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  “No,” I tried to recover. “What I mean is that they’re rougher than I thought they’d be. I like it.”

  “Oh, well in that case–” He didn’t say any more, just let his hands roam over my back, down to my waist. Tracing the deep cut V on my sides, he circled his arms around me, running them up and over my abs. Parker pushed my legs wider with his, making room for his body to rest against mine. His cock pressed into my lower back and it took all my restraint not to push onto him, not to beg him for what I needed.

  When his soapy hands slid over my dick, I groaned, letting my head fall forward. “Your hands, Park . . . fuck they feel so fucking good.” Alternating between slow smooth strokes and hard fast pumps, he had me on the edge of coming in a matter of minutes.

  His teeth sunk into my shoulder, making me cry out in shock. When he kissed and licked over the same spot, the cry turned into a low growl of pleasure. “You been tested?” he asked, his hand stilling on my dick, but holding firm at the base. The few seconds it took me to process his question were apparently too long for him as he asked again, and with little patience, “I said, have you been tested?” The heavy pressure of his cock against my ass kick started my mouth.

  Arching a brow at him, I replied, “Every three months. Haven’t had a partner since the last test and that one, along with every other one I’ve ever had has been negative.” I hissed in pleasure as his hand resumed its torture.

  “Good. Me too.” He smiled a slow, sexy grin. “No condom then?” The rough pad of his thumb swirled over the crown of my cock making anything but the simple nod of my head impossible.

  Without any warning, his hand was gone from my dick and his lips were dancing down my back. Squatting behind me, he traced his tongue down my spine, spreading my ass wide with his strong capable hands. Between the warm water flowing down my back and the soap on his hands, he easily slid a finger past the puckered skin of my ass. Before I could process any of the pleasure, he added another finger, effortlessly thrusting both of them in and out of my body. “Your ass feels so fucking hot, so ready.”

  Just when I thought he was ready to fuck me, to finally take me and push me over the edge, his heat was gone from my back. Looking over my shoulder, I was more than surprised to see him sitting on the built-in bench on the other end of the shower. With ravenous eyes, he looked at me as he stroked his own cock.

  We stayed on opposite ends of the shower, each of us jerking our cocks, unable to look away from the other. With his other hand, he crooked a finger at me, telling me he was done with our little visual standoff. When I stood in front of him and made a move to turn around so that my back was to his front, he stopped me. “No, you’re going to face me.” Moving himself to the edge of the bench, he gave me enough room to wrap my legs around his body. The wall behind him was cut deeper than the rest of the shower, too. Otherwise there was no way in hell we were making this work. A spark of jealousy shot through me at the thought that he already knew it would work, but I buried it down for now.

  His arms encircled my body once more, moving to the upper swell of my ass. Fucking me with his fingers once more, he made sure I was ready for him. Then, he reached down, adjusted his dick and thrust it up into my body until he was buried so far inside of me, I wasn’t sure he’d ever be able to get himself free.

  “Fuck,” I groaned, his fullness sending heat through my entire body. “Shit, Park, you’re so much.”

  He smirked at me then let his head fall back as he cursed, “And you’re so fucking hot. I’m afraid to move. It’ll be over too soon and I’ll look like some horny teenager.”

  “Just fuck me. I need it. Hard and fast,” I begged, licking a path from his collarbone up his neck. With my lips pressed against his ear, I whispered, “Please.”

  As if my single word unleashed an animal within him, Parker began thrusting up into me, pulling me down onto him in the most perfectly precise rhythm of which I’d ever been a part. This wasn’t the sloppy mess of the one-night-stands to which I was accustomed—the only kind of fucking since I’d been with Gabe, that I’d ever allowed myself.

  This was the definition of hard and rough, but there was something soft and tender in the way he looked at me, as if he’d hoped to get more out of this than just physical pleasure.

  Angling my body forward, my cock easily glided up and down his rock hard stomach. Our foreheads pressed together and I watched in awe as Parker’s face contorted in pleasure. “Are you close? You coming?” I asked, though it seemed pointless because I could feel him growing harder with each powerful thrust. Then his face went slack, shallow gasps of need dancing on my shoulder as his head fell forward. The power he’d wielded all night was given over in a breathless whisper against my skin as his orgasm barreled through him and into me.

  Still inside of me, he reached between us, grabbing my pulsing cock. “Now I get to watch you.” It was one hundred percent threat; a raw one, promising it would be an orgasm I’d be unlikely to forget.

  As if mine was the only dick he’d ever touched, he moved his hand over the veins and ridges, using a perfect balance of hard and soft, fast and slow. My fingers dug into his shoulders, leaving half-moon imprints from the strength of my grip. “Fuck . . . Park . . . I’m coming . . .” We both looked down at the exact moment that the first jets of my orgasm painted the ripples of his abs. Moving his hand to the base of my cock, another pulse sent more cum flowing over his hand.

  “That was . . .” Lost for words, I couldn’t finish my sentence.

  “Yeah, it was.” Parker’s eyes were bright and alive, his words conveying the sentiment neither of us could put to words.

  Running my hands languidly over his body, I reveled in the feel of his muscles pressed against mine. There was a heat brewing between us despite the chill starting to move through the shower. “We better get out of here before the water turns to ice,” I said as I regretfully stood from his lap. After he slid out of my body, I immediately thought about the next time he’d be there.

  “Good idea,” he added, standing back under the lukewarm water that was once steaming hot.

  We cleaned up and rinsed off quickly, our growling stomachs a reminder of our other appetites. As we stepped out of the shower, the thing that struck me as the most meaningful part of the night wasn’t the way he’d taken me, or the way I’d given myself to him. It wasn’t the way he watched on in the shop with passionate interest in learning something new, or the way he’d asked a million questions.

  No, the thing that proved to be the most significant event of the night was when Parker pulled a huge, fluffy towel from the bar, and wrapped it around my body, pulling me against him, and kissing the life out of me one last time.

  “Chicken and broccoli or shrimp lo mein?” Dangling a container of Chinese food from each hand, I reveled in the relaxed way in which Liam eased into the night. Certain that he’d close up when he came here, I figured I’d be pushing him a bit beyond his comfort zone by bringing him here instead of his house. But considering what we did last night on the phone, he was just going to have to get over the whole money issue.

  Which, in my mind, wasn’t an issue at all.

  “Both.” He snatched the two containers, popping them open before setting them on the counter. Watching him dish out our food, shirtless, with a pair of my sweats riding low on his hips was most certainly a great way to end the night.

  “Here you go.” There was a bounce in his step as he handed me my plate.

  After grabbing two waters from the fridge, I led us into the living room. As I turned on the television and sank onto the couch, Liam shot me an odd look. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Shaking his head, he sat down next to me. Laughing as he folded his legs under his body, he turned to face me. “I guess I just had this very different idea about you. It’s not like you left me with the best first impression.”

  “No, I guess I didn’t.” Setting my bottle of water down on the side table, I shoveled some food into my mouth. “Te
ll me, what did you think?” I mumbled around a huge piece of broccoli.

  Smiling and laughing, it was the most carefree I’d seen him. “You want the truth?” he asked, tentatively.

  “Uh huh. I’d expect nothing else.”

  “Stuck up, prick,” he spat out without missing a beat.

  His answer made me choke on my food in laughter. After recovering, my face red from laughing and coughing, I said, “Fair enough. For what it’s worth, it was a shit day at the office.” After taking another, smaller, more manageable bite, I added, “Come to think of it, most days are pretty shitty.” Busying my mouth with eating quickly became the better alternative to talking.

  Apparently, Liam had other plans. “Your father?”

  It’s not that I was surprised he’d remembered what I’d already told him about the less-than-perfect relationship I had with my father, but it was the compassion in his voice that made me drop my fork. “Yes, he certainly makes me less than enthusiastic about my job.” After taking a sip of water, I added, “Come to think of it, the day I met you was the day of a huge meeting where he pretty much raked my ass over the coals. We’d just received our court date for this major divorce case and he was laying into me in front of the whole team. Then I busted up my car and it only made my day shittier.”

  “Is that the same case you were working on today? The same one that had you all pissed off when you called the other night and then again at the shop tonight?” Irony knows no bounds, and just as I was about to deflect his question, give him the bare minimum, the news came on, listing out the very recent developments of the case, and naming me as the attorney.

  My picture flashed across the screen as they played a brief snippet of the press conference we held earlier in the day. “We are currently working with all local authorities to get to the bottom of these allegations, keeping the family’s privacy at the pinnacle of everything we’re doing.” Hearing my own voice call out from the television hanging above my fireplace was quite surreal.

  “What allegations?” Liam asked as I turned off the television.

  It wasn’t as if I was about to tell him something he couldn’t find out on his own. Knowing it was already on the news, and that TMZ probably had it blasted all over the place–not that Liam struck me as the type to watch TMZ—I figured I might as well tell him before he googled it on his own.

  Setting my plate down, I took a deep breath. “Avery is suing for full custody. Her husband, Harvey, cheated on her so that’s been the key to our case.”

  “Sounds pretty obvious who’s in the wrong then.” Liam took another bite of his food, not understanding the magnitude of their case.

  “Have you ever heard of them?” I couldn’t hide the shock in my voice. Only people who lived under a rock, which I realized might as well have been Liam’s existence in the shop, didn’t know who they were. “Maxwell Recording Label?”

  “Okay.” Shrugging, he didn’t seem at all fazed by who they were. “Doesn’t mean they’re excused from the rules of decency like the rest of us, right?”

  Thinking back to my meetings with Avery and her attitude, I wished more people thought the way Liam did. With a short, dismissive chuckle, I said, “It shouldn’t, but I guess for them it does.” I took another sip of my water and got to the knot of the complications. “They have two kids. She wants full custody of Mia and Ashton, and what I consider an exorbitant amount of monthly child support. When we first landed the case, I told my father as much, that we’d probably have a better chance of winning, and of making a decent public impression if we asked for a more reasonable amount.” Liam listened on with interested focus and I realized for the first time how good it felt to have someone to talk to about my work life, an outsider who didn’t only see dollar signs. “I’d seen my father quite angry over the years, but the look of pure disgust on his face when I made that statement . . . it wasn’t so much that I saw him in a different light. . But it was the first time I was able to acknowledge that the way I’d always seen him was horrid. In that moment, something shifted and I knew I wouldn’t be able to take him and his attitude any longer.”

  Liam moved closer to me after putting his plate on the coffee table in front of us. Dropping a hand to my leg, he offered more comfort in that gesture than he could even know. “What changed? I mean, if you said that weeks ago, then what’s with the news report. What’s making him pissed off at you now? You mentioned allegations.” He tipped his head at the television, “Did something new surface?”

  Visions of the police reports played in my head, making my stomach roil in disgust. Scrubbing a hand over my face and through my hair, I sighed, an angry noise flying from my mouth. “Avery is accusing her husband of abusing their son.”

  Liam stiffened next to me, his body going rigid, and his eyes wide with fear. As if he was focusing on something far-off in the distance, his eyes became these vacant pools of black. Almost as if he was totally unaware of his own reaction, he dug his fingers into my thigh, stopping only when I forcefully pulled his hand away from my leg. Waving a hand in front of his face pulled his stare away from the wall behind me. “You okay?” Running a hand down his shoulder, he shrugged it away as if my touch was infested or something.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” He shot up from the couch, clearly lying to me. Storming into the kitchen, he grabbed his jacket and keys. “I gotta go.” He was steps away from the front door before I could even get my brain and my feet to move fast enough to catch him.

  Just as he was about to open the door, my hand fell to his shoulder, turning him around and pulling him back into the entryway. “Liam, wait.” With a quick movement, he swung his arm, pushing my hand away from his body.

  “What do you want?” There was so much hatred in his voice that if I hadn’t heard him speak the words, hadn’t seen his lips form the sounds that flew from his lips with such vehement anger, I never would have believed he was the one who actually said them. Standing there, shock written all over my face, freezing my body in place, the words he spoke seemed like they were someone else’s—they simply couldn’t belong to the man with whom I’d just spent the night. “I said I need to go. You want a song and a dance, too? You want me to stay the night and pretend like what we did meant something?”

  He stepped back from me and I couldn’t keep my head on straight. What did our very new relationship have to do with whatever the hell this was? What did our attraction for one another have to do with what was racing through his mind? What did the feelings we both knew we were starting to feel for one another have to do with this abrupt, whiplash-inducing change of moods?

  “Because it didn’t,” he continued, pulling the door wide open, letting the chill in the air rival the chill from his words. “It was a good fuck and that’s it.”

  And with that, he stormed out the door. When he pulled out of the driveway, he left behind angry black marks as he peeled away. Unable to keep up with what the hell just happened, I tried to make sense of it in my own head, but I couldn’t.

  It wasn’t until I walked back into the living room to clean up our plates that my head stopped spinning long enough to piece it together. The instant I mentioned Ashton’s alleged abuse, he changed into a completely different person.

  Unwilling to picture Liam as anyone other than the strong, wise-ass of a man who I’d come to know, I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of him being abused. Or maybe I just didn’t want to.

  One thing rang clear in my head as I flopped back in my bed twenty minutes later: I needed to get to the bottom of whatever it was that made him fly off the handle, that made him feel as if what we had was nothing but a good fuck.

  Between not hearing from Liam once, despite my efforts at contacting him, and the newest difficulties Avery Maxwell was giving me about speaking to her son, even with her present, made the week drag on. It had been three days since Liam had stormed out of my house and I was beginning to worry about him. It had been close to a week since I’d learned about Ashton’s abu
se and with each passing day, with each conversation with Avery, the more and more I doubted her.

  On any other week, I’d barely blink an eye at the thought of going out for drinks after work, but tonight, I couldn’t wait to loosen this tie from my neck and numb some of the stress away. As I was shutting down my laptop, my father popped his head into my office.

  “Looks like you’re finally going to get what you want.” The boastful pride in his words made me sigh deeply, waiting on the lecture I was sure would be falling from his thin lips. “No thanks to me, I might add.” He strutted into my office, his hands tucked neatly into his pockets and a smug look plastered on his face.

  “Care to divulge exactly what you’re getting at?” My nerves were already wearing thin and the last thing I wanted to make time for was for my father’s asinine behavior.

  He didn’t even bother to sit in the chair on the opposite side of my desk. No, this time as a show of how much better than me he was, he leaned his ass against my desk and crossed his arms over his chest. “Avery caved.” He straightened his tie, his tell for feeling powerful and in control. “She’s letting you speak to Ashton for twenty minutes, Monday morning. She will be in the room,” he clarified when he saw a glimmer of hope blaze in my eyes.

  Rather than give him the thanks he obviously wanted from me, I stood next to him. “The fact that you think I need to thank you for convincing a mother to do the right thing by her child is almost as laughable as her being motherly.” Pulling my suit jacket on, I gathered my briefcase and phone. “And since you’re so clearly waiting for it, I’ll say thank you, but not for the reason you want.”

  “And what do you think those reasons would be?” His eyes, the same shade of blue as mine, turned to ice. In that instant, I realized no matter what I did, no matter who I became, I would always be a failure in his eyes.

  “Reason,” I clarified, holding up a single finger in his face. “Money is the only reason you ever do anything. It’s the only reason you pushed me to be a lawyer. It’s the only reason you’ve stayed married to mother all these years, even though you’ve both hated each other for as long as I can remember. It’s the only reason you’re dying to get this case settled in your favor. For money. Not for the benefit of the kids, or for what’s right in the eyes of the law. All you saw from the moment Avery Maxwell strutted into this office were dollar signs and you’ve all but kissed her pompous ass to work every angle in your favor.”