Chapter 22
OLIVIA
“ O h my God, I’m gonna come,” I panted as Jake nuzzled my clit, turning his full attention to the precise spot that pushed me over the edge, licking and sucking. My legs trembled, and I cried out as he gently led me through my first orgasm of the day.
I laid back in his bed, content and boneless, body still tingling, as he kissed his way back up my abdomen.
“Well, good morning.” I smiled, raking my fingers through his hair as he nibbled at my neck.
“It sure is,” he mumbled against my ear as he nudged my legs open with his. He rolled on a condom, and I could feel him hot and hard at my entrance. Then in one sure thrust, he sank into me with a satisfied groan.
I was still throbbing from the first orgasm, all my nerve endings ready to fire.
It wouldn’t take much to push me over the edge again.
He watched me, smiling wickedly as he moved slowly, his pelvis hitting my still sensitive flesh with each thrust, that soul-wrecking pleasure building again at the base of my spine.
I hadn’t thought it was possible to have so many orgasms in a row.
Before Jake, I counted myself lucky if I had one, but now I was becoming damn greedy.
“God, I fucking love waking up like this,” he rasped in my ear. “Slipping beneath the sheets to get a taste of you. Those little kittenish sounds you make when you wake up with my head between your legs.”
I whimpered as he ground into me. And that’s all it took; my body clamped hard around him, and I arched my back. “Yes, yes . . .”
I raked my nails against his ass, holding him to me as he let me ride out my orgasm on him, rocking deeply, pressing his face into my neck, and pulsing inside me. When we caught our breath, he hovered over me, rubbing his lips against mine as I cupped my hands around his face.
“Olivia . . . I—” He hesitated and his eyes darkened, deep green with flecks of gold in the sunlight. I waited for him to finish his thought, sensing it was important. But instead, he rolled away and went into the bathroom.
When he came back to bed he gathered me into his arms. I closed my eyes and buried my face into his warm chest, inhaling his clean masculine scent. He carded his fingers through my hair and said, “Have I ever told you that I love how you always tell me when you’re about to come?”
“Shut up. I do not.” I peeked up at him through my hair. “Do I?”
He smiled and nodded. “It’s very considerate. Then I can lap up every last drop of you, hold still while your sweet pussy milks my cock.”
“Jesus.” I blushed and leaned over to kiss him while he fondled my breast.
“I’m out of condoms.”
“You don’t have to use them, if you’re careful.
” I was dying to see how it felt with nothing between us and cursed myself again for not going on the pill before coming here for the summer.
I’d gone off it a year ago and hadn’t really thought that anything would happen with Jake.
It was nearly impossible to see a doctor here in the summer; the first available appointment wasn’t until next month.
“Too hard to pull out in time.”
“Well, then I guess we’ll have to find some other way for me to repay you for earlier,” I teased, trailing a path down his sternum.
A door slammed downstairs. “Chantal,” I gasped, bolting into the bathroom to hide.
“I hate to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure she already knows,” Jake teased outside the door.
“Just go distract her please while I get ready.” I turned the shower on. “And don’t let her up here!”
* * *
Freshly showered and dressed, I snuck down to the kitchen, hoping that Chantal had left. No such luck.
She peeked up at me from the corner of her eye and continued wiping down the coffee machine. She had a very efficient air about her today in her starched navy blue dress and her gray hair in a bun. I was afraid she might admonish me for having abandoned our cooking lessons.
“I didn’t have much to clean in the cottage this morning,” she said finally. I understood her much better now that she spoke slowly and threw in the odd English word. Plus, my French was also improving; I’d had a fun anatomy lesson in French just last night.
I blushed at the memory, and Chantal squinted at me, her mouth turning up in a satisfied smile. “I also washed the lingerie I found in the bedroom upstairs. You should hand-wash your bras. Too delicate for the machine.”
I sighed and met her eyes. I couldn’t help smiling myself.
“ Merci, Chantal. Mais . . .” I mimed zipping my lips and hoped she’d understand.
“ C’est un secret .” She winked and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
At least someone approved. I only wished Jake would tell me that he was happy too.
Oh, I knew he was having fun. He’d lost that permanent scowl he’d been wearing every day when I first got here.
And he could be surprisingly affectionate.
Even when we were just hanging out, reading near the pool, or cooking dinner together, he was always touching me, planting little kisses here and there.
When it came to emotional intimacy, though, he still held back.
He listened to stories about my childhood and my fraught relationship with my mom, but he never shared anything about his own childhood.
He’d shrug and say he didn’t remember, and he didn’t like to talk about the past. But I couldn’t help but feel that his problems with tasting, his apathy about his business, were connected to his family.
His unwillingness to share frightened me because I was falling deeply, deeply in love with him.
Any time I tried to broach the subject of what was going on between us—Would things just end when I left?
Was he fine with that?—he’d change the subject or distract me with sex.
I couldn’t tell him how I felt, of course.
He was like a skittish animal, and I was afraid that if I made the wrong move, I might scare him off for good.
Once Chantal had left, the house was quiet, and I went looking for Jake.
As I headed down the hallway, I heard him speaking agitatedly in Dutch inside the mysterious downstairs guest room.
From the half-open door, I could just make out the shape of him silhouetted by the window.
He tossed his phone on the chair and hung his head, so lost in thought that he didn’t turn when I came in.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, walking toward him gingerly. He didn’t appear to be in the greatest of moods, and I was ready to give him his privacy if he needed it, but I also wanted to comfort him.
He turned around, dragging his hand through his hair, a sure tell when he was stressed or annoyed. “Yeah, just an unpleasant conversation with my mother. Nothing new.”
“I know something about those.” I nodded in sympathy. My mom had been sober for the past few years, but there was always that fear inside me that the next time we spoke she’d be high again.
“Right, sorry.” His eyebrows drew together, and he slid his hands around my waist. “Do you still keep in touch with your mother?”
“Yes, of course. But we don’t talk that often—maybe once a month.”
“Really? After all she put you through?” Astonishment laced his voice.
“She’s not perfect. No parent is. I went through periods where I didn’t want to talk to her, but then I just reminded myself that she was just a kid from a fucked-up family when she had me,” I explained.
“At the age I am now, she had a five-year-old. People always go on about making the right choices, but hers were very limited at the time, and it’s not like addiction is a choice. ”
“That’s a very mature way of seeing things. How’d you get so wise?”
“Years of expensive therapy.”
He wandered back over to the chair and pocketed his phone. “My mother wants me to invite her over. She’s never been to the house, and she’s making me feel guilty about it.”
“She’s never been here?”
He cringed. “Is that horrible?”
“It’s not a judgment. I was just surprised.”
“I guess I’ve been keeping this part of my life separate from my family. It’s an old habit.” I followed his gaze around the room. There was a large bed with white linens and an antique rug on the terra-cotta flagstones. The walls were as immaculately white as the bed coverings.
I’d never been in here before. The door was always shut—like the places inside himself that Jake had closed off to me.
Jake wandered over to the wooden doors at the back of the room and opened them, revealing dozens of cardboard boxes stacked in a precarious heap. “This is what I cleaned out of my father’s house last year.”
“When you were back last Christmas?”
“Yeah, I donated all the furniture but couldn’t bring myself to deal with this. He’d boxed up his entire life—or at least any trace of his family—when my mother finally left a couple years ago.” He kicked at a box with Detroit scrawled across it in black marker.
“Did he know he was sick?”
“Who knows? He was always healthy, or at least he pretended to be. It was a heart attack—totally unexpected, especially since I didn’t know he had a heart.” My stomach clenched. I wanted to comfort him, but before I could take his hand in mine, he moved away.
“My parents were miserable together. I don’t know how my mom stayed with him so long after I left.” He tapped his hand against one of the boxes. “Anyway, I have to go through these. Whenever I pass by this room, I feel like there’s some sort of malevolent ghost in here.”
“Why don’t we do that today? It won’t be so overwhelming if you have some help,” I suggested, sliding my hand across his waist.
He pressed a kiss to my head. “I wouldn’t want to subject you to that.”
“I don’t mind.” I couldn’t, of course, admit that my offer wasn’t only one of goodwill. I was curious about his past and how it continued to affect him. In these boxes were more of those puzzle pieces that I needed to fit together.
When he hesitated, I bumped my hip against his. “Oh, come on, it’s like ripping a Band-Aid off. It’s always easier if someone else does it for you.”