by Hayes, Piper
He kisses my neck as he backs me onto the bed. Another motion and he’s on top of me. I want him. I want to lose myself in his arms.
“I like the look,” he says. He slides his hands under my shirt and slips it over my head. He grins and kisses my collarbone, sending waves of warmth through my chest. His hands are on my breasts and then my hips, and he’s sliding my pants off. I fumble with his shirt, ripping it open as quickly as possible. I grab his belt and pull it off of him as he grinds against me. I can feel his excitement.
I moan as he rocks against me again.
“I want you now,” I tell him.
Blake reaches behind my back and unclasps my bra before sliding my panties down my thighs. “I’ve been thinking about this moment since you left. I’m not going to rush it.”
He kisses my breasts and then my stomach. His hands are firm on my hips, but his kisses are so soft and tender. They send butterflies through my stomach. When he kisses between my legs, I gasp and spread wider for him. I close my eyes as he flicks his tongue against me, and I curl my toes. “Get up here,” I tell him.
He stands up and strips, tossing his shirt aside, letting his clothes fall in a heap around his ankles. When he slides off his underwear, I can barely contain my excitement. He’s completely hard. He leans down and grabs something from his pocket—a condom. He holds it in his hand as he lowers himself against me. I feel the bare skin of his shaft against my sex as he grinds against me. It feels hard and smooth and warm. I grab the condom from him and unwrap it, tossing the wrapper aside and sliding the condom over his cock.
When he presses his tip against me, I feel like I might climax that very second, but then he pushes himself inside me and I cry out. He gasps too, taking a short, sharp breath. Then he moves inside me and leans in for another kiss. When his lips meet mine, I feel like we’re completely connected, completely in sync. It’s incredible.
With each movement, my need for him increases. I run my hands over his arms and chest. I grab his ass and pull him harder against myself as I grind my hips into his. He rocks into me again and again. I can’t help but shout in delight as he grabs my hips and directs my motion, moving me in time, sending new surges of excitement through my body.
He holds me tight and rolls over, flipping me on top of him in one fluid motion. He lets one hand run over my breasts before leaning up and pressing his lips to my nipple. He kisses my breasts as he works me up and down his length. Then both his hands are ranging all over my body. He can’t get enough of me. He’s kissing my neck and my shoulders, and he’s looking at me with that look again, like I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. He cups my breasts and bucks his hips against me, and I grind down against him. He’s so hard inside me that it makes me ache in the best possible way.
He kisses my chest again before sitting up and sealing his lips against mine. I’m still in his lap, but now his chest is firmly against mine and I feel like he has complete control of my body. He grabs my hips hard and rocks me against him. I can hear our breaths echoing back and forth, overlapping as we race our bodies against each other, desperate to feel that last rush.
I’m crying out now, and I don’t know how much longer this level of pleasure can last. Blake holds me tight as he starts to climax. I can feel him pulsing inside me. It sends me into a dizzying spiral of delight until finally, I can’t hold off for another second. I tense my entire body against him and shout as I come. I collapse against him as he leans back in the bed.
Blake runs his fingers through his hair. “I’m never letting you out of my sight again,” he says.
I look at him and laugh. “Your eyes are closed.”
“I haven’t slept in days,” he replies. “How about I never let you out of my sight as soon as I wake up?”
“That sounds great to me,” I say. I slide myself off of him and nuzzle up to his side. He wraps an arm around me, and I listen to his breathing as he falls asleep. There’s so much we need to talk about. There are the files, the secrets, and everything having to do with my father and Ben and the investigation. For the moment, none of that matters. For this moment, as Blake holds me in his arms, everything is right.
CHAPTER 4
CATHERINE
Blake wakes up an hour later. The sun is shining through the dirt-streaked windows, and he still has his arm around me. I lie my head against his chest. I can hear his heart beating. I can hear his breaths. I feel warm and secure. If I could trade everything else in my life for that feeling, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d gladly be broke if it meant having that kind of happiness. But my happiness can’t be an excuse. I can’t just bury my head in the sand and pretend that everything is okay.
“We need to talk about something,” I say. I feel like I’m breaking the spell, ending our perfect moment, but this is too important to just ignore. “I need to know what’s going on. Blake, you can trust me with anything. You know that, right?”
“I trust you with my life,” he says, “but this isn’t just about me. This is bigger than that. I’m trying to protect you,” he says. He’s running his fingers through my hair. “The less you know about any of it, the less likely you are to get hurt.”
“I’m here with you, and I’m here for you, but you have to tell me what’s going on. If you’re worried about hurting my feelings because my father is involved with this or you think you’ll somehow makes me feel bad, don’t. I already told him I’m on your side.”
“You did?” he asks. The genuine surprise of his question catches me off guard. Suddenly, his guard is down again. He brushes my hair aside and places his hand on my cheek. He presses his lips to mine. The kiss is warm and comforting, and I can feel myself losing my resolve as I start to lose myself in Blake’s affection.
“Of course,” I say. “I’d do anything for you. I just need you to trust me.”
“This isn’t just about your father, Cat,” he says. “I wish there were an easier way to explain everything.” He’s looking into my eyes, searching for something, as if I could answer the question for him. He clears his throat and sits up. “I guess it would help if I start by explaining what happened at Carlisle Capital. Have you ever heard of a company named M-CORE?”
“No,” I say. “What was it, some kind of front?”
Blake laughs. “I don’t even know what M-CORE is. Let me tell you what I do know. When I started working for Carlisle Capital, I was lucky to get the job, or at least I thought I was lucky to get the job. I was fresh out of school, and I was making big money for the first time. We’re talking a hundred thousand a year. Within two years, I was making several times that. I was rising up the ladder faster than I knew was possible.
“People started talking about me inside the company. They started calling me the golden boy. It seemed like every trade I made was successful. After a while, I began to wonder if I was having too much success. I mean, we were coming close to the height of the market and everything was crazy anyways, but I was on a hot streak like no one had ever seen before. I figured out something wasn’t right. I started going back through the records, and that’s when I found it. Three trades at huge volumes in a company named M-CORE.
“At first I thought it was some kind of accounting error, but then I noticed a few other trades I hadn’t made were on my file. Some were winners, some were losers, but overall, it was a huge boon of cash. We’re talking tens of millions of dollars. And none of this reflected the actual work I had been doing. Well, I went to accounting to see if there had been a mix-up, and then I went to my boss, who went all the way up the ladder to your father.”
“Seriously?” I ask.
“Yeah. He asked me to meet him for lunch the next week. We left the building and went somewhere. I can’t remember where, but it was nice, and he offered me a promotion for my diligence. I thought I had exposed something. I thought I had done the right thing, and I went back to my work thinking it was over. Except a few months later, I noticed another irregularity and another after that, and I w
ent directly to your father this time, but he was out. He was out a lot that spring. He was all bent out of shape. It was an open secret that he was a train wreck.”
“That was the year my brother died,” I say. “I didn’t know he had taken it so hard.” All I had gotten from him was a look of disappointment at the funeral. My father had always been detached, and I had just assumed he had buried my brother and moved on with his life. It never occurred to me that my father loved us, that he cared about us more than business or money or power. I try to think back to everything that happened in the limo, the argument, me leaving. Was he mad at me for messing up his plans? Or was he mad because our relationship was broken beyond repair, and I was only making it worse by leaving?
“I think he saw me the same way he saw you, like someone who needed direction. I don’t know why, but he took an active interest in me, started grooming me for bigger things. I tried to tell him about the trades, but he wouldn’t listen. I tried to warn him that something was wrong, but he insisted everything was fine. It wasn’t.”
“What does this have to do with the company you were talking about earlier?” I ask. I sit up and put my feet down on the floor. “Can you hand me that shirt?”
Blake laughs and starts picking our clothes up off the floor. He tosses me the shirt. “This part might take a while,” he says. “Do you remember how I told you that my sister moved to New York to follow a boyfriend? That wasn’t exactly true. There’s another part to this story, and it’s where the trouble really started. Something happened when I was a teenager. It was bad enough that my sister and I left town in the middle of the night. We changed our names. She dyed her hair and cut it short. She managed to get a job working at a bar. I wanted to drop out of school and help pay the bills, but my sister wouldn’t let me. She forced me to go to school. So I forged a transcript under my fake name and enrolled in school here in Brooklyn. I felt so guilty about lying about who I was that I made sure to use all my real grades, right down to the C I had gotten in shop class.”
“What happened?” I ask.
“I forgot to turn in a final project. It was a checkerboard that never turned out right. Still, I got screwed on the grade if you ask me,” Blake says. He’s grinning.
I give him a light tap on the arm. “I mean with you and your sister.”
“I’ll get to that after. Let me get through the rest of this first,” he says. “I got a scholarship to Columbia. I managed to graduate in three years, and I enrolled in grad school. By that point, I had become Blake Bennett. I even had a driver’s license. There was no turning back. I got a summer internship at Carlisle Capital and managed to get a hired as an associate out of grad school.”
“So what was the problem?” I ask.
“I thought I had made it. I thought the past was buried and I could move on, but somehow, someone figured out my secret along the way. I wasn’t moved up the ranks because I was so special. I was promoted again and again to be the fall guy. They knew I had lied about who I was, and someone saw it as an opportunity to cash out without getting caught.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” Blake says. “I still don’t know. Someone at your father’s company. Potentially several people high up at your father’s company. It could have included him, too. I guess no one thought I’d be smart enough to figure it out, but I did, and when I tried to get to the bottom of it, I found out that there was all kinds of abuse going on within the company. They were screwing their investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”
“Why didn’t you go public?”
Blake pauses and looks at me for a second, like there’s something he wants to say but can’t. “Well, the easiest answer is that I didn’t want to call attention to myself. I wasn’t exactly being honest. I was working there under a false name. There’s a reason they chose me to take the blame. But also, not everyone was crooked, and a lot of people had a lot of money invested with us. If I had gone public, it would have brought the whole thing crashing down. After my final attempt to fix things failed, I pulled together all the evidence I could and I took it with me. I also took my entire client base. I had a noncompete, but they didn’t dare come after me.”
“Why come after you now?”
“The company imploded. The regulators have been combing through the books, and they know something’s wrong. They need someone to blame. Why not go after the original fall guy? My success after only bolsters their case.”
“Why not go to the FBI, then? Ben could help you.”
“Ben might, but what about his boss and his boss’s boss? If I went to them, I’d have to tell them the truth about who I am.”
“Why not tell them?” I ask.
“Because it’s not my secret to tell,” he says.
His sister. What the hell happened to her that Blake won’t even hint at it? I look at him, confused as hell, and I wait for him to give some kind of explanation.
“Do you really want to know?” he asks. Blake reaches over the bed and grabs my clothes off the floor. He tosses them to me. “Get dressed and I’ll bring you to hear the rest of the story.”
CHAPTER 5
CATHERINE
Save for Alex, the bar is empty when we get there. It’s early afternoon, and she’s wiping down glasses and stacking them for the night ahead. “Look who it is,” she says as she sees us standing in the doorway. “You look like hell, little brother. What’s going on? Do you need a little hair of the dog?” I look at her long blond hair and try to imagine it cut short and dyed any other color.
“Hey, we need to talk somewhere private,” Blake says.
“We’re the only ones here,” Alex says.
“I mean really private,” Blake replies. “Is there anyone in the back who could overhear us?”
Alex grabs a ring of keys from under the bar and tosses it to Blake. “A couple of guys in the back. Lock up and I’ll send them off to go pick up some supplies. What is it?”
“Grab something to drink, and we’ll meet you in the back.”
“What is this about?” Alex asks. I can see the worry in her eyes, but she also seems a little bit annoyed. “Did you get her pregnant?”
“No, I did not get her pregnant,” Blake says. I hear him lock the front door. “This is about why we’re in New York.”
“You’re kidding, right?” she says.
“No. I need you to tell Cat everything. I need you to tell her about him.”
“Christ, Blake, I thought we were done with this,” she says. She turns and grabs a bottle off of the back of the bar. “Give me a minute to make sure we’re completely alone.” She disappears into the back room. When she comes back, the bottle has noticeably less liquor in it.
“Do you really think this is a good idea?” Alex says. “We agreed that we were done with this forever.”
“The FBI came to my apartment last weekend. They tore the place apart.”
“Forgive me for being rude, but you start seeing this girl, and then the FBI shows up at your house, and you think we should suddenly tell her everything?”
“We can trust her,” Blake says.
“No,” Alex replies. “You guys should go.”
“She saved me. They were going to find the key to the loft. They would have found it, but she hid it from them. If she had gotten caught, she could have gone to jail. Then they would have had everything. They would have found you. She’s the only reason why we’re here right now. And she’s not some girl, Alex. I’m asking you to tell her.”
“Sorry,” Alex says. Her tone is flat, and I can tell she’s still skeptical about this whole thing. “How much of this do I have to tell?”
“Only what you’re comfortable telling,” Blake says.
“When Blake was in high school, I worked as a waitress at a yacht club. There were lots of rich and powerful men who were regulars at the club. One of them took a liking to me. He was married, but I didn’t know it at first. He gave me expensive gifts and would ask me to
join him on his yacht.” She rubs her hand over her temple. “God, this is so embarrassing, but you have to understand I was young and dumb, and he seemed like he really cared about me.”
“He didn’t,” Blake says.
Alex laughs. “Well, he cared about having control over me. We started seeing each other. At first everything was good. He was charming and funny, and he knew so much. I was in awe of him. Christ, I can’t believe I’m saying this with my brother around, but the guy was good in bed. He was too good. And he liked things rough.”
“Oh, you don’t have to—” I start to say, but Alex cuts me off.
“No, if you want to know what happened, you have to know the truth. He liked to throw me around when we slept together. He got off on it. One day, I came home with a bruised cheek and a sprained wrist. Blake was furious. He said he was going to kill whoever did it to me. I told him I fell down at work.
“Afterward, Jacob, well, I guess you know his name now, Jacob was so apologetic and sweet. I really thought that maybe it was a mistake. He paid for the lease on a better apartment so I could be closer to work, and Blake could be closer to school. It was a townhouse, and had two levels and a big-screen TV, and all kinds of stupid stuff that impressed me at the time.”
“It was just the two of you?” I ask.
“Our parents were never in the picture,” Blake says. “We were raised by my grandmother. She passed away the year before that. She left us a little bit of money, but Alex insisted on saving it for me to go to college. Of course, by the time I was ready for college, we didn’t have access to it anymore. It worked out well enough, I guess.”
“Things with Jacob got more serious that winter,” Alex continues. “He talked about leaving his wife for me. He said I was his muse, his singular passion in life. Soon, the apartment wasn’t enough. He wanted me to move into a house on his block and he wanted to send Blake off to boarding school. He offered to pay for it all, too, but Blake wouldn’t listen to a second of it.”
