Chapter 14
Nate
New York, night…
As we rode home from the ballpark in my town car, she softly ran her fingers through my hair over and over, as if she regularly stroked me as we talked in the back of the cushy car.
I loved every second of the contact from her, and especially loved that she felt comfortable enough to do it without thinking twice.
Whether she was touching me as friends or as lovers didn’t matter. I didn’t have the brain cells working at full-speed to decipher it. They’d all been put to pasture for the night in the wake of finally coming together with her.
As we rolled through Manhattan, the neon lights of Broadway guiding us on our way downtown, I said, “So, um, how was the game?”
She laughed. “The good guys won. And the crowd went wild.”
“Too bad I missed it,” I joked.
“I’d say you made it just in time for an epic finale. You’re like a closer.”
I laughed. “I’ll happily play that position.”
“Hey,” she said, as she now trailed her finger along my neck. I raised my eyes to look at her. “I told you I’m going to London soon, right? To meet with Sofia’s, one of our retailer partners.”
“You mentioned it. You’re going to an auction too.”
Her eyes lit up, sparkling like a starry sky. “Good memory,” she said.
“To buy a kiss. From Miller Valentina,” I added, hoping to impress her with the real estate I’d reserved in my brain for remembering details about her.
“Now, you’re just showing off,” she said playfully. “So I was wondering—is there any chance you have a hotel in London?” There was a look of mischief now in her eyes.
I laughed. “You know I do. You angling for a free room, Casey?”
“Maybe,” she said, taking her time with that word, lingering on it suggestively. “But I was also thinking a roommate might be nice. Do you happen to have any business in London you need to do?”
My heart sped up. “Are you inviting yourself to my hotel?”
She nodded. “I am inviting myself. I told you I was known for being direct. It bothers some men. But right now, I don’t care. I’m going to be direct and say what I want.”
I held up a hand like a stop sign. “I told you I’m not most men. I like your direct side and I like your…how shall we say, newly submissive one too.”
She flashed me a sweet, innocent smile that nailed me in the heart. I ran my finger across her lips, watching her draw a quick breath.
“What would you think about going with me? Because now that I’ve had you, I want more of you, and we still have a lot of ground to cover. You haven’t tied me up yet or spanked me for that matter,” she said, counting off my omissions on her fingers. “Or used handcuffs.”
“Damn,” I said, with a low whistle. “I’m falling down on the job.”
“I’ll let you make it up to me across the pond.”
“Though, let the record reflect, I have not engaged in any orgasm denial either. Per your request.”
“And I thank you very much for that.” She raised her fingers to my face, tracing a line down my jaw.
“You’re very sexy when you don’t shave,” she whispered, and heat pulsed in my veins from the out-of-the-blue, unexpected compliment.
It gave me hope that this thing between us was more than simply a means to an end for her.
But then, I shouldn’t feel any sort of hope. Hope was risky, and led to things I didn’t believe in. I didn’t possess any hope myself, so it made no sense why I’d want her to think in bigger terms that went beyond the here and now.
“Thank you,” I said, trying to ignore the way my heart beat more furiously as she continued to trace soft lines along my jaw.
“And Nate?”
“Yes?”
“Because you don’t mind it when I speak my mind, I want you to know that I’m really enjoying our lessons.
In and of themselves. Sometimes, I don’t think about where they might lead.
Actually, most of the time I don’t think about where they’ll lead.
I just think about how amazing it all feels with you,” she said, finishing her sweet ode with an even sweeter kiss on my lips that sent my heart racing and my mind galloping.
This was supposed to be neat and clean, a tidy little deal that was mutually beneficial below the belt for the both of us.
But now, it had become something that turned those clear-cut lines into a wild chaos of zigs and zags.
I couldn’t sort any of this out. All I knew with any kind of certainty was that I was going to London with her in a week, and somehow my goal had changed.
When she’d first proposed our unconventional arrangement, I gave a yes borne from years of lust and desire for her.
Now I was saying yes for other reasons. Reasons that weren’t entirely clear in my head—reasons that came from a different place inside me.
A place I tried hard to deny even existed.
I had once thought that my job was pretty damn exhausting, but running a multinational hotel conglomerate was nothing compared to entertaining two newly walking, hardly talking, very busy one-year-old twin girls.
Thank goodness Casey had handled the diaper changes.
The woman needed a medal for that. The rest of the time though, we had been a team, and hell, did my nieces require a team.
After their evening bath, which resulted in my T-shirt becoming completely soaked when they splashed virtually the entire contents of the tub onto me, Casey and I dressed the girls in their pajamas.
“So let me get this straight. You yanked Bryan out of the luxury suite and that’s why we’re babysitting your nieces for a few hours on a Sunday night before we fly to London?” Casey asked me for probably the twentieth time as she nudged me with an elbow.
“Hey, I had very important business to attend to at Comet Stadium and I don’t regret it whatsoever.”
“Nor do I,” she said with a wink as she tugged a short-sleeved shirt on Cara. “And I certainly don’t regret spending time with these adorable little chunks of love,” she said, cooing at the baby.
Well, they were damn cute. I held Chloe tighter. “Thank you again for helping me out here.”
“There’s no way I would let you do this on your own. I feel horribly guilty that you took them out of the stadium. Though, not too guilty,” she said with a laugh, as we made our way to the girls’ bedroom and tucked them into their cribs for the night.
But twenty minutes later, Chloe and Cara were crying up a storm, and neither one of us had a very good idea of how to handle them. We had fed, bathed, and played with them, so the only recourse was to hold them. We retreated to the living room, each with a baby in our arms.
I made a pit stop in the kitchen, grabbing a carton of salted caramel gelato from the freezer and two small spoons. I joined Casey on the couch.
She held a finger to her lips. “Shhh…” She gestured with her eyes to Chloe, who was sound asleep already on her chest. Casey whispered, “Looks like she just wanted to be snuggled.”
“Let’s hope I can work the same magic on Cara,” I said, gently patting her on the back. After a minute, Cara settled in, letting out a soft exhale as she rested her head against my wet T-shirt—wet from the bath.
“Do you want me to get one of Bryan’s T-shirts for you?” Casey asked.
I shook my head. “Nah, I’ll grab a new one at home before we head to the airport.
I need to swing by my house anyway. I forgot to bring my suitcase.
” I popped open the top of the ice cream container and dug in.
I brought the spoon to my mouth and was about to take a bite when I stopped and handed a utensil to Casey. “Ladies first.”
She took a spoonful of the ice cream then she froze, holding the spoon in midair. “I just had an idea,” she said, unfreezing as she snapped her head to look at me, her eyes practically glittering with excitement.
“No, Casey,” I chided. “We are not going to do it on my sister’s kitchen counter. You’re insatiable, woman.”
Admittedly there was a bit of truth to that.
We’d been together a few times since the ballpark, but then we’d had to take a break mid-week when I traveled to Vegas where I met with Brent Nichols, a wildly successful late-night comedian who was also prepping to open a new nightclub in the city of sin.
The club was on the outskirts of town, and I’d been talking to him about the prospect of relocating it inside The Luxe on the Strip.
That trip had cut into my time with Casey, but in the few nights I’d seen her before, we’d made the most of the shortened hours, and she’d passed my spanking course with flying colors.
She’d also discovered that she was particularly fond of having her hair pulled when I took her from behind, with her bent over the bathroom sink.
I’d told her to look in the mirror as I gripped her hair tight in my fist. My god, the sight of her wild abandon reflected back at me was branded on my brain forever.
“No. That’s not what I mean,” she said, talking quickly. I recognized the tone instantly—she had entered the idea zone. “I was just thinking back to the night in New Orleans, when we shared the cake.”
“The night it all began,” I said, wiggling my eyebrows as she finally ate the ice cream on the spoon she was holding, then set the spoon on the table.
“No, seriously. What was I doing beforehand?”
“Do we really need to go there?” I muttered, as I took a bite.
“Grant, obviously.” I didn’t want to admit that there was a Grant.
In my world, Grant had ceased to exist. It seemed that way for her too.
She hadn’t brought him up once in the last week.
She hadn’t brought up anyone else, come to think of it.
She had barely breathed the word lessons.
“I meant, why I was even meeting with Grant in the first place? A partnership,” she said, answering her own question.
“The deal for the LolaRing. You practiced the pitch in the car, and that toy sounded pretty fucking awesome if you ask me,” I said, covering Cara’s ears, even though the baby was sound asleep.