CHAPTER 40

Taking a deep breath, I step up to the rack, squat, and position the bar over the back of my shoulders. It’s loaded with three hundred and twenty-five pounds. Certainly not my personal best, but I’m not going for heavyweight, only repetitions.

I take another breath, push up against the weight to stand straight, then take two steps back from the rack. I exhale, inhale again, and squat. The breath pushes out of me hard as I stand back up.

I do this for a total of six reps and then manage to maneuver the barbell back onto the rack. I’m streaming sweat from every pore in my body, and my legs are shaking from that last set.

One of the perks of being incredibly wealthy is having all the toys. I’d outfitted my apartment with a world-class gym, and I take advantage of it every single day. If I’m not power-lifting, I’m running. I’m doing something every day because exercise is the second-best way for me to distress from my hectic life.

Sex obviously being the first one, but that situation’s all fucked up, so I worked out extra hard tonight after I left the office.

Grabbing a towel and my water, I first mop my face, then drink the entire contents of the bottle. I toss it in the waste bin that my housekeeper will ensure gets to recycling, and head to my master bath for a shower.

Just as I’m entering my bedroom, I hear my phone vibrating on the nightstand where I’d left it with the ringer turned off and charging. As I walk closer, I see Noel’s name on the screen.

I’d like to avoid him right now, but that will do nothing but feed my guilt, so I answer it reluctantly.

“What’s up, man?” I say casually as if the weight of his little sister weren’t resting on my shoulders.

“Not much,” he says. “Just checking in with you. Did Jas get up with you?”

“What?” I ask, freaked his first question would be about his sister.

“She texted me yesterday morning for your phone number,” Noel says casually, apparently not picking up on my distress, thank fuck. “Said she was in Las Vegas and was going to try to get up with you for lunch.”

Fuck. Is he testing me? Did Jas tell him we talked? Had lunch? Do I lie? Do I tell him the truth that we did, in fact, hookup but not for lunch. We hooked up and fucked all night.

Goddamn it.

“Um… no,” I say, throwing caution to the wind and lying my ass off. “She didn’t.”

I wince and wait for Noel’s next words, my entire frame feeling weak with the guilt for what I’m doing. I’m not always a good guy, but I am loyal and forthright with my friends. Especially Noel.

Always with Noel, actually.

Until I fucked Jasmine.

Shit. Shit. Shit.

“Well, you might want to give her a call,” Noel suggests, and I exhale so hard in relief my lungs almost completely deflate. “I think she’s been a little down since all this shit with Peter. It would be nice for her to see a friendly face.”

Like friendly as in my face between her legs? Because she’s seen that plenty.

“Yeah, sure thing, buddy,” I say as I walk into my bathroom, then move to change the subject. “What’s up with you?”

“Aren’t you going to ask for her number?” Noel asks.

More guilt… a punch to the gut that I’m doing something Noel would go ballistic and would probably sever our friendship over. “I’m getting ready to jump in the shower and don’t have anything to write it down with. Just text it to me,” I say easily.

“Will do,” he returns. “So, I’m working on an updated design for a power dildo.”

I laugh, relieved to be talking about dildos with my best friend. “What’s the concept?” I ask as I turn on the shower and step back to let the water warm up. I lean against the marbled vanity as I listen to Noel explain.

The man is a brilliant engineer and founded a premier firm in San Francisco almost five years ago. He’d started out in Michigan after graduating from college, soaked up as much knowledge on the business side as he could, and moved to northern California after Jas turned of age.

But despite his success and money, he’s turned a kinky hobby into a business concept that might have some legs. He started dabbling in these sex machines just to get his girlfriends’ rocks off, but Ford paid him good money for that dildo machine and the chance to try it out, and a niche business suddenly looks to be feasible. Noel can certainly do it on the side and still maintain his professional business.

“What do you think?” he asks me solemnly after he tells me about the concept.

Let’s see… he envisions a contraption that will hoist a spread-eagled, tied-with-rope woman in the air and drill a mechanical power dildo into her from above?

“Fucking fantastic idea,” I tell him, and my dick gets rock hard as an image of Jas in that contraption erupts within my mind.

Christ. My hand goes to rub myself through my gym shorts, but then my erection starts to fade when Noel says, “Thought you’d like that. But listen… I got to go. I’m texting you Jasmine’s number. Maybe take her out to lunch or breakfast or something, okay? Help get her mind off that asshole husband of hers.”

“Okay,” I say hoarsely as a wave of shame from my deception threatens to render me impotent forever.

That’s it. Decision made. I absolutely cannot do this with Jas.

“Thanks, man,” he says. “You’re the best.”

“Back at you,” I mutter, and we say our goodbyes.

I turn and set my phone on the vanity, the shower now emitting steam from behind me. Morose eyes stare back at me from the mirror. There’s a woman I want more than anything in the world, and I absolutely cannot have her.

Noel made sure of that three years ago after my divorce finalized with Rachel.

It was a time to get together with my best friend and confidant. To mourn the loss of my marriage, or perhaps it was to celebrate since it started a new chapter in my life. Noel never came to Las Vegas because he hated the glitz and touristy nature. He had no family left at all except for Jas, and she was in Los Angeles living her life. I often chartered a plane to San Francisco to party with Micah, so it was the logical place for me to go the weekend after I got the divorce papers filed.

We got drunk.

Well, I got supremely drunk that first night.

Shit faced.

I woke up in his apartment, in the guest bedroom with a naked woman on top of me. I remember raising my throbbing head off the pillow and looking at her with bleary eyes, not recognizing her or remembering a damn thing about what we did.

After I rolled her off me, I stumbled into Noel’s kitchen, joining for some coffee and promising myself I’d never drink again. My stomach was threatening to rebel. My headache was so intense everything was blurry.

I found Noel in the kitchen, wearing nothing but a pair of boxer shorts, sipping at his coffee. He didn’t greet me, but I didn’t notice at the time, or think anything was off.

After pouring my coffee, I sat across the table and muttered, “Sorry about the woman in there. Hope we weren’t too loud.”

Noel put his cup down. “We brought her home together.”

Despite the pain in my head, my eyebrows raise in interest. We’d shared women before, but it had been a long time. “I don’t remember. What did I miss?”

“The usual,” he said, which meant one of us had her pussy and the other had her ass at the same time.

“Let me get my stomach and head settled, and we can give her a nice send-off,” I told him with a grin, then winced at the pain that caused.

“You really don’t remember?” Noel asked, and that’s when I noted something funny in his voice.

I didn’t shake my head in denial because it would have hurt too much, but I told him the truth. “Completely blacked out. How much did I drink last night?”

“Enough to make you black out, apparently,” he said with heat to his voice.

“Did I do something to piss you off?” I asked flatly.

Noel’s eyes narrowed. “Does my sister Jas ring a bell?”

I honestly had no clue what he was talking about. Jas had been living in Los Angeles for several years. I hadn’t seen her in forever, and didn’t know much of what was going on other than she was married to some financial advisor or some shit like that.

“Jas?” I asked in confusion.

“You don’t remember the shit you told me last night?” he asked with disbelief.

Dread welled up inside of me, because that could only mean a couple of things. I either professed my attraction to his sister, or I spilled the beans about what happened to her when she was sixteen, a secret Jas and I had kept solidly together.

“Why don’t you enlighten me?” I asked, but I sure as hell didn’t want to know the answer.

“After we fucked that woman in there,” he said with a jerk of his head toward the hallway that led to the bedrooms, “we came out to the living room and drank some more. You were bitching and moaning about Rachel.”

“Bitching and moaning?” This was odd because Rachel and I mutually decided to end the marriage. There was nothing really to bitch or moan about, except for the fact I was going to miss having sex with her.

“About how you shouldn’t have bothered with marrying her.”

I could totally see me saying that because it was the truth. I was smart enough to have a prenup signed with Rachel, but she still left the marriage with a nice chunk of my money. Still, I didn’t begrudge it to her. I knew what I was getting into.

“What does that have to do with Jas?” I asked.

“You started talking weird shit about Jas,” Noel said. “It made no sense.”

“Like what?” I prodded, my stomach tightening, the one sip of coffee I’d had threatening to come up.

“That you didn’t have a special bond with Rachel, not the way you did with Jas,” he said, and bile rose in my throat. “I asked you what that meant, but you just kept repeating that, all slurred and not making sense.”

“Okay,” I said hesitantly.

“Until you appeared to sober up miraculously for just a moment,” Noel said through gritted teeth. “You looked at me and said, ‘If you could have just seen the way she looked at me, brother… I’ve never had anyone look at me like that before.”

I wanted to mutter every curse word in the dictionary, because while I had no recollection about what I’d said while drunk, I knew exactly what I was referencing.

I was talking about the moment I walked into that bathroom in that hotel suite to rescue Jas. When I walked in that door, the utter look of worship in her eyes almost made me stumble. Like I was her hero, or that if she never saw another thing as long as she lived, she’d be satisfied with that one moment where I came to save her.

“Did you fuck my sister?” Noel growled.

“What?” I barked back at him, stunned he would even think that. He actually jerked his head back at my tone. “Fuck, no. Why would you ever ask me something like that?”

“What did you expect me to think?” he retorted, but the heat had died from his voice. “What did you mean ‘the way she looked at you’?”

This was dicey. I couldn’t share Jasmine’s secret.

I lied for the first time about Jas to my best friend who was like my brother. “I don’t know, Noel. Maybe I was talking about how when we were growing up together, and Jas would fucking follow us around all the time. She looked up to us, man. We were her heroes, dude. Surely you remember that?”

I hated turning the tables on him like that, but I had to deflect the pressure off me. Noel’s eyes softened as he admitted, “Yeah… that little monster wouldn’t leave us alone.”

“She was a little monster, wasn’t she?” I chuckled with relief. “Look… you know I love Jas like a sister. I have no clue why she came into the conversation about Rachel last night, but maybe I just wanted that from my marriage. To be her hero or something.”

God those words tasted like shit on my tongue. Not only from the lie inside of them but because I never in my life wanted to be that to a woman. I’d been that to Jas for just a few hours of my life and the connection was so intense, it was almost painful. Letting her go completely from that type of emotional connection sucked hairy balls, and I sure as shit didn’t want Rachel looking like that at me. It smacked too much of an emotional commitment I wasn’t ready to give, even to my wife.

“Alright, dude,” Micah said with a nervous laugh. “I get it. But fuck… the thought of you and Jas together. Christ, it gave me the willies. Talk about fucking wrong, Alexander.”

“So wrong,” I’d agreed with him because I was on the same wavelength. She was like a little sister to me, but more importantly, she had moved on.

At that time, it wasn’t a lie when I told him, “You have no worries, bro. Jasmine’s too much like a sister to me to ever even consider that.”

And that is the real reason I can’t be with Jas. That’s the reason why I know without a doubt Noel would never accept me fucking his little sister. He told me it was wrong, and I fucking agreed with him. He’s got every right to expect me to keep my distance.

I look down to my phone and think about the texts Jas had sent me this afternoon. When I packed her off this morning, I evaded making plans with her by telling her I might have to work late. I hadn’t responded to her two texts asking me if I was, in fact, working late.

She wanted to come over, and God save my soul, I wanted her to.

But I couldn’t let her.

I pick up my phone and respond to her last message with a simple, Sorry. Caught up in late meetings and still working. Can’t see you tonight.

It was lame and it was a lie, but I’ve gotten good at those over the last few days apparently. I set the phone back down and turn to the shower. I’m going to get cleaned up and then head to The Sinful Night Club to finish putting Jas out of my mind.