“I can handle this!” She explodes in a gasping fit. “I want to do this for you! What don’t you get?”
My hands rise to my sides. “Relax. I was just trying to help, remember? You asked me to tell you. You’re embarrassing yourself. Your words not mine.”
“Oh!” She covers her mouth with her hand. “Is there biting involved?”
“No biting—no teeth for that matter.” Just the thought is enough to make me want to dive over the edge of the roof and free-fall three stories. “It’s like this.” I guide her down, and she opens for me, landing those sugared lips over me, tight, ready to put in her time. Once Macy gets her mind to something, nothing seems to stop her. Gently, I navigate her until she catches the rhythm, and my head arches back, eyes to the stars as she pulls me into a nirvana I have never felt before. All of those dizzying nights, all of those revolving door girls, all of the lips that have tread where she is now—none of them were able to wake me up right down to the last firing synapse and bring me closer to ecstasy, closer to the height of my existence.
Just like I predicted, it does not take long. Macy brings me to the brink, and my hands catch her hair, pulling her closer before pushing her off, whispering, “I’m going to come.” And she plunges me into her cleavage, Macy, the gift that keeps on giving. I come for minutes, hours, weeks. It feels like years bleed by as I nestle in that tight, slippery when wet, beautiful part of her body, and I hold her like that, her mouth panting over my stomach, the wind whipping by in a stream of screaming laughter.
Macy takes a generous bite out of my side, and I let out a sharp groan.
“What did you do that for?” I ask, pulling her up and planting a kiss on her forehead.
“I wanted to make sure you were awake, so you can return the favor.”
“Always thinking.” My brows hike in lieu of a laugh.
I stuff myself back into my boxers and button up. “Plan on it, Sin.” I scoop her up into my arms and take her inside in the event some pervert has his telescope focused on us. I would never want to embarrass Sin like that, never want to hurt her. She’s in the coven. Even more frightening than that, she’s in my heart.
I lay her down onto the mattress and tongue her deep as her throaty cries climb the walls, reach the ceiling, pour through the open windows, and fly up into the depth of the universe. Gone is the sweet innocence I tasted in her the other night and replaced with something metallic, raw. It’s no wonder she isn’t chasing me down and pole hopping. She’s hurt, sore, not nearly ready for me to thrust into her mercilessly like I had been. I’m an asshole. And not always a magnificent one. But as long as I’m with my favorite sin, I’m a happy one at that.
I’m almost all there with her. I’ve turned the Closed sign around on my heart for her, traded in my stoic demeanor for a couch-jumping proclamation at the Trattoria, one I may never quite live down. And perhaps the most valid proof that Macy is the one for me—is the fact I’ve accepted that Cannon blood is fueling that powerhouse of a heart of hers. The truth is, it never bothered me. The truth is, she opened my heart as soon as she stepped into my office that day.
I think maybe it’s time to let her in all the way.
It’s time to tell her about Jackie.
Fire the Flare
Macy
There are certain “truths” in life you can ignore, like never wear white after Labor Day, and you can’t get pregnant your first time. No, still not pregnant, thank God up in heaven, but the false truth I’m trying to wrap my head around is that I’m essentially a virgin again. I’m convinced the wound from my first time was so severe my vagina had mended itself by fusing together. No baby—no period for that matter, would ever come out of me. I’ll have to be painfully cauterized to function properly again, thanks to Lincoln and his thick, exaggeratingly long horse dick. He’s been a total sweetheart when it comes to playing along with my new oral fixation. I’ve decided that until I’m ready, we can share our mutual pleasure by way of our mouths. It’s working out beautifully, for the most part, except for some strange reason, my body seems to crave him hovering over me, crave the most intimate part of him buried deep inside me—and then my insides burn like lava from our last transaction, and I recoil at the thought of progressing further in that department.
I’m sure Lincoln is in deep regret over giving up one-night stands for my totally lacking oral copulation skills. I can get him where he needs to be, but there’s an awful lot of gagging and knifing him with my teeth on my part. I might just go down in his fornicating record as the redheaded virgin who sexually regressed since he’s deflowered me. Not really. He seems rather smitten and more than willing to please on a cunnilingus level. I’ve never seen him so bright-eyed and ready-to-serve, never complaining that it takes me a full hour, on a good night, to get there. But when I do, it’s cataclysmic. The cosmos collide, and the universe explodes into little heart-shaped dust particles. How can women and men all over the planet have something so spectacular at their fingertips (no pun intended), and there still be war and so many other awful things in this world? It’s a wonder couples don’t just give up on daily life and accidentally fuck themselves to death via starvation. I feel like I need to shake strangers on the street, shouting that orgasms have the power to save humanity. But then, not everyone is getting what Lincoln has the capability to deliver. Being with Lincoln, loving Lincoln is the most profound, most beautiful thing I have ever experienced. It would never have been like this with Bradley. After careful analysis, I’ve come to the conclusion I was never really in love with him, never actually thought of him as handsome. His mouth has always had a reptilian quality I tried hard to ignore. His eyes a bit too sunk in for me to ever believe what he was saying. It was the face of a mocker, a liar, and, in truth, he was all of that and more—a cheater.
In the early hours of Monday, while the fog stretches like batting outside the seamless windows of the hive, Luke and I relax our legs over a shared comma-shaped ottoman. We hem and haw over our finished apps until the afternoon sun spears through the marine layer and lets out a slow, broiling yawn. The pod stiffens underneath our feet, and we kick it away. Everything at Jinx is futuristic in nature as if in some far away delusion the people who designed this fantasyland want us to believe this is what the inevitable future holds—pods, pills instead of food, and communal hippy farms that clandestinely grow weed on the periphery. Yes, I found acres of reefer. I knew it was there. But the future is now, and it looks a lot more mid-century Spanish fusion than it does space station meets professional grade stainless kitchen. The future is a funny thing because you expect such audacious things from it. People forget that life doesn’t change all that dramatically, with the exception of technology. Nobody is going to be running around in matching silver suits a hundred years from now. People are far too individualistic to ever let that happen. I would stab my eye out before I was forced to play twin dress-up with Leah on a regular basis, and I’m sure the same goes for Lincoln and Luke, although comically when they both happen to wear a suit, it’s sort of the same deal. The best you can hope for in the future is that you’ve managed to get all the rough edges shaved off. As for me, I can feel my edges smoothing out. The hard blows Leah and Bradley dealt left me in shards, but Lincoln is carefully sanding those rough edges away, one kiss at a time.
“You’re quiet,” Luke says with his eyes still heavily focused on his laptop. His lids droop to his keyboard at regular intervals as if he can’t type without reassuring his fingers of where to go.
“I’m usually that way. Everything okay with you and your brother?”
“Should I be asking you that?”
“We’re fine. We’re better than fine.” God’s honest truth.
“Figures.” He smirks into the screen. The blue cast glows off his reading glasses. “Golden Boy always gets the prize.”
“Hey.” I toss a metallic silver pillow at him. It’s so uncomfortably slick that it ricochets, pinning one of the supermodels strutting by in h
opes to garner his attention. “Lay off your brother. He’s perfect. A walking piece of art if you ask me.” I fall back and sigh, landing on another uncomfortable metallic disc. It reminds me of the time my mother, who worshiped Martha Stewart both pre-prison and post, threw out all of our comfortable, happily yellowing polyester-stuffed pillows and made us lie on sacks of buckwheat. I still blame that brief stint of maternal psychosis on the crick I get regularly on the right side of my neck.
“Walking piece of art?” He looks up at me from over the rim of his laptop. “Boy, you have got it bad. So, are both of you moving into the Riviera house? That’s a pretty big step, moving in together.”
“What Riviera house?” I sit up in a panic as though someone pulled the fire alarm.
“I heard Stevie mention it—some beefed-up McMansion right on the water. Sounds like you’ll have a blast. Aspen said he’ll see the ocean without getting out of bed.”
My body tenses. Why would he tell his sisters and not me? I bet he’s going to surprise me. “It does sound perfect.” A lump forms in my throat. Why hasn’t he mentioned it? I mean, my mouth is doing him nightly favors. We have the best laughs over the silliest things. He pulled me into the shower this morning and held me out as if he were about to ask me to dance and told me I looked fucking beautiful. It almost made me cry. And now it feels as if Luke has pulled the rug out from under the spectacular Cinderella fantasy I’ve been living in, if Cinderella happened to be wildly good at blowjobs—a fact she wears like a badge of pride.
“I’m implementing ReInvent tonight.” He keeps clicking away at the keyboard with an intense veracity. Luke sort of reminds me of a freakishly handsome mad scientist. He’s brilliant. He’s done all the coding for our apps and has come up with at least a dozen ideas for his own apps. He’s not giving his shit away for free. His words, not mine. But Jinx can have my app. I’m just glad to have a part in it. What I miss is painting. I miss the actual act of setting brush to wood and begging it to come to life again.
“You okay with that?” He looks up from his piqued brow as if to say, Last chance.
“Yes. That’s what they hired us for, remember?”
“That’s what they hired you for.” He gives a lazy grin. “I’m here beating the drum. Learning what I can. Just another cog in the wheel.”
“And those brilliant apps of yours?” Food Story will be big. We both know it.
He pauses, looking up, those dreamy day-glow blue eyes piercing right through me like a Husky’s. Any other girl in the hive would have given an aching sigh by now, but I’m saving all my aching sighs for Lincoln. I sigh just thinking about him.
“I love it when you call me brilliant. When I’m rich and powerful one day, I’ll be sure to give you a hundred grand for each time you stroked my ego.”
“Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. That’s four hundred thousand you’ll owe me. The first one counts, too.”
“Duly noted.”
“You’re avoiding the topic. When are you leaving Jinx and doing your own start-up?”
“I don’t have to leave Jinx to do that.”
“Yes, you do. It’s in the contract.”
“No, what the verbiage says is, they get first look.” That smug smile expands over his comely face, and ten girls melt behind me. “But I’m not giving them first look, so you’re right.” He snaps his laptop shut and motions for me to get up. “Let’s do sushi—or is your boyfriend taking you out to lunch?”
It’s been an even split, lunches with Luke and lunches with Lincoln. Usually, Lincoln is at Merlin until one in the afternoon before he makes his way here.
“He’s not here, so you win.”
“Good.” Luke lands his hand in the small of my back and shuttles me into the mouth of a waiting elevator. “I like to win. In fact, I always win. But then, I bet your boyfriend says that, too.” He rarely says Lincoln’s name. It’s always your boyfriend or my brother, and usually both of those are smeared in sarcasm. As handsome, and yes, brilliant as Luke Van Der Wolff is, he’s a tad juvenile when it comes to his “brother.”
The elevator bounces to the lobby, the doors opening like curtains waiting to reveal some magical prize. The lobby is always the prize because it smells of insanely delicious coffee—that I’m actually beginning to appreciate, and the exit is only ten feet away.
There’s no better feeling than leaving work at noon. There’s something exhilarating about ducking out in the middle of the afternoon, even if it is only for an hour. It feels as if we’re ditching school for the day without a note from our mothers, and this brief form of treason makes me feel alive.
“If things don’t work out with your boyfriend, you should give me a shot,” he says, draping his arm over my shoulder as if I were already giving him a shot. For a second, I’m tempted to inquire of the size and girth of his manhood, because if he’s smaller, that might open up talks. I shake the thought away. I shouldn’t even joke like that. My lips pinch tight to keep my vagina’s newest phobia from leaking out. Not to mention, I wouldn’t trade Lincoln for all the tiny penises in the world.
“Forget about me. I’m off the market. How about Pepper? She’s unforgivably adorable, bubbly, and not at all related to you.”
“Pepper is hot,” he admits. “But I’ve seen Carson giving her the side eye one too many times. She’s taken. She just doesn’t know it.”
“Is that how you men work? That’s disturbing.” I laugh at the idea.
We pause in front of the grand fountain sitting smack dab in the middle of campus. We always pause here for a few brief seconds, and I’ve yet to figure out why. Its residual spray cools us off, refreshing us for the next leg of the journey, and I think I’ve just cracked the mystery.
“Macy.” He takes a step in just as I do, and we land at an uncomfortably close proximity. His eyes squint into mine as if he were about to deliver devastating news. “I know you think what you have with my brother is real, but I really don’t think he or my father knows anything about matters of the heart.”
A hard knot pinches in my chest like he might be right. He’s not, but it doesn’t stop the doubt from seeping in like poison, leaching into the groundwater.
“He does,” I correct.
Luke searches my face before his gaze falls to the concrete. “Has he said he loves you?” He shakes his head as if he already knows the answer.
“You heard him that night at the Trattoria.” Everybody did, and I was glad about it. I felt like a princess—a queen to his king. “He said he’s falling in love with me.”
His chest rides up and down with a tired breath. “That was him claiming you like property.” He shakes his head again, losing his focal point on some indiscriminate place behind me. “Don’t get upset, but they’re sociopaths. My sisters, thank God, turned out fine, but Lincoln is as big an asshole as they come, just like his father.” There it is again—that thirteen-year-old in him jumping up behind his eyes with his own hurt and pain so ripe you can smell it emanating off his skin.
“Hey.” I pull him close, platonic, but it’s still intimate enough to let him know we’re very good friends. “My father took off when I was a kid and started a whole new family. The bastard wasn’t even coming to my wedding.” The words bite as I choke them out. It’s hard to believe I can still be emotional over something that at the time I pretended didn’t wound me. “I get it. I get that when you’re rejected as a child it messes with your head even as an adult. I wanted a man in my life so bad that I settled for Bradley. That sucked. Bradley sucked. Thank God I landed in front of Lincoln one day. I don’t know your father, but I do know your brother. When he loves you, he loves you with a passion that rivals the power of the sun, the moon, the stars. Not hell or high water is going to separate you from that man’s affections. You are his blood. He worships his blood. Those sisters of yours—you—you are a part of his tribe. I’m not sure what kind of loyalty test it is you’re running past each other, but I can tell your penises are getting in the way of w
hat can be an awesome brotherly bond. When the two of you crest that wave, it’s going to be beautiful. You’re going to have that family you’ve always craved.”
I pull him into a tight embrace. His chest hiccups over mine as if swallowing a sob.
“Thank you.” He gives a gentle kiss over my cheek. “I think I needed to hear that.”
“Sin.”
I drop Luke like a moldy rag and spin to find Lincoln Lionheart, the man who ironically saved me from myself, and give a spastic two-armed wave as if I were landing a 747.
He runs up, spins me, and kisses me full on the mouth. “What’s he doing here?” he whispers hot into my ear.
Luke holds up his hands in surrender. “Just taking her to lunch since you weren’t available.”
Lincoln huffs a dull laugh, silent and potentially deadly. “You like stepping into my shoes, don’t you?”
Luke shoots me a look that suggests my lengthy dissertation regarding Lincoln’s great brotherly attributes were severely off the mark.
“I’m out.” He gives a brief wave before heading to the parking garage solo.
“Where were you headed?” Lincoln wraps his arms around my waist, powerful and strong, claiming me as Luke suggested, but I don’t mind.
“Out to lunch for my favorite kind of meal.”
“Sushi.” He gives a knowing nod. “I know just the place.” Lincoln speeds me off by way of my hand, and I trail behind him like a kite.
“Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise.”
My heart thumps wildly at the prospect of being surprised.
With Lincoln, every day feels like a new surprise.
* * *
The “surprise” involves a private jet.
Lincoln has a brief conversation with his personal pilot before we get settled, and the plane hits the ever-expanding American blue sky. My guess is Las Vegas or San Diego, but it could be someplace quasi-exotic compared to L.A., like Catalina Island or San Francisco. I groan at the thought of San Francisco being labeled as exotic. That just showcases what a pathetic hermit I’ve become.