63. Chapter 63
“You don’t really think—”
She was prepared to defend herself against Chloe’s accusations, not Jase’s mouth. He kissed her as soon as they were alone.
“Think what?” he asked with a quick breath.
“Me and Graham.”
His face contorted in disgust. “No. You serious?”
“It’s nothing. Just Chloe—”
“Stop talking.”
Jase pulled his sweaty shirt over his head and kissed her again.
“You taste salty,” she observed, licking the sheen from his lips off her mouth.
“You like it?”
He lifted her tank top over her head and unclasped her bra with a practiced flick of his fingers. His hands immediately found her breasts.
She pushed him back an inch, before he sent all the blood rushing from her brain. “We need to talk, Jase.”
“Okay.” He swallowed hard and curled his fingers around the waistband of her jean shorts. “Now?” He unsnapped the button. “Or later?”
With the metallic pop, she was a goner. “Later.”
Later, after she let herself melt into his hard body, breathing the raw tang of his sweat, running her hands down the slick muscles of his stomach to the button on his jeans. His pelvis reached for her in anticipation of the same pop that had broken Lindsey’s own will.
After he set her on the bed and pulled her shorts and panties down her legs.
She took for granted how tan he was compared to her until her knees looked like white porcelain under his bronze hands as he spread them.
Heat from his breath on her clit sent whatever blood was still in her head rushing to his mouth.
Jase, a vision of smut lore with his head between her legs and eyes locked on her face, used his shiny, broad shoulders to keep her legs apart and two fingers to fuck her while he licked and sucked her clit.
He wasn’t slow or gentle or taking his time today.
Jase ravaged, licking and sucking and finger fucking to make up for a lost night on opposite sides of the same bed.
She couldn’t keep her hips on the mattress with his attack on her sensitive flesh.
Bucking and writhing, Jase needed both hands to anchor her to the bed, but the attack didn’t let up.
If anything, he went harder. His tongue pumped in and out of her with a punishing savagery.
She clenched around it and he licked up to her clit and sucked hard enough to send her hips off the bed despite his hands holding her down.
“I need you,” she managed to cry out. “Jase, I need—”
He stood and pulled off his pants. For one dizzying moment she caught her breath and grasped for a scrap of sanity that hadn’t been sucked away by his insistent mouth.
But Lindsey didn’t stand a chance against the view—another vision to remember and even write about later.
Jase Young with his erection in his hands, appraising her with the hungry, hooded eyes of a predator relishing the submission of his prey.
From her open, aching center, over the dip of her stomach, to her breasts and the tips of her taut nipples, Jase’s voracious gaze carved a plan of his next attack, and Lindsey could do nothing but clutch the bedspread and wait.
Talking was never what she had in mind when she was naked and at his mercy.
After the short reprieve, he engulfed her.
His body covered hers from the tips of her toes to his lips on her mouth where she tasted herself on his tongue.
Then he was inside her, settling between her legs and finding his way in easily.
With her hair in one fist and her breast in his other, she was completely surrounded and filled by Jase. Utterly, helplessly consumed.
It was usually enough. Today she clawed at him for more without knowing exactly what.
Anger—at him, at Chloe, at the uncertain future—was a living entity in her veins.
With a sharp inhale, Lindsey sank her teeth into his shoulder for a salty bite.
His hips jerked in surprise or pain, and he plunged himself deeper inside.
Vaguely aware of the people downstairs who didn’t need to hear her scream, Lindsey wailed on the inside.
She should’ve felt bad for the tooth-shaped welts in his skin, except the answering force of his thrusts awakened a fierce need.
She pressed her nails into his shoulder blades and dragged them down the damp skin of his back.
Jase arched into the pain, grinding his pelvis against her.
“Fuck,” he ground out. “How hard do you fucking want it, baby?”
His fist in her hair tugged, sending a jolt straight to her core. She couldn’t stifle the moan in her throat.
“Don’t stop,” she begged. “Harder.”
This was her first truly angry sex. Her first ride on the razor-thin line between pain and pleasure. Briefly Lindsey thought back to the time Graham pinned her to an alley wall. There had been nothing sexy, nothing arousing about the bricks slicing tiny cuts into her back. If it had been Jase?
A shiver worked through her at the thought. She imagined the roughness against her skin would’ve only intensified the feel of Jase’s hard body pressing into her, the way his mouth clamped on her neck now drew a throb from her clit.
“Harder,” she demanded, and he bit down on the fresh bruise he’d just sucked from her skin. Teeth weren’t what she was asking for, and she gasped at the sharp burst of pain that brought her over the edge.
Cries she couldn’t hold back urged him deeper, harder, the way she needed now that their tenuous future was falling apart.
He roared with his last thrusts—clearly unconcerned about any listening houseguests—and fell in a heavy, sweaty heap on top of her, hissing, “Son of a fucking bitch.”
Lindsey closed her eyes under the weight of his body while her heart rate slowed with the beats still throbbing between her legs.
Wrecked. She was…just utterly wrecked.
Minutes later, Jase rolled off of her and onto his back with a raspy laugh.
“I didn’t know your nails were so sharp.”
He was probably bleeding. She had wanted to make him bleed.
“Or your teeth,” he said with a lopsided grin that said he’d thoroughly enjoyed the expression of her anger.
“Later,” she breathlessly reminded him. “This is later.”
“After that? I thought we could lay here and just…lay here,” Jase said.
“Not today.” Lindsey licked her lips. With the edge of her fear softened by post-orgasm fog and bone-melting exhaustion, she asked, “Do you love her?”
“What?” he gasped, as if the question knocked the wind out of him.
She turned to him and propped herself on her elbow. Of the dozens of questions she needed to ask, none were more important than this.
“In California, you told me this thing with Chloe was over. Things are different now,” Lindsey said. “I need to know, Jase. Do you love her?”
“This is seriously messed up. I’m naked with you.” He cupped one of her breasts. Unbelievably, her clit stirred as if ready for another round. “We just had mind-blowing sex, and you’re asking me if I love someone else?”
“I am.” She squeezed the hand on her breast. “Do you?”
“No.”
“She’s in love with you.”
“Irrelevant.”
“Not when she’s having a baby that could be yours.”
“I’m not in love with her.”
“Jase—”
“No, Lindsey.” He rolled over to face her, taking his hand off her chest. “How many times do you need me to say it? Baby or no baby, I’m not in love with her, and I don’t want to be with her. You want the truth? I wish I loved her. It would make things so much easier.”
He grabbed her waist and held her tight to keep her from turning away.
“Whether this kid is mine or not, it isn’t a choice between you and her. The only thing I’ve chosen since I lost my dad is this, right here.” He squeezed her hip. “You. I choose you.”
The muscles of his chest twitched beneath her fingertips. Being chosen today didn’t feel like enough with the end looming.
She didn’t feel like enough to compete with a bike or a baby or three million bucks.
“What does that mean, Jase?” she asked. “For us.”
His mouth opened and nothing came out, as if he’d never considered the question. He licked his lips. “Is this…is this the girlfriend thing again?”
“What girlfriend thing?”
“Nothing.” He fell back and rubbed his eyes. “Never mind.”
“I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to know what happens to us when you don’t have to be here anymore.”
There. She finally, sort of, said it.
“What answer are you looking for, Lindsey?”
“None that you don’t want to give.”
“What do you want for us? Honestly?”
To be enough, for once.
“You know, it’s really…weird…watching your ex-boyfriend tell someone else how important she is to him when I wasn’t.”
“You’re talking about last night?” Jase asked. “I knew it would come back to bite me in the ass.”
“What?”
“They’re engaged, Lindsey. Graham and Helen are getting married.”
His tone was biting, almost condescending, and made her feel as stupid as she probably was for thinking he could ever fall in love.
That was before.
Graham had given her the side eye and a cryptic message he didn’t explain before Chloe and Charlie’s fight interrupted them. Before what? Did Jase say something while they were setting up the tent to change Graham’s mind about his brother’s philandering?
Lindsey stood on rubbery legs to find her clothes. She might want to hear what Graham had to say more than the evasive excuses Jase was offering.
“Lindsey.” Jase groaned and sat up, taking ahold of her leg. “Lindsey, come here.”
“I’m getting dressed.”
She let him pull her back into bed anyway.
“I didn’t mean it how I said it. But they are engaged. They were together for years and then they were hung up on each other for years, and now they’re engaged.”
“I’m very aware of their story.”
“Are you aware of mine?”
“Mostly.”
“This—everything about this—is new to me.”
“You think I’ve ever inherited my ex-boyfriend’s house, was forced to live in it with him, while also sleeping with his brother?”
“No, of course not. But that’s not what I meant. I mean about us. Just us. This is new and we’re still trying to figure it out.”
He was trying to figure it out. Lindsey was trying to survive the crash landing at the bottom of the I-can’t-help-loving-this-idiot-man chasm she’d leapt into.
“And…” Jase paused and she sensed she was going to be irritated by whatever he said next. “I’m not Graham.”
And she was right.
“I know you’re not Graham.”
“Do you? My brother’s good at all the boyfriend shit. If that’s what you want—”
“I don’t want your brother!” Lindsey stood and moved out of reach. “And not that it matters, but the way he is with Helen? He was never that way with me.”
She swiped her clothes, one piece at a time, from the floor.
“Maybe, just maybe, that is what I want from a man.” She leaned over the bed. “Maybe I want someone who isn’t afraid to tell me how he feels or that he’ll be around longer than the next four days. And you know what else? I don’t think that’s too much to ask for.”
She kicked his pants out of the way and scooped her underwear off the floor.
“And another thing—either your fucking girlfriend goes to a hotel tonight or I do.”
Clothes in hand, Lindsey stomped out of Jase’s room into the—thankfully—empty hall and slammed the bathroom door behind her.