by Julie Kriss
“You’re not my type,” I breathed, cupping him harder.
His tattooed arms were tense, holding him over me. “I know,” he said against me, his beard scratching me. “We’re a terrible idea. You want to fuck me, counselor?”
He’d called me that in defense, and in friendship, but when he said it now it was unbearably hot. “Yes,” I said.
“Good. I want to fuck you, too. I have since we first met.” He eased up and kissed my mouth, deep and needy yet gentle, his tongue tasting every part of me. I kissed him back, let him inside my mouth as I undid the buttons of his jeans and worked my hand inside them, tracing his cock through his boxer briefs.
He broke the kiss, scraping his teeth on my lip. We were both panting like teens in the backseat of a car. “Fuck, I want to be inside you,” he said.
I rubbed him harder. He felt big, and I’d never wanted anything so much in my life. “Tell me you have a condom,” I breathed.
“Found some in the bathroom. Probably from my brothers.” He seemed to have lost the ability to make complete sentences. He pushed off me—I extracted my hand from inside his jeans—and stumbled to the bathroom in the dark. I heard him bang around in there, and then he came back as I sat up and scooted to the edge of the bed again, naked now.
He stood in front of me, and I yanked at the waist of his jeans. “Off,” I told him, impatient. He handed me the strip of condoms and I pulled one off, unwrapping it as he pushed his jeans and boxer briefs to the floor. Then he stood in front of me naked, his cock out and ready for me. I took it in my hand and put the crown in my mouth, unable to help myself.
Jace made a strangled sound. “Tara.”
He tasted good. I pushed his cock further into my mouth, taking in its outlines with my tongue, tracing its contours. He was big and thick, just like I’d imagined. Because yes, I’d imagined Jace’s cock. Multiple times.
He hissed a breath. “Tara,” he warned again.
He was right. I wanted him inside me, right now. I drew back and unrolled the condom over him, sliding it down to the base, then stroking his balls as I kissed his hip.
With a growl he pushed me back on the bed, and then he was there with me, his big body against mine, his hard thigh between mine, his hands tangling in my hair. He kissed me quick and deep, his mouth hard on mine. “You like that?” he asked. “My cock?”
“Yes,” I said, because I did. I did.
“Then fuck me,” he ordered.
He rolled on his back. I straddled him and he leaned back, letting me get in position. From here I could see the smattering of dark hair on his chest, the shadowed curl of his stomach muscles. I could see the landscape of his pecs and his gorgeous shoulders. I very much liked this view.
I positioned myself over him, put the head of his cock against me, and sunk down. Jace groaned and gripped one hip with his hands, his muscles straining with tension. I sunk further—I was wet, and so ready after an orgasm, but still I could feel him stretching me, pushing me apart. I panted in pleasure, gripping him with my knees.
“Fuck,” he said, pushing his hips up, penetrating me harder. My muscles relaxed and I took him, all the way, until he was finally fully in. I felt full, and a rush of possessiveness came over me for the cock inside me. Mine, I thought. Mine.
I rocked on him, and Jace pushed himself up on his arms, taking the back of my head roughly with one hand. His mouth came on mine, and we began, me moving my hips, him pushing up into me, his mouth scraping mine, his tongue inside me. “Fuck me how you like,” he said on an exhale, and I closed my eyes and rocked harder, letting him take me. I was lost. I didn’t even feel like myself, recognize myself. I just pushed myself onto him over and over, claiming him, chasing another orgasm.
Already I was close, so close. I pulled my mouth from his. “Your fingers,” I said, moving on him. “I need them. Please.”
He moved his fingers between us, stroking me. “There?” he asked softly.
“Oh.” My head fell back.
Jace moved his fingers. “There.”
That was the spot. I rocked harder still, moving my hips to get the most of his fingertips, not caring that we were sweating and the bed was rocking. This was mine. No woman would ever have this, this piece of this particular extraordinary man. This was mine, all mine, and I wanted to come, and I wanted him to come. I dug my fingers into the hard flesh of his shoulders.
He wound his free hand in my hair again, hard, his mouth coming to my ear. “I knew it,” he said in his sexy low voice as he stroked me with his cock and his fingers. “I knew you’d fuck like this. I knew you’d be so dirty for me. My smart-mouthed counselor. I wanted to be inside you. I wanted your legs spread. I fucking wanted to watch you come.”
I came apart, my body pulsing with another orgasm as I cried out. I felt myself squeezing him, rippling over his cock, and Jace thrust up into me hard, losing control. He pounded me from below, all of his strength drilling into me, and I took it, my body absorbing the shock. Then he let out a cry of his own and I felt him start to pulse.
He flipped me roughly onto my back without disconnecting and shoved into me that way, still pulsing, still coming, his body arching over mine. After what seemed like an eternity he started to relax, his body settling over mine, warm and sticky with sweat. We were still joined. I wrapped my legs around his waist and locked my ankles.
We lay there for a minute, unable to speak, unable to think. I thought, maybe, that I had never been so happy in my life. That had been spectacular. I felt fully, completely alive.
Still, Jace was a big man. I unlocked my ankles and pushed his shoulder. “You’re crushing me,” I said.
He turned his face into my neck. “I can die like this,” he said. “This is perfect. Right here.”
I smiled and pushed him again. “Don’t die, please.”
“I could go right now and have no complaints,” he said, but he pushed his weight up onto his arms. He leaned in and kissed me softly on the mouth, the touch strangely sweet.
He broke away and looked down to where we were still joined. “I should…” He pulled out of me, then looked at me. “Do you… need anything?”
Because, of course, he hadn’t done this before. I felt my chest squeeze. “No,” I said. “I’m fine.”
He swung off the bed and walked to the bathroom. And left me staring at the ceiling, wondering what the hell I was going to do. Because I wasn’t falling for him anymore. I had fallen.
And I had a feeling I still had further to go.
Twenty
Jace
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, wearing my T-shirt. The white one with a smear of motor oil on it that I’d discarded on the floor. Her long brown hair was twisted and tousled down her back, her legs slender and graceful beneath the hem of the shirt, her feet delicate and perfect.
I was sitting up in bed, next to her, leaning on pillows against the headboard. I wore the sheet up to my waist and nothing else. I had one arm propped behind my head and the other resting on my stomach. If you’d offered to pay me a million dollars to move from that exact spot, I’d have told you no.
“I think we should talk,” Tara said.
“Why am I not surprised?” I asked.
She watched my face and then she smiled, just enough that I knew she caught my teasing. “I’m serious.”
“I know.”
“This,” she said, pointing to herself and me and back again. “This, here. We need to be clear about what it is.”
Of course she’d be direct. She asked everything head-on. It was what I liked about her. I felt a second of aching fear because she had no idea how I felt about her. None. “You think it was a one-time thing?” I asked her.
“I hope it isn’t,” she said.
My stomach dropped at that. It was something, at least. A start. “Yeah, well, I was hoping you’d get dressed and leave,” I said. “I’d like to set up my Tinder account.”
“Shut up,” she said, the words with no s
ting in them. “Nice try. I’m not going anywhere.”
There it was. Our gazes locked for a long minute. No, I thought. You’re not going anywhere.
“What?” she said to me. “You’re looking at me funny.”
“Am I?” We were back to fencing.
“Tell me the truth, Jace Riggs. I can’t read your mind.”
I rubbed my finger over my chin and gave it to her straight. “You’re the first woman I’ve ever fucked, and you want to know if I’m done with you yet,” I said. “To me, that’s a weird question. No. I am very much fucking not.”
She bit her lip. She was unbearably beautiful, even just-fucked in the shadows of my bedroom. Especially then. “I think I read that in a book of poetry somewhere.”
“Write it down and savor it,” I said.
She put a hand on my shoulder, letting her fingers trace down my bicep. Her lashes swept down, then up again, a flicker of uncertainty I’d never seen in her before. I stared, fascinated.
“This…” She paused. “This isn’t casual to me.”
My throat closed. I tried to think of words, but nothing came.
“It better not be,” I said at last.
For some reason, that made her exhale, like she’d been holding her breath. Had she actually been wondering? “Okay, then,” she said. “This is a thing. Right? We’re a thing.”
I’d never seen this side of her, vulnerable and questioning. “Will you get in trouble?” I asked her.
She frowned, catching my meaning—she’d been my counselor until a few days ago, after all. “No,” she said. “I don’t see a reason I would. The paperwork is done. It’s pretty clear we no longer have a professional relationship. And my personal relationships aren’t anyone’s business.”
“This hasn’t happened to you before? With a client?” I asked.
Her eyes went wide.
My hackles went up. “Was the last guy a client?” Silence. “The truth, Tara.”
“No,” she answered me. “He wasn’t a client.”
But there was something there, something heavy. Something she wasn’t saying. You can’t be angry, dipshit, I told myself, because you haven’t told her about the coke, have you? The Thunderbird, the junkyard, the fire. She’d be pissed off if she knew. Disgusted, maybe. I could handle that some other day, but today was not that day.
I reached out and hooked a hand behind her knee. Pulled her gently until she had unfolded her legs and was leaning back. Then I rolled on top of her.
“No more talking,” I said.
She parted her lips, looking up at me. Her hair was spread on the pillow, her dark eyes fixed on me, her mouth still rosy from kissing me.
I had Tara Montgomery naked in my bed. Suddenly, that was the only thing that mattered. I ran my thumb along her lower lip, tracing it, watching her eyes go hazy.
“We’re a thing,” I said simply. “No more talking.”
Her voice was a whisper. “Okay, Jace.”
I leaned down and kissed her. Tasted her. Those soft, beautiful lips, all mine. For now.
I kissed her, and I kissed her. And we didn’t talk again.
Twenty-One
Tara
By the end of the day on Monday, I was restless in my own skin. I had gone about my day the way I always did: seeing clients, writing emails and reports, eating lunch at my desk. If I still had sore muscles and chafed skin from Saturday night, well, I was a grownup and could ignore them. I had work to do, after all.
Except my focus kept slipping. I’d be writing an email and I’d picture the tip of Jace’s cock sliding into my mouth, the way he’d said my name. I’d be sipping my afternoon cup of tea and I’d hear him say I knew you’d fuck like this in my ear. It was a movie that played over and over in my head, pleasant and distracting and worrisome at the same time. I wanted to see Jace, and I was terrified of seeing Jace. What was supposed to happen now?
We’re a thing, Jace said in my ear. No more talking.
It sounded so simple. But if I could be an Olympic champion at any sport, it would be at overthinking things. This was the same office I’d been in on Friday, and I was doing the same routine. I looked the same, dressed the same, but I was a different person, and I wasn’t entirely sure how.
I needed to talk to someone.
Not Jace, of course. Someone I could talk to about Jace. I didn’t have any close female friends, something I never took the time to examine too closely. Too busy was my usual excuse. The girls I’d known at my private high school had all gone their separate ways as soon as we graduated, and my college acquaintances had spread around the country, going where the jobs were. Most of them were, I assumed, married by now and maybe even mothers. Which still left me no one to talk to.
My mother wasn’t an option—I’d never dished to my mother about my love life, and I wasn’t going to start now. I thought about Emily, the pretty blonde who was Luke Riggs’ adored girlfriend, very briefly, but I couldn’t quite get up the nerve to track her down. It would seem stalkery and weird.
At four-thirty, with my appointments done for the day, I walked down the hall to see Catherine Fox, one of the other counselors in the office. Catherine was in her thirties, and she was one of the best counselors we had on staff—smart, patient, straightforward, kind and authoritative at the same time. I admired her, and in lieu of friendship, that would have to do.
Her office door was open, and she saw me approach. “Tara,” she said, taking off her glasses as she looked up from her computer. “Nice to see you.”
I closed the door behind me. “Do you have a free counseling slot?”
“My four-thirty cancelled, so you’re in luck. Do you have a referral for me?”
“Sort of,” I said. “The patient is me.”
Her eyebrows rose in surprise. It wasn’t unheard of, of course, for counselors to need counseling—we’re human, just like everyone else. But I’d never asked before. Still, Catherine took it in stride.
“Have a seat,” she said.
I sat down in the chair across from her. It was crazy déjà vu, being the patient in this situation. I’d been on her side of the desk hundreds of times but never on this side at all.
“What can I help you with?” Catherine said.
I blew out a breath. If my clients could do this, then so could I. “This needs to stay confidential,” I said.
“Of course.”
“I’m seeing someone new.”
Catherine nodded encouragingly, knowing there was more.
“He’s a former client,” I said. Her eyebrows rose again, so I clarified, “Our sessions were finished, and my report was written. We didn’t have a professional relationship. But I saw him again, and now we have a personal one.”
It reduced it to such simple terms, the relationship between Jace and me. The crazy way we’d turned each other’s lives upside down.
“Still, it’s unusual, to say the least,” Catherine said, prodding me along. “This man must be very important to you.”
I looked at her—her neat dark bob streaked with gray, her professional blouse and blazer—and then looked away, at the wall, at nothing. I was starting to understand how Jace had felt in this chair, talking about things that were secret and personal. “He is,” I said. “Or he could be. I know you know the kind of clients I see, but Jace is different. He’s smart, and he’s…” A con. A confidential informant. A thief. A man who reads Dostoevsky. A virgin, until I got my hands on him. Oh, and he’s a natural genius at sex, and I’ve never come like that in my life. “He’s complex,” I finished lamely. “He’s interesting. Fascinating.”
Catherine leaned forward in her chair and put her chin in her hand, listening to me. It was an un-counselor-like gesture. “Tara, you’re smitten,” she said.
“Maybe.” No, it was time for the truth. “Okay, I am.”
“That’s wonderful. So why are you here?”
God, this was hard. “I’m here because I’m confused,” I said. “I’ve neve
r crossed the line with a client, a former client, before. It feels risky. And my last relationship ended eight months ago.”
“You were engaged, weren’t you?” Catherine asked. Office gossip was as reliable as ever, obviously.
“We were. I broke it off. But he was a cop on the Westlake PD. And Jace just finished doing time. He knows I was engaged, but he doesn’t know who I was engaged to.”
Catherine still had her chin in her hand. “And you haven’t told him yet.”
I pressed my palms together in my lap, twisted my fingers. “This is too new. Jace won’t like it—I know he won’t. I don’t really know how he’ll react. But with the way I feel, I can’t go further without telling him.”
“That’s a dilemma,” Catherine said. “You want to hear something?”
I blinked at her. “Um, sure.”
“One of my clients did a four-year stretch. She got out two years ago. She lost custody of her kids, and she hasn’t gotten it back, and it depresses her. She’s got a lot of problems—I won’t get into it—but she’s busting her ass to overcome them so she has a shot at getting her kids back. Last week she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Stage three.”
“Oh my god,” I said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
“She came in here this morning and talked about what she wishes she would have done. About the time she wasted doing stupid things that made her lose her kids when she had no idea her time was so short. ‘None of it was important,’ she said to me, ‘none of it, I know that now, and now that chance is gone.’ I’ve worked with you for three years, Tara, and I’ve never seen you look like you do right now. All tied up in knots, like something actually matters.”
I sat speechless.
“You’re one of the most unruffled, self-contained women I’ve ever met,” Catherine said. “Even when you were going through that breakup—and we all knew it—you didn’t show a crack. Now you’re asking for a therapy session and sitting in my chair, twisting your hands and worrying about this guy. And all I can think is, Finally. I have to assume the sex is off the charts. Is it?”
