Rock Chick 05 Revenge (37 page)

Unfortunately, Ren asked what was happening. So, seeing as I felt like talking, I told him.

Everything.

From Luke moving into the house across the street; me being Fatty, Fatty Four-Eyes (that last part, Ren knew, I met him pre-weight loss and he’d been nice to me then too); having a crush on Luke since time began; all the way to the cookie swipe (though I just said we did the business, I didn’t go into detail, thank goodness, his eyes got a little scary just hearing the “we did the business” part).

He listened without comment to all of this.

When I was done he asked, “Did you get your head together?”

I nodded.

“What’d you decide?” He seemed very interested in my answer.

Yikes.

I sat back and took a sip of wine. This was going to be the hard part.

“I need you to take me back to Luke’s,” I told him in a quiet, don’t freak out on me voice.

His mouth got tight but, to my surprise, without a word or a freak out, he nodded.

That said a lot about him. All of it good.

Hell and damnation.

We did the dishes and he took me back to Luke’s. He walked me into the building and when the elevator doors slid open, his hand came to my neck before I could walk in.

He brought me close, his face dipped to mine and I saw the hungry look in his eyes. This time it was more intense because I could see it was mingled with anger or frustration or both. I figured whatever he was going to say was going to complicate my complicated life significantly.

I was not wrong.

He started talking and I vowed that if I ever got caught in a man pickle again, I would choose a man who was
not
a straight-talker.

“After he gets done with you, screwin’ with your head while he’s fuckin’ your body when he knows you have serious feelings for him, or you get done with bein’ with a guy who would do that, done with a guy who’s thinkin’ of someone else when he fucks you, when you decide you wanna be with a guy who is thinkin’ of nothin’ but you when he fucks you, Ava, you call me.”

Ho-ly
shit!

What did I do with
that?

I just stared, I couldn’t do anything else.

“Do you understand me?” he asked.

At that, I just nodded.

I understood him. Ee-yikes but I understood him.

“Good,” he said and he sounded pissed off. Even pissed off, he still brushed his lips against mine. I registered that the lip brush felt nice while he walked away.

I shrugged off the lip brush, got in the elevator and used the key to Luke’s floor. I did my now familiar holding-of-the-breath-until-the-doors-slid-open-to-Luke’s-loft and I let it out on a gush when they did.

He was sitting at a stool in front of the bar, the kitchen garbage can a few feet in front of him, sorting through one of the piles I made for him (tossing most of it in the garbage, I might add) and eating one of my Milano cookies. He was still in his Tom Petty mood, I knew this because Tom was singing “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” on the stereo.

His head swung around when I walked in.

I opened my mouth to say “Hey” when he spoke. “Where the fuck have you been?” he bit off.

Hmm.

Someone was in a bad mood.

It was about to get worse. I knew it would because I was going to make it get worse.

And I did it on purpose.
 

Barlow Bitch Blood was pumping so watch out!

“At Ren’s,” I answered.

The air in the room went scary as I walked in, got close to Luke, put my phone down on the bar and grabbed the bag of Milanos. I shoved my hand in the bag, studiously avoiding the scary air and Luke’s gaze and nabbing a cookie.

“Ava.”

I looked at him. He was in his controlling-fury mode, I knew it with one look.

“Yeah?” I asked, sounding unconcerned and a little surprised at myself that I could pull it off.

“You wanna tell me what you did at Zano’s?”

Not really.

Still, I answered, “I needed space to get my head together. He gave it to me. I spent the afternoon at his place, alone, and took a nap. When he got home from work, he made me dinner and brought me back here.”

I’d gone from lying through my teeth every other second to being honest when it was definitely not good for me. I should have stuck with lying. Even though all this was perfectly innocent, I could tell Luke didn’t like it, not one bit.

“Now that you answered that question, you wanna tell me why you couldn’t get your head together and take a nap here?”

I shrugged, being Queen of Calm. Barlow Bitch Blood was apparently latent. I’d lived twenty-nine years hardly ever being a bitch. Now it was coming out in spades.

“Okay, then you wanna tell me what your drama was about at Fortnum’s?”

I was starting to bite into my cookie, I took it out of my mouth and said (back to lying),“I didn’t have a drama.”

“Then what was that?”

“It wasn’t a drama.”

“Eddie said he saw you crawling on all fours.”

Jeez!

This was
so
annoying. He had sources everywhere.

“I dropped a contact,” I lied.

Luke glared at me and then said, “Ava,” in a very low, very lethal voice.

“I told you, I had somewhere to go. I had to meet Ren so he could help me out.”

“When did Ren Zano become the one who helped you out?”

“Yesterday, at dinner,” I told him breezily, shaking my cookie in the air for effect.

Not
a good answer. I knew this because the scary air started pressing in.

Surprisingly he let it go and asked instead, “Where did you sleep?”

Again I was about to bite into my cookie but stopped and asked, “What?”

“At Zano’s, where did you sleep?”

Uh-oh.

Before I could fight back the Barlow Bitch Pull it popped out of my mouth. “In his bed.”

Eek!

Red alert! Red alert! Scary air hitting danger zone! Evacuate the premises immediately!

Then Luke growled in a voice so low, I barely heard him, “You’ve got to be fuckin’ shittin’ me.”

“Luke, it was no big deal. He wasn’t there,” I decided to go back to breezy.

I was standing a few feet in front of him, between him and the garbage can.

He leaned in but kept his seat. I leaned back. I did this mainly because his intensity was kind of scaring me.

“You wanna call Zano right now? Ask him, shoe’s on the other foot, he fucked you three times, you fell asleep with his cock inside you, how
he
would
feel about you takin’ a nap in
my
bed?”

It was then I saw his point.

Then again, if it was Ren fucking me, he would have been fucking
me
. Not some fill in until he sorted out his feelings for another woman.

On that thought, I lost interest in my Milano and threw it back in the bag. I put the bag on the counter and sifted my fingers through my hair, leaving my hands on top of my head. Then my eyes moved back to Luke.

He was holding his body perfectly still and I got the impression he was doing that so he wouldn’t strangle me.

Time to defuse the situation. I controlled the Barlow Bitch Pull and took a deep breath.

“Luke,” I said softly. “Give me a break. It’s not like, in my life, I’ve ever been in this situation. I’ve no fucking idea what I’m doing.”

“What you do is, you let me sort it out for you. That’s why you came to the fuckin’ office in the first goddamn place,” he snapped, no less angry for my soft voice.

I dropped my hands and looked at him direct in the eyes. “That’s not the situation I’m talking about,” I said, voice still soft.

“Give me a clue.”

Nope, no less angry. I looked away, closed my eyes tight and licked my lips.

Could I do this? No, I couldn’t do it. Still, I did it so I guess I
could
do it.

I looked back at him and on another deep breath, I admitted, “You
know
, Luke. You know that most of the time I couldn’t get a guy to look at me. Much less a hot guy. Now I have four. Four, all after I’d sworn off men. I don’t know what to do.” My voice went ultra quiet, barely even a whisper, even so there was an accusation to it. “You know. You, of all people,
know
.”

That’s when his body unstuck. Before I knew what he was about, he leaned forward, his arm snagging me around my waist, and he pulled me around the garbage bin and to him, between his legs, our torsos tight together. His other arm closed around my upper back, pinning me against him.

“I’ll tell you what to do. You come to me when you gotta sort shit out. I’ll take care of you. You come to me when you need somethin’. I’ll take care of it. I’ll also tell you what
not
to do. You don’t have dinner with another man. You don’t sleep in his bed, I don’t care that he’s not in it with you. You don’t leave me standin’ on the sidewalk while you take off with a guy who, days earlier, kidnapped you and threatened to blow your fuckin’ head off. You don’t –”

“Okay I get it,” I broke in quietly.

His arms tightened and he gave me a mini-shake. “You better get it, Ava. I’m not goin’ through the last six hours again.”

I looked at the piles of stuff on the bar. I had left him several, now there was only one. I had come home and he was sitting, sorting through it and eating a cookie.

I looked back at him, confused. “Organizing your paperwork?” I asked.

He stared at me a second as if three identical noses had just popped out on my face then his head dropped back. I could almost hear him asking for patience from the divine. His chin came back down so he could look at me.

“I mean worryin’ where the fuck you were and if you were okay considerin’ the last look I had of you, you had tears in your eyes.”

Oh. That.

“I’m over that,” I lied,
so
not over it and
so
never going to tell him what I wasn’t over. Not in a million years. “It was a girl thing,” I lied again for good measure. In my experience, men hated to talk about “girl things”. I was hoping even the brutally honest ones would shy way the hell away from any discussion of a “girl thing”.

He stared at me and I got the impression he totally knew I was lying.

Finally, and thankfully, he decided to let it go. “Zano fed you?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I answered.

“Good. Now I can fuck you.”

My knees did a little wobble. “We didn’t have dessert,” I stalled.

His head (and, I must remind you, his fantastic mouth) started coming toward mine.

“Glad he left that to me,” he said before he kissed me.

* * * * *

It wasn’t like last night where it was all go, go, go or shocking but world-tilting surprise or all about Luke giving then taking.

This time Luke went slow and we took turns. He let me touch him, taste him, stroke him, take him in my mouth and I liked it, a lot. He had an unbelievable body and, let me tell you, it was fun as hell to explore.

When he was through letting me, he flipped me over, spread my legs and settled between them. I felt one of his knees come up for better leverage and I was certain he was going to slam into me again. I was ready for it, I wanted it and I stared at him in a fog, my body burning, nearly begging for it.

He didn’t slam into me. Instead, I felt him right there, ready to come inside when his hands came up to either side of my face. Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, he slid inside me watching my face the whole time. My lips parted and I held my breath as he slowly filled me until he was buried deep.

I waited for him to move.

He didn’t. He just kept watching me.

“Luke,” I whispered, pressing my hips into him.

“Be still, Ava,” he said then his mouth came to mine and he asked, “Do you feel that?”

Yeah, I felt it. It felt
great
.

“Yeah,” I told him.

I felt him smile against my mouth but he said, “You don’t feel it.”

“I feel it.”

“Then you don’t get it.”

I
wanted
to get it but he wasn’t moving.

I licked my lips and since my lips were close to his lips, I licked his lips too.

His eyes went molten and he moved, slowly at first then faster then harder until we both came, breathing heavy in each other’s mouths. It was the first time in my life that I climaxed with a partner at the same time. If I thought the other sex was mind-blowing, I was wrong. Reaching orgasm with Luke was mind-blowing, mind-altering and world-tilting all at the same time.

I was so screwed.

After, his mouth at the skin behind my ear, he murmured, “You ever run away from me with tears in your eyes again, Ava, I’ll hunt you down. Do you understand?”