Up in Smoke (Kisses and Crimes Book 2) Read online

  But instead he circled the table, strolled towards me and wrapped his hands right around my waist. I held my breath as he leaned in. I closed my eyes as his arms kept reaching.

  Around me and around and around. Until they finally touched the stove.

  He turned the knob at my back with a flick of his fingers, and with a loud and final click, the fire was extinguished. The one on the stove and the one inside of me. Deflated, I finally looked up and into his eyes.

  And that’s where I found that fire that I thought had been snuffed out.

  “There,” he finally said. His blue eyes were colder than ice. “You were gonna burn our eggs.”

  And then he pulled me into him.

  For a man as fast in everything he did, he sure knew how to start a kiss out slow. Jackson took his thumb, rubbed it under the edge of my jaw, and drew his mouth to mine in a way that was so soft that I almost wasn’t sure he was kissing me until I felt the sweep of his tongue.

  He dampened my bottom lip with it.

  Taking his time, he held my jaw, touching and teasing, licking and exploring until the slight brushes and workings of his mouth and lips were too intense for me to hold back.

  I moaned. And the sound, unexpected and unrestrained, was like a torch set to a gasoline-soaked wick.

  It brought out the “famously fast Jackson” from his temporary hiding… and he crushed me to him as if he needed to breathe my air.

  My body slammed into his with unnatural finesse, like it was made to fit beside his.

  Curve for curve, line for line, Jackson pressed his lips and the entirety of his tall, muscular body against me. His bottom lip, insistent and surprisingly soft, swept and slid across the bottom of mine as the planes of our bodies skimmed one another’s, creating friction with each contact, driving a need in me that I had forgotten had ever existed.

  Everywhere he touched me, it felt as if a tiny lit flame had sparked. The sparks became one, and the flame inflated into an inferno, one that started at my lips and continued traveling south until, finally, it reached the second pair.

  My entire body was on fire.

  One hand around my neck, another at the small of my back, and Jackson was slowly but surely rubbing himself against me, the length of him growing rock solid as he slid his hardness along the apex of my thighs, rubbing his cock across the tip of the tender nub below my waist and stroking it with what felt like the softest steel ever made.

  The friction of his body mimicked the motion of his mouth as he loved me with his tongue, drawing out my moans, letting the rumble of his own groans reverberate against my lips as he deepened the kiss.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  But who needed breath when you were kissed like this? When the very thought of stopping filled you with more dread than the singular prospect that you could die of suffocation? That there just might not be enough air in your lungs for you to continue on living… but you just kept on kissing anyway.

  That’s how fucking good Jackson kissed you.

  He kissed you until nothing mattered but him. He kissed you until you didn’t even exist, until you just became an extension of him, inextricably linked to this absolute mess of a man. A beautiful mess.

  The type of mess I couldn’t help but get lost in. I wanted him so damned bad.

  He broke the kiss, breathing in.

  “Fuck the pancakes, Pea. I want you. I want you so bad it fucking hurts,” he exhaled over my lips. I nearly collapsed. “I want to take you over and over…” His voice trailed as his mouth began to wander over my skin. He took the long route, kissing the area along my jaw.

  A small nip on the tip of my earlobe became an open-mouthed kiss on the side of my neck, and he took another nibble that became hungry—surprising me when he didn’t stop, but kept right on going.

  He slid his lips along the expanse of my collarbone, whispering. He blew the words “over and over” again and again along the sensitive spots, brushing his lips there, making sure I could hear him as well as feel everything that he was doing to me.

  His movements were deliberate, and he had turned me into putty at his feet. I melted against him, murmuring his name.

  “Jackson, I… we…”

  “Just say ‘yes,’ baby. No need to speak French.” I could feel his smile against my décolletage. “Trust me.” He ran a hand that traced below my belly button. “I understand what you want from here.”

  He reached lower, and I gasped.

  I was the strangest woman in the world for wearing boxers to bed. Regular women wear women’s underwear at night; some wear none at all, but me? I chose to don men’s boxers every night before I went to sleep.

  It was bad enough that I hadn’t gotten any action in a long fucking time. But the fact that I hadn’t even thought to alter my sleepwear habits into something more sexy only seemed to exacerbate that embarrassing fact.

  For years, I’d chosen comfort over style in my bedroom, never considering the obvious observation that maybe if I didn’t make my bed clothing enticing, then maybe—just maybe—no one would be enticed to come into it.

  But I had never been so fucking wrong.

  Jackson’s fingers inching their way along the opened seam of my underwear made me feel like the sexiest woman in the world.

  With easy access to my pussy, he slid the pad of his thumb across my wet slit. I groaned onto his shoulder before he even slipped the fingers inside.

  I was completely and utterly, un-fucking-believably undone with just a few strokes. I thought I’d come right there on the spot, if he hadn’t interrupted me with his voice.

  “Fuck, Pea.” He touched a little further inside. “You’re so goddamned wet.”

  “Please…” I muttered.

  “Please what?” He stopped kissing, looking into my eyes.

  “Please. Stop telling me what you want. If you tell me one more thing you want to do to me, I’m going to lose it… I’m barely holding on as it is.”

  I pulled back to look at him, and his eyes turned serious. He withdrew by another inch.

  “Maybe it’s about time that you did…”

  He brought his lips back to mine.

  “Maybe it’s about time that you lose control.”

  He kissed me again.

  “I know your rulebook, Counselor,” he emphasized. “I’ve read it chapter and verse…”

  He captured my lips again.

  “Maybe it’s time to put it down…?”

  He stared me down.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Let it go…?”

  I could barely breathe. “Yes.”

  “Let someone you can trust do the controlling this time. Do you trust me?”

  “God, you can’t know how much I wish I could...”

  His fingers, both sets of them, rose from where they had just played a few seconds ago to grip my waist. I was sad to see them go.

  “Then maybe you shouldn’t, Penelope.” He never called me Penelope. “You need to leave. Get out of town and don’t come back. I know you were going after that Jordan Chambers file at the senator’s party. Let it go. This isn’t the city you once knew. Not anymore. There are dangerous men here.” He drilled me with a hardened glare. “And I’m one of them.”

  He kissed me.

  “I wrote down the confirmation code for an open flight back to Paris and left the passcode on your dresser. My driver will take you to the airport.”

  He stepped back.

  “Just call me as soon as you’re ready.”

  BURNING DESIRE

  JACKSON

  I kissed her.

  I kissed her in an attempt to push her away.

  The entire time, I’m standing there in Penelope’s kitchen, a hard-on pitching my boxers at the crotch, knowing she wanted me just as badly as I wanted her, and all the while I was plotting. I tricked her with my bullshit.

  At least… that’s what I was trying to do.

  I wanted her gone.

  For four day
s, I watched her. Four days, I sat back and thought about what I would do with her now that she was back home. Back in New York. Back in my arms.

  And the only conclusion I could come up with was that she shouldn’t have been in either.

  Because Penelope was “unfinished business”… and her presence back here in New York only proved that she was bad for mine.

  I knew she was right. She was right from the start.

  Emotions had no part to play in business. The money from my mystery caller was going to set the tone for the new chapter in my life, and if I wanted to leave Penelope in the old one, I needed to follow my plans to a T.

  The kiss was nothing more than a “Hail Mary.”

  It was like pulling the pin on a grenade. Meant to disorient her, throwing her off her game and sending her scattering like shrapnel.

  I knew what kissing and dismissing Penelope would do to her.

  What I didn’t know… is what it would do to me. And I fucking hated myself for it.

  In that kitchen, a hunger that surpassed horniness grabbed me by the balls (literally), and it was all I could do not to have Penelope right then and there.

  Not to slide the flimsy fabric off her long legs, lift her onto the stove and put us both on a path to fucking nirvana, taking pit-stops along the way as I made her come again… and again… and again…

  I shook the thought off, concentrating on the road ahead, narrowing my eyes at the mission ahead of me.

  My dick harder than my Audi’s throttle, I let “white-knuckled sobriety” take on a whole different meaning as I gripped the gearshift of my black car, my cock practically throbbing, my head trying to wrap itself around what I needed to do right now and what I so badly wanted to do in that moment.

  What I wanted? Penelope.

  What I needed? My agency. More money. This mission. To keep my fucking head (along with the smaller one) out of the equation and do what I was paid to do—keep following Senator Fletcher’s car and do whatever the hell it took to keep tabs on that pompous, overblown fucker who sicced his two sick, rabid dogs after her.

  I should have known she couldn’t fly under the radar. How the hell she’d ended up with an invitation to that bastard’s Halloween party, I had no idea, but I knew that he had his eye on her.

  If he didn’t, I wouldn’t have had to beat his two thug security dogs into bloody pulps the night before. I could have saved a beating on my knuckles, a bruising and satisfied soreness that I could feel even as I gripped my padded steering wheel.

  I focused on the senator’s license plate, reminding myself that keeping personal feelings out of my interactions with Penelope was her fucking idea.

  If I lived my life according to a playbook, then she lived hers according to one with strict rules.

  I used mine to maneuver my way through life, and she used it to hinder hers.

  In lieu of strategies and play suggestions, she opted for regulations and unreachable standards. Where I bent the rules, she padded and bolstered them.

  Penelope lived in a world of well-defined pant creases and guidelines, and if things didn’t fit on her interminable list of “do’s and don’ts,” she eventually discarded them.

  I was no exception.

  And I often wondered if our best friend, Bishop, was the reason why I had been.

  I thought about the promise I made to her… and I pushed my Audi faster.

  A gray, morning sky turned the color of stone, and it wept tears of concrete down my back. In my Audi, I accelerated out of the city and further into the recesses of nearby Westchester County.

  The rain fell heavy from the heavens, crushing me under a cascade of guilt, and I let it beat down on me, drowning me in a frustration of my own making as I pursued the crooked senator without penance.

  Stalking him like a shadow. Mirroring his quick movements with my own as I maneuvered through thickened traffic to keep up with his dark Mercedes Benz CLS class coupe.

  Senator Robert “the Fraud” Fletcher and his vehicle twisted through traffic on the highway like a stitch through a black cemented wound.

  Over darkened pavements, without two fucks to give, the Benz barely scraped by several cars, cut off vehicles without warning and nearly took a side-view mirror out as he sailed past the speed limit.

  Hell, I was a fast driver, and I could barely keep up.

  With no method to his madness, I had no choice but to follow the senator’s suit, doing my best to signal as often as I could, keeping a respectable distance as I kept one eye on his grey, speeding Benz and the other on the angry motorists left in its winding trail.

  And as I did, my eye caught something I didn’t expect.

  I wasn’t alone.

  Road rage was understandable. A few beeps and “fuck-you” fingers made sense as I cut through traffic in attempts to follow the wayward luxury car.

  But where I expected outrage or angry shifting and swerving from the car behind me, I found none. Instead, I found in its place a “calm”—a sense of purpose as a black Navigator, several cars behind, weaved in and out of the scope of my rearview mirror.

  There again. Gone. Back again. And disappeared.

  It was done so deliberately I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it earlier.

  Maybe because I was too busy fantasizing about chasing that redheaded dream girl that I somehow ended up being the one chased…

  Into a fucking nightmare.

  This wasn’t a passing, pissed-off driver—a stranger searching me out to catch me and curse me to high fucking Heaven.

  No. I was being followed.

  Calmly and orderly stalked.

  The Navigator, for as big as it was, was doing a pretty good job of hiding it. It made smooth transitions, curving effortlessly through a rain-slicked street that was beginning to flood with greyed waters.

  Vehicles slashed through puddles. Tires sloshed through a growing mini-monsoon, and through it all, the sleek black truck stayed on my ass, never straying too far, never lagging out of “arm’s reach.”

  My cover was blown. If the truck had teeth, it could have bitten me where the sun doesn’t goddamn shine.

  With a gear-shift and a twist of my steering wheel, I abandoned my pursuit of the senator’s car, taking the nearest exit and pulling off the freeway.

  I tightened my seat belt, and as expected, the big dark SUV came barreling after me, switching lanes just as I veered right while my intended target still ripped down the roadway, blissfully unaware.

  I pounded my dashboard with my fist and kept rolling.

  Through the quickening rain, past the rumbles of thunder and the revs of my own engine, I couldn’t hear anything—anything but the beating of my own rapping heart.

  I made a U-turn.

  Entering the freeway just as soon as I exited, I put my tag-along and myself on a ride back to the city. With skyscrapers on the scope of my grey horizon, I pushed my Audi’s pedal almost as far as it could go.

  Oil pumped through my overextended engine. Adrenaline pumped through my overextended veins. And by the time I had crossed the bridge over into the borough of Manhattan, the hulking black truck was but a blip in my side view mirrors.

  The driver of the Navigator had abandoned all caution, pursuing me now with a blind instinct that made him recklessly obvious.

  His efforts to hide had gone to pot, and I egged him on from the front seat of my own car.

  Beckoning him with my eyes in the rearview mirror. Taunting him with glimpses of my Audi’s tail as I knitted my coupe in and out of the fabric of New York City traffic.

  I hissed through tightened teeth.

  “Come on… Come on, you fucker…”

  I wanted my hands on this bastard.

  And it just so happened that I had him right where I wanted him…

  I turned a corner and found myself heading down 125th street. I grinned to myself, drumming my fingers against the padded rubber over the driver’s wheel.

  With a turn of the hardened r
ubber, I was rolling down one of my favorite city streets—an alley I used to frequent often in Harlem when I was young and my head was harder than my dick—and I parked there.

  With the engine still running, I hopped out of my driver’s side door, huddling my way through a cold curtain of late autumn rain. I pressed my chilled limbs into the confines of the nearby brick building that bordered the alley.

  And then I listened.

  I listened to the sounds of the city streets around me. The honking horns. The swish of dirty rainwater.

  And there I stood completely still.

  Listening. Listening. Listening…

  Until the discreet sound of spinning tires came rolling my way. Until the hum of a nearby rumbling engine inched nearer and nearer, before cutting off completely.

  I heard the muffled sound of an opening door.

  And then, just as squeaking footsteps began to fall on the asphalt of the alleyway, I heard my world go quiet.

  All noise ceased to exist. Reality unplugged itself until all that was left was me.

  Me… and him.

  And I lashed out with deadly purpose from the alleyway entrance in which I waited, crushing my fingers around flesh as I made a calculated grab for the unseen driver’s barely-exposed neck.

  We hit the ground.

  In a tumble of oversized coats and exasperated grunts, I tackled my unknown tracker, wrapping my hands around his windpipe as he struggled beneath me. His huffs were heavy as he landed in a pool of rainwater, amidst a growing humidity that was suffocating even me.

  I didn’t want to kill him; I just wanted to shock him to fucking death.

  But when I hoisted him to his feet, when I dug my fingers under his dirty collar and looked into his face, I wished that I almost had...

  I wished I could scare him into an early grave.

  This fucker was the one of the two crazy cocksuckers from the bar… and he was looking at me with a stare that could only be described as murderous.

  His brown eyes went alive with vengeance.

  “You fookin’ wanker…” he spit in my face. He threw a punch that missed. “I should have kicked your ass when I had the chance.”