Page 10

9

Fane

After

We slept with a wall of pillows between us so high there was a serious concern about the potential to be smothered while I slept. Either by Cali holding a pillow over my face or by the tower doing it all on its own.

If I hadn’t been so deliriously tired, I would have stayed up the entire night, all too aware of the fact it was her on the other side of the wall.

It had been pointless, her attempt at putting distance between us. I knew it, she probably knew it. Jerry probably knew it too.

I woke up at least thirty minutes before her. Jerry’s soft snores trickled in from the living room, pulling me from what had to have been the best sleep I’d had in longer than I cared to admit.

At some point in the night, the pillows between us had disappeared, and Cali had ended up exactly where I knew I’d find her. For the two years she’d been mine, I woke up to her draped across my body like a ragdoll. Legs entwined with mine and one dainty hand splayed across my stomach.

I hadn’t felt her move over to me in the night. I wasn’t sure if she reached for me or if I reached for her.

The only thing I was sure of was how her leg was pressing against my achingly hard cock, and every small movement she made was making the ache in my balls worse and my length thicken.

There would be no mistaking it. The flimsy fabric of my briefs wasn’t hiding a single fucking thing, and I knew this was probably karma for taking off my pants in the first place.

Cali shifted again, and I couldn’t stop the grunt it pulled from me or the way I shifted beneath her, my hands fisting the bed sheets beneath us.

I was not going to thrust against the leg of my ex-girlfriend, who hates me. I was not going to thrust against the leg of my ex-girlfriend, who hates me.

Because—why the fuck wouldn’t it happen—that was the moment her eyes fluttered open. It took her a full three seconds to realize what she was doing before a bloodcurdling scream shot out of her throat, and she launched herself off the bed.

Her abrupt departure gave me enough time to swing my legs off the side of the bed and reach for my jeans. I tried to cover the bulge in my briefs with one hand, squeezing to relieve the building pressure, but all it did was make my eyes roll back. At this moment, there was no escaping her. Not like I’d been able to before with distance and pathetic distractions.

I was covered in her smell, and just the thought sent another painful ache up from the base of my spine.

A handful of seconds after that, a loud thump sounded on the other side of her bedroom door that sounded a lot like Jerry’s head making pretty solid contact.

There was really no other option; I ran from her room. Reaching her door in three long strides, I stepped over Jerry where he’d flopped down outside Cali’s bedroom door.

Her bathroom was…tiny. It was so fucking tiny. The shower stall was barely big enough for me to fit into, my shoulders almost touching either wall. I didn’t care that the water was still cold or that the door didn’t have a lock. I stepped in and released a shuddering breath as I fisted my cock.

There wasn’t even time to think of anything but how warm she’d been pressed against me. The scent of the same milk-and-honey body wash that I remembered but nothing like what I’d conjured up in my imagination. The way it was so completely intertwined with the essence of her . Her delicate hand up my shirt, pressing against my stomach. Her squirming, sleepy movements rubbing against me.

My cock thickened, impossibly so. My slow measured pumps weren’t nearly enough to feed the need that consumed me, taking over every part of my brain, directing all the blood in my body to one very specific area.

I squeezed the base of my shaft, swiping the leaking pre-cum at the tip before it could be washed away by the warming water.

That’s when Cali’s voice trickled through the too-thin walls. She was talking to her dog, I knew that. Somehow, that knowledge didn’t help in the slightest.

“Are you coming?” she murmured, probably leading her pony-sized dog outside, but all I heard was the gentle lilt of her voice. The memory of her lips moving along my jaw, the bite of her teeth on the lobe of my ear, and I was fucking done.

A choked “ Yes” made its way out of my mouth, half stuck in my throat. I caught myself with one hand slapping onto the wet tiles next to my head, my orgasm erupting from me like it had a fucking vendetta. My legs shook with the force of it, and all I could do was watch as thick ropes of cum shot out to cover the shower wall, my jaw lax and eyelids half closed. My hand was still moving in lazy strokes until my cock started to soften.

I dropped my head to the cool tiles, breathing hard and wondering what the fuck just happened to me.

“Who’s a good boy?” I heard Cali’s muffled coos that were definitely not for me and couldn’t stop my cringe.

“You’re so fucked, Fane,” I mumbled to myself before starting to clean up the mess I’d made. I’d arrived here with a half-formed plan, and none of it had involved fisting my dick while pretending the praise the woman who hated me was giving to her dog was for me.

My plan was so shit I wasn’t sure I could even consider it a plan.

Images of her mouth at my ear, asking me if I was going to come, asking if I was a good boy, were all I thought of when I made a beeline for her front door, my hair still dripping wet. I didn’t want to face her because, for some reason, I was sure she’d know what I’d just done. I also didn’t fully trust myself to hear her voice or, fuck, even see her scowl at me. Those red heart-shaped lips of hers turning into a pout, and not be able to imagine them wrapped around my cock.

I drove to work with a semi-hard-on, recalling, again and again, the feeling of her pressed against me and put my behavior down to the last two years of celibacy.

It hadn’t even been hard to endure. Nothing and no one had made me want . The very thought of touching anyone but Cali had made me physically sick.

“C’mon, boss !” Declan called out from the back of the room while he balanced on the back two legs of a plastic chair, effectively snapping me out of my thoughts of Calista and deflating the hard-on I was sure I’d be sporting all day.

At least he was finally good for something.

The chair looked like it had been plucked out of the trash, and I waited with bated breath for the thing to collapse beneath him.

“What’s going on?” Ashton decided that was a good time to walk in.

I met Ash when I was eighteen and hadn’t been able to shake the asshole since. When I told him I was going to work for my dad, he hadn’t so much as breathed differently. All he’d done was be dressed the next morning, waiting by our front door, ready to come with me.

“Can’t let you face off with the devil on your own, can I?” Nothing more, nothing less. Two years later, we were still in it together. He was the only real family I had left.

“Boss isn’t staying at the accommodation with us.” Declan wagged his eyebrows, and I immediately wanted to punch him.

“Anyone ever mentioned you’re not welcome here at all, Dec?” Ash said around a mouth full of the massive bite of apple he’d just taken.

“Sure, why?” Dec had already moved back to his phone, completely unfazed.

I was pretty sure Declan was a psychopath. I’d caught him once at a job site outside Banks City trying to drown a bird in a birdbath. His hand shot out so fast, grabbing the bird, and before I could react, he’d shoved it under the water.

It took me a heartbeat to move, ask him what the fuck he was doing. When he let it go, he turned to look at me with this expression that I’d taken something vital from him. It was there and gone in a second, but I knew then that there was something broken about him, and not something that could be fixed.

“I was just trying to save it.” He shrugged before picking back up his tools and getting on with what he was doing before, flashing me a megawatt smile.

I dragged my hand down my face to shake the memory, nodding my head in greeting as little by little the rest of the crew started to show up for work.

“So?” Ash sat down on the corner of my desk. “Care to share?”

“No,” I bit out.

Ash knew why we were in Darling. He was fully aware of who Cali was. He’d been there the night we met.

I chose to plead the Fifth and keep my mouth shut. It wasn’t going to keep him from finding out, but I wasn’t going to help him.

“Oh!” His face was almost split in two at the sheer giddiness he was trying to keep contained. “Goody!” He rubbed his hands together. “Is—”

“All right.” I stood up, effectively cutting him off but doing nothing to dampen the challenge he’d set for himself to figure out where I’d been. The moment he found out, I’d never hear the end of it.

“Everyone’s been broken up into groups. The goal this week is to understand what it is we’re working with throughout the four central zones we’ve outlined on the map of the town. Zones five through twelve are of no real consequence to us at this stage while we evaluate the viability of the town center.”

Cali had been wrong when she said that I believed what I was saying about what Mackenzie Co . was doing to small towns. I hated every word coming out of my mouth, but I was here for a reason, and so right now, the end justified the means. It was what I repeated to myself day in and day out.

“I emailed everyone their lists this morning,” I said, letting my gaze sweep over the room. “If you finish ahead of schedule, come find me. Otherwise, I don’t want to hear from you until your tasks are done. Clear?”

Chairs scraped as the crew half-rose from their seats, but before anyone could make it to the door, Declan’s voice cut through the room like a cold draft.

“What about what people are saying?”

Groans rippled through the group as everyone sank back into their chairs, clearly resigned to whatever bullshit was about to spill out of his mouth.

“About what?” I leaned back, aiming for calm even as my patience thinned.

“About the development,” he said, lounging in his chair like he had all the time in the world. “People aren’t happy. Heard a rumor the mayor’s pushing for it because he’s up to his ears in gambling debt.”

My jaw tightened as the room shifted. Everyone was glancing at each other now, the kind of curiosity that wasn’t harmless. Rumors like this one made people panic.

“And who did you hear that from?” I asked, keeping my tone even.

Declan shrugged, a lazy hand fluttering in front of him. “Oh, you know…around.” A deliberate smirk tugged at his lips, slow and smug. “But I’m sure it’ll blow over. Wouldn’t want anything to rattle this perfect little project, now would we?”

“If you’ve got something to say, Declan,” I said, my voice dropping, “Say it now.”

His smirk spread like he’d won some private victory. “Nothing at all. Just thrilled to be a part of your first project as a big boy in the family company, boss. Would be something awful for there to be any ulterior motives on it. That’s all.”

I leaned forward, elbows on the table, my eyes locked on his. “Because it seems like this needs saying, I don’t care how things have been done before. Here, we’re doing things right. No cutting corners. We’re assessing the town, plain and simple. I don’t care if a report has been done recently, or what the company’s standard procedure is. I want things done by the book. I want every figure and fact checked twice. Am I clear?”

A halfhearted chorus of yeses mumbled their way across the room as chairs scraped and the crew finally shuffled out. Declan lingered. He winked, slow and deliberate, his face blank for just a second too long before his usual shit-eating grin slid into place.

Then he strode out, walking like his dick was too long for his pants.

“I hate that fucking guy,” I said, dropping my head back into my hand.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!” Ash pointed, gaping at me. “We haven’t even been in town for twenty-four hours!”

I leaned back in my chair and looked up at him, lifting an eyebrow. “I’m actually pretty curious about your methods.”

“I retraced your steps, and then I remembered the café you went into before you came out looking like a ghost.”

“That’s what you were thinking of this whole time while I was talking?”

“Yup,” he said, popping the p on the end for emphasis.

“Good to know you’re so committed to the job.”

Ash was a tall guy. I had an inch or so on him, but if he could have, I imagine that he would have been swinging his legs back and forth from his spot sitting on my desk like a fucking school kid.

“Plus, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I started to rifle through paperwork on my desk that I wasn’t sure even belonged to the project we were here to do.

“So, you don’t know anything about visiting a café yesterday called Sunshine?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” He tilted his head to the side. “Because I could have sworn when you were dating Carly—”

“You’re such a dick.” I glared at him. The thing was, he wasn’t wrong. I’d seen the name of that café, and my heart just about flew up and out of my mouth before I forced the useless organ back down.

Ash and Cali had always referred to each other by the wrong names. When I’d introduced them, the music had been so loud that neither of them had actually heard one another’s names. The next time they met, Cali had called him Antwon and he’d laughed so hard he had one hand holding onto his junk for dear life while he rolled on the ground and tried not to piss himself.

“So?” He wasn’t going to let it go.

I let out a long exhale. “I saw her.”

“Okay.” He nodded, “And?”

“I had dinner with her and her parents.”

I waited for him to say something back, but after about a minute, I chanced a look and found his eyes the size of saucers.

“Are you clinically insane? ”

I rolled my eyes at his dramatics. “Her dad came in while I was there, and apparently, they think that we never broke up.”

He gasped. “Carly, you sneaky bitch.” Ash’s giddy smile was back in place.

“Watch your mouth.” I stood up, covering his whole face with the palm of my hand and giving him a small shove. I doubled over in a wheeze after he stood up faster than I could compute and delivered a jab to my kidney. Ashton might have been leaner than I was, but that was only because where I favored cardio and weights, all he did was box.

“You’re so fucked. This is awesome!” He loitered behind me as we headed out of the room. He was always careful not to make contact with anyone if he could help it, and over the years it was something I’d adapted to, always making sure he had plenty of space. We were the last two, and he was my only other group member, namely because he was also the deputy manager of this project.

“Great, hold on to that feeling when I tell you what I need from you,” I said.

“I’m all ears.”

“I need you to do the scouting yourself this week.”

That stopped him in his tracks. “This week?”

“Yep.”

“What about the other weeks?”

“Probably. But I’ll do all the reporting. I just need your notes.”

“We’re here for like a month? Maybe longer?”

“Yep.”

Ash started at me, so I stared back. And then the jackass broke out into that same stupid smile. “You can tell me all about it after you buy me a coffee from our new favorite café.”