Billionaire Erotic Romance Boxed Set: 7 Steamy Full-Length Novels (58 page)

I couldn’t sit up. Every ounce of my energy was focused in on keeping my eyes open. Even turning my head was such a laborious act that I resigned to keep it pointed towards the window, treating the rest of the room like it didn’t exist. I could not ever remember having felt this weak and injured before. But then again, I had never been shot before.

Leon sat in a chair, slumped over. If I wasn’t completely dulled with drugs, I would have felt alarmed at the way he looked almost dead. His breath rose and fell in spaced out, shallow intervals. I couldn’t make out his face, the moon was behind him and it cast darkness on him, but I knew that he was asleep.

I let my eyes fall closed, feeling oddly content and at peace. Sleep came easily, welcoming my return to a blackness that was devoid of all color and light.

When I finally opened my eyes again, the sun was shining. I had no idea how much time had passed. I felt stronger and the pain in my shoulder had lessened to a dull ache. The taste in my mouth was horrible and I imagined the smell rivaled the taste in its awfulness. I lifted my arms and brushed my hair back.

Leon was still in the chair. He looked disheveled, a fitting look for someone sleeping in a chair. Even with his eyes closed, I could see bags under his eyes and wrinkles in his clothes. His hair hung down over his face, this time messy and not in a stylish way. His hand propped up his face and his mouth hung slightly ajar. I smiled as I looked at him; he looked almost childish in his cuteness, despite the apparent exhaustion all over his face.

I reached out my arm and delicately ran my fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his face. His head had been leaning down slightly, pointed towards the grounded in his uncomfortable looking sleep, and when I touched him, his eyes opened groggily. When he saw me, his eyes opened wide. I smiled at the sight.

“Good morning,” I said in a hushed voice, barely above a whisper. It was as loud as I could talk.

“Morning,” Leon said quietly, but still excitedly. “Did you sleep well?”

I let a smile grow once again on my face. “A girl needs her beauty rest and I’m no exception. How long was I out for?

“Two days,” Leon said, a hint of worry strong in his voice.

I was speechless for a full minute before I thought of anything I could say. “I woke up last night, briefly. I saw you sleeping there. The moon was full and it was beautiful.” Every word was labored, slow and thorough.

“Julie,” Leon began softly, “the moon was full two nights ago.”

“Oh,” I said. I laid there, unable to do anything else but lie there, and thought about what happened. I had a brief flash of doctors hovering over me, talking about something. I remembered blinking and I could hear music in the back of the operating table.

“Your wound opened up when we were talking a few days ago. Apparently there were some complications, something about your body rejecting the sutures.” Leon said. “When you woke up and started moving around a lot and talking, the added irritation must have caused the wound to open again.”

I could hear the faint echo of Leon being told to get out of the room. They had threatened to call security because he had refused to leave.

“You were rushed into emergency surgery and they used something different to stitch you up. The doctors said everything is fine now and that you’re out of the woods.”

I tried to take in all of what Leon had said and it just felt too much to comprehend. The memory of Leon refusing to leave warmed my heart in a weird way. I felt scared over what happened to me and at the same time I felt joyous at the sight of Leon. More than anything, I simply felt confused.

“While you were in surgery,” Leon said, his voice growing horse and thick. “They weren’t sure if you were going to make it.” Tears formed in his eyes and slowly strolled down his cheek. He made no move to wipe them away. I reached my hand over and brushed away the tears gently. He took my hand in his and gave it a gentle squeeze. A loving squeeze.

I felt my defenses start to dissipate. I noticed then that Leon was wearing the same outfit that he had been wearing when we had talked two days ago. His hair was a mess and he looked like he needed a shave, badly. It dawned on me that Leon had not left the hospital since I had fallen back ill.

“Have you gone home yet?” I asked, shocked by the truth that I knew he was about tell me.

“No,” he said solemnly. “I wasn’t going to leave you. It was my fault that I had upset you and somehow made your wound open. I knew I needed to be here for you the moment you woke up.”

“Leon,” I said, choking back tears. I was so touched that it took every effort not to cry out to him to embrace me. “What about your life? Your clubs?”

Leon smiled out of the corner of his mouth and started nodding his head slowly, as if agreeing with something I said. “Stills. I called him to tell him about what was happening and he didn’t even need me to ask him to take over things for a while. And to be honest, I didn’t even give a shit what happened to the businesses.”

I smiled back, thinking of Stills. On some level, I should almost curse him. Without him, none of this would have happened. But then again, without him, I wouldn’t have met Leon Christensen. Despite all that had happened, Leon piercing my heart and then Marilyn literally shooting me in the chest, it seemed worth it to know that my feelings were being reciprocated.

“I realized that losing you would hurt too much. No matter how I try to push you away, being apart from you is the last thing I want. I hope you can forgive me for all of this. For Andrea, for Marilyn, for all the bullshit defenses I put up because I didn’t want to let you in. Maybe it’s too late Julie, and I can never take back the things I said or the things I’ve done but I’d like to start over again. To start over again with you. Will you give me that chance?”

To hear Leon open up to me like this was something entirely new for me. Could I forgive him for the things he did? I don’t know. But he was just asking for a chance. Maybe he didn’t know it, but it wasn’t just a chance for him, it was a chance for me to melt the protective ice that had covered my heart for so long. I felt the pangs of loneliness that I had long kept repressed surge in my chest.

I knew what I would say before I even opened my mouth. After all, what choice did I have? Bury my memories of Leon in the past and continue smiling and selling clients a dream I didn’t believe in?

“Yes, let’s start over again” I whispered.

The nurse came in and paused when she saw us.

“Everything alright in here?” she asked casually.

“Yes, everything is perfectly fine. Perfectly fine,” I said, smiling.

“Good. I have to take your vitals sweetheart, I hope you guys don’t mind,” the nurse said, looking at Leon.

“I think I’ll go to the bathroom and wash up a little bit. I’m starting to look like a bum,” Leon said. I saw his eyebrows rise at me and he gave me a small smile. His face looked completely new, still tired and frayed with worry, but lighter, as though something had been lifted from him. He looked happy.

Leon walked out slowly, hands in his pockets. He looked around the hallway and then I heard his footsteps grow fainter as he walked away.

The nurse leaned in close to me and looked around conspiratorially.

“Damn girl, that is one handsome man you’ve got there. If I were twenty years younger and single, I think you’d be in trouble,” she said, winking. She shook her head and whistled a catcall. I giggled and covered my mouth.

“I think you’d have to fight me for him,” I said.

“You know I’m not about to fight a tough cookie like you,” she said, raising her hands defensively. “Taking a bullet like some action hero, you’re way too tough for me. You can have him, but I’m still gonna steal a little peek at him every now and then.”

The nurse poured me a glass of water and asked me if I needed anything else. Her name was Rose. She told me she had been working in the hospital for over thirty years. “You’ve got the best damn nurse in this godforsaken building,” she had said. I immediately liked her.

Leon came back in, drinking a cup of coffee. His hair was slicked back and wet, his face clean but still unshaven. Even wracked with stress and sleep deprivation, Leon Christensen looked better than any other man I had ever seen. He walked over to me and ran his hands through my hair. I closed my eyes and breathed in the sensation of his fingers pressing firmly against my scalp as they ran down to the top of my spine. When he got to the top of my spine, his fingers turned to feathers so that he wouldn’t hurt my wound. It felt wonderful.

He sat down on the chair beside the bed and moved it forward so he could be close to me.

“So,” I said, not sure as to how to proceed. “What is this now?”

“What is what?” he asked.

“This,” I said, motioning back and forth between him and I slowly with my still weak arms.

“Ah,” he paused. “I don’t know. This is all so new. But I know when I think of you, I feel the beginnings of something different inside of me. Something turning over and opening up to letting you in.”

I nodded, listening to his words. It was still hard to keep my eyes open, but even in my state between the waking life and dream world, his words sank in deeply. I reached over and took his hand with mine and we felt the slight warmth of each other as he continued on.

“I’ve had a lot of time to think. In the past few days, all I’ve had is time to think about what this is and how I feel. I still don’t know. What I know is that you got in my head without even trying. The simple sight of you planted some seed in me and despite how hard I tried to deprive it of water and sunlight, the bastard’s grown like a weed,” Leon said, smiling at me. I squeezed his hand playfully and leveled my eyes at him, feigning anger.

“I know the feeling,” I said.

Chapter 20

The hours turned to days. Soon, I was out of the hospital. The wounds were not debilitating and they all healed, other than the scar where the doctors had performed emergency surgery. Days turned to months.

The months added up until it was the anniversary of my shooting. Marilyn was locked up in a penitentiary for five to seven years for attempted manslaughter. At the trial, she tearfully apologized to me and her psychiatrist said that she was responding well to medication. Her apology seemed genuine. It took a long time for me to forgive her for almost killing me, but when I think about it now, I hope that Marilyn’s mental state gets better.

“POW!” Leon yelled as he jumped out from behind a door. I jumped back and my heart skipped a beat. He laughed wildly and I punched him in the chest, laughing as I did so.

“Not funny!” I cried.

“Oh, come one. It was kinda funny,” he said, winking. “What would you like to do for our anniversary?”

Leon and I were dating, seriously. We decided that our anniversary was the day that Marilyn shot me in my office because it was the day that showed us how much we meant to each other. Morbid, perhaps, but now that our first year anniversary was finally here, I felt anything but morbid. I felt alive in every fiber of my being. I leaned in and kissed him gently on the lips as my hand slid between his legs. He grew hard in my hand and I pressed against it firmly.

“Well, I can think of a few things I’d like to do first,” I said playfully.

After that night in the hospital, we had eased into a relationship. I thought it would be awkward at first, but it was anything but. When the pretext of a working relationship was gone and our feelings were out on the table, the conversations flowed between us. Yet Leon had never fully lost his wonderfully charming sense of humor.

I pushed my hand down in his jeans and wrapped my fingers around his cock, now throbbing with hard warmth, pulling on the tender skin, teasing him.

He let out a breath of air as I began to move my hand up and down in his jeans, jerking him off. He looked up to the sky and closed his eyes as he leaned against the wall, enjoying the sensation. Then his eyes fell down to me and when our eyes met, the connection that we had first shared by the fireplace seemed like a tiny shock from rubbing socks on a carpet in comparison to a bolt of lightning striking you.

His arms wrapped around me and lifted me up. I pulled my hand out and grabbed the back of his head and kissed him strongly on his lips, pulling him tightly against me. I could feel his cock press against me, hard as stone. He walked me through the living room in my house and laid me by the fireplace. A soft rug was already laid out, awaiting our arrival.

“This has always been my favorite place to make love,” he said. I reached up and caressed the side of his face as he said this, my heart melting over his words.

The sex between us had been nothing short of revolutionary. Each embrace was less encumbered by inhibition until it finally we were embracing each other totally as our selves, unified yet individuals. When we made love, the boundaries between us dissipated into nothing and the world faded away. All thoughts were gone. Only we remained.

Leon took out a silk handkerchief and bound my hands. I looked away from him into the fireplace, knowing that he loved it when I let him lead. If I fully became his sub, he would shoot like a rocket almost immediately. I let him explore every inch of my body and opened myself up to him completely.

He tied the silk fabric tight and I turned to him, nodding up and down. Leon tore off my button-up shirt that I had been wearing, destroying the buttons and tearing the entire back in half. Leon threw it into the fire and blue flames erupted. I had not been wearing a bra; the fire warmed my hard nipples and made them ache with want. Leon’s muscles flexed as his hands found the button on my pants and broke it off as well before sliding them off me quickly. He reached down and grabbed my cotton panties with his teeth before ripping them off like an animal. I moaned loudly.

Leon rolled me over. He kissed my ass cheeks softly, squeezing each cheek as he did so until he began to move upwards towards my lower back. His fingers hung tantalizingly close to my inner thighs and I grew wet with desire. Leon rubbed his nose along my lower back and made a trail higher and higher until he reached my upper back. Then he stopped and rubbed his fingers softly along the scar on my back.