Chapter Twenty-Eight
Jules woke in a strange house wrapped in familiar arms, tangled in the sheets, her back pressed to Rhys.
She didn’t want to disturb the quiet. She didn’t want the day to start.
There was no telling where they had to go or who they had to speak with.
All she wanted was to lie in this man’s arms and hide from the world.
“Morning, baby.” His rough, sleep-soaked whisper teased against her neck.
Her lips curled up, and she melted against him as her mind flashed back to the way they’d collided downstairs. She didn’t know what it meant, only that it meant something. Maybe everything. “Hi.”
Sleepily, he pressed a kiss under her hair and pulled her naked body closer. “Do you want coffee?”
She wanted him . “I can’t survive without it.”
“You can do anything you want.”
“Go home?” Not that she wanted to.
His body trembled with silent laughter. “Trying to run away?”
“Never.” She added a tease to the word, but the truth was it would take a feat of God to pull her out of his arms and send her running to the West Coast. Did that make her pathetic?
Actually… No. It didn’t. Wanting to be with someone who made her feel this good wasn’t pathetic.
It empowered her. He empowered her. Rhys, with the growly, possessive way he handled her body, had treated her like…
like what exactly? Something precious and desired.
Every relationship she’d ever been in had been a transaction, not like she was a prostitute or they were some kind of whore, but like everyone would get something out of the connection. Attraction and sex hadn’t been high on the list.
She and Rhys didn’t have that problem. What was the opposite of a transaction?
Jules hadn’t the slightest clue. Whatever it was, it felt like breathing without counting the breaths. They didn’t have an agenda—well, he did, wanting to prove that sex wasn’t so-so. Mission accomplished. The opposite of so-so was Rhys Callaghan.
Turning in his arms, she twined her legs with his. “Are you going to make me get up and go somewhere?”
“The only reason you need to get up is if you want me to bend you over this bed.” He winked. “Or you want coffee.”
She didn’t care that she blushed. Jules grinned anyway. “Is there some kind of option where I can get both?”
He rolled over, caging her head with his forearms and settling between her legs. “If I didn’t make this clear last night, you get everything you want.”
Her face hurt from smiling so much. “Lucky me.”
“Lucky me ,” he countered. “All you have to do is ask.”
She’d get there. For the time being, half the fun was his telling her what to do and promising what would happen. The man delivered.
Jules shivered. “What if I’m asking now?”
The thickening length of his erection twitched between them, and he reached past their cell phones for the condoms on the nightstand. Rhys rolled the protection on and covered her again.
In the morning sunlight, with the first time together nerves out of their way, he gently took her mouth. The hard length of his shaft stroked against her, rubbing against her seam. The lazy strokes coated her arousal between them as he slid against heated skin, caressing her clit.
Her eyes slipped closed as Rhys nuzzled the spot behind her earlobe. The scruff on his cheeks scratched while he whispered how good she’d been for him the night before.
Jules spread her legs apart, lifting her hips until his erection pressed where she needed him. The lazy, languid strokes continued, even as he split her muscles, inching deeper and deeper until she wrapped around the length of him.
Rhys held still, buried to the root, tensing and holding her body like he was savoring the way they fit. “Fuck, baby.”
He stole himself from her body, kissing her as she gasped.
Rhys thrust again, in and out, somehow deeper and more intense. He could ride her all day long, pulling orgasm after orgasm like he was the master of her cunt.
And he did. One orgasm crashed after the next, each one bigger and better than the last.
Every time her body spiraled for him, she fell harder, deeper, needing him more than she knew she could need a man.
Rhys drained himself into her, muttering nonsense against her ear, smothering his words against her neck.
Delirious and exhausted, she didn’t care if he was speaking another language, and as her heart fell harder, the reasons why they didn’t make sense pushed out of her mind. All that mattered right now was them.
Alone to explore the house, Jules put in her earbuds and answered Abigail’s phone call on her new phone. She curled onto an overstuffed accent chair and tugged the soft blanket over her legs.
“Wes and I have an opinion,” Abigail said.
“I bet you both have lots of opinions.” Jules didn’t know Wes Wilder very well, but stemming back years to Jordan Everett’s trial and continuing through her wedding fiasco, Wes had helped with big events when Rhys needed someone he trusted.
Around her, he was quiet, but Jules wasn’t sure that was actually the case.
“Are you going to regale me with whatever you two have been gossiping about, or are you going to drop it?”
“You and Rhys should date.”
Jules snorted, not because that wouldn’t be exactly what she wanted but because she didn’t know how it would work. Hope flickered in her chest as she remembered the night before. Even if she didn’t see how, it might be possible. “Right.”
“I’m serious. Wes is serious. I bet if you asked Rhys, he’d be on board.”
“All right. I’ll put it on my list of things to talk to him about.” Did she have the guts to ask him about the future? A week ago, the answer would have been no. Now…?
“Did you sleep with him yet?”
“ Abs .”
“Oh, that sounds like a yes.” Abigail drew in a deep breath. “I bet that man can fuck.”
“ Abigail .”
Her sister chortled. “Am I wrong?”
“You’re nosy. That’s what you are.”
Abigail hooted and said to someone else, “I’ll tell you later.”
“Is that Wes? If you tell Wes anything, I’ll… make sure…” Jules stared at the ceiling. She wasn’t good at lobbing threats. “Just imagine something bad. I’ll sic Sloane on you. She’d probably stab someone if I asked her to.”
“If you could see me quaking in my bathing suit.” Abigail laughed. “Besides, if you and Rhys really got together, Sloane would throw a party.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Because every picture of you two together is like midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Like you’re drunk on each other and staring into the future with hope and blinky lights shining in your heart-shaped eyes.
It’s so cute that it’s gross, and the world is eating it up.
” Abigail gagged. “Kinda makes me want to puke a little, except I know it’s real, so I have to be happy for you. ”
“There’s nothing to be happy about. We’re just…” Hanging out? Screwing up a solid working relationship? Falling for each other—or something even worse? Ruining everything. “Being us.”
“God, you’re a precious pain in the butt. What’s holding you back?”
“Besides the fact that we live on opposite sides of the country?” Jules thought back to all the animosity she used to harbor for him and wondered where and when it had gone. “I don’t trust him completely.”
Abigail scoffed. “I know you’re not still talking about the Jordan Everett thing.”
“Well, yeah.”
“First, I think you got over that a long time ago.”
Maybe…
“Second,” Abigail continued, “even if you hadn’t, you trust him professionally. And maybe you don’t trust him with your secrets. But that’s why people date. To grow together. To figure out how they exist as a couple.”
“I don’t know.”
“Jules, wake up, sunshine. It’s not that you don’t trust him.
You do. You always have. It’s that you think you haven’t forgiven him.
But guess what. You did that too. Over the last fifteen years, you’ve grown up together.
You forgave him without realizing it. He’s your guy.
He’s always been your guy. Maybe it’s time for either of you to notice. ”
A shiver ran down Jules’s arms as she sucked in her cheeks. Her breath caught in her chest, and she wasn’t exactly sure how to jumpstart her lungs again.
“Did your phone die or something?” Abigail demanded. “Stroke out on me?”
“Ugh, shut up, please.”
A truck pulled into the driveway, and Rhys jumped out.
“Hey, Abs, I have to go.”
Her sister laughed. “Tell Rhys we say hey and to—”
Jules ended the call before she blushed again. The front door unlocked, and he strode in. Metallic clinks trailed him. Two dogs trotted behind Rhys, their name tags jangling on their collars.
Jules dropped to her knees. “You have dogs?”
They beelined for her as though she were holding steaks in each hand.
She jerked her chin up and caught Rhys’s half-hitched grin, then scrubbed her hand over their fur as they jumped and licked for attention. “You have the cutest fur babies alive and never told me?”
“I have a dog. Clyde.” He crouched next to her and petted the wavy brown-and-white bundle of energy with big eyes. “But Clyde stays with Pickles”—Rhys scratched the other dog under his chin—“when I travel for work. Pickles wanted to go for a ride when I picked up Clyde, so we’re all here.”
“Does Pickles have a human?” she asked.
“Two humans. Callum and Grace Hale. I work with Callum. They don’t live too far from here.”
Rhys had a totally adorable dog that she had never heard of before.
He had friends she didn’t know. Yet he knew almost everything about her.
Uncertainty wrapped around her chest like an invisible rope, squeezing just tight enough that she noticed—but underneath it, something felt almost like possibility.
The list of unknown details about Rhys daunted her. There were probably a lot of things she didn’t know about him. Did he sleep in? What did he do for fun? “I didn’t know you had a dog.”
Pickles knocked her onto her butt and, along with Clyde, clobbered her with doggy attention.
“Now you do.” He yanked her to her feet. “I have to go back to the office. This time with you, but afterward, if you’re up for it, Pickles’s dad is grilling out.”
Pickles’s dad. God, Rhys was cute. “I thought I was hiding.”
He shook his head. “We’re not telling the world where you are. But the people I work with? They’re solid. No one’s running to a gossip blogger with details on your location. They’re normal. You’ll like them.”
People didn’t treat her like they treated everyone else. That was a lesson she’d learned a long time ago. Then again, she already knew some of his coworkers. “Will Scarlett be there?”
He nodded.
“Yay. What about Vivian Maddox?”
He nodded again. “There’s a good chance.”
“I’ve always been curious about her, to be honest. Is she scary?”
“Depends on who you ask.” He winked. “I think you’ll like her. Though… she had questions the other day.”
“What kind of questions?”
Rhys pointed between them. “The personal kind.”
“Ah. What’s the office policy on…” She pointed between them like he had. “Personal situations?”
The corners of his dark eyes crinkled. “Let me figure that out later.”
She understood. Bodyguards weren’t supposed to sleep with the people who hired them. That made more sense than how people who lived on opposite sides of a continent might manage to date. “Speaking of questions, Abigail and Wes are a little gossipy. Just so you know.”
Rhys rubbed a hand over his scruffy jaw. “I’ll handle Wes.”
“Okay.” This would be the perfect segue for a conversation about what they were doing. Or not doing. Rhys had called her his. What did that even mean? “I handled Abigail.”
His lips quirked. “Does anyone actually handle Abigail?”
Nope. He knew that just as he knew everything else in her life. And Jules knew nothing about his.