“Peaches, your hip okay?”
My breath picked up, and I licked my lips, trying and failing to not clench my thighs together. With him so close, I was losing myself in his smell, in his eyes, in the way my breath seemed to sync up to his.
When his eyes locked on mine, they dilated, and I was pulled in. The Caribbean Sea now looked dark, stormy, ready to devour. His hands shifted, both under my shirt now, wrapping around the small of my waist, almost encircling me.
As he leaned in, I parted my lips.
The loud vibration and ring jerked me back to reality.
Jax swore and tried to hold my gaze. “Ignore it,” he commanded.
My body screamed at me to listen but I sidestepped.
He growled and pulled his phone out. “This better be good.”
Even the menace in his voice had my knees shaking and weak. I smoothed my hair back and tried to take in slow breaths, tried to calm the ache in me to have him again. I sat and shuffled the papers around, trying to forget what just happened.
I needed to remember who we were today rather than who we were years ago.
He eyed me while listening to his phone call and something in him seemed to snap. “I can’t talk about this right now. I hired you to handle it, so handle it.”
He ended the call and looked down at me. I just moved my textbook to the middle of the table and opened a few windows on my laptop. Clearing my throat, I said, “So, I already reviewed the lesson plan. The professor wants us to create an investment plan and track it for six weeks. I studied some stats, and I figure if—”
“Sweet Sin,” he harshly whispered, planting his hands on the table as if trying to steady himself.
I flinched because I knew what that name signified, what it meant, how much weight it held when he called me by it. “Jax, I wish you’d stop calling me that,” I sighed.
He exhaled, and then his intoxicating voice rumbled out, “When I get as close to you as I did a second ago and I’m tempted beyond reason, it’ll always be what I call you.”
To say I was embarrassed by the fact that I vibrated in my seat across from him just from his confession would be an understatement. I was embarrassed and so angry that I still wasn’t immune to him. I tried to roll my eyes and look uninterested, but I heard the snark in my voice when I replied, “Or what you call me and every other girl you bring up on stage.”
I admit, some sort of sick hope festered in me when I glanced up at him. I wanted to see some sort of guilt, some sort of remorse, or maybe even a sliver of regret.
The evil half-grin on his face didn’t show any shame though. “You want to talk about my Sweet Sin album and tour, I’m happy to, babe. Calling women on my tour ‘Sweet Sin’ is basically a damn memorial to you anyway. I named my album and my tour after you.”
“It’s a memorial to me when you call them a name you once called me and then make out with them in front of millions of people watching on TV?”
He had to be kidding.
“They obviously never meant anything.” He shrugged.
His nonchalance grated at every nerve that had been hurt every time I saw those concerts on TV. That sick feeling in the pit of my stomach intensified as I thought about it. “It meant a little something to me when my ex called other women a name he’d only used when he couldn’t resist me the night before he left. Not only did you use it with them, you used it the same way.”
He balked at that. “I didn’t use it the same way,” he almost growled. “It was a gimmick, good PR, and like I said, it’s a sort of memorial to us.”
“So, if the roles were reversed ...”
“What? If you called some guy L.P.?” He smiled. “I’d let them take that nickname any day.”
“If I called them L.P. and then started sucking their face, you’d be just fine with that?”
His gaze narrowed. “Aren’t you already doing that exclusively with Roman?” He sneered the name. “You want to talk about my album and tour? Why don’t we talk about you and him and what you’ve been doing for the last couple of years?”
My eyebrows raised because I knew he was trying to accuse me of something. “I have nothing to hide. If we’re going to talk about that, let’s just add in what happened when you left and why you still go to see the man everyone calls my father?”
An article in Rolling Stone had claimed the man who stood a foot away from me couldn’t be read, that his walls were so high they couldn’t be penetrated, and that he didn’t have a tell known to man. So, the music he wrote was even more unique, giving people a window into the mind of a man so calculated and so elusive the world would never really know what he was thinking.
They called him cold and unconquerable.