Page 26 of Mr. Wrong (Hollywood Knights #1)
Twenty-Six
Lex
Traffic was just as bad coming as it was going, so we don’t get home until well after dark.
Ellenore just sat in her seat the entire time, knees turned ever so slightly away from me, with her gaze aimed out the passenger side window while her giant orange cat lounged on her lap and glared at me with baleful, yellow eyes.
“What’s his name?”
“He’s sitting right here,” she says without looking at me. “Ask him yourself.”
Because we’re, once again, at a dead stop on the 405, I laugh and play along. “What’s your name?” I ask the cat, giving him a quick chin jerk for good measure.
The cat turns its head, looks up at her and lets out a plaintive meow.
“Not if you don’t want to,” she answers back with a bland smile and a shrug.
Then they both go back to ignoring me.
As soon as we pull through the gate and I kill the engine, she scoops up her cat and bolts from the car.
Circling to the back of the SUV, she yanks the hatch open and sets the cat down to start dragging her suitcases across the cargo area and juggling boxes before I even have a chance to unfasten my seatbelt.
“For fuck’s sake,” I mutter it out loud, the curse drown out by the heavy slam of my door.
“Just go inside. I’ll get—” I round the back of the SUV to find her practically buried under a pile of suitcases and cardboard boxes because she clearly intends to carry it all herself.
Angrier about the situation than I have a right to be, I jerk the box of books out of her grip and toss it back into the cargo hold. “Will you just wait a goddamn—”
“Fuck you,” she sputters it at me, the curse spreading an ugly red stain across her chest and neck.
“Excuse me?” I move closer. “What did you just say to me?” I ask her, wrapping my hand around the strap of her tote bag to pull it off her shoulder.
“I’m not sure I heard you correctly.” I’d bet my life she can count the number of times she’s said the word fuck out loud on one hand and that more than half of those times have been since she met me.
“You heard me just fine,” she says, making a small, helpless sound in the back of her throat while I relieve her of her bag.
“I said fuck you .” She reaches for the bag I just took from her and aims a glare almost as baleful as her cat’s in my direction when I move it out of her reach.
“Fuck you, Lex,” she seethes at me. “I know you don’t want me here—I get it, trust me, I get it —but I need this job.
” She advances on me, fists clenched. “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to tuck my tail and run or take your moody bullshit, just because you’re unhappy with the situation. ”
“Unhappy?” I rock back on my heels and laugh, which admittedly does little to help the situation, but I can’t help it.
It’s either laugh or throw her into the back of the Land Rover and get her naked so I can bury my face between her legs.
“You think I’m unhappy with the situation?
That’s what you think this is? Unhappiness . ”
“No.” She sets her chin at an oppositional angle and folds her arms across her chest. “I don’t think you’re unhappy —I was just trying to be nice.
” Dropping her arms she moves even closer, pushing herself against me and up onto the toes of her tennis shoes so she can look me in the eye.
“What I really think is that you’ve been throwing a pouty, crybaby tantrum ever since you opened the front door this morning and found me standing on your brother’s doorstep and I, for one, am sick of it. ”
There it is again.
That spine of steel that I’m pretty sure no one has ever seen but me.
That mile-wide stubborn streak that only seems to rear its ugly head when I’m the one pushing her buttons.
And fuck me if knowing that doesn’t go straight to my dick, stiffening it in an instant.
Did I say I wanted to get her naked and bury my face between her legs?
Well, scratch that.
The only thing I want to bury between her legs is my cock, so I can pound that stubborn streak right out of her.
“Careful, Ellenore,” I say, tilting my head forward just enough to bring our mouths to within a breath apart. “I don’t think my brother would appreciate coming home to finding me giving his daughter’s nanny a pop quiz in the back of his Land Rover—not on her first day, anyway.”
“I’m…” She makes that sound again, soft and helpless, in the back of her throat and my cock jerks so hard in response that it brushes against her stomach.
The graze of it against her belly button breaks the seal on her lips and forces the tip of her tongue out to wet them like her mouth is full of cotton.
Shaking her head, she swallows hard and tries again.
“I’m not the nanny,” she finally manages, her deep, brown gaze dropping to my mouth, gaging how close it is to her own, before she forces it back up to mine. “You are.”
No I’m not.
Not anymore.
Thanks to her, I’m not anything.
I open my mouth to tell her exactly that, but somewhere overhead I hear a door slam, the sound of it followed by a pair of fast feet hitting a set of stairs.
Killian to the rescue.
“I was wondering if the two of you got swallowed by the 405,” he calls out on his way across the driveway.
Hearing his voice feels like someone pulling the emergency brake.
Jerks me back to my senses and away from her.
I have just enough time to put a respectable amount of space between us before he appears from around the side of the SUV. “You need a hand with that?”
I’m about to tell him to fuck the fuck off when Ellenore reaches for the tote bag I took from her a few minutes ago.
This time, I let her have it, watching in sullen silence as she slings the strap of it over her shoulder before reaching for and scooping up her cat who’s been sitting in the cargo hold of the Land Rover the entire time, watching me sexually harass his mistress.
“Help would be great, thank you,” she says, aiming a nervous look in Kill’s direction that’s meant for me, before scurrying away, cat slung over her shoulder and glaring at me as she hurries her way down the walkway, like he’s trying to figure out a way to kill me without opposable thumbs.
“You do remember that there are no less than a hundred security cameras on this property, right?” Killian reminds me in a conversational tone while he hefts Ellenore’s box of books from the back of the Land Rover. “Approximately twenty of which are pointed directly at this driveway.”
In other words, he saw everything.
Knows just how close I was to losing control.
“Fuck off, Kill,” I grumble at him, balancing my own set of boxes on my knee while I reach up to shut the hatch. “It’s none of your business.”
Reaching in for the last suitcase before I slam it shut, Killian laughs at me. “Under normal circumstances, you’d be right—because, let’s be honest, who you fuck is usually about as important to me as what kind of cereal I have in my pantry.”
“ But ?” I punctuate the question with the hard slam of the hatch.
“But this one’s different,” he tells me, glaring at me over the box of books in his arms. I have a feeling he’d be throttling me if not for his hold on them.
“There’s nothing normal or usual about Ms. Pierce because she’s one of us—at least for a while—so, if you can’t keep your dick in your pants, which I sincerely wish you would, then can you at the very least, not contemplate fucking her in your brother’s very secure driveway? ”
“Whatever you say,” I tell him, even though it’s not whatever he says because in the span of less than 24-hours, I’ve lost my goddamned marbles when it comes to the invasion of Ellenore Pierce and we both know it.