Romance: Gibson's Legacy ( New Adult Contemporary Erotic Romance) (Last Score Book 1) (35 page)

Bending down between her thighs again, I licked her a few times to make sure she was wet enough to receive me, then cupped my palm over her pussy possessively and stared at her, fascinated that she was so receptive when she was relaxed.

Chloe’s eyes were gone. Drunk and filled with lust and a wanton look on her face, she was ready for me. “Chloe, holding you here…in the palm of my hand… it feels right. More right than anything I’ve ever felt in my life. Do you want me inside, Chloe?” Several expressions flitted over her face, fear, nervousness and she looked worried and swallowed hard, so I kissed her again to give her time to decide what came next.

“Yes I do.” She murmured around my lips in a breathy half whisper.

Breaking the kiss, I rolled away from her and hoped that Johnny had left some condoms in the nightstand. Thankful and relieved when I saw that he had, because the last thing I wanted to do was assume that she’d have unprotected sex with me.

Chloe’s reaction was fierce as she struggled to sit up. “How did you…?” She shuffled to the end of the bed, became extremely pissed and started to pull her bathing suit on again.

“Wait, Chloe. Fuck.
No
. It isn’t what you think.” Tears were rolling down her cheek as she pulled the bikini bottoms up over her ass and I was watching all our efforts at being together going to shit.

“No? You get me alone on a fucking boat, ply me with alcohol then take me to a cabin to seduce m -- and ohhhhhh you are so fucking good at that. Then you reach over to a drawer on a boat you’ve never been on, because this is supposed to be a spontaneous gesture, and there just happens to be a box of condoms in the drawer?”

Putting my hands up I stood naked on the plush cream carpet preparing to defend myself. “Chloe, Fuck, I knew the condoms were there because Johnny put them there. If you go to any of those rooms I bet there is a box in all of them. I have them in my glove compartment, my plane cabin, every hotel and dressing room I have ever been in. Johnny does it, I don’t ask him to it’s just what he does.”

Beginning to put her tank top on and flicking her hair back, she gave me a solid stare and that disgusted sneer that was locked in my mind from way back. “What? So that makes everything okay? You use protection?”

Chloe felt it was all planned, but it was just something that Johnny did. He’s convinced I’d die of syphilis or some other venereal disease, so I reasoned that it was Johnny’s way of protecting me, but she was livid and continued to pull her tank over her breasts, getting the wrong idea about that as well. Like I thought I should be applauded for wrapping my dick up before it got wet or that I might have caught something from her.

Slowly, I tried to reach out to take her by the arm. I had wanted to explain about the condoms but she flinched like she was seconds from being beaten. What the hell did she think I was? I was shocked and feeling completely misunderstood by her reaction. She was behaving like she was bipolar, upbeat one minute and freaking out or depressed the next.

“What the fuck? Will you stop doing that? The last thing I ever want to do is to hurt you. What the fuck has you doing that? You think I’ve ever had to take a girl by force? You think because I play in a rock band I don’t know how to be tender? For fuck sake Chloe, have I given you any cause to feel that?”

For second time in as many hours, Chloe had responded like I was someone to be afraid of. In fact it pissed me off so badly I called her on that because nothing I had done would have suggested I’d ever be anything but gentle with her.

When she started crying again , I got frustrated and knocked a bucket of ice I’d taken in with us to chill the champagne I’d taken in there, but hadn’t because my attention was on her.

Who knows we could have gotten t a little kinky with the ice as well, but I ended up using it to vent on, knocking it off the table and fuck if she hadn’t flinched again and cried all the more.

Cutting quite a pathetic picture, Chloe crouched down beside the bed and continued to cry without making a sound. That was when it dawned on me. All the full-on-full-off behavior-- Chloe had been subjected to some kind of abuse.

I found myself placating her and pointed to the bed before sitting on it. I was trying to be careful not to rock her fragile state any further, telling her that I would never harm her, that I was definitely not the kind of guy who found it cool to hit women. Reaching over, I picked up my swimmers and shucked myself into them before kneeling down a couple of feet in front of her.

Again, I tried to reassure her about me, then asked if I could hug her. All the while I was watching her, it became more apparent she’d been hurt badly by someone and that thought made me so fucking mad, but I had to contain it or else I’d frighten her again.

When Chloe didn’t answer me, I figured she was in shock because she was staring blankly at me and shivering, so I bunched the comforter in my fist and dragged it off the bed, wrapping it around her.

Pulling her gently against my chest on the floor, I began to rock her, speaking in a low even tone in my effort to soothe her. I told her I’d take care of her now and not to worry about anything.

We sat in silence, perhaps because I was so pissed; anything I had to say would have been unhelpful. My legs and back began to ache from the position we were in on the floor. “Darlin’, I’m just going to move you and cover you up you’re cold.” Once I had warned her of my intention, I moved slowly to my feet and helped her onto her feet, then lay her the bed.

Chloe was completely passive when I moved her but she lay as stiff as a board on the bed, before she curled up suddenly into a ball on the edge.

Desperate to protect her, I climbed on the bed and lay behind her, hugging her firmly, but not intimately. By the time I did this, I was shivering as well. The air conditioning in the cabin had made the air in the room cold, so I covered the both of us with the comforter and draped my arm over the comforter.

CHAPTER 34 – RECLAIMING

Gibson

“Tell me. Who the fuck did this to you?” I needed to know because I wanted to kill the bastard who took my sweet girl’s smile and her sunny disposition. I may never have spoken to her but she always had a smile on her lips then.

“You weren’t the only one watching back then, Chloe. You were definitely in my sights, but I’d never have come after you. I’m glad you were with someone then because I didn’t deserve to know you at that time and I’d have ruined trying to get to know you now.”

I wanted her to know that I wasn’t spinning her one of my famous chat up lines and that I really had noticed her and she wasn’t the only one with images in her head from our time at Beltz Bar. Although, all the images I had of her were mostly appropriate ones.

She surprised me by turning to face me, flatly saying, “Kace.” Pulling my head away from her to look at her, I waited for some recognition to kick in— did I know him? I was sure I didn’t. “Who’s he?” For the following hour she told me about her life since I’d last seen her and it left me feeling sick.

By the time she was done I made a mental note to speak to Johnny I wanted the fucker found and dealt with, but in a clever way. She was mine now and I was going to make sure that Kace stayed out of the picture.

When she mentioned Ruby, my heart sank because I still wasn’t sure about her. I couldn’t exactly ask her if I had fucked her but I was going to have to have Lennox do that for me, because she made me feel uncomfortable.

Also, if I had then it would suck to have to come clean to Chloe that her friend had been with me and not told her. Right at that moment, that was immaterial. My task was to make Chloe feel safe with me. So I stored it at the back of my mind to address at a later date.

“I got you, darlin’. Trust me, no one is ever going to harm you while I’m around. That bastard is a poor excuse for a man. Where is he now?” Chloe shook her head, then lowered it so that I couldn’t see her face, so I just held her close to me again and we both fell asleep.

Darkness bathed the room when I woke to the feel of Chloe pulling away from me. My hold around her waist immediately tightened and I was fully alert.

I would have liked to have laid there in the dark holding her, but I felt I should say something. “Hey. How are you feeling? I guess we both passed out.”

Sitting up, for me to see her, she faced me and I heard her swallow audibly. Chloe was sitting in the perfect position for me to see her by the light of the moon. She was sitting back on her heels on the bed facing me. Bright moonlight illuminated her small frame, but everything around her was dark.

Speaking softly, she apologized for her behavior around me, but I didn’t want to hear it. None of how she had been behaving was her fault. She was ashamed and blamed herself for some of her situation and I think that made me more pissed that she seemed to make excuses for how he got to the point of hitting her. He had done a real number on her. Chloe had become a victim in what sounded like a slowly progressive situation that took her self-worth.

It was my turn to apologize because had I known what she had been through, there is no way I’d have taken a chance to get her in front of me the way I had. I’d have done things very differently had I known all this then. I couldn’t conclude our conversation without asking her to give me a chance to know me.

“Why?” Chloe’s voice was small in the room, and the lull of the engine almost swallowed it up.

“What do you mean?” Why couldn’t she get that I thought she was amazing?

“Why me? What did I do that you are so fixated on me? Do you see me as a challenge?”

“Fuck no. I never saw you in that way. Besides, I wasn’t into challenges when there was so much pussy it didn’t matter if someone wasn’t into me. Hell if they weren’t, I never noticed anyway.” I looked sheepishly at my raw reaction and the way I’d explained it but I am what I am, so trying to dress it up would have given her less cause to trust me.

“Chloe, I noticed you because you weren’t the same. All those other girls in the room were. Dressed similar, pretty and flirty in the most obvious of ways.” I could see immediately she thought I thought she was plain.

“You weren’t pretty, Chloe. You were like a fucking distress flare in comparison to all of those girls. Completely unassuming, completely unaware of how you drew my eye and kept it on you. Those little tank tops you wore to work drove me wild. Without doing anything
you
had my attention.”

Chloe leaned forward and kissed my closed mouth. I was scared to touch her because even in the dark I could see she was trying to find a way back to a better emotional place than she had been for the past couple of hours apart from when she was asleep.

“Should we be getting back to the others?” When she asked that question my heart sank. It cemented the fact we were running out of time and I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

“Do you want to go back and find them?” The thought of her slipping away from me gave me such a feeling of dread. Inside I was screaming to hold her again. My body physically ached to keep her beside me, but I was trying to resign myself that our time alone was probably over.

Convincing myself I had to do whatever she needed because her past dictated that patience from me, I mentally prepared for us to leave when Chloe answered.

“No.”

Damn, she was so fucking frustrating with those one word answers.

“No?” It was my turn to ask her to express herself without pushing her in either direction, so I just mirrored her answer.

Chloe cleared her throat and sat upright, her body looking more confident with her new posture.

“No, Gibson. I don’t want to go back. I want to stay right here and finish what we started earlier. I’ve never taken a risk and always tried to do the right thing. This feels like the wrong thing-- to have sex with you… in my head I mean, but my body is telling me I’d be missing out on something pretty mind blowing. I’m hurting anyway, so if this is what I think it is, at least I’ll know what it is like for a man to really want my body.”

So, the Gibson legacy had reared its ugly head again and I was faced with a woman I’d wanted for years who was now willing, but had already decided, probably because of the condoms, I just wanted to screw her like all the rest.

Thinking I would cut my nose off to spite my face if I told her I wasn’t fucking her, I wasn’t stupid enough to go down that route. This was my chance to be able to show her that it was more than that between us, but there was no way I was going to be her consolation fuck either.

She frustrated me to no end, but at least there was a reason why she was behaving how she was. Fear and hurt were all there. Now that she’d told me about her past, it was written all over her. How she held herself, how she tried to be invisible, how she blended rather than shone these days.

“So that’s it? You want to have mindless sex with me, Chloe? For me to treat you like I treated all those other girls, you want me to fuck you like a rock star? You want me to throw you down on the floor and fuck you until you can’t see or walk straight and your pussy is aching sore for days, because I might like some rough sex? Is that what you want from me? Is that
all
that you want from me?”

Chloe climbed off the bed and went into the bathroom while I swung around and sat on the edge of the bed nearest the bathroom door, waiting for her to come back. I thought I had struggled to contain my temper around her comments about how having sex with me would be wrong for her. If we were going to progress, I needed to change tactics because we were just about at the end of the road.

Suddenly it dawned on me that she’d gone to make space between us. I’d scared her and now she was going to regress again. I was just about to get off of the bed to go after her when she walked back, wrapped in a towel.

“I believe the tub will be full now and you wanted to watch the stars. Are you coming?” Fuck, with the feelings I had when she said she wanted to be in the tub with me, I may well have been near to doing just that.