End With A Bang (Slap/Bang Duet #2)

2. Joy

CHAPTER TWO

Joy

A charged hush enveloped them like warm, surging bath water, both calm and rousing at once. Their only soundtrack remained the low hum of whirlpool jets, errant soft moans of relaxation, the occasional splash as their entwined hands surfaced and submerged.

Sever had to be careful now. The best thing that ever happened to him was in his arms, hot and thrumming and slippery, and he wasn’t going to let her slip away. Knew she would, eventually, but hell if he’d be the cause.

Above all, he had to keep his mouth shut. Let this be what it was without talk, without damning analysis... or without him whooping and prancing about like a kid who’d just snatched the brass carousel ring. The slightest assumption could send her running, and he was liable to propose marriage next time he took a breath. So, he’d made a conscious effort to dress her wounds, walk her up the grand staircase and help her into his sunken tub with nary a word.

Well, except, “Might be a bit hot.”

“I like it hot,” she’d said with a coy grin, which made him imagine rigorously fucking her in his Rio flat. Right by the windows, shoreline twinkling below, their mingled sweat coating her backside... Oh, the places they could go.

But he knew better than to speak of the future, and here she was, seated between his legs, allowing him to hold her.

Ivy let out a contented sigh. “Your tub is way better than mine.”

Sever traced the line of her clavicle. Live with me and it’s yours. All of them are yours. You should see the one on my island. Do you like sailing?

She lay her head back on his shoulder and closed her eyes.

She was so pretty, but not in any usual way. She had a face from a distant era, a face that revealed so much, even in repose. It wasn’t just her eyes, it was the ridges of her nose, the fullness of her lips, the delicate curve of her chin. Her long, graceful neck, sheened with bath oils and gleaming in the candlelight ...reminded him that he was one violent shithead.

Fingers rising to her throat, he said, “I’m sorry.”

She touched his arm and looked up at him. “I’m not.”

Such a simple answer, so many possible implications.

Wisely, she averted her gaze and changed the subject. “Is that a shower over there, or a Polynesian dance club?”

“Big enough for two,” he said, smelling her hair.

“It’s big enough for the circus, Sever.”

Sever tightened his legs around hers, rubbed his toes against her smooth calf. “Yeah. I get that a lot.”

She chuckled, momentarily disarmed.

Love the way you laugh. “I love the way you laugh.” Fuck .

Mercifully, Ivy wasn’t spooked. In fact, she pointed her chin at the far door and asked, “That’s your bedroom, right?”

“Why, wanna sleep over?” This thought was unfiltered, too, but it sounded more like lascivious teasing than sappy adoration. Small favors?

She became rigid in his arms, and he was sure he’d crossed a line and lost her for the night. Mentally berating himself and counting the seconds to I should probably go , he almost missed it when she said, “I guess I could.”

He stilled. Was she fucking with him? Was she not fucking with him? “You...?” He craned his neck to see her eyes. “Did you and Jason?—”

“No. No, we didn’t—” She spun, buoyant, to face him, straddling his lap and anchoring her grasp at his neck. “Could we not talk about him right now?”

“Yeah. No, I...” He shook it out of his mind, grateful for one more opportunity to hold her hips and gaze into her eyes. “Stay.” He added quickly, “If you want to.”

He watched her internal struggle, wishing he could talk her through it, but that would only push her away, wouldn’t it?

Ivy looked down into the dark water between them, and confessed, “I don’t even know how I got here.”

Sever held his tongue. Gave her the space to explain, though she didn’t have to.

“I knew.” She glanced at him briefly. “That you were seeing someone tonight? Don’t ask me how, it’s... It’s kind of a long, largely irrational story.”

He’d assumed she’d used her wily charms to get someone talking. “It’s not important to me how.”

“I didn’t plan on doing anything about—” She trailed off with a self-conscious huff. “I was sitting at home, just... holding your watch? Next thing I knew, I was outside the gate.” Her eyes finally rested on his for a while. “You forgot to change your code.”

He wanted to kiss her. “I never dreamed you’d sneak in with it.”

“Well, I thought I was sneaking in,” she admitted through an adorable pout, “until Vikram opened the side door for me. So much for stealthiness.”

“That code alerts Terrell. You never let me tell you that part.”

“Yeah. It doesn’t turn off the security cameras either. They watched me walk all the way up.”

He frowned. “They didn’t ask you to leave, did they?”

“Actually,” she shifted in his lap to get closer, “Vikram asked me what took me so long.”

Vik said that? “That sly dog...”

“Please don’t fire him.”

“Bugger that, he’s getting a raise.”

She smiled briefly with him. “He sent the girl away and let me through, and... that’s when everything got really clear.” She pet the hair at the nape of his neck. “I knew exactly what I had to do.”

He let that hang in the air for a moment, until he couldn’t keep quiet anymore. “Is it still clear?”

“Slight fog forming now. Chance of rain. Thunderstorms...”

That last word came out as no more than a whisper, because he’d begun to glide a teasing caress over her slick thighs, then between them. “Anything I can do to change the weather?”

She nodded, and pressed her lips to his.

Water billowed onto the granite floor with her every move. Her arms encircling his head, her breasts bouncing in his face, his fingers curved inside of her, Ivy gulped and gasped his name and he thought, Fuck careful .

“Clear out, Chef,” Sever announced as he strut into the kitchen, shirtless, arm slung low around Ivy’s waist. “You’re off tonight.”

“But,” Ivy reached out to Marco as he left the room, “the five stars...”

“Too bad; cooking you my specialty.” At the island, he pulled out a stool for her to sit on, smacked it twice.

She sat down, smoothing his pink Oxford shirt over her naked bottom first. She’d commandeered the shirt from the bathroom floor, and he’d just gone with it. “How many stars are you?”

He grabbed a pan from the array and cocked a brow. “Just one great big one, baby.”

She rolled her eyes, but with a smile.

Yeah, she liked him.

“Here’s how it goes,” he said, slinging the pan on the stovetop and gathering the ingredients from the refrigerator. “First, butter. Lots of butter. Little milk. Dab of mustard... Fromage ...” he sniffed a block of Gruyere, and tossed it her way. She caught it. “ Jambon ... Baguette.”

She caught the baguette too. “So, basically you’re making a grilled cheese sandwich with ham.”

“ Croque Monsieur ,” he corrected her. “But, yeah, basically. Do you mind?”

“Actually it sounds pretty fantastic right now.”

He beamed, and took the bread that she held out.

“Can I help?” She placed her elbows on the island and her chin on her palms, fingers curled on her rosy cheeks. Her hair, cascading over her shoulders, was still damp and wavy at the ends and she looked quite like she’d just orgasmed in a bathtub. “Not that I mind just sitting here watching you slice bread in your skivvies.”

“By all means, relax and enjoy the impressive view.”

“What is your view, anyway?” She nodded at the wall of windows. Now that it was night, all they could see was their reflection. “Out there.”

“Backyard,” he said, melting butter in a saucepan and grabbing a wooden spoon for the flour. “Fountain. Pool. Tennis court. Guest house. Birdseye view of the commonfolk. What you’d expect.”

“Do you play tennis?” she asked, touching the rim of the fruit bowl.

“No, Melody was the—” He realized he shouldn’t be bringing up his ex-wife—and his son’s abuser—at a time like this. “No, I don’t.”

Ivy picked up an orange, inspected it and put it down. “I think Kara Bennett—you know, the lawyer Jason works with? I think she might be spying on us.”

Was that what she was looking for out there? “She was.”

“She was?” Ivy sat up straight in alarm. “How do you know? Why didn’t you tell me?”

He put the whisk down. “I found out the day after we...” saw Roxie. “After I took you to the motel on Figueroa.”

“I knew it!” Ivy jumped off the stool and began to pace, hands on her hips. “Shit!”

“It’s all right, Ivy,” he calmed her, “she never knew a thing. I made sure of it.”

She gave him a suspicious frown. “And how did you do that?”

Choosing to ignore the suspicion, he said, “Well, she might be an amateur, but the bloke she hired wasn’t.” He pushed the bread into the oven. “He followed us there, reckoned he had a drug scandal on his hands, so he came straight to me. I paid him off and had my guy check her out.”

“Oh. What did he find?”

“Nothing.” He tasted the sauce on his fingertip. “As in, nothing at all. It’s like she didn’t exist until about six years ago.”

There was an appealing little spark of calculation in her eyes. “Did he give you any documents?”

“Yeah. Her driver’s license, apartment lease, W2, social security number, ironclad proof of life. But not a thing before that.”

“Witness protection?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe an abusive ex. Either way, it’s not for us to shake that tree.”

She sighed. “I wish I could. She’s been digging everything up for Jason.”

Right. The murder they thought he committed. His gaze lowered to the bubbling béchamel mix. “That still going on, then.”

“I... I don’t know, to be honest. We haven’t talked a lot.”

Their eyes met, hers cautious, his insecure.

“So,” she said, and sat down again, “how does Sever Mark make his famous Croque Monsieur ?”

He flashed her a grin, and launched into an enthusiastic demonstration.

She was adorable, watching him as he performed, eventually standing next to him to see the finale up close.

At her first bite, she moaned and praised it with her mouth full. At her second, she spilled melted cheese on his Oxford shirt. She hastily unbuttoned it while giggling at something he said, and he had to kiss her. When she began to wrestle the shirt off and fervently return the kiss, he had no choice but to deposit her on the kitchen island to tongue her nipples, then her pussy, then fuck the living daylights out of her.

One hand holding herself up, the other on his chest, she met his gaze with candid desire. Occasionally she would break eye contact to watch his cock slide in and out of her, her hot breaths matching his thrusts.

She began a backbend, which was absolute poetry in motion, but then he remembered her whip-welts. He tried to slow her drop, but she seemed even more turned on when her shoulder blades met the hard granite.

Shirt sleeve still on one arm, the rest of it crumpled beneath her, Ivy squirmed, took his hand, and whispered, “Spot.”

Sever didn’t hesitate. Keeping one possessive hand on her tit, he reached under her and dug his fingers into her sacrum. Goosebumps rose against his fingertips and she let out an ecstatic whine. As she wrapped her legs around his hips to bring him closer, she corkscrewed her pussy on his throbbing cock, making him say, “Love the way you fuck.”

Her nipples tightened and her eyes rolled back. “Gonna come, gonna come, I’m gonna...”

“Come,” he encouraged her. “Come, tigresse , come?—”

She began to tremor, her inner walls pulsed and slicked him up anew and she began to groan and buck in agitated and desperate need. As she released, he momentarily uncoupled to watch as her nectar spilled out of the glistening pink orchid before him. Holding her by her trembling knees, he drove into her again and said, “I’m gonna have to come on you now.”

“Do it,” she said, without skipping a beat. “ Jouir partout sur moi .”

Come all over me in French? Fuck yes, he would. Growling through clenched jaw, Sever revved up inside her, quickly pulled out, and claimed her quivering belly as his own.

It was damn satisfying, spattering daubs of white all over her golden skin. That’s right. You’re Sever’s girl.

Chest heaving, back of her hand on her forehead, she said, “Now I’m really hungry.”

He finished signing an S on her come-covered belly, and held his finger to her lips with a sneer. “Eat up.”

She sucked it off with an Mmmm , and he had to stop himself from taking her all over again. The effect she had on him… he hadn’t been this quick to recover—or this horny, period—since his twenties.

He didn’t want to tire out, though, if he was going to have her in his own bed, in his own home, all night. He quelled the urge, dampened a kitchen towel and cleaned her belly, closed up her shirt, and brought the food and a bottle of wine out to the fire pit on the west veranda.

As he flipped the fire switch on and she took in the view, it occurred to Sever that he hadn’t been in this particular nook for years. It was for entertaining, and he hadn’t entertained in... nearly a decade. He’d been in stasis all of that time, living in his work, going through the motions.

Until there was Ivy.

They sat together on the circular couch, firelight warming their skin. He let her keep the conversation light and teasing for her sake, but they didn’t have to talk. The space between them was filled with satiated afterglow, and the errant smiles that kept creeping over her face were all the information he needed. To be fair, he may have been smiling like that, too.

At the start, she’d tucked her bare legs under her, but by the end of dinner her little feet were in his lap and he suddenly understood foot fetishes. As he proceeded to rub her impossibly soft soles against his briefs, she said, “I’m starting to think you don’t want me to see your bedroom.”

The fact was, he didn’t want this night to end.

Without a word, just a soft smile, he stood and outstretched his hand. Without a word, she took it.