Beg for It (10 page)

“Don’t what?” she murmured.

“Don’t act like I’m the bad guy.”

She laughed without much humor. “I could hardly say that, could I? I mean, you’re practically a white knight, am I right? Riding in here on your charging steed to rescue us all? Save us?”

“I haven’t saved this company yet,” he said. “But I can. I will.”

“So, you think you just saved
me
?” The question slipped out of her, unbidden but brutally honest. She wanted…no, needed, to know.

His hands went flat on the desk as he leaned forward to look at her. His fingers curled on the smooth wooden surface. He took a breath, then another.

“You don’t have to worry about taking care of your kids now, do you?”

She swallowed a rush of emotion. “Is that what this is all about? Me and you?”

She watched the pulse throb in his throat. She got up and went around the desk to stand in front of him as he turned to face her. This close, she could smell his cologne.

“What are you wearing?” Corinne asked in a low voice.

His tongue swept along his lower lip, leaving it glistening. “Something by Armani. It’s called Code.”

“I like it,” she said.

Something glittered in his gaze. She should walk toward him, she thought. Or he should take those two steps to her.

Neither of them moved.

“I don’t like that cologne, whatever it is.” Corinne takes a long, deep breath of the skin of his throat, then bites. She holds his flesh between her teeth, teasing him with the idea she might actually take out a chunk, leave him bleeding. She knows she never would. She’s not sure Reese does, though.

He groans. That noise, guttural and helpless, makes her lose her fucking mind. It makes her want to hurt him and heal him all at the same time.

She releases his skin but can still taste him. “Don’t wear it again.”

“Yes, Ma’am.”

She puts a hand on his shoulder, pushing him down to his knees. Inches her skirt up to reveal the edges of her panties. Her boy moans again. When she buries her fingers in his hair, tangling them tight, pulling hard, he looks up at her with a dreamy, blurred gaze.

“Tell me what you want,” Corinne murmurs. Her voice sounds thick and sweet as syrup, dripping off her tongue.

Her boy smiles. “To make you happy.”

Her finger traces the line of his jaw. Her fingers curl lightly around his throat. She could choke him, but she doesn’t. Even so, he closes his eyes, still smiling, and leans almost imperceptibly into her embrace.

“Hurt me,” Reese whispers.

“Why did you buy this company, Reese?”

He didn’t look away from her. “Because it’s what I do.”

“It wasn’t to…” Her breath hitched. It was hard to swallow, her throat tight. Too much emotion. She took a step toward him. “To protect me? To take care of me?”

She was wrong; she saw that immediately in the twist of his lips and the way his gaze shuttered. He took two steps back from her, far enough to be certain there was no way she could reach and touch him. His look of utter disdain hit her like a stone through a glass window.

Shattered.

What had she really thought? That after all this time and all that had passed between them that any decision he ever made had anything to do with her at all? How could it?

Hadn’t she learned already that she wasn’t worth the effort of being cherished?

Hadn’t Reese been the one to teach her that very painful lesson?

She’d seen it at once written all over his face and could have gone the rest of her life without hearing him seal it with his words, but of course he said them anyway.

“I think you’ve got the wrong idea,” Reese told her. “I’m not your boy anymore.”

Chapter Eleven

Before

“He’s going out again, Mother.” This is what Reese’s father says while looking directly at his son. “Look at him. What are you wearing? Girls’ clothes?”

The hot pink skinny tie had been a gift from Corinne, true, but it’s still from the men’s section of the store. The soft cotton panties he’s wearing under his dark jeans, though—those are girls’ clothes for sure. His dad would have a heart attack if he knew his son was wearing panties. Reese is pretty sure that’s a big reason Corinne has asked him to. She’s never met his father, but she knows exactly how to push every single button Reese has.

“When you’re wearing my panties, it reminds you constantly that you’re mine,” she had told him two days ago as he knelt between her thighs to press his cheek to her skin. Her hands had stroked, stroked through his hair. He could smell her pussy, so close and yet denied him for the sole purpose of making him crazy with desire.

“I could never forget that I’m yours, Ma’am.”

She’d never asked him to call her that. It had slipped out of him the first time they were together, an automatic expression of polite address, and her reaction had been electric. He didn’t call her Ma’am all the time. Just when he wanted to watch her eyes grow dark with arousal and see her nipples grow tight. It was his version of her asking him to wear panties.

“Answer me,” his father says with a thump of big fists on the table, drawing Reese’s attention back to the present.

Reese shrugs. “I’m not wearing girls’ clothes, Dad.”

“You’re wearing makeup.”

“It’s just…a thing.” Reese shrugs.

“You look like a fairy.”

“I’m not wearing wings.” Reese grins, but his father doesn’t. There’d been plenty of times when Dad had been able to take a joke, but it seems more and more like he’s set on turning into a grumpy old man who never laughs at anything. “Dad, c’mon. It’s a pink tie and a little eyeliner. Not a big deal.”

“You’ll be out all night in that pink tie, doing what? Wasting your money and your time.”

“It’s fun, Dad. That’s all.” Reese tugs at the knot of the tie. “Here, I’ll take it off, if it offends you so much.”

When he shifts, he can feel the softness of the cotton riding up his ass crack. The panties are meant to fit Corinne, too small on him. She’s right about how they keep him constantly reminded of her.

“Never mind,” his father says. He shakes his head in disgust and waves a hand in Reese’s direction. Dismissing him. “Go out. Go waste your time and your money, come home with a sick belly. You already have the sick head.”

Reese had been backing out of the kitchen to avoid the tirade, but this stopped him, dead still. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

His father won’t look at him. He keeps his attention on the paper spread out on the table in front of him. The after-dinner cigarette smokes in the ashtray. Stinking. Reese’s father looks at what’s in front of him so he doesn’t have to see his only child.

“Dad.”

His father gives another of those dismissive waves, but Reese isn’t going to let him get away with it this time. He steps closer to the table, forcing himself into his father’s line of view until the old man looks up with a long sigh rooted so deep in his guts it seems to take forever to slip from his lips. Reese puts his hands on the table and leans forward, trying to catch his father’s eyes.

“What did you mean? Sick in the head?”

Finally, looking pained, his father raises his head. “Go. Just go. And if you’re going to stumble in with the stink of alcohol on your breath tomorrow morning instead of being ready to help with the milking, you might as well just stay out and not come home.”

“Are you kicking me out?”

“I’m sure,” his father says with a slightly curled lip, “that one of your
boyfriends
can give you a place to stay, if you need one.”

Reese doesn’t know what to say to this. A dozen responses rise to his tongue and are swallowed, making no sense. He can’t wrap his head around this accusation that feels like it must’ve been building inside his father for a long time.

“I have a
girlfriend
.”

“Sure, you do. That’s why you bring her around so much.”

Reese hasn’t brought Corinne around because she works nights, because his parents are old-fashioned and might not understand about her being a few years older, they would ask her embarrassing questions about if she goes to church and if she plans to marry him and push out babies. Even if Reese can’t imagine his life without Corinne as part of it, they aren’t anywhere close to that sort of relationship commitment yet. It’s occurred to him that she might not want to actually marry or raise a family with him. She’s never talked about it, never even hinted. In another couple of weeks, they’ll have been together for an entire year.

“I don’t bring her around because I’m afraid you’ll be rude to her.”

At this, his father looks up. His glasses have slipped down his nose. Tufts of hair burst from his ears, his nostrils. His eyebrows have grown immensely thick and gray. All of his dad’s hair has turned gray, and Reese discovers he can’t remember when that happened.

When’s the last time they went to the diner together for breakfast? Reese can’t remember. When’s the last time they did anything but snipe at each other? Reese can’t remember that, either.

He’s sure his dad’s going to say something so Reese can combat it. They can have a fight. It’ll be a little ugly, but Reese might be able to get some of the things off his chest that have been bothering him for a long time. His dad will yell and scold and accuse.

Instead, his father simply shrugs. His face holds no expression. Disappointment would’ve been easier to face than that utter lack of emotion.

All of Reese’s arguments dry up. He actually has nothing to say to the old man; that’s what he realizes as he straightens the knot on his tie. He can’t do much about the slide of cotton into his ass crack, but there, again, he is thinking of Corinne and what she does to him. And for him. How she makes him feel, as though he’s all full up and needs nothing more than to be with her, making her happy.

His dad wouldn’t understand, Reese thinks, watching his father ignore him. If Dad had ever wanted to make someone other than himself happy it had been a long, long time ago, and hell, it seems as though he’s even stopped trying to please himself.

Without another word, Reese stalks out of the kitchen and down the long country lane to the main road, where he finds Billy and Jonathan waiting for him. They’re going clubbing, and at the end of the night, they’ll drop him off at Triton’s Diner. Corinne will serve them all coffee and eggs and pancakes, but Reese is the only one she will take home.

Chapter Twelve

“There isn’t anything I can do about it, except maybe quit. And I’m not going to do that, not only so he doesn’t get the satisfaction, but of course because I’m not stupid enough to let what happened in the past ruin what I have going on now. I don’t want another job. I like the one I have.” Corinne mixed cake batter as she spoke to her sister, who was sitting at the breakfast bar allegedly looking up job prospects on her laptop. From the way Caitlyn occasionally giggled, Corinne suspected she was surfing Connex, instead.

Peyton had volunteered to bring in a dozen cupcakes for the bake sale. Typically, since the girl had spent the weekend with her dad and the new family, she’d been too busy with lots of other projects to remember that someone, somehow, needed to provide the treats. That left it up to Corinne, who hated baking, especially the last minute emergency aspect to it.

“Sprinkles,” Peyton said. “All different colors of sprinkles. But no coconut shavings, because coconut is the devil’s—”

Corinne watched in amusement as her daughter’s cheeks turned pink. “Uh-huh?”

“Dental floss!” Peyton burst into giggles.

“That’s not how that goes,” Caitlyn murmured.

The phrase was “coconut is the devil’s pubic hair,” uttered by Corinne any time she had to deal with the foul stuff, but now she laughed as hard as her kid was. “Dental floss. Right. Good one. Dental floss isn’t that gross, though.”

“Tyler must think it is. He never flosses his teeth.” Peyton made a face, wrinkling her nose and glancing into the living room where her brother was busy with some video game. “Or brushes them, either. And he pees on the seat, and he doesn’t flush… I wish I had my own bathroom here like I do at Dad’s.”

When she and Douglas had bought this house, it had been with the idea of settling for what they could afford without financially strapping themselves. Since at the time both kids were toddlers, neither she nor her ex-husband had looked ahead to the day when the sharing of their bathroom would lead to power struggles or other complications and cause so much domestic strife. Well, there were other things she’d need to change about this house before she could consider adding another bathroom. The kitchen, for one, with its outdated appliances and linoleum.

“Well,” Corinne said lightly, “I’m sorry that our house isn’t as big and nice as Dad’s new one, but I can talk to Tyler about being more considerate in the bathroom.”

Before Peyton could answer, the house phone jangled, catching them all off guard. The landline rarely rang, especially this late in the evening. It was almost bedtime.