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I rolled my eyes. “You sound like my brother.”
“It’s gross.”
“But the fact that hundreds of people have slept in this bed doesn’t bother you?”
Jack made an annoyed noise and walked into the bathroom, his shower taking precedence over continued bickering with me. The lock clicked, and the water started, and I tried not to think of Jack naked and wet beneath the spray. I threw an arm over my eyes and begged my brain not to replay the night we’d spent together in Budapest, but it was no use.
Jack had broken into my hotel room, and he’d been sitting in the dark when I got back from grabbing a quick meal. In seconds, I had the knife I always carried pressed to his side. He’d moved equally fast, driving his blade into me the second I did the same to him. We’d both missed anything vital, but cuts were deep, which was why we both still had tiny scars. The stabbing turned into an all-out brawl as I tried to take him down and he fought back. It wasn’t until Jack whispered, “Hello, sweetheart,” on a ragged, pain-filled gasp that I realized it was him. By that time, we were both bloody from wounds inflicted by our knives and having rolled on top of broken glass from a lamp that had fallen and shattered. Besides the small scar on my side from Jack’s knife, the only other scar I carried from that night was theone through my left eyebrow. The wound had healed quickly, but my eyebrow never grew back where the cut had been.
Jack had stripped off his destroyed shirt and pants and reached out to me. I did the same and let him lead me into the shower. He washed every inch of my body, helping me remove shards of glass from my back and arms, and I did the same, and then he told me to get on my knees so he could fuck my throat as the last of the blood from our injuries ran down the drain. He’d held my hands against the cold white tile and filled my mouth until I was choking around him, and still he drove deeper. My cock was so hard it hurt, but there was no way for me to find relief until Jack gave it to me. My face was a snotty, tearstained mess when he shot his load down my throat, and tasting him was almost enough to make me come. He hauled me to my feet, wrapped his hand around my cock, and stroked twice before his name echoed off every hard surface around us as I came, screaming his name.
After, he’d laid me out on the bed and fucked me until his cum ran from my body and I wasn’t sure I remembered my name, but he reminded me, whispering, “Good night, Caligula,” in my ear the second before sleep claimed me.
It had been the single hottest night of my life, and thinking about it had my dick rock hard, which I realized was a major problem when I heard the bathroom door open. I tumbled off the bed, but even hitting my knees on the hardwood floor wasn’t enough to make my dick stand down. I crawled to my bag and dug through it, grabbing for a pair of boxers, and trying to remember how much I’d hated Jack when I’d woken up the next morning, alone, his side of the bed cold.
“What are you doing on the floor?”
Jack stood in the bathroom doorway, steam billowing from behind him. His towel hung around his neck, and his hair was wet and messy as he used one end to towel it dry. A few errantdrops of water slid over the dips and valleys of his torso, heading straight for the waistband of the plaid boxers he’d pulled on so they rested low, the top of the vee between his hips on full display. My mouth watered, wanting to lick the drops away, wanting to taste more than just the water, which definitely didn’t help my predicament.
“Dropped something.” I pulled out the next thing my hand touched and surreptitiously held it in front of my raging hard-on—praying to whatever deity might be listening that it was a pair of underwear—while I slipped past him into the bathroom. I didn’t take a full deep breath until the door was locked behind me. That had been close. Too close. I leaned my head against the door and tried to get my heart and my dick to calm down.
It was a losing battle with one of the organs in question.
Needless to say, the second I stepped under the shower spray, I wrapped a hand around my cock and jerked myself off, biting on a folded washcloth to keep from making any noise as I came. Even though I’d tried to be quiet, I had a feeling Jack knew exactly what I’d been doing. Especially since I hadn’t, in fact, grabbed a pair of boxers but a dirty T-shirt, and I’d had to dart out of the bathroom in a towel.
“Forget something?” he drawled from where he was sitting on the bed, his back resting against the padded headboard, his laptop propped up on his knees.
“Grabbed the wrong thing.” I rummaged through my bag as fast as possible, keeping my back to him. If it were anyone else, I would have dropped the towel and done a little teasing—hell, maybe that’s exactly what I needed to do. Maybe I needed to run a little experiment to see if Jack was as affected by our proximity as I was. Sure, he threw out innuendo left and right, and he hadn’t had any trouble with our hookups in the past, but maybe he had more self-control and wasn’t walking around half-hard, hoping one of us would give in to the pull between us.
A quick glance over my shoulder showed Jack back at work reading whatever was on his computer screen. In one slow movement, I untucked my towel and let it slide down, catching the ends to slow its descent toward the floor and tugging it up and away from my body after it cleared my ass.
“Shit.” Jack’s curse was followed by a crash.
“Everything okay over there?”
“Uh, yeah. I, uh, I… dropped my laptop.”
Bending forward slightly, I dug into my bag, pulled out a pair of boxers, and tugged them up my legs inch by inch. When I was done, I turned around to see Jack standing by the bed, his laptop held low so I couldn’t see his dick, but I could guess what he was trying to hide.
He swallowed hard and looked at me. “What are you doing?”
“Getting changed.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.” He ran one hand through his still-damp hair. “It’s not a good idea.”
I knew it wasn’t for reasons that probably weren’t the same as Jack’s, but the rejection still hurt, even if I knew he was right, even if I knew what it would do to my heart if we went there again then parted ways. It was the small dagger of rejection piercing my heart that I blamed for what I said next. “Because you can’t run this time.”
Jack took a step back like I’d slapped him, and then his wide, shocked eyes settled into a scowl. “I don’t run.”
“Really? You don’t run?” I scoffed and counted on my fingers. “Colombia. You left me zip-tied to the goddamn bed. Calgary. We fucked in the bathroom at that club, and you were gone before I finished washing my hands. See also Tokyo. And let’s not forget Budapest, where you made sure to be gone before I woke up.” The second the words finished falling from my lips, hanging in the air between us so heavy they were almost visible, I wished I could take every single one of them back. Jack hadstolen one of my jobs after each time we hooked up, and I hated him for it. But after Colombia—the only time we’d ever spent the full night together—after I realized what he was to me, I hated it more that he never stuck around.
“Cal—”
I held up a hand, cutting him off before he said something neither of us needed to hear. “I’m sorry. That was out of line. I’m tired and cranky, and I just need to get some sleep.”
He nodded. “Yeah. You’re right. Okay.” Jack set his computer down on the desk and walked back to the bed, folding the blanket down.
I went to the closet and yanked the two spare pillows I found there off the shelf.
