she woefully said.
“Okay.” I wrapped both arms around her and held her so tight I thought she might tell me to stop. Instead she locked one arm across my chest and turned herself to face into me.
“It’s the same dream I always have,” she softly whispered.
I gritted my teeth. She woke from bad dreams every once in a while, but the way she talked suggested the nightmares were more common that I thought.
I carefully selected my words. “Maybe it’s time you thought about going back to therapy.”
She tensed a bit. “No.”
I bit back a curse.
At this point her resistance to getting professional help bordered on childish. “I really think it’s time Paige.”
Paige pulled away and sat up, long streams of hair falling around her face. “I went to therapy. I spent years there. And I saw, like, three different therapists. There’s nothing else it can do for me, Angelo?”
I sat up as well, bringing my knees up and resting my arms on them. “But you might as well try. How can that hurt? As long as there’s a small chance that you might get healthier, why not take it?”
She looked down. “Because it’s exhausting. Going through that… is exhausting.”
“And living with anxiety and nightmares isn’t?”
She didn’t answer.
“Look...”
“If it doesn’t work, I’ll keep having these dreams and will eventually have to talk about them!” Her head snapped back up and she glared at me.
I silently counted to ten. I wasn’t angry at Paige, but I was furious over her willingness to be so complacent.
“The way you put it,” I slowly said, “Does make it sound awful. But most people find talking about traumas to be beneficial.”
She crossed her arms. “You’re not a professional.”
“So go see one,” I shot back. “And at least get an initial consultation. What about that?”
She eyed me.
“I’m not the enemy,” I reminded her.
Her arms fell down and her shoulders hunched over. “God, I know. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m being so mean to you.”
I rubbed her arm. “I think I know.”
“Yeah?”
“The idea of therapy can be scary. You might go there and discover more things trapped inside of you. Things you didn’t know about. Feelings… Memories...”
Her lips twisted and she looked away again, a sure sign I’d hit the nail on the head.
I took Paige’s hand in mine “But a therapist is trained to face those things. They’ll be able to guide you through anything that might come up.” I tightened my fingers around hers. “And I’ll be here as well. I would even go with you to therapy if you wanted. Or I could sit in the waiting room. Or I could not go and all. I could stay at home and when you get back we can talk about it. Or not. It’s all up to you, Paige. Just take care of your health. I love you. I can’t see you in pain like this.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Okay,” she said with a nod and a few sniffles. “I’ll do it.”
The words hardly seemed real. “Thank you.” I wrapped her up in a hug.
“When we get back I’ll find someone,” she said.
“Good.” I pulled away and wiped the one tear off her cheek. “Hey,” I softly said. “It’s Christmas Eve. How do you feel?”
She smiled a tiny bit. “Better now.”
“What can I do to make you feel great?”
She cocked her head and looked up at me through those long, dark lashes. “Just be you. You do a badass job at that already so there shouldn’t be any problem.”
I lightly pinched her cheek. “How about snowman and reindeer shaped pancakes?”
This time a real smile lit up her face. “For real?”
“Mariel makes them every year.”
“Too bad we don’t have any real snow to go along with them.”
“Christmas isn’t over yet.” I pulled her back to me and kissed her long and deep.
Banging on the door interrupted the embrace. “Wake up bro!” Franco yelled. “Look outside.”
His footsteps faded away, likely headed towards the kitchen and those pancakes.
Paige’s face scrunched in a question. “Really?”
“Let’s go see.”
Taking her hand, I pulled her from the bed and to the window. Sure enough, the scene outside was just as we expected. A thin blanket of snow covered the ground, the best part being the thick snowflakes still wafting down.
I wrapped my arms around Paige. “Well what do you know?”
Paige
I told Angelo to go on to breakfast without me. I needed to take a shower and wake up some, I explained.
I also needed to shake off the horrible visions that just rampaged my mind.
It wasn’t like they were anything new, really. Just another repeat of the day my parents were murdered. But this time had I not only not known it was a dream, I was also frozen solid behind the false wall, unable to move, unable to breathe. I just stood there, a deer in headlights as one of the men slowly turned in my direction and walked towards me.
I woke up the second before the man ripped away the false wall and discovered me.
But even in a bed in Chicago, hundreds of miles away and ten years later, I still saw my parents laying in a pool of blood.
I turned on the shower as hot as I could stand and immersed myself in the spray. Angelo was right. I needed to be in therapy. No one could live like this. Not only was I cheating myself of a chance at happiness, I was hurting him. How could he be really satisfied with a girlfriend always twenty seconds away from completely losing her shit?
He deserved better than that.
I turned off the shower head and grabbed my towel from the top of the rod. After ringing water from my hair, I wrapped the fluffy towel around me and stepped onto the mat.
“Nice ass.”
I yelped and jumped. “Sophia! Jesus… You scared me.”
She grinned from her perch on the long sink. “Sorry.”
I grabbed a second towel and rubbed it on my head. “And you can’t even see my ass.”
“I know, but that was the line I had prepared. I didn’t expect you to come out of there with a towel on.”
“Why are you creeping into my room?”
Her face grew serious. “I had to talk to you alone. You know who it’s about.”
“Uh oh.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s practically family.”
“She may be practically family, but you and I are real family. The only real family we have, and...”
“I get the idea.”
I went into the bedroom to pull some clothes from my suitcase.
Sophia followed. “Dominic told me about Lia.” She plopped down on the unmade bed.
I pulled on some jeans and a V-neck shirt. “Yeah, she basically thinks I’m a golddigger.”
Sophia threw her hands up. “That doesn’t even make sense! You have your own money.”
I looked pointedly at her. “Please just leave it alone. I’ve already had to tell Angelo to drop it.”
Sophia crossed her arms. “So what, then? You’re just going to take this shit from her?”
I froze, my hands halfway finished zipping up my pants.
Good question.
I couldn’t to resign myself to bad blood between Lia and me. It wasn’t right. We had no history that I could remember. Plus, she was Angelo’s sister, and he and I would hopefully be connected for the rest of our lives.
If I didn’t make my own effort to fix things between us, family gatherings were only going to get more and more strained.
“I’ll take care of it,” I told Soph.
I cornered Lia after breakfast by following her to the basement game room, a place I hadn’t even known existed. She was following Tre and Franko down there for some air hockey when I caught her on the stairs.
“Hey Lia...”
She turned and coolly looked at me, her hair sweeping across her shoulder. Standing like that, one hip cocked and two eyes steely, she reminded me of the mean girls in high school.
For all I knew that stereotype could have actually been Lia, but I still didn’t remember high school too well so could only make guesses.
I gulped and took a couple steps towards her. My heart beat in my throat. There was no reason to be afraid of her, and yet I was.
Well, not really afraid of her… more like hurt by her. The fact that she thought I wasn’t good enough for Angelo stung horribly.
I wanted to show her I wasn’t who she thought
I was, and I also hated that I so desperately felt a need to prove myself to her.
She turned her heart shaped face up at me in bored expectation.
I licked my lips and summoned the courage to go on. “I was thinking that you might like to go out for a bit… just the two of us.”
She kept staring at me, the only thing happening was the blinking of her eyes and the slipping away of my nerve.
Just when I was about to tell her to forget all about the offer, she responded. “Okay. Sure.”
“Oh… Uh, great.”
“I need to go pick something up for mom. At this coffee shop.” She stomped past me, not looking at me once. “Let’s go in my car.”
I followed after her, texting Angelo where I was headed on the way.
The garage contained spaces for at least six cars. Lia took us to a black Chevy Suburban at the end. My nervousness still getting the best of me, I buckled in and waited as she drove the car out into the freshly fallen snow.
“Is this for a present?” I asked after a while, making my question the first thing spoken since we stood on the stairs.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, nice. What are you getting there?”
“Coffee,” came her clipped response.
Coffee at a coffee shop.
The small talk on the rest of the ride was incredibly forced. Though I kept reassembling new ways of raising the topic between us, in the end whenever I opened my mouth it was either to talk about snow, how great the Christmas tree was, or how much I liked that it had finally snowed—that last one being a poorly veiled re-hashing of the first conversation.
By the time we pulled up to a coffee shop in a house, I was wondering why Lia even agreed to hang out with me. She didn’t seem interested in talking or indirectly bashing me. It felt like she was mostly just putting up with me.
We unbuckled ourselves and stepped down into the still soft snow. The coffee shop, further away from the city than the Salvatore house, was nestled between a row of houses and a recreation center.
I shoved my hands into my coat pockets and followed Lia up the wooden steps.
Once we entered the door into the shop it became obvious why Lia wanted to come to this particular place. Long bins of coffee beans lined on wall, dozens and dozens of different kinds boasting differing roast levels, countries of origin, and taste factors.
The Billionaire and The Virgin Page 27
