Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NATE
Levi, Finland
“Davenport!” Jeff slurs as he slides up to me. He wobbles his landing, bumping his shoulder against mine and spilling some of his drink onto the floor.
“Big celebration for you, old man,” I say, slinging an arm around his shoulder to hold him steady. He’s going to hurt tomorrow. But he’s celebrating a top ten finish in addition to his thirtieth birthday.
“Old man, pfft.” He tries to roll his eyes, but his whole head moves with them and I wonder if he’s making himself dizzy. “How old are you?”
“Still twenty-nine for a while,” I assure him.
“Okay, so before your thirtieth are you going to lock shit down with Jackson finally?” He’s practically yelling, but luckily with the music blasting I don’t think anyone else can hear him.
“We talked about this, Jeff.” In other words, shut the hell up.
“Oh, yeah, your top secret classified plan.” Even in his inebriated state, his voice is mocking and his lack of discretion is pissing me off.
“It won’t be top secret if you don’t shut your mouth about it,” I growl. But he’s too drunk to care that I’m annoyed.
I glance around the room looking for Jackson.
She’s been hard to miss in that sexy as hell flapper dress she’s wearing.
As far as dresses go, it’s fairly conservative with its high scooped neck and cap sleeves, but it’s very sheer and it’s short if you don’t count the fringe that hangs to her knees.
It hugs her body too perfectly for me to be capable of looking away.
Unfortunately, she’s stuck so close to Sierra all night that I haven’t had a chance to get her alone for even a second.
But at least Marco’s not here with her. He came up to me after the event today, congratulating me on my finish and earning my first World Cup points.
I wanted to strangle him, because the thought of him with Jackson does that to me, but there were cameras all around us. Instead I shook his hand.
“You’re looking for her right now, aren’t you?” Jeff asks.
Either he’s not as drunk as I thought, or he’s an astute drunk who won’t remember any of this tomorrow. Either way, I neither confirm nor deny his accusation.
“Just saw her heading up to the second floor . . .” he says, tilting his chin at the various balconies that overlook the dance floor of this very small nightclub attached to our hotel.
“Okay.” I shrug as if this information is useless to me.
“Alone.”
Oh. In my head I’m plotting how to get up there and find her, hopefully without Sierra seeing me and coming at me like a fucking bulldog. She’s way too overprotective of Jackson and always has been.
“Moving on,” Jeff says as he breaks out from under my arm. Dude’s definitely unsteady on his feet as he walks away, but he’s clearly sober enough to know what he’s doing by providing me this tip.
I take a moment to glance up at the second level and that’s when I see her leaning against the gilded wall of the balcony closest to the stage.
She’s almost entirely out of view, and this couldn’t be a better place for us to finally have a private conversation.
I turn and head toward the stairs quickly, hoping nobody notices me leaving.
I pull the heavy velvet balcony curtain back and am greeted by a gorgeous view of Jackson’s curves.
The taupe flapper dress she’s wearing is almost the color of her skin, covered in intricate rows of golden beads and sequins.
She’s leaning forward, her arms spread wide across the balcony railing and the hem of her dress barely covering her underwear, with the gold fringe hanging down her thighs, taunting me.
She has one leg crossed behind the other and she’s balanced on ridiculously high heels as she watches the mayhem below.
When I come up behind her, I’m afraid I’ll scare her and she’ll topple over the short wall in front of her. I put one hand on each hip to steady her as I lean toward her and ask, “You hiding up here?”
She looks over her shoulder, takes in the sight of me, and her lips curl into a wicked smile I instantly recognize—it’s her ‘get me out of here and to the bedroom’ look. And it could not be more unexpected. Unless me telling her today that I came back for her has somehow changed her mind about me?
She’s shifts her weight back, grinding that perfect ass right into me and I am instantly hard.
I want nothing more than to push myself into her right there, but I have the good sense to take a moment and assess the situation.
Her right hand loosely encompasses a glass with nothing but ice left in it.
“How much have you been drinking?”
“More than you,” she says, her eyes leaving my face and returning to the dance floor below. Given that I’ve chosen not to risk drinking with only one kidney, her answer tells me nothing.
“Dammit, how much?” I ask, then take a risk by pulling her hips back against mine so she can feel what she does to me.
Her throaty groan is barely audible over the music pumping through the speakers, but I hear it just the same.
She’s been drinking, I need to shut this down right now.
But my body has stopped taking orders from my brain for the moment.
“Just enough to take the edge off,” she says as she glances back at me again.
“Take the edge off what?” I growl as she slowly rocks her hips against me. I’m fairly sure I’m hidden in the shadows so that from the dance floor no one looking up here would suspect that we’re connected at the hip right now, but even if I’m not, it’s a risk I’m willing to take.
“The loneliness,” she mumbles, then presses her lips between her teeth like she’s trying to keep any more words from coming out.
“So you’re trying to make Marco jealous because he’s not here to keep you company?” Even my annoyance doesn’t stop me from dropping my fingertips to the back of her thigh and trailing them up her leg and under the fringed hem of her dress.
“Believe me, he’s not jealous of you,” she says with an acerbic laugh, and I try not to let the truth of it sting.
Because why would the top-ranked skier in the world be jealous of me, when he’s dating my ex-girlfriend and he clenched a first place finish today while I barely finished in the top fifteen?
“Would he be jealous if he knew where my hand was right now?” I ask, rubbing my thumb along the crease where her thigh meets her butt cheek.
“Don’t tease me, Nate,” she says, her glare turning hard and her back going rigid so that I panic and say the exact opposite of what I mean.
“It doesn’t have to just be teasing.” I regret the words the second they leave my mouth. This can’t go anywhere, not with her drunk and still dating Marco. But her proximity and the blatant desire I see in her face is fucking with my moral compass, has it going haywire and spinning in circles.
“Nate, please,” she begs as she slides her foot out from behind her, parting her legs in an obvious invitation.
I lean in, my back cradling hers, and drop my lips to her ear. “Tell me what you want.”
“Touch me.”
This is cruel torture, but I did it to myself.
“Not here,” I tell her, nodding my chin toward the dance floor below us. “Let’s go.”
I find the stairwell, deciding it’s best to avoid the elevator where we’re more likely to run into people we know.
She takes the first flight quickly, but slows as she approaches the next floor.
When she reaches the landing by the door that will let us into the hallway, she turns and I see the hesitation in her eyes.
Good, maybe she knows this is a bad idea and I won’t have to let her down.
She doesn’t say anything, just stands there as her eyes move up and down my body, appraising me.
I lean in, bracing my arm against the wall behind her and it takes everything I have not to lean in those extra few inches and taste her lips. “You don’t want to do this,” I say, testing whether she knows herself well enough to disagree.
“I can hate you and want your body at the same time.” It’s not what I was expecting her to say. I guess I thought she’d mention Marco, use him as an excuse to put a stop to this.
“You don’t hate me.” I look her in the eyes and see nothing but hurt and defiance shining back.
“Oh, trust me,” she says. “I do.”
I bring my mouth toward her ear to make sure she understands every word of what I’m about to tell her. “I’ve been waiting for this for years. I’m not throwing my chance away on a one-night stand.”
She pulls her head back and her eyes narrow, completely focused where before they were a bit glazed. Then she looks down, her voice quiet when she asks, “Are you turning me down?”
“Turning you down? No.” I take my free hand and press my fingertips to that sensitive space where her ear and jaw meet, then trail them down to her chin and tilt her face back up toward me.
I trail the bridge of my nose up her cheek until my lips graze the hair hanging in front of her ear.
Quietly I remind her that we’re worth more than this.
“But we both deserve better than what’s on the table tonight. ”
I push off the wall, my resolve settling in as I put my hand on her lower back and guide her toward the hallway door. She pushes my hand away. “I can get back to my room myself,” she says, then swings open the door and walks through it without looking back.
I stand in the doorframe, watching to make sure she gets to her room okay, and praying that I didn’t make a huge mistake by not following her. But I don’t want to be someone she regrets. Or rather, I don’t want to give her another reason to regret being with me.
Instead, I’ll make her understand why I left, since it’s become increasingly clear that no one in her life has been honest with her about that.
In the few minutes it takes me to make it back up to my room, I’ve already pictured three different scenarios for how things with Jackson could have ended tonight, and all of them involve me buried in her while she cries out my name.
Once I lock the door behind me, I shed my clothes as I walk toward the bathroom, not even caring where anything lands.
As I turn on the water in the shower I’m pulling down my boxers, anxious to not feel so confined.
I step into the hot shower and tilt my head forward, letting the spray hit the top of my head and run down my face.
It’s easy to picture Jackson here with me, in this shower, her legs spread like they were tonight, and her hands pressed above her shoulders on the sterile white wall tile.
It’s equally easy to imagine that the streams of water that trail down my chest and fall to my hardened cock are her fingers, reaching behind her to guide me.
The image of her perfect ass pressed up toward my hips, with her dark hair thrown over one shoulder as the water runs down her back, has me fisting my cock into my hand and groaning as the sensitive nerves there finally make contact with something other than my zipper.
In my imagination, or perhaps my memory, I feel the slick heat of her pussy as it clenches around me while I push in to the hilt.
She looks over her shoulder and moans for more.
I bring my fingers up to her mouth, let her swirl her tongue around them a few times, and then I bring them back down in front of her and use them to circle her clit.
Instantly I can feel her tightening around me, her moans growing louder as she tells me how fucking good it feels.
A few more thrusts and in her breathy sex-voice she says, “Oh God, Nate. I’m coming!
” She’s squeezing me impossibly tight now, and I can feel the pull at the base of my spine, the tingling as it travels to my balls, and now I’m shooting my release all over the wall of the shower, both sated by the relief and disappointed that it was only a vision.
When I head back into the room, my phone is vibrating in my pants pocket on the floor.
My lawyer’s name flashes across the screen where I really hoped to see Jackson’s name, which is a bit of a mood killer.
“You still up?” Jed asks when I answer the phone.
“Yeah, just got back to my hotel room.” I glance at the clock and do the math, realizing its just about the end of the work day back on the East Coast.
“Okay, I wanted to let you know that the Blackstone folks want a meeting to hammer out the last details.”
“What details do we need to hammer out?” I ask. “They already accepted our revised proposal.”
Blackstone Mountain is the last brick in my path back to Jackson. It’s a deal that’s been over a year in the making, the crowning jewel on the real estate empire I’ve been quietly building. That, combined with skiing, have given me the fulfillment I needed to be the man she deserves.
“It sounds like they want some reassurances about a few of the terms. You just need to show up and remind them that Blackstone is your home mountain and you have their best interests at heart.” He lets out a frustrated breath.
“I mean, that’s what this is about, right?
You’re investing in it for sentimental reasons? ”
Jed thinks Blackstone is a bad investment. I’ve made riskier investments and had them pay off, but nothing of this magnitude. And I can’t deny that there’s a sentimental connection here—where Jackson and I fell in love, where I raced for my last two seasons before having to give it all up.
“Sure, but it’s also a smart investment. There is so much potential there. Just wait, you’re going to be bringing your family there instead of Stowe, and cutting your travel time in half.”
Jed lets out a laugh that’s a half snort. “I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“See if you can schedule the meeting Thanksgiving weekend. I’m spending the holiday there with my dad anyway,” I tell him. “I’m sure you’ll be with your family so maybe we can just video conference you in.”
“Depending on the day, I may come up for it. Like you said, it’s not that far from Boston.”
“Okay, let me know the details of the meeting once you have them, and send me a summary of the items they want reassurances on.”
“Will do,” Jed says, and disconnects the call.
I stare at my phone, thinking about how this deal has the potential to be the best investment I ever made, or the worst—largely dependent on how Jackson reacts when she finds out.