by Chloe Cox
She didn’t really mean to call him a bastard. When she closed her eyes and concentrated, she could still feel him on her. And she didn’t want to shower, even though she should, because she knew she’d smell him on her skin.
Ridiculous.
It wasn’t just that Jackson Reed had reappeared out of nowhere; it was that he’d reappeared out of nowhere exactly as she’d always wanted him to: as a strong, sexy Dom. And apparently a wealthy one, too. How often did that happen? How often did someone actually rise beyond one’s expectations and meet one’s hopes?
Well, let’s not get carried away. If experience had taught Ava anything, it was not to trust people who were too good to be true.
She wished she could stop thinking about him. About what he’d said. You will come to me. You will submit.
Ava called her voicemail and put her phone on speaker. Three new messages. She got excited for a second before she remembered she hadn’t given Jackson her phone number; he’d given her his card. With an address.
Right, because she was coming to him.
The annoying, vaguely British robot lady recording droned on about voicemail from her phone as Ava slipped out of her dress. There had been a moment, when he’d pressed her against the window, when she’d thought he would rip it clear off. And she’d wanted him to.
She stood still for a second, stark naked in her bedroom, and let the ghost of that orgasm rush through her once more. Just thinking about it, about his hands on her, in her, she could almost…
“Ava, it is I, your favorite.” Her boss’s nasal voice intruded on her thoughts. Damn, she’d told Alain about the engagement party. He’d been very interested in such an exclusive event. “I am a little disappointed you did not call tonight, but I am sure you did well and got many new contacts, yes? I am out late, call. Perhaps we meet up.”
Ava grimaced. She spent almost as much energy deflecting Alain’s creepy advances as she did doing her actual job. She was beginning to suspect that he was demanding that she land a big new advertising account before the end of the year mostly as an excuse to give her another option when she failed to meet that impossible deadline: sleep with him.
As disgusted as she was with her boss, the thought of sex immediately brought her back to Jackson Reed. And what he could do with just his hands and a thick glass window. She still thought about that night they’d shared together, just before graduation. The one night. It had given her a totally unrealistic expectation of sex; before Jackson, she’d only ever slept with two guys—one in high school, who she’d more or less shanghai’d into the experience just to get it over with, and then Peter, who had been a cheating jerk and who had been her big reason for transferring for her senior year. Jackson made her think she’d just had bad luck. Jackson made sex make…sense. He’d made it seem like vital necessity, like a basic human right.
Maybe she’d only convinced herself that there would be more like him because it made it easier to walk away from him. Not walk, she reminded herself. Run. You ran away, and you hid.
Not her proudest moment.
Don’t think about it. She actually flinched, even though she was alone. It still made her feel ashamed, still made her feel small, all these years later.
“Second message,” the British robot lady voice intoned.
“Ava—”
Ava immediately recognized her mother’s voice and leapt across the room to grab at her phone. She pressed madly at buttons until her mother’s voice stopped.
“Message erased.”
Thank God. If the memory of Jackson’s face could reliably make her feel ashamed, her mother’s voice could do a whole lot worse with a whole lot less. Her stress response was just instinctual. There was nothing to be done about it; she just had to stand there, waiting for it to filter through her system, waiting for the fear and anger to drain away.
Ava was so damn tired of being afraid. She’d been afraid of making the final leap into being submissive, and then Jackson had found her.
He’d said one week, no strings, he’d be in charge. He’d take control and show her everything. It sounded like a free pass to explore all the sexual stuff she’d never trusted anyone else with, but was it really free? The man had already broken her heart once. And as much as she’d tried to forget Jackson Reed, in her worst moments, when she felt most alone, the memory of him had been a comfort to her, late at night. Her friendship with Jackson was the closest she’d ever felt to being safe, and cherished, and treasured. The closest she’d ever been to anyone, ever. What if it had been an illusion? What if one week with Jackson revealed that she’d been wrong all along?
“Stop thinking about Jackson Reed!” she said to the empty room. Maybe if she said it out loud, it would actually take.
She pressed a button on her phone to replay the last message. She’d missed it completely, thinking about Jackson, and fear, and being alone forever. Good job, drama queen, she thought, and snorted. She was glad to hear her sister’s voice, finally.
“Hey, it’s me. Um, don’t hate me, but I’m just calling to remind you about dinner with Mom.” Ava cringed. What Ellie was too sweet to say was, ‘Please, for the love of God, don’t make me go alone.’ How could Ava let her little sister deal with that all on her own? Ellie was stuck with their mother the rest of the year, but she shouldn’t have to bear the burden alone during the holidays.
“And it’s Christmas, Ava,” Ellie’s voice said. “And don’t roll your eyes, I’m not being sweet. I just want to see you.”
Ava laughed, rooting around for her pajamas. Ellie couldn’t help but be sweet, even when she was trying to be a bitch. Ava tried to tell her, you can’t fight who you are, but Ellie was a stubborn little sister.
Wait, who can’t fight who they are? Ava stopped halfway through getting her pajama pants on and nearly fell over. Did I just accidentally give myself good advice?
Jackson had told her he knew what she really was. That he was going to show her.
She shivered.
The most infuriating thing about Jackson’s offer was that it had shown her how much she was missing. The thing was, not finding anyone she could trust meant that Ava hadn’t been able to be fully herself—ever. She couldn’t fully be herself at her job, she couldn’t fully be herself with her family, she didn’t even feel like she could share her painting anymore, which she did in secret in a tiny little second bedroom in her apartment. But this was something there was no outlet for. This was sex. And the kind of sex where she definitely needed someone else to be there.
And it hadn’t been an offer so much as an order.
Which was damn sexy.
And he’d called her Frida.
“Damn it!”
She plopped onto her bed, her comfy pajama pants still half around her ankles. She was always telling Ellie not to fight who she really was, and yet Ava had been doing that for ten years. At least. She was still doing it. The universe had gone ahead and plonked the best man she’d ever known in her lap, and he had told her he wanted to fulfill all of her fantasies for a week, and her reaction was…to freak out? Who does that?
Maybe she was just rationalizing the fact that she couldn’t stop thinking about him, that she felt an inescapable pull whenever she remembered his hands on her body, as though there were an invisible cord that tied her to him. Maybe it was that she’d never wanted anyone so badly in her entire life. Maybe it was that he’d said that she belonged to him.
She knew from experience what it meant to trust Jackson Reed with her heart, and she wasn’t about to do that again. But she’d never had the chance to trust him with her body. Until now.
It was almost like she didn’t have a choice.
It’s ok, Ava. No strings. Just sex.
She grabbed her running shoes, coat, and purse, and ran out the door before she could change her mind.
chapter 4
Jackson Reed did his five-hundredth sit-up, lay back, sweating, and waited.
Fuck.
It
hadn’t worked. He’d had at most a moment’s respite before his dick demanded access to a woman who wasn’t there. He’d been like this all goddamn night, ever since he’d left Ava Barnett breathing hard in an empty room.
He flipped over and punched out quick twenty chest-to-deck push-ups, then switched to one-handed when the burn wasn’t enough. Might never be enough. It was out of character for Jackson to vacillate like this—or at least it had been for a long time. Realizing how damaged Ava had been had thrown him. He’d hurt her more than he’d known, years ago, and then he might have done it again tonight by pushing her. Jackson worked hard not to be a man who hurt people, not to be a man who pushed people past where they ought to go just to show he could. Not to be a bully, not to be...
He worked very hard not to be like him.
The idea that he’d become what he feared in the very process of trying to become the opposite, like some stupid Greek myth, angered him.
Where the hell is she? he thought, sitting up, the sweat dripping down his chest. He was sure she’d come—as sure as he’d ever been of anything. They still had that connection. He’d seen it in her eyes when she came all over his hand.
He felt himself getting hard again, and groaned.
The thought of her, any thought of her, was enough to get him going. She’d tripped some wire, set off some sort of damn fuse left over from ancient history, and now he was like a caged bull.
It made it hard to think. And Jackson had a lot to think about.
He had to think about how much he didn’t know about Ava Barnett. He was willing to bet he knew more than most—maybe more than anyone, the way she kept herself closed up tight. But that didn’t mean much. He knew she must have been rubbed raw already, even more so than he’d thought, a woman who’d already been battered by the world, or maybe just some of the people in it. She had to be, if the one metaphorical blow from Jackson that stupid night was enough to knock her out for the count for ten years.
He thought back and tried to remember details from the late nights they’d stayed up after studio sessions for their shared art class. Details were hard. He remembered the vague outlines of a relationship that went bad for her just before she’d transferred in at the beginning of senior year, a relationship she’d never wanted to talk much about. And he remembered the way she had mostly changed the subject whenever anyone had brought up family, but half the time, Jackson’d been right behind her, no more eager to talk about his family than she had been to talk about hers. And they were both scholarship kids, both of them working outside of class. But it was difficult to recall the hard facts of her life before him, because that’s not how he thought of her. She wasn’t a dry biography or a cold psychological profile. Every time something useful started to float to the surface, there’d be something else, something of far more interest. Her laugh, or the way she smirked at him at a party, sharing some private joke. The look she got on her face when she was listening to someone else’s problems, like there was nothing more important in the world than whatever was making her friend sad. All those things you notice when you’re in love.
Goddamn it.
He’d just been too self-absorbed, too concerned with his own bullshit. She’d been too good at hiding. And they’d both been too enamored at that connection they’d felt to do much more than enjoy it. And he’d let her slip through his fingers because of it.
There was, of course, the one night he remembered in crystal clear detail, one night he’d carried with him since then, and would until the day he died. The night she had given him the two most precious gifts he’d ever gotten.
You owe her.
That was all that was important. He couldn’t just wait around, hoping she’d come to her senses. He’d waited ten years to become a man who was good enough for her, and he wasn’t going to fuck it up by waiting around any longer. He wasn’t going to give either of them a shot at ruining their second chance.
Jackson jumped up, possessed with purpose. He was going to go out there and find her; there was just one thing he needed to hide first. No point in scaring her when he did finally bring her back here.
He barely had time to find a hiding place before the doorbell rang.
chapter 5
As soon as Ava’s finger touched the stupid bell—which, this was the only door in New York with an actual bell on it, wasn’t it? Of course it was—as soon as she did the one thing that was completely irrevocable, she was beset by doubt. Not when she’d given the cab driver the wrong address, twice, in her nervousness; not when she’d stumbled into Jackson’s swanky lobby, all ready to give the doorman some crazy story, and had simply been waved through because he assumed she must have gotten locked out while feeding a meter or something; not when she realized in the elevator, Oh, hey, I’m wearing pajamas, a winter coat, and running shoes, and it’s two in the morning, what the hell am I doing. Only when she’d actually rung the bell in the middle of the night, surely waking up the man she’d come to see, had she remembered to doubt herself.
Well, not just any man. Jackson freaking Reed.
She was about to turn around and slink away when the door opened wide to reveal Jackson, shirtless, sweaty, in low slung pajama bottoms.
Oh God.
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.
“Come in,” he said. It didn’t sound like an invitation. It sounded like an order. Ava was grateful for the direction. The sight of him had just leveled her.
She obeyed.
His apartment was dark, except for one area right by a couch in a corner, where there were a few dumbbells and other exercise-looking things strewn about in a pool of lamplight. She couldn’t see much else, but she could see that while he might not have been asleep, she had definitely interrupted something. She was just turning around to apologize and explain when Jackson grabbed her by the waist and kissed her.
He did more than that. He pressed her whole helpless body against his, wrapped his arm around her like a vice, grabbed her hair, and took her mouth with his. He was hard against her. His cock pushed into her belly as he sucked on her lower lip, and every muscle in Ava’s body gave out. The tension and doubt rippled and left her, as though he had sucked it right out of her, and now she only craved more contact. Her chest rose, her breasts trying to reach his chest, and her hands ran up and down his shoulders and back, feeling the muscles and the sweat that was already starting to cool. In one stroke, he smoothed his hand down her neck, to her breast, her belly, her hip, her ass, and then he pulled away, leaving her gasping.
There was a hint of a smile in his grey eyes.
“That said it better than whatever you were going to say would’ve done, didn’t it?” he said.
She nodded and looked down. She couldn’t help herself. He looked huge, bulging through his pajama bottoms. She remembered him as big, but…damn.
He said, “I’m glad you’re here.”
“Me, too.” Her voice sounded hoarse.
“If you hadn’t shown up, I was going to have to come out and find you.” He pulled her peacoat down over her shoulders. His hands brushed her bare arms, and she jumped. Now she had on only a tank top and her own pajama bottoms.
Ava was feeling woozy, being around him, and she fought it. She desperately wanted to keep the conversation in the realm of the sane. Somehow, every interaction between them threatened to veer into crazytown almost immediately, and Ava was suddenly feeling like she needed to keep her wits about her. This was more troubling than she’d thought. She wasn’t just feeling lust; she was feeling…she was feeling.
“How were you going to come and find me?” she asked. She tried to sound nonchalant, but her voice shook anyway. “You don’t even know where I live.”
He looked at her, completely serious. “You know I would find a way.”
She felt herself crumbling, felt her senses leaving her, felt… No. She couldn’t fall already. Whatever it was between them had short-circuited her brain, wired itself directly to her gut, her he
art. This was the power of the man: he made her forget everything she’d promised herself.
He moved closer and slipped his hands under her tank top, resting them for a moment on her bare skin, preparing to take the top off. She inhaled and fought through the pulse roaring in her ears.
“Wait,” she whispered.
Please don’t make me say it again, she thought. I don’t think I could say it again.
He bent his head toward hers and traced the line of her jaw with his finger. She could smell him, musky and strong. It did not make her resistance easier.
“We should talk first,” he finally said.
She exhaled with relief and nodded. Not just because she needed talk, but also relief that he was still just as sensitive as she remembered. That connection was still real. She was right to feel safe, and as soon as she felt that, the words just came tumbling out.
“How does this work? I mean…what are the rules? I have no idea, I’ve never…like, I mean, are there safewords? What happens if—”
Lightning quick, he snaked his arm around her back, reached down, and grabbed her ass hard enough to shut her up. He pulled her up toward him, his fingers slipping into the fold between her buttocks. Her clit screamed, and her whole body heard it.
He said, “Slow down.”
It’s not as if she had a choice. There was hardly any oxygen going to her brain.
He began to caress her up and down with his free hand along the length of her body, almost petting her. It made her both calm and incredibly…the opposite of calm. Whatever that was. She could barely think.
