“I can do it,” I lied.
A crease formed in the corner of Justice’s eye as he tried to hold his laughter at bay. “I guess that means that you can take just one more?”
Consequently, that was how I ended up carrying four cases of beer to the door of Justice’s parents’ house.
I managed to ring the doorbell, barely, and not drop the cases.
Again, also barely.
Justice’s father answered the door.
And there was no doubt in my mind that the man was, indeed, Justice’s father.
The man had the same eyes, the same nose. The same build. The same steely look to him.
He was an exact replica of his son, just with a little extra silver in his beard and his hair, paired with a few more lines around his mouth and eyes that indicated decades more laughter than his younger version.
He took one look at me struggling with the cases of beer and took all of them but one from me.
“You must be Royal,” he said, holding the door open for me to enter.
I did and came face to face with the biggest goddamn dog that I’d ever seen.
“Ummmm, Mr. Rector,” I said, halting. “Your horse has blocked my access.”
“You can call me Loki.” Loki snorted. “And this is Jo-Jo. My wife’s newest addition. He’s a two-year-old English Mastiff who will straight up eat the food off of your plate if you’re not careful.”
I brought my free hand up and touched the dog’s head, giving him a good scratch as I did.
His face was in line with my sternum.
“Big boy,” I found myself saying.
“Stupid, big boy,” Justice corrected me as he pushed his way inside. “Move, asshole.”
Jo-Jo moved, barely, to allow us to pass.
“That’s not nice,” I found myself saying.
“He’s an asshole that likes to eat food off your plate when you’re not looking.” Justice repeated the words that had literally just come out of his father’s mouth. “Last time I was here, he ate my steak.”
I barely kept a smile from overtaking my mouth.
“Where do you want all this beer, Dad?” Justice asked.
“Put it in his playroom,” came a woman’s reply deeper in the house. “He can’t fit all of it into the fridge right now, anyway.”
“It’s not a playroom!” Loki shouted. “It’s a game room.”
“Playroom, game room. Same thing,” the woman’s voice was closer now.
Then she was appearing on the other side of the island that separated the kitchen from the living room, and my breath caught.
She was gorgeous. Hell, I couldn’t tell what she looked like from the waist down, but if the waist up was anything to go by, she was a knockout.
She was like one of those people that didn’t age, I was guessing. Kind of like Jennifer Aniston who hadn’t changed a bit in twenty years since she played on the TV show Friends—which was one of my most favorite of shows, so I would know.
“Mom,” Justice said, setting all of his beer down in the middle of the living room and rounding the cabinet. “You look good.”
Channing didn’t waste a second wrapping her son up in her arms, and I had a pang of loneliness hit me like a battering ram.
I wanted that type of relationship. I also wanted a mom.
I couldn’t remember mine.
Didn’t know anything about the lady she’d once been.
Hell, the only picture that I was able to get was of her and me when I was first born. She was in the hospital, her hair all matted and wet from pushing me out, and I was lying naked on her chest.
And I barely even had that.
I’d managed to snag it from my father who’d had it locked up in the desk in his office.
Except, he’d left it unlocked once and I’d been able to sneak in there and find it.
How the hell I’d been able to do that was still a mystery to me.
“And you must be Royal.”
I whipped my head up and smiled at the woman that was now staring at me with open affection.
If Justice didn’t have his mom under one arm, I knew that she’d likely be in front of me, wrapping me up in her arms just like her son had done to her moments before.
“That’s me,” I replied teasingly.
I felt sadness deep in the pit of my belly and wondered what it would feel like to never be sad.
Would that ever be possible?
I wasn’t sure that it would be.
“I’m glad that you came,” she said. “I so wanted my son to bring the woman that’s been driving him crazy for months.”
My eyes turned to stare at Justice.
“I’ve only been around for the last couple weeks,” I said, sounding just as confused as I felt.
“We’ve been hearing about ‘that girl in the greasy coveralls’ for a while now.” She shook her son who had a blank mask on his face. “You’ve been driving him nuts for a while now. A ‘girl like you’ shouldn’t be on Eleventh Street. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that. Though, we’ve just recently learned your actual name.”
My cheeks heated.
“A girl like me?” I asked, hoping that it wasn’t a bad thing to be ‘a girl like me.’
“A girl that clearly is as beautiful as you shouldn’t be ‘rubbing shoulders with the trash of Eleventh Street.’” Loki’s deep, calm voice came from behind me. “Not that my son would ever say that to your face or anything. Getting him to show any kind of emotion is like pulling teeth.”
My lips twitched at seeing Justice’s cheeks flush.
“It’s no fuckin’ secret.” Justice pulled away from his mom. “Dad, come help us get the rest of this beer.”
And then he was gone, leaving his mother and me alone.
“I’m Channing,” she said, holding out her hand to shake across the counter that separated us.
I grinned and shook her proffered hand.
“Royal St. James,” she said. “It’s nice to meet you. Justice has said nothing but great things about you, which in turn makes me jealous.”
Channing’s smile was warm as she gestured for me to take a seat. “Do you want some coffee?”
I thought about that for a long moment, then shrugged. “Actually, I’d love some.”
***
“I’m going to have to ask you to share your parents with me,” I said hours later as Justice was showing me to my room. “They’re great. I love both of them.”
“They’re great until they embarrass the shit out of you,” he agreed, sounding amused.
I wouldn’t care about the embarrassment, either. Not if I had them.
He pushed open the one and only door that was at the end of the hallway and said, “This is my old bedroom.”
I turned to stare into the darkness, and he reached forward and flicked the lights on, illuminating the room.
The quick glance into the room had my heart rate picking up speed.
The room wasn’t anything too fancy. Mostly it was just dark colors and clean lines.
But there was a hint of masculinity. A hint of Justice.
“It’s…bare,” I found myself saying.
“My mother took down all the half-naked girl posters after I left,” he chuckled. “But the colors and everything are the same.”
I stepped through the door and looked at the king bed that was the focal point of the room.
“You had a king-sized bed when you were younger?” I asked, looking at the bed, then back at him.
I had a twin-sized.
Both now and back then.
My phone rang in my pocket, and I silenced the vibration and set the phone down onto the table next to the large bed before turning to see Justice studying it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Had one since I was young. It was my parents’ cast off at first. Then when I was thirteen or fourteen, I got another one because one of my buddies spil
led carburetor fluid all over it. Stunk to high heaven, and nothing my mom tried got the smell out. I got a new one the next week with explicit instructions not to let Ford anywhere near my room.”
“Carburetor fluid?” I asked. “What the hell was that doing in your room?”
“We were working on a motorcycle and my mom said that we couldn’t watch what we were watching in the living room anymore.” He grinned. “There was too much violence and cuss words on it, and she was tired of hearing it. So we went to my room, and then Ford fucked my bed up.”
I just shook my head and sat down on the bed that had cradled Justice’s body once upon a time.
Something that I wanted to do. Preferably with my thighs parted.
I shifted on the bed uncomfortably and looked around at his room.
I could practically see where the posters were hung once upon a time.
“So are you a boob man, or an ass man?” I found myself asking, thinking about the posters.
When he didn’t answer right away, I turned only my head to see him studying me with such intensity that my heart started to pound.
“Are we talking about with you? Or just in general?”
“Ummm,” I hesitated.
His grin was positively wicked when he said, “Goodnight, Royal. I’ll be in the guest room right off the kitchen if you need me.”
And with that, he was gone.
He took my inhibitions with him.
Chapter 15
If you clean the receipts out of your purse and stack them together, it explains why you’re broke.
-Royal’s secret thoughts
Royal
I couldn’t sleep.
I’d tried.
Oh, boy, had I tried.
But I couldn’t find sleep.
And that all had to do with a certain wicked man that had known exactly what he was doing when he’d left me with that comment earlier.
Are we talking about with you? Or just in general?
I groaned and flopped back over onto my other side, eyes squeezing shut as I tried to tell myself that what I was about to do was the completely wrong idea.
I shouldn’t do it…yet I was going to.
Practically throwing the covers off of me and onto the floor in my haste to stand, I marched to the door and came to a sudden halt when I looked at my state of dress.
I was wearing a long t-shirt, panties, and nothing else.
But, with it being three in the morning, I highly doubted that I’d be seeing anybody else.
Mind made up, I cracked the door open, peeked out into the hall, then opened it wider. I used the light from my phone to help navigate in the dark.
The house was quiet besides the sound of the grandfather clock that I’d seen when Justice had led me to the bedroom he’d once occupied.
Hell, it was pretty damn loud now that there were no other sounds to mask its clicks.
Creeping down the hallway to the kitchen, I finally spotted the door to the guest room that Justice said he’d be in and walked up to it.
I didn’t give myself time to think.
Instead, I just opened it, then closed it really quickly behind me.
I didn’t try to be quiet, though.
I knew that he’d hear me.
Mostly because I knew he’d be awake just like I was.
Sexual frustration was one hell of a motivator in keeping you awake, and I knew without a doubt that Justice was feeling the same thing that I was.
“Royal,” came Justice’s husky voice. “You okay?”
No. I wasn’t okay.
This feeling inside of me had been brewing for a while. Waking up with his erection—intentional or not—digging into some limb of my body for weeks. Seeing him wearing those tight ass pants that left nothing to the imagination. Watching him come in from a run shirtless and sweaty.
All of those things, paired with the hundreds of shared looks of lust between the two of us, had ended the moment I stepped foot in his bedroom.
I stripped off my t-shirt once the door was closed.
My panties followed in between one step and the next.
Then I was crawling into the bed that he was lying in somewhere in the darkness.
I found him there in the very middle of the bed, lying silently, waiting for me.
“Thought you’d never come,” he rasped.
That was when I knew we were doing this.
There was no doubt anymore.
“You could’ve come to me,” I said, moving until I was straddling his body.
His big hands came to my hips and guided me to him, making me shiver.
“Couldn’t come to you when I knew that we’d be making noise,” he said. “Lock’s in the bedroom next to yours, and my parents are in the same hallway.”
That made sense.
Yeah, I needed to be the one to come to him.
His hands moved up the length of my naked torso, and I felt my nipples pebble even harder as I tried to keep myself from grinding down onto his lap.
His hard cock was digging into the flesh of my inner thigh, and I somehow knew that he was completely naked underneath the sheets. Just like I knew that I was about to make the biggest decision of my life.
“I’m on birth control,” I found myself blurting out.
He stilled.
“Yeah?”
I nodded once. “Yeah.”
“Why?” he wondered.
I bit my lip.
“I was dating a guy…”
He squeezed my hips a little too hard.
“I don’t want to hear about another guy when you’re straddling me,” he growled.
My lips twitched.
“You asked me why,” I pointed out.
“I did,” he agreed. “But I also didn’t think it was going to have you mentioning another guy.”
I rolled my eyes. What exactly did he think I was going to get onto birth control for? Because it sounded delightful?
“Fine,” I said. “I wanted to be on birth control because some person teased me about being a lightweight when I was on my period. Apparently, I turned into a mess that required special treatment, and he didn’t like it.”
There was a long pause, then he said, “After we’re done, you’re going to have to explain this better.”
And then he reversed our positions, him on top now, and me underneath of him.
I gasped at the sudden move, then groaned when he began to dig his cock into me.
I bit my lip to keep myself from screaming.
God, all he had to do was press himself into me and I was on the verge of an orgasm breakdown.
“Justice,” I breathed.
Suddenly the only thing separating us from having full-on skin to skin contact—the sheet—was ripped from between us.
Seconds later, I felt the full length of his cock settling between my thighs.
Moments after that, he was pressing the full length of his body against mine. His elbows went into the bed on either side of my head and his knees went between my thighs, pushing them wider than I ever would’ve taken them on my own.
And his cock.
Jesus Lord have mercy, his cock.
I couldn’t see it.
I’d never actually seen it.
But the vague outlines of it in his pants—some of those times being hard—had given me a slight indication on just how big he was.
But feeling him against me, the base of him starting at my entrance, his balls brushing my anus, and the rest of him up near my navel? Yeah, I had no doubt in my mind any longer.
The man was big.
Really, really big.
I licked my lips and widened my legs impossibly farther, arching up when he ground down.
“I haven’t had sex in years,” I found myself babbling. “I’m fairly sure I’m a born-again virgin, and just sayin’, but you feel really big. Be gentle with me.”
&
nbsp; I felt the brush of his beard on my lips as he searched for my lips in the darkness.
He found them a moment later, growling against my lips when he said, “I’d never, not ever, hurt you.”
I bit my lip and brought my hands up to rest on his wide shoulders. The muscles there felt like giant rocks, and I half wondered if the man had ever been a normal person, or if he’d always had a superhero’s body.
He moved until all of his weight was resting on one elbow, then brought his hand up the length of my outer thigh, trailing his fingers up the length of my side, coming to a stop once he reached my breast.
“I’ve wanted nothing more than to touch you since I first saw you,” he rasped, one blunt finger trailing up to circle around my hardened nipple. “Every time I told you to stay away, I really wanted you to push impossibly closer.”
My hands left his shoulders to travel upward to his hair.
One of the things I’d been dying to do was sift my fingers through it. And when my fingers finally met the locks of hair that drove me to distraction, I moaned. As did he.
Scrunching my fingers up to hold onto the strands, he growled when I pulled slightly, hoping to guide his mouth down onto mine.
He acquiesced, but not before skimming his lips up my jaw and along my cheek, teasing and not giving me what I wanted when I wanted it.
“Tease,” I laughed against his lips.
“I don’t think it’s teasing,” he said. “I think it’s called anticipation.”
Whatever it was called, it was driving me crazy.
“Justice, please,” I begged.
I didn’t know what I was begging for.
I just felt like something was needed, but I didn’t know what.
He shifted his hips, bringing his cock down further, and speared the lips of my sex with it.
I shifted in the bed, loving the way he felt.
Then he started to rock his hips, coating his cock in my wetness, while also allowing it to drag along the sensitive tissues.
My breath hitched in my throat and my hands clenched in his hair once again, causing him to chuckle.
“That what you needed?” he asked.
No. What I needed was for his cock to be inside of me, which I told him in the next second.
“Inside,” I told him breathlessly. “I want you inside.”
He paused in his movements, breaking the hold I had on his hair, and moving until he was on his knees between my splayed thighs.
Make Me Page 11
