CHAPTER 39

Turns out, we both got dressed, but not after an honest attempt at naked breakfast.

It started off on the wrong foot because I felt too awkward with my ass sitting on a cold, leather bar stool at his kitchen island and my arms crossed over my chest. Alex shot me an exasperated look as he pulled the eggs out of the fridge.

“Drop your hands, Jas,” he commanded. “You ingeniously argued your way into my bed so you’re not about to deprive me of staring at your body.”

I blushed and dropped my hands, the coolness from the air conditioning hardening my nipples.

Because I apparently couldn’t look him in the eye in the bright light of day while he scrambled eggs, I stared at his cock, fascinated by it. He’s way larger than Peter… than anyone I’ve ever been with, but that’s a grand total of three men. The guy I lost my virginity to, which was a drunk hookup in college, Peter, and then Alexander.

He had absolutely no shame as he moved with casual ease around his kitchen. His hair was pulled back again at the top, the length just brushing his shoulders. Alex made a gorgeous picture, but I mostly just stared at his dick.

To my surprise, it started to move and lengthen.

My eyes flew up to his, and he was staring at me staring at him.

“Go put your clothes on,” he said drily. “And bring me a pair of briefs out of my top dresser drawer. At this rate, both of us will perish from starvation.”

I scurried to the bedroom and did as he asked, relieved not to have to feel awkward around Alex. I expect we could move toward naked breakfast, but things are still too new on the sexual-discovery scale. You’d think after all the things Alex has done to me, I’d be a bit freer with my body, but if anything, I might be more insecure. I guess I might feel inadequate after seeing up close and personal—repeatedly—how confident he is sexually. I’m not sure I measure up.

This thought sucks because this all leads back to Peter making me feel this way, and it’s something I just don’t like.

But now I’ve got on my panties and one of Alexander’s t-shirts, which he told me was way sexier than me being naked anyway, and he has on a pair of very well-fitting boxer briefs in black. I make myself not look at the front, which has his beautiful package clearly outlined as he butters some toast.

I quietly watch him work, thinking I’ve never seen anything as inherently sexy as a man who feels confident in the kitchen.

In his underwear.

“What are we going to do today?” I ask him casually, and then I wince because that sounds so clingy. It also sounds bossy and intrusive, and much the way I imagined he viewed me when I was a little girl always demanding his and Noel’s attention.

Alex glances up at me, swallows his food, and smirks. “Some of us have jobs, Jas. I have to go into the office.”

Oh, shit. It’s Monday. Given the fact I’m unemployed, and haven’t worried about what day of the week it was for several now, it slipped my mind.

I glance over at the digital clock on the microwave. “But it’s almost eleven.”

Another smirk. “One of the perks of owning your own business. Besides, I texted my secretary early this morning to cancel any appointments I had before noon.”

“Oh,” I say and focus on my eggs. Pretty soon, I’ll need to leave his place. Pretty soon, I’ll know for sure whether Alex will let me back in here. Last night, I goaded him into reacting to me, but I can’t do that again. Not because I’m not that devious, because I am, but because I really don’t want to go to The Sinful Night Club by myself. I don’t think he’ll call my bluff a second time.

“What are you going to do, Jas?” Alex asks as he picks up his coffee to take a sip.

I shrug. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess get some laundry done, maybe—”

“No,” he interrupts. “What are you going to do with your life? You can’t just hide out in Alma’s apartment forever.”

“I’m not hiding,” I say hotly.

“Have you looked for a new job? Have you decided to stay in Nevada permanently? Or maybe move to San Francisco to be near Noel?”

“I don’t know,” I say in my surliest voice. “I haven’t given it much thought.”

“Why not?” he asks curiously. “You’re a go-getter, Jasmine. Always have been.”

“Well, I’m sorry, Alex,” I snap. “I got kicked out of my own house three weeks ago because I was a lousy lay to my husband. I think I’ve been reeling a little bit and not sure what to do.”

Alexander’s eyes harden, and he sets his cup down. Leaning across the island, he says, “You are not a lousy lay. Stop thinking of yourself that way.”

“I can’t even have naked breakfast with you,” I mutter. “I’m pretty sure I’m not good at this stuff.”

“Hey,” he says, and my eyes lock to his. “These last two nights, I’ve never come harder in my life. You drained me dry, Jas, and trust me when I say… you’re a fantastic fuck. Your husband is a moron.”

I give him a weak smile and take a bite of my eggs.

Thankfully, he moves on from the topic of sex, but not thankfully, he moves back to prodding me about my life. “I’m assuming you quit your job when you came here?”

“Well, yeah. It was back in Los Angeles. I’m here in Nevada.”

“Your job could be done from anywhere,” Alex points out, and I blink at him in surprise.

Then my lips curve upward. “You knew what my job was?”

Alex shrugs. “Noel kept me a little up to date with what was going on with you.”

I suppress my grin, because although we’ve lost touch for several years, Alexander knew I worked as a copyeditor—which was the most boring job ever and I hated it—but technically… I could do my job anywhere.

I graduated UCLA with a degree in journalism. I’d had starry-eyed visions of working for The Washington Post or reporting from war-ravaged countries, maybe even anchoring the CNN weekend news desk, but never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d be doing copyediting for a fashion magazine. It was long, awful hours of tedious work on subject matter I abhorred. One thing I was not sad to leave behind was that job.

“I’m rethinking my career path,” is all I tell Alex. “Peter set me up a generous bank account so money is not an immediate concern right now.”

He studies me a moment, perhaps hearing the failure in my voice, and he leaves it alone.

“What about your marriage?” he asks.

“What about it?” I ask vaguely.

“Well, you’re married. Are you going to try to make it work?”

My eyebrows shoot high. “Excuse me? Why would I try to make it work?”

“Because you have years invested in it,” Alex says in a matter-of-fact tone. “What your husband did to you was awful but maybe not unforgivable.”

I consider this for only a moment. “Did Noel tell you why I got married?”

Alex goes still, a forkful of eggs dropping back to the plate as he slowly shakes his head.

“I was pregnant.”

Alex’s eyes harden. “Noel never told me,” he says.

“I’d dated Peter through most of my college years. He was five years older than me, and I found out I was pregnant just a month after graduating. Peter offered marriage, and I accepted.”

Alex straightens and pushes his plate away, his eggs half-eaten, his toast ignored. “What happened?”

I shrug and push my food around my plate, not overly hungry because this conversation turned heavy. “I miscarried before we got married, but we went ahead and did it anyway. I mean… we loved each other, so why not? My point being, we didn’t necessarily get married because we felt we would spend the rest of our lives together.”

“If you love each other, you should talk things out,” Alex says, but his voice is tight. I wonder if he’s saying that because he believes in the sanctity of marriage or he just wants to push me away.

I’m not ready to accept either of those right now, so I turn the tables. “What about your marriage?”

I expect this to put Alex on guard and maybe turn him defensive, but he acts all casual now as he leans back over the counter and grabs his fork. “What about it?”

He takes a bite, chews as if this is the easiest thing in the world to have a conversation about, and watches me… waits for me to ask more.

“Why did you get divorced?” I ask, not sure I want to know about how he got to the marriage part.

“We didn’t have a lot of compatibility to make it long term,” he tells me.

“But you had some compatibility,” I push.

“Well, yeah, Jas,” he says with a smirk. “I didn’t just marry some woman off the street.”

“Did you love her?”

“Yes.”

Ugh… why does that bother me?

“How were you incompatible? You’re pushing me to work things out with Peter, so why didn’t you work things out in your marriage?”

Alex swallows some eggs he’d forked into his mouth, takes a napkin, and wipes his mouth while he appraises me, as if he’s trying to figure out if I really want to know the truth to the questions I just asked.

Finally, he says, “The only thing we really had in common was sex. It was…”

He trails off as if trying to find the right word, so I supply it for him. “Good?”

“Fantastic,” he corrects, and that makes my stomach sink. “It was so incredible for both of us, we thought it meant more than it did. In the end, it was just great sex. That wasn’t enough to overcome all the other areas where we just weren’t aligned.”

“Like what?” I can’t help but ask, because I want to compare her to myself.

“We had sex without a condom,” Alex says in return.

“Well, yeah… you were married. Why would that be an incompatibility?”

Alex shakes his head, his eyes focusing hard on me. “You and I had sex without a condom. Half an hour ago. I didn’t ask your permission, and you didn’t protest.”

“That’s true,” I say hesitantly, because he’s veered so far off course from talking about his marriage that I’m having a tough time keeping up. Also, just thinking about the way he felt inside of me as he came, and the way he leaked out of me after…

I shake my head to get out of my head.

“Jas… we had unprotected sex, and you don’t seem to care.”

“I’m on the pill,” I tell him, even though he already knows since he did ask me about it just before thrusting inside of me.

Alex rolls his eyes at me and growls, “Aren’t you worried about STDs?”

My eyebrows knit in confusion. “No, why should I?”

“Jas,” Alex says in exasperation. “Safe sex. STDs. How can you not be worried?”

Then it hits me. Alex really doesn’t understand that even though we haven’t seen each other in years, it doesn’t mean I don’t know his core being.

“You’d never hurt me,” I tell him simply. “You would have never taken it upon yourself to expose me to something like that. I figure if you took me without protection, you did so because you were clean. So, no… I wasn’t worried then and I’m not worried now.”

I expect this reasoning to make Alex happy, but his jaw tightens. I’m insightful enough to know that he doesn’t want me believing in him so much, because while he may never expose me to physical harm, I’m sure he’s worried about the emotional wreckage someone like him could leave behind.

With a curt nod to my plate, Alex says, “Finish up. I’m going to get a shower, and then I can have my driver take you back to your car.”

I’m silent as Alex puts his plate in the sink and turns to his bedroom. I have a million things I want do, none of which I can.

I want to crawl naked into the shower with him, take him back into my mouth, and make him see me as something other than a little sister.

I want to pull him back to the counter and make him talk to me. I want to know more about his marriage, and why he is so opposed to relationships now. I want to know if we could ever be anything to each other than just sex.

But I can tell he’s closed off for now, and I should back off. Alex is a man who doesn’t like to be pushed too far, and I’m a woman smart enough to know how to play this cool.

Still, I can’t help but call out. “Alex?”

He stops, turns slightly to look at me.

“Why weren’t you worried about having unprotected sex with me? You didn’t ask me if I was clean.”

“Same as you,” he says quietly. “I knew you’d never do something to hurt me. You were trying to push my bare cock into you, and you would have only done that if you were safe.”

My heart soars with his admission that we’re tight enough he trusted me on something that’s important in a sexual relationship. I’m satisfied enough to let him walk off without any further conversation.