Sweat Equity (3 page)

"Jack," she muttered as he pushed her back against the pillows and made his way down her body with his lips.

"Shh," he dipped his tongue into her navel, went lower, and nuzzled the small bit of hair covering her sex. His cock twitched, leaked, ached for the now-familiar connection with her. His brain engaged long enough to acknowledge he'd meet her damn father, suck up properly, and let the guy pay for some of the ceremony. He couldn't lose this woman. He smiled against her pussy as he sucked the hard nub of her clit into his mouth, before plunging two fingers inside her, brushing that magic spot, sending her over the edge. Her juices coated his face and fingers and he licked his way back up, giving each nipple a suck, rubbing the thick head of his cock against her now creamy center.

"Look at me," she whispered. He did, caught off guard by the depth of emotion he found in her gaze. "I love you Jack. I truly do. But, I'm afraid. I'm…oh. God."

Jack let his body speak for him, pressing in, filling her, groaning at the amazing tight glove of her body which enveloped him, milked him, as he eased in and out. She put her hands to his face. As always, the deeper connection he felt with her roared over him, deafening him with urgency and no small amount of fear at letting go. He dove into her body, pressing against her clit, using his hips with small thrusts to drive even deeper. They hadn't used condoms since the New Year's trip and the whole barebacked thing was, in a word, glorious, although they played with fire, and he knew it.

"Tell me." Her voice was low, rasping, and sexy. "Tell me Jack."

"Ah God, Sara," he ground out, as her orgasm gripped his cock, tightening and pulling him over the edge. "I, I love you, oh Christ. Yes!" He pounded hard, felt his world burst into a thousand pieces behind his eyes as his cock jerked and filled her. She cried out with him, and held on, arms and legs wrapped around his body, bringing him utter and complete happiness.

Sara smiled at the man next to her. He'd taken her world and yanked it into his orbit so hard and fast her head still spun some days. God help her she did love him. She put a hand on his sweat-slicked chest, and draped a leg over his. The smell of sex permeated the bedroom. She propped up on her elbow and touched his check.

"Hmm?" his sleepy voice reminded her how much they both needed more shut eye having passed out rather than actually rested last night. He pulled her close. "I'm sorry," he muttered into her hair. "It's just." She nodded into his shoulder. "Shit week, you know. All this wedding talk is not my thing or something. I don't know. I do know I don't deserve you."

"Yeah, that is true. Look, we still have dinner with my parents tonight. My dad is a know-it-all doctor. I dread having the two of you in the same room, frankly, but we have to do it. They're my family and they want to meet you."

She felt him tense beneath her.

"That's fine. I'll be on my best behavior. But I don't want him paying for any of this," he swept a hand towards the small table where she'd piled up magazines and spreadsheets of wedding planning paraphernalia. "I'm doing it. You're grown, not some little girl needing daddy's money anymore."

She bit her lip. "If he wants to I'm not going to stop him. It's his prerogative. Can't you just go with it?" She sat up, swung her legs to the floor.

Dear God he was so unbelievably stubborn!

He sang the same song, different verse, every time. They'd fight, he'd make up by making love to her. She'd let him. They wouldn't talk about it. Again.

Sighing she stood, stretched her sated and tingling body, her mind back on the massive list of shit to do today. Glancing over her shoulder, she allowed herself a long look at the man who would be her husband. His six-foot five-inch frame firm, legs and arms covered with a light dusting of black hair; torso mostly bare, but for a line of jet-black hair beneath his navel leading down to the part of his body that he had, apparently, shared with so many. Her eyes trailed up, to his firm, square jaw, in need of a shave. Her palm itched to reach out, feel the sandpapery rasp of it, keeping him real.

Mine.

How completely unreal this still seemed, even now after he'd given her yet another mind-boggling set of back-to-back orgasms. That should've been solid evidence he was there, with her, "hers" even. But he wasn't. That small voice in her head, the "Old Sara," with its nagging and worry, poked her psyche once again.
You're too alike. It will never work.
Jack's eyes opened, at the sound of his own light snore. His sleepy grin made her smile in spite of her heavy heart.

She was no sap. Her own parent's relationship had made her a cynic to the extreme when it came to men. She knew it. She fully acknowledged her own emotional constipation. Yet, she let the man who currently held her heart in his large, talented hands tug her down onto the bed, into the circle of his arms. His skin, smell, and feel eased her as always. She closed her eyes, just for a few minutes.

Chapter
Two

"Why in the hell did you leave it here?" Sara bounded up the steps to Jack's bedroom, having yet to acknowledge as "hers." She yanked his suitcase out of the closet where he'd placed it after his Vegas trip to the National Association of Realtors convention. She still smarted from that week but set her jaw, determined not to bitch or whine about it another minute. The extreme tidiness of Jack's space…
no, her space now
…made the small voice of self-doubt speak a little louder, yet again. She tossed the small black suitcase up on the bed and unzipped it.

"Do you see it? I must have tucked it in the front pocket. At the top." His voice was tight, tense. She frowned as she fished around in the pocket. When her fingertips touched something, she grabbed hold and pulled it out without thinking.

"Yeah, I found…" she stared at foil squares containing condoms held in her hand. "Holy shit."

"What?" She heard voices, and remembered he had a final meeting with the city council today. "Sara, did you find it?" Her ears buzzed as she reached back into the recesses of the case and found his driver's license.

"Yes." She sat, and let the room narrow as her heart pounded so loud she was ready to make a 911 call for herself.

"Thank God. I've been scrambling around for it all morning. Sorry babe. Thanks for going back to the house for it."

She let him talk as she stared hard at the evidence of her humiliation. Gripped them, letting their crinkly noise fill her ears and cover the building hum of fury. She couldn't form words.

"Sara? Baby? You there?"

"Yeah. I'll put it on the kitchen counter. I'll be late tonight. Meeting Blake for dinner." She quickly made up plans, knowing if she said anything more it would come out in a primal scream of sheer outrage. "Bye." She let the handful of incriminating latex slip from her hands and hit the floor as tears blinded her vision.

Since getting engaged last fall, she hadn't gone more than twenty-four hours without talking to him, either by phone or by text, when they were apart. The level of control he wanted over her, the connection they shared since first meeting nearly a year ago, demanded it somehow. When he'd disappeared onto that plane for the convention in Las Vegas, it had felt as if he'd gone into a black hole.

The five days of "radio silence" had made her insane, first with anger, then fear, and then had circled back to bright red indignation by the time he got home. She'd stayed at his house for the first two nights, and then decamped back to her own neglected condo, unwilling to talk to anyone, not even her brother who'd banged on her door after she had ignored his calls for an entire day.

It had given her a glimpse into her future and she had zero desire to live through anything like it again. She knew should trust him. He'd told her many times, she could. The complete silence from him as he "worked" in a place she knew he'd be sorely tempted on many levels had built in her until she'd nearly exploded from the stress. Then he'd arrived, fresh faced, only slightly reeking of old booze and cigars, and she'd welcomed him home, relieved beyond measure to see him again. And now…

She stared at the phone that had started buzzing in her other hand. Blake. She wiped her eyes and answered it. "Hey. Can you meet me for dinner? I need," She stopped, unwilling to give anything away as her voice broke.

"Sure. What time?"

Relieved beyond words that he didn't ask what was wrong, she blurted out without thinking. "What the hell is wrong with me?"

"Nothing that I know of, other than a serious bout of poor judgment lately. But that's an argument I know I'll lose." He kept his voice easy, light, but she knew he'd picked up on her unhappiness. She bit her lip. "So…what time?"

The pub buzzed with activity by the time she walked in, her mind for a change. She'd used the entire busy day avoiding Jack's calls and texts and had reached the conclusion that she'd overreacted.

Who knew how long those condoms had been in there anyway?

She smiled when she spotted Blake's face behind the bar as he flirted with the many women sipping beer and giving him their full attention. Pocketing her phone, after reminding her fiancé that she had plans for the evening with her brother, she watched as Rob exited the kitchen, tension etched onto his handsome face.

"Blake!" Her brother glanced up from his extreme attention to a couple of very attractive women and frowned at his partner. "An alarm is going off in the brewery. Can you please handle it?"

Sara narrowed her eyes at the look of frustration Rob shot him. "I'll be right back," Blake patted her hand as he passed. She sipped the beer the bartender put in front of her, observing the two men and the palpable tension between them as they made their way back into the recesses of the huge building behind the restaurant. Within twenty minutes, her brother was back and perched on a barstool next to her, his green eyes clouded with something Sara realized was likely reflected in hers. She sighed and put an arm around him, kissed his rough cheek.

"We are quite the pair, aren't we?"

"Don't know what you're talking about." He kept glancing to the kitchen door, but it remained devoid of the tall, broad, blond man Sara knew he wanted to see. "So, what's the issue?"

"Oh, it's nothing, really." She picked at the salad she'd ordered, suddenly afraid to admit what she'd found or that she was willing to let it go. Her eyes felt hot, tired, and she glanced over at him. Blake stared hard at her.

"What the fuck has he done now?"

"I found condoms in his suitcase. The one he took to Vegas. The week he…"

"The week he m
ade you
a basket-
case by not
calling and talking
to you at all
. Huh. Imagine."

Anger flared in her chest. Her sudden desire to defend Jack nearly made her as mad as Blake's asshole-ish reaction to her dilemma. "Never mind." She sipped her beer and studiously ignored him.

"You're really willing to live like this Sara?" Blake kept his voice low but she sensed his tension mount as Rob made his way from the kitchen and took up a spot behind the bar, picking up the flirtation where Blake had left off with the gaggle of women at the other end. "I mean, did you and I not live through this sort of shit already?"

"What are you talking about?" But she knew exactly what he meant. Her face flushed and her ears started buzzing again.

She flinched when Blake put an arm around her shoulders. "I'm sorry." He sighed and kissed her hair. "I don't mean to point out the obvious." Wiping at her eyes before the tears could flow, she shrugged him off.

"Forget it. I'm sure it's…" She slumped; her earlier resolution, to let her anger at Jack go, to accept what was no doubt a perfectly decent explanation about his using the suitcase during an earlier trip, one he took before committing to her, faded. She had to believe that. It was that or drive herself completely insane thinking up all of the other reasons for him to have the stupid things.

"Don't make me say it Sara."

"Say what?" She pushed her half-eaten food away and propped her chin on her hands. Rob made his way down to them, leaned over the bar and brushed her cheek with a light kiss.

Blake ignored him. "That the guy is exactly like our father."

She closed her eyes. That concept had swirled in her head for weeks and since the utterly dreadful dinner she'd endured, when her high-powered fiancé had finally met her aging Alpha-male father, had become a clanging gong of fear.

"Blake," Rob's voice stayed soft but Sara heard the firm command of it. "I don't think…"

Blake's face reddened, and he startled her with his vehement response to his lover. "You don't know. That's the problem here. She's my sister. I don't care how long you've known the guy. He is not your family. You don't owe him anything."

Sara put her hand on Blake's leg, alarmed at the waves of unhappiness rolling off him towards the man she knew he loved. He glared at it, so she took it back. "Stay the fuck out of it," he ground out making Rob blink once, then walk away without a word.

"Jesus, honey. That was a little harsh." She stammered. She'd never seen them like this before. "What is going on with…?"

"
You
stay the fuck out of that, too." He kept his gaze trained down at the bar, then looked up at her, the bright green of his eyes shimmering with emotion. "I mean it."