Beautiful Bitch (15 page)

She stared at me, eyes wide and lips parted as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I stood and ran over to the dresser, pulling the box from the drawer and carrying it over to her. When I opened the box and let her see my grandmother’s antique diamond and sapphire ring, she clapped a hand over her mouth.

“I want to be married,” I said again. Her silence was unnerving, and fuck, I’d completely botched this with my rambling nonsense. “Married to
you
, I mean.”

Her eyes filled with tears and she held them, unblinking. “You. Are such. An ass.”

Well, that was unexpected. I knew it might be too soon, but an ass? Really? I narrowed my eyes. “A simple ‘It’s too
soon’ would have sufficed, Chloe. Jesus. I lay my heart out on the—”

She pushed off the bed and ran over to one of her bags, rummaging through it and pulling out a small blue fabric bag. She carried it back to me with the ribbon hooked over her long index finger, and dangled the bag in my face.

I ask her to marry me and she brings me a souvenir from New York? What the fuck is that? “What the fuck is that?” I asked.

“You tell me, genius.”

“Don’t get smart with me, Mills. It’s a bag. For all I know you have a granola bar, or your tampons, in there.”

“It’s a ring, dummy. For you.”

My heart was pounding so hard and fast I half wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. “A ring for
me
?”

She pulled a small box out of the bag and showed it to me. It was smooth platinum, with a line of coarse titanium running through the middle.

“You were going to propose to me?” I asked, still completely confused. “Do women even do that?”

She punched me, hard, in the arm. “Yes, you chauvinist. And you totally stole my thunder.”

“So, is that a yes?” I asked, my bewilderment deepening. “You’ll marry me?”

“You tell me!” she yelled, but she was smiling.

“Technically you haven’t asked yet.”

“Goddamnit, Bennett! You haven’t, either!”

“Will you marry me?” I asked, laughing.

“Will you marry
me
?”

With a growl, I took the box and dropped it on the floor, flipping her onto her back.

“Are you always going to be this impossible?”

She nodded, eyes wide, lip caught between her teeth.
Fuck
. We could settle this later.

“Take my cock.” I bent, pressed a kiss into her neck, and groaned when she reached between us to grip me. “Guide it into you.”

She shifted her hips beneath me until I could feel myself at her entrance. I slid into her slowly, even though every tendon and muscle in my body wanted it rough and frenzied. I groaned, shivered on top of her, feeling myself sink inside.

Shifting my hips back and then forward, I felt her arms wrap around my neck, her face press into my neck as she rose to meet my movements. It took only two more shifts of my hips before we grew louder and more frantic.

“Give it to me,” I whispered into her mouth, licking forward, asking. I lifted her leg, pressed it up to her side and slid in deeper. My eyes rolled closed for a beat and I felt like I was about to explode in her.

She pressed her head back into the pillow, parted her lips to gasp, and I took the opportunity to slide my tongue into her mouth, to suck a little on hers. “That okay?” I whispered, pressing into the skin of her hip with my fingertips. She loved the edge of pain and pleasure, that razor-sharp
line we’d discovered early on together. She nodded and I moved faster, filling my head with the smell of her. I tasted her collarbones, her neck, bit a mark into her shoulder.

“Up here,” she breathed, pulling me back up to her face. “Kiss me.”

So I did. Over and over until she was panting and squirming beneath me, urging me to move faster. I felt her abdomen tense and then her legs squeezed hard around me, her cries sharp in my ear.

Clenching my jaw, I pushed my own release to the back of my mind, wanting more, and longer, and to feel her coming again before I would even let myself drift toward orgasm.

Her cries grew louder, and she screamed and then gasped and tried to pull away but I knew she could come again. I knew she was sensitive but she could take more.

“Don’t pull away. You’re not done yet. Not even fucking close. Give me another.”

Her hips relaxed in my hands; her grip tightened in my hair again.

“Oh.” It was just a breath of a sound. There was so much contained in that single, quiet gasp.

I pressed closer, holding her hips and tilting them with my movements. “That’s it.”

“Coming,” she breathed. “I can’t—I can’t—”

Her hips shook and I gripped her as hard as I dared. “Don’t you
fucking
stop.”

“Touch me . . . there,” she gasped and I knew what she
wanted. I kissed her neck before licking my fingers and sliding them to her backside, touching, pressing.

With a sharp cry she came again, the coiled muscles beneath her skin tightening all around my length. Taking a deep breath, I let my orgasm unravel down my back and tear through me; light bursts exploded behind my closed eyes. I could barely hear her hoarse cries over the pounding of blood in my ears.

“Yes yes yes yes . . .” she chanted, delirious, before collapsing onto the pillow beneath her.

It felt like the walls rattled in the silence that followed. Everything in my head shook with need for her; it was disorienting.

“Yes,” she gasped one last time.

I held very, very still as awareness seeped back into my thoughts. “Yes?”

Then with her limbs still trembling all around me, and breaths coming out in sharp little pants, she gave me a radiant smile. “Yes . . . I want to be married, too.”

Thank you to the readers who also wanted more from these two. Your tweets, FB posts, emails, comments, and reviews make us feel like the luckiest chicks out there, and without you, there is no BEAUTIFUL
anything
.

Thank you to Adam Wilson for having us howling in laughter while we were editing at midnight on a Tuesday. For two people who claim to be writers, we are surprisingly inarticulate when it comes to expressing how much we value your confidence in us.

Thank you to everyone at Gallery for being game for our silly, smutty words.

Holly Root, thank you for your calm, cool, collected self and for continuing to let us play in every sandbox. And thank you to our families, for being as excited for all of this as we are.

Lo, you put the “
in my words. Christina, you put the
” in my stories. Race you to the tattoo parlor in Paris.

I raced down the darkened hall of the now-empty building, the presentation materials clutched haphazardly in my arms, and glanced at my watch. Six twenty. Mr. Ryan was going to have my ass. I was twenty minutes late. As I experienced this morning, he hated late. “Late” was a word not found in the
Bennett Ryan Dickhead Dictionary.
Along with “heart,” “kindness,” “compassion,” “lunch break,” or “thank you.”

So there I was, running through the empty halls in my stilt-like Italian pumps, racing to the executioner.

Breathe, Chloe. He can smell fear.

As I neared the conference room, I tried to calm my breathing and slowed to a walk. Soft light shone from beneath the closed door. He was definitely in there, waiting for me. Carefully, I attempted to smooth my hair and clothing while tidying the bundle of documents in my arms. Taking a deep breath, I knocked on the door.

“Come in.”

I walked into the warmly lit space. The conference room was huge; one wall was filled with floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a beautiful view of the Chicago cityscape from eighteen stories up. Dusk darkened the sky outside, and skyscrapers speckled the horizon with their lighted windows. In the center of the room stood a large heavy wood conference table, and facing me from the head of the table was Mr. Ryan.

He sat there, suit jacket hanging on the chair behind him, tie loosened, crisp white shirtsleeves rolled up to his elbows, and chin resting on his steepled fingers. His eyes were boring into mine, but he said nothing.

“I apologize, Mr. Ryan,” I said, my voice wavering with my still labored breathing. “The print job took—” I stopped. Excuses wouldn’t help my situation. And besides, I wasn’t going to let him blame me for something I had no control over. He could kiss my ass. With my newfound bravery in place, I lifted my chin and walked over to where he sat.

Without meeting his gaze, I sorted through my papers and placed a copy of the presentation on the table before us. “Are you ready for me to begin?”

He didn’t respond aloud, his eyes piercing my brave front. This would be a lot easier if he wasn’t so gorgeous. Instead, he gestured toward the materials before him, urging me to continue.

I cleared my throat and began my presentation. As I moved through the different aspects of the proposal,
he stayed silent, staring directly at his copy. Why was he so calm? His temper tantrums I could handle. But the eerie silence? It was unnerving.

I was leaning over the table, gesturing toward a set of graphs, when it happened.

“Their timeline for the first milestone is a little ambi—” I stopped midsentence, my breath caught in my throat. His hand pressed gently into my lower back before sliding down, settling on the curve of my ass. In the nine months I had worked for him, he had never intentionally touched me.

This was most definitely intentional.

The heat from his hand burned through my skirt and into my skin. Every muscle in my body tensed, and it felt like my insides were liquefying. What the hell was he doing? My brain screamed at me to push his hand off, to tell him to never touch me again, but my body had other ideas. My nipples hardened, and I clenched my jaw in response.
Traitor nipples.

While my heart pounded in my chest, at least half a minute passed, and neither of us said anything as his hand moved down to my thigh, caressing. Our breathing and the muted noise of the city below were the only sounds in the still air of the conference room.

“Turn around, Miss Mills.” His quiet voice broke the silence and I straightened my back, eyes facing forward. Slowly I turned, his hand skimming across me and sliding to my hip. I could feel the way his hand
spread from his fingertips on my lower back all the way to where his thumb pressed against the soft skin just in front of my hipbone. I looked down to meet his eyes, which looked intently back at me.

I could see his chest rising and falling, each breath deeper than the last. A muscle twitched in his sharp jaw as his thumb began to move, slowly sliding back and forth, his eyes never leaving mine. He was waiting for me to stop him; there had been plenty of time for me to shove him away, or simply turn and leave. But I had too many feelings to sort out before I could react. I had never felt this way, and I had never expected to feel this about him. I wanted to slap him, and then pull him up by his shirt and lick his neck.

“What are you thinking?” he whispered, eyes somehow both mocking and anxious.

“I’m still trying to figure that out.”

With those eyes still locked to mine, he began to slide his hand lower. His fingers ran down my thigh, to the hem of my skirt. He moved it up so his fingertips traced the strap of my garter belt, the lace edge of one thigh-high stocking. A long finger slipped beneath the thin fabric and pulled it down slightly. I sucked in a sharp breath, feeling suddenly like I was melting from the outside in.