Legally Yours (Spitfire Book 1)

by Nicole French

  I leaned down to kiss him gently, but his hand braced my head to tug me closer, begging entry to my mouth, which I granted willingly. His hands roved, grasping desperately at my shirt, pressing me into me into his chest and groaning painfully, as if he couldn’t get close enough.

  Finally, he stood up, his mouth fused to mine, and keeping me straddled around his waist with his big arms. His kiss was sensual, but it wasn’t until he broke it that I realized he wasn’t carrying me toward the stairs, but instead over to the piano. He squatted down and released me onto the bench.

  I looked bemusedly at the piano in front of me. “You know, this is really too much instrument for a house. The sound on this is designed for massive concert halls. It will break your ear drums if you ever open the top.”

  Brandon stood up and grinned. “Well, you’ll have to help me choose something more appropriate, then.”

  I gave him a small smile. “Maybe.”

  “Definitely,” he corrected me. “But before we do, will you play something for me on it?”

  He stepped away from the piano, sank his long, lean frame back into the love seat that now faced the instrument, and looked at me expectantly. I opened my mouth to argue with him again, but I couldn’t quite do it. I stared down at the beautiful piano, lost for a moment in admiring the way the warm lighting of the room blinked off its sleek, polished lines. I’d probably never get another chance to play on something of this caliber again. I closed my eyes, hearing the notes already.

  I gave in.

  “All right,” I said. “You win.”

  “Do you know any love songs?” Brandon asked as I took a seat at the bench and turned up the fallboard to reveal the long row of untouched black and white keys beneath it.

  I pressed a finger lightly on upper C to hear the sweet, clear tone expel throughout the room. I grinned.

  “I play classical music, Brandon,” I said with a small smile. “They’re all love songs, in some way.”

  “Then play one that reminds you of us.”

  I nodded and turned back to the piano. I didn’t have to consider the request long; the brooding, angsty melody of Chopin’s Waltz in C Minor came fervently and immediately. Given the frustration, worry, and longing I’d been feeling nonstop for the past week and a half—for the past several months, really—it was easy to pour myself into the lilted phrases of music that seemed to reflect exactly the shifting polarities of Brandon’s and my relationship. At times my feelings felt as natural as could be, no harder than a walk in the park. He was so easy to love. But at other times, I felt like I was being swept up by a tide, lost in one of Chopin’s furious arpeggios or the multi-octave scales that spilled up the keys like a loose wave. Falling in love with him was simple, but we still fought, still clashed as only two people as strong-willed as we were bound to do.

  The piece was short, but it did my feelings justice—better than I could ever do with words. It wasn’t until the end that I realized I’d played the entire thing with my eyes closed. When I opened them, I found Brandon standing next to me, staring at my hands with a look of awe. I took them off the keys and released the pedal; he blinked and sat down next to me on the bench with a thump.

  “When…why…why did you choose that one?” he asked quietly.

  I shook my head. It was hard to explain, especially to someone who didn’t know music. “I don’t know. The minor key, maybe, and the alternation between a walking cadence and the arpeggios—”

  “That’s the fast part?”

  I nodded. “I think the combination of all of that, probably, is why I chose it. It just…came to mind, I guess.”

  He nodded, drifting one finger across the shiny surface of the keys, but not pressing any down.

  “It was intense,” he said quietly.

  I nodded again. “Yes.”

  He turned to me with a small smile that caused the skin at the edges of his eyes to crinkle. “Intense,” he repeated. His eyes flickered down to my lips. “Is that what this is?”

  “I thought you said it was love.” My own gaze dropped a bit to focus on his mouth as well.

  “Love,” Brandon repeated again. He tipped his head to the side. “It doesn’t seem like enough,” he said just before he captured my lips with his. Then, just as he broke away again: “Move in with me.”

  I gasped. That was the last thing I was expecting him to say. “What, here?”

  “Well, I don’t think I’m allowed to live at the law school, Red,” he said with a brief smile, but his expression quickly turned serious while he awaited my response.

  I stared at him, dumbfounded. “You’re serious. It’s only been, what, two months since we met?”

  “Two months and sixteen days. And yeah, I’m completely serious. I’d probably ask for more if I thought I had a chance in hell you’d say yes.”

  I didn’t even want to entertain what he meant by that. Brandon continued to stare, refusing to break eye contact even once, while I blinked, over and over again, trying to process this possibility.

  “And before you say you don’t want all my money, that’s not what I’m proposing. This isn’t me buying you a condo, Red. It’s asking you to share my home.” He took my chin in hand and forced me to look directly at him. “I love you. Don’t overthink this.”

  “But…we just met…and we barely know each other,” I sputtered. I pulled my chin away, but continued to look at him. “I love you too, but it’s a bit soon, don’t you think?”

  He shrugged, finally looking down at the keys, sliding his fingers over their shiny surface. “I don’t really care about that. I only know that I wake up wishing you were with me, and I go to sleep thinking about your face. I want to hear you play this piano every day, and listen to you grumble about your work, and just be with you when you finally you soar, because I know you will.” He sighed. “The best times I have with you are when we’re just being together. No fancy dinners, no fancy clothes. Just sitting on the couch, reading in our sweats. I don’t want to wait until Friday every week to do that.”

  I ventured a small smile when he peeked back at me. “So basically, you want me to be an old married couple with you?”

  “Well, minus the old,” he said with a smirk before sneaking a quick kiss. He didn’t linger—he wanted an answer to his question.

  I looked away, unwilling to call him on that bluff. “I’ll have to think about it. I’ve already paid for student housing through the end of the semester, so I’m not moving anywhere before then.”

  “But you’ll have to move somewhere, right?”

  I looked back to him, and found him watching me with a raised brow and a knowing expression. I rolled my eyes.

  “Yes,” I admitted. “I will.”

  The truth was, I wanted to shout “yes!” and throw myself into his arms. Despite our occasional hiccups—like the one tonight—I felt the same. I wanted to sit with him on a couch, watch our careers, our lives grow together. I felt loved with him, safe with him, not to mention completely turned on by him. I wanted to play house too.

  I pulled on the collar of his t-shirt nervously. He’d been making grand overtures since we met, and I’d been fucking them all up, too scared to take what he was offering. Maybe it was time for me to make one of my own.

  “Okay then,” I said softly. I looked up, finding his eyes wide and vulnerable while he waited for me to speak. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  Brandon didn’t breathe for a moment. “Really?”

  I offered a small smile and leaned in. “Yes,” I said, and kissed him.

  Like the music, his kiss started out light and easy, but quickly slipped into something more torrid. We grasped at each other frantically, our tongues warring and adoring at the same time. He managed to get one arm around my waist long enough to yank me onto his lap, causing the piano bench to creak loudly under the pressure of our stacked weights.

  “Wait,” I breathed in between his insistent kisses. His hands were flying up my shirt, tearing it over my h
ead so his mouth could cover every square inch of my neck, shoulders and chest.

  “Ignore it,” he muttered as he unsnapped my bra and threw it down to the ground. With a half-painful, half-enraptured groan, he buried his face into the sensitive skin between my breasts.

  I followed his order. Instead, I focused on tugging and pulling his shirt over his head, eager to feel the smooth, taut expanse of his toned chest beneath his fingers. His lips found mine again as one hand clasped the back of my head, holding it still so he could conquer my mouth completely. I grasped at the skin around his back, hard enough to make him jerk at the feeling of my fingernails digging into his shoulders. He grunted and yanked me even closer. It was no good. We couldn’t get close enough.

  With a groan, he pushed the bench back with his feet and stood up, wrapping his free arm underneath my legs to keep me firmly tucked around his waist. I kicked off my pumps and hooked my ankles together, unwilling to give up any space between our bodies while I maintained contact between our mouths.

  “Need you,” Brandon heaved in between kisses. “Need you. Now.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, wholeheartedly, then stopped when I realized he wasn’t carrying me upstairs or even to the couch, but just enough steps to set me on top of the closed piano. “Whaaaat are you doing?”

  His mouth drifted back down my torso as he pushed me back onto the hard, polished surface. The buttons on my pants popped under the pressure of his fingers.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” he mumbled before taking one of my nipples deeply into his mouth, causing me to jerk beneath him. He tugged insistently on my pants and finally succeeded on peeling them, along with my underwear, completely off. They fell to the floor beside my blouse and bra.

  “You can’t fuck me on a hundred-thousand-dollar instrument!” I cried out, although my treacherous body only urged him on as my hips thrust upward toward his waiting hands as if by their own accord and my hands clutched desperately at the blond thicket of curls that was moving steadily down my stomach.

  “I bought it to play, Red,” he growled. “So let’s play.”

  His tongue dipped into my navel, causing me to squirm, but his hands gripped my backside and held me still. He wrenched my legs open, spreading me like a buffet across the piano top.

  “Jesus, baby,” he breathed as he looked over me. I squirmed again, but his hands kept me still. One released me long enough to swipe a long finger up the center of my core. The finger traveled up until it was poised over my mouth.

  “Suck,” he ordered, his eye dark with desire.

  Obediently I opened my mouth and took the salty-sweet blend of myself and his skin onto my tongue, sucking hard and then releasing with a sudden pop. His eyes darkened to a navy blue. The hand traveled back down my body, pinching one nipple as it went and causing me to yelp. My hips were starting to thrust toward him—I craved his touch, any kind of it.

  “Do you like the way you taste, baby?” he asked as he leaned down, tracing his mouth over the soft skin of my lower stomach and inner thighs—anywhere but where I desperately wanted him to be. One finger, then two gently slid into the warm depths there, and I bucked.

  “Please,” I breathed, barely able to get out any words. I wanted him so badly I couldn’t think.

  “Easy, baby,” he said, laying kisses closer and closer, nuzzling his face in between my legs without actually making any contact with his mouth. A third finger slipped in with the first two, stretching me delicious as they all made contact with that delicate bundle of nerves inside me. I groaned as he blew cool air over my most sensitive parts.

  “Brandon,” I whimpered. “Please.”

  “Please what, gorgeous?” His voice rumbled and teased against my tender flesh. “I don’t know what you want if you don’t say it.”

  “Please…ah!” I cried out as his finger twisted within me before resuming their steady, pulsing movements. “Fuck! You know what I want.”

  He leaned down and gently rubbed the tip of his nose over my clitoris. “Do I?”

  “Gah! Yes, you do!” I thrusted my upward, trying to catch the edge of his lips, his tongue. I desperately wanted contact, and he refused to give it to me. Instead, he pulled his nose away.

  “You smell so good,” he murmured with a brief kiss to my inner thigh, and another into the small patch of hair that surrounded his fingers. “You have no idea how badly I want to taste you. But you’re going to have to say it.”

  “Taste me,” I repeated. His fingers had picked up their pace, and I was starting to lose feeling in my legs.

  “Taste what, Skylar? Say it.”

  “Taste my…oh, God…taste my pussy. I want you to eat my pussy!”

  He grinned devilishly. “Your wish is my command, babe.”

  “Brandon!” I yelped as his mouth finally found me.

  The scratch of his unshaved cheek was deliciously rough against the smooth skin of my inner thigh. He alternately between licking and sucking over the tender nub of my clitoris, his occasional deep growl vibrating pleasantly over the sensitive flesh. His tongue was voracious, teasing and exploring as if he couldn’t get enough of me, couldn’t taste enough of me. I moaned, thrusting hard against the insistent rhythm set by his fingers, fucking them, fucking his face with everything I had.

  All of the energy in my body seemed to be gathering around his mouth and fingers. The hand that had been holding me down at the hips released and reached up to tweak one of my nipples, pulling on the hardened nub in time with the fingers inside me.

  “Oh, FUCK!” I screamed as his tongue twirled around the sensitive bundle of nerves, complementing the pressure from inside and beneath it. “Oh, God, Brandon…fuck…I’m…ohmygodI’MGOINGTOCOME!”

  My orgasm swept through me fast and hard, pulsing through my tensed limbs in time with his fingers and mouth. He hummed against my skin as he worked out the thrum of my heartbeat, his free hand grasped around my waist as I shook violently against him. I came, in wave after wave until every last bit of energy within me had been spent.

  At last, when all of the tension was gone and I had flopped back against the lacquered piano top like a shot animal, he gently removed his fingers and lifted his mouth. He leaned his head onto my thigh, looked up, and smiled sweetly at me.

  “I love making you do that,” he rumbled against my skin before standing up. His hands ran up the sides of my body, gently slipping under my back and lifting me up to lay against his chest. I was limp, like a rag doll.

  “I love you,” I muttered against the smooth skin of his shoulder. He chuckled and arranged my arms around his neck.

  “I love you too, Red,” he said. One arm reached under my legs, the other braced around my back, and in a fluid move, he picked me off the piano. He turned and started walking us toward the stairs.

  “Where are we going?” I asked drowsily, content to play damsel in distress. He’d distressed me, after all.

  “Upstairs,” he said with a brief kiss on my cheek. He was moving quickly, with a lot more energy than I currently possessed. “First we’re going to do that again, and then I’m going to finish the job properly.”

  Just the thought had me perking up. I bit his shoulder lightly, earning a devilish grin. “Sounds good to me.”

  ~

  Chapter 36

  I woke up the next morning in a pool of light. Nestled in the impossibly soft white sheets of Brandon’s bed, I blinked my eyes open against the bright sunlight streaming in from the tall bay windows. Reaching my hand out next to me, I realized that I was the only denizen of the bed and sat up, my sex-rumpled hair falling down my bare back.

  Scooting off the bed, I padded into the walk-in closet across the room in search of something to wear—my clothes, as far as I knew, were still scattered around the piano. My stomach clenched at the thought. The piano he’d bought for me. “I love you,” he’d said. “Move in with me.” The words still rang, sweet and soft, as if they had just been uttered.

  I glanced around the
closet as if I hadn’t been in there several times already. It was bigger than my entire bedroom. One wall was hung with evenly spaced designer suits, the opposing side full of various shelves and drawers with immaculately folded basics. The third was completely stocked with shoes and other accessories, and an ottoman as big as a double bed sat in the middle of the plush carpeted floor. Where would my homely belongings go in here? Could I get used to living in this kind of splendor? Would I ever feel completely normal in it?

  Despite the centrally heated air, I shivered, and not just because I was naked and slightly cold. Tiptoeing across the carpet to the enormous shelves lined with jeans, t-shirts, sweaters, and other casual apparel, I ran a finger over some of the soft cotton materials, all of them brand new. Brandon must have owned at least fifty plain white t-shirts. I tugged open a few drawers and found yet more work out apparel and stacks of undershirts. I didn’t even think I owned fifty shirts period.

  At the bottom of one drawer, the edge of a ratty blue shirt caught my eye, and I tugged it free to find a worn Red Sox logo smeared with a bit of paint splotches here and there. I smiled, pulled the thin cotton over my head. In the mirror, I caught a glance of myself practically swimming in the shirt. I could smell Brandon in the thin, time-softened fabric. I grinned in spite of myself. I may not have felt—yet—like I belonged here, but I was happy. Filled with sudden delight, I decided to run downstairs and share those feelings with Brandon.

  I made my way down the two flights of stairs to the kitchen, where I could hear the deep tones of Brandon’s voice in conversation with someone else.

  “So if she shows up, I’m not home, got it?” he instructed Ana, who was intently scribbling his instructions in a small notebook. “Otherwise, you’ve got the rest of the weekend off until Monday. We’ll want the place to ourselves.” He turned when he heard my footsteps approach the arched entryway into the kitchen. “Hey, there she is.” His eyes flickered over my rag-tag outfit, prompting a wide grin to spread on his face. “Did I convert you?”

  I looked down at the Sox logo and back up with a grin. “Well, I’ll always be a Mets fan, but I’m starting to come around on Red Sox Nation.” I glanced over at Ana and sent her a shy smile as a flush rose up my neck. Shit, I was standing here in her boss’s clothes. And this t-shirt was very thin.