And so I stay with him the entire weekend. We shower together, he feeds me, we make love, we talk, we laugh and, occasionally, we sle
Ep I wake up with his arm slung around me. We’re in his California king- sized bed and I hear my phone chirp from my bag on the chair. Ace is asle ep, so I crawl out from under the relaxed weight of his arm to go and check my messages, which is way overdue. I pull an oversized t- shirt of Ace’s on, fish my phone out of my bag and tiptoe out into the great room so I don’t wake him, sitting on a forest-green velvet chair by the window, curling my feet under me. There are a flurry of texts and missed calls from my mom. Sweet Dusty. It’s too much!! Ten thousand dollars? How are you earning so much money already? Dusty! The bank manager came yesterday and gave me the fully-paid deed to the house!! I can’t believe you did this honey! Call me!! Honey I love you so much. Are you sure about this? Are you sure you can afford it? Please call me xx Call me sweetheart. Your sister is so over the moon. Roxie Tucker??? How did you manage that?? I guess the new job is going well? I hope you’re loving New York. How’s Emma? I still can’t believe the house is paid off honey. How did you do this?? Call me sweetie xx And now our taxes are being paid every month for five years??? Dusty Rose, you are the biggest sweetheart in the world. Are you sure you can afford this? DUSTY CALL ME I love you honey. Pls call me xx So I text her back. Hi mama. All is well. I’ll call you soon. I’ve been swamped with work but everything is really amazing here in NY and I’m loving the new job! What to say about the paid-off house? I still want to convince Ace it’s way too much and he needs to take it all back, but every time I bring up the subject he shuts it down and tells me it’s already a done deal. So I do my best to act like this is all normal and not some seismic shift in my space- time continuum. I’m glad you like your surprise. I hope it makes things easier. You’ve always worked so hard and I appreciate you so much. I’ll call you as soon as I get a chance, I promise. I love you mama xx And then I read the messages from Sky. WHAT THE HELL DUSTY ROSE ARE YOU SERIOUS ROXIE TUCKER JUST CALLED ME OUT OF THE BLUE AND WANTED TO TALK ABOUT HOW MUCH SHE LOVES MY MUSIC!!!!!! SHE SAID MY SISTER’S CONTACT WHO HAPPENS TO BE EXTREMELY WELL CONNECTED CONVINCED HER TO LISTEN TO MY SPOTIFY AND SHE LOVED IT AND NOW SHE’S OFFERED TO BE MY FREAKING MANAGER!!!!!!!!!!!! And this is incredible timing because Billy the asshole broke up with me yesterday and told me he wasn’t going to give me any gigs at the Blue Lounge and I didn’t want to tell you but I’ve kind of been at the end of my rope, Dust
Thank you soooooo soooooo sooooooooooooooooooo much you are the best sister in the history of the freaking world ROXIE IS SOOOO NICE AND SHE’S SENDING ME A TICKET TO NASHVILLE AND HAS A SPARE ROOM FOR ME TO STAY IN AND SHE’S PUTTING TOGETHER A CONTRACT!!!!!!! ROXIE’S BROTHER KADE TUCKER (OF THE FREAKING TUCKER BROTHERS!!!!!!!!!!) LISTENED TO ONE OF MY SONGS AND SAID HE LOVED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! CALL ME YOU CRAZY BEAUTIFUL WOMAN HOW DID YOU DO THIS???? I’M LEAVING TOMORROW MORNING TO GO TO NASHVILLE CALL ME ROXIE WANTS ME TO RECORD AN ALBUM ON THE SAME LABEL AS THE TUCKER BROTHERS!!!!!!!!!!! I LOVE YOU DUSTY ROSE THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHERE ARE YOU CALL ME I’M IN NASHVILLE!!!!!!!!!!!!! I laugh and text her back. Hey sis, wow them with your genius and HAVE FUN. I’m sorry I haven’t called, been busy with work but I will call you later in the weekend or on Monday. You deserve this. Remember: you’re wildly talented and beautiful and amazing!!! I love you Sky Rose. Good luck!!!!! xxx My phone’s battery is on 3% so I go back into the bedroom, fish my charger out of my bag and plug it in. Ace’s eyes are open. The sheet barely covers the low, muscle-quilted, hair-dusted plane of his abs and he looks warm and sle epy and delicious. “Hey,” he purrs. “Everything okay?” “I think it’s safe to say that you’ve made my mom and my sister very, very happy. I still feel like we need to talk about that.” He pats the bed next to him. “Come here.” So I do, crawling back in with him. “The question is,” he drawls, “is Dusty Rose happy?” “Of course I’m happy, Ace. But I’m still mad that you did that without asking me. It feels so uneven. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to pay you back for all that.” “I told you, I owed you one. To me, it feels uneven the other way. There’s still more I want to give you to r epay you for converting me into a romantic and making me believe I’m actually capable of falling in love.” Despite the fact that his big, rock-hard body wrapped around mine feels more comforting than anything ever has, the die-hard cynic in me has to challenge him. “Stop throwing around the L word. It’s too soon for that. And we still have to address the whole you’re-my-boss dilemma.” “I’ve already addressed it.” “How?” “By coming in your mouth. Once you drink the magic elixir, you own me. You’ve already transcended my power. You’re the queen of my kingdom.” I laugh, rolling back on the pillow. “I’m trying to be serious here.” He presses his tongue to his plump bottom lip, watching my face as though enchanted in a hot, manly way. But his tone is more measured when he continues. “You want serious? Okay, here’s some serious. I want to hear about that day when you were four years old and you realized your father had left.” I blink at him and my smile fades. I wasn’t expecting that. “Oh. You mean really serious.” It’s the most serious of all my damages. In fact, it’s the cause of them too.
Ace seems to get this. “Tell me about it.” And so I somehow end up confessing things to Ace I’ve never really talked about with anyone else. “Well, he went out for the proverbial pack of cigarettes on a sunny Saturday morning and he never came back. I was on our porch playing with the little horses Sky and I used to love. We had this stable we’d made for them out of shoeboxes. And my mother came out and sat on the porch and watched us play. It’s one of my earliest memories. She sat there until after the sun went down, crying silent tears. She already knew.” Ace’s arms and legs are languidly wrapped around me and he holds me close. “That’s hard.” “Yeah. It’s so cliché. But that’s exactly what happened. He disappeared off the face of the earth, as far as we could tell. Later my mom heard from her hairdresser that someone had seen him and that he was working in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So she went over there to confront him and he’d changed his name and was living with his new wife, even though they’d never divorced, not legally.” “What a coward.” “Yeah. He hid from us so he didn’t have to take responsibility for us or pay for us. He wanted to wash his hands of us so much, he created an entirely new identity for himself just so he could avoid us. I mean, who does that?” “Someone who has no integrity, or self-respect.” His fingers play with mine absent-mindedly. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. And that your family did.” I sigh, more heavily than I mean to. “You know, I honestly don’t care anymore. Once he left, there was nothing left to salvage anyway. I always felt like we were better off without him.” “I’d say you were. And look how far you’ve come, without his help or anyone else’s. It’s all you.” “I guess so.” And I guess I’m acc epting that he’s not going to take back his way-too-generous offers. “And now you.” “That’s still you,” he insists. “Because of the way you smiled at me that night in Waikiki. I was like the Grinch. My heart grew three sizes and busted out of its mean little cage. I felt, for the first time in a long time, like I was capable of real happiness.” This makes me smile. “Well, I’m glad.” And I ask the question carefully. “What about your father? He must have been very successful.” Ace is quiet for a long moment. “We had a complicated relationship.” I get the feeling he’s putting that diplomatically. “We never really saw eye to eye on much. I’d just told him I was leaving the family company to go out on my own. And to top it all off, I was poaching two of my brothers. Needless to say, he wasn’t happy about any of it. He was determined that I would fail. We had a big blow-out over it and we both said some things we —or at least I—regretted. Three hours later he died of a massive heart attack.” I look up him. “I’m so sorry. You must have felt like it was somehow partly your fault.” He leans his head back against the plush pillows. The twisted regret is easy to read. “Good guess.” “It’s not your fault, though. It’s okay for you to want to live your own life and not his.” “He didn’t see things that way. Anyway, it turns out he might have been right.” I brush the backs of my fingers against the stubble of his jaw gently. “Don’t say that. It’s not your fault that someone leaked some info they shouldn’t have leaked. You can’t control everything all the time.” “I’m the CEO. It’s my job to control everything all the time.” I ease him onto his back and climb up his body. My breasts press against the warm surface of his broad chest. “I’m sure the whole thing will blow over. Maybe they’ve already tracked the person down and isolated the incident.”
With one hand wound into my hair, he angles my head, contemplating me, assessing every detail of my face. “It’s possible. And it’s something I’ll need to deal with. On Monday. Right now I’m going to devour the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen because I really don’t know how to handle how hard and fast I’m fucking falling for her. Now I know why they call it falling.” This is what he does. He convinces me. I kiss him. His warm lips open mine and the kiss turns slippery and greedy. “Texas, I’m losing my goddamn mind over you.” “Good,” I murmur against his mouth. His fingers stroke me, finding the wetness he knew was there. He swirls it all over my pussy, painting me with my own arousal, sliding his fingers into my slick, fluttering core. “My girl is always so fucking wet for me.” He cups me, playing me with his fingers until I’m whimpering with need. “You’re ready for my big cock, aren’t you, Texas. You’re sore because you can’t get enough of me. But still, you want more.” He lays me back, r eplacing his fingers with his hot, engorged length and I can feel every vein as he slowly, slowly drives in, and in. Gripping me, leaving marks as he sucks and bites on my neck. Ace makes love to me with a passion he can’t quite contain. I’ll admit it’s a strange feeling, to feel so incredibly treasured. He makes love to me with a kind of unrelenting joy that reaches de ep into my body and soul. He doesn’t hold back. He’s gentle but commanding. He fucks me with a quiet desperation, like he wants to consume me, whispering words to me about how he’s never felt like this, how I’m the only thing he can see. I can tell you this much: when a man like Cash Maddox growls very dirty sweet nothings into your ear as you’re having simultaneous crazy- intense orgasms, it creates a powerful, life-changing bond. His grip and his groans are real. They’re full of heartfelt lust that makes you believe him. And not just believe him, but to lean in and feel him. I’m falling for him and I’m doing it willingly. In fact I’ve fallen so hard for Cash Maddox over the course of one weekend—plus one hell of a one-night stand—the whole thing is kind of giving me vertigo. For now, he gives in to his obsession and I give in to mine, because we seem to be in capable—at least tonight—of anything else. Before I even open my eyes, I can feel the emptiness on his half of the bed. My eyes blink open. “Ace?” He’s gone but the duvet is wrapped snugly around me. No answer. So I get up and wrap the sheet around myself and wander into the living room. It must be Sunday morning. The slant of the golden rays of sunlight onto the rustic earth-tones of the art and the furniture and the wood make the apartment look like even more of a dream world. The opulent interior, framed by the insane view, gives the space a grand but also cozy atmosphere. Basically I never want to leave. Ace isn’t on the patio so I ke ep wandering. I find him in the kitchen. It’s as over-the-top as I’ve now come to expect. He glances up at me from the feast he’s setting out on the marble kitchen island. There are a dozen or more bags and boxes full of food. “Hey, gorgeous.” There’s a huge fruit plate with mangoes, pineapple and papaya, bagels with cream cheese and lox, gourmet-looking donuts, an antipasto platter with olives and cheese, French bread, omelets, rashers of bacon, hash browns, maple syrup, fresh-squeezed orange juice and a bottle of champagne on ice. “I had some stuff delivered,” he says.
“Wow.” “I hope you’re hungry.” “I’m starving.” “No wonder. You really worked up an appetite.” That crooked grin. His eyes are a light sky-blue this morning. I smile, biting my lip. “Guilty as charged.” All he’s wearing is a pair of gray sweatpants—Lord, help me—that hang low on his hips. He’s shirtless, barefoot, he needs a shave and his too- long hair is still a mess from bed. His chest hair and his muscles and the way his sweatpants hang low on his hips is just so... the kind of thing you fall in love with. On a second date. Or maybe we can count this as our third. “There’s enough food here to feed an army.” “We need energy. For later.” “What’s happening later?” “We’re going to go back to bed. I’m going to give you a massage then you’re going to ride me into a gilded sunset after I fuck you from behind like an animal.” I smile. God, this man. “Oh. Again?” “Yes. Champagne?” I notice he’s already poured two glasses. One of them is only half full. He hands me the other one. “What time is it?” He checks his phone, which is sitting on the counter. “Two fifteen.” This weekend feels like a fever dream. It’s gone so quickly. And tonight’s our last night. Tomorrow morning we both have to be back at work. “Isn’t it a little early for champagne?” “No. We’re on vacation for the weekend. Which I’ve never done before. And which I definitely shouldn’t be doing now, but I’m doing it anyway. So we’re going to make the most of it.” He’s never taken a weekend off. Until me. It’s a heady thought, that I have this kind of power over him, to make him drop his billionaire lifestyle and his company/investigation/portfolio to hide me away in his apartment and ke ep me all to himself. But we can’t ke ep the rest of the world at bay forever. Even now, his phone ke eps vibrating on silent mode. “Do you need to get that?” “I’ll call them back.” I’m really in over my head here. Maybe we both are. Because what is this? What are we actually doing? I’m staring at my CEO with heart-shaped eyes while he pretends that there’s nothing happening outside our little lust bubble. On the kitchen table, there are two wrapped packages, a big one and a small one. “Those are for you. Open them.” “I don’t want you buying me anything, Ace. You’ve already done too much. This is too n —” “Fast, yes. Inappropriate, possibly. Too good to deny, definitely. Open them anyway.” He lifts me and sets me so I’m sitting near the corner of the huge kitchen island. He lowers the sheet I wrapped around myself to my waist. My exposed nipples tighten in the relative coolness of the open air. But by now, I’m so used to him licking, sucking and feasting on every inch of me that I barely even blush. “No gifts,” I tell him. But Ace goes over and takes the smaller one and brings it to me, opening the sheet and pushing my knees apart so he can stand between them. Those gray sweatpants are doing nothing to conceal a very gigantic hard-on. “Please?” It’s almost... adorable—if an alpha billionaire hunk can be described like that. He’s excited for me to open his presents. So I unwrap the present, carefully removing the fancy wrapping paper —so he can save the wrapping paper if he wants to reuse it—to reveal a robin’s-egg-blue box. I open it. Inside is a bracelet. “Ace.” Three rows of pink diamonds are held together by inter-locked gold nests, all the way around. “This is... not real, I hope.”
“Of course it’s real.” Like he’s insulted. My huff of laughter is incredulous. “I can’t acc ept this. This must’ve cost n —” “Tex. Jesus. You don’t analyze the cost of something when someone gives you a gift. You just say thank you.” He takes the bracelet and lays it over my wrist, doing up the clasp. It really is the most stunning thing I’ve ever seen. I hold out my wrist to admire the sparkle of the diamonds, which catch the light, turning it up, then down. “It’s so, so beautiful... but I really can’t n —” “Stop protesting. Here.” He sets the bigger box next to me. “This one’s more practical.” Practical? Okay, I’m curious. I open the box. And pull out the most gorgeous suede coat I’ve ever seen in my life. “Whoa.” How did he know I love suede? Especially in my favorite fawny brown color. “I thought, since you’re from Texas and not used to New York winters, that it might ke ep you warm.” Here he goes with the adorable thing again. The sincerity in him is killing me. Combining it with his sculpted muscles and that colossal beast inside his sweatpants is almost more than I can handle right now. I run my fingers over the velvet-soft coat. It’s Ralph Lauren. “It even has a little bit of fringe along the back.” How did he know I love fringe? “It kind of looked Texan. I thought it looked like you.” He drapes it gently around my shoulders, sliding my hips forward so my bare pussy is almost touching his cock, which is so hard the head has es caped the waistband of his sweatpants. It’s hot-looking and there’s a slick of wetness. “It’s absolutely beautiful, Ace. But you have to stop n —” He licks his tongue into my mouth, kissing me slowly. I take the offering, sucking gently on his tongue. He groans, pushing his sweatpants lower, positioning his cock so the broad head pushes barely inside me. “You’re going to take everything I give you. Whenever I want to give it to you. Say thank you, Ace.” He grips my ass and his cock drives de eper. He’s so big but I’m so wet. The thick friction is already starting to make me come. “Thank you, Ace,” I gasp, as his heavy, skewering cock slides all the way to the hilt. Once again, Ace gets his way.