Chapter 15
Garrett
I really hate to wake her.
Lola was asleep before I even managed to climb back in the car, legs pulled under her and cheek resting on her hand. I’d like to say she looks peaceful, but the truth is she looks exhausted. Completely and totally drained.
It makes me feel like a total asshole, especially since I’m at least partially responsible for the maelstrom she’s been caught in over the last sixteen hours. More like totally responsible, but since I don’t know what else she’s been dealing with, I’ll pretend it’s not all my fault…for a little while anyway.
Still, the guilt is real and it is harsh. So harsh that in the end I decide not to wake her after all. Instead, I slide out of the car, then walk around to her side. I grab her briefcase and rummage through it for the keys.
Once I find them, I hand them off to Bryce with a nod toward the front door. He nods back before bounding up the steps. I click off her seatbelt, then slide her into my arms before kicking the door shut.
“I’ll be out in a few minutes,” I tell him as he holds the front door open for me. Then I’m carrying Lola down the very short hall to what I assume is her bedroom.
It’s as big a disaster as the living room was last night, but I’m pretty confident the mess in here is her stuff versus stuff for Va Voom Vintage, considering at least two of the piles of clothing on the floor include clothes I’ve already seen her in. It’s an interesting side note to her personality, one I’ll have to think about later considering how ruthlessly organized she was at the photo shoot today.
Right now, I settle for kicking the pile closest to the bed out of the way, awkwardly bending down to smooth out the crumpled-up covers as I do. Lola stirs at the jerky movements, twisting in my arms until her arms are around me and her face is buried in my neck.
“It’s okay,” I murmur as I rub a soothing hand over her hair. She presses closer, and I’m shocked at the wave of tenderness that goes through me at the feel of her. It’s as unexpected as it is unfamiliar.
I mean, sure, I know that I’m grateful she’s decided to go along with this plan even though it messes up her life.
I know that I’m intrigued—fascinated, really—by her no-holds-barred approach to life.
And God knows, I want her—I’ve wanted her since the moment I set eyes on her at the lake, and the two times we’ve kissed since then have only made that desire burn hotter and brighter.
I’m more than okay with all of those feelings, will even go so far as to say I’m pleased by them since it’s been so long since I’ve been intrigued by anything or anyone. But this creeping tenderness? This softness I feel when I look down at her? It’s something else entirely, something I was certain the abduction had knocked out of me forever. The fact that I feel it for Lola confuses me and makes me cautious. I don’t know how I feel about it, and I sure as shit don’t know what I want to do about it.
Getting her in bed and then getting the hell out of Dodge is probably a good place to start. Which is what I do—or at least, what I try to do. But as I deposit Lola on the bed, she wraps herself around me and hangs on tight.
When I try to pry her hands away, she murmurs, “Stay,” and holds on even more tightly. But her eyes are still closed and her words are so slurred I almost can’t make them out.
“You need to sleep, baby.”
“Stay,” she says again. “Can’t sleep.”
Her words are patently untrue, considering she’s sleeping right now. But there’s something about the way she says them—even when she’s mostly asleep—that gets to me. That reaches inside of me and tugs on my own issues before I can even begin to brace for it.
I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since the afternoon I was kidnapped. And I’ve pretty much given up on the idea of ever having one again.
But the idea of Lola suffering as I do bothers me more than I care to admit. It bothers me so much that, after I slip her shoes off and pull the covers over her, I find myself sitting on the edge of her bed, stroking her hair and whispering to her, though I’m really just making sounds instead of actual words.
She curls into me almost as soon as I sit down, one arm over my lap and her body curved around my hips. “Stay,” she says again, and though I know I shouldn’t, I can’t fight her. Not now when my resistance to her is so incredibly low.
After sending a quick text to my detail, I stretch out beside her, pulling the covers around us and sliding my arm beneath her head so she can use my bicep as a pillow. It’s just for a minute, I tell myself as she burrows close. But even as I try to fight it, her warmth sinks into me, burrowing inside of me and taking away the cold for the first time in way too long.
I take a deep breath and hold her even tighter. Just for another minute, I promise myself. Maybe two. Five minutes won’t hurt anyone—not Lola, who is back to being out like a light, and not me. And if I’m wrong, well, that’s okay too, because the only one I’ll hurt is myself…and that’s something I’ve been doing for a long time now. Something it feels like I’ve been doing forever.
The nightmare comes like it always does—in the quiet, in the dark, when I’m most alone and most vulnerable. There is no rhyme to the dream, no reason, no one thing I can point to and say, that’s it! That’s why I’m having this dream. That’s why I’m so damn afraid. There’s no image from my childhood, or even my captivity, manufactured by my brain to terrorize and hurt me.
But the dream does just that anyway. Dark and silent and empty, so empty, it looms in my brain, an open cavern just waiting for me to slip in, to slip down and down and down, until I hit the bottom.
It’s not a metaphor, I tell myself as I struggle to pull myself out of it. Any more than it’s real. I’ve clawed myself back from the edge, clawed my way up from the bottom, and I’m not sliding back again. Not now. Not ever.
And still the chasm yawns in front of me. Still I feel myself moving toward it, one slippery toehold at a time.
Michael tells me not to fight the dreams, to just go with them. But he’s not the one about to be sucked into the abyss. And he’s not the one who has to try to function with whatever he finds there. Sweat blooms on my brow and pours down my face. I want to yell, to tell myself again that this isn’t real. To say it over and over and over again, until it’s true. Or until I finally believe it, whichever comes first.
I’m getting closer to the darkness, closer to the emptiness, and I decide to take Michael’s advice this time. I give up trying to fight it. Instead I let it pull me forward, faster and faster, until I’m standing right in the middle of the darkness. Only then, as the horrors of the past nip at my heels and the blank emptiness of the future looms large and overwhelming, do I finally find the strength to do what must be done. The strength to do the only thing left for me.
I open my eyes…and find Lola staring down at me, crazy corkscrew curls falling half over her face as she watches me with obvious trepidation and concern.
Fuck.
I drape an arm over my eyes in a belated effort to hide myself from her as I try to get my shit together.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
“I’m okay,” I tell her a few seconds later, after I’ve shoved as much as I can back inside of me. To prove it, I shove my hair back from my face. Fake a smile I’m far from feeling.
Lola doesn’t answer, just continues watching me with too much compassion in those beautiful eyes of hers. Somehow it makes everything worse, as does the knowledge that I have totally overstayed my welcome.
I push up on my elbow, trying to get a look at the old-fashioned alarm clock on the dresser so I can figure out just how long we’ve been asleep…and just how long I’ve left my detail sitting outside, waiting for me.
I get a quick glimpse of the clock—it’s eleven thirty—but before I can move to shrug the covers off, Lola is leaning forward. Cupping my cheek with her hand. Pressing her lips to mine.
It’s not our first kiss, but it’s the first kiss we’ve shared that feels like this. Soft and sweet, and so much more than the heat from earlier. Which is ridiculous, I know. We barely know each other, no matter what it feels like in the dark.
As her lips move against mine—slowly, tenderly—I feel the tension inside me drain away. Feel the heaviness I’ve carried for months now lighten, just a little. I don’t know why, when she isn’t the first woman I’ve been with since the kidnapping. But maybe the why isn’t important. Maybe all that matters is that Lola feels good. So good. And as she scoots closer to me, as she wraps her arms around my neck and presses her breasts against my chest, I feel good too.
It starts with her whimper when I slip my tongue along the seam of her lips. Continues with the small gasp she gives as her fingers dig into my skin. And when she parts her lips for me, sliding her tongue along my own, the journey is complete. I close my eyes and sink slowly, inexorably, into the oblivion she provides.
Rolling onto my back, I pull her over me so that her glorious legs are straddling my hips, her sex nestled against my cock. She’s warm and soft and sweet, so sweet, as I wrap my hand around the back of her neck and pull her mouth back down to mine.
She comes willingly, her fingers sliding up my chest to tangle in my hair as I pull her lower lip between my teeth and nibble at it.
“Garrett.” My name is more feeling than sound, an echo that moves from Lola’s mouth to mine as I slip my tongue inside of her, as I delve deeper, as desperate to explore the recesses of her mouth as I am to explore her body.
She tastes like cinnamon, like honey, like everything I could possibly want. It’s crazy, so crazy, to be thinking like that when we’re caught in this crazy situation together. When everything about us being together is fake.
But that doesn’t seem to matter as I slide my lips across her cheek and down her neck to the pulse point at the hollow of her throat. As she moans low in her throat and tugs at my hair. As heat races through the both of us, her body turning molten as she arches against me.
I lick my way from one pulse point to her neck, savoring the sweet and salty taste of her almost as much as I savor the feel of her nipples hard against my chest. Almost as much as I savor the feel of her hips rocking against my own.
It wouldn’t take much to slide inside of her, to rip her underwear away and feel all that heat clamping down on my cock as she moves over me. But amazing as that sounds—and fuck, it does sound amazing—I want more for our first time than a lightning-fast race to completion.
I want to touch her, taste her, hear her—I want to explore every part of Lola. Want to feel her orgasm on my fingers and against my mouth, want to give her so much pleasure that she comes screaming my name, again and again and again.
I tell her so, whispering every single thing I want to do to her between hot, wet, open-mouthed kisses—to her neck, her shoulders, the upper swells of her breasts.
She’s crying out before I even pull her dress down and brush my thumbs against her nipples, her eyes closing and her head lolling back. But that’s not what I want from her right now, and I pinch her nipples just hard enough to have her eyes flying back open. They’re dark and dreamy in the dim light leaking in from the living room, her pupils wide and unfocused as she shudders against me.
“Look at me,” I demand, pulling her face close enough to mine that I can feel her breath on my cheek. “Tell me this is okay. Tell me you want this.”
“I want you,” she answers, voice thin and breathy. “I need you, Garrett.”
It’s more than good enough to satisfy my conscience, more than good enough to have my body slipping the tight leash I’ve kept it on since the moment I first laid eyes on her at the lake.
Heat explodes inside of me and I slam our mouths together. I kiss her for what feels like forever. Kiss her until I’m drowning in her. Until our lips are swollen and sensitive. Until I don’t know where she leaves off and I begin. And then I kiss her some more.
I want her on fire, want her burning with the same need that threatens to eat me alive. I want her to lose control, to trust me enough to let me take care of her in every way a man can take care of a woman.
I want her. I just want her.