Underneath It All (The Walsh Series #1) (22 page)

I balanced my arms on the table, gesturing toward Nick with my glass. “By all means, what do you recommend?”

Nick’s pager beeped and he frowned at the readout. “Hang on.” He punched a few numbers into his phone and waited. The transformation from Nick to Doctor Acevedo always fascinated me, and I tried to decide whether I kept my personal and professional sides separate as seamlessly as Nick did. It probably wasn’t possible, not when my work was so intertwined with my family that I could barely tell where one started and the other ended.

“This is Doctor Acevedo.”

We had it easy compared to Nick. It probably didn’t seem that way, with our sixteen-hour days and working straight through most weekends, but architecture wasn’t life and death. We took our work seriously—sometimes too seriously—but it was a challenge we freely accepted. If we took a day off once in a while, we weren’t putting the lives of sick children on the line, and we needed to remember that.

“That’s early sepsis but I’m most concerned about this kid throwing a clot. Get the on-call pediatric resident, page the attending, and press broad-spectrum antibiotics. I’ll be there within the half hour. Get me an OR. Three or five, but not four, definitely not two.” Nick disconnected his call and pocketed his phone and pager before turning back to me. “As predicted.”

I stretched a hand across the table for a firm shake, and he slipped out of the booth.

“Something I learned about diagnoses,” he said, turning back toward me. “Unless you ask the right questions, you will always get the wrong answers. You missed something. Get in front of her. Couldn’t be any worse than crying into your beer.”

*

I gulped, propping
my hands on my hips and mentally picking through the passengers streaming through the jetway. This was the definition of a poorly conceived idea, and I was probably going to have my ass handed to me in the middle of the New Orleans airport by a little blonde hurricane.

That was assuming Lauren didn’t already see me waiting, and evade. She knew how to tap into that ninja sense when she needed it.

Finally, a crown of golden hair caught my eye. Head lowered, eyes glued to her phone, she was walking past me and would have kept going if I hadn’t put myself directly in her path. She bumped into my chest and braced herself on my arm.

“I’m sorry, didn’t look where I was…Matthew.” Her mouth quirked into a beautiful, stunned smile and she laughed. “You’re here.”

Her tote bag slid from her shoulder and tumbled to the ground, her phone falling on top of it, and she reached up to wrap her arms around my neck. She struggled without the ass-kicking heels, stretching up and pulling at me, drawing me down to her. Her lips were on me, and I reacted, pushing my tongue into her mouth, tasting her, drowning in her. She was commanding and impatient, and exactly how I wanted her. With my hands comfortably seated in her back pockets, I squeezed her ass, and she met my hungry growl with a laugh.

“What are you doing here? I mean, seriously, why are you here?” Her hands moved down my chest and under my shirt, fingers cool against my skin.

“I wanted to get a drink with you,” I said into her mouth.

Every kiss was frenetic, a bit too eager, a bit too aggressive, and our hands were everywhere, touching, pulling, holding. I couldn’t keep my mouth off her, not after the weirdness of the past two weeks. Not after the way she jumped into my arms and attacked me.

“Drinks? All this way…for
drinks
?” she said, shaking her head. She was breathing hard, her chest heaving against mine and her cheeks flushed. “Please tell me my building didn’t collapse or you found a tyrannosaurus skeleton or some other ridiculous thing.”

I rolled my eyes. This wasn’t the time to ask her if she was fucking me for architectural advice, and honestly, I couldn’t find a way to form those words without sounding like a self-important asshole.

“Would you shut up about your fucking building for a minute and let me kiss you?”

I backed her against the wall, yanking her up on her toes, kissing her like we were alone in this terminal and there was nothing else but her, and I felt wild. It was raw and demanding and urgent, and if it weren’t for that tiny, obnoxious corner of my brain and its incessant reminders not to rip her clothes off in an airport, I would have been inside her by now.

Lauren’s hand moved, sliding along my torso and past my navel, and her fingers dipped into my boxers. We looked down at the same time, staring at her fingers against my skin, her palm over my belt buckle, and the thick bulge of my erection as it pointed northeast.

“Yeah, I think I’d like some day drinking,” she said with a smirk.

LAUREN

O
kay, so the
fizzle out wasn’t happening.

It was probably better that way. Moderation, right? I was the queen of moderation; it was the only reason my ass wasn’t the size of a picnic table.

I leaned against the elevator wall and eyed Matthew. He was the last person I expected to see when my flight from Chicago landed, and I still couldn’t wrap my brain around him flying to New Orleans. He said he wanted to be with me, but there was something behind his eyes I couldn’t get past. “I see you haven’t gotten treatment for that creeping problem yet.”

“And why would I?”

He shot a glance at the group of woman alongside us in the elevator, and wrapped his arm around my waist, pulling me in for a quick kiss. It was nothing like the overwhelming moments we shared in the airport, or the borderline indecent ones in the cab, but it reminded me of the immediacy, the automaticity with which I responded to him.

Whether I liked it or not, my body knew Matthew, and knew what to do without my direction.

I tried suppressing a wide yawn when we stepped off the elevator, shielding my mouth to hide my exhaustion, but he noticed with raised eyebrows. Time zones were kicking my ass. That, and
American Horror Story
. “I’m tired. It’s a long, bizarre story. Or not so long, but definitely bizarre.”

Matthew grasped my hand at the threshold to the room, a sweeping view of the French Quarter stretching before us, and the muddy Mississippi in the distance. He didn’t have to tell me he upgraded the suite; there was no way in hell I reserved a room like this when I’d been staying in glorified shoeboxes the past two weeks.

He stood behind me, his arms wrapped around my torso. “Too tired for…drinks? We could just talk.”

I pivoted, shaking my head. Talking seemed far too complex right now. “Remember all those times you promised to bend me over your desk? Let’s work on a rendition of that.”

Walking through the double doors leading to the bedroom, I kicked off my shoes and stripped out of my clothes, and laid against the tall, four-poster king bed, my face to the fluffy down blankets. He edged my feet apart, and made room behind me. Not looking up from the bed, I heard the rustle of fabric and the metallic purr of his zipper, then I felt him, and that was all I needed to rouse that deep spiraling ache in my core. He was hard and hot, and rasping his stubbly chin over the most sensitive parts of my shoulders, and I was never comparing him to bread ever again.

His fingertips trailed up and down my spine, and then lower, over my ass, slipping inside me, and I knew I’d never been so wet. As much as I told myself I didn’t want this, my body wasn’t lying about what it wanted. “Miss Halsted,” he growled.

He pressed into me, his head sliding through my slit, and I was already there, the early tingles of orgasm crawling up the backs of my legs, around my ribs, through my scalp. His hand spread over my back, pushing me flat against the mattress, and when he finally filled me, we moaned, greedy and hungry and desperate for each other. We didn’t move for a long moment, and I savored the weight of him inside me.

“I think your pussy missed me.” He moved my hair to one side and kissed my neck. “I think it wants to come all over me right now.”

“Mmhmm,” I said. “It missed your cock and your fingers and your tongue.”

He grabbed my hands, stretching them out over my head, holding them in place, and brought his other hand to my clit. My teeth connected with the blankets, and I groaned against them, knowing I was seconds away from dissolving into a sloppy orgasm puddle.

Matthew started moving, sliding in and out at a leisurely pace while his fingers hovered near—never exactly on—my clit. I sensed him straining, his muscles pulled taut, his breaths coming fast, his control eroding with each measured stroke.

“Did
you
miss me?”

There was a method to his agonizing madness. As if he knew there was one place I couldn’t hide from him, one moment when I was wholly unfiltered, his thumb strummed my clit—just as I’d shown him—and I came, screaming, “Oh fuck, Matthew, yes, I’m never leaving you again.”

I was too busy shattering to care what I admitted, but I knew I wasn’t ready to absorb his reaction, and kept my eyes screwed shut and my face buried in the blankets.

“Good,” he growled. “I missed you too.”

He didn’t relent, the pressure low in my belly building again, and when his words turned into unintelligible pleas and demands, I whispered, “I want to feel you coming inside me.”

He pumped into me, his fingers steady on my clit while I exploded again, and then he came with a hoarse roar and his teeth on my back. I expected to find my limbs and vital organs in bits all over the room, obliterated by the force of my climax and the tension between us. We stayed there, panting, basking in the aftershocks, and I wanted this little moment to continue forever.

“Get under the covers,” Matthew said. He pulled out, and slapped my ass. “I’ll be right back.”

I climbed onto the mattress, groaning as my muscles relaxed into the marshmallow bedding. I needed to take notes and do some major redecoration at home. Rolling to my side, I smiled at Matthew’s beautiful face when he returned from the bathroom and joined me. So scrumptious.

He drew his finger down my arm, but didn’t smile back. “Be honest with me.”

I stopped admiring the pillowcases. That sounded cryptic.

“Since you’ve been traveling, the only thing you’ve wanted from me is news about your project. I want to know if that’s the only thing you’re getting out of this.”

My lips parted but no sound came out.

“I need to know why you’ve avoided me for two weeks. You don’t even acknowledge my texts most days, and I need to know if you’re over this, or I did something to piss you off.”

I couldn’t lie in our warm glowy bubble anymore. I brought the blankets to my chest and scrambled off the bed. “Did it escape your notice that I just had sex with you? Do you really think I would have done that if I was over it?”

“No, no, no, that’s not what I’m saying,” he said.

What did I get for being uninhibited with a hot architect? For doing things I’d never done, never dreamed of doing? For breaking all my rules about men and relationships and sex? All of it thrown back at me.

“Did you come here just to ask me that? And then what? You’re on the next flight to Boston?” He paused, glancing back and forth between the bed and me. “Or did you come here to fuck me and then tell me I’m a slutty, slutty whore?”

I searched for my clothes, still clutching the sheets, and refused to look at him when he walked across the suite and stepped into his boxers. He handed me his Cornell t-shirt, and I snatched it from his hands without a word, storming to the other side of the room. I couldn’t handle this swing, this violent shift from high to low, and I needed space to breathe.

“That’s not why I’m here, and that’s not what I was implying, and you know that. You know I’d never say anything like that, ever.”

“Really? How am I supposed to know that, Matthew?”

“I fucked up, and it came out all wrong.” Matthew rubbed the back of his neck and groaned. “I missed you like crazy, and you weren’t talking to me, and I didn’t know why.”

“It’s not about the goddamn project, Matthew! How about being busy? I tried to tell you I wouldn’t have time for—”

“I know all about busy, sweetness. That one’s not working on me.”

We gazed at each other across the room, and despite Matthew’s intensity, I refused to look away first. He continued staring into me as his long legs ate up the distance between us and his hands gripped my waist.

“Tell me what you want,” he begged.

I knew that request so well, but this time, the words weren’t there. When we were together with nothing but breaths and kisses between us, I understood—deep, in a tender place I couldn’t locate on a map—what we needed and wanted. I
knew
. But now, with him in his unbuttoned jeans and me in his t-shirt and daylight soaking the air around us, I couldn’t reach that place. “I don’t know.”

Matthew stared at me, nodding, and shifted his focus out the window. I stood there, pantless and vibrating with fury—maybe it was hurt or indignation or even whiplash—while his hands drew small circles on my hips and anchored me in place. I understood that his words came out in the wrong combinations, but the thought that I was getting naked with him for architectural work still crossed his mind more than once, and he let it.