Chapter 25

Jax

The chain scraped back, the lock clicked, and the door swung inward.

There she was.

She took my damn breath away.

Riley stood on the threshold, gripping the door handle. Her hair tumbled to her shoulders, chocolaty and soft, glossy. It touched her tan cheeks. I traced my gaze along the line from her cheekbones to her button nose, which turned up slightly at the tip, to the lips beneath it—cushiony but not too full. Natural.

I couldn’t look at her body. I’d never resist touching her if I did.

Two weeks, and it’d felt like two damn years. Every cell in my body screamed for me to take her into my arms again, to kiss her and claim her. To fucking own her.

I held back.

Every move I made now could make or break us. I wasn’t a man who broke. I didn’t bend easily either, but I’d have to if I wanted to make this work, because if she was the same as me, that meant she didn’t break or bend either.

“Jax,” she hissed. “What are you doing here?”

“We need to talk,” I said, evenly. Nerves were another thing I didn’t do, but the curling, warping feeling in the pit of my stomach told me I wasn’t immune when it came to Riley.

“I told you not to contact me.” But there was no heat in her voice.

Riley shuffled out onto the tiny porch, glanced at the house adjoined to Veronica’s, then back to me. She creaked the door shut behind herself. “Whatever it is, you’ve got to be quick about it, OK? Nessy’s asleep, and Veronica wouldn’t be happy about you being here.”

“Like I give a fuck what Veronica would or would not be happy about,” I replied and smirked with it. I couldn’t help that.

“I see you haven’t changed.”

“Same to you,” I said and didn’t mean it as an insult.

“So, what do we need to talk about?” She folded her arms across her breasts. She wore a silken pj set, shorts, and a loose tank in lilac. I tried not looking at her, but it was futile. “Jax?”

“You,” I said. “How are you doing?”

“I—what does that matter? Look, if you’ve come here to mess me around, don’t waste your time. I’ve got a lot on my mind, Jax,” she said, softly.

Moonlight arced down from the heavens, a gap between the clouds, and highlighted her feet, set so firmly on the porch’s worn, splintering boards. French manicured toenails. Christ, how could I have forgotten that little detail?

“Jax!”

“Jesus, Riley, I’m trying to gather my fucking thoughts here. It’s pretty damn difficult to do with you standing there with hard-as-rock nipples, smelling like sex and sweetness,” I snapped.

She shivered.

I took her by the upper arms, stroked my thumbs across them, and relished the contact. She didn’t flinch but didn’t lean into me either. The heat was still behind her eyes. She couldn’t hide that from me, at least.

“I’ve got a proposition for you,” I said.

“What?”

“A proposition,” I repeated. “And you’ll hear me out before you interrupt with complaints and resistance. Understand?”

“Not in the slightest.”

“You will in a moment.” I ran my thumbs back and forth, creating light pressure, warming her cool skin. “I bought your studio.”

She jerked against my grip, tried backing away. I held her fast. “You did—you—are you—–?”

“Relax.”

“Relax? You buy my studio and what? You came here to gloat? It wasn’t enough that I was uncomfortable about you working with strippers, now you’re going to take the dream I had and crush it further?”

“Riley,” I said.

But she was on a roll now. “I told you I wasn’t comfortable with it becoming a club. I don’t care if it’s classy like Club Queen. I told you! Yeah, I know I don’t own it anymore, but I—fuck, I—I can’t believe you’d do this and come tell me about it.”

“Riley.”

“Is this your payback? You couldn’t make me into your possession, so you took the studio and made it yours instead?” She banged her fists into my chest. “Who do you think you are? Who do you think you are?!” The pressure of that banging increased, but the woman was tiny. She couldn’t possibly hurt me. “You asshole!” Tiny and angry. “You seeping wound of a human being.” OK, furious.

“Riley!”

But she’d already dissolved into tears. She beat against my chest, writhed in my grip, scuffled her feet, and stepped on my shoes. She wouldn’t hold still, and nothing I said now could calm her down.

I tightened my grasp on her, brought her closer to my chest, then brought my lips down on hers.

She stiffened underneath me, sucked air in through her nose.

I parted her lips and tasted her. She nipped my tongue. A moan wormed up her throat, gave away the game. She quit beating her fists against me, slung her arms around my neck instead, and kissed me back.

Riley’s tongue tangled with mine. She massaged and tasted, probed as deep as I did, wet and warm and everything I’d craved for the two weeks since I’d made the decision to buy the damn place.

She took hold of the lapels of my jacket and tugged on it.

This woman needed me as much as I needed her. She’d never admit it to herself, she was just as stubborn as I was, and she didn’t have a Bane to whip some sense into her. Fuck, what I’d give to pin her against the front door of this ramshackle house and fuck her with her leg over my shoulder.

I pushed her back a step, pressed her to the wall, and deepened the kiss. Gripped her right leg and lifted it, wrapped it around my hips. I ground my cock into her pussy, hot through the silk of those shorts.

Riley moaned against my lips, ran her hands down the front of my shirt, and tugged on my belt buckle, worked it back and forth, desperate for me as she’d been two weeks ago.

My woman. My Riley.

Stop, asshole. You’re ruining it all. You’re fucking it up again.

I released her and stepped back, swiftly.

She swayed on the spot, blinking up at me, her gaze hooded. She touched her wet lips, pressed two fingers to them and exhaled. “Why are you here?” she whispered, voice trembling. “Did you come to mess my head around again?”

“No,” I said. “You didn’t let me finish. I had to shut you up somehow.”

“Such a romantic,” she hissed.

“I’m not here to be romantic, I’m here to tell you something, Riley, and if you’ll calm down for a second, I’ll let you in on the fucking secret. How’s about that?”

She chewed on her bottom lip but didn’t turn around and retreat into the house. That had to be a good sign. “Spill it, King.”

“I love it when you call me by my rightful title,” I quipped, just to lighten the mood. “I bought the studio, and not because I want to turn it into a strip club or a restaurant. I bought it for you.”

“You what?”

“I bought it for you.” I let that sink in for a second.

“I—you—” She did that supersonic, lost-in-translation babble she’d perfected over the course of our relationship. Not that she’d ever admit it’d been a relationship. The suggestion would probably make her head pop off and levitate. “You—I—I can’t believe—why?” Her eyelids fluttered. “Are you insane? You can’t just leave it alone, can you? You have to put your oar in the water.”

“My dick in the pot,” I corrected. “And that’s not what this is. I bought it so you can run it. You can make the money you’ve always wanted to, maybe even expand, and then buy me out later on.”

He jaw dropped. A flicker of hope passed through her but was just as quickly extinguished. “That’s generous, I guess, but it just wouldn’t be right. I already failed once at running the place. I don’t want to bring anyone else down with me. I—Now would be a good time for me to get a steady job with a steady paycheck. No risks. I’m done with risks.” She said that last sentence pointedly, and dragged the back of her hand across her mouth.

“Riley, what the hell are you talking about? You’ve got to take risks in business. If you don’t, you don’t get the payoff. You know that.”

She shook her head, mute now, her lips pressed together so tight they went white.

“This is your opportunity. Take it.”

“No,” she said. “No, thank you. And next time you make a decision like this, talk to the person you’re trying to help first. If you’d just asked me, I would’ve told you that—you know what? It doesn’t matter. I guess this works out for both of us.” She was changed. Something about her was different.

She’d carried burdens on her shoulders these past four weeks. When she’d lost the studio, I figured at least one burden would have lifted. But it hadn’t. She was heavy—in the strictly metaphysical sense.

“Riley, this will help you live your dream. This was what you wanted.”

“What did I know?” she asked. “Nothing. I knew nothing. There are no dreams, Jax. There’s cold, hard reality. You have yours, and I have mine. Look, I’m going through some stuff I need to work out. I’ll call you sometime soon.”

I blinked. That was unexpected. If anything, Riley’s rejection should have meant a total shut down of communications between us. “Call me?”

“Yes,” she said and opened the front door. She stepped inside and turned around holding it ajar. “I’ll call you, not the other way around.”

She expected me to hang around for her call and do nothing? “Riley, whatever is hurting you or worrying you can’t be bigger than your dreams. Let me help you.”

“Let you help me? I don’t want any help right now. Just keep doing what you do best. Hiring strippers and dominating. I’ll keep doing what I do best,” she said.

“And what’s that?”

“Avoiding you.” She closed the door with a curt snap.

Nothing about tonight had been what I’d expected. The anger, yes, that had been there, but this? Why would she fall into my arms, kiss me like she’d done two weeks ago if she was so good at avoiding me?

Something was up. I walked to the door and knocked again. “Riley, open up. Talk to me about this, now.”

Silence.

“Riley!”

“Go away,” she hissed, against the wood. “Everyone’s sleeping. I told you, I’ll call you soon. Just go. OK? Just go.”

I considered camping out on my sister’s doorstep. I’d do it if it meant Riley would fucking talk to me. Or listen. But she wouldn’t. Riley wasn’t ready, and buying the studio had been a mistake. She was fixated on the fact that I was someone who worked with strippers, even though I’d shown her that Club Queen wasn’t some bubbling pot of filth and sleaze.

“Just go,” she whispered, one last time.

I didn’t obey the order. I walked off only because I’d come up with another plan. A way to help her help herself.

My life would blank out without her. The minute she’d left, everything had lost flavor.

There wasn’t a chance I’d let her get away again.