Playing Dirty (21 page)

Her mother consulted her diamond wristwatch. “Let’s make it in fifteen minutes.” She reached out and briefly touched Ava’s cheek. “This is a fabulous party, darling. Simply everyone has raved about it.”

The praise warmed her all over. “Thanks, Mom.”

“Mother,” Jacqueline corrected.

She sighed.

Her mother smiled. “Very well. Mom. But just for tonight.” She looked Ava over. “Your dress is truly lovely. I don’t believe I could have chosen better myself.”

Holy crap. Pigs really could fly!

“Now if you were just a few pounds lighter.”

“For God’s sake, Mom!” Usually a weight reference from Jacqueline made her doubt herself, made her feel…less. Less than attractive, less than worthy. But Cade’s
I love your curves
and
You’re beautiful—full stop, period
echoed in her head. And perhaps because for a second there she had basked in her mother’s approbation, what she felt now was furious betrayal. “I’m not doing this anymore. I am just tired to
death
of feel
ing that unless I fit in your mold I’m never going to be good enough for you.”

Her mother stared at her in shock. “I have
never
said that!”

“Not in so many words, maybe. But every time you tell me I did something well but it would be better if I would just lose however many pounds it is you deem acceptable, that’s exactly what you’re saying. That, yes, I’m accomplished—just not accomplished enough to make up for my physical shortcomings. And I’m through listening to it.

“Look at me, Mom. See
me
. I have Grandmother Spencer’s big bones. I am
never
going to be fine-boned like you, am never going to wear a size four. So you can accept that, or you can keep doing this soul-destroying you-could-do-better crap. I’m telling you right now, though, that the latter will drive me away. Because I am not going to let you make me feel bad about myself, make me feel inadequate, ever again.” She focused a level look on her mother. “Are you hearing me?”

“Yes,” Jacqueline said through stiff lips.

“Good.” Even though her heart pounded in distress over the confrontation, she felt immeasurably lighter for having finally said what she should have said years ago.

She turned and walked away.

C
ADE HAD NEVER
seen Ava quite like this. She’d talked nonstop all the way back to her place, hammering him with questions about what a wrap party entailed, throwing detailed idea after detailed idea at him for his consideration. Then the minute they cleared her front door, she grabbed him by his tie and strode straight for her
bedroom, making it necessary for him to hunch over and pick up his pace to keep from being strangled. Nobody’s fool, he decided to save his breath until she no longer had her hot little fist around the tie-turned-garrote circling his neck.

Even after they entered her bedroom and she turned him loose, however, she remained the aggressor. It was that, in a nutshell, that constituted the difference in her behavior. It wasn’t the rapid-fire party talk. That he got—he hadn’t given her any real time to prepare. No, this had to do with the fact that up until now the aggressor role in their sex life had been primarily his job description.

He liked that she’d switched things up.

She suddenly gave him a shove and, like some old Three Stooges routine, the mattress behind him caught him off balance and tumbled him on his back on her bed. “Whoa!” He pushed up on his elbows and watched as she kicked off her heels, hiked up the skirt of her dress and climbed onto the bed to knee-walk over to him. She threw a thigh over his hips and settled astride him.

Gripping her hips, he bumped his ready erection against the damp satin-covered sex she’d aligned with it. “What’s gotten into you? Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but did something happen after you left me in your dad’s pool room? Because something’s got you all fired up.”

“My mother started in on my weight again.”

He went still under her. “Dammit, Av!”

She gave his chest a placating pat. “The key word here is started. I didn’t really give her a chance to say much before I went off all over her and told her what I
should have made clear years ago—that I’m not okay with her making me feel bad about my body.”

Her beautiful, beautiful body that not only her mother but he had helped to make an issue for her. He rubbed his thumbs over the silk dress that had ridden up to bunch around the full curve of her hips. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. There’s a part of me that feels a little sick over the whole business, but you know what? Mostly I feel empowered. God, Cade, I finally told her once and for all that her constant criticism is
not
all right. Whether or not she listened, of course—” She hitched a shoulder. “Well, I have no control over that.”

She undid his tie, slid it out from beneath his collar and tossed it on the nightstand. Then she went to work on his buttons, unfastening his shirt with the same efficiency she gave everything she turned her mind to. “What I
do
have control over is what I choose to put in my body. And right now, Gallari—” she wiggled atop the hard-on still pressed between her thighs “—that would be this bad boy.”

He had an urge to roll her over, hold her down and demonstrate just how fast he could help make that happen. But this was her show tonight. So he sucked in a breath and kept his hands where they were as she began stripping him of his shirt. When she slid off him and climbed from the bed to remove his shoes and socks, then reached for his pants, however, he had to transfer his grip to the comforter to keep from wresting control from her.

Once she had him buck-naked, his cock taking aim at the ceiling, she reached behind her to unzip her dress. The garment loosened, and she pushed it over her hips
and down her legs to pool in a purple spill around her feet. Then she unfastened the front hook of her black bra and slid it off.

Leaving her in the skimpiest pair of black panties he had ever had the pleasure of viewing, a nude-pink-and-black-striped garter belt and sheer thigh-high hose the color of smoke. She shimmied her shoulders at him, making her breasts jiggle. “Do
you
think I could stand to lose more weight?”

“
God,
no.”

“Good answer. Neither do I. And for the record, that was the last time I ask that question. My days of letting anyone but me weigh in on the matter—no pun intended—are over.” She climbed back on the bed and crawled over to him. Stretching out on her stomach between his splayed thighs, she spread her fingers on his abs and pressed those lush tits—
breasts
—against his dick.

He sucked in a breath and made an adjustment to drive his cock into the channel of her cleavage.

“Ooh.” Lifting onto her elbows, she pressed her arms to the sides of her breasts to intensify their pressure around him.

“God!” He raised his hips off the bed, retracted them, then thrust again, all the while watching Ava watch the head of his sex appear from and disappear into the hot hollow between her breasts. She glanced up at him and licked her lips, and his cock jumped. “This is not the time to mess with me,” he warned. Not when his control was hanging by a thread.

She sent him a guileless smile. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

He had the impression she hadn’t been messing with
him with the lip lick—but that she was now. “The hell you don’t.”

With a shrug, she bent her head until her breath wafted over him, and he froze with his hips thrust high. “Kiss it,” he growled. “God, Ava, I want you to kiss it. Lick it.
Suck
it.”

Her eyes widened, and her cheeks went pink. But she lowered her head and pressed a prim, closed-mouth kiss on the tip of his cock. He made a sound, and she opened her full, pillowy lips just the slightest bit and sipped it.

The groan that escaped him this time was a wordless
You’re killing me.
She smiled demurely.

And lapped him with her tongue.

His hips thrust higher yet, pushing him into the warm, wet cavern of her mouth. And finally—finally!—she quit toying with him and set about doing her best to flat-out destroy him.

He hung on as long as he could, standing on the edge of hell, one elusive tongue stroke, a slick pull of her lips and cheeks, from achieving heaven. When he truly feared he was about to go the distance without so much as having even kissed her, he pulled back, rolled her over and came down on his knees between her sprawled legs. After swiftly donning a condom, he stripped her of her panties, hooked the bend of his elbows in the bend of her knees and, pressing her knees toward her chest, sank into her.

Where he discovered that for someone who’d given all of and received none of the foreplay, she was beautifully, liquidly primed. A moan purled out of her chest, and hot, strong tissues clamped around him like a wet
velvet fist. He pumped into her, finessing his position in order to bump her clit at the apex of each stroke.

And as he felt her winding mind-bendingly tighter and tighter, as he sensed her drawing closer by the second to her climax, words began crowding his throat.

Words he tried to bite back.

Then she screamed beneath him, and the kiln-hot vise surrounding him clamped down in blistering, undulating contractions. As his own climax boiled and built, he gritted his teeth. “Christ, oh, Christ, I’m gonna—”

It broke over him, roaring up and out in strong, hot pulsations, making him thrust deep and grind against her in mindless oscillations. And as he came he heard himself chant, “I love you, Ava.

“God, Spencer, I love you, love you, love you so damn much.”

I
LOVE YOU SO DAMN MUCH
.

Ava lay very still beneath Cade’s weight for a long moment, her pulse racing even faster from his words than it had from the screaming orgasm he’d just given her. The only sound in her bedroom was that of their harsh breathing slowly mellowing out. She knew she should probably say something. No, there was no probably about it. She knew she should.

But what?

Nothing. Trust me, sister, he probably didn’t mean
love
you love you, anyway, and brilliant or stupid, once words have left your mouth, you can’t take them back.
Silence was better than talking merely to fill the void. She knew from personal experience how well
that
usually worked out.

And really. When had she ever found impulsive talk to be brilliant?

So it was decided then. She’d follow her own advice and keep her trap shut.

Which made it doubly appalling to hear herself promptly blurt, “Thank you.”

Crap!

He stilled, then slowly pushed up on his palms. His penis might not be as rampant as it’d been a moment ago, but it was plenty sturdy enough to push a little deeper with his motion, to rasp against her still sensitive clitoris.

She swallowed a little moan.

Brows furrowing, he stared down at her. “Thank you? I tell you I love you and you say
thank you?
What the hell kind of response is that?”

“You mean you meant it?”

“Jesus, Ava. Yes, I meant it!”

“Oh.” Now, as when she’d first heard the raspy-voiced words, her heart lurched against the wall of her chest. And, yes, for a moment she once again hugged the rush of warmth of his words to her breast.

But only for a moment because, face it, it would never work. Having understood that the first time he’d said it, she had assumed— “I thought it was, you know, sex talk.” Even though the lazy way he’d been sprawled atop her, plus the soft, tender postcoital kisses he’d pressed to her throat, her chin, her shoulders, had suggested that he just might mean it.

“Jesus,” he said again.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m screwing this all up. But I really wish you hadn’t said that.”

“You want to tell me why?”

Not while she was naked, she didn’t. Which was probably absurd, considering how bold she’d been just a little while ago.

But that was then. This was now.

And now she was feeling a little panicky.

No.
She straightened as much as a bare-naked, sprawled-across-the-mattress woman with a man still
inside of her, for cri’sake, could do. She wasn’t panicky. She was cautious. Big difference.

She gestured for him to get off her.

Pulling out, he climbed to his feet and strode without a hint of self-consciousness toward the bathroom, although he did pause long enough to sweep his slacks up off the floor. He disappeared inside but was back before she had a chance to locate her discarded clothing, let alone put anything on. He’d donned his pants and had her Spa Collection bathrobe gripped in one hand. He tossed it to her.

Mentally blessing him for his sensitivity, she rolled out of bed, wrapped herself in the robe’s long, plush folds and tied the belt. She opened her mouth to say something—
anything
—then considered how swell that had worked for her so far.

Still. She stared at him, stubbornly not wanting to admit that when it came to a place to begin, her mind kept drawing one big, embarrassing blank after another.

Cade stepped forward and said, “I do love you, you know. And I think you love me, too.”

The panic she wasn’t feeling beat harder in her pulse points, and raising her eyebrows, she gave him a look she hoped to hell came across as a lot more amused than she felt. “Nothing wrong with your ego.”

He brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. “Ego’s got nothing to do with it, Ava. I know you. And I know you wouldn’t be sleeping with me at every opportunity the way we’ve been doing if you didn’t have strong feelings for me.”

The nonpanic was nudging into the real deal, but she made a rude noise and forced herself to meet his eyes. “Please. It’s a new millennium, Gallari. Women have great sex strictly
for
the sex all the time.”

“Yeah. A lot of women do. Maybe even most.” He stepped closer. “But the first time you slept with me this go-round, great sex wasn’t exactly something you had any real expectation of getting, was it?”

She glommed onto the opening he’d provided. “Because you sucked large our first time out of the gate, you mean?” Hey, when in doubt, lay the burden on the other guy. That was her shiny new motto from the school of The Best Defense is a Good Offense.

“I wouldn’t have put it quite like that, but basically, yeah.” He crossed his arms over his chest and pinned her in place with a gimlet-eyed gaze. He was shirtless and shoeless, for heaven’s sake; he shouldn’t make her think of some hard-nosed cop from an old film noir movie. “So if expecting great sex wasn’t the reason you slept with me the first time, what was?”

“Because—” Her mind shut down. She looked at the ceiling for inspiration and didn’t find it. Looked for it on the floor—with the same result.

Finally, she crossed her own arms under her breasts and looked him in the eye. “Fine. I care about you, okay?”

“You
love
—”

“I
care
.” God, why was her heart trying to pound its way out of her chest? “But you know as well as I do that we’ve got nil long-term potential.”

“Do I?” Stepping away, he braced his shoulders against the wall and lounged back, his crossed arms now matched by negligently crossed ankles. He quirked an eyebrow. “And how did I reach this conclusion?”

“C’mon! You’re based in L.A. My friends, my family—” benignly neglectful as the latter might be “—and my work are all here. It’s not like I could just pick up and go, even if I wanted to. Which—” she
looked him in the eye “—contrary to your assumption, I do not.”

“So I guess we do the long-distance thing.”

She felt her anxiety lessen slightly. “Oh, sure—that being so all-fired successful and all.” She’d been feeling uneasy over nothing. This was a no-brainer. Cade could be stubborn, but even he would have to admit that a relationship between them was destined to fail.

But not quite yet, apparently. “Hey,” he said easily, “it’s a two and a half hour plane ride. That’s not much longer than bucking rush-hour traffic.”

She made a rude noise. “Until you factor in the time it takes to get to the terminal, be at the airport two hours early to get through security, and how long it takes to get to your or my place at the other end. Face it, traveling these days is an all-day ordeal.”

“We live on the same coast,” he said with a shrug. “It’d only be a half day ordeal.”

“And yet
ordeal
remains the operative word. It wouldn’t work, Cade. I don’t know anyone who’s been successful with a long-distance relationship. I’ll admit the people I know who tried one seemed to start out great guns. But it’s almost as if there’s a written-in-stone shelf date on the damn things. Because the couples I know all broke up around the six month point from sheer attrition, caused—I don’t doubt for a minute—by the stress of all that backing and forthing.” Her shoulders hitched. “Well, that or never being able to do a damn thing together that didn’t have to be planned to death first. Or both.”

“Okay, so long-distance is out. We’ll just have to go to plan B.”

“Which is?” Why couldn’t he just give up?

“You joining Scorched Earth Productions.”

She literally felt her jaw drop. “Are you serious?”

“As a sailor on shore leave looking to score.” He flashed her the smile she’d privately labeled The Panty Charmer-Offer back in the day. She’d rarely seen it since signing up for this job. “You’ve been fantastic to work with on this project, and I can promise you a shitload of variety—not to mention the occasional exotic location.”

She felt downright relaxed now, and, spotting her panties, she disentangled them from the knob of the nightstand drawer, then sat on the side of the bed to don them. It was probably silly considering it was late and she’d undoubtedly be taking them back off to go to bed soon. But she just felt better armored with them on.

She looked over at Cade as she wiggled into them. “The reason I’m so effective in Seattle is largely due to the roster of contacts I’ve compiled over the past decade. Heck, some of them—like my Uncle Robert who’s a golfing buddy of the mayor’s and a few of my folks’ more clout-heavy friends—I’ve known since birth. I don’t have anything even close to that anywhere but here. If we’d had that blown utility meter problem in L.A., it likely would have taken me two or three days to get the city crew out to fix it. Anybody can make the calls, Cade. It’s who the caller knows that moves their problem to the top of the fix-it schedule.”

“I could introduce you to all sorts of people in L.A.,” he said easily. “With your way with people, you’d have contacts in no time.”

The unease snuck back. Why did he have to be so damn persistent? “You don’t get it. I’m not giving up a business I spent the past nine years building to be your—or anybody else’s—employee.”

“Okay,” he agreed without any apparent regret, and she blew out a little sigh of relief. Only to be immediately alarmed when he added, “I guess I’ll just have to move my home base to Seattle.”

“What?”
No two ways about it—this wasn’t simple unease or anything so namby-pamby as disquiet, and she quit trying to fool herself that it was. This was flat-out panic. “No!”

He raised a brow at her. “No?”

“You can’t just disrupt your entire life—hell,
my
life!—this way! We’ve been having a relationship, if you can even
call
it that, for—what?—ten minutes in the overall scheme of things?”

“We’ve been having a relationship—and make no mistake, baby, we damn well
can
call it that—since we were eight years old. I love you.” He gave her a level look. “And you love me.”

“Stop saying that!”

“Why?” He shrugged. “We both know it’s true.”

“No, we both know I
care
about you.
Care,
Cade. You’re a smart man, you oughtta know there’s a big difference between that and the freaking L word. Which, by the way, I have never, not once, mentioned.”

“That only proves my point. I clearly need to be up here where I can help you learn to do that.”

She clutched her hair and screamed.

Pushing away from the wall, he came over and rubbed a soothing hand down her hair from the crown of her head to her nape. When she looked up at him, he gave her a faint smile. “Okay, I’ll concede to ‘care about me.’”

“Well, it’s a start. Thank you.”

“Not a problem. So, you care for me.” He looked at her expectantly. “And?”

“And what? That’s it. That’s all I’ve got.” She could barely swallow around her heart, which seemed to be lodged high in her throat. The condition, of course, had nada to do with the fact that maybe she was prevaricating a little. That maybe she feared he might be right and she did love him.

He merely raised that damn brow at her. Repeated patiently, “And?”

She rolled her shoulders. “Oh, all right. I know you’re a good man, okay?” But what if she said she loved him back, and a week, a month or a year from now, after she’d let her guard down because he’d gotten her addicted to him, he changed his mind?

He merely stood there, silently looking at her, and she sighed. “I know you’ve evolved worlds from the boy you were in high school.”

“And?”

She could not say the words. She simply couldn’t. The last time she’d even
thought
of telling him she loved him she had ended up standing emotionally naked in a high school cafeteria, the butt of everyone’s joke.

She knew she wasn’t being fair, but she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, and her heart kept beating faster and faster, until she wondered if it would simply explode. At least that would put her out of her misery once and for all. Because—

“What if I get
fat?
”

Oh, God.
It was as if the world stilled.

She froze. Cade froze.

Only her mind seemed to keep spinning. Had she really said that out loud?

What the hell is your problem?
her barely functioning rational side demanded.
You
know
that’s just wrong.

For God’s sake, this evening she had declared her
independence from this exact kind of unproductive thinking. Yet, here she stood, a small part of her clearly still rubbed raw from years of being made to feel as if she simply didn’t quite measure up.

A small part that clearly felt she still didn’t.

But that’s not Cade,
her conscience howled.
My mother might be like that, but…

That’s.

Not.

Cade.

He thinks I’m wonderful just the way I am. He thinks—

“That’s what you think?” he demanded. “That I’m so…shallow…that ten pounds or a hundred would matter to me? That it’s your body I love and not the whole package?”

“No. But…you don’t know. I mean, the whole package might not hold up and your feelings might change.” She trailed off as his eyes went blank and distant.

It shocked her into realizing that she had virtually just told him she had zero trust in his feelings. She reached out.

He stepped away before she could touch him. “So this is what it comes down to,” he said levelly, no anger or sorrow or expression of any kind that she could discern in his voice. He picked his shirt up off the floor and pulled it on. “No matter what I say, what I do, we’re never going to get past my one fuckup.”

“No—”
Her voice cracked, and she cleared her throat. It was so damn devoid of moisture, every word felt as if she were forcing ground glass through the eye of a needle. But force it through she would, because she needed to let him know she’d been wrong to doubt him.
“No, I’m
sorry
. That was my insecurities talking, not my intellect—”