To Love Jason Thorn (28 page)

The clicking stopped.

Jason kissed my nose. “You’ll have to be a
little more convincing if we want them to think we are in love. I’ll have
to…touch you.”

“Touch me?” I squeaked.

His eyes dropped to my lips and he nodded.
“And you’ll have to touch me like you actually like me.” Reaching down, he took
my hand and put it on his chest.

“Of course. You’re right,” I said, barely
recognizing my own voice.

“It’ll be over soon. You won’t suffer for
too long, don’t worry.”

“Sure. No suffering. Over soon. Got it.”

“You ready?”

I relaxed my shoulders and nodded. Act and
look like I loved him?
Child’s play.

When he gave the okay, the shoot started up
again.

Jason straightened from the wall and took
me with him. His hand still on my back, he kept me close to his body, my
breasts properly squished between us.

“Olive, can you look at the camera while
Jason is focusing on you?”

I took my eyes off Jason and looked at the
damn camera.

“Great. Now place your hands on his chest
and slightly lean into him.”

I was already plastered to the guy, how was
I supposed to
lean
into him?

I chanced a glance at Jason and my heart
stuttered. Was this how he would look at me if he was in love? His eyes heated,
his lips slightly parted, his breathing uneven.

I closed my eyes and sucked in a breath. I
could do this. I could just let myself enjoy his closeness without messing this
whole thing up.

I wanted to play, too.

Not even hearing what Amelie was saying, I
slowly slid my hand up from his chest and ghosted my fingers over his dark
stubble, right where his dimple was hiding. His eyes darkened, and I was pulled
even more firmly against his chest.

Whoa!
My
nipples liked that very much.

To his questioning look, I said, “I want to
play, too.”

I rose on my tiptoes and stopped when I was
a breath away from Jason’s lips. “Do I look like I’m in love with you?” I asked
quietly, my eyes firmly focused on his parted lips.

Take it
.
My
lips are right there
.
Kiss me. Just once.

He didn’t.

Keeping his heated gaze on mine, he kissed
the corner of my lips. “We look like we’re crazy for each other,” he whispered,
his hand tightening at my back. His head tilted forward and his lips ghosted on
my throat. “We look like we can’t bear to take our hands off of each other.”

With a quick maneuver, he turned me against
the wall and rested his forehead against mine. I hissed and bit my lip when the
cold concrete met my bare skin. Arching my back, I rounded my arms around his
neck and made sure to push my breasts against his chest.

Amelie was to our right, making sure to
capture every intimate moment.

What did
she
see through the lens?
Could she see that we were only playing?

His hand curled around my waist and he gave
me a smirk right before he pulled my lower half against his own. Now, it was
only my head pressed against the wall.

When I felt his…hard on…cock…penis…dangly
bits (as Lucy would say)…I groaned and closed my eyes.

So he wasn’t exactly oblivious to me. That
could count as a good start, right? I could work with that.

“We look like we are about to fuck each
other,” he whispered into my ear.

My eyes closed on their own and I kissed
his cheek, right where his dimple was; I knew I could find it even when my eyes
were closed. “You’re fucking me right now, Jason.”

Because he was. He might as well have pulled
my dress up and entered me right there, right in front of everybody. My body
was sure as hell ready to take him.

He nipped my chin with his teeth—not too
soft, not too hard—and I sucked in a breath. He drew his head back and ordered
me to open my eyes in a husky voice. I did as I was told.

Because I was a good girl like that.

What I saw in his eyes… Everything around
us melted away. All the lights, Amelie, Alvin, every single person in the
building melted away and it was just us. It was just
my
Jason and me.
Not the movie star, not Jason Thorn whom every woman was salivating for. Right
at that moment, he was just mine.

My
dream
boy.

My
childhood
crush.

My
first
love.

My
only
love.

And now my pretend husband.

An eternity passed.

I bit my bottom lip.

His eyes flared. “Is it that good, Olive?”
His eyes held me captive just as much as his body did.

“The best,” I whispered achingly.

Slowly he lowered his head again and
captured my bottom lip between his lips. Then I felt his tongue gently licking
that said bottom lip.

Please, insert another one of those ‘My
body is ready gifs’. Holy moly!

“Place your hands on his chest,” whispered
Amelie next to us.

Holy shit!
Where had she come from? Had she heard us?

I didn’t even care, just did as I was told.
I slid my hands down from his neck, making sure that my fingertips grazed his
skin beneath his collar and stopped when I felt his erratic heartbeats.

I heard a few more clicks.

“That was amazing guys. Wardrobe change,”
Amelie announced beside us, breaking our connection. I was still in his arms,
he still hadn’t let me go, but he eased himself off of me. I swallowed and
Jason’s eyes slowly cooled down.

Damn, but he was a good actor.

The same girl came and swept me away for a wardrobe
change, which was probably for the best.

The rest of the photo shoot was tamer, and
instead of going at it on our own, both Jason and I followed Amelie’s
instructions. It felt safer to do so. I got a forehead kiss, and another one on
my cheek.

When we sat down for the interview and told
them that we were actually married, the looks on their faces were priceless.

We had a quick dinner where Lucy and Olive
managed to make me laugh multiple times with their stories before we headed to
the bar where the cast and crew were meeting up. More than a party, it was a
way to reconnect with each other and get to know the new people before filming ate
up all our time. If Olive was sad that Charlotte couldn’t make it, she didn’t
show it, but I could see that something about her friend’s absence in her life
was troubling her. I didn’t ask questions.

While Lucy had preferred jeans and some
number with a lot of cleavage, Olive was wearing a sparkly, metallic gray skirt
with a casual white shirt. Her hair was still damp from the shower she had taken
after the shoot and she barely had any makeup on, and she looked perfect in my
eyes.

Still reeling from our photo shoot, I was
having trouble looking away from her. Every little detail seemed to matter
somehow. The way her cheeks were flushed from laughing so much, the way I caught
her looking at me under her lashes, the way her eyes sparkled whenever I
reached out to hold her hand. It was becoming impossible to not notice every
little thing about her.

Impossible to not like everything I was
seeing.

I had been forcing myself to sleep in my
own room ever since she had cried in my arms before coming on my fingers that
night, but my patience was starting to wear thin.

I was seconds away from prying her legs
open and taking her for myself. Every innocent look, every innocent touch,
every secret smile…everything just pushed us closer to our inevitable.

Chugging down my second beer of the night,
I kept track of Olive and Lucy from the corner of my eye. I wanted to give her
alone time with her friend because even I could see how much they were missing
each other. They hadn’t stop talking ever since Lucy had stepped foot in the
car. I hadn’t meant for my schedule to keep her away from her friends, but in
my line of work, you got used to not having your freedom.

They were doing tequila shots and chasing
them with beers. She didn’t look like she was drunk, and she certainly wasn’t
acting like it, but I couldn’t be sure. If they had another round of shots, I
was going to interfere. As much as I would have loved to deal with drunk Olive
again, I wanted her to be stone cold sober when we got back home.

An hour into the party, a few of the crew
members had decided to set up the karaoke machine and proceeded to sing their
hearts out, becoming the night’s de facto entertainment. Every now and then,
they were hopping back onto the stage to torture everyone’s ears. Other than
them, no one else had picked up the mic, which was a blessing if you asked me.

I was sitting at the bar with the assistant
director, Tyler Cameron, a guy I had worked with before and respected, when I first
heard Olive’s voice through the speakers.

“Hello everyone, I’m Olive.” She coughed
and tapped the mic with her finger.

Someone let out a loud whistle.

“I believe that’s your wife, Jason,” Tyler
said, looking over his shoulder. He was the first guy at the party that I’d
told that we were married. Tyler wasn’t a guy who would repeat it to anyone
else, especially after I’d asked him not to.

Wife. Yes. Right. I was married.

I turned in my seat to face the stage.
“That she is,” I said, my eyes taking in the curves of her body. Leaning back,
I rested my elbow on the bar and took a gulp of my beer.

There was a smile in her voice when she
said, “I just lost a bet to my friend Lucy there.” She pointed to a beaming
Lucy and got a whistle from her. “So as the loser, I’m supposed to make your
ears hurt for a little while. I hope you can bear with me. It’s a slow one, so
you should be okay.”

“Is her voice any good? I don’t think I can
handle any more screeching for the night,” Tyler said as he gave his full attention
to Olive.

“Oh, she’s good. Don’t worry.”

“You look okay, Jason,” he said, eyeing me
cautiously before Olive started her song.

I took my eyes away from Olive as she tried
to get on the barstool. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I know better than to believe anything I
read in the tabloids, but after all those photos and videos…well, you looked
like you were a bomb ready to go off at the wrong move. I’m glad you’re back
with us, and if she is the reason…well, good for you.”

Instead of answering him, I grunted and
gave all my attention back to Olive.

As always, she hadn’t been able to get on
the barstool, so when she started Ed Sheeran’s song “Kiss Me”, she was standing
up, one hand wrapped tightly around the mic, the other resting on the barstool.

After a while, when the song pitched higher
and her sweet voice charged through the space, everyone seemed to be shocked
into silence. Tyler spoke up again. “She seems to be good at a lot of stuff,
your wife.”

I nodded; that was all I could manage at
that moment.

Somewhere in the middle of the song, after
her eyes had finally found mine in the crowd, her voice turned soft and husky
as she gently ordered me to kiss her. I held her eyes because I needed that
connection since it felt like we were busy falling in love with each other. She
was seeing me, and maybe for the first time, I was seeing her too. Her voice
called to me as much as her eyes did, but then she hid those beautiful eyes
from me, and I found myself crossing the room to get to her.

I wanted her to look at me.

I wanted her to see
me
when I was
kissing her.

And I needed her to kiss me back.

When the song ended and she opened her
eyes, I was standing right in front of her. She smiled at me as if she’d known
she would find me there waiting for her.

Taking another step, I closed the space
between us. Prying the mic out of her hands, I laid it on the barstool. My hand
curled around her neck and I asked, “Do you see
me
, Olive?”

The question was important to me, her
answer even more so. It wouldn’t be the movie star Jason Thorn kissing her into
oblivion in a few seconds. It would be me. Jason. Her friend. The man who wanted
to make her his.

A shiver went through her body as she
lifted a shaky hand to put on my cheek. Her voice was nothing more than a
whisper when she answered me. “I’ve always seen just you, Jason.”

Then my lips were on hers, and her lips
were on mine. We kissed long enough to cover years. In front of everyone, her
lips became mine and I took her breath for myself, because I needed it more
than she did.

I was aware of the whistles and all the
applause, but I couldn’t hear, couldn’t feel anything beyond the woman in my
arms. In my mind, it was just the two of us. Standing in the middle of a dark
room, we were in each other’s arms, where we had locked ourselves in and tossed
away the key without a second thought. She tilted her head and my tongue slid
deeper into her mouth.

It wasn’t enough.

Burning with the need to consume her, I
gripped her waist and leaned my body over hers, forcing her to arch her back,
and kissed her more desperately.

Harder.

Deeper.

I put everything I’d started to feel for
her in those past few weeks into the kiss and offered it back to her.

Our first kiss.

I wanted it to be good for her, change her
world in some way. I wanted it to be her best first kiss of all the first
kisses she had experienced.

It was my first time touching her heart
after all; she needed to remember every second of it.

Her arms went around my neck and her fingers
slid into my hair.

I groaned.

She whimpered into me, her body shaking
with fine tremors.

She would remember it all.

When I wanted more from her, I slid my hand
up and reached for her ponytail to pull her head back, just enough so she could
catch her breath while I kissed the edges of her mouth where she hid those
secret smiles, the ones she saved for when she was writing on her laptop, lost
in a different world she was creating from the start, brick by brick. I wanted
to own those secret smiles just as much I wanted to own her beautiful heart. I wanted
to be the reason for their existence.

When she ignored everyone and captured my
mouth for herself, I went willingly, giving her more of my tongue and taking just
as much from her.

Then I kissed her again.

And again.

And again.

And again.

I kept one of my hands on the back of her
head and let the other one slowly cup her ass so I could pull her more firmly
against my rapidly lengthening and throbbing cock.

If we hadn’t been clinging to each other,
the hunger I felt for her, the way my world was spinning…it would have brought
me down to my knees.

My heart was ready to be hers if she wanted
to take it for herself and keep it for an eternity.

I couldn’t stop.

Not when my body was aching to feel her
hands on me.

Not when her mouth was giving me something
I was desperate to have from her and only her, even though I hadn’t realized I
needed it.

Especially not when she was clinging to me
as if I was breathing life into her.

Then she was pulling away and looking at me
with lust and a little bit of surprise in her eyes.

“Hello,” she whispered hoarsely. I nipped
at her lips and she gave me one of her secret smiles.

My first one.

“You sure took your time,” she said, hiding
her face against my neck as soon as the words left her delectable mouth. Her
warm breath was whispering her longing against my skin.

Ignoring the room full of people around us,
I asked, “You’ve been waiting for me to kiss you?”

She came out from hiding and looked into my
eyes with the sweetest grin on her face. “Ever since I was a little girl.”
Kissing me on the cheek, she added, “Thank you for making my dream come true.”

My heart ached with love for a little girl who
in some ways had always belonged to me. “Was it worth the wait?” I asked, my
voice gruff, my heart thundering in my chest.

She scrunched up her nose, her eyes focused
on my lips. “The jury is still out. You think we can try again, maybe?”

“Guys?” Lucy whispered urgently, just below
the stage.

Olive stiffened in my arms for a moment as
if she’d just remembered the bar full of people we were giving a show, but I
caressed her back and she melted against me. Then we both glanced at Lucy.

“I’m fucking loving what is going on here”—she
motioned between Olive and me—“but people have been filming the whole thing.
Since you look like you’re ready to go at each other on stage, I thought maybe
you’d want to know before you start losing your clothes.”

Shit!

“We should leave,” I said to Olive and
quickly got her down off the stage. No matter how quickly we left, I knew we
would be the talk of the night. With the videos and the news of our marriage,
maybe even more so in the coming days.