One Man Read online

  My first inclination is to reach down and rip away her panties, sit her on top of the back of the chair and make her wait while I undress. That submission comment gives me pause, though, and my instinct is to earn her trust in ways I might not need to otherwise. But friend or enemy, and I hope like hell it’s a friend, I need this woman’s trust. But again, it’s not that simple. I want her trust, too. I want her to forget to feel the pain.

  I caress a path downward until two fingers of each hand run along the line of her ample breasts, sliding beneath the lace on one side to tease her nipples. Her teeth scrape her bottom lip, and I lean in and lick the offended skin, kissing her before I press her hands to either side of the chair next to her. “Don’t move.”

  “And if I do?”

  I could promise to spank her or work her to near orgasm then deny her pleasure, and I believe at another time or place, she might like it. Just not now. Not this night. “You’ll never know if you move, now will you? I’m not going to punish you, not unless you want to play that kind of game.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then we won’t, but nothing has changed. Don’t move.” I cup her face and press my cheek to her cheek. “Good things come to those who wait. Only good things tonight, Emma.” She trembles beneath my touch, and I can almost feel the emotion radiating off of her. Emotions that aren’t about me, but her. I’m just here for the ride.

  I step back from her and reach for my belt. Her gaze follows, her expression tightening, and I have this sense that she knows a belt in a way no woman should know a belt. Holy fuck, I might kill York. I need to get out of this city before I see him again. Her eyes meet mine, her bottom lip trembling with the truth that gives new meaning to Mrs. Nichols’ comment about her never bringing men here. And yet she brought me.

  “You’re giving me too much time to think,” she says, pushing off the chair, and stepping into me, her hand on my belt, tugging at it. She wants it gone, with an almost desperate need. I slide my hand under her hair, cupping her neck to bring her mouth to mine. “You want to stop thinking?”

  “Yes.” She tries to rip my shirt and fails, a soft curse falling from her lips. “Why aren’t you naked yet?”

  My lips quirk at her failed effort. The woman is adorably sexy, but I don’t dare laugh. Instead, I unbutton the necessary buttons and tug my shirt over my head, tossing it aside. Before it ever hits the ground, her hands are all over my body and if she keeps touching me like this, I won’t last. She might forget what pains her, but not for long. Not if I don’t slow her down.

  I cup her head and kiss the hell out of her, the kind of kiss that leaves no room for anything but the kiss. She moans into my mouth and strokes the line of my zipper down my pants, her fingers teasing the line of my cock that’s so damn hard it’s nearly painful. I reach down and unclip the front clasp of her bra, and then caress the straps away from her shoulders, my gaze raking hotly over her high breasts and puckered nipples.

  Fuck. I want to fuck. Hard, dirty fucking, here, now, and then repeat. I cup her breasts, pinching her nipples between my fingers, even as I press her against the chair again. “What are you thinking now?” I demand, but I don’t give her time to reply. I kiss her, and while her tongue is playing with mine, my hand grips the lace between her thighs and I rip it away, reveling in the yelp that follows. “What are you thinking now?” I demand again, my fingers sliding along the wet heat of her sex.

  “I loved those panties,” she pants out.

  “I’ll buy you a new pair.”

  “I loved those panties.”

  “I’ll make it worth your while,” I promise, pressing her hands to the chair again. “This time, don’t move.”

  “Or else what?” she asks again.

  “My tongue will stay in my mouth when it could be on your body.” I kiss her and back away, putting enough distance between us to waste no time removing my pants, aware of her eyes on my body, on the jut of my thick erection. I grab my wallet and pull out the condom stashed there.

  “Always prepared, right?” she asks, her body bared for me, her breasts high and full, but her eyes filled with judgment I’m not going to let go.

  “My daddy told his boys to always be prepared.” I rip open the package. “I like to fuck, not get fucked, which means a condom.” I roll it into place.

  She cuts her stare and I close the space between us, catching her chin and forcing her gaze to mine. “What just happened?”

  “Just fuck me already, will you? It’s what you want. It’s what I want. And I’m thinking too much again, Jax.”

  “That’s not an answer,” I say, my hand finds its way under the long silk of her dark hair and cups her neck again, dragging her mouth to mine. “What just happened?”

  “A lecture I don’t need.”

  “Just making sure you know I’m safe.”

  “Are you?” she challenges. “Safe?”

  I opened this door. I walked right into it and I can’t seem to make it a room of lies. “I’m a loyal friend and a dangerous enemy. So am I safe, Emma?”

  “You hate my family. No. No, I don’t think you’re safe at all.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  “Because I want you here. Now you answer the same question. Why are you here, Jax?”

  And there it is, the question I should be asking myself. Why the hell am I here, getting naked with a Knight? I’m playing a dangerous game and somehow, innocent or not, Emma is in the middle of it. It doesn’t matter, though. When this is over, she’ll hate me, but that just makes the here and now matter more. And so, I give her the most honest fucking answer I have to give. “Because I damn sure want to be, Emma.” I lean in and press my mouth to hers, my tongue licking into her mouth, kissing her deeply, passionately, my hands roaming her body, touching her freely, her breasts, her nipples. We touch each other and every plan I have to go slow is now all about fast. I lift her leg, sliding my throbbing cock along her core and pressing into her. Thrusting deep. Hard. Burying myself to the furthest part of her. And then we’re just staring at each other, fucking staring when we should be fucking, but we’re not. We’re still, utterly still, lost in that connection that I’ve felt with her from the moment she sat down at my table. That connection that I want to blame on grief expands and damn near suffocates me. My heart is thundering in my ears, adrenaline rushing through me, heat in my chest that I don’t want to feel. But if this is about shared grief, the very grief at the root of what may separate us, right now in this moment, we’re alive, we’re together, we’re what matters, and in that realization, I snap. We snap.

  Our mouths collide, and I cup her backside, picking her up. Obediently her legs wrap my hips and regretfully her high heels fall away with one thud followed by another. We are now truly naked, nothing between us but her thigh highs, and a history I hope like hell she doesn’t understand. I carry her to an oversized chair with a connected ottoman, laying her down on her back, settling on top of her. There is no time lost now, no holding back. I’m driving into her, thrusting, pumping, my hand still cupping her backside, lifting her, arching her into me. This is fucking, wild and hot and without limitation, raw, real, primal.

  She moans, these soft, desperate sounds sliding from her perfect mouth, thickening my cock, driving me wild. She drives me wild, she speaks to me. I understand her, I feel her. I don’t want to understand her. I don’t want to feel anything but pleasure, and so I drive harder, pump and pump again, trying to make the sex all that matters. I fill my hands with her breasts and suckle her nipples, licking, teasing. My teeth nip her earlobe, her shoulder, her nipple. She tangles fingers in my hair and pulls, murmuring something as she does that I don’t understand, outside of the desperation in her words. I’m right there with her and together we’re grinding and moving, damn near crawling under each other’s skins.

  Her nails dig into my shoulders, and I press her knee to her chest and roll to the side, using that angle to pull her down hard, but it’s not enough. I roll her to
her back again, pump into her, and then we’re there, burning alive. She cries out and her body tenses. Another second and her sex clenches around me, spasming, milking my cock. Dragging me into that sweet spot with her, and I am suddenly shuddering with the intensity of my release. Time fades in and out, and then it’s done, it’s over, and yet, nothing is done and over between me and this woman. I roll her to her side, we’re facing each other, easing her leg down. She buries her face in my shoulder, and this is where I would normally get up, but I don’t. I don’t get up and there is no doubt that Emma Knight has given the word bittersweet a whole new meaning.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Emma…

  I lay there with Jax still inside me, emotions welling in my chest. God no. I’m going to cry. Sex was supposed to be an escape from the perpetual emotional rollercoaster ride of the past month, not a trigger. I press against his chest. “I need to get up,” I whisper, but still my voice manages to crack.

  “Hey,” Jax says, his leg between my legs, his hand sliding between my shoulder blades. “What’s up? Are you okay?”

  I swallow the cotton in my throat. “I’m fine. Of course, I’m fine. How can I not be fine after that?”

  “You’re not fine.” He strokes my hair, tilting my face to his and in this close proximity, there’s no escaping his inspection. “And I hate to tell you this, sweetheart, but you won’t be fine for a long time.”

  He’s the only person that has been honest with me, who didn’t fluff up his words to make me feel better. “Thank you.”

  “For what? The orgasm, or the orgasm?”

  I surprise myself by laughing. He surprises me by making it happen. “Yes. The orgasm, but,” I sober quickly, “more so, the part where you didn’t coddle me and tell me this was all going to be better soon. I really want to jump off a bridge every time I hear that these days.”

  He takes my hand and kisses it. “I know. Believe me, I know, which is why I suggest that you keep me close and fuck me every time you get stuck in your own head.” He pulls out of me. “Because I already want to be inside you again. I don’t want to leave, Emma. Not unless you want me to leave.”

  “No,” I say easily. “You’ll be going back to Maine soon, I’m sure, back to the land of North Whiskey. I don’t want you to leave tonight.”

  “Good,” he says, his voice a soft rasp, his eyes tender, and I swear there’s a flicker of something in his eyes that resembles relief, which is silly. We’re fucking. Nothing more. The man lives in another state. We’re just not ready to call this done yet.

  He kisses me. “I need to go clean up.” He rolls away and I fight the urge to pull him back, not yet ready for reality to kick in, and when he’s touching me, that’s easier done. Instead, I sit up, holding myself up on my hands, comfortable in my own naked skin, the one good thing York did for me. Even if I wasn’t, I have a distraction right now. Jax straightens to what I guess to be his full, six-foot-two-inches of long, hard man. “Where’s the bathroom?” He snatches up his pants and steps into them, rippling abs and defined biceps working a number on my eyes. There’s this line of hair down his abs that I haven’t gotten to appreciate until this moment and—

  “Emma?”

  I jerk my gaze back to his face instead of the rest of him, which works just fine since he’s now wearing his pants. “Yes?”

  His lips, those perfect lips, quirk. “Do I pass inspection?”

  “I didn’t finish the inspection. You put your pants on.”

  His lips quirk. “Another reason to stay.”

  “Yes,” I agree. “I do believe I need to finish what I started. Use the bathroom in my bedroom upstairs. The lights burned out in the one down here this morning.”

  “Your bedroom it is,” he says, his eyes alight anew and he’s already walking toward the stairs.

  I twist around to follow his retreat, watching all that muscle flex and move. The man is gorgeous. He also just had sex with the daughter of a man he hated, which reminds me of that anger in him when we’d first arrived; when we’d talked about the castle, his family castle, the one my father was secretly obsessed with, which still makes no sense to me. Why? I set that question aside with the memory of Jax inviting me to that very castle, almost as if he was baiting me. This unsettles me and I stand up, naked and aware of my nakedness this time, suddenly feeling exposed with Jax, vulnerable, when just a few minutes ago I felt a kind of kismet with this man. This is confusing—he’s confusing—and I find myself seeking out my velvet coat and pulling it around me like a robe, hurrying up the stairs to the loft-style upper level.

  I step into the room as Jax exits the bathroom, his phone at to his ear. “What’s the address here, sweetheart?” he asks. “I’m having something delivered to cheer you up.”

  Sweetheart.

  He’s called me this, and baby, before and I can’t explain why, but this time feels different. It does though, gentler, more tender, and then there is the cheer me up thing. He wants to cheer me up, not just fuck me? The wind of confrontation is officially out of my sail. Confused all over again, I recite the address and walk into the closet, exchanging my coat for a pink silk robe before exiting to find Jax has returned to the bathroom. My gaze catches on my father’s journal where it lies on the floor beside a lounge-style chair, sitting beside my bedroom fireplace. I hurry forward, scoop it up and sit down on the lounger, the fluffy white area rug soft beneath my toes, when everything inside this journal is hard and unfamiliar, and yet somehow the man I both grieve and hate right now.

  Jax re-enters the room, disconnects his call and sits down next to me, both of us on the same side of the lounger, our legs now pressed close. “I ordered ice cream from an all-night spot I found when I did my law internship here. A lot of ice cream because I don’t know what you like. Which brings me to my therapy recommendations.”

  He ordered ice cream? I’m charmed but I home in on another part of the conversation. “Therapy? Did you go to therapy?”

  “I am now. It’s a combination therapy. Ice cream and,” he leans in and kisses me, “you.”

  “What about all that hate earlier?”

  “I told you. I don’t hate you, Emma.” He kisses me again. “No hate. Just a lot of raw shit from losing my brother. You get that, I know.”

  “Yes,” I say softly, my heart hurting for him and his loss. His brother was young and I don’t know that I know how he died, but there’s an edge to Jax that says now isn’t the time to ask. “You went to law school?”

  “It felt like the best way to contribute to the business. Middle son and all. I felt a need to prove my worth.”

  “I considered law school for the same reason, but for me, it was about being a girl. My father was old school. Men were stronger, better. More worthy.” I cut my stare. “How did we start talking about this? I don’t want to talk about him right now.” The phone on the wall by the door rings. “That’s security. They’re probably trying to clear the ice cream delivery.” I stand up and walk to the phone, answering to give clearance for the delivery. “Ten minutes,” I say. “They called the security desk.” I look down and realize I’m holding the journal. The journal of a man I idolized. The journal of a man Jax hated. The journal that says he might have a good reason.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say, walking toward the bathroom before my emotions get the best of me.

  I never make it. Jax catches my hand and turns me to face him. “What just happened?”

  It’s the same question he’d asked me during sex, and like then, I don’t hold back. I’ve done way too much of that in my life. I’m not doing it now with Jax. “You hate my father.”

  “That has nothing to do with you and me.”

  “Because we’re just fucking. Right. I know. I—”

  “Is that what this is to you, Emma? Just fucking?”

  “You’re leaving. We just had this conversation. North Whiskey. The castle in Maine. You remember that, right?”

  “It’s not that simple and we
both know it. Otherwise, I’d be gone right now. Well fucked and back in my own hotel room. If you were anyone else, I would be back in my hotel room right now.”

  “You live in Maine, Jax.”

  “And yet I’m right here, now, with you, and if I remember correctly, you told me that’s where you want me. Has that changed?”

  I could end this. I could send him way. I should send him away, but I’m not going to do that. He knows it. I know it. “I don’t want you to leave. Not yet.”

  “Not yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then I won’t leave, yet.” He reaches down and lifts my hand that holds the journal. “What is this and why are you holding onto it for dear life?”

  I like Jax. I might even be able to fall for Jax if we lived closer, but this moment reminds me I’m in dangerous territory. I’m holding the secrets my father kept in my hand, and Jax hated my father.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Emma…

  The doorbell rings and I’m saved from explaining away the journal or I think I am. Jax doesn’t quite let it go so easily. “I’ll get the ice cream,” he says, and then he lifts my hand, the one holding the journal, to his mouth and kisses it. It feels like there’s a point, like he somehow knows what the journal is to me, and my father, but that’s impossible. He can’t know.

  He heads for the door, and I watch him walk away, exiting the bedroom. My gaze drops to the journal. The things inside it are horrible. And the truth is, I don’t know how Chance, who worked with our father every single day of his life, while I was kept at a distance, wouldn’t know. I love my brother but I question him now. I hate my father for giving me that thought.