DEBT (28 page)

My sex clenched as he held an arm out to me when I moved toward the bed. I moved to straddle him, his hand settling on my hip as I lifted up and he held his cock for me so I could slowly slide down onto it. He stretched me to the point of fullness, settling in deep and I leaned down and pressed my forehead to his on a sigh.

"So wet for me," he growled, voice low and sex-rough.

"Always," I whispered back, opening my eyes just in time to see something cross his face. I couldn't quite place it, but it was something deeper than I usually saw there. And, well, Byron was deep as the freaking ocean at any given time so that was really saying something.

But before I could decipher it, his hand went to my ass cheek, squeezing slightly. "Ride me, Prue," he reminded me gently.

Then, look gone, I had no choice but to follow instructions. I rode him slow and steady at first then wilder and erratic as I felt my orgasm build. "Lift up," he told me and I shifted my hips up slightly as he started thrusting upward into me, fast, unrelenting, not giving me even a couple of seconds to try to catch my breath between moans. "Come for me, babe," he growled, his voice barely audible and I knew he was close. I slammed my hips down as he thrust upward and I collapsed down on him on a choked cry as the pulsations built and spread outward until my entire body felt enveloped in the sensation.

I came down slowly, feeling him fill me with his release, realizing that it had never been like that before with anyone else. No other boyfriend, no matter how much I thought I loved them, how much of a connection we had, how good the sex was, I never felt like I got torn apart and put back together when they were inside me. I never felt quite so fully and completely present as I did with Byron.

He patted my thigh and I knew him well enough to know it was gentle encouragement for me to climb off. I grumbled, nuzzling into his neck deeper. "You have time," I objected, not sure how long we had been having sex, but pretty sure two hours hadn't passed since we'd checked-in.

"Unfortunately, I need some of that for travel," he said and did genuinely make it sound like he was as disappointed as I was.

"Oh, okay," I said, lifting off slowly then moving to the bathroom.

By the time I came back, Byron was dressed, looking completely put-together like he'd spent the whole day at his desk, not on a plane then having sex in a hotel room. My bathing suit was hanging from his fingers. "Put it on. Go down to the beach. Get a tan. Take a swim. Enjoy yourself a little, okay? I'll be back around seven." I took the suit, nodding, when I suddenly felt my chin snagged between his thumb and forefinger. "You gonna kiss me goodbye or what?" he asked, shocking me enough to make me jerk slightly. But he used his fingers to pull my face closer to him and our lips pressed together and the sweetness there was enough to make my lips greedy, wanting it to last forever. It ended far too soon and he ran a finger down my cheek. "Should get some interesting tan lines with this," he said, handing me my bathing suit.

With that, he was gone, leaving me to wonder what it meant that we were suddenly in 'goodbye kiss' territory.

But I threw on my suit and thought about that while getting silly tan lines on the beach.

That weekend was like a dream, all sepia-toned beautiful, blurred around the edges. Perfect. We ate together. We fell asleep and woke up together. We sat on a beach together. He might have copped a feel or two, making me squeal and look around frantically, making sure no one was watching, and we might have had wild, kinky, belt-wielding sex, but that didn't detract from the overall sweetness of it. He put his hand at my lower back. He held my hand.

The trip back to the airport wasn't wrought with the expected anxiety of the flight home, but an overwhelming sadness that it was over and the, maybe a bit presumptuous, but inescapable feeling that what we found was going to disappear as soon as we landed back in Jersey.

I leaned into his shoulder and his arm went around me as we lifted off.

He likely thought it was to ease the anxiety.

But, in reality, it was me trying to hold on just a little while longer.

SEVENTEEN

Byron

Something happened on the flight home. I couldn't tell you what it was, but something came over Prue that hadn't been there over the weekend, or perhaps at all since I had known her. Maybe just briefly, the night I forced her to confront her father. Sadness. It emanated from every pore, it seeped into the air around her until she had an aura of melancholy so thick you could choke on it.

Rack my brain as hard as I might, I couldn't figure out what the fuck I had done to warrant that reaction.

I had thought the trip had been a success. It had done what I had intended- gotten Prue out of the mindset of being indebted to me, working for me, of trying to find the balance between those things and whatever-the-fuck was happening between us. It didn't take a genius to see that Prue, like her very name suggested, thought every single little thing through. She weighed pros and cons. She considered all possible outcomes. It was a side effect of growing up in an uncertain household with no one truly solid to lean on. I understood that, having had shitty parents myself. And while I did the opposite of Prue, clinging to her father like it was all there was for her in the world, and left mine behind without a thought, I could see how it happened for her. She was softer, sweeter, while I was a little shit growing up, constantly getting into trouble, always pissing off my old man. I used rebellion to cope while she turned to enabling.

And from the minute I got her on that plane, shaking like a leaf and clinging to me like a life vest, to right before we walked out of the suite at the hotel, things had gone to plan. She had relaxed. The tension that was ever-present in her shoulders fell away. She didn't watch me like she expected something unexpected or bad to happen at any given moment. She laughed and smiled and she even teased me. I caught her when I came in from my meeting on the second day to find her dancing around the bedroom to a fucking Disney song blaring from her cell phone. It was the most at-ease I had ever seen her outside of post-sex exhausted snuggling. And even when she spun around and saw me, she didn't shrink back into herself like I had expected. She had frozen almost comically for a second, then burst out laughing and demanded I not judge her because, "Megara was the most under-appreciated Disney female of all time."

See, I was honest when I told Aaron she wasn't an obsession. I was also right when I told Prue that I had absolutely noticed her and considered her. But it hadn't gone beyond that.

It all changed when she walked into my office with her head raised, sounding as authoritative as her little frame would allow. I'd been prepared for a showdown with Mack. It had been a long time coming. I'd had Aaron talk to him once. I'd had one of my less scrupulous men corner him outside his car one night. He'd proved himself stubborn and utterly unafraid of consequences. My guess was because he was very rarely the one who had to deal with them. Then seeing him walk into my office with his daughter, she being the one to do all the talking, try to set up a payment plan, yeah, it just confirmed my suspicions.

See, when you worked in the business I did, it was an important skill to learn to size up people as quickly as possible. Mack, despite letting his daughter foot his bills, loved her. It was obvious in the way he spoke to me, in the way he looked at her. So I figured the best way to put a fire under his ass was to threaten what he held dearest. While the death threat wasn't wholly empty, it was truly a last resort. My uncle taught me the necessity of brute force once in a while. But it was a final option. It was something you did when someone threatened to bring your empire down. I didn't want to kill Mack. Hell, I actually almost liked the guy until he started stealing from me. He was a hard man to be angry with. I guessed that was why his daughter found it so easy to forgive him.

Taking Prue had been an on-the-spot decision. It had been impulsive. But as each minute passed after I did it, I was more and more satisfied by it. Maybe Mack was okay with his daughter paying his bills or bailing him out of jail or whatever the fuck she had done over the years, but I seriously doubted he'd be comfortable with having her enslaved to a man he knew enough about to fear.

And it had been the right choice in the end.

Not because it worked for Mack, but because it worked out for me.

Obviously that shit did nothing for him because he was back at my tables just a couple days later.

But I got Prue.

Granted at first, I was just enjoying pushing her around, pushing her buttons, seeing how far she would let me take it before she pushed back. Which was way too fucking far in my opinion. Any woman in her right mind would have told me to take a flying leap off a tall building over half the shit I pushed on her.

That night on the couch being a prime case and point. I'd wanted it. She'd wanted it. It was like fucking music to hear her come alive then come just by my hand. But the shit I said after? Yeah, she should have kicked off one of her heels and fucking chucked it at me. She didn't.

And, well, it became my mission to find that backbone of hers.

Then, close to her for reasons both sexual and personal, I got to see just how repressed she was, how much she denied herself for the sake of others, mostly just her father.

And it became another mission to get her out of her shell, to force her to live her life on her own terms for a change.

Why?

Yeah, that was the fucking question of the century.

I gave a shit. That was why.

But why I gave a shit? That was a mystery. I generally gave a shit enough about women to foot the bill for dinner and make them come before I even thought about coming. But that was about it. I had too fucking much going on in my life to let it go beyond that, a physical need getting met.

At first, I blamed her constant presence. She was always there. It was easy to think about her more than some random chick I saw at a bar. Her strutting around (or more accurately, stomping around) in the uniform I picked for her certainly didn't help. Because, at the beginning, of course that was all it was. She was beautiful, gorgeous in the way that she honestly had no fucking clue how attractive she was, all legs and hair and those light blue eyes, and a voice whose sound I swear went right to my dick. It wasn't long, though, before it became more than just that.

I didn't like Matt looking at her.

I didn't like the way she second-guessed herself.

I didn't like to see her wasted talent in the name of practicality.

Then, once I was inside her that first night in the cabana, yeah, she was mine. There was no other way to put it. She came alive for me. She sparked and exploded. And it was the most fucking incredible thing I'd ever seen in my life.

From there, it was like a virus, like something that worked its way through my system until there was no distinguishing it from what was there before, until it had fucking infected my DNA.

I made her bake for me. I boosted her confidence. Not that she should have needed it, seeing as she literally made the best desserts I had ever had, and, let's just say... I'd had a lot of fucking baked goods in my life. I had one of the girls in my office design business cards for her. I planned a party for the sole God damn purpose of exposing her to what was possible for her future.

Then, yeah, there was the play.

Don't get me wrong, there were plenty of women who were willing and eager to meddle in being submissive, to enjoy pain and pleasure. There were women who could only get off with a man being dominant with them. I'd had my share of those women over the years.

But doing it with Prue, someone so wholly new to it, or any kind of play at all, was something beyond amazing. For fuck's sake, she hadn't ever even had anal before. I was pretty sure I'd never met a woman closing in on her thirties who was as hot as she was, as in-demand as she must have been with men, who had never given that a try. But she hadn't. And everything had been new for her. But sex was the one place she didn't seem to be able to hold on to her guards, her insecurities, her practicality. She just let all that shit go.

So over the weeks of slowly slicing away the layers, seeing what was underneath, feeling myself slip into the spaces to ease the sting, I started to see it was different. She was different. I was different. We were different.

It wasn't that Prue was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. It wasn't that she was the smartest or the funniest or the most open sexually. It was the unique combination of shy and extroverted. It was her sharp tongue and her soft, uncertain words. It was her confidence marred with her insecurity. It was her unique set of skills. It was the way she said my name. It was the way she baked with Prince blaring and the way she championed for her ridiculous as fuck TV show. It was the way she snuggled in close when I hauled her against me. It was the way she always took a deep breath as she did so, like she was trying to breathe me in. It was the way she lifted her chin when she didn't like an instruction. It was in her practicality mixed with her impressive amount of silly. It was in the fierceness in which she loved her father, in her loyalty to him despite what he had put her through.