Chapter Three #2
My undoing, Lemon Perkins. She reads the room and rewrites the script, and hell if my fingers haven’t been dying to flip every last page since I met her.
I slam my palm down hard across her ass, and the brat likes it. Of course she does.
The fact she can’t be broken fuels my fire even more.
It rages in the presence of her strength.
She rides the line and tests the limits until I’m left straddling the edge of right and wrong, asking myself whether feasting on this storm of a woman will end the hunger for good or just make me a tempestuous glutton.
Boss’s daughter or not, I gave my heart up long ago, and I don’t think I’ll ever get it back.
That’s fair to no one, which is why this is a horrible idea.
She moans around my thumb, and the vibrations go straight to my cock that’s pressed deep into her stomach as she lies across me, breaking up my thoughts.
“Nash! Please!” she begs for more, for the release only my eyes can bring, my name on her tongue and her flesh between my grip…but I can’t do it, can I?
This is wrong.
Emil’s daughter.
Yet she feels like she should be mine in all the ways I shouldn’t want.
I roar, bringing my hand down as hard as I can across the right side of her tight muscular ass, one I imagine slamming against as I grind her naked body over my cock. I growl, unsure which thing I’m feeling more intensely.
That she makes me lose control?
Or how damn good it feels to hold her across my lap and use her for pleasure, to hear the moans and cries and know they’re just for me.
“Miiiiine,” I growl the word like a curse, rocking her naked form back and forth across my lap, punishing my cock that’s still trapped beneath a thin cotton barrier and aching for the warmth of her wet cunt I can feel at the tips of my fingers.
But this moment here is as close as I’ll allow myself to get. I grip harder, grinding until I explode, my body shaking violently as my fingernails sink into her curves.
I groan with instant regret as I watch the white marks across her backside turn red in the shape of my fingers, bruising before she’s even left my lap, my mark on her body something she’ll still bear when she’s strewn across those godforsaken couches I can’t get out of my head.
“I looked up casting couches last night,” I growl, as she slides off my lap and throws a sassy grin my way. I don’t miss the clench of her thighs, reminding me she hasn’t orgasmed yet.
Yet? What am I thinking?
I scrub my hand over my face, blowing out a breath.
She’s thrown on a band tee, seemingly unbothered by what just occurred, and I eye the shirt greedily, hating the way someone else’s musk now kisses her nipples.
Nipples I haven’t yet tasted.
And there it is again. Yet.
I grind my teeth at the jealousy and desire taking hold, over a woman who would lay with me just as soon as the next man who walks through her daddy’s office door.
She picks lint from the front of the abominable shirt I ought to rip right off.
Who knows which member of this tour bus it belongs to. I don’t think she cares, even if it bothers me like nothing else.
Her legs dangle from the loft bed above the kitchen nook, her usual bunk when she weasels her way onto these coastal tours. I can still see the pink glowing stars above it that she stuck there on her first one.
Guilt stabs me as I watch her there now, feet hanging with French manicured toes, like they were back then…when she had just turned twenty.
What I just did was not only professionally wrong, but morally and ethically as well.
I’m fifteen years her senior. Doesn’t matter that she’s a willing participant in all things hedonist, or that she’s a grown adult.
If some old asshole preyed on my daughter like I am Mr. Perkins’, I’d end him, sexy violet eyes of an invitation or not.
If she tells her father, I could lose out on the promotion and the opportunity to settle down with my family. To glue the cracks of our foundation before it comes crumbling down.
I can’t allow that.
Not for anyone.
“Your father can’t know of this. We can’t…” I struggle to get it out, half of my brain warring against the words that will push her away from me instead of in my arms and my bed where the deluded half of me craves her to be.
But I’ll do anything for my girls.
I swallow, knowing what must be done for my family and our future.
Even if it’s a lie.
“It was a lapse in judgment. It won’t happen again; you have my word.” I nod. “Miss Perkins.”
That’s who she is.
Not Sour Patch.
She’s the daughter of my boss. The woman who will inherit every bit of the global enterprise controlling my family’s futures without so much stepping a single toe in the boardroom.
She’s a billionaire’s heiress, Lemon Perkins.
And I’m the help.
Her smile slips with each word I speak. I see hurt in her eyes, just briefly, but it’s gone as soon as it starts. She turns her attention to her jingling bracelets, pinching a tiny silver charm between her finger and thumb, feigning nonchalance, despite the storm in her eyes.
“What’s there to tell?” she asks. “It’s not like I got off or anything.”
I deserve the jab. I’ve hurt her.
She hops from the loft and takes up all the space left within my lungs as she presses her lips to my ear. “Men come undone for me all the time. But you know that better than most.”
It wounds me just like she hopes it will, but I don’t react. Years of parenting taught me that’s exactly what she wants. She wants to see me want her.
And I need to convince both of us that I don’t.
“I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
She’s all any man would want, and she knows it, but I’m not that man for her.
Her lip trembles, and it breaks a heart I didn’t know I still had. But this is what’s best for us both.
“Sour Patch, I—”
“Don’t call me that anymore.” Her eyes score my heart with finality, and I know it shouldn’t wound me, but it does.
“I’m sure there are several someone else’s around here more than willing to make the left cheek match the right.
” She leans closer, daring me to shut her up with my tongue and finish what I began. I lean, too, before…
“They might even let you watch.”
Fuck.
I shove away, and she gasps, stealing my breath as she retreats, hurt and surprise etched across her brow.
She’s beautiful, tempestuous, and reckless, full breasts heaving, and those otherworldly purple eyes swirling and charged.
I ache to fall to my knees for this woman and worship the goddess she doesn’t know she could be…
this tease of a yellow bow that’s needled her way into my tour bus and worse, my heart.
But I don’t.
And she knows very well that means we’re done here. We must be. And if she thinks that’s what I want in order for this to end, then I’ll do what I must to keep us apart. For my family.
She doesn’t bother replacing her panties, just swipes my work jacket from the wall hanger, wipes the arousal from her unsated cunt and tugs the hem of the band tee back over her thighs.
She gives me one last look of pure disgust before she snatches up her in-line skates and slams the door behind her.
My chest heaves, cock hard again at the passion behind her anger. At the suggestion I’d need another man’s permission to watch.
Even if it was just another one of her missiles to my defenses, it worked.
I yank my sweatpants off, wrapping my bottom half in a towel and moving to my private bunk for replacement clothes, but before I can solve one problem, my next begins.
My jaw tightens at the name on the phone.
Scrubbing my palm down my face, I throw on my slacks and polo combo as I swipe accept.
“Mrs. Kempling, yes, how are you? The girls all right?” I hold my breath when she doesn’t immediately reply, familiar with the silence and what it means.
What now? Are they hurt? Is someone in trouble?
I hate that I’m not already there to know. To control and fix whatever the problem may be.
But I know—deep down, I know. And I heave a sigh as I flick my fingers to the blinds of the bus and look out at the loading dock.
“What’s Bryar done, Mrs. Kempling?”
She hesitates longer, but her voice cracks and she finally speaks. “I’m sorry, but she’s horrible, Mr. Nashville! I…I tried. I thought I was making headway, but she’s…she’s…”
“She’s what?” My pulse quickens, worry still lacing my fears even as they are replaced by anger that she’s done it again.
I know right now, by the tone in our nanny’s voice, that this will be Mrs. Kempling’s last day, and my teenage daughter is the culprit.
“Tell me.” I’m short with her, dominance maintaining control.
It’s what I’m good at. Why I’m in charge of these million-dollar tours. And somehow, despite all that experience, it’s a thirteen-year-old girl who brings me to my knees for guidance.
“What has she done, Mrs. Kempling? Drugs? Alcohol? Shoplifting again?” I massage the bridge of my nose as I pace the small stretch of the bus. “Jesus, please say it isn’t boys.”
“It’s boys,” Mrs. Kempling starts, but that’s as far as she gets before I curse, throwing my phone to the floor and ending the call.
I’m lucky it isn’t cracked.
I dial Mrs. Kempling back and apologize, getting the full story of Bryar and the tenth grade, car-driving boyfriend she snuck out with.
My fists clench, my stomach already in knots. She could get in a wreck or mistreated.
A boyfriend?
I don’t even know this young man.
Roadies cart tubs of lighting gels and cables into the venue as I stare out a window that doesn’t open to my girls doing cartwheels on a green, sunny lawn, and I know with all certainty, this is my doing.
I haven’t been home to meet this boy, even if she’d wanted me to. I sink to the floor spinning the imaginary ring on my left finger, the one I feel even if I no longer wear it.
“You would have known how to fix her,” I cry to Lauren, to the fucking air as tears spring to my eyes. “I’m the one who should have died, and our children are the ones who suffer for it.”
Not anymore.
I rise from the ground and straighten my clothes.
Tracing the word Perkins across my badge, I shove all thoughts of bratty teenagers—and adults, as it were—from my head, replacing them with one thought only. Promotion.
The Nashville family will not crumble.
“I promise, Lo.”