Sugar Rush (9 page)

Eyes connected to me.

Slam.

Back into me again.

His actions are leisurely, his gaze is tender, and his cock is dominating.

It's exactly what I needed to assure me that Beck doesn't see me as a victim. His mouth between my legs and his declaration of possession was what I needed for Beck to assure me I was still as beautiful to him as ever, despite the perverted things done to my body ten years ago.

Beck continues to pull out slowly, ram back into me with bruising reclamation. His pace picks up only slightly, but his fucking of me is deliberately possessive. His actions speak to me loudly, and as he pushes me closer and closer to another orgasm, I feel my heart becoming more and more enslaved to him.

We'll work this out…whatever needs to be done about JT.

But that's a side issue right now.

What's more important is what we have between us, and I vow that's where I'm going to put my attention from this moment forward.

I lean my elbow on the kitchen island counter, the fingers on my other hand moving over the track pad on my laptop to pull up my calendar.

“Move Thursday's ideation session to week after next,” I tell Linda, who is listening in via my phone lying on the counter in speaker mode. “Cancel tomorrow's meeting with JT and just ask him to email me the proposed business and marketing plans. We don't need a meeting for that.”

“Got it,” she says over the speaker. “What about the second round reviews of the video component? Programming is slated to begin changes on Monday.”

“I'll work on those remotely,” I tell her.

Hopefully, remotely means far, far away from here if I can convince Sela to be impulsive with me.

“Anything else?” Her tone is sharp and brisk. She's in full executive secretary mode.

“Yeah,” I say as a thought strikes me. “Why don't you take the rest of the week off too.”

“Just because you won't be in the office doesn't mean there's not work to do,” she chides me.

“Yeah, well, I say you can ignore the work and take the time off,” I counter.

“We'll see,” is all she says, but I can hear the smile in her voice. “Let me know where you're going and I'll make the reservations for you.”

“Thanks, Linda,” I say before reaching over to my phone and disconnecting the call.

As I grab my cup of coffee beside my laptop, my eyes land on Sela, who's walking into the main living area. She gives a big yawn and scratches the skin on her belly, which is peeking out beneath the hem of a tight tank she wore to bed.

“Why are you up so early?” she asks, her voice still heavy with sleep.

And let's face it. She didn't get much last night, as we had a few days to make up for in the sex department.

I'm not going to lie…that first time was all kinds of awkward at first. Rationally, I knew Sela's rape was years ago, and she had clearly moved past many of her hang-ups. There's no doubt that in our time together, she was giving herself fully to me and enjoyed it as much as I did. Hell, just the way I can make her come so hard and fast was a testament that she was comfortable and trusting with me.

But still…scabbed wounds get scraped open and start bleeding, so you handle the body with care. Same goes for emotional wounds, and my instinct was to tread delicately with her.

Sela felt differently though, and I'll admit, her position made sense. She didn't want me stroking her with kid gloves. She wanted to feel alive and normal.

She wanted to feel.

So I felt her up nicely. Fucked her three times last night, feeling her up in between. It reminded me of the night she sucked my dick in the limo, swallowing me down and searching for more. That night we were rabid for one another.

Last night was the same.

I want more of the same today, and the next day, and the day after that.

“Got up around six,” I tell her as I push away from the laptop and walk over to the stove. I grab the kettle, turn to the sink, and fill it with enough water to make her a cup of tea. Once it's heating, I turn back toward Sela. She's watching me with a soft smile as she sits on one of the barstools on the opposite side of the island.

While her water heats, I move back to the counter and lean forward on it, the bottoms of my forearms pressed against the cold granite. “Do you have a passport?”

She blinks at me slowly, but nods. “I did a semester in London my junior year of college.”

“You did?” I ask, slightly amazed she'd do something so far out of her comfort zone. I've come to find out in just a few short days just how fucked up Sela's existence was for a very long time because of what was done to her. “That was pretty brave.”

Sela gives me an impish smile and says, “I did come out of my shell as time went on, you know. I tried new things.”

“I'm impressed.”

“Yeah, well…it's not like I backpacked through the wilds of Kenya or anything,” she says in a self-deprecating way, and that causes me to laugh.

“Okay…so let's pack up and catch a flight out of here tonight. We can go wherever you want. Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Prague.”

“Are you serious?” she asks with her eyebrows practically touching the ceiling.

“Dead fucking serious. We can go for a few weeks, just bum around Europe if you want. Get away from all this craziness and regroup. Or we can go tropical if you want to, because if you only want to wear nothing but a little bikini, I'm down with that too.”

“I can't just take off and leave like that.”

“You sure as hell can.”

“I have school, Beck. Classes I have to attend, work I have to do,” she says with an eye roll.

“Drop the classes. Take a semester off,” I tell her simply. I mean…why the fuck not?

“Just drop my classes? Take a semester off?” Her tone is one of astonishment and exasperation with me.

“Okay, two weeks. I'll pay for it,” I say smoothly. “You won't be out any money.”

I expect that to piss her off—the not-so-subtle reminder that I paid for her education in return for her giving herself to me—but I'll make her see that I'd buy the world for her right now if I could and wouldn't expect a damn thing in return.

Instead, she narrows her eyes at me. “You are the least impulsive person I know. Beck North doesn't just wake up one morning and decide to jet off to Europe. What's really going on here?”

Taking a deep breath, I push off from the counter and walk around the island until I come up to her stool. She swivels it toward me, her eyes filled with concern.

Blowing out the breath, I take her hands and pull them onto my chest, where I hold them tight. “I need to get away, Sela. I can't go into the office because I can't risk a run-in with JT. I just won't be able to hold it together because all of this is so fresh and raw. I'm afraid of what I might do to him, to our business…all of it…if I lose control around him. So I want to just leave for a bit, collect ourselves. Take the pack off. Relax and get to know each other better. I don't know what the future has in store, but if JT is going to pay for this, we need to have our ducks in a row. Things are going to get stressful, and I'd like some time with you and away from all of this shit.”

Her eyes soften and her head tilts in understanding. “I can't do two weeks. I can only miss three classes in each course.”

“A week then,” I counteroffer.

“Where would we go?” she asks.

“Wherever you want. I don't care.”

“So we'd leave tonight?”

“I'd leave right now if we could, but unfortunately, two things prevent that. First, I have that investigator coming just after lunch. I'm going to hire him to start digging into JT. And second, and probably most important, I need to do laundry, as I'm out of clean underwear.”

Sela laughs, and it fills me with hope that we're going to get through this. She leans forward on the stool, presses her bare feet down into the bottom rung, and pushes up to bring her mouth to mine. Just the softest of kisses and an even bigger smile on her face when she pulls back. “Okay. I'm going to go start laundry, then I'm going to message my professors and let them know the classes I'll be missing. You do whatever work you need to get things cleared away.”

“So we're going?”

“I'd like to see Vienna,” she says as she pushes up from the stool. I step back to give her room and she slides past me, heading over to the kettle, which is now boiling. “Or Prague. That would be nice.”

“I'll get Linda to book us flights and make hotel reservations,” I say, admiring her ass in some tiny white panties that look virginally sweet.

Then I walk back around the counter to my laptop, and start putting things in order.

Dennis Flaherty sits across from my desk in my home office, looking nothing like what I thought a sleazy investigator would look like. I was expecting short and portly with perhaps a bad Hawaiian print shirt with mustard stains. He's tall and built solidly, wearing a tailored navy blue suit with a sedate yellow tie. His hair is fiery red but cropped close to his head in a military-style cut. The only other thing I notice is a wedding ring on his left fourth finger.

“You're sizing me up,” Dennis says with a smirk.

“That obvious?” I ask him with a laugh.

“I get paid to observe,” he says dryly.

“Well, what I'm getting ready to ask you to do might cross some ethical lines. I need some dirty stuff. You look like a financial advisor or banker or something.”

Dennis nods in understanding. “Don't let my love of fine Italian silk suits throw you off. I've had plenty of dirt under my nails before.”

I glance past Dennis to my open office door. Sela's in our room packing. I asked her if she wanted to sit in on this meeting, but she just shook her head and said, “I'd rather not. I know in painstaking detail what you're going to be talking to him about. I'll let you take this one for the team.”

Team.

I liked the sound of that.

“I want you to investigate my partner, Jonathon Townsend. I assume you've done some background research on me?”

“I have. Your partner too. Quite an interesting business you have.”

“Well, I want the business for myself and I can't seem to dislodge him. I need something that will convince him to leave.”

“How far do you want to go with this?”

“All the way isn't far enough,” I tell him smoothly. “I don't care what the cost or what it takes to get me what I need.”

“It's personal to you,” Dennis observes as he pulls his phone out of the inside breast pocket. I watch as he taps a few times, presumably pulling up an app or something, then his thumbs race across the screen as he types.

“Just making some notes,” he says without looking up at me. “I need to know why it's personal so I know which direction you want me looking.”

His face tips back up and he pins me with a direct stare. I know he needs to know this, because I want him also looking into fraternity brothers as possible suspects, but it still burns to have someone know what Sela went through. But I have her permission to disclose this sordidness to him, and he came highly recommended, so I press forward.

“Ten years ago, three men raped my girlfriend,” I say, and Dennis makes a sound of disgust deep in his throat. “She was drugged and couldn't identify her attackers, but she did remember tiny bits and pieces. One was a distinctive tattoo of a red phoenix on one of her attackers' rib cage.”

“She later saw that tattoo and was able to identify him,” Dennis surmises, his face now dipped again so he can type into his phone.

“It belongs to my partner, JT…otherwise known as Jonathon Townsend,” I say, and Dennis' head snaps upward, his eyes wide with surprise.

“You're fucking kidding me?” he practically chokes out.

“I wish I were,” I respond grimly. “But it was him, and one of the things I want you to do is look for one of the other suspects that had a matching tattoo on his wrist. It belongs to an inner ring of fraternity brothers.”

“I'll need her to give me a drawing or something to go by,” Dennis says, still typing.

“No need. I have a matching one on the back of my shoulder.”

Again, Dennis' head snaps up, but this time his eyes are angry. “What the fuck is going on here?”

“I was in the same fraternity as JT but three years behind him. Still in prep school when the rape happened, so you can get that look off your face. I'm not sure the tattoo has anything to do with the rape, but clearly at least two of my fraternity brothers were there. I want you to try to identify at least one of the others by the wrist tat. Sela doesn't remember anything other than he was tan and had dark hair.”

And that he raped her ass,
but I don't tell him that.

“Understood,” he says. “What else?”