Billionaire Romance Boxed Set (9 Book Bundle) (102 page)

I stared, wide-eyed, at the foot of the stairs all the
way across the library room from where I sat. I saw feet first, in
polished leather shoes, then immaculate dress slacks, a smooth suit coat, and
finally Asher’s somber, solemn face. He stared at me and I stared back at
him. I tried to breathe, but the air felt too heavy to my lungs.

“Jessika,” Asher said. “What are
you doing?”

I didn’t answer him; I couldn’t answer him.

He kicked the blankets away from the bottom of the
stairs and stepped towards me. In his hand he held the four
bookmarks. Hidden in my chemise blouse sleeve, I’d tucked the piece of
paper with notes on which page he’d marked in which book, but he couldn’t have
known that. Walking to the edge of his table, he checked each of the
books.

“Too afraid of this one?” he said, lifting
up the
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
. “Probably a good
idea. It’s worth a quarter of a million easily.”

I gulped. I wanted to cry all of a sudden, for
no good reason. I’d done this on purpose, intended on doing this, but now
I really didn’t know why.

Asher left the table and came towards me. He
tossed the bookmarks in my lap and stared at me, hard. “Do you think
this is a game?” he asked.

I somehow managed to shake my head, no.

“Why did you do this?”

I lifted my shoulders in the barest hint of a shrug.

“I wanted you to leave,” he said, talking to
himself more than me. He began pacing in the library, fretting, rubbing
at the sides of his eyes with his index finger and thumb. “I didn’t
want this to happen. Do you know how difficult this is for me? Do
you know what I have to do? I have to tell Beatrice about all of this,
and then what? Besides that, I have to deal with you now, too. I
don’t even know what you’re doing. Why did you throw a tissue in the
trash in one of the bedrooms upstairs?”

“I don’t know,” I squeaked. My voice
cracked as I tried to speak normally.

“I don’t know, either! I do know one thing,
though.” His eyes glimmered and he stared at me with vicious
passion. “You’re going to clean it all up. Now.”

I stood immediately, hurried to the stairs. My
God, Asher was scary like this. Scary and… I thought back to my episode
in the bathtub. Probably a bad thing to think about right now. I
ran to move past him, but he grabbed my arm and pulled me to him. He
squeezed me hard around my waist, his fingers tickling and digging into my sides.
I started to laugh, but then a prick of pain sunk in and I opened my mouth,
gasping.

He kissed me hard. His mouth covered mine, some
voracious, wild thing, and he kissed me. His arms wrapped around me,
pulling me close, and he eased his tongue into my mouth and toyed with
mine. I paused, confused, but only for a moment before I engaged him in
this wild, unforeseen passion. I kissed him, licked him, wanted to press
my lips against every part of his face. My hands clung to his body and
his coat and his belt. Before I knew it, he pulled me up against him,
grabbed my thighs, lifted me up, and coaxed me into wrapping my legs around his
waist.

He carried me to the ottoman as he kissed and touched
and teased me with reckless abandon. Without a care or a thought in the
world, he dropped to his knees and tossed me onto the ottoman. My back
hit the leather cushions with a thud while my head landed on the seat of the
chair behind me. I gasped, surprised, and Asher used my momentary shock
to loosen himself from me.

He pulled and tugged on the buttons of my chemise
blouse, undoing all of them. Moving the fabric to the side, he licked and
caressed my stomach with his tongue and lips. His hands grabbed, greedy,
at my skirt and he ripped down the zipper in the back then wrenched the skirt
off with one hasty tug. Sliding one hand beneath my bra, he groped and
squeezed at my breast. I squirmed on the ottoman, wriggling in his grasp,
reluctant and trying to get free.

Or, my body acted reluctant, but I didn’t want to go
anywhere. I whispered shy encouragement to him, over and over.
“Yes. Asher. I’m so sorry. Please.”

He pulled aside my panties and licked a ragged line
down my stomach towards my belly button, lower to my hips. His tongue
left a wet trail across the fabric of my underwear as he bit and nibbled at the
cloth. Then lower still, until he pressed his mouth against my slick
folds. He sucked and licked at the lips between my legs, kissing them
with the same fervid passion he’d used on my mouth. My feet pressed
against the library floor and I pushed up and towards him with my hips. I
placed my fingers in his hair, holding onto him, but he moved my hands away and
made me grab onto the sides of the ottoman instead.

“You dirty slut,” he said, his voice a
growl. I looked down at him and he watched my expression with heated
awareness. “Why do you keep getting distracted when I order you to
do something? First in my office, and now in my home?”

“Asher,” I whimpered. “I’m so
sorry. I didn’t mean to. I can’t help it. I…”

“What?” he asked. “Say
it.” He lowered his face and licked around my clit, then stuffed two
fingers inside me while somehow expecting me to speak.

“I…”

He pushed harder into me, frantically licked me into a
frenzy. “Say it!” he roared into my pussy.

“I masturbated in your bathtub,” I yelped.

He paused, completely caught off guard. His
finger stopped moving, buried deep inside me, and his tongue lay still on top
of the sensitive flesh of my clit. I whimpered and writhed, wanting him
so desperately to give me more.

“You masturbated in my bathtub?” he asked.

“Yes,” I whispered. “The jets and
I was and… Asher, please?”

He grinned and added another finger next to the other
two pressed hard inside me. His tongue explored every inch of space
between my legs. I screamed out his name and tried to press my knees hard
together, but he held one of my legs against the ottoman to stop me. My
other leg twitched and spasmed, unsure what to do, and then I lost all control
of anything. My body quivered, moving up and down, trapped between
Asher’s strength and the chair and the ottoman, trembling under his touch.

He never stopped, merely watched me climax. I
clamped my eyes shut and squeezed my fingers into the sides of the ottoman,
holding on for dear life. His tongue, my God! Inside me, his
fingers curled up, pressing against me, finding my g-spot and delivering me
into exquisite pleasure. I wanted him so very badly, wanted to grab him
and pull him up and undo his pants and wrap my legs around him, squeeze him
forward and into me, but I couldn’t think well enough to manage anything like
that. Asher plied my body, pulling my orgasm out of me, never relenting.

My breathing stopped and a rush of ecstasy soared
through me. I clenched against his fingers inside me and soaked the
leather cushions beneath me with my arousal. Too much, so much, I let out
a heavy sigh and collapsed on the chair and ottoman while Asher slowed his pace
and let me relax.

When I thought I was done, when I thought everything
was over, he picked me up and put me on my feet. I stood, knees
shaking. Asher stepped away and inspected me once I had some semblance of
a proper standing position. The front of my panties were still pushed to
the side, wet from his tongue and my climax, and the right side of my bra was
out of place from when he’d shoved his hand under it to snatch at my breast.

“Go,” he said.

“What?” I asked.

“Go! Go clean. Pick up the mess you
left upstairs. The crust of bread on the basement stairs, too. And
fold the blankets and put them back where you found them.”

I went. I ran. I could barely feel my
legs, but I managed my way up the stairs, nearly naked in only my bra and
panties. I took the tissue from the trash in the bedroom and tucked it into
the waistband of my underwear, then picked up the towel from the bathroom floor
and hung it on one of the shower doors to dry. I smoothed out the corner
of the sheets and fixed them back into place. Back downstairs, on the
first floor, I tossed the tissue from my panties into the trash barrel in the
kitchenette, then stumbled down the basement stairs and grabbed the crust from
the steps, then back up the stairs to put it with the tissue.

To the library again, where I folded the blankets and
put them on the chair. Asher lay on the couch now, reclining and reading
The
Time Traveler’s Wife
. He tossed a cursory glance towards me before
sitting up and staring my way.

“Are you done?” he asked.

I shook my head, no. Rushing towards my
discarded clothes, I searched through them until I found the piece of paper
with the pages he’d bookmarked. He laughed as I pulled the paper from the
sleeve of my chemise blouse and handed it to him without a word.

“You wrote down all the pages?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, unsure and shy all of a
sudden. “I didn’t want to lose your place. I…”

“Jessika,” he said. “We can’t do
this.”

“I know, but…”

He looped his fingers into my panties and pulled me
towards him. Dropping his book onto the floor, careless, with no regard to
where he’d left off, he shoved his other hand between my legs. Two
fingers inside me, as easily as that, with his thumb curved up towards my
stomach. I shrieked, surprised, almost folding my knees and falling to
the floor, but he held me up and pulled me onto the couch with him.
Laying me down, fingers still in me, he stared at me as I squirmed against
him. My body, his touch, it all felt so wonderfully perfect.

I wanted him to take me again, to bring me to climax,
but he slipped his fingers out of me as easily as he’d slid them in and left me
in a needy mess on the couch.

“Jessika, no more,” he said, smiling.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” I said. I lifted
myself off the couch and sat alongside him.

“I can’t cheat on my wife,” he said.
“We have, and I did, but it’s not as simple as that anymore. We
can’t do this again. Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No,” I answered. “I understand,
though. I do, it’s just…”

“You’re curious,” Asher said.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” he recited a line from the Wonderland book
on his library table. “Do you think that’s cliché? I find
myself falling deeper down the rabbit hole, wanting to know more about you, but
I’m afraid it’s going to be the death of me. Off with my head.”

“We can paint the roses red?” I offered.

Asher stared at me, blinking. All of a sudden he
laughed and kissed my forehead. “I’m sure it’s not that easy.”

“I just… I’d like to be close to you,
Asher,” I said, candidly.

He nodded. “I think it’s alright to be
close,” he said.

“But, your wife?”

“Yes, I have a wife, Jessika, and I have
obligations towards her.”

“I won’t tell her,” I said.

“It’s not about telling her. It’s about
trust. If I don’t tell her, then what do I do? She might never find
out, but I’ll always know, and…”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Will you do it, still?” he asked, looking
at me softly. “The surrogacy and everything we talked about?”

“Your wife and… I don’t think she’ll agree to
that.”

“She’s returning from her trip tomorrow. We
have plans for dinner tomorrow night. I think it’s best if you join us,
too. We can discuss everything and…”

I frowned. “Asher…”

“Jessika,” he said firmly. “I
know what happened and we both know we can’t go any further, but that doesn’t
mean…”

“I think it does actually mean quite a lot,”
I interrupted.

“I’m ordering you to attend dinner with me and my
wife,” he said. He attempted to sound firm and confident, but I
thought I heard a faint trace of uncertainty.

It slipped out of my mouth. I never meant to say
it. “What if I get distracted beforehand?”

He stared at me, silent, and then he burst into
laughter. “How distracted?”

“Asher, I’m really distracted right now,” I
said, teasing.

“Go,” he said. “Put on your
clothes. Get dressed. I’m going to yell at Jeremy, but then I’ll
come back. We can talk about things.”

I nodded.

“
Talk
,” he repeated, his tone solid
and firm. “Talk and nothing more. What kind of pizza do you
like?”

“What?” The question was so out of the
blue that I didn’t know what to make of it.

“I’ll order pizza. We can eat and talk and
get to know each other. We can watch a movie?” he offered.

“Asher…” I paused, stared, grabbed
my skirt from the floor and squeezed it between my hands. “Yes, I’d
like that. I like mushrooms. And ham. I usually ask if they
can go light on the cheese. Anything else is fine, too. I’m not
picky.”

“Not picky?” He asked, sounding
unconvinced. Grinning, he stood up. “Alright. I’ll be
right back.”