Chapter 17
"I can't come back here." I don't mean it. It's what I should say though, right? He's too controlling, too demanding, too manipulating and too appealing when he's standing naked in front of me.
"Did you find your shoe?" He reaches his hand out to grasp mine. "I think it fell under the bed."
I place my hand in his as he pulls me and my wayward shoe up. "It's here."
He grabs it quickly and tosses it back under the bed. "You need to get back on your hands and knees and look for it."
I cock a brow and look down at his once again erect cock. "How? Just how, Nathan?"
"How what?" He pulls a smile across his delicious lips.
"How can you be hard again already?" I kneel back down to retrieve my shoe yet again. "How many times in a row can you actually f*ck a woman?"
"Any other woman, once." He takes my shoe from me and kneels down. "You, endlessly."
"Don't be charming." I rest my hand on the back of his head as he slides my foot into the shoe. "I can't be mad at you when you're charming."
"Are you wet again?" His hands are on my thighs, pushing the hem of my shift dress up. "I want to taste you again before you leave."
"Nathan, no." I push helplessly at his hands. "We can't."
"Do you mean, no, Nathan stop and don't lick my beautiful body until I come?" He grazes his tongue over my thigh. "Or do you mean, Nathan, don't stop until I come over and over again from you licking me?"
I close my eyes as my hands lace through his hair. "Nathan," I whisper. "Please."
He moans loudly as his tongue traces hot over my panties before he pushes them aside and plunges his face into my wetness.
***
"You're actually leaving this time?" The amusement skirting the edge of the question isn't lost on me.
"I need to go." I take a few steps back to try and create a barrier between us. "Don't you have clothes you can put on?" I search the ground for the jeans and t-shirt he was wearing when I arrived.
"I'll get dressed and I can go with you." He races towards his closet to pull out a pair of navy pants and a light blue dress shirt. "Formal, semi-formal? Where are we going?"
"I'm going to look at places to live." I pull my hair back into a hastily thrown together ponytail. "You're staying here."
He drops the clothes in his hands to the floor and bolts towards me. "Wait. You're doing what?"
"I can't live with Rebecca anymore." I breathe in heavily as I continue, "I feel weird about it and she gives you status updates when I'm brushing my teeth and eating a sandwich."
"Only when you leave the crust behind," he jokes. "We're not doing that anymore. You don't have to move out of there."
"I don't trust her," I say it with regret. I don't. Our relationship is on shaky ground right now and it's important to me that we salvage it. I can't do that if I'm living with her.
"I think you should reconsider." His hand rests on my elbow. "She's a good friend."
"A good friend wouldn’t have convinced me to sneak into your hotel room that night."
"What do you mean?" His brow furrows. "She told you to go into my suite that night?"
I can't place all the blame on her. "Not exactly," I qualify it. "She said something about you f*cking every woman in the place and that made me want to go see if you still had the room."
"Jessica." He pulls my head into his chest and cradles my body next to his. "You've got to get it through your head that I'm crazy about you."
I nod against his skin, relishing in the smell of him and the feel of his strong, steely chest against me. As much as I doubt his sincerity, there's just something so raw and real about his words when he's telling me how much he cares for me.
"I've f*cked up your friendship." He pulls me back so he can look directly into my eyes. "Let me fix it. I can fix it."
I reach to cradle his cheek in my hand. "I need to move out. I want to." I can't continue anything with Nathan if I live with Rebecca. I don't know how I can deal with the two of them in the same room together.
"Move in here." He takes a step back and almost jumps up and down. "You can come live with me."
"That's a horrible idea," I smirk. "Really, really horrible."
"Why?"
"Are you seriously asking me why it's a bad idea for me to live here?" How is he a lawyer when he can't understand something this simple? Does he not understand that I don't trust him at all?
"I love you. You should live with me." The words are thoughtful and direct but they bite right into me like a rabid dog.
"I don't trust you," I say boldly. "I don't trust anything you say to me."
"What?" His hands jump to his chest as if I've thrown a dagger into his heart. "You don't trust me?"
I want to reach out and shake him. Maybe he's missing the common sense gene. That would explain a lot about him. "No, I don't." Why beat around the bush? I don't trust him. I see no reason to skirt around the issue.
"You came over here today," he says hoarsely. "We made love."
I have to take a step back when I hear the words. He's never, once, ever said that we make love. "We made love?" I parrot back to him.
"Do you f*cking have short term memory loss, Jessica?" He points to the bed. "We've spent the past three hours naked together."
"We f*cked." The word sounds harsh. "We just f*cked, that's all."
He stalls and his eyes scan my face. "It meant nothing but a f*ck to you?" His eyes squint and move past my face to the wall behind me. He's grabbing tightly to his chest as if he's holding back something.
"That's all it was." I shrug my shoulder. "I was horny. I wanted you to f*ck me. Nothing else has changed."