Page 60 of Wait for Him

I stand and reach for my bag.

“Hear me on this, Elyse.” I round the desk and stop in front of her. “You get into any trouble tonight, any at all, and I swear to fuck I will leave you in whatever cell you end up in and go home and sleep like a baby. I don't care what Daddy says.”

I pitch the last two words into the same spoiled little whine she's been using since she walked in.

Her eyes narrow.

“There's a version of this where I stop catching you,” I tell her. “And you're a lot closer to it than you think.”

For once, she doesn't have an immediate comeback.

Thank fuck, because I am so fucking tired of catching people today.

Chapter Three

Jackson

I'm not proud of this. I want that on the record before I say the rest of it, for whatever my pride's still worth at this point.

The whole idea of Stacy exists because she scratches my Rose itch. That's the ugly engine under the hood of the thing I keep calling convenience to my own face. I found her on Tinder about a year ago, right after the closest call I've ever survived with Rose. Close enough that walking away from it, I understood with total clarity that I needed something built between me and her before the next time, because there wasn't going to be a next time so much as a point I couldn't come back from.

We'd both been drinking heavily, one of those corporate days that earns a bottle at the end of it. Bennet had bailed on the two of us at the bar, the way he does, and left us to our own devices, which should've been fine. Rose and I had been alone together thousands of times by then. We'd survived hotel rooms on business trips, late nights at the office, dinners, beaches, celebrations, arguments, all of it without doing anything we couldn't take back.

But there's always been a current in the air between Rose and me, a live wire we've spent a long time stepping carefully around. Most of the time we don't even have to think about it anymore. It's just there, buried underneath the friendship, and we've both gotten good enough at pretending not to feel it that sometimes I can almost convince myself it's gone.

That night it wasn't gone.

Whether it was the alcohol, the length of the day or just the accumulated weight of not touching her, neither of us stepped around it. We decided to go swimming at the rooftop pool in our building, closed to everyone except the handful of people who own the place, which at that hour meant empty and ours.

We laughed at everything and nothing the whole way up, bumping into the walls and each other, useless and happy. Rose kept trying to walk backward while talking to me and nearly ate shit twice, then accused me of sabotaging her when I caught her the second time. By the time we pushed through the doors onto the roof, she had one heel in her hand and the other still on her foot, and I was laughing hard enough that my stomach hurt.

"Let's see the goods, Jackie boy. Get those pants off and that ass in the pool."

She started stripping before I could answer.

The problem was that I'd just watched her peel down to a black lace bra and a scrap of a thong before she hit the water, and there are limits to how evolved a man can reasonably be expected to become, because every good intention I'd ever had went straight south to my dick with zero regard for my dignity.

I did my level best to be a gentleman about it. I stripped down to my briefs, got into the water and tried to keep enough distance between us that neither of us had to acknowledge what was happening. The cold water helped for a minute, right up until Rose surfaced, pushed her wet hair away from her face and looked at me. And Rose being Rose, she clocked the erection almost immediately.

Her eyes dropped below the water, and when they came back to mine, I felt the change between us so fast it almost sobered me up. Her breathing got heavier, her lips parted, and those piercing gray eyes went dark in a way I hadn't seen directed at me in years.

Rose was turned on.

And once I knew that, keeping my distance became a much harder fucking argument to make.

I stepped toward her and watched her eyes move over me, across my chest and stomach before dropping again to the bulge straining against my briefs. She wasn't even pretending not to look. Her gaze stayed there long enough to send every bit of blood I had left directly to the problem, then slowly climbed back up until it landed on my mouth.

I took another step.

She still didn't move.

By the time I reached her, we were close enough that I could feel the heat of her body despite the water between us. Every inch of me was vibrating with the need to touch her, taste her, kiss her, and the only thing keeping my hands at my sides was knowing exactly how badly this could go.

"Maybe this was a bad idea," she breathed.

"Why is that?"

I closed the last of the distance anyway, because asking the question while doing the exact thing that made it irrelevant was where my decision-making skills had landed for the evening. We were hip to hip now, her body nearly against mine, and I watched her gaze drop to my mouth before she forced it back to my eyes.