Chapter 26
It’s Monday, I can tell by the sounds of the morning outside the open French doors before I even open my eyes.
The trucks of the clean-up crews are more businesslike on a Monday morning than they are at any other time of the week.
New Orleans parties non-stop, with the exception of the four-hour lull of a Monday morning.
The drunks are still asleep in some tucked-away doorway, the tourists left last night to make their way back to wherever they came from and won’t be replaced until noon, and the street musicians are recovering from the weekend.
The vivaciousness of the city is momentarily at rest.
Cruelly clear-eyed and unromantic, Monday mornings are entirely immune to whatever logic the weekend convinced us might have been a good idea at the time.
Speaking of good ideas versus am-I-going-to-live-to-regret-this ideas, my eyes open to find Dallas’s side of the bed empty. I can hear that he’s outside on the balcony talking on his phone.
Even though I’ve always hated Monday mornings, I know I won’t regret this weekend. Whatever happens later, I still won’t. It was a perfect moment in time with a perfect dream man who may or may not evaporate into thin air like dream men tend to do. Still, I’ll always have it in my memories.
Monday morning does its usual thing, instilling a cold ordinariness to the light.
It’s the only time of the week that New Orleans feels like a regular place.
Not that I’ve been to many other places, but it’s how I imagine they would feel.
Dull. On a schedule. Empty of music and eccentricity and fun.
My stomach swoops as I remember a very important detail of what’s happening today.
I’m moving to New York today.
Jesus H.
I agreed to move to an entirely different city that’s very far away from my home and stay with a man I’ve known for three days.
I sit up a little. Our love-nest is an absolute den of iniquity.
It looks very much like a scene in which two people got as sexy and debauched as it’s possible to do and spent the weekend thoroughly throwing every caution under the sun into the proverbial wind.
The duvet is balled up and wrapped loosely around me.
Our clothes are strewn over chairs or have been left on the floor.
Several trays of empty room service platters are over near the door, along with their empty bottles of champagne and now-melted ice buckets full of room temperature water.
My hair might as well be dreadlocks and I have bruises on my arms and thighs—which are smeared with the remnants of all manner of wanton behavior. I’m sore, I’m sated, I’m enlightened, and I am not the same Amelie Esmé Sabine Ana?s Thibodeaux who started her bartending shift on Friday night.
I’m in love.
My subconscious insists on attempting to be the voice of reason. I’ll remind you again that this random billionaire you think you’re “in love with” is someone you’ve known for less than the duration of three shifts.
Either way, there’s one thing I can confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt. I’m definitely no longer a virgin. Not even close.
My stomach does that swooping thing again. Because I’ve agreed to do things today that are so far outside my comfort zone, I might has well have booked a ticket to fly to Mars on an alien spaceship this afternoon.
But his words echo through my mind along with the fear. I’ll protect you. I’ll take care of you.
And I know Sadie was right about it being time. The hotel is nothing but a ball and chain to me at this point.
It’s all too much to think about.
I roll over, stretching, testing all my sorenesses, reveling in the sheer comfort of the bed. Displacing the duvet in the process.
I don’t really realize that I’ve arched my back in way that completely exposes me in a coy, bare-ass-naked invitation until I hear Dallas behind me. “You tryin’ to seduce me again, Amelie Thibodeaux?” comes his husky drawl, mimicking my accent.
I’m on my stomach, my ass raised and my knees apart and I glance behind me to see the towel dropping and Dallas’s big, buff body. His giant cock is fully, hugely hard and upright as he grips my hips, raising them higher.
“Good mornin’, Dallas Wilder,” I coo. Because to hell with it. I can’t control how easy it is for this man to tune into my most primal cravings. They don’t seem to turn off around him. I just want him, plain and simple.
“It sure is a good mornin’, with you in it. You want more of my big cock, don’t you, you greedy girl. Let me give you what you need.”
We made love sometime in the early morning just before dawn and I’m still full of his cum, which makes it easy for him to ease his thickness silkily inside me, sliding deep. I arch back, taking all of him. He feels so good there’s no reason to deny him anything he wants.
Dallas fucks me slowly at first, drawing the pleasure out of me as his hot, ridged thickness drives in, and in, as he takes me from behind.
It doesn’t take long before he’s tipping me into yet another full-body climax that racks through me lusciously—and so strongly all I can do is moan his name as my inner muscles work him hard and sweet until he’s pumping me full of his own throbbing bursts.
He’s still breathing hard, his weight heavily over me as he begins to recover.
His fingers tease me into another lush orgasm that milks his softening cock in a wet, erotic rhythm.
He likes doing this. Coming inside me, then making me come again.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say Dallas and my inner sex goddess are in cahoots, both determined to get as much of his seed as deep into me as it’s possible to do.
I go limp and Dallas kisses my face and smooths my hair, murmuring sweet words into my ear that I know are designed to calm me and coax me without spooking me.
I love how you feel, baby girl. You were made for me.
I’m going to take such good care of you.
You know that, right? Don’t you worry about a single thing. I’ll take care of everything.
Dallas pulls himself from my body. He helps me up, guiding me to the shower. Rivulets of wetness trickle down my thighs.
I let him shampoo my hair and soap me up.
“This is all so crazy,” I comment blithely, thinking about how, normally, on a Monday morning I’d have started my housecleaning shift hours ago.
He looks down at me. His eyelashes are spiked in a starburst pattern and he looks so brawny and handsome it takes my breath away. He really is the most masculinely beautiful man. “It is crazy. It’s also the sanest thing I’ve ever done. Angel girl?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s nothing to be scared of.”
“I’m not scared.”
“We’re going to finish our shower and get dressed. Then we’re going to go to your apartment and pack up whatever you need for New York.”
I haven’t told him about my “apartment” or lack thereof. “There’s nothing I need.”
He blinks at me with those wet eyelashes. “Nothing?”
I hold up my hand and show him the ring I wear on the pointer finger of my right hand.
“This is the only thing I have that’s worth anything.
My mother’s wedding ring.” It’s a plain gold band and I never take it off.
“This is all that’s left. There are a couple half-finished paintings but no one will bother them.
I live in a storage room. And I’m the only one with a key. Not even Ellen has one.”
He pauses. “You live in the hotel?”
It hardly matters if I tell him at this point. “Yes. I bunk in an old storage room. That’s where I’ve been living since …” Weirdly, it doesn’t feel so painful to say it this time. “… since soon after my father died before he even hit the floor.”
Dallas’s expression is hard to read. At first he’s a little shocked, maybe. Then pissed off. Then sort of … rabidly protective. “Amelie.”
“Dallas.” I can’t help being almost sassy about it. He’s using his I-rule-the-world billionaire’s voice and it makes me want to tease him and bring him back down to the realm of reality I inhabit.
“You’ve had a hard time, and the way you’ve handled it is nothing short of heroic. But you’re okay now. I meant it when I said that I’m here for you now. You’re mine. And I’m not going anywhere.”
You’re mine hits me in a lot of ways, and none of them are easy to name or to process. “Except to New York,” I point out.
“Yes,” he says gently, “and you’re coming with me. You already agreed to it and it would break Sadie’s heart if you backed out now. You know it would.”
I bite my lip, getting the feeling he’s using the whole Sadie angle to his advantage. Which I can’t exactly be mad about, but still. “True. But—”
Dallas puts two fingers gently to my lips.
“There’s always a ‘but’ with you. I can see why Sadie was so shocked when you actually said yes.
Remember: I’m going to be with you the whole time.
The limo is already waiting for us. We’ll take the jet, you’ll stay with me for a week and if you don’t like it, I’ll take you to Sadie’s sister’s place.
That’s never going to happen, but the option is theoretically there for you to find whatever comfort in it you need to.
” He kisses me, like he can’t help himself.
“Tonight I have a surprise for you I think you’re going to like. ”
“What surprise?”
“That’s the thing about surprises. They’re surprising. You’ll find out when we get there.”
“I don’t like surprises, Wilder.”
Dallas smiles at my suddenly-surly attitude. “You’ll like this one.”
I glare up at him even though there’s no reason to. I’m just … the whole thing is so overwhelming.
He reads my mind. “You’re going to enjoy it, Amelie. It’s going to be fun.”
“Fun,” I repeat, like I need to try the word on.
“Yes. And Boo?”
I’ll admit I kind of melt whenever he calls me that. Only a few people ever have, and it makes me feel like we know each other better than three days would usually allow. “Yes?”
“If you don’t like New York we can come back.”
We. “I know.”
But it’s the right thing to say. Of course I can come back to New Orleans whenever I want. The thought relaxes me by a millionth of a fraction.
Dallas is trailing his fingers over my nipples, playing with them as he soaps me up. And something occurs to me. “I just remembered there is actually a thing I need to get from my room.”
“What’s that?”
“My pills.”
“What pills?”
“You know. My birth control pills.”
He’s silent for a few seconds and I can see the thoughts flickering behind his eyes.
I can detect a sort of charmed curiosity, and something darker.
His caveman, for some unknown reason, likes what I’ve just said.
“I guess, since you didn’t bring any kind of bag with you and the clothes you were wearing are still in the limo, that maybe it should have occurred to me.
So does that mean … you haven’t taken your pills at all this weekend? ”
“No.”
“I know you said you just started taking them a couple weeks ago. Did anyone tell you … how to take them?”
“They were out of brochures and the free clinic was packed because it’s being shut down due to budget cuts.
So we didn’t get any kind of briefing. But Sadie said there are a bunch of sugar pills in the pack that you don’t have to take if you don’t want to.
So I figured it’s fine if I don’t take them for a couple of days.
Since you only have to take twenty-one of them. ”
Dallas bites his lip like he’s trying not to react. And his cock—I can’t help but notice—is suddenly rock-hard again, bumping hotly against my stomach. “I think the sugar pills are for a certain week of the month when something else is going on.”
It dawns on me what he’s explaining and feel like a na?ve child and a total idiot. “Oh my god. You mean … you’re supposed to take them every day?”
“I believe so.”
I grip his muscular arm, suddenly panic-stricken. “Oh no.” How could I be so stupid? And how was I supposed to know that? No one told me. “Dallas. Holy shit.”
We’ve been having mostly—which basically means completely—unprotected sex all weekend.