Love Hard

by Nalini Singh

Her laughter lingered in the air after she disappeared into her suite.

  Returning to his own, he first helped Esme get into her pj’s too. They’d bought two pairs for this trip, and she wanted the yellow ones with brown dogs on them.

  “Look at the doggies, Daddy,” she said slyly as she finished buttoning her top.

  Jake was onto her. “We are not getting a dog,” he said for the thousandth time. “I travel too much and your grandparents can’t dog-sit all the time. A dog would be lonely.”

  “Grandma and Grandpa stay home more. It could be their dog,” his too-smart kid said. “We could take it for walks and pet it.”

  Jake knew full well that she was wearing his parents down on the topic, but he wasn’t about to be a sucker too. “You know dogs poop,” he said, bringing out the big guns. “You wanna clean that up?”

  A screwing up of her nose.

  He popped into his room to change while she thought that over, leaving his door partially ajar. He was just pulling on a pair of sweatpants when she called out, “I saw Mrs. Dennis use a thing!”

  “What thing?” He found a loose tee, was about to pull it on when he remembered the way Juliet had shaped his arms while they’d been in bed together. Throwing the tee aside, he found his white one that was snug on the arms and showed off his biceps. It had been a gift from Catie. Ísa’s sister had become part of the family and, according to her, he needed to flaunt what he had.

  “The poopy thing!” Esme said loudly as Jake came out of his room. She was making motions as if she had a shovel, a tiny and determined creature digging at the hotel carpet.

  Growling, he ran over and picked her up, pretending to be a monster who wanted to take bites out of her.

  Shrieking with laughter as he “attacked” her stomach, she said, “Daddy!” but it wasn’t a request to stop. They were still playing when the door opened and Juliet walked in.

  She paused on the doorstep, dressed in a pair of gray sweatpants and a dark blue hoodie under which he could see a hint of lace. Maybe a camisole?

  “Jules! Save me!” Esme reached out her arms.

  Juliet joined the game, and all three of them were huffed and warm and happy when they collapsed on the sofa not long afterward.

  Jake picked up the room service menu. “What do you want?” he asked his ladies.

  Because they were both his ladies now, even if Juliet hadn’t yet committed to it. Yeah, there were obstacles—he’d checked his phone during one of the car rides and seen that her bastard of an ex was still shooting off his mouth. Since Juliet had made it so clear that she had no use for Reid, the buttwipe had switched tactics and was now trying to paint her as a bitch who’d broken his heart by cheating on him.

  28

  An Invitation to Misbehave

  Jake didn’t know if Juliet had seen the latest volley, but he’d sent Thea a text to see if they should do anything. Her reply had been succinct: Let him dig that hole. He’s looking like more of a whining ass with every word he utters.

  True enough, but the problem was that he was keeping Juliet’s name in the media without her consent or desire. It was something that needed to stop, but Jake put it out of his mind for tonight—this was special and Reid had no place here.

  Right then Juliet was pretending to tickle Esme, and Esme was attempting to shield herself while not going far from Juliet, and they both looked so happy and at home. Jake trusted Juliet absolutely with Esme’s heart, and he’d never trusted anyone outside the family with his baby.

  “Ahem,” he said. “Shall I order salad?”

  “Ew!” Esme declared. “No salad!”

  “Yeah, no salad,” Juliet echoed. “I want a burger. Esme, burger? Nuggets?”

  Esme put a finger to her lips and thought about it. “Spaghetti,” she announced at last.

  He scanned the menu. “They do burgers.” Fancy burgers with ingredients he’d never heard of, but hey, it was a burger and at that price, it better be prime. “No spaghetti, but they have mac and cheese.” He’d have nixed the cheesy dish if Esme’s stomach had still been iffy, but she was back to her usual self, and probably quite hungry after the light snacks they’d given her through the rest of the day. “You want that, Boo?”

  “Yummy in my tummy.” She rubbed her stomach and licked her lips, just like Danny had taught her. “Plus ice cream.”

  “No ice cream today, but I’ll reconsider tomorrow,” Jake said. “I don’t want to give your stomach too much to handle tonight.”

  “Tomorrow!” Esme collapsed on the floor on a giant sigh, making Jake shake his head and wonder if he was nurturing a future star of the stage.

  “I’ll get a burger too.” He glanced at a laughing Juliet, so content in this moment that he felt… right. Exactly where he was meant to be. “You want to try this appetizer platter thing?”

  “Is it weird?”

  “Can’t tell,” Jake said, reconsidering the platter thing. “Don’t think the ingredients are in English.” He was already going out on a limb with that burger.

  But Juliet being Juliet, said, “What the hey. Let’s order it—we can play a game to see if we can figure out what we’re eating.”

  Fully on board with the idea of playing with Juliet, he placed the order, and Esme declared that they had to have a proper picnic. Which entailed moving the dining table out of the way and spreading one of the spare blankets on the carpet. Jake and Juliet chose a spot by the windows that looked out on the colorful chaos of Times Square.

  “You’ve always been ballsy,” he said to Juliet when Esme went to the toilet. “But today, how you dealt with that ad exec, was something else.” He’d been so fucking proud of her—and he’d had a Neanderthal thought: She’s kicking your ass and she’s mine.

  Juliet gave him an odd look. “How come you weren’t mad I took over like that?”

  Reid. Fucker had left her with more than one scar. “Because it’s your job,” he said simply. “You knew exactly what to say to get her to back down. I’d have come across as being irrational.”

  “There’s nothing irrational about wanting a certain brand image.”

  “Jules, you know I don’t do it for that reason. It’s because I don’t want Esme confused by seeing images of her dad cozying up to a random woman while in his fricking underwear.”

  A twitch of her lips. “She was unfazed by seeing you in your briefs.”

  “Try having a kid and not letting them catch you in your skivvies.” Jake remembered many a night when, bleary-eyed, he’d rocked his little girl to sleep after a nightmare or soothed her when she was feeling sick. “But it’s different if there’s a woman involved. Especially since Esme doesn’t have a mum.”

  “I get it.” Juliet took a cross-legged position on the blanket. “She knows something’s up.”

  “Yeah, she’s a smart cookie.” He couldn’t help feeling smug about that, even though most of Esme’s brains had no doubt come from Calypso. “The thing is, Jules, you’re part of her life now, whatever happens.”

  A hard swallow. “I won’t let her down. I promise.”

  “I know you won’t.”

  Esme ran out right then, holding out her hands. “I washed! With soap! Promise.”

  “Good girl.” He patted a spot on the blanket just as someone knocked on the door. Esme came with him to get the room service cart. He handed the waiter a generous tip and wheeled the cart over to the blanket.

  They set out their meals on the blanket, along with the bottles of water the turndown service had left behind. The service had also left behind small boxes of chocolate that he’d had to hide from his daughter.

  As they ate, he was struck by the comfort of it: Juliet wasn’t trying too hard with Esme. She was being herself, and the person she was happened to be kind and gentle with people who needed that gentleness. She’d snapped at him in school, but he’d never once seen her snap at Calypso.

  When Esme decided she’d rather have some burger instead of finishing her mac and cheese, Jul
iet cut off a piece of hers before Jake could do the same. God, she was digging deeper into his heart with every second that passed. He was screwed if she decided against him. Which was why he had to make very sure she decided for him. For them.

  Even when Esme began to fall asleep midway through the meal and grew bad-tempered with her inability to stay awake, Juliet took it in stride. While Jake carried his daughter through to the bathroom to clean her teeth before he put her to bed, Juliet got her laptop and returned a couple of emails.

  He came back to find she’d waited for him rather than finishing her meal.

  Seeing him, she closed the laptop and put it aside.

  “She hates missing out,” he said after sitting down on the blanket next to Juliet rather than across from her. He put his hand deliberately behind her, his arm acting as a brace for her back.

  “Jake.”

  “She’s conked out,” he assured her. “Trust me, when she gets like this, I could set off a siren next to her and she’d sleep on.” It amazed him, where both Esme and Emmaline could fall asleep. “My mum says she gets that from me. Apparently, one time I fell asleep while Mum was riding in an ambulance with the siren going full blast.”

  “Why was she in an ambulance?”

  “Danny—he came early and the birth was a bit complicated. She was alone with me at home, so I got to ride with her to the hospital. Family legend is I crawled onto the stretcher beside her and snoozed away. Dad arrived at the ER right as she was being wheeled in—I was still fast asleep.”

  Juliet’s eyes were on his mouth, her teeth sinking into her lower lip. “You’re even sexier when you smile.”

  Smile turning into a grin, Jake said, “I’ll use my powers for good.”

  Instead of making a face at him or laughing again, she turned back to her food. Three bites later: “Did you see what Reid’s saying?”

  “I come from a good family, but I’m pretty sure one of my cousins knows a hit man or three.” Aleki had gone over to the dark side for a while in his teens, though he now ran a very legitimate security firm. “Want me to put the word out?”

  “If only.” She picked up a fry, stared at it before defiantly crunching it between her teeth. “Thea says I should maintain radio silence right now. That he’s trying to goad me into turning this into a melodrama.”

  “That’s what she told me too.”

  Juliet’s brows gathered over her eyes. “Why are you talking to Thea about me?”

  “Because you matter to me.”

  * * *

  Jake’s words knocked the breath out of Juliet. To say it so bluntly, so without hesitation: You matter to me.

  No one since Calypso had claimed her so without conditions—and that had been a childhood friendship. This… She didn’t know how to react. Fear tangled with need inside her, alongside a bone-deep terror. The need won and Juliet found herself leaning into him, the hunger inside her painful. Cupping her jaw in that way he had of doing, as if she was precious, he kissed her.

  Jake’s kiss…

  Toes curling, her slippers long ago kicked off, she leaned deeper into him, drunk on him and on how he made her feel. Cherished. Wanted. Beautiful. “You smell too good.”

  Her complaint made his lips curve against her own, his kiss even more potent for it.

  When he went to nudge her down to the blanket, she found the breath to say, “Food.”

  A second, two, and he’d pushed that food out of the way. Then he was coming down over her, a strongly built man sleek with muscle. She loved feeling the weight and power of him. Nudging her legs apart, he settled himself in between. She groaned. He was already hard. Harder than the biceps she gripped as he moved his head down to the curve of her neck.

  She shivered under each kiss, but she didn’t attempt to control the sensations… because this was Jake. Strong, annoying, protective, too serious Jake who devastated her when he smiled. Curling her legs around his hips, she held on for kiss after kiss. His hair was slightly rough under her touch, the strands sliding through her fingers before she managed to get a grip.

  In contrast, his skin was silky and hot and when she gave in to temptation and tugged up the back of his T-shirt so she could slide her hands underneath, he made a rumbling sound in his chest that went straight through her nipples and to her core.

  Clenching her thighs around him, she kissed the curve of his shoulder. He pushed up against her, once, twice, his erection hard and frankly a bit intimidating despite the fact they’d already been together twice.

  He kissed her throat again, sucking for a second.

  Shivers cascaded over her. “Jake.” She pushed at his shoulders. “Bedroom.” He might be certain Esme would sleep through an earthquake, but Juliet needed the security of a door and at least a second’s warning.

  The last thing she wanted to do was traumatize Jake’s baby girl.

  He rose up off her, his arm muscles flexing and his ridged abdomen taut as he went into an effortless push-up. She swooned like a romance-novel heroine. The man was hot. But that wasn’t what caught her, held her.

  With his hair falling across his forehead and a wicked smile on his face, he looked so young. And the thing was, they were both so young, only twenty-four. It was just that life had aged them.

  “Do you think we can be young together?” she found herself whispering.

  Though she’d spoken utterly out of context, Jake said, “We already are, Jules.” He rose to his feet with enviable fluidity, then held out his hand with that smile that enslaved her. “Let’s misbehave.”

  Her own cheeks creasing, she took his hand and he hauled her to her feet—and into him. She rose onto her tiptoes, unable to resist the temptation of his mouth, of him. He moved backward as he kissed her and she followed, her breasts crushed against the heat of his bare chest and one of his hands on the back of her neck, the other on her ass.

  Her skin heated at his open appreciation of her curves.

  Once inside the bedroom she said, “Do we close the door?” She didn’t know about children Esme’s age, what they would and wouldn’t find scary.

  Jake nudged it shut. “She’ll come in if she needs me.” At her horrified look, he chuckled, and she saw a glimpse of the Jake who’d souped up his car and burned rubber. “Seriously, Jules, if you’re going to be with me, you’ll have to get used to the idea of occasionally being caught with your pants down.”

  She shoved at his outrageously gorgeous chest, though the idea of being part of such a tight little family group made her go all warm inside. “It’s not that. It’s because we’re not together yet.” It’d be different if Esme walked in on Mummy and Daddy or even Daddy and Daddy’s long-term lover. You could explain that away.

  A quietness to Jake’s face. “Aren’t we?” He cupped her jaw and cheek, rubbed the pad of his thumb over her cheekbone. “Are you going to see other people?”

  “No.” She fisted her hand in his T-shirt. “But you know what I mean.”

  He brushed his thumb over her cheekbone again. “Thank you for watching out for my baby girl, Jules.” The tenderness in his voice shattered walls inside her she hadn’t known she’d put up. “But trust me, she’s not going to wake up.”

  She did, she realized. Trust him. Jacob Esera, the annoying boy from school, had grown into a man she trusted in a way she’d never trusted anyone else.

  Tugging at his clothes, she said, “I thought we were going to misbehave.”

  He laughed, wild and young again, and tore off his T-shirt. It ended up hanging on top of a standing lamp. “Three-point throw,” he quipped.

  Juliet giggled, adoring this Jake as much as she did serious Jake. He caught her laughter with his mouth, her hands landing on the hard, ridged muscle of his chest. Every part of her clenched. The man was flat-out-beautiful.

  It wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t also been Jake.

  But because he was, she let herself indulge and she let herself fall. He unzipped her hoodie and she shrugged it off. Her
camisole was a dark burgundy with matching lace at the top. She’d worn it because it was comfortable, with no intent to entice, but bared to Jake’s gaze she was glad to be wearing something pretty.

  Breaking the kiss, he bent his head to press his lips to the vee between her breasts.

  His hand slid up the satin to cup one unfettered breast. “No bra,” he said in a very happy tone of voice. “Naughty Jules.”

  Brain cells misfiring, she had to fight to get out the words. “I wanted to be comfortable.” She never wore a bra while at home.

  “Be comfortable around me all you like, I insist.” He closed one big, hot hand around her breast, the other on the back of her neck as he took another voracious kiss.

  Juliet broke it to kiss her way down his jaw and along his throat, to the hollow at the base of his neck that had tempted her from the start. He shivered when she licked him there, and though Reid had done a number on her self-confidence in bed—she knew he was full of shit, but she wasn’t superhuman, couldn’t forget all his barbs—she kept going, kissing and licking and sampling the addictive taste of him as she shaped her hands over his body.

  “God, Jake. Your body is ludicrous.” It was the stuff of a woman’s wet dreams.

  He chuckled, one hand fisting in her hair. “Comes with the job.”

  She tongued his abs, began to slide lower, but he tugged her up with a grip in her hair. His eyes were hot.

  “That can wait,” he said. “First I want to see your back arch, feel you go all wet and quivering around me as I make you come.”

  29

  Jake Improves His Grade

  Throat dry, Juliet braced herself against the back of the door as he hooked his fingers in the sides of her sweatpants and tugged down.

  He looked up with a grin. “I like the little rabbits.”

  She flushed, remembering the cotton bikini panties she’d pulled on this morning. Black, with happy white bunnies bouncing all over them, they didn’t match her camisole, weren’t in any way seductive. But she found herself smiling back because he looked so damn delighted with her. “Wait till you see what’s under them.”