by Julie Kriss
“Um…” I couldn’t summon the words. “I, it was, um. It was…” I trailed off, because how should I describe what it felt like to have Jace Riggs inside of me? It was unlike anything in the world. “Yes, it is.”
“I figured,” Catherine said. “You’ve finally been banged to Heaven and back, holy angels be praised. I approve of this guy for that alone. Is he hot?”
This time, the answer slipped out easy. “So, so hot,” I said.
“Ha,” Catherine said. She reached over and turned her computer off. “You want my advice? Here it is. Go find your hot sex god and bang him again, and again and again until he can’t stand up. Tell him about what’s-his-name that no one even remembers anymore. If he tries to dump you, get him back. If he tries again, get him back again. Get him back as many times as you have to before your time is up and all you have is regrets.” She picked up her purse and stood. “And next time, just ask me to go for a drink, will you? I’d rather hear the juicy details over a martini.”
I drove home in a daze, and I was already in my pajamas, glass of wine in hand, before I unpacked everything she’d said. What was I doing, booking a therapy session to talk about my new boyfriend? Why hadn’t I just asked Catherine if she wanted to have a drink?
Let’s analyze your intimacy problem, Jace said in my head.
Damn him, was he ever wrong?
Go find your sex god and bang him until he can’t stand up, before all you have is regrets.
I looked down at myself: pajama pants, loose top. I put down my glass of wine and picked up my phone. Where are you? I texted Jace.
Finishing work, he replied. You?
You know where I live, I wrote. I’m home, and I’m naked. Your call.
There was a second of silence. The dots on my phone moved. Stopped. Moved again.
Then the words came up: Stay there
The dots stopped, because he was on his way.
I smiled. Then I dropped my pants to the floor, pulled off my shirt, and stripped off my panties to make it true.
Twenty-Two
Jace
I needed a shower. I needed condoms. I needed a car.
Damn it, damn it, damn it.
I was at Riggs Auto alone when her text came in. Luke usually gave me a lift to and from work since we worked the same hours, but he’d had somewhere to go and he’d left early. Which meant I had no way to get where I was going unless I took the bus, which would take nearly an hour.
You know where I live. I’m home, and I’m naked.
When he’s only had one sex session in his life—one stupendous, incredible sex session—a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. I opened the cash drawer and took out enough money for a cab. I knew that most people took Uber these days, but credit cards are hard to get when you’re a con, as are the latest phones with apps. So I used my five-year-old phone to call a taxi so I could pay the driver in cash. It wasn’t stealing this time because I’d repay the money.
I had the driver take me home to the guest house, because I was hoping Luke would be home by now so I could take his Charger. But as the cab pulled away, I realized the driveway was still empty except for Emily’s old Tercel. The thing only ran because Luke spent a lot of hours maintaining it—which was a sign of devotion if I ever saw one—but it did, in fact, run. If she’d lend it to me, I could get to Tara’s.
First I went into the guest house, showered in record time, and changed into clean clothes. Tara had had to put up with me once without a shower, and I wasn’t doing that to her again. I grabbed some of my brothers’ condoms from the bathroom drawer and put them in the pocket of my leather jacket. Then I locked up and walked to the main house to work on Emily.
She answered my knock at the back door—I only ever came to the back door so that she and Luke would know it was me. She was wearing jeans and a loose flowered top, her natural blonde hair tied messily on top of her head. “You can just come in, you know,” she said, giving me a smile.
I liked Emily. Her mother was one of Westlake’s most prominent cops—one of the force’s only female cops, a woman so good at her job that she’d moved up the ranks. It should bother me to be so closely connected to someone so high in the Westlake PD, but Nora Parker’s rank meant she knew who I really was. I’d never met her, but I knew she knew, which was why she left me alone. This was the strange kind of cat-and-mouse game you play when you’re a confidential informant—some cops know, some don’t, and no one is allowed to talk about it either way.
Emily—and her fraternal twin sister, Lauren—had always been known as one of Westlake’s good girls when we were all growing up. Beautiful, popular, good grades, the kind of girl who dated football players. At eighteen she’d stopped dating football players when she met Luke, and they dated in secret until Emily left for college. When she came back, she worked it out with Luke and now they were publicly a couple. If Emily ever took flack for being with a Riggs brother, she never let on. The way she looked at my brother made my stomach hurt with envy, but it also made her good folk in my opinion.
“We’ve had this conversation,” I said to her. “I’m not going to just walk in. This is your house.”
“It’s your house, too, remember?” Emily said.
“It isn’t,” I replied. Really, she was never going to get me to budge on this. “Besides, I could walk in on something embarrassing.”
“We’ve had this conversation,” Emily said, shooting my words back at me. “We’d come up with a warning system if something embarrassing is going on. But Jace, you should come to the house if you want to watch TV or raid the fridge or something. Or just hang out.”
I shook my head. “I’m fine in the guest house.” I was. After getting out of prison, the guest house had been pretty fucking great. And Luke and I had never actually hung out—none of us Riggs brothers did that. Try it, a voice in the back of my mind said. Maybe you’d like it. But I’d have to be a different guy to do that. A guy who didn’t have hangups and intimacy problems and all the other baggage I was carrying around.
“I came to ask a favor,” I said.
Emily’s eyebrows rose. I never asked favors, and she knew it. “What is it?”
“I need to borrow your car.”
She tilted her head. “For how long?”
I scratched my chin, wondering how long I would be. Who was I kidding? “Overnight,” I said.
Her eyes went wide, and immediately she started calculating. “You need to go somewhere overnight.” She crossed her arms. “And it’s so important that you’re willing to knock on my door and ask me a favor, which you never do.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“It’s that brunette,” Emily said, fixing her woman’s laser gaze on me. “Tara Montgomery. The one who was looking for you.”
I pushed my hands into my back pockets. “No comment.”
“I take it she found you that night,” Emily said.
“No comment,” I repeated.
“Was that her car I saw parked here on the weekend?”
“Possibly.”
“You like her?”
“Define ‘like,’” I said.
“Does she like you?”
“You’d have to ask her that.”
Emily bumped her fist lightly against the doorframe. “Damn it, Jace Riggs, you’re like a brick wall. This is important. She was really pretty. Are you two a thing?”
I sighed. “Yes. But we won’t be a thing if I don’t get to go see her. Get it? Just give me a break here, Emily. Come on.”
Emily groaned and sagged against the doorframe—she’d always been the dramatic type. “Jace, I don’t know how you do it, but you’re adorable. Adorable.” She disappeared into the house and came back with a key ring, which she tossed at me. “Take it,” she said. “It needs a good crank to start. If it idles too long, it sometimes dies. And the wipers are fussy, you have to flick them like five times.”
“Thanks,” I said, meaning it.
“I want
to meet her. Again. And I’m telling Luke.”
Jesus. So much for privacy. Well, I was willing to sacrifice it.
I gave her a salute and left the back porch, headed for the driveway. I didn’t need directions. For the first time in my life, I knew exactly where I was going.
Twenty-Three
Tara
This was harder than it seemed at first. I’d felt bold when I sent that text, but the longer Jace took to get here, the less bold I got. I sipped my wine until my glass was empty, then thought maybe I shouldn’t have another. I thought about putting makeup on, then decided that would be too much. I thought about taking a shower, but my hair would be wet when he got here. I thought about eating something—even though I was too nervous to be hungry—but what if that made my belly pop out? There was no way to hide it. I was naked, after all.
Naked. Right, I was naked. I had to remember that and not think too much about it at the same time. Because if I thought too much about it, the usual female doubts would creep in. I hadn’t been working out as much as I should be since the breakup—I’d been too busy, too preoccupied, and with no one to see me, it seemed like it didn’t matter. I didn’t have a Brazilian wax or a bikini wax or any other kind of wax—for the same reasons as the lack of working out. And then there were my small boobs, which I’d been painfully self-conscious of until I’d learned better. My boobs were given to me by God and genetics, there was nothing I could do about them, and anyone who didn’t like them knew where they could put their opinion.
Except… Jace would see they were small. It was so obvious, standing here naked. Jace has already seen them, you idiot, I told myself firmly. You didn’t hear him complain.
I stared at my empty wine glass and wished he’d hurry up.
Let’s talk about your intimacy problem. Well, I was doing something about it, wasn’t I? I just wished it wasn’t so freaking terrifying.
My phone rang, making me jump. I grabbed it off the counter. It was Jace. Oh shit, he’s standing me up.
“Hey,” I said, trying to sound casual when I answered.
“Tara,” he said, and the tone of his low voice made my spine jump. “I’m downstairs. I know your building, but I don’t know what apartment you’re in.”
I ran a hand through my hair. He was right, of course—I’d never told him. He’d dropped me off in front of my building, but he hadn’t come in. We were both bad at this booty-call thing. “Third floor,” I said. “Apartment 302.”
“You still naked?” he asked.
My heart did a loud thump in my chest. “Yes, Jace.”
“Unlock the door,” he said and hung up.
I buzzed him in, put the phone down, and turned the bolt lock on my door. Then, in a last-minute attack of nerves, I turned out the overhead lights and turned a lamp on instead. I had just stood straight again when the door clicked open and closed again.
I turned. Jace was in my apartment, all six feet plus of him, jeans on his long legs, a black tee, his black leather jacket. He had stopped at the door, his ocean-gray gaze moving over me, taking me in.
“Jesus,” he said softly.
I stood to face him. I brushed my long hair back behind my shoulders so he could see. I could feel my nipples going hard.
His eyes went dark and a muscle twitched in his jaw, but he didn’t move. He kept looking at me—not just my breasts, not just between my legs, but all of me. Finally, his gaze moved back up to my face and he caught my eyes. The darkness was still there, but it was softened by something more thoughtful. He had the most fascinatingly expressive face I’d ever seen. I could stare at Jace Riggs forever.
The silence stretched out. It should have felt awkward and uncomfortable, but somehow it didn’t. It felt warm, like we were talking without talking. Finally, Jace turned and locked my door behind him in one graceful turn of his wrist. Then he turned and came toward me.
He didn’t rush. He didn’t swagger. He just crossed the room until he stood in front of me, and then he put his hands on my waist. His touch was warm and hard, smoothing over my skin until he had pulled me toward him, his palms on my spine. I let myself press into him as he ran his hands slowly, gently up and down my back.
I could feel everything against my naked skin—the cold teeth of the zipper on his jacket, the cool hardness of the leather, even the press of his belt buckle against my belly. My nipples brushed against him, hard and vulnerable. My bare thighs brushed his jeans. I could smell leather and soap—he’d had a shower—and the scent of Jace’s skin. It was a smell I’d reimagined a dozen times since the last time I’d seen him.
I put my hands on his chest beneath his jacket and smoothed them upward. This wasn’t how I’d imagined this would go—I’d pictured something wild, more animalistic. He hadn’t even grabbed my ass or touched my nipples. But I stood there with his hands on my back and his hard, warm chest beneath my palms, and something inside me cracked open instead. I felt like I’d never been naked with a man before. I’d never been this naked with a man before, and it almost made me feel like weeping.
Before I could do anything stupid, like sob, Jace’s big hand moved to the back of my head, tangling through my long hair, and he lowered his head and kissed me. A long, sweet, open kiss that made everything inside me come alive. We’d never done this yet—just stood face to face and kissed. The next thing I knew I was up on my toes, my arms around his neck, my hands in his soft hair as he wrapped his big arms tightly around me. He pressed my whole body against him, nearly lifting me off my feet. His beard rasped against my skin and our tongues tangled like we were teenagers. Beneath the cool of the leather jacket he was warm, so warm. His clothes pressing against my bare skin was exciting and frustrating at the same time.
He broke the kiss and dropped his mouth to my neck. One of his hands brushed over my hair, smoothing the strands, and I could feel my pulse in my throat. My fingers tightened on the back of his neck.
“Jace,” I managed to say, “I’m naked.”
His mouth was traveling slowly over the side of my neck, savoring it. His hand moved down and finally slid over the soft flesh of my ass, exploring the curve of it, then cupping it gently. “You are beautifully naked,” he said softly in my ear.
I couldn’t breathe for a long moment. Then I remembered what I was going to say. “You have clothes on,” I said. “Take them off.”
“I’d rather look at you,” he rumbled against my neck.
“I wouldn’t,” I said. God, did I know his hair was soft before? I couldn’t remember. “I’ve been standing here for a while. I’ve seen enough of me.”
His answer was immediate. “There’s no such thing as seeing enough of you.”
I couldn’t breathe again. Then I brushed my fingertips over his trim beard. “I’d rather see you.”
He grumbled again, but I pushed at the leather jacket and he allowed it to drop to the floor. He took his arms off me just long enough for it to be gone, and then he put them around me again. It wasn’t enough, but at least I had access to his arms now, bare beneath his tee. I ran my hands over his forearms, the insides of his elbows, his biceps, exploring them as he bent and kissed me again.
He bent his knees and lifted me, and my legs wrapped around him of their own accord, gripping his hips like we did this every day. He didn’t take his mouth from mine but walked us into my kitchen like I weighed nothing. I broke the kiss and gasped as I felt the cold of the counter beneath my ass.
He let go of my waist and his hands moved up to my breasts, engulfing them easily, his thumbs brushing over my nipples. He bent his knees again and lowered down to put his mouth on my nipple as I moaned and dug my hands into his hair.
“More clothes off,” I gasped.
“You’re impatient,” he said, moving to the other nipple.
I was. I yanked at his shirt from my awkward angle, and he gave in and pulled it off, tossing it away. He returned to my nipples and I gasped again as the sensation shot through me, down my belly and betwee
n my legs. I needed him there. I needed him there.
But I didn’t want to do it on the kitchen counter. My plan for wild, animalistic sex had disappeared. I didn’t want to do it that way, not with this man, not in this moment. “The bed,” I told him, my voice choked.
He understood, like he always did. He straightened, his hands smoothing down the small of my back. He lifted me again like a feather, and the next thing I knew I was on my back on the bed with Jace over me.
We’d done this before in his guest house—me on the bed, Jace braced over me, his big arms flexed. That had been dirty and raw and spectacular, a first time for the record books. This time I pulled him down to me and kissed him while his hands moved down my sides, over my belly, making me shiver. His hand slid back up over my breast and he bit my lip gently as his thumb brushed over my throat. He hadn’t even touched me between my legs yet and I was going crazy.
I undid his belt, the buttons on his jeans, and slid my hand inside, rubbing him. He braced himself over me on one hand and with the other he pinned my free hand to the mattress. He looked down at me, his dark mussed hair falling forward, his gray eyes never leaving mine.
“Christ, you’re gorgeous,” he said.
Happiness bubbled up through me. I’d never in my life had a man look at me the way this one did. I hadn’t been made with curves that men stared at, the kind that drove them wild, but Jace looked at me like he’d never seen a sexier woman in his life. I felt voluptuous and female and perfect. “No talking,” I said, letting my hand travel over him, feeling his heat and his length.
The corner of his mouth quirked, though he was fighting to keep control. “The condoms are in my jacket. In the other room.”
“We don’t need them.” I’d been thinking about this while standing naked in my apartment, waiting for him to come. “I’m on the pill. I know you’re clean. And I am, too. I got tested after…” I couldn’t say more. Kyle had no place in this bed. “After,” I finished lamely.
