Chapter 37 - 0037: I Kissed You Because I Wanted To

Chapter 37: Chapter 0037: I Kissed You Because I Wanted To

Elena’s Point of View

The muffled sound of Graham roaring my name carried down the narrow service corridor, bouncing off the damp brick walls and fading beneath the low, resonant thrum of the club’s bassline.

"Elena! Get out of there!"

A tiny, bitter spark of triumph flared in my chest. So I could affect him this much. After five years of being treated like a piece of polished living room furniture, five years of watching him look right through me while his mother mapped out my replacement, I had finally made Graham Sinclair lose his cool. He sounded frantic. He sounded pathetic. He sounded like a man watching his prized possession walk out the door.

There was a strange, aching satisfaction in that thought, the kind that curdled almost instantly into something closer to grief. Five years of my life, reduced to the sound of his voice cracking down a filthy hallway. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did neither, just stood there letting the feeling hollow me out.

I let out a slow, shaking breath, the high-proof scotch still burning hot in the back of my throat.

Now that Graham was safely blocked by the club’s muscle and being ushered back toward the valet, the sudden surge of adrenaline began to drain from my limbs, leaving behind a cold, heavy fatigue. My knees felt unsteady, and for one disorienting moment I wasn’t sure if it was the alcohol or the sheer emotional wreckage of the night catching up with me.

Everything I’d built, or thought I’d built, had come apart in the span of an evening, and my body seemed to be only now catching up to that fact. I shifted my heels against the concrete, placing both hands flat against the dark fabric of the chest pressed against mine to push myself back.

"He’s gone," I muttered, my voice raspy and unpolished. "You’ve helped me enough."

Jaxx didn’t move an inch.

If anything, his grip around my waist tightened. His large, calloused hand dug firmly into the silk of my dress, pinning me flat against the exposed brick wall of the passageway. His thigh remained slotted right between mine, dark, solid, and utterly unyielding.

I could feel the heat of him seeping through the thin fabric separating us, an unwelcome reminder that my body hadn’t gotten the memo my mind was frantically trying to send. Every nerve I owned seemed to have realigned itself toward him, and I resented it fiercely.

"Where do you think you’re going, Bambina?" he drawled, the low, lazy rasp of his voice vibrating directly against my collarbone.

I blinked, taking a small step back mentally, my brow furrowing as I looked up into his shadowy, sharp features. There was something maddening about the calm in his expression, as if none of this... the chaos, the scandal, my entire unraveling life, registered as anything more than mild entertainment to him.

As though I were a curiosity he’d stumbled upon rather than a woman whose whole world had just come apart at the seams. "What do you mean, where am I going? He’s gone. Let go of me."

"And?" Jaxx tilted his head, a faint, dangerous curve touching the side of his mouth.

"What do you mean, ’and’?" My voice hitched, a sudden spike of annoyance cutting through the haze of alcohol. "I said let go. The show’s over."

"Princess," he murmured, leaning down until his lips brushed the sensitive skin just below my ear, making me flinch, "you came into my booth willingly, baby. Did you think I put on that little performance back there just for whoever was standing behind that curtain?"

"Well... yes!" I choked out, pushing hard against his shoulders. "You saw someone at the curtain, I needed a distraction, and you went along with it!"

"I don’t give a damn who was standing behind that curtain," Jaxx growled softly against my neck, his grip on my hip shifting, his fingers tracing up toward my ribcage and sending an uninvited spike of heat straight down my spine. "I kissed you because I wanted to. And right now, I’m saying you’re not leaving."

A sudden wave of panic cracked through my confidence. The liquor in my system suddenly felt heavy and dangerous, dragging at my thoughts, slowing my ability to fight back the way I wanted to. My pulse thudded so loudly I was certain he could feel it against his chest. "What do you mean by that? Jaxx, step back! Stay away from me, you asshole... stay away!"

He didn’t even bother answering.

Jaxx smirked, captured my lips again in a hard, possessive slide of his mouth, and before I could even draw a breath to yell, his hands slid under my thighs and lifted me straight off the concrete floor.

My air cut off. Instinct took over before my brain could stop me... my knees snapped up, my legs wrapping tight around his waist, my hands flying to his broad shoulders to keep from tumbling backward onto the hard ground. The contrast was terrifying; his back was solid steel, his chest warm and broad, pinning me effortlessly against the cold brick wall.

Every rational thought I owned scattered like startled birds, replaced by something far more primal and far more inconvenient. Some distant, sensible corner of my mind screamed that this was madness, that I should be fighting harder, but the rest of me had already stopped listening.

What the actual fuck is wrong with him?!

I tore my mouth away from his with a sharp, furious gasp, pressing both palms flat against his jaw, shoving his face back as far as I could manage.

"Put me down right now, Jaxx!" I shrieked, my voice echoing off the narrow pipework above us. "What do you think you’re doing?! Put me down! I only needed you for that one moment!"

"And you think you can just easily dump me and get rid of me like that?" he asked, his dark eyes glittering under the faint red neon light, completely untroubled by my hands pushing against his face.

"Dump you?!" I shrieked louder, my voice cracking on the word. "What do you mean, dump?! There was nothing between us! Absolutely nothing! I hate you! Why on earth would I ever want to have anything to do with you?!"

My heels kicked futilely against the back of his knees, but he didn’t even sway. He just adjusted his grip, his rough palms sliding higher up the smooth skin of my bare thighs, the hem of my violet dress bunched up completely useless around my hips.

The damp chill of the brick behind my shoulders clashed violently with the furnace-like heat radiating from his chest, and I hated how aware I was of every single point where our bodies met. My body, traitor that it was, seemed determined to remember things my pride wanted desperately to forget.

"Let me down!" I slapped his shoulder. Hard. It felt like hitting a sack of wet sand. "I swear to God, Jaxx, if you don’t put my feet back on the floor this second, I will bite you!"

"Go ahead, Bambina," he whispered, leaning his face back into my space until our noses were practically touching. "Bite me. See if that gets you down any faster."

"You are insane!" I gasped, trying to arch my upper body away from him, but his chest moved right along with me, keeping us glued together. "I walked into that booth because I was drunk, I was angry, and I needed scotch! You were just an unfortunate piece of furniture sitting in the dark!"

"An unfortunate piece of furniture that you grabbed by the collar and kissed until you were out of breath," he corrected lazily. "And don’t pretend you didn’t enjoy every second of making your little husband lose his mind out there."

"He’s not my ’little husband’... he’s my ex-husband as of twenty minutes ago!" I snapped, my heart pounding an erratic rhythm against my ribs, the reality of those words hitting me freshly even as I shouted them. Twenty minutes. It felt like a lifetime and no time at all. "And I used you! Okay?! Is that what you want to hear? I used your face, I used your lips, and I used your booth to get back at him! It was purely transactional!"

Jaxx let out a low, dark laugh that rumbled deep in his throat, vibrating straight into my pelvic bone.

"Transactional," he repeated, tasting the word like a bad joke. "Well then, princess, you’re terrible at business. Because you haven’t paid the bill yet."

"What bill?!" I practically squeaked, my fingers digging into his unbuttoned shirt collar out of sheer self-preservation so I wouldn’t fall. "I drank two shots of your stupid scotch! Send the invoice to Graham’s office!"

"I don’t care about the scotch," he growled softly, his thumb pressing into the soft flesh of my outer thigh, tracing slow, dizzying circles that made my breath lock up in my throat. "I care about the fact that you haven’t seen me in ten years, you walk back into my life looking like an absolute sin, drag me into your pathetic little marriage drama, and then expect me to just let you walk out into the night."

Ten years. The number landed strangely between us, heavier than I expected, dragging up fragments of a past I’d worked hard to bury.

"Because that’s what normal people do when a fake kiss is over!" I yelled, my face burning so hot I was amazed the neon light wasn’t reflecting off it. "They say ’thank you,’ they walk away, and they never speak again!"

"We were never normal, Elena," he murmured, his gaze dropping to my mouth, watching my swollen lips part as I tried to catch my breath. "And you know damn well I’ve never been polite."

"Jaxx, I am warning you..."

"Or what?" He hitched me an inch higher against the wall, making me gasp as my core pressed flush against his rigid frame. "You’ll call the guards? I own the guards, princess. You’ll call the manager? Miller works for me. You’ll call Graham? He’s currently being escorted to the valet parking lot looking like a drowned rat."

I stared at him, my brain stalling out as the realization finally hit me like a bucket of ice water.

"You..." I stammered, my hands loosening slightly on his shoulders. "You own The Vesper?"

"I own the building, I own the liquor, and right now," he whispered, his head dipping lower until his heavy, hot breath fanned over my lips, "I own your undivided attention."

"I hate you," I breathed, though the insult lacked every bit of the teeth it had two minutes ago, my body betraying me as my fingers instinctively tightened around his collar again. Some traitorous part of me wondered when exactly hatred had started feeling this much like longing, and whether it had ever really been hatred at all.

Jaxx’s smirk widened, his hands tightening on my bare thighs beneath the bunched-up violet silk.

"You’re holding on pretty tight for someone who hates me, Bambina."