TWENTY-THREE
LUCY
Although my mother’s wish for Tom to fuck off is apparent, he doesn’t make any effort to leave. He just stays there, on the couch. We stare each other down for a long time. Finally, he offers me a self-indulgent grin, and my face catches fire. “All you had to do was come back to California, and you wouldn't be in this situation,” he says calmly. Standing, he presses his lips together and jerks at the hem of his suit jacket. It's immaculate, like always, and I hate him for the façade. I wish Jace had ruined it when he had the chance earlier today.
And I’m so ashamed of myself for admitting that.
I rush over to him until the toes of my pumps bump against his perfectly polished shoes. “Come back to California?” I demand in a hushed voice. “For what? To work for you? To have your relationship with Shane thrown up in my face every time I stepped into that office with the douchebags you hired? And do you know what they said about me behind my back? Do you know how it made me feel that everyone in that office knew what you were doing but me?”
“How it made you feel?” He cups my face, but none of the warmth that radiates from Jace’s touch is there. Instead, everything is cold, from his eyes to his body language. When I recoil, it doesn’t even seem to bother him. “The Lucy I married cared more about getting things done than feelings.”
Is he kidding me? Does he honestly believe that I was so driven that love and happiness hadn’t mattered to me? Apparently, he does, and it’s tragic that, had I not found out about his affair, I might have spent the rest of my life with a man who thought I valued my career and achievements over the welfare of my heart.
“You’re wrong,” I say shakily. “The Lucy you married thought she was in love. She thought she was in love and then she found out he loved someone else. I don’t know any woman who would be able to get shit done with that kind of clusterfuck happening all around her.”
Bending his head close to mine, he sneers. “You could have at least fulfilled your obligations.”
“No, I couldn’t. And I’m not going to—not when it comes to you. So if you think you're accomplishing something by coming to my job, insulting the people that I work with, and then popping up at to my house to tattle on me to my mother, you're not. All you're doing is making me see how stupid I was for not realizing exactly who you were sooner.” I’m trembling from my head to my feet by the time I finish speaking.
“You belong in San Francisco. I need you to make the company work. We had a deal.”
I clench my hands into fists to ground myself. “I’m not coming back to San Francisco,” I say as slowly as possible. “I'm not helping your company. And if you want to sue me, go right ahead. It’s going to take more money than you can afford and at the end of the day, I'll still have my job here while you make shitty coffee from your apartment.”
His light blue eyes are tight at the edges as he stiffly walks to the front door. He looks over his shoulder, so I meet his glare with my own. “You really are a bitch, Lucy. And a lousy lay which is why I fucked around all those years. If you think a man like your boss is going to stick with you, you have another thing coming.”
A vicious slap of pain rockets through me, but I pretend it doesn’t hurt. I grit my teeth and I bear it. “You're right,” I whisper. “You shouldn’t have married me. Let's just chalk it up to bad life decisions and move on.”
He flashes me an angry smile. The sound of the front door rattling behind him startles my heart, and I stare blankly ahead for a long time before I sag onto the couch. I hold my arms around myself, replaying every detail of our conversation until the sharp pain in my chest overwhelms me. Then, drying my cheeks with the heels of my palms, I take off to my mother’s bedroom to explain myself.
“You know, Williams, I really didn’t expect you to come,” Jace drawls when he opens his front door several hours later. He’s shirtless, with nothing on but a pair of boxer briefs. Before he can get out another question, I press my body up against his and shove him back into the foyer. I kick the door closed behind me, and a dark gleam leaps into his slate blue eyes. “That’s my sweet girl. You want it rough tonight?”
“I want it any way you give it to me.” Because I’m desperate to take my mind off the thoughts that made it too difficult for me to fall asleep when I climbed into bed. I hadn’t warned him I was coming. I had simply gotten in my car and drove, blasting the same rock station he listened to whenever we were together. I hadn’t even bothered to change out of my night shorts and oversized tee shirt. “Don’t talk, Jace. Just … fuck me.”
He takes my face in his hands, fanning his thumbs over the outline of my cheekbones. “What happened, Lucy?”
“Nothing,” I whisper.
“Lucy, I think we should—”
“Please don’t talk.” My voice sounds desperate, and I’m sure my eyes mirror the emotion. When he draws away from me, he’s out of breath, but then he gives me an angry nod. Doing away with his boxers and kicking them into a corner, he hoists me up, positioning my legs on either side of his bronze body. The air floats from my lungs as he pins me against the wall by his front door, and I swallow a gasp.
He doesn’t apologize. Doesn’t say a thing. Instead, he shoves the center of my skimpy shorts to the side, rubs the head of his cock over my slick flesh, and drives into me with a force that rips the breath out of my body all over again. When I start to talk, to apologize, he cuts me off with a bruising kiss that makes my sex tighten and pulse around his cock. He sucks in a harsh exhale and grips the outsides of my thighs, picking up speed.
“No, you don’t fucking speak, Williams.”
So, I don’t. The only sound that falls from my lips are whimpers of pain intermingled with the sweet buzz of pleasure. I hold on to him, my fingernails raking over the tattoos on his chest and my head banging against the blue-gray wall behind me, as he takes me like this is the last time we’ll ever do this. After I come, he pulls out of me without a word, and I sink to my knees in front of him. My climax is still zinging through me, shaking me to my core, but I want more of him.
I need it.
The moan that breaks his silence when I wrap my fingers tightly around his shaft and stare up at him from beneath my lashes is the best thing I’ve heard all night. And when my mouth is full of him a moment later, and he gathers a fistful of my hair, I peak again at the tremulous way he whispers my name.
“Stay the night,” he orders long after we’re done and I’m sitting across from him on the foyer floor.
I take a moment to catch my breath, then I shake my head. “I can’t, I—”
“Then at least tell me what the fuck is wrong. You show up here telling me to shut up, let me fuck you raw, suck me off until I can’t stand up straight, and now you can’t even stay?” His blue eyes are hard as they take me in, and my breath catches when he moves across the narrow space to sit right beside me. He smells like a mixture of his cologne, my amber-scented perfume, and sex, and my mouth goes dry in anticipation of more.
“I had a rough night,” I admit.
He groans, dragging one large hand through his hair and over his face where he rests it over his mouth. “You shouldn’t tell me that. I’ve been known to be a bit of a tosser, and I might make your work environment a living hell just to get a repeat of that.” When I don’t crack a smile, his expression sobers, and he squeezes the inside of my thigh. “What happened, Williams?”
I consider evading his question, but then I release a harsh, painful breath, and I let everything out. It’s like the afternoon I revealed the truth about Tom’s relationship with Shane, but tonight, I detail my ex-husband’s visit and what had happened with my mother. I tell him how Mom had left shortly after I tried to speak to her, and how she hadn’t said a word to me when she returned home a couple of hours later.
I tell him that it hurts.
I don’t realize I’m pressing my palm to my chest until he pulls my hand into his and kisses the inside of my wrist. In one swift motion, he pulls me on top of him, and I drop my forehead to his, blanketing our faces with my black hair. “Are you embarrassed of what you do?” he asks after a beat passes. “Of working with me?”
Without hesitating, I shake my head. “I’m embarrassed that I was too chicken to tell my mother, that I let Tom get me into this mess, but I’m not embarrassed of working with you. You gave me a chance when nobody else would, I appreciate that. And there’s nothing—nothing—I would do to jeopardize that.”
Though I won’t say the words aloud, he must know what I’m saying. That I won’t let my feelings for him, my desire for him, ruin the work I do for EXtreme. I can’t because I’ve assured him all along that I can handle the intimacy.
“I understand, but I think you need to fix things with your mother.” He sifts his fingers through my hair, brushing the ends of my locks between his thumb and forefinger. He does this for a long time before he finally clears his throat. “When we were broke, and the chemo was killing my mum because she couldn’t take what it was doing to her body, I was angry with her for a long time because I didn’t understand why she wouldn’t ask for help. She died knowing I felt like that.” It’s the first time he’s directly mentioned his mother, and I swallow hard at the sharp pang that twists my chest.
“I’m sorry, Jace,” I whisper, but he shrugs it off.
“I don’t have many regrets but that’s one of them. I spent the year after she died homeless, bouncing around and living with neighbors and friends. Gwen’s dad, my uncle, finally found out what was going on and brought me to America. He took me in and gave me some sense of normal. It wasn’t the same, though. Didn’t feel like family. You know, it’s why…” He leans back from me, and I bite down on the inside of my cheek at the ghost of a smile lingering on his full lips. “It’s why there’s that pesky two-year difference between you and I.”
“I haven’t brought that up since our interview,” I say over the lump that’s taken residence in the back of my throat. I still feel pathetic for pointing out that, while I had graduated at seventeen thanks to skipping a grade in elementary school, he was nineteen when he graduated. Supposedly, he missed so much school his seventh year in England that he had no other choice but repeat the grade when he moved to the states.
"Didn't feel like going to school last year, so I fucking didn't," he'd once told a group of girls congregated around him at lunch, explaining why he was fourteen to everyone else's thirteen and my twelve. His flippant excuse only did wonders for his reputation.
Now that I know the real reason he’d repeated that year, my chest clenches and I feel so small for scoffing at his excuse.
My father died of cancer. Though I was lucky enough to have more time with him than Jace had gotten with his mother, my heart still breaks every time I pass the photo of us at my graduation from Brown. I open my mouth, a harsh sound whooshing from my lungs, but Jace shakes his head.
“Don’t say it, love.”
I toss my hair over my shoulder and lift my brows. “Say what?”
“Don’t feel sorry for me.” He moves me away from him for just a moment so he can stand us up, but then I’m in his arms again, straddling my legs around his waist just like I had when I came in earlier. “I don’t want your sympathy. I just want to touch you. I want to taste you. I want to make things right for you so that when you fall asleep tonight—and make no mistake, Lucy, you’ll be doing that in my bed—you won’t think of your ex-husband or your mother giving you shit. You’ll think of me.”
“Okay,” I whisper, a thrill racing through me when he bumps his bedroom door open with his shoulder. The bed in his room is legendary, better than the one in the photo room back at EXtreme, and I have a feeling I’ll become well-acquainted with it tonight.
“And when you go home tomorrow—” he starts, dropping me on the mattress and reaching for something in his nightstand drawer that’s bound to tease me to the point of breaking. “When you go home tomorrow, fix things with your mum.”
I bob my head, moving it until the lump in my throat dissolves. “I will,” I promise just before cold metal closes around my outstretched wrists.