Sparked, p.14
Sparked, page 14
I grind up into his mouth, panting for breath as I transform into a human bottle rocket and shoot into the sky, shattering in a noisy explosion of sparks and “God, Sam, yes, Sam” that make me grateful my parents are still on the other side of town.
He emerges from his bliss-inducing exploration to kiss me on the lips, sending the salty, ocean-creature taste of my own arousal tingling through my mouth. To my surprise, it isn’t a bad taste. Not even a little bit.
It’s a sexy, earthy taste that makes me eager to do a little exploring of my own…
“My turn,” I say, tugging open his fly and shoving his pants down around his hips as best I can with one foot. “I want to taste you.”
“Are you sure?” he asks, cupping my breast and finding my already tingling nipple. “You don’t have to. No pressure at all. I love making you come on my mouth. I’ll do it every day and twice on Sunday, if you’ll let me, and you never have to return the favor.”
“It’s not a favor, it’s a calling,” I insist, rolling him over onto his back, so starved for a taste of him that I don’t feel self-conscious about the fact that I’m naked and straddling a nearly naked man’s hips for the first time in my life. I reach down, fisting his long, lovely cock in my hand and stroking it up and down, grinning as it twitches in my fingers and Sam lets out a long, tortured groan that assures me he finds my touch every bit as magical as I find his.
I scoot lower on the bed, holding his gaze as I bring my lips level with the glorious erection pulsing in my hand. I have no idea what I’m doing, but Sam looks completely enthralled, so mesmerized I suddenly feel certain that I’m going to rock his world. All I have to do is follow my instincts and lean into things that make him look like he’s being slowly, deliciously tortured to death.
Grinning at the thought, I drag my tongue up his length, savoring the clean, salty taste of him nearly as much as the moan I wrench from low in his throat.
I lick him again, swirling my tongue around his swollen tip at the end. I’m about to see how much of him I can fit into my mouth when a voice calls out from the front of the house, “Jessica, it’s Dad. Vicky had the baby!” and I come fully out of my skin with terror.
“My father! Get dressed!” I hiss, bolting off the bed so fast that I fall down and end up struggling into my khakis on the carpet like a turtle trapped on its back as I call, “Great news, Dad, be right there. I was just…”
“Playing chess,” Sam supplies as he hauls up his pants and tugs on his shirt with a speed that gives me hope we’re going to escape this mess without getting caught. “To keep from worrying.”
“Yeah, we were worried,” I add as I whip my shirt back into place, stuffing it into my khakis with one hand as I hastily smooth my hair with the other. When I’m done, I turn to Sam and whisper in a breathless rush, “Do I look like I was about to have sex?”
He grins. “No, you look totally normal.”
I prop a hand on my hip. “Then why are you grinning like that?”
He laughs. “Because I’m crazy about you and that was the best thing that’s happened to me in years.”
“Me, too.” I start to giggle but swallow the sound as I hear my father’s footsteps in the hall. With just seconds to spare, I whip open the chess set on the desk and plop it down on the carpet.
Sam joins me, plunking a few pieces onto the board and settling into a cross-legged position across from me just as Dad appears in the doorway.
He smiles at the sight of us, and I instantly feel a little guilty for deceiving him. But only a little guilty. It’s hard to feel too guilty about something that felt so good and so very, very right.
“Glad to see you two found each other,” Dad says. “Ready to go see the new baby?”
“Absolutely,” I say, grinning at Sam.
“Good. Mom’s so excited. The doctors cleared her to come down to the nursery with us. Just let me feed Isabelle her lamb hearts and we’ll go,” Dad says, a spring in his step as he turns to head back down the hall to attend to the demon ferret.
“Disgusting,” Sam whispers.
“She’s a monster,” I agree, arching a suggestive brow his way as I add, “And so am I. We should pick up where we left off at the earliest opportunity.”
“Damn straight we will,” he says, and then he kisses me, and my heart does fluttery, squirmy puppy things in my chest that would have terrified me just a few days ago.
But now they just make me smile as I whisper against his lips, “Race you out the window. If we crawl out and meet Dad in the driveway, we won’t have to risk Isabelle mistaking our ankles for lamb hearts.”
We tumble through the window, laughing and giving each other shit for being afraid of a ferret the size of a slinky and it is…lovely.
As lovely as this unexpected treasure I’ve found with my best friend.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sam
They say money can’t buy happiness.
Growing up in a single-parent household, where grocery money was tight, and I was lucky to wake up to one present under the tree at Christmas, I wasn’t so sure about that. Mom and I were happy in our shabby little bungalow with nothing but each other and the rabbits she bred in the backyard for extra money, but I suspected a thousand extra dollars a month would go a long way to improving both our moods.
Mom could stop working doubles at the hospital as an X-ray tech, we wouldn’t have to worry about where the next mortgage payment was coming from and going out to eat more often would have been fun. Mom used to love getting dressed up in one of the disco-era dresses she inherited from her mother and heading out for a night on the town.
As a kid, I hated that we only went to the steakhouse she loved on her birthday. I wanted to be able to treat her to a filet mignon with fancy mashed potatoes squeezed out of a pastry tube, so it looked like the top of an ice cream cone, whenever she wanted. I vowed that when I grew up, I would make a shit ton of money and give her everything she missed out on being a young single mother whose baby daddy decided not to stick around.
Just a few years after my early graduation from college, I dropped half a million dollars in her checking account one Christmas morning, but Mom didn’t stop working doubles and still only goes out to eat on special occasions. She’s happy with her life and her work the way it is—though she did pay off the house, buy the bunnies a fancier kennel, and takes way more vacations than she did before.
But I can’t fault her. I’m the same way—I love my private estate in the English countryside and penthouse in London, but I was just as happy in my tiny garret studio, sleeping on a blow-up mattress and writing code at a desk that was way too small for a grown man. It was my work, my friends from school, and my amazing mom back home, rooting for me every step of the way, that brought me joy.
And it was the lack of one certain person, the one woman I couldn’t get out of my head, that kept that joy from being complete.
But now…Jess is with me, really with me, and I’m with her.
The fact that she can’t keep her hands off of me, even when we’re standing in front of the nursery window with her parents, watching Steve hold up his daughter, makes me so damned happy.
It’s all I can do not to run down the hospital hallway pumping my fist and whooping, “That’s right, people, she said yes!”
Only the fact that she hasn’t actually said “yes”—at least not officially—keeps me quiet and relatively cool. Still, I can’t stop smiling. Every time I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the nursery windows or the mirror on the wall in Mrs. Cho’s room, after we escort her back to her bed for the night, I’m grinning like an idiot.
I grin all the way back to the Cho house and through brushing my teeth and pretending to go to sleep in the guest room before sneaking down the hall to crawl into Jess’s twin bed with her. But it’s after midnight and we have to be up early to have breakfast with her dad and pick her mom up from the hospital before catching the train back to the city, so we don’t start anything we won’t be able to finish.
I simply curl around her, big spoon-style, and ask the question I’ve been holding in all night, “Be my girlfriend?”
She giggles softly. “You just asked me to be your girlfriend.”
“Yeah, I did,” I say, smiling into her hair. “Why is that funny?”
“It’s not. It’s just…no one has ever asked me that before, either.”
“It’s a night of firsts.”
She sighs and snuggles closer, her ass rubbing against where I’m hard for her again. “Yes, it is. This is also my first time trying to sleep with a small log digging into my back. It’s…interesting.”
I start to shift positions, but she grabs my arm and hugs it tight to her chest, adding, “No, don’t move. I like it. It makes me feel like the All-Powerful Goddess of Sex and Hard-ons.”
I grin. “You’re the goddess of all my hard-ons. No doubt about that.”
“Good.” She sighs again, her body softening against mine.
“Are you asleep?” I ask after a beat of silence, broken only by the soft, rhythmic rise and fall of her breath.
“Almost. With great sex-goddess power comes great tiredness,” she says, yawning. “And great need for sleep.”
“So, you’re going to make me wait until morning for an answer?”
“Of course not. The answer is yes. Yes, I will be your goddess girlfriend and kiss you and hug you and call you Handsome Sam the smexy god of my loins.”
Face aching with the force of yet another goofy smile so intense it threatens to crack my jaw, I hug her closer and whisper, “Good, but you can’t call me handsome as part of that nickname. That’s the cat’s name.”
“You can both be handsome. It isn’t a competition. I promise to love you both equally.”
“Sounds fair,” I say, my heart about to beat right out of my chest, even though I know she’s just joking. She doesn’t love me…yet. But my gut says it won’t take much to take our friend love to the next level. She’s open, she’s interested, and she feels the same electricity I feel whenever we touch.
Now to find a way to wiggle out of all your lies before you fuck up the thing that matters most to you in the whole world.
My heart drops into my stomach and the warmth filling my chest goes cold, leaving me awake, staring at the video game posters on the wall, long after Jess has gone to sleep.
The inner voice is right.
I have to fix this—fast.
Luckily, I know just the person to ask for advice.
By the time we get back to the city on Monday night, it’s too late to call Jack.
Tuesday morning is spent prepping Jess for her interview and stressing about it from Cam’s room as I eavesdrop on her conversation with the board.
She kills the interview—I had no doubt she would, but I’m still relieved when it’s over—and we spend the rest of the day celebrating by making out, having a picnic on her roof, making out some more, and catching an early movie at an old art house theater we both love. During the film, dubbed in English, we learn how to say a few scandalous things in French we didn’t know before and whisper them to each other over a dinner of muscles and crusty French bread that is the perfect ending to another perfect day.
Perfect, except that I’m keeping secrets from the woman I love, secrets that are already coming between us.
Instead of going up to her place and taking our making out and “nearly having full-on sex” to its logical conclusion, I tell her I need to catch up on some work early in the morning and have to head back to my hotel to get my laptop and a good night’s rest. But we make plans for dinner again the next night at her place to celebrate Handsome’s big homecoming.
Which gives me the entire day on Wednesday to seek out Jack and his words of wisdom.
We meet at a coffee shop around the corner from his high-rise office in the financial district. Jack looks the same as ever—full-on corporate shark in a two-thousand-dollar suit and a vintage Armani briefcase that probably costs more than Jess’s rent—but I know a soft heart beats beneath that cool, expensive exterior, a fact he proves by wincing as I finish filling him in on the latest developments.
He sits back in his chair, dragging a hand through his shaggy, sandy-brown hair. “Fuck. Now I’m even more stressed out. How about you? Are you worried yet, or are you still foolishly thinking she’ll understand why you’ve sheltered her in a house of lies?”
“I haven’t sheltered her in a—”
“Nope,” he says with a shake of his head. “We’re not arguing about that part. There is a house. It’s made of lies. Well-intentioned lies, but lies all the same, and there’s nothing women hate more than lies. Trust me. Now, what are you going to do about it?”
I lace my fingers together around my steaming cappuccino. “I was hoping you could help me out with that part. I’ve only had two serious girlfriends and I never lied to either one of them. I don’t have any experience with this sort of thing.”
“And you assume I do?” Jack says with an offended snort, but before I can apologize, he adds, “Well, you’re right. I do. I’m not proud of it, but back in college I was a dumbass. I thought it was okay to secretly date several girls at a time without telling them about each other, as long as I informed each of them that I wasn’t looking for a relationship.”
I wince. “How’d that work out?”
“About as well as you would assume. They eventually found out about each other and joined forces to destroy me. Luckily, they were nice people and seemed satisfied with egging my SUV and writing ‘Jack is a Limp Dick Loser’ on the sidewalk outside my apartment, but it taught me a lesson: When it comes to intimate relationships, always err on the side of too much information.”
I nod. “Okay, so I’ll tell her everything, all the reasons I thought it was a good idea to blur the truth and let her misunderstanding about us both being virgins stand that first night. I’ll do a twenty-page PowerPoint with all the data, ending with reasons it would be a good idea to forgive me.”
Jack rolls his eyes. “No. It’s too late for that. Information only works up front. On the other side of lies like these, you only have one option: Groveling for forgiveness. On your belly. Preferably with some sort of expensive jewelry clutched in your pitiful lying hand as an offering.”
I sit back in my chair with a grunt.
Clearly reading my doubt, Jack doubles down. “Jewelry, my friend. The fancier the better. And don’t start telling me your girl is the lone woman on earth who doesn’t like jewelry or care about how expensive it is. It’s not just jewelry; it’s physical evidence of your interest in commitment. It’s putting your money where your heart is. That’s what they like about it. It’s not the money, not directly anyway. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I bite my lip, my gut still insisting that Jess isn’t that girl. She’s never cared about stuff like that, and when she asked me about being rich the other day, she didn’t ask in a covetous way, more…a curious way. And her dreams for having money didn’t involve expensive jewelry or fancy clothes. She just wanted… “A washer and dryer in her apartment,” I blurt out, sitting up straighter. “That’s what she wants.”
Jack frowns. “No, it’s not. I mean, she may want that, but first she wants expensive jewelry and groveling.”
Pushing back my chair, I pull a twenty from my wallet. “Okay, I’ll do that, too. But I have to hurry if I’m going to get that all in place before she gets back with the cat.”
“You’re not listening,” Jack says. “And you’re not ready to be a cat dad. You two are moving way too fast. Start with a goldfish. They’re hardy and easy to move out when one of you decides love is too hard.”
I put the money on the table, feeling more at peace than I have since Sunday night. “Jess doesn’t believe in ‘too hard.’ If she wants something, she goes after it with everything she’s got and doesn’t stop until she makes her dream a reality.”
Jack sighs and lifts his hands in surrender. “Okay. I hope you’re right.”
“Thanks, I do, too,” I say, promising to touch base before the picnic on Friday before heading out of the coffee shop into the still-cool morning air, determined to make things right.
But I should have realized that the only thing harder than finding a company willing to do a same-day installation on a washer-dryer combo in an apartment on the fifth floor with no elevator and no approval from the landlord is…love.
Love is hard as hell.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jess
Timing is everything.
If I hadn’t been half an hour late to pick up Handsome—subway delays are the bane of my existence and a good reminder why I don’t like leaving the house—I wouldn’t have run into Fake Boob Woman and her friend in the lobby of the Animal Rescue building.
I wouldn’t have attracted her attention by shooting daggers at her with my eyes for causing Sam to get run over by a bicycle or heard her weirdly husky voice say, “You’re that girl, right? Sam’s friend?”
I blink, my chin retreating into my neck in surprise as my copy of Cat Fancy drops to my lap.
Did Sam tell her his name at the event on Saturday? I don’t remember that happening, but maybe I was distracted by cute cats. Stranger things have happened.
“Um, yes. I am,” I say, still too new to the girlfriend gig to feel comfortable announcing that he’s actually my boyfriend and we’re totally going to have sex soon.
Maybe tonight.
Maybe this weekend.
Who knows, but we’re definitely headed in that direction and it’s going to be amazing.
But that’s on a need-to-know basis, and Boob Woman and her friend do not have a need to know. I haven’t even told Evie and Harlow yet, and I’m not sure I’m going to until after the deed is done. I don’t want to jinx it, not when everything is going so well.
