Chapter 19
LOCKE
The world was conspiring to keep me away from Jett Davis’s ass.
First, I’d spent two hours on a call with Minnie, discussing some complex legal matters with my grandfather’s estate. This had involved multiple embarrassing incidents of me staring off into space, thinking of the raw need and vulnerability on Jett’s face when he’d finger-fucked himself.
Minnie urged me to follow up our call with the candidate interview she’d mentioned earlier in the day, and I agreed.
Although the idea of sinking into Jett’s body to lose myself for a little while was seductive as fuck, I was still head of Maris Holdings, and I knew what my priorities were.
I just hoped Jett would understand the delay.
I couldn’t believe I’d had to leave him like that, sexy as fuck on the floor, stretched out and desperate for release.
Having sex with Jett was completely different from having sex with a woman. Even when I’d had highly physical sex with women, it had felt performative. Like the woman was only acting “dirty” for my benefit and not because she, herself, was turned on by it.
With Jett, it was clearly equitable. He was physical as fuck, and dirty talk only seemed to ramp him up. If anything, he seemed to be holding back his responses to me. I had the feeling that if we were truly alone in the house, I could get him to shout and cry when he came.
I blew out a breath and refocused on work. The interview.
Carina was accomplished and smart—the perfect candidate for the position, just as Minnie had said. She was also very attractive. Exactly the kind of woman I would have been interested in pursuing, if she wasn’t about to be my employee. This realization wasn’t as disappointing as it should’ve been.
After shooting Minnie a “You were right” text, I finally closed down my computer and stood to stretch. I needed sleep and Jett, not necessarily in that order.
I’d taken two steps away from my desk when a message from Vukasin Drakovi?, one of the Paxis players on the council, popped up on my phone.
The Bremen derailment involved Drakovi? cargo which has since gone missing. Regrettably, it may negatively impact my visit.
I stared at the screen. Missing cargo from the Serbian company meant missing weapons. Which most likely meant the derailment was not an accident but a targeted offensive.
The manner of his message made it clear he thought it was related to the Russian activity, the reason for our tournament.
I shot him back a quick confirmation of receipt and benign reassurance that we’d handle any arrangements required.
And then I blew out a sigh and sat down to do much-needed research on the issue.
After a few moments, I heard a soft noise and looked up. Jett padded sleepily from the bedroom out to the main part of the house, obviously trying not to disturb me.
I followed him.
“Can’t sleep?” I asked before he reached the living room.
He jumped and turned around. Then he smiled. “Hey. I was going to sneak some of Roberto’s sorbetto.” He shrugged. “I got hungry.”
I realized with a pang that I’d missed the window. He’d waited for me—skipping dinner so we could have sex—and I’d blown it.
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged again. “I understand. Shit happens, and your job is very important. Get back to work. I’m fine.”
He looked disappointed but not angry, completely the opposite of women I’d been in similar situations with in the past. As he turned to continue on to the kitchen, I followed him.
“Friends don’t let friends midnight snack alone, Jethro,” I said when Jett shot me a questioning look.
He grinned. “Shit, babe. If you’re there, I’ll have to restrain myself and only eat a mildly embarrassing amount of sorbetto. Maybe you should go back to work. Surely there’s a cyclone somewhere with your name on it.”
I shook my head. “And let you finish the sorbetto without sharing any of it? Not a chance.”
We snuck into the darkened kitchen like little kids, in a way Celeste and I never would have actually done as kids.
“I don’t even know where the fridge is,” I admitted in a hushed voice.
He laughed. “It’s your house, Locke. And the fridge is in here.”
When I stepped into the small room off the back of the kitchen, childhood memories came flooding in. “Oh,” I said, reaching out for the wide glass bottle on a nearby shelf. “My grandmother used to keep lemonade in this.”
I twisted off the metal cap and imagined I could still smell the tang of it inside.
“She made it extra sweet when Celeste and I were here.” I let out a laugh.
“Or she had the kitchen staff do it, I guess. There was a chef one time who added cut-up cherries to it. We thought we’d won the lottery that summer. ”
Jett looked at me over the arm he held the fridge door open with. “You enjoyed it here.”
I nodded. “It was like a break from reality. And my grandparents were so… normal compared to my own parents. They didn’t fight. Didn’t express their frustration with my presence—” I stopped myself, realizing too late that I’d ventured into too-personal territory. “Yes. I loved it here. Still do.”
Jett pulled the container of sorbetto from the freezer while I searched the shelves for the little cookies. We took our booty out to the kitchen and began looking for utensils. Jett knew exactly where they’d be.
“How do you know where the ice cream scoop is, for fuck’s sake?” I asked.
He smiled up at me sheepishly while he rinsed it under hot water. “I’ve done reconnaissance. This sorbetto mission wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, Jerome.”
After scooping some into the bowls I found, he returned the container to the freezer and waved me over to the small table in the corner. “Bring those cookies. I want more than one.”
“You must be starving,” I said. “I can make you something more substantial.”
“Do you cook?” he asked in surprise.
“I mean… no. But I could wake someone.”
He snorted. “You’re lying.”
I nodded and grinned. “Not sure what it says about me that you believed me. I may not be a great cook, but I can scramble some eggs and make a grilled cheese.”
Jett plucked up a cookie and scooped it into the sorbetto before putting the entire bite into his mouth and groaning. “Fuck. I’m going to marry that man.”
“You’ll have to go through his wife first,” I said with a laugh that quickly faded out. “You’d like her, actually. She’s a nurse. She helped care for my grandmother before she died. Lung cancer. She came here for her final months a few years ago.”
Jett eyed me over the spoon as he dragged it out of his mouth. If only he knew what that did to me.
“It sounds like you were closer to your grandparents than your parents, yeah?”
I nodded. “They were incredible people. Never stopped trying to make life better for everyone around them.” I thought back to some of the amazing moves my grandfather had made in Paxis tournaments over the years.
His generosity and goodness had helped the entire fucking world, not that anyone would ever know it.
I swallowed and dug into the sorbetto again. “My grandfather taught me Paxis, too,” I said, lifting the conversation out of deeper places. “So I’ve been thinking of him a lot this week.”
Jett’s eyes were still on me. “Will you teach it to me?”
“Paxis?” I asked in surprise.
“Yeah. I’m kind of good at games, actually. And I already know how to play chess.”
“You know how to play chess,” I said, ignoring my excitement.
He tilted his head at me the way he did when he was going to tease me. “Don’t take my word for it, Maris. Let’s see what you got.”
Which is how we found ourselves on the floor of our suite a couple of hours later, dressed in pajama pants and arguing over the placement of his rook.
“You said I could move it onto the yellow board,” he accused. “This is my home rook, and yellow is the fire board, right?”
“Yes, but the blue player played his requesting pawn. And you’re responding with—”
“With my home rook,” he said. “Because I’m offering blue my home.”
“Babe,” I said, not realizing what I was saying. “You want to use your resource rook instead.”
To be fair, he’d picked up the game incredibly quickly. I’d been surprised by the way his brain worked. It was understandable he’d made a simple mistake.
“Right, but if I offer him my home rook instead of my resource rook, when my home is located on vast mineral wealth, can’t I then offer my resource rook to another player and make use of both in the same way?”
I stared at him before blinking at the board and realizing what he’d set up. “Fuck.”
His chest puffed up. “The student becomes the teacher. You may blow me now.”
I held his chin and turned his face away from me before blowing a hot stream of air behind his ear and down his neck until his skin broke out in goose bumps and his shoulders contracted. “Jesus fuck, Jeffrey,” he breathed. “Why is that hotter than a real blow job?”
“You’re not getting out of this game by distracting my dick,” I warned, pulling away. “Make your second move.”
He stretched his neck, tilting his head from side to side and groaning again. “You’re purposefully distracting me. That’s a dirty tactic.”
“Yes, well, I may have forgotten to mention that according to family lore, my great-great-great-great-grandfather was a privateer. It’s in my blood.”
Jett reached for his influencing bishop and played it to the blue board, next to red’s rook. Solid move.
“Why does it not surprise me that you’re from a family of pirates?” he muttered, reaching for his glass of wine.
“Privateers,” I corrected. “We pillaged for the crown and had the law on our side. It’s different.”
“Barely!” he spluttered with a laugh.
I took a minute to focus and move two countermoves. Then Jett moved for the red player, and I moved for the blue. We continued playing until he made another unexpected countermove.
“Audentes fortuna iuvat,” I muttered. Fortune favors the bold.
He snickered. “Fata viam invenient.” The fates will find a way.
I stared at him. “You speak Latin.”
He blinked and flushed pink in the cheeks. “What? No. Jesus. I saw it in a movie once about the Trojan War. In history class? I can’t remember.”
“You sounded more sure than that,” I said.
“I’m good at languages,” Jett admitted. Which explained the blush. “I learned High Valyrian from Game of Thrones on Duolingo.”
“No,” I said, laughing.
He bounced his eyebrows, but his words were formal and solemn. “Skoros iksos hen lenton.”
“And that means?”
“It’s like, totes true,” he said, using a cheeky, playful accent.
We took a few more turns before Jett suddenly boxed me in. “Ha! Now you’re going to have to sacrifice your home rook if you want to save your king. Suck it, Paxis Daddy.”
I sacrificed my home rook but then quickly took it back on the next move. “My company’s called Maris Holdings, Jethro. Not Maris Take and Give Back. Once something’s mine, I keep it. It’s pretty much my family motto.”
He didn’t look very bothered by the loss. His eyes were bright from the wine and lips cherry red. “Pirates gonna pirate, I guess.” He tapped his chin. “In real chess, you can’t just do that, you know. In real chess, these moves have dire consequences.”
If only he knew how dire real Paxis moves were in the game I usually played.
“You want to challenge me to a game of real chess, Jethro?” I teased. “Because I’ll kick your ass in that, too.”
The heat of competition flared in his eyes. He knocked all the pieces and boards away except the black set closest to us. He quickly set it up for a game of straightforward chess.
And then he wiped the board with me again. “Rematch,” I said in disbelief.
His eyes were alight with victorious satisfaction. “Sure, babe. Whatever you need.”
I may not have taken Jett’s ass tonight, but at two in the morning, with both of us struggling to keep our eyes open, I finally took his king.
And it was somehow almost as satisfying.