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Unsurprisingly, Lia went straight to my new kitchen.
I grinned at the door, picking her purse up off the floor and setting it on the dining table.
“What are you doing?” I asked as she laid her upper body across the marble island and moved her arms around like she was making a snow angel. I had to laugh. “You wanna sleep on my kitchen counter?”
“No! I want to make ten million chocolates on it, oh my God, it’s so beautiful!” she whined, stumbling back to look up at the copper pans I had hanging from the ceiling. “I think I hate you.”
“Well, that’s unfortunate because I certainly don’t hate you.”
She stopped and looked at me. “No?”
“Never,” I said as I joined her in the kitchen, hugging her from behind as she continued to explore.
“Do you see this?” she kept asking, to which I repeatedly said yes despite the fact that I wasn’t looking at anything. I had my eyes closed as I took in the scent of her hair and her skin.
She was like a drug. She soothed and calmed me down and had me thinking crazy thoughts at the same time. It didn’t help that I was watching her walk all around my place – my apartment, not Tess’s. Letting go of Lia, I slid my hands in my pockets and leaned against the wall with a smile, watching her burst through each area and flit over the windows, pointing at every view. My floor-to-ceiling windows faced north, west and south and she pointed in every direction like she was seeing each for the very first time.
It was fucking cute. And just like my couches and my kitchen cabinetry, Lia’s little sundress was an eggshell white, matching her pretty damned well to the rest of my home.
Fuck.
Crazy thoughts. My brain was hosting a dangerous amount of them as I followed Lia up the stairs, grinning at my view up her skirt. I couldn’t believe it’d been over a month since I met her because I was still so damned curious about her. I was still turned on as hard as I was the first day I saw her in that wet little robe. I still craved her company more than I did anyone else’s.
It was also nothing short of a miracle that Wyatt’s birthday came and went with little issue. I was usually a fucking mess – self-destructive and dangerous to be around. I usually went out with Emmett and woke up with no recollection of where I was, how I’d gotten there or why my knuckles were bleeding. Julian generally ignored us for the entirety of the week that we did this. He knew how bad I was hurting and why I needed to do whatever I could to forget, but he couldn’t get behind the drinking, the drugs or the guaranteed violence that was known to follow me during my week of destruction.
He generally didn’t give a shit about any of the women I slept with but I knew Julian approved of Lia, just for the fact that she unknowingly saved him from his annual responsibility to pick me up from a random location or bail me out of jail.
“Oh my God, this feels amazing,” Lia breathed as she rolled around on my bed. I shook my head at her.
“You can’t do that right now. I’m too late for work to fuck you right now.”
She giggled, grabbing my pillow and hugging it to her tits. “Are you sure?” she asked, flashing me big, irresistible smile as she continued rolling around.
“Nope.”
She squealed at the sound of my belt unbuckling, shrieking the moment I pounced on her in bed. She playfully wrestled me on the mattress and I let her till I was too hard to play games anymore. Pinning her down, I guided my cock inside her and for the next four hours – despite the fact that we kept swearing we’d get up and go – we stayed in bed, kissing, talking and falling into each other at a speed that hadn’t stopped accelerating since our trip upstate.
I’d never felt it before and I normally hated the unfamiliar but I was pretty sure I didn’t hate this.
I was pretty sure I loved it.
29
LIA
“Holy shit, Lia, I’ve written about this place before,” Sara whispered as we followed Elaine through the front doors of the beautiful boutique hotel on Lexington Avenue. It had a doorman and large tinted windows. I’d passed by many times before and always saw shiny, expensive cars parked by the entrance, so I always assumed the place was strictly for the rich and the famous, and that I should never so much as look at it let alone go inside. So I never did – at least not till today.
On her first real lunch break in a week, Sara had opted to accompany me to a meeting with Elaine Gardner and Joanne Lee, yet another high-powered woman in her social circle. But considering the swanky location, I couldn’t understand what the meeting was for – at least not until Elaine and Joanne led us from the sleek, dimly lit lobby to the sparsely filled gift shop to the left.
“Oh, wow,” I breathed.
It was a cozy but sophisticated space that I immediately fell in love with. The tiles on the floor were a retro black and white and the walls were the exact, rich cream color I wanted for the walls of my shop. If anything, the space was slightly smaller than I imagined for my store but considering the location, I didn’t care. It was out of this world and a part of me wanted to ask Elaine what she was thinking bringing me here and making me fall so hard in love – because if I couldn’t afford most of the places in Gramercy Park, how the hell would I afford one in a high-end hotel?
But in typical Elaine fashion, she answered my question before it could even come out of my mouth.
“So, they’re shutting down this gift shop and hoping to open up a restaurant sometime down the line, but that’ll require a little construction in the lobby to open up more space,” Elaine said, tucking a silver lock behind her diamond-studded ear as she gestured toward the cozy but sophisticated space. “In the meantime, they plan to build a kitchen in what is currently the storage area – we’ll take you back there in a second – but the point is that they’re hoping to rent the space out while they find the right hospitality group to work with to open a lobby restaurant. Basically in the meantime, they’d like to use this as a retail space and because it’s guaranteed to be at most a two-year lease, they’re offering a very affordable price.”
“One I could afford?” I blurted as Sara squeezed the living hell out of my hand.
