Because of His Future (For His Pleasure, Book 26) (9 page)

“No, I hardly got inside.
 
I was walking through the lobby to the
elevators when the security team surrounded me and told me I had to vacate the
premises.”

“I’m coming right there,” he said.
 

She covered her face as the paparazzi
continued to push their recorders, cameras and even cell phones into her space.

“Leave me alone!” she shouted at all of
them, and then burst into a sprint, breaking free of the pack.

They took up chase, but she outdistanced
them rather quickly, running inside some tourist shop and quickly walking to
the back, where she couldn’t be seen from the street.

“Grace!
 
You there, Grace?” she heard Liam
calling from the phone, as she finally put it back against her ear.

“Yes,” she said, catching her
breath.
 
She was shaking all over.

The man behind the counter watched her
warily from his stool.

“What happened?” Liam asked.

“Nothing, it’s fine.”

“I’m going to call the hotel now,” he
said.
 
“Someone’s going to catch
hell for this.”

“I guess just text me when you get back
here,” she said.
 
“I’ll stay nearby.”

“I’ll be there in no time,” he said.
 
“You just hang tight, baby.”

“I will,” she said, nodding, wiping the
sweaty strands of hair from her forehead.

After they got off the phone, she
pretended to browse, but the man at the register didn’t seem to believe she was
there to purchase anything.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“Nope, just looking for now,” she called
back to him in a fake cheery voice.
 
She was still shaking and she felt almost faint, like she needed to sit
down.

Replaying the whole thing in her mind,
Grace couldn’t believe how quickly everything had gone so wrong.

One moment she’d been heading up to
Liam’s beautiful penthouse suite in his hotel and the next she was being thrown
out like so much trash and then chased by the paparazzi.

While skimming through a rack of I HEART
NY T-shirts, her phone started ringing again.

It was Liam and he was irate.

“Un-fucking-believable,” he shouted.

“What?
 
What is it?” she cried.

“They’ve frozen me out of the hotel,”
Liam said, his breathing coming in short little gasps, as if he was busy
walking.
 

“Who froze you out?”

“Who do you think?” he said.
 
“My two idiot siblings.”

“Oh, Liam,” she groaned.
 
“I’m so sorry.”

“Hey, I can’t find the limo.
 
Didn’t you send it back?” he asked.

“Yes,” she replied, her stomach twisting
sickly.
 
“He should’ve been back to
you by now.”

“Hold on, I’m going to text him.”

The line went silent while Liam
apparently texted his driver.
 
Meanwhile, Grace looked up to find the man behind the register watching
her intently.
 
And then she realized
he wasn’t just watching her—he was filming her with his stupid phone.

“Excuse me, could you please stop filming
me?” she said.

He ignored her and continued recording
her on his phone, so Grace quickly left the store.
 
There were only a few reporters milling
nearby, and they hadn’t expected her to come out.

They were smoking and chatting amongst
themselves, and the moment Grace slipped out the door, she took off running
again.

She could hear them calling behind her,
but she once more ducked into a safe place—this time a local coffee shop.

Grace ordered a coffee.

Liam came back on the line.
 
“Fuck…” he muttered.

“What’s going on?” she said.

“Trying to hail a damn cab,” he
said.
 
“The limo driver told me he’s
no longer allowed to provide me transportation.
 
He wouldn’t give me any details, just
kept saying he was following orders.”
 
Liam laughed bitterly.

“Don’t stress out,” Grace said, knowing
he’d been drinking, and that he was likely to blow up if he got too
overwhelmed.

“I need to get in touch with my bank,”
Liam said.
 
“If they’ve frozen me
out of the hotel and the car, I have to think they’ve already gotten to my
other finances.”

“Shit,” she said, as she grabbed the hot
coffee from the counter where it had been placed for her.

She nodded and mouthed her thanks to the
barista before sitting down in the corner, as far from the windows of the café
as possible.

“I need to go,” Liam said.
 
“I’ll be over to you in a few
minutes.
 
We’ll talk more.”

“Be careful and don’t get too upset,” she
said.

“You keep telling me that,” Liam
said.
 
“I’m not sure you get how
deep this trouble is for me.
 
I’m in
danger of losing everything, Grace.”

“I know.
 
But I don’t want you to do anything
rash.”

“Like punch my brother in his twerpy
face?”

“Exactly like that,” she said.
 
“Stay calm, we’ll figure it out
together.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said, and then the
line went dead.

Not long after, Liam texted her from a
cab and asked her to come meet him outside of the café.
 
When she went out there, Liam opened the
door to the backseat of the taxi.
 
“Get in,” he told her, his eyes bloodshot and weary, his clothes
rumpled, his skin waxen and paler than usual.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, getting inside
and shutting the door.

“Where to now?” called the driver.

Liam gave Grace’s address and the driver
nodded and pulled into traffic.

“Why did you tell him to go to my
apartment?” Grace asked, turning towards him now.

He smiled.
 
“How do you feel about having a new
roommate?”

She stared at him, trying to figure out
if he was joking or not.
 
“Liam, you
can’t just move into my apartment.
 
I’ve got roommates already and they have a say in it.”

He grinned wider.
 
“Yeah, but who’s going to say no to
living with a hot stud like me?”

“Tell me what’s happening.”

His smile faded but he continued to act like
everything was fine.
 
“It’s what I
figured.
 
They cut me off.”

“So your accounts—“

“It’s all gone.
 
I’m dead broke with nowhere to
live.”
 
He said it like he was
describing a minor inconvenience, like he was saying he’d had a bad day at the
gym.

Grace felt like all the air had been
knocked out of her.
 
She sat heavily
back against the seat.
 

The taxi interior smelled like those air
fresheners, mixed with the scent of sweat and cologne. Exotic dance music
pounded from the speakers.

She thought about Vera’s threats and her belly
lurched.
 
“I feel sick to my
stomach,” she said.

Liam chuckled.
 
“I’m the one who lost everything and
you’re the one who feels sick.
 
That’s kind of ironic.”

“Maybe you’re in shock.”

He shook his head.
 
“No, baby.
 
I just don’t give a shit.
 
I feel free.”

She looked at him.
 
“So you’re not going to fight this?
 
You’re not going to find a good lawyer
like Easton and Red told you to do?”

Liam’s expression hardened.
 
“And pay them with what?
 
IOUs?
 
Promise them they can stay at my hotel
for free if we win the case?”
 
He
shook his head more firmly this time.
 
“Besides, I’m not interested in getting down in the mud with my brother
and sister.
 
If they want the
business and the money so badly, let them have it.
 
I never wanted that life, anyway.”

Grace wanted to feel the same sense of freedom,
but something didn’t sit well.
 
“I suppose,”
she murmured, without much enthusiasm.

Liam put his hand on her thigh and looked
at her directly.
 
“We’re going to be
fine, you and me.”

“I know,” she lied.
 
“I believe in you.
 
In us.”

“Look at the bright side,” Liam told
her.
 
“Now that I’m broke and cut
off from my family business and all of that, we can just be us.”

“That sounds great…”

“No, it
is
great.”

“But there’s the little problem of making
money to live and eat.”

He took both her hands in his and turned
his entire body towards her as the taxi rumbled towards their destination.

Liam’s eyes focused in on her and she
felt a ripple of love and fear and need as his touch and his gaze consumed her.

“We’ll make enough.
 
We’ll work normal jobs, and we’ll
be
normal.
 
I’d love nothing more than to just be
able to have a regular life with you, Grace.”

“You don’t know what it’s like to be
regular, Liam.
 
It’s hard.”

“I’m not as soft as you think,
Grace.
 
Give me a chance, huh?”

“Always,” she said, and then he was
leaning forward and they were kissing in the back of the taxicab, and she
didn’t care bout the weird music or the smell of the air freshener.

She didn’t care about anything but him.

***

It turned out that Grace’s roommates were
more than fine with Liam staying there temporarily, just as he’d so confidently
predicted.

Eliane simply demanded that Grace’s rent be
doubled to account for the extra person living with her.

Grace wasn’t sure the arrangement was
fair, and she was even less certain that they could afford the price increase,
now that Liam was dead broke.
 
Grace
had even had to pay for the cab ride.

Liam only had a few dollars in cash
because he was used to using credit.

Well, the credit cards no longer worked
and his bank accounts were all frozen.

“What can you do for money?” Grace asked
him later that night as they lay in her tiny bed together, the sound of traffic
loud outside the window.

Liam sighed.
 
“I don’t know.
 
Maybe I’ll see if I can pull some
strings and get a bartending gig or something.”

“You were in law school.
 
Could you do something in a law office?”

There was a long silence.
 
“I’m not doing that shit,” he said.

“But why not?”

“Because,” Liam told her.
 
“The one perk of being broke and
ostracized is that I don’t have to do shit I didn’t want to do, like be a
lawyer or work in a law office.”

“The one perk?” Grace asked, as she
stroked his bare chest with her fingertips.

He chuckled.
 
“You know what I mean,” he said.

“Sure I do,” she whispered, as she
allowed her fingers to stray down to his flat belly, and then even lower, where
his cock was already hard and excited.

“I mean that…that…”

She began stroking his shaft softly as
Liam spoke.
 
“Go on,” she said.
 
“What did you mean?”

“I’m sort of…losing track…” he said, as
she stroked a little faster.

Already, her palm was slick with his
excitement, and now she was getting slick between her legs.

“That’s what I figured,” she murmured,
and then her mouth was on his shaft, sucking, tasting, licking.

She loved the taste of his dick.
 

She loved the smoothness of it, the size
of it, the texture—everything about it.
 
She jerked him as she sucked and then
Liam was pulling her off.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Come here,” he grunted, and then dragged
her onto him, so that she was straddling his body.

Grace closed her eyes as she lowered
herself onto his rock hard prick, and felt it easily sliding up and inside of
her, filling her instantly.

She allowed her body to sink down onto
him, and then she began riding his dick.