Chapter 30
Megan
“I’m freaking out,” Jameson mutters.
I tear my gaze away from the dreamy bed of fluffy white clouds below, which I’ve been zoning out to quite happily. We’re in a private jet owned by his family, flying direct to Paris overnight.
Over the two and a half weeks we’ve been “engaged,” we’ve settled into a mostly comfortable rhythm as a fake couple.
Our daily schedules mesh. He works while I write. Simple. We eat most meals together. We work out together in his home gym sometimes, with his trainer. He takes me along with him to business dinners, parties, and any other events he feels like attending, and I’ve met some of his friends.
We even drove down to Seattle so he could take me to a Dirty concert, and at an afterparty, he introduced me to Jesse Mayes and his wife, Katie. (Who seemed extremely surprised that Jameson got engaged. Which makes me wonder what kinds of parties—and women—they’re used to seeing at his house.)
He’s been attentive and supportive, making an obvious effort to ensure I’m happy, and regularly checks in to ask me how I’m doing, if I need anything, and how I feel about my book, the one I’m writing. He has fresh flowers delivered to the house for me every other day, and lavishes me with gifts and surprises, including bringing me along on this business trip to Europe.
We share a bed every night, while neither of us acknowledges the physical relationship that we don’t have, and it just kind of works.
I haven’t spied on him since that first night, I try not to think about whatever he’s doing when he’s in his bathroom, and I make sure I masturbate in the privacy of my bathroom instead of in bed next to him like a maniac. I face away from his side of the bed when I fall asleep, he seems to avoid coming to bed until I’m already asleep anyway, and we’re making it work.
Maybe because he’s so extremely nice to me, I’ve somehow managed to neatly look past the fact that he won’t touch me. For now.
I keep telling myself it’s just for now.
And that it will possibly change at some future date when he decides he’s ready.
We’ll be sleeping on this flight, waking when we arrive in Paris, and I couldn’t possibly be more delighted about it. I mean, it’s Paris.
I almost cry, I’m freaking out, too!
But when I look at him across the aisle, he’s carefully setting his tablet aside, like if he doesn’t handle it just right, it might burst into flame. His expression is nothing short of grim.
I sit up, alarmed. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s the end of the book and he just fucked her and now there’s a cliff-hanger and they’re about to arrive at the citadel,” he rambles agitatedly. “He’s going to leave her there, with people who will continue her bridal march and take her the rest of the way to her intended husband, to save himself.”
My first thought is: Oh, jeez. He just finished book two.
My second thought is: Holy mother of all that’s good and holy, he’s wearing glasses.
I gape and blink, trying to wake up from the dream I’m obviously having that the most delicious man who ever lived is sitting right in front of me reading my book, and wearing glasses in which he looks so fucking hot there’s no logical way I could be awake right now.
But I am. I know I am when he swipes the glasses off and rubs at his eyes with his tattooed wrist, and my ovaries groan.
How did I never catch him in the act of reading my book before? And realize that the man wore reading glasses??
I don’t even know if I should be elated or fucking terrified that my fake fiancée not only checks off all the boxes on my list—I even caught him working with tools the other day, helping his handyman guy install more bookshelves for me!—he’s destroyed the list. Incinerated it. Absolutely killed it dead in all its irrelevance.
Because he is the list.
And I’m a living, breathing mind-blown emoji.
I snap out of it, willing myself to function.
I get up and go over to him. “Aw. Come here.” I take his hand and bring him to sit down on one of the cushy bench seats along the wall. I sit on the upright seat at one end of it, and he lies back.
“What happens in book three?” He starts babbling again, like he’s spilling to a therapist, and I have to bite my lip to keep from giggling. “I mean, book one ended on a cliff-hanger too but they were okay. There were those two men who tried to attack Rowan in the woods but then Wolf saved her and you could’ve stopped right there and I’d be happy that they were together and they were safe. But then you just kept writing and now I need them to be okay. You know. Together.”
He finishes, staring at the ceiling, like he’s still reliving it all in his head.
“Jameson?”
“Yeah?” He blinks at me, like I’ve just yanked him back to reality.
“You know what this means, right?”
“What?”
“You’re a romantic.”
He groans, like it’s a loathsome curse to bear. “Don’t tell my brothers.”
* * *
Jameson wore a three-piece suit onto the jet, but I manage to convince him to take a break from reading and get changed into his lounging clothes. He emerges from the bathroom in soft sweats and a T-shirt, looking as delectable as he does in a suit, and far more touchable.
Dear Lord.
If he really is trying to resist fucking me for my brother’s sake, no wonder he avoids bedtime. It’s way too intimate.
I’m already in sleep shorts and my Dirty nightshirt, a soft blanket for each of us in hand. The sky outside has darkened to a deep azure in the west as the sun melts into the horizon, and to the east, where we’re headed, it’s pretty black.
“Chat for a while, then sleep?” I ask hopefully, holding up the blankets like a safe buffer between us.
He holds up a bottle of wine. “Add wine to that and you read my mind.”
He pours us each a glass, and we settle onto a couple of the big reclining captain’s chairs near the front of the cabin. There’s a small table between us where we set the bottle of German Riesling he chose, my favorite wine, in a bucket of ice that the flight attendant brings out at the tap of a button; he vanishes again into a room at the back, leaving us alone.
Locke and Rurik are back there somewhere, too. Jameson told me he never travels without at least two men.
We touch glasses and drink. “Tell me more about what we’re doing in Paris?” I ask him.
“Well, we’ll be enjoying your first time there.”
“Ah yes, my virgin French experience.” I mean that as sexually as it sounds and laugh when his eyebrow lifts slightly. His eyes darken, landing hungrily on my lips. “I may flirt more in Paris. Just to warn you. I feel like I’ll be drinking a lot of wine.” I swig my wine gratuitously.
“It’s the French way,” he says simply.
I’m not sure if he means the flirting or the wine, but I’ll take plenty of both.
However, the heat in his eyes clears so quickly, I wonder if I imagined it. “And I’ll be working. Though it probably won’t look like it.”
“What does ‘work’ for Jameson Vance even look like?” I inquire. He works from home while I write during the day, but I don’t actually see what he does. I’ve only ever glimpsed him on business calls here or there.
He told me he has a corporate office in Vancouver, and I know he has an executive assistant named Annabeth who seems to work her butt off for him there, but it doesn’t seem like he ever goes there.
“Whatever you do, don’t ask my brothers that question,” he says dryly. “My job is hard to define, if you’re someone like Graysen or Harlan. As our CEO and CFO, they only see in numbers. I’m our head of marketing, but sometimes, I don’t think even they know what that means. We work with a lot of celebrities, from athletes to actors, to align our luxury brands with the right ambassadors. I oversee the general direction of things, and I’m the one out there forging and maintaining a lot of the relationships that are essential to our business. So my work, when it comes down to it, is mostly envisioning our future, and social meetings.”
I smile a little. “Is that code for daydreaming and parties?”
“If you ask Graysen or Harlan, it is.” He raises an accusatory eyebrow. “And don’t you daydream for a living?”
I groan. “I wish I were making a living from it. And if you think writing amounts to daydreaming, you’re more of a dick than I took you for.” I bat my eyelashes and sip my wine.
I half expect growly threats about spanking, though that hasn’t happened since the one time in the limo. Unfortunately.
Instead, he frowns adorably. “You took me for a dick?”
“No. Okay, briefly. The Romeo thing, remember? The nice man you fired for no reason?”
“There was a reason,” he says, so grimly, I laugh. “I’m looking at it. And by the way, when I hired him back, he said, ‘I understand. I’d rather hire her than me too.’ That’s a direct quote, and he was dead serious.”
“See?! He’s such a sweetheart!” Since moving into Jameson’s house, I’ve bonded with Romeo over our mutual obsession with plants, and spent many hours chatting over tea in the greenhouse and toiling in the gardens with him, just because I want to. “You should give him a raise.”
“Don’t push it. And don’t call another man a sweetheart if you don’t want him fired again.”
Well, that was growly. And bossy.
Almost sounded like he was jealous of a little old man whom I find delightful.
Huh.
“Oh-kay. So, let’s get back to your job and your brothers and why they’re dicks. Wasn’t that where this was headed?”
“Pretty much. Basically, Harlan and Graysen don’t love to acknowledge that if I go golfing or yachting with a business connection, or if Damian entertains a potential business connection at one of our private clubs, that’s how we do business. But this is why I handle the marketing and they don’t. It’s all about communication. Who you talk to and how you talk to them. If Harlan had my job, he’d fail miserably at it. But honestly, I’d do the same at his.”
I muse on that a moment as I sip my wine. “You all seem really different. Yet similar in some ways.” I search for the right word to sum up the Vance family commonality. “Self-assured? Headstrong. Am I getting it right?”
He grunts. “To put it nicely. I’d put it like this. Graysen may be the oldest and literally the boss of us, but what we really are are four alpha males and one alpha female who’re constantly sinking our teeth into one another.”
I smile at that imagery. “Ouch.”
“Yeah. You could say that.”
“So how does the littlest alpha survive in such a pack of wolves?” I tease.
He frowns at being called the littlest. At six-four, he’s actually the tallest, though his brothers are all built like he is. They’re all tall, muscle-toned drinks of water, and their sister is curvy and formidable in her own way.
But any way you slice it, Jameson is the baby of the family, and I can understand how much that sucks sometimes.
“Well, my superpower has always been knowing how to communicate with people. Companies spend millions to try to get the right message to the right customers, and it’s tricky because different people need to be communicated with in different ways. I didn’t realize I had a talent for that, so to speak, because the ability to handle each of my siblings just came naturally to me. I figured it out on my own from a young age.”
I’m intrigued. “Tell me more. Like, what’s the best way to approach each of your siblings? I’m terrible at knowing how to talk to all kinds of different people.” Usually, I just avoid it.
And hide behind my words of fiction.
I curl my legs up under me as he tops up our wine. I could talk to him all night. We never talk this much before bed in the evenings. I’m convinced he’s avoiding the intimacy of pillow talk with me because that sort of intimacy is a slippery slope to sex town. And he’s never expressed any change in his stance about us not having sex.
I keep waiting for it, like a salivating, Wanty kitten, but it hasn’t happened.
Yet.
“Well,” he says, “with Graysen, you have to be serious and professional. He wants to know you’re following the rules, playing inside the lines. That’s very important to him.”
“I could see that.”
“With Damian, you have to be honest or very clever, or he’ll be three steps ahead of you.” He frowns slightly, like he’s both impressed and annoyed by the fact. “He’s a game master, like our granddad. Honestly, he’s the most like Granddad of all of us.”
“And what about Harlan and Savannah? They’re twins, right? Are they a lot alike?” I never would’ve known that they’re twins, to look at them, but Jameson told me so before I met them.
He laughs abruptly. “Never let Savannah hear you say they are. They’re actually not a lot alike, but they’re both stubborn as hell. With Harlan, you need to talk in facts and figures, black and white. Shades of gray just annoy him. And the thing about Harlan that people don’t always realize, to their detriment, is that he’ll always expect the worst of you until you prove him wrong.”
“So, he’s a pessimist?”
“I’d say he’s downright cynical.”
“And Savannah’s the opposite?”
“No. Not the opposite. But she’s all about the feel of things. Why should she care about something? You need to get that across, quickly, or she won’t have time for you.”
“I guess that’s understandable. She’s probably a busy woman.”
“That, and she grew up with four alpha brats who were always ruining her day with some mess or another. She tried to outman us for so many years, until maybe she realized she couldn’t. When she stopped trying to compete with us, though, I think it left a weird void in her life. I think she’s still figuring out how to deal with the hand she was dealt. Pro: she was born a billionaire. Con: she’s got us to deal with, for life.”
“Well, now I feel sorry for her,” I tease.
“So do I,” he says seriously.
“And how should one communicate with Jameson Vance? I mean, for best results?” I innocently lick wine from my lip.
His eyes track the movement of my tongue, and heat tingles across my skin. His tone is molten when he says, “All you have to do is be honest.”
We stare at each other.
When did this become foreplay?
No. Not foreplay.
Foreplay leads to sex.
I clear my throat, and change the subject. “You have a lot of empathy for your sister.”
“I do. I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes.”
A slow smile spreads across my face.
His wine stops halfway to his mouth. “What?”
“I was just thinking, you empathize with Rowan the same way.”
He sets his wine down and drops his head back on the seat. “Fuck. I’m boycotting book three.”
“No, you’re not,” I purr. “You’re dying to know what happens next.”
“I think I know.” He gives me a darkly disapproving look that I’m pretty sure is meant for the male protagonist of my books. “Let me guess. Wolf fucks up.”
“Maybe.” I sip my wine as my heart absolutely races. It thrills me that he’s responding so strongly to my books.
I didn’t expect that.
But I love it.
What more could an author hope for?
I’d never pictured any of my readers looking like him, though.
“But maybe he also fucks her a lot more, so it’ll be worth it?” I tease.
His eyes hit mine, all dilated pupil and ravenous need. I actually suck in a breath.
“What’s the dirtiest thing that happens besides him taking her virginity?” he demands.
“Um.” I almost choke on my wine. I swallow and cough a little, clearing my windpipe. “Let’s see…” My mind races through dirty scene after dirty scene as I wonder if I can cough out the words. “Well. Okay. He fucks her up the ass and then licks his bloody come from her thighs afterward.”
Yup. Coughed that out.
Jameson stares at me. His lips part. He’s breathing soundlessly, but so deeply, his chest rises and falls with a shudder—kind of like a dragon smoldering just before it seizes the princess.
And eats her alive?
My whole body flushes. “Should I just die now?”
“That’s—”
“Unsanitary.”
“That wasn’t even close to the direction my mind went, but okay.”
I shrug. “I know it is, but I don’t care. They’re in the wild. It’s just books.”
But they’re not just books to me.
And he has to have noticed that by now.
My feverish writing in every free moment I’ve got, curled over my laptop as I zone out everything around me. How many times has he tucked a blanket around me or left a cup of coffee next to me without a word when he finds me tucked into some corner of his house or his yard or his greenhouse like that?
“There are other scenes, too,” I offer, my voice husky with the lust I’m really trying to keep at bay. “Like, ones you might find dirtier than that. I guess it’s subjective. But there are reasons they’re dirty. I don’t think sex should just be a cheap thrill on the page. I think sex reveals character and how people feel about one another, when it’s done right.”
He’s still staring at me. And those words hang over us.
When it’s done right.
We aren’t even doing it at all.
Because him.
Because he doesn’t want to.
Not yet.
For… whatever reason.
A reason he still hasn’t quite articulated to me.
“I shouldn’t have asked,” he says.
“It’s okay.”
“It was rude. The whole story is good. I’m not obsessed with the sex scenes or anything.”
“Neither am I.”
We stare at each other.
And finally, I crack. I laugh.
He shakes his head, and holds out his glass with a groan of surrender. “Top me up. I think I have more reading to do tonight.”
I grin and top up his wine.