“The truth is, I thought about you too. I couldn’t stop. That’s why I’m here. I’m not here to tell you thank you or sorry. I’m here to tell you that I can’t move past this until I have you.”
“Have me?” Was that mousy squeak truly her voice?
“I need you to tell me that you haven’t thought about it. I need you to tell me that you weren’t haunted, that you slept well, that you didn’t play back the smell of me, the shape of my body. I need you to tell me that you don’t want to learn what my skin feels like, what my lips would feel like against yours.”
“I… of course I didn’t imagine that. I don’t even- I don’t even like you. I don’t know you. I would never-”
“You’re a liar. I don’t know you either, but I can tell.” He leaned in so that his lips were just a fraction of an inch from hers and his breath was warm and sweet against her mouth. “I can tell that you’re burning up the same way I am.”
“I’m…” not. The word wouldn’t come out of her throat. It lodged there, the lie refusing to float up in the air between them, to be given life.
“Well then, here it is. This kiss. And then maybe we can both just get on with our lives because it won’t mean anything at all.”
Before she could pull away, before her foggy, desire addled brain could truly register what was happening, Jay slammed his mouth over hers.
Chapter 10
That Kiss
Laya
Jay’s kiss… it was a kiss she felt all through her body. She felt the tingles in her arms, her weightless, jelly legs and the secret spot between them. Her skin broke out in a mass of goosebumps and a chill shot up her spine.
She managed, through the fog in her useless, non-functioning brain, to get a hand between them. She planted it on the rock solid wall of his chest, right between his pecs, and pushed hard. Despite the fluttering in her stomach and the utter chaos raging through her entire body, she stumbled back a step. She was entirely thankful she’d worn practical shoes. If she’d been in heels, she probably would have rocked to the side and broken her ankle in her haste.
The confusion in Jay’s eyes was almost comical.
“I’m…” she panted. “I’m not like that… you can’t just come in here and tell me how I feel and kiss me and expect me to just fall at your feet.” He actually had the nerve to look shocked, as though that was exactly what he expected to have happen. “What were you going to do? Just push me onto the floor and take me in the dust like some kind of- of-”
“No. Of course not,” he said smoothly, having obviously recovered himself. His features were inscrutable once again. The corners of his eyes crinkled and she had the feeling that he was laughing at her silently, internally. “I was going to lift you up and you were going to wrap those long legs around my waist and I was going to take you up against that wall.” He pointed across the way to a non-descript spot that looked exactly like the rest of the raw brick that made up the wall. “It’s clean there.”
Laya nearly blurted something harsh before she realized he was joking. She didn’t like the way her body reacted hard, a sultry shiver of lust paralyzing her, freezing her to the floor. She wanted to turn around and leave, escape, keep herself safe, safe from Jay and the unknown, mysterious wildness that he represented. The other half of her wanted to wrap herself around him like he said and have him teach her what passion truly meant.
“I… you’re insane,” she said thickly. “I’m going to go.”
He stepped closer and extended his arm. His hand fell to her waist and desire rocketed out from the touch. Her blood was so hot it was scalding, as it passed through her veins.
Jay bent his head and his lips landed right next to her ear. He didn’t touch her again, other than that hand at her waist, but she felt his breath like an erotic caress.
“I can take you somewhere. Somewhere nice.”
She wanted his lips on hers again. She wanted that delicious burn, the wondrous awakening of incredible, sweeping sensation. She wanted that silk tongue and that mouth making her come alive. She’d never even had an orgasm with another person before. She’d never felt anything close to what she felt with Jay just standing there, doing nothing but resting his hand on her hip above her clothes.
“I can’t.” Her response wasn’t as forceful or sure as she wanted it to be.
“Why not? Can’t or won’t?”
“I can’t just do this with you. You’re a stranger.”
That hand, that heated, beautiful, strong hand swept over her hip and down, down her thigh and gripped hers. His fingers threaded through hers.
“Then come with me and we’ll talk and we won’t be strangers anymore.”
“I thought you hated me,” she whispered.
He had the nerve to shrug. “I wouldn’t say hated. I’d say maybe we had a shitty start. It doesn’t have to dictate the rest of our lives.”
“You’re… I can’t believe that you-”
“That I what? If you knew me better, you’d believe that there isn’t anything I wouldn’t be daring enough to do.”
“I do believe that. You’re- you’re not like other people.”
“That I’m not. Now, are you going to come with me?”
“Where?” She winced. Say no, not where.
Jay turned and glanced towards the back of the warehouse. “There’s a set of stairs over there. They go to the second level.”
She raised a brow. “And we have permission to be here?”
“Of course not.” That devilish bad boy grin was back. The fine lines at the corners of his eyes deepened.
Smiling with his eyes. Does he have to be so impossibly handsome?
“You- brought me here twice and you didn’t even have the okay? We’re trespassing. We could be arrested.”
“We’re not going to disturb anything but the dust. No one will know that we’re here.”
“What if there’s an alarm or something.”
“If there was, the police would have been here long ago.”
“You’re insane,” she said again.
Jay’s eyes twinkled. “Are you leaving? Or are you coming?”
“I… what are we going to do up there?” She cast her eyes to the ceiling and the hidden rooms above.
“Get to know each other.”
“What does that mean? Talking and that’s it? I’ll only come up there if we’re going to talk.”
“Is that what makes you come?”
Laya’s mouth opened in astonishment. “There isn’t anything that you won’t say, is there?”
“Nope. I’ve never had a filter.”
“Maybe you should. It’s not polite.”
“We’ve already been over that. Now, I’ll ask you again. Are you leaving or not?” He released her hand, as though that would help her make an unbiased decision.
She turned towards the exit. It would be so simple to just walk through those doors, to her car and drive back to the world she knew, a world that was safe. She could leave Jay and his loud mouthed opinions behind. She could leave the wild passion, the shuddering, violent sensation, the white hot heat that he stirred in her, everything that she’d never thought possible with another person because she’d never experienced it before.
She should have walked right through those doors, but she should have done a lot of things in the past couple days and hadn’t. Slowly she pivoted back around and met Jay’s deep blue eyes. They were as mysterious and untamed as the rest of him was, as wild as the sea and as wondrous as the never ending sky.
“Let’s go,” she said. Her voice echoed with far more conviction than she actually felt.
Chapter 11
The Only One
Jay
The upstairs of the warehouse, which he’d already explored before their first meeting, looked like it had been gutted with the idea of reclaiming it or putting warehouse condos into or something. The project had obviously been abandoned. What had once been rooms had been stripped down to the bare stud
s, the wood as shockingly new as it had been when it was put in decades before. The raw brick was exposed on that floor as well. He loved that look. It was really too bad that whoever was trying to reclaim the building hadn’t finished.
Or maybe it wasn’t. If they had, he wouldn’t be there right now. With Laya. No matter how he tried to play it cool, he couldn’t pretend that she didn’t affect him. His entire body was ringing from that kiss. He felt like he’d just gone nine rounds. He felt beat up from the effort of keeping himself under control. He throbbed in all the wrong places.
Talk? Get to know each other? That wasn’t something he’d ever done. Talking meant opening himself up and that sure as hell wasn’t something he did.
Laya trailed up the steps in his wake. Her boots made little scuffling, shuffling noises. He liked the even scrapes.
The upstairs was actually well illuminated. It was pretty wild to see the millions of dust motes and little particles dancing in the sunbeams slanting from small square windows that were set every five feet or so.
When he turned and found Laya standing a few feet behind him, he could tell she was trembling on the inside even if her head was lifted boldly and she looked him in the eye. He wasn’t sure why she hadn’t walked right out those front doors. He would have, if he was her.
Maybe that kiss fucked her up as badly as it did him. He had to do it. He had to taste her, to find out if those lips were as soft as he thought. Most of all he needed to kiss her just to see what happened. He felt completely transformed. Whatever life he’d known was gone and in its place was a new, untried, frightened, more innocent, more hopeful, kinder, far less confident replacement.
“I think this is far enough.” Laya actually sat down, her back to the wall, her feet splayed out in a beam of sunlight from the window a foot away. She arched a brow when he stood there staring at her. “Are you coming?”
“I thought you were the one who was going to be coming,” he said with a smirk. He was trying to be his old cocky self but his voice fell flat.
Laya rolled her eyes. “Please. Can we just cut the bullshit talk about coming. It’s getting old.”
Wow. It was fucking hot when she put him in his place.
He couldn’t actually bring himself to apologize. That would be going too far. Instead he closed the distance and sat down beside her, back to the wall. He made sure there was a good foot between them, mostly because he didn’t trust himself not to do something stupid. He felt like he was right on the edge and he couldn’t even think straight. His brain was having a real malfunction, probably due to the fact that all the blood in his body was in his fucking dick at the moment.
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“What?”
“Siblings. Do you have any?”
“What kind of a middle school question is that?”
“Middle school?”
“It just seems like something kids would ask each other.”
“Well I really want to know. I said get to know each other. That’s what I meant. Or what did you think I was talking about?”
He ran a hand through his hair, mussing the long strands. Laya’s eyes widened and she looked down at the floor instead of at him. He realized how sexual the movement was and how practiced he was at doing it.
“I have a sister.” He relented because he didn’t want her to get up and leave. “I think I said that before.” He racked his brain, trying to recall where exactly. “Anyway, she’s younger than me. It’s funny, I have a best friend too. He was closer than a brother to me growing up. They’re actually together now. I guess he wasn’t like a brother to her.”
“Clearly.”
“I was against them getting together, but it’s been a year and she lives with him now and they’re happy enough.”
“Why?”
“Why are they happy?”
“No. I mean, why were you against them getting together?”
“Oh.” Jay glanced at the ceiling. He actually felt himself go red, which was just about the strangest sensation he’d felt in a long time. “I don’t know. It’s hard to explain.” He needed to distract Laya and get the attention off himself. God, I’m shit at this talking business. “I bet you’re an only child.”
“Why would you say that?”
“It’s so obvious. No parent would buy their kid a car like that if they weren’t an only child. It would be too expensive to buy two or three of them and the others would be bound to be jealous.”
Laya actually laughed. The sound was so soft and pretty it cut right through to some mushy part inside of his chest that he hadn’t known existed. He wished she’d laugh again, just to treat his ears to the beauty of the sound.
“I actually am an only child.”
“I knew it.”
“It’s not what you think though.” Her pretty forehead knit into a frown and her eyes shimmered with some inscrutable emotion. “It’s because my mom had such a hard pregnancy. She started bleeding when she was four months along with me. They thought they were losing the baby. She went on bed rest after and everything was fine, but I did come almost a month early. She had such a hard pregnancy and her health was so poor that they didn’t want to risk having another kid. They would have liked more, though. She used to say all the time growing up that she wished I had a brother or sister to play with.”
“I’m sorry…” Jay felt a little like someone had just kicked him in the teeth.
“That’s alright. Now it’s my turn to guess. I’m going to guess that you’re the type of guy who doesn’t have any pets because you can’t take care of anyone but yourself.”
It took Jay a minute, but then he burst out laughing. A real laugh, the kind he hadn’t actually let loose in a long time. They were an even match. He’d made her laugh and she’d done the same for him.
“I actually don’t have any pets,” he admitted. “I do want a dog, but I work a lot, sometimes twelve hours a day and you can’t be gone that long. I own my own house, but I don’t want it to be chewed to shreds or pissed all over.”
“You could get a cat.”
“I’m not really a cat person.”
“You might be surprised.”
“Let me guess, you have a cat.”
“We actually have two. They’re Siamese. They have good personalities. I like them a lot.”
“So what do you do, besides modeling?”
“I thought you had me figured out.”
“Don’t make me guess because if I had to, I’d guess nothing and that just sounds rude.”
“Well… I want to do fashion, but that’s not going to happen. I draw and stuff, on my own time. I always have, since I was a kid. I like clothes. I like dresses. I like to imagine the way they’d fit on people. I used to sew, back in high school. Sometimes I made my own clothes for fun.”
“That’s a pretty wild thing to do.”
“Not really.”
“I was forced to do sewing class in home economics in high school. It was hard. I hated it. Everything I tried turned out like shit. We also had to do cooking and as bad as my sewing was, my cooking was worse. We had to bake this cake from scratch and I think I put salt in instead of sugar. My teacher just about barfed when she took a bite.”
“Was that on purpose?”
“Of course not.” He put on what he hoped was an innocent face and they both laughed again.
“Anyway, I’m never going to be able to convince my dad to let me go into fashion or design. He’s a lawyer. He doesn’t want me to be a lawyer like him, but he does want me to have an education I can actually use. I was in business for six months when I was twenty, but I hated it. I finished the semester just to get it done, but I didn’t want to do more than that. My mom convinced him to let me take some time off and figure out what I wanted to do. It took me a while to even figure that I wanted to do this. Modeling, I mean. I’ve been at it for a couple years. My dad said if it doesn’t work out, then next fall I have to go back to school. He’s goin
g to make me go into business again, even though I hate it. I would way rather go into education and be a teacher or something.”
“Well, that’s a good enough calling isn’t it? I don’t think I could put up with bratty kids and horrible teenagers all day.”
“It can’t be all that bad…”
“Yes it could.”
“Did you always know you wanted to be a mechanic?”
He almost laughed, rudely, but he swallowed it back. Laya’s eyes were sparkling and her face so eager that he could tell she was actually interested. How long had it been since he talked with anyone about anything that meant something? A very, very long time. Probably last year, when he and Rone and then he and his sister, Heather, had their heart to heart chats about them seeing each other.
“I didn’t know that I wanted to be a mechanic, but I was always good with engines. I was constantly taking things apart and putting them back together. It drove my mom nuts growing up. When I got older I was really into motors. I loved cars. I got this piece of shit shell of a car when I was fifteen and started working on restoring it. I actually did finish it, five years later and sold it. I bought the truck I have now with the money.”
“Well, at least you knew what you were good at.”
“You’ll figure it out, I’m sure.”
“Was that actually a compliment? Coming from you, it’s probably high praise.”
He actually didn’t have a smart ass retort ready. “My sister never had her shit together, at least not if you heard my mom talk, but the more I think about it, the more I think Heather knew exactly what she was doing. She got a job working as a receptionist at a tattoo place. She was always artsy and she liked getting inked, so I guess it was a good fit. She started apprenticing there a while ago. She loves it. Tattooing I mean. I think she always knew what her calling was. My mom doesn’t like it. She still gives her a hard time, though it’s got a bit better since Rone came into the picture. My mom always liked Rone. She likes having him around. She hopes that Heather will marry him and make him a permanent part of the family.”
Forbidden Soulmates_A Steamy Hot Revenge Romance Page 6
