Chapter Twenty Five
Ilaywithmy eyes closed, flat on my stomach with my head resting on his pillow, blissfully enjoying the foreign feeling of lying naked and sated in someone else’s bed - along with enjoying the company of the man I was stupidly starting to fall for.
The moonlight glistened across the dark hardwood floor, the only source of light available in the master bedroom of Jake’s penthouse. Why was it that all single CEOs lived in penthouse suites?
I let out a soft laugh into the pillow at the thought and felt the mattress dip slightly at my side. The silk bed sheet that had been wrapped around my shoulder blades was pulled down and draped loosely across my waist.
Jake slowly began to draw patterns across my back, joining the many scars I’d acquired like some twisted dot-to-dot. Thankfully, the little light surrounding us didn’t show the full extent of my past.
Small mercies.
Propping his head in his hand, he repeated the same pattern, drawing invisible lines across my skin.
“How did you get this?” he asked, tracing the small, raised circle just right of my spine.
“I got a mole removed,” I murmured sleepily in response as his fingers moved onto the next mark marring my skin. Goosebumps chased across my flesh as they followed his movements.
For the most part, I couldn’t remember the backstories of my scars after years of abuse in my childhood merged with injuries obtained on the job, blending them into one.
Some were an easy answer: oh my dad was drunk and used my back to snub out a cigarette, or my dad held my arm under scalding hot water for who knows what reason, or some fuckwit I had been paid to kill managed to superficially stab me when I first started this career path, but don’t worry I put that fucker’s knife right through his eyeball, so who got off worse?
But that one had truly been a questionable mole I got removed in my early twenties and it was about the only one of hundreds that I could answer honestly without lying about who I am. I may want to tell him my deepest and darkest secrets for a reason unbeknownst to me, but realistically I couldn’t - not without killing him. Can’t tell someone’s secrets if you’re dead.
“And this?” he asked, pressing his lips against the first scar that started my collection, leaving tiny kisses in the surrounding area. It was no bigger than fifteen centimetres and hurt like a bitch at the time. I reached around and felt a thin line running parallel to my hip bone.
“We were just kids. Chris and I were playing, and I fell down the stairs into a console table, smashing a vase. I lost my balance and landed on the glass. My father wasn’t happy I broke his vase, so didn’t take me to get stitches as punishment.”
A lie.
Not the part about the stitches, but everything else.
My internal struggle with the undeniable need to tell him the true meaning behind that scar - all my scars – caused a knotting sensation to build in the pit of my stomach. Lying came as natural as breathing, but my lies to Jake started to taste like poison on my tongue.
I swallowed hard, pushing the guilt aside, and thought back to when Chris was six and I was ten. She had gotten a nosebleed, dripping small dots of crimson blood on an obscenely expensive white Persian rug that was at the entrance to our house, bought by my mother in one of the years before she left us.
I pushed Chris into the downstairs bathroom, quickly smeared her blood under my nose and stood over the bloodstain, knowing I could withstand any punishment doled out by our dad. He was like a bloodhound; always sensing disobedience, perhaps one of the only things he was truly good at, and was out of his office, towering over me before I could blink. He had wrapped my pigtails around his hand, and cracked my head off a marble table hard enough that it did cause a glass vase to smash. But instead of falling, he threw me to the ground and a long thick shard pierced through my woollen school jumper and into my back.
Ironically, the mess he made of that rug with my blood completely hid the few drops caused by Chris.
One concussion and two scars later - the second on my head thankfully hidden by my hair - I woke up in my bedroom days after the incident. No one but Alex, Mac, and Chris knew the truth. I had to miss school for a week, until the bruises on my face had disappeared.
“Chris?” Jake questioned, pulling me out of my head and was still peppering my skin with kisses like he was trying to heal my past. I kept my eyes closed, enjoying the softness of his touch.
“My baby sister. Christina,” I whispered, opening my eyes and watching the flex of his muscles as he moved his arm.
“What’s with the masculine nicknames?” he murmured, releasing a small laugh that tickled my skin as his lips trailed upwards toward the back of my neck.
“My dad always wanted boys. Unfortunately for him, two girls were what he got, so our names were chosen to allow him to shorten it to something more manly. He wasn’t a nice man, but I refuse for that moniker to have power over me. I love my name and Chris loves hers too, and it kind of symbolises everything we have overcome. I own my name with honour. It’s my full name that I hate.” I twisted to face him, looking into his shadowed face, and even in the dimness of the moon, I could see the intensity of his blue eyes as they assessed me.
“Why?” his hand snaked around my waist, pulling my naked body closer to his. He continued to ghost the tips of his fingers up my spine as his eyes bore into mine. I’d had enough of looking in that locked box and exploring what I’d done so well to shut away, but the words were on the tip of my tongue, and I wanted, no needed, to tell him. He told me about his brother, so it was only fair I told him about my sister.
But trusting people didn’t come easily to me. Letting people see the real me didn’t feel natural. But nothing about this assignment felt natural and Jake had seen the real me right from our first encounter, hadn’t he?
“Our mom chose our full names. The only thing we had to remember her by when she left us with that man.” I blinked, realising that was the first time I had ever voiced that. And once I’d started, the word vomit kept coming. “She was meant to protect us; hell, our father was meant to protect us. But neither of them did. Neither of them helped Chris when she needed them to be her parents and love her the most. She was still a child, for fuck’s sake, and they let her down. They didn’t keep him away from her as a good parent should, and I had no idea until it was too late.”
I hadn’t realised I was shaking until Jake pulled me tighter against his body, wrapping his solid arms around me and gently cupping the back of my head, settling me into the groove between his shoulder and his neck. My hair stuck to my tear-stricken face, as the floodgates decided to join in the time for sharing.
Fuck, I was a mess.
I sobbed into Jake’s shoulder while he held me, letting me exorcise my demons in his bed and in his arms.
Pain radiated through every cell in my body. Pain I didn’t know I had harboured for years by admitting something I never shared with anyone. Not Alex or Mac, and certainly never Chris. Pain was what I shielded her from. I took it away from her when she needed me to the most. And right now, here with Jake, I was more vulnerable than I’d been in my lifetime, protectively held in the arms of a man who was supposed to be a target, and it felt good for him to hold me as I fell apart. It felt cathartic, and for once, I welcomed the protection as Jake smoothed me.
Slowly, my tears stopped, and I dislodged my face from Jake’s hold. I pushed my wet hair out of my face and took a deep, shuddering breath.
“Shit. I’m sorry,” I whispered, heat filling my face at the state I had gotten myself in. “I guess I’ve never let myself cry over that. This is sorta awkward.”
Jake slid his hands into my hair, cradling my head as he kissed over my tears, tasting my pain in the form of salty splashes. I swallowed thickly and my shoulders stiffened. I wanted to push him off, embarrassed at my weakness, but his lips were blazing a new sense of freedom as he kissed my tears clean off my cheeks. Every brush of his soft lips burned, but I didn’t fight his fire. I wanted to be consumed by it.
“Your family are fucking assholes,” he whispered against my face.
“You have no idea,” I murmured with a weak laugh, wrapping my hand around the back of his neck and pulling him closer so our mouths touched, allowing me to taste my tears too. I tilted my head to deepen the kiss, my tongue pushing into his mouth to finally tangle with his.
Jake gently pushed me onto my back, his hard erection pressing against my bare thigh. He ran a large hand across my collarbone and wrapped it around the front of my throat, applying the slightest amount of pressure. Warmth slid its way down my body and pooled between my legs as my lips parted in a gasp.
“I never realised how incredibly strong you are, Stefany,” he said, his fingers brushing over my hammering pulse point. His head dipped down to kiss the swell of my breast and lick over a hardened nipple. As if I couldn’t sound more pathetic after my sob fest a soft whimper sounded as his warm breath swept across my chest to the other breast and held my nipple between his teeth, pulling on the taut peak, then taking it into his mouth and sucking hard. The sharp pinch had me arching my back, pushing my breasts further into his mouth.
He let go to continue his way down my chest, lightly brushing his lips over my stomach, past my belly button and down to my hips, my skin rippling with bumps at his every touch. I let my eyes drift shut as he continued his descent toward my pussy.
“I don’t think I noticed this the last time I was here,” he said, running a thumb along a small tattoo of a heart with big sis in italics sketched below my hip bone. It was hidden beneath my underwear where no one could see it unless I let them. Chris had the matching ′little sis’ on her skin, as if we couldn’t get more unoriginal if we tried.
“I thought you were very observant, Mr. Weston?” I asked breathlessly, shifting my hips in his hands as my body begged for him to move lower.
“Your sister has the same?” he asked, his warm breath ghosting over my skin. I nodded and shamelessly opened my legs wider in frustration. I didn’t want to talk about a tattoo – I didn’t want to talk at all. I needed him to put his mouth to better use. My body ached for him to touch me as if he hadn’t had his hands all over me barely two hours ago. I ached for him to use his tongue on me to bring me to ruin again and again.
Jake sat back on his heels and ran a hand down the bicep with the lion.
“I know a little about wanting to have something forever binding you to those you’ve lost.” My eyes roamed his ink and the way the moonlight hit the defined muscles of his toned stomach flex as he shifted to slowly align our bodies. “I’ve never met anyone like you, Stefany.” I looked into his darkened eyes, not seeing that look of desire I had become accustomed to this evening, but rather something like regret.
I blinked and furrowed my brow. What did he have to regret? If anyone should have regrets, it would have to be me. This was wrong and went against everything in my code. But being in Jake’s arms like this, didn’t feel wrong.
He kissed my wrinkled brow line. “I don’t mean that in a bad way. I’ve just never had to work so hard with someone to see the real them.”
“The real me?”
“You’re just so…” He paused to think, and then it was his turn to frown as he chose his next words. “You are so confident and unbreakable in your daily life, but when you get through that shell, you’re just the same as everyone else.” A million questions were on the tip of my tongue when he continued, “You just want someone you can rely on. Someone to be your person.”
I had my person, or rather people; Alex, Mac, and on occasion, when he wasn’t being a massive ass wipe, Will. And I learnt long ago, that you couldn’t rely on anyone. Not really.
“You don’t trust anyone, do you, Stefany?”
“No.”
“I could be that person if you just let me in. You can trust me to protect you, Stefany,” he said, his face hard and unyielding as he asked me to put blind faith in him. I couldn’t, though. Once broken, trust was a hard thing to restore.
“Jake, I–” I paused, my throat clogged with the words I was unable to say that he wanted to hear. “I need you inside me,” I whispered, reaching up to run my fingers over his short stubble beard combo.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, gripping my hip tight. I hooked a leg over his hip and rubbed myself against his erection so he could feel my arousal. He lowered his head with a laugh, then looked at me with a smile that showed his perfectly white teeth, a gesture that softened his features and gave him an almost boyish charm sort of look. Like no one could refuse him when he gave them that smile, and I had found I wanted to give him everything.
Well, almost everything.
“Okay, then.” He reached over to the nightstand and pulled off another condom from a different strip. He rolled it down onto his cock and my mouth watered. I so badly wanted to touch him, to taste him, but somehow, I knew he wouldn’t let me do it this time either.
Questions around the reasons why he may not want someone, or maybe it was just me, touching him, were quickly forgotten when he trailed open-mouthed kisses on my neck. He ran his hands up the side of my body, my stomach fluttering as his fingertips lightly caressed the side of my boobs. They rested against the side of my head, stroking through my damp hair that had gotten wet from my tears.
This time, when he pushed inside me, everything was different. He was tentative and gentle, as if he was trying to show me what it would be like if I let him love me. There was no urgency like before, no nipping or biting of skin or dirty words. His kisses were soft against my jaw, my neck, then my shoulder. Sparks ignited every inch of my body, right to the tips of my fingers, as he gripped my shin and rested my ankle on his shoulder.
My back arched, and I cried out at the new depth he reached. He looked down, watching the way his rock-hard cock disappeared inside me with every downward thrust. A loose curl of his hair bounced on his forehead with his movements, small beads of sweat trailing down his jaw as he was deliberately gentle with his movements. Such a simple act buried its way into my stone heart.
This was too intense, and I was feeling too much that I needed to feel his body completely cover my own. I threaded my hand into the hair at the bottom of his neck and whispered his name. Our eyes meet and he dropped my leg from his shoulder, running his hands down my thighs and guiding them around his hips to pull him as close to my body as I could get him.
He rotated his hips in deep, languid rocks and brought his lips to mine. In that kiss, I felt his every emotion mirroring my own.
Breaking the kiss, he rested his forehead against my own, his warm breath ghosting down my cheeks with each exhale in time with his thrusts. He reached between us and slid a hand down, rubbing circles against the sensitive bundle of nerves. His breathing was getting ragged, his thrusts more powerful and with purpose, in a tell-tale sign he was getting close but wanted me to be there with him.
His circles against my clit became stronger and pleasure started at my toes and worked its way up my body in a wave of bliss. My orgasm came at the same time as I felt him pulse inside me, groaning my name into my hair and holding me tight.
I felt him smile against my neck and place a small kiss behind my ear before I drifted off, wrapped up in his arms.