Kissed (21 page)

“Precisely,” he said just as he walked through the door, leaving it open so I could follow.

I sat there for a couple minutes, trying to work up the nerve he expected me to have. I was terrified of calling my professors. I’d fucked up. Not a little bit, a lot bit, big-time bit. I wasn’t actually used to being the screw-up. It didn’t come naturally or easily to me, and admitting I’d screwed the pooch on pretty much my entire future was…hard.

I finally followed him and found him standing at the bathroom sink shaving. I picked up the toothbrush he’d given me earlier that morning.

“Okay.” I started brushing my teeth as he smiled at me.

I spent the next few hours either on the phone as he watched patiently from the sidelines or engaged in some sort of sex act that he’d promised. I was nervous as hell every time I picked up the phone, and my fingers trembled as I dialed. I’d walk around as the phone rang, and I’d even gnaw on my thumbnail. The relief I felt the moment I hung up was instantaneous. I had to wait for a couple of them to call me back when I reached their voice mail, but in the end, not a one of my professors refused to help me, and by four-thirty, my legs were over his shoulders and he was inside me, fucking hard and fast. I looked down, watching as he sank into me over and over, and my mouth hung open as I focused on the sight of him sliding into me. I was wet, and every time he pulled out, the condom was glistening with my cum.

By the time it was over, we were both panting, our legs were twisted and twined together in a tangle of sheets, and we’d both come. We were silent as we caught our breath. I needed to go home, but I didn’t want to. No part of me wanted to go back to Milwaukee where I would have to deal with my life.

When I sat up to the side of the bed, I stared out the window. His finger trailed slowly over my back, and I let my chin drop to my chest.

“Why are you still here?” My voice was quiet.

“
You’re
visiting
me
,” he said accusingly. “I happen to live here, at least at the moment.”

I didn’t bother turning to look at him, but my lips pulled up slightly. “That’s not what I was asking. I mean…why are you still…here? Spending time with me? Willingly?”

“Wantonly even.” The bed shifted as he moved closer to me, and then his legs straddled me and his mouth touched the side of my neck. “I like what we do. I like how we do it. I like how it feels. I like how we fit.” He exhaled deeply against my skin. “It’s hard to walk away from something that feels so good and that I like so much.”

“Not for you.” I shook my head. “You’re all about self-control, thinking about the consequences of your actions, setting up the dominoes to run up the stairs to the top, not setting them up to fall apart into nothingness.”

“Dominoes, huh?”

“Dominoes.”

His arms encircled me, and his hands covered my breasts, gently squeezing even as he kept his mouth against my neck. “I used to spend hours playing with dominoes as a child. And yes, you can make them climb, you can make them go in all sorts of directions and sometimes even down into nothingness.” He was silent for a moment, and his hands moved down my body, resting on my stomach. “But you know what the real tragedy is with dominoes?”

“Hmm?”

“When they fail to go anywhere. When they fail to even start.”

I angled my head back, pulling away just far enough that I could see him.

“I wouldn’t be here with you right now if we’d failed to start. You’re not something I can strategize, Gabe.” He reached out, brushing my long hair away from my forehead. “And thinking about the endgame with us is…confusing.” He looked out the window for a moment. “Right now I’m just letting the dominoes run because stopping them when they’re moving so perfectly and beautifully would be tragic.”

I nodded slowly, but I wasn’t sure I agreed. “I need to go,” I finally said.

“Are you upset?”

“No.” But of course I was. I just wasn’t upset
at
him.

“Then tell me what you’re thinking.”

I didn’t respond right away. “I can’t help but wonder if stopping the run is the most humane thing to do.”

His jaw tensed, and his brow flinched. “Why?”

“Because I’m pretty sure there’s pain at the end of it.” I tried to turn away, but he gripped my chin with his hand. I was trying hard not to swallow, not to breathe, not to do anything at all, because I knew it wouldn’t take much to make me cry right now.

“You can’t know that,” he whispered.

We looked at one another, saying nothing for a long time, and when he leaned forward, he paused just moments before he kissed me. “Everything about you feels so good.”

He kissed me, and I turned farther toward him as he leaned into it. His strong arms pulled me closer to him, and he lifted me, laying me down under him as he came down on top of me. His body was pressed into mine, and I wrapped my legs around his hips as he kissed me. I would never get tired of kissing this man. He made it exceptional every time, and it was never just some random thing for him.

“Come back for the weekend. Bring your school work with you.” He’d just pulled back from my lips, and he was studying me.

I nodded because, at the end of the day, I was no better at walking away from something that felt so good than he was. “When?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. That’ll give me time to get some stuff done during the day, and then I’ll be yours for the weekend.”

“Okay.”

He pushed off of me, and I stood from the bed and reached for my dress, which was slung neatly over the occasional chair. I slipped it on, ignoring my bra, and he watched as I inched my black underwear up under my dress. Neither of us had bothered dressing since getting up, but as he rose too, he grabbed a pair of sweatpants from the dresser drawer and pulled them on quickly.

He followed me to the door. I was being too quiet. So was he for that matter.

“Thank you,” I said quietly when we reached the door.

He smiled. “Trading sexual favors for difficult phone calls was definitely a first, but it had to be done.”

I smiled. “I appreciate you”—I shook my head, looking around—“just being here.”

“You’re welcome.” He pulled me into his arms and kissed the top of my head. “May I have your phone, please?”

I looked up at him, fishing in my purse for it as he smirked down at me.

When I handed it to him, he walked away as his fingers worked.

“What are you doing?”

He glanced at me over his shoulder. “Something that’s long overdue.” He winked.

His phone started ringing from the kitchen, and he ignored it. “There,” he said as he handed my phone back to me. “I’m in your contacts, and you’re now in my call history. Now I can stop being offended that David has your phone number and I don’t.” He smirked. “And no more conversations with your bitchy housemates when I have no other way to reach you.”

I cringed. “Which one?”

“Casey.”

My cringe twisted up even more. “She hates me.”

He nodded. “It would certainly seem so.”

He watched me walk down the hall away from him, and when I finally stepped into the elevator, I sank back against the back wall and sighed as the doors closed.

Chapter 15

Keegan

MY
week ended with a bang. Many, many bangs, in fact, that came in rather quick succession one after another, building momentum and compounding as they went like a snowball down a mountainside. I will never understand exactly how it is that life can go along seemingly simply and smoothly and then just shit on you in a second flat, but by the end of Friday, everything in my world had been turned upside down, and I felt very much like I was sitting in life’s toilet bowl.

Bang number one came quite literally with a jolting painful crack to the side of my eye as David’s rather effective left hook caught me on the side of my face.

Bang number two crushed my balls up into my guts as David brought his knee up into my groin. It was a dick move that had started with his hand held out as though to shake mine. Moments later my head was splitting and my balls had taken up residence in my abdomen.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” he asked as he cracked his neck and pulled the cuff of his dress shirt out from the arm of his suit jacket. He picked up a glass from his desk. Knowing his habits as I did, I was guessing it was scotch.

This wasn’t how Friday was supposed to go. This was actually supposed to be a good day. Gabe was going to arrive on the four-fifteen bus from Milwaukee and then meet me in the lobby of Trump Tower at four forty-five. Then I was supposed to have an entire weekend alone with her. That was something I’d not yet had—time, lots and lots of uninterrupted time with the woman I couldn’t seem to get enough of. That and a fucking hand job, which I was irrationally desperate for. She’d not touched me enough, and I fully intended to get her hands and fingers on every last ounce of my skin this weekend.
That
was the agenda, not this.

I held my palm up to the spot that was throbbing on the side of my eye, and I pressed against it, coughing as I tried to dislodge my testicles from my innards. “Fuck,” I spat out loudly.

“You want me to be squeaky clean, huh?” David said as he lifted his glass to his mouth. He took a swig, gritting as he swallowed. “You get paid to sweep up after my messes, and instead, you start fucking my leftovers?” He waved the glass around, nearly sloshing some of the liquid on the marble floor.

My jaw clenched tightly as I watched him. He was pacing in his office, back and forth with his glass in his hand. We were alone, and it was Friday afternoon at four o’clock. I’d only just walked into the grandiose space that overlooked the city, and I really didn’t have time to get beaten up at the moment.

“How did you find out?” I gasped as I braced myself on the edge of his desk. I wasn’t really sure I needed him to answer that question, but I had to say something as I waited for the nausea to pass. I felt like vomiting, and my breath left me in a grunt as my body tried not to die from the pain coursing through my balls.

David scoffed. “Trainor called me.” He laughed cruelly. “What? Thought they’d keep your secret?”

I shook my head. I
had
actually expected the Malcolms to keep it silent because I’d made it clear I had an agenda with that bit of information—a completely fake agenda that I had no intention of ever executing, but still…

“I’m going to take that slut down.” David was muttering as he still paced. When he downed the rest of his drink, he walked to the serving tray on the coffee table that sat in the sitting area of his office. He lifted the crystal decanter, pouring more of the clear brown liquid into his glass.

My lips pulled back in a snarl. “You will do no such thing.” My words came out through gritted teeth.

I’d built my life around this—analyzing every last detail of a person’s life and history. I didn’t give a shit about the politics. Better men than me could deal with that aspect of the game. I was all about the package, the presentation. I could make a man look good if he let me, and there’d always been something deeply powerful about that to me. Without doubt it was my Freudian way of pleasing my parents as well as telling them to suck it at the same time.

But I didn’t want this. My world was encroaching on hers, and her world was too fragile to withstand it right now.

David smirked. “What’s wrong, Keegan? You haven’t become attached to that whore’s pussy, now have you?” He was mocking me, throwing the same line in my face I’d thrown in his plenty of times before.

My jaw was so tight it ached, and I focused on that pain. I wanted to tell him I’d kill him if he ever called her that again. I wanted to tear his balls off and shove them down his throat. I wanted to do so many things I simply couldn’t do.

Instead, I did the only thing I could do—my fucking job. “She’s no longer associated with The Service, which means you have no access to her.”

He snorted. “I have her fucking phone number, asshole—”

“If you do anything to hurt her, it will hurt you too,” I snapped back at him. “You expose her, you expose yourself.” Reasoning with the man I’d rather be killing felt very much like getting kicked in the balls all over again. “I told you she was a liability from the beginning. I meant it for more reasons than just her age and profession.”

“All the more reason to discredit her now in my opinion,” he muttered, turning to look out the windows to the expansive view beyond. He was pouting like a child.

“Be careful, David. She may know a thing or two about discretion, but every person has their limit. If you push her, if you threaten her reputation, her livelihood, she’ll push back. Everyone does eventually. You stay away from her and out of contact with her. Do you understand?” I sat on the edge of his desk, finally finding my composure again.

David turned toward me, his face cold and his expression tight. “Yes. Well, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of contact with her for both of us.”

“Whatever my contact with her is, it is none of your business. You can accept that, or you can shoot yourself in the foot and destroy your political career at the same time.”

I walked toward the door, ready to be done with him, ready to be done with all of it.

“Why her?” David asked quietly.

When I turned toward him, he was staring out the window again. I didn’t bother answering largely because I didn’t feel as though I owed the man even one ounce of an explanation. But I also couldn’t say I knew the answer either.

I walked past the receptionist, whose eyes followed me. I couldn’t imagine our altercation had gone unnoticed or unheard. I ignored everyone I passed, and when I stepped into the elevator, I held my breath until the doors closed, leaving me blessedly alone inside. I didn’t speak to a single person as I walked to my car, and it was only after I was safely sitting in my driver’s seat that I finally said anything.

“Goddamn it,” I yelled, ramming the heel of my palm into the dashboard.

I grabbed my phone, dialing Trainor.

“Trainor here,” came the deep baritone I’d come to recognize and hate.