by Stella Rhys
“Whoa, there! Happy birthday, me!” Caleb’s eyes went wide when he saw me. Sloane’s mouth dropped as she ran to me, arms outstretched. But when she got to me, she stopped short and gave me an air hug.
“I’m afraid to twist this dress around and expose your whole body!” she squealed. “Oh my God, Lara, where did you buy this?”
“This little pervert bought it for me,” I smirked, nodding at Jackson. I looked up at him to find him looking elsewhere though – across the table at slick-haired Dane McNulty, who shook his head at the big, shit-eating grin on Jackson’s face. He wiggled his eyebrows at Dane, as if asking, “Yeah, you like that?” Guessing the context, everyone at the table burst out laughing. With Sloane wrapped around me in a hug, I joined in. It felt good. Familiar. I was starting to feel like myself again. I should’ve known that all it’d take was one of these parties with champagne, friends and Jackson’s silly antics with his boys. Those things had always been a surefire way to put me in a good mood.
“It’s so weird,” Sloane murmured to me as the entrees were being brought out. She’d been nursing the same flute of Veuve all night but was already drunk – a downfall of being five-foot-six and a hundred and twelve pounds. Her jet-black hair spilled over my shoulder as she leaned her head on me, watching Caleb and Jackson give a hard time to some new guy at the company. “We’re all just laughing and celebrating tonight like Lyle and Sofie aren’t at home worrying like crazy about Gabrielle. What kind of friends are we to be out here drinking instead of trying to help them find her?” she asked.
I gave some generic answer that Sloane agreed to before I even finished. Clearly, it was the same thing everyone else had been saying. “No, we have to keep living our lives or they’ll feel worse,” “Gabrielle’s out there. We just have to put out positive energy for her to come home.” And within a couple minutes, Sloane was shrieking with laughter again, swatting Caleb’s hand as he went from holding an ice-cold beer to slipping his palm into the cutout at the waist of her dress. “That’s freezing!” she yelped, trying to wriggle away as Caleb lay his hand flat against her skin. Sawyer watched Sloane’s body writhe against him before turning his gaze to Jackson.
“You gonna do that to Lara now or are we really gonna end this night with no wardrobe malfunction?” he asked.
His arm around my shoulder, Jackson shook his head at Sawyer. “You’re a sick fuck, you know that right?” he smirked as I thought, you love it.
When I excused myself to the bathroom later, Jackson followed. I bit my lip, feeling a flutter in my stomach as I heard his neat footsteps on the marble floor behind me. But I decided not to look, not to let him know that I knew. I wanted to build up the excitement, the anticipation that I hadn’t felt for Jackson in a month.
And it worked. The second I opened the bathroom door, he was on me. His chest pressed against my backside, he pushed me in, shutting the door behind us and pushing me up against it. Gripping my jaw, he opened my mouth for his tongue, sweeping it against mine and then sucking hard on my lower lip. “I need you now,” he grunted, his voice low, gravelly as his hand grabbed the X shape on my dress. Eyes gleaming, Jackson twisted till my breasts and pussy were exposed beneath the sheer fabric. Breathing hard, he took a few seconds to stare at me, his lecherous gaze feasting upon my naked body as if it had been starving for ages.
With a growl, he pushed my breasts up, kissing them over the sheer cloth of my dress. He took my tight nipple in his mouth, nipping, sucking as his other hand groped me roughly, with abandon.
In no time, I was pushed up against the sink, my hands gripping marble as behind me, Jackson gathered the bottom of my dress. Breathless, I watched through the mirror as his handsome face contorted with the desperate need to be inside me already. With one hand, he undid his belt, his zipper, pulling out his hot, hard cock. I moaned as he rubbed its head along the length of my wetness.
But the second I closed my eyes, I saw her.
“Fuck,” I hissed, standing up and pulling away.
“The fuck – ?” Jackson nearly fell over, having been a mere second from plunging himself inside me. I spun around to see him bewildered, his blue eyes wild and his pulsing hard-on tortured. “Babe, what – ?” Panting, he read the look in my eyes. “Fuck, Lara, come on!” His voice was hoarse with torment.
“You bent her over like that.” I covered my face with my hands, desperate to erase the image of Jackson slamming into Gabrielle, those desk drawers rattling open in a noisy chorus with her moans. “Trust me, I do not want this scene playing over and over in my head! Every time I see it I think, ‘He doesn’t love me. He would never hurt me this bad if he really did.’”
Eyes blazing, Jackson roared at me like an animal. “I love you more than I can fucking say!”
Once he got dressed, he stormed out, leaving me alone in the bathroom, a shaking mess.
Chapter Five
“You’re leaving already?”
Sloane’s question took me by surprise when I returned to the table, which was otherwise empty.
“I – what?”
She took my hand and pouted her doll lips at me. “Jackson said you weren’t feeling well and that you’re leaving now.”
Before I could answer, Jackson returned to the table with Caleb. “Yeah, she’s going home,” he said, casting a steely look at me that demanded I go with it. When I narrowed my eyes at him, he came around the table. “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice still hard. “But you and I aren’t going to be in the same room tonight without having some kind of blowup that’s going to ruin this party so one of us needs to leave. I’d go but Caleb would kick my ass and it’s his night. So just do me a favor, Lara, and go home.”
“You’re an asshole, Jackson.”
Jackson looked elsewhere for a second to control his anger. “I’m not trying to be an asshole, I’m trying to save this fucking night. I can’t look at you right now. It’s not an insult – it’s me being fucking in love with you and you hating my guts right now. So please. Just let me blow off some steam with the boys tonight and I’ll see you at home.”
I glared at him for as long as I could without warranting concern from Sloane. “Fine,” I muttered.
And within forty-five minutes – since that was how long it took to say goodbye to our friends – I was in the back of a car, on my way back to the duplex. My mood was sour until Jackson’s driver, Beck, read my mind and asked if I wanted to make a stop at “the little cart.” He was referring to an empanada truck that was generally parked a few avenues away from our apartment. Whenever I found myself in the car without Jackson, I asked Beck to stop there. It was my deep-fried, guilty pleasure – one I didn’t want Jackson to know about. Not that he was the picture of health with his smoking habit.
“Do you want to eat in the car?” Beck asked. “I’ll park.”
“Yes, please, that sounds awesome. They served such tiny little portions at the party,” I laughed.
“That’s usually how those are, right?”
“Pretty much.”
Thirty minutes later, I was back at the duplex and fully sober thanks to the empanadas. But the second I stepped into the apartment, I stopped.
Something was off.
Standing in the doorway, I stared out at the sprawling space. The lights in the open industrial kitchen were on. Had I left them that way?
Clink.
My heart stopped at the sound I heard upstairs. I held my breath, waiting to hear it again. Hand pressed against my chest, I willed my heartbeat to slow down so I could hear something besides its thumping pulse in my ears. Did I imagine that?
Clink.
Christ. Was it a drip in the bathtub? No, this sounded more like something being picked up and put down. Something glass. My heartbeat picked up further as I waited to hear it again. But after ten frozen minutes at the doorway, I heard nothing and began to tell myself that I was crazy. My fight with Jackson had my mind rattled, overactive. You’re imagining things, I told myself. And so I dra
gged my full stomach and lazy body up the stairs to peel off my dress and draw a bath.
But in my bedroom, I saw a man.
“Oh God.” My cold stomach dropped like a brick as the stranger turned to face me, my diamond tennis bracelet in his hand. I turned and ran. I didn’t stop to look for another second. But a scream ripped from my throat when I felt my knees smash into the ground, my jaw bouncing against the hardwood floor as the strange man tackled me and rasped throaty expletives in my ear.
“Don’t fucking move, bitch! Don’t you fucking move!”
A rough voice. Hands gathering my wrists. A switchblade flicked open right in front of my eyes. On my stomach, I let him press my cheek into the ground, tears pooling under my right eye, the outer lashes drowning in them as he continued to curse. Through the corner of my left eye, I saw him pulling a black ski mask back over his face. God, oh God, what the fuck. Didn’t this only happen in movies?
“Now get up!” Disguised, he yanked me up by my dress. I cried out, dread pitting in my stomach as I felt my body exposing.
“Please, no, no, no – ”
“Walk!” he snarled when my knees buckled, tossing me to the ground only to yank me back up.
“Please don’t hurt me, please, I swear to God I won’t – ”
“Shut your mouth, bitch!”
Face-first, I was hurled onto my bed.
“Head down, keep your fucking head down!”
I did as told. Shaking from head to toe, I laid on the bed, my breath hitched in my throat as I prayed to be wrong about what he might do next. Sobbing, my heart slammed against the mattress, beating so hard my insides rattled. It was painful. I cried and ached to simply lie on my side. All I wanted was to pull my knees to my stomach.
But when I so much as closed my legs, he yanked them back apart by the ankles.
I shrieked. “No!” Kicking, twisting, I fought harder than I had with even Gabrielle. So hard that I found myself suddenly on my back again, my wild arms swiping his mask half off.
Oh shit.
For the split-second I had, I stared. Six foot. Black mask. Birthmark. Sandy hair.
“Fucking bitch!”
And suddenly, I was blind. Breathless. Suffocating, my limbs flailed, bucking against the pillow he shoved hard on my face. Laying on me, he weighed me down, absorbing my fight, killing me slowly I was sure.
But then suddenly, I heard Jackson.
“Get the fuck off of her!”
The stranger lifted from me, I gasped for air. Coughing, choking, I rolled to my side, blinking my vision back in time to see Jackson’s muscled six feet and three inches slamming the man to the ground, going beyond just holding him still. Ripping his mask off, he grabbed a fistful of his hair, yanking his head off the ground only to slam it brutally back down. Once. Twice. Three times before the switchblade came out.
“Jackson!”
I screamed and leapt off the bed, just as the strange man brought his knife down into Jackson’s back.
Chapter Six
From the full bar of the yacht, I stared out at the turquoise water. Ibiza was exactly what I needed to escape the madness – specifically Ibiza in July. Clear skies, white sand and a low of seventy-five degrees.
Not to mention a hundred foot yacht on which to drink before the night’s festivities.
“Christ, babe. You look fuckin’ good in white,” Sawyer came up behind me as I popped three perfect cubes of ice into a lowball. I snorted as he played with the fringe on the side of my bikini bottom, the smell of seawater and scotch coming off his skin as he peered over my shoulder. “You know, when you and I get married, we’re going to wear these exact outfits down the aisle.”
I finished pouring my Hendricks and tonic before turning around and bursting out laughing. Stretched over Sawyer’s clearly endowed package were skintight, white trunks with aqua blue stripes up the sides. The prankster as usual.
“You’re drunk, Sawyer, and I’d never marry you in that,” I giggled, swatting his hand when he tried to play with the fringe hanging from my bikini top. “Hey. Nice try, buddy.”
Mischief twisted his lips. “Can’t blame a guy.”
“No?”
“Not when you’re as goddamned gorgeous as you are,” he said, leaning in and reaching behind me for a bottle of scotch. He grinned as his chest brushed against mine – just enough to cause the slightest bounce. “Oh, fuckin-a,” Sawyer took one look before squeezing his eyes shut and gritting his teeth. He’d always been a charming terror when drunk. “That one I actually didn’t mean to do. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay, silly.”
“You know you were always my dream girl, right?”
I giggled. “Sawyer, Jackson’s gonna kill you. You know that right?”
The mention of Jackson’s name plucked the smile from his lips. I frowned, unaccustomed to seeing Sawyer anything but jovial. “Yeah,” he murmured, swaying slightly in his drunkenness. He looked down blankly at the bottle of scotch. “I know,” he said, suddenly somber. “I know a lot of things.”
“Yeah?” I tried to entertain him. “What kind of things do you know, Sawyer?”
His gaze returned to me. “Things that you’d wanna know,” he replied.
My eyebrows pinched. He was serious for once so I set my drink down. “Babe, what’s going on with you today? Is there something you want to tell me?” I asked.
But before he could answer, Sloane burst in from the tanning deck.
“Lara, Jackson’s about to do a back flip off the end of the yacht! Can you please stop him before he splits his frickin’ scar open?” she asked breathlessly before running back out.
Oh God, Jackson, damn you. Squeezing past Sawyer, I ran out as well, mentally cursing Jackson as I did so.
Something in him had changed since the invasion at our duplex five weeks ago. I would have predicted the opposite but he’d grown suddenly fonder of taking risks. Perhaps it was the fact that he’d been stabbed by a strange man who’d broken into our home. Or the fact that he’d grabbed the man’s arm before his blade could sink deeper than two inches. While the man escaped, he’d saved both his own life and mine. And since then, he’d been every kind of unpredictable. A week after the invasion, he booked a vacation for ten to Ibiza. A few days later, he got into a random bar brawl. The week after that, he purchased a four-story townhouse in Greenwich Village for twenty million dollars.
And now, on the deck of a yacht, in front of all our friends, he was on one knee.
“Oh my God.” The voice I heard was not my own. It was girly and breathless and muffled by my hands flying to my mouth as I watched Jackson. Surrounded by his boys, he opened a little, black velvet box. I burst into tears when I saw the actual ring – a single, enormous square-cut diamond on a fine platinum band.
I wish I could have frozen time and gathered myself enough to truly absorb the moment, because through my friends’ cheering and my own tears, I could barely hear Jackson’s beautiful speech about wanting to spend the rest of his life with me. But the most important part, I did hear.
“I will love you no matter what happens. No matter what dramas, highs, lows, trials or tribulations, I’ll be at your side through it all. Proudly. I know these guys tell you all the time but you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Lara. And the only thing you can do to make me even happier is agree to be my wife.”
Through tears, I gazed down at the hopeful smile on Jackson’s impossibly handsome face.
“Lara, will you marry me?”
~
I hated the phrase but making love was what we’d done right after I’d said “yes.” Our gaze hadn’t broken once while he rocked into me. He’d come shortly after I had and as he held me, catching his breath, had murmured my name and his last. Lara Kinsley. He listed every way he loved me as I drifted off into sleep – a bride-to-be’s lullaby. It was the definition of making love.
But this – this couldn’t be considered anything but down and dirty sex.
Naked, I leaned over the railing of our balcony, my head cocked back and my waves gathered tight in Jackson’s fist. Another hand groping my breasts, he thrust into me, his lips grunting, muttering filth in my ear. Our friends were down the hall but I couldn’t help my shameless moaning as he sunk into me, occasionally torturing me by withdrawing his hot, hard cock and rubbing its pulsing head against the length of my wetness.
“Jackson, please,” I whimpered as he stroked my clit with his dick.
Lusty amusement curled in his voice. “What’s wrong, baby?”
“Put it back in,” I breathed, moving my hips, desperately trying to fill the void his thick shaft leaves every time he pulls out of my pussy.
Jackson wrapped a strong arm around my waist, holding me still enough to continue teasing me with his smooth helmet. “No. I’m enjoying your squirming.”
“Jackson, fuck me, please…”
“No.”
Moaning with torment, I twisted out of his grip and threw my naked body onto the white chaise. Fine, Mr. Kinsley. Two can play this game. Lying back, I closed my eyes and spread my legs for my fingers, immediately relieving the mounting need he so deftly built up. Biting my lip, I sighed, one hand circling the sensitized pearl between my thighs with one hand, the other roughly fondling my breasts the way I knew Jackson liked. My back arched, I writhed with pleasure at my own touch.
On his heels, Jackson watched, a smirk on his lips as he stroked his cock, still slick with my wetness. “Is this your idea of punishing me?”
I shrugged one shoulder and played tough, eyeing him for all of a second before returning to myself. Arching my back, I reached between my legs with my other hand, sliding one, then two fingers between my wet folds. “Oh… God…” A sigh drifted from my swelling lips. Stroke by stroke, I quickened my pace, my breasts bouncing between my arms as I pleasured myself to the fullest. All the while, I watched Jackson. Vague envy curled his lip as he jerked himself off, his roving eyes watching my hands as they rubbed, thrust, did all the things that he wanted to do.
