Chapter 20 WREN
WREN
The door opens.
He comes in.
He shuts it behind him, quiet, and crosses to the bed. He stops at the side of it and looks down at me.
I sit up on an elbow.
“Jace—”
“I’m done holding back.”
He doesn’t wait for me to answer. One knee on the mattress. Then the other. His weight settling over me, pushing me back onto the pillows, one hand sliding up the inside of my thigh under the sheet.
His mouth finds mine.
I make a sound I’d die of embarrassment over if I could bring myself to care. I can’t. His hand is between my legs, his fingers inside me, and he’s watching my face while he does it. I’m already close.
“Jace—”
“Shh.”
His thumb finds exactly the right —
And then his mouth moves to my ear.
“Wake up, sweetheart.”
I wake up gasping.
My hand is between my thighs.
My hips are still moving.
Oh my GOD.
I yank my hand out from under the sheet like it’s on fire — which it might as well be — and lie there in the guest bed of Jace Carrington’s Manhattan penthouse, my pajama shorts in an unspeakable condition, my heart going a hundred and forty, my face on actual literal fire.
I just had a sex dream about Jace Carrington.
I just almost came to a sex dream about Jace Carrington.
In his guest bed.
Twenty feet down the hall from his actual room.
I put both hands over my face. My hands smell like me. I take my hands off my face.
Okay. Okay. I’m a grown woman. I have had sex dreams before. They happen. They don’t mean anything. They’re just my brain processing things.
Specifically, my brain processing the fact that last night I unbuttoned his shirt in his kitchen, put my palm on his bare chest, and he stood there shaking hard enough for me to feel it while refusing to touch me.
Also?
My brain is processing that man’s chest.
I wish I could report that when I opened that shirt, Jace Carrington looked like a normal human being. I cannot report this.
I opened that shirt and found a body under it that should not exist outside of extremely expensive gyms and personal trainers. A stomach cut so sharply it looked carved. A broad chest streaked with ink I hadn’t known was there—a tattoo spread across his skin right where my hand had been.
Something that meant something to him. I knew that immediately. A man like Jace doesn’t put anything on his body unless it matters.
I still don’t know what it means.
I didn’t ask.
I walked away from that kitchen and then spent three hours lying in this bed thinking about the fact that he wanted me badly enough to shake from it and still didn’t break.
So apparently my subconscious decided to handle that problem for me.
Because Dream Jace did break.
Dream Jace walked into this room, looked at me like he was done fighting himself, and put his hand between my legs.
My thighs press together under the sheet.
Stop it, Wren.
I sit up.
The sheet falls and the cool air of his guest room hits my skin and every inch of me is still tuned to the wrong frequency. There is absolutely no going back to sleep, and definitely no staying in this bed another second.
I swing my legs over the side.
The apartment is quiet and somewhere down the hall, a shower is running.
I freeze.
Here is what I know. He wants me. I felt it last night with my palm on his chest. I felt it when his whole body shook and he still refused to move. He is not refusing me because he doesn’t want me. He is refusing me because he has decided he’s not allowed to want me.
He is not going to come to me.
He is never going to come to me.
If I want him, I’m going to have to be the one to do it.
I go into the guest bathroom. I brush my teeth, run my fingers through my hair, and look at myself in the mirror.
You can do this. You are taking what you want.
Then I’m at his door, hand raised, and for a second I just stand there, fully aware of how this looks—a woman knocking on a man’s bedroom door at seven in the morning to offer him a blow job like a door-to-door saleswoman.
The alternative is going back to that bed, and there’s no version of this where I go back to that bed.
I know how it looks. I’m doing it anyway.
So I knock softly.
He doesn’t answer—and I don’t wait to find out why. I push the door open and step inside before I can talk myself out of it.
His bedroom is dim—the blinds are half-drawn against the gray morning light, soft bedside lamps still on from last night.
A massive leather bed, bigger than a king.
A flat screen mounted across from it. A chair in the corner with a shirt thrown over the back of it.
Behind one wall of paneled doors, what has to be a walk-in the size of my entire living room.
And across the room, another door, half-open—steam coming out of it, the warm yellow light of the en-suite spilling onto the hardwood.
I’m just looking at that half-open door when it swings the rest of the way open and he walks out, towel slung low at his hips.
Then he sees me, and he stops dead.
Water still on his shoulders, on his chest, running in slow lines down over the tattoos—the sleeve up his right arm, the one over his heart.
“Wren.”
His voice stays calm. His expression almost does too.
“Hi.”
He takes a step into the room, stopping a few feet away from me.
I can see him do the same quick scan he did last night in the kitchen—my face, my hair, down the tank, down the shorts, back up—and I watch him catch himself doing it and stop.
He exhales once. “You okay?”
That’s what he says. Not what are you doing in my room. His first instinct when I show up in his bedroom is to check if I’m okay, and something in my chest pulls tight.
“Yeah.”
“Did something happen?”
“No.” He waits. “I’m up. I figured you were up. I came to find you.”
“You shouldn’t be in here.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t move toward me. He just stands there in that towel, water still on his chest, and looks at me.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Wren. Don’t do this.”
I hold his eyes. “You don’t get to decide this for me again.”
Something passes across his face.
“You pulled that guy off my detail and put yourself there. You kissed me back—I felt it—and then you couldn’t get out of my apartment fast enough.” I take a step. “I know why. You think wanting me makes you a liar to Dawson. So you keep deciding for both of us and calling it honor.”
“Wren.”
“Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you don’t want this, and I’ll walk back down that hall right now.”
His jaw works. “Wanting you isn’t the problem.”
“I know it isn’t.”
“You need to leave.” Quiet. Controlled. The voice that makes grown men do what he says.
“No.”
He looks at the wall over my shoulder, then looks back at me.
“Please.”
That word. From him. He has never said that word to me.
And that’s when it happens—the look he had last night in the kitchen, a man hanging on by a thread.
Good.
My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my throat as I cross the distance between us, but I don’t slow down and I don’t look away.
He is standing a few feet into his bedroom in a towel that is barely holding on, and I know how his body comes apart for mine—I’ve known since last night—and the knowing is the thing that keeps my feet moving.
Whatever nerves I had in the hallway a minute ago are gone. I stop a few inches in front of him.
He is warm from the shower. He smells like clean soap and something darker underneath that is just him. A bead of water catches the light just below his collarbone.
I press my thumb to it and slide it slowly down along the edge of the tattoo over his heart.
His hand comes up and closes around my wrist.
“Wren.”
I hold his eyes.
He doesn’t move.
His grip on my wrist is hard. The grip of a man who is barely holding onto himself and is using my wrist to do it.
I slide my other hand down his chest, over his stomach, until my fingers reach the edge of the towel at his hip.
His eyes close.
I go down on my knees.
“Wren.”
“Yes.”
“This is a bad idea.”
“I know.”
“I’m asking you to stop.”
“I don’t think you are.”
He exhales. Hard. Like I’ve hit him.
His hand opens around my wrist and falls away.
I pull the towel off. It drops to the floor at his feet, leaving him bare in front of me.
He is—oh. Okay. That’s going to keep me up at night. But right now I am a woman with a mission and he is right in front of me and he is so hard it is almost violent.
I look up at him.
He is looking down at me. Chest rising and falling hard. Hands in fists at his sides. I can see the muscle in his jaw working and the tendons in his forearms, and everything about him is strung tight, but he hasn’t looked away once.
I wrap my hand around him, and I bring my mouth down and take him in.
The sound he makes.
The sound.
Low and broken. Half a groan and half my name. Every muscle in his body locks.
I take my time. My tongue traces the underside of him, slow, before I take him deep, pulling him into my mouth as far as I can.
His face tells me what he likes—his jaw, his throat, his stomach tightening every time I get it right.
Slow. Then harder. My tongue drags over the tip and his whole body flinches, and then he’s back in my mouth, deep, held there, and he is coming apart in front of me, and I have never felt like this in my life.
I suck harder. Faster. I am going to suck the control right out of him. He tries, once, to pull me off—his hand coming down into my hair—and I don’t stop, and whatever was left of his control snaps. He curses under his breath. His grip in my hair goes tight.
“Wren—fuck—Wren, I’m going to—”
I go faster.
I look up at him. His eyes are hooded, locked on my face—and the second I hold his gaze he is done.
His head goes back.
He groans—deep, broken, ripped out of him—and his hand fists in my hair and I feel him come undone in my mouth.
Mission accomplished.
I sit back on my heels.
He is breathing hard, eyes still closed. For a long moment he doesn’t move at all, and neither do I—and then I stand up.
He opens his eyes.
He doesn’t look at me. He looks past me—at the floor, at something on the hardwood that isn’t me—and he shakes his head, once, small. Then he picks up the towel and wraps it back around his hips.
He still hasn’t looked at me.
I turn and walk out of his bedroom, and behind me, low and unsteady, I hear him say my name. I don’t turn around. I keep walking, down the hall and into the guest room, and I close the door behind me and sit on the edge of the bed and put my face in my hands.
I am not crying. I am grinning.