Before We Fall (Beautifully Broken #3)

Jacey’s startled brown eyes meet mine, then she looks at Joe.

“Sorry, Joe,” she tells him as she scrambles to her feet. “We got locked in. Thank you for rescuing us.”

He stares at her, then at me. “There better not be any funny business going on under this roof,” he finally says. “There’s a time and a place for that—and it’s not here and now.”

Jacey’s cheeks flush bright red, and for a split second I think about what would have happened if Joe had shown up a few minutes earlier and found me with my hand buried between Jacey’s legs.

I’m pretty sure he would’ve considered that “funny business,” although it was far from funny. Far from funny. Somehow, being locked in that tiny room with her made me lower my guard. I forgot, for a minute, who she is and who I am. Who we are in relation to each other—and the answer to that is nothing. We’re nothing to each other.

We follow Joe out and I keep my eyes glued to his plaid-covered back, my resolve returning. I can feel Jacey staring at me, but I don’t return the look. She almost sucked me in back there, with her soft eyes and her laugh that seems genuine.

That’s not gonna happen, though. Fuck that. I steel myself against it, against her, pissed at myself for my moment of weakness. I don’t get involved with people. Jesus.

“Your ride’s here,” Joe tells Jacey, turning a bit to look at her. “If it weren’t for that big dude coming in to look for you, you’d have been stuck in here all night. You’re lucky.”

Lucky. As we follow him through the gym and then say good-bye and head out to the parking lot, I don’t know if lucky is what I feel, even if I am pissed with myself for momentarily lowering my guard.

As I watch Jacey approach that big-ass truck of her “almost-brother’s,” I can’t help but marvel at how different she is from everyone else I know.

Yet at the same time, she’s the same. Because she greets the blond hulk with a kiss on the cheek, and as she turns her head and I look into her eyes, I see that I was right. The guy is seriously into her, and she knows it.

And still she lets him haul her around, using him for what he can give her.

Typical woman.

I sigh and open my car door, and for the briefest of seconds I know that something isn’t right. There’s a shadow in my car, something in the dark that shouldn’t be… but I don’t have time to really register that before Kira materializes in front of me as the streetlight overhead shines on her face.

Startled, I take a quick step back, my heart pounding. Kira’s perched in my driver’s seat, her legs curled under her as she grins widely up at me.

“What the fuck?” I manage to get out as I stare down at her in the dark, calming myself and pretending that she didn’t just startle the shit out of me. “What are you doing here?”

She’s wearing a thigh-length trench coat, cinched at the middle. Her cleavage is spilling from the top. From the mischievous look in her eyes, I have a feeling the coat might be the only thing she’s wearing. As she unfolds herself from the car, the belt comes loose, and I get a glimpse of tan skin and nothing else.

I was right.

She leaps from the seat and presses herself against me, wrapping her arms around my neck, her skin smelling like coconut and perfume.

“What took you so long?” she whines. “I was dying of boredom out here. I wanted to surprise you, but damn. I was running out of patience. You know I don’t have much in the first place.”

Her curvy body folds into me and my body reacts, hardening again. The girl is wearing almost nothing, after all, and I’m only human. Skin is skin and tits are tits, no matter who is wearing them. But as I look over Kira’s shoulder, I find Jacey staring at us through her passenger window, and her expression is indefinable.

Hurt? Anger? Disgust? Annoyance?

I don’t know. I also don’t know why I care.

But I must, in some way or form, because my dick softens and I’m staring after the truck as it drives away with Jacey inside.

“What’s wrong?” Kira asks suddenly, pulling away, noticing the change down below. She grabs at me, cupping my balls, kneading them, but I’m not into it and my dick stays limp.

I shake my head. “I don’t know. I’m just tired. Not in the mood, I guess.”

She raises a perfectly waxed eyebrow. “Since when are you not in the mood to be groped in a public parking lot? I’m naked under this jacket, you know. This is all for you, Dominic.”

I know. For a minute, that knowledge, the knowledge that I can have Kira any time I want, weighs on me. It takes the excitement out of what might’ve been a fun situation. Now, if it’d been Jacey here in my car… I quickly put that out of my mind and shrug.

“I’m sorry, Kira. I’m tired and not in the mood. I’ll take a rain check.”

And with that, I get into my car, leaving Kira standing alone. I roll my window down.

“You’d better get going,” I advise her, ignoring her surprised (and pissed) expression. “This isn’t a good neighborhood.”

I roll the window back up, stifling her sputtering indignation. I watch her climb into her car and wait for her to start it up before I drive from the parking lot, immune to her irritation. There’s one thing about me. I don’t lie and I don’t pussyfoot around. I’m not in the mood for Kira and I’m not going to lie about it.

I rev the engine, enjoying the way it vibrates my foot through the accelerator pedal. The vibration hums in my leg and the Porsche makes short work of the roads leading to Sin’s house. For once, his massive house is quiet. I’m relieved as I slip through the halls, thinking that for the first time ever, I’m the only one here aside from the staff. However, as I walk past the main living room, I hear giggling and I pause in the darkened doorway.

Of course I’m not alone. What was I thinking?

Sin raises his head from where he’s lounging with two women in a mess of tangled arms and legs and bare skin. One is somehow dangling around his shoulders, and the other has her head in his lap. The room smells like sex, but for some reason he’s still got his pants on. For that, I’m thankful.

“Hey, bro,” he greets me, his hair standing up in spikes. “Look. Two girls—one for each of us.” He waves his hand as if he’s bestowing the greatest gift on me, then examines the two girls. He nods at the brunette draped over his shoulders. “You can go with him.”

Her face brightens at the prospect, but before she can answer, I shake my head quickly. “No, I’m good. I’m tired. But thanks anyway.”

Before I walk away, I see Sin’s index finger, the one with the thick silver ring on it, the one with the horns, disappear into the depths of the brunette’s pussy. She throws her head back and moans and I can see that she has already forgotten about the idea of being with me.

Good. I turn my back on the whole thing without a backward glance. Normally, I enjoy watching. But not while my fucking brother is involved.

Jesus.

I seriously might have to get my place. I don’t know if I can take ninety days here.

I pad upstairs and down the hall, where I collapse onto my bed and stare at the ceiling. Try as I might to clear my mind, all I can do is think about one thing.

Jacey.

I’m not sure what it is about her that fascinates me so much, whether it’s the fact that she doesn’t give a shit who I am or whether it’s the fact that she doesn’t try to hide who she is. She’s an open book.

You ask, I’ll answer, she’d said. Yet I know that there’s a lot to her that I don’t even know to ask about. Plus, she’s not so self-involved that she demands that you listen to her talk about herself. And she doesn’t care if you take her or leave her.

I flip on the stereo and turn it up to drown out my thoughts. Hard rock screams at me, thumping and loud. But it doesn’t really help.

Instead, I just picture Jacey’s tight ass wrapping itself around a stripper’s pole to the music. No, she would probably never do such a thing in real life. But this is why a man’s fantasies are so good. In my head, she’ll do whatever I want her to do. And my imagination is vivid.

After a minute, there’s loud banging on my door. “Turn that fucking shit off! You know I hate Jagged Edge. You know they fucked with me last year at Lollapalooza.”

I roll my eyes. “Go fuck something, Sin,” I call back.

He bangs one more time on my door, then he’s gone, and all there is the bass thumping the walls, leaving me free to think about Jacey again.

I slip my hand into my pants as I think about the way her pussy smelled, the way she folded around me, warm and soft, as I fingered her through her clothes. I picture the astonished and embarrassed look on her face when Joe barged in and I can’t help but laugh.

Maybe one of the things I like about her is that she seems innocent at the same time as she seems wild and unrestrained. She has an almost childlike gullibility that seems so different from the people I’m used to.

But one thing is for sure. If she is distracting me this much, I’ve got to stop thinking about her, because I’m never going to get close to anyone again. Fuck that. I’ll never give anyone that kind of power over me.

Never.

Again.

I pull my hand out of my pants and roll over, closing my eyes, letting the music surround me as I get lost in the raging beat.

I think one last conscious thought before I slip away into the oblivion of sleep.

Fuck you, Emma.

Days pass at the gym and I slip into a routine, one day running into the next as I try to serve out my fucking sentence and get the hell out of this place.

Each day, I stay a respectable distance from Jacey. I’m civil, but not friendly. I’m detached, but I still watch her from a distance. I never acknowledge what happened in the cooler… our conversation or the intimate way I’d touched her… and the way she’d let me.

She fascinates the hell out of me because I can’t help but want to figure her out. She’s contradictory, and something about that pulls me to her. But I can’t let her know that.

She seems hurt at first when I ignore her, but then she cools toward me. She makes a point of not looking at me, and whenever she can help it she avoids being in the same room with me. That’s the way it ought to be.

Today, I head toward Joe’s office and stop outside the door when I hear him on the phone.

“Yeah, I know what I owe. It’s my accountant’s fault. He told me what to pay and I paid it. I don’t do my own taxes. What kind of fool does that?” There’s a pause and a sigh. “Yeah, I understand. One way or the other, you’ll have it by the first.”

The phone slams onto his desk and I’m still for a moment.

No wonder Joe has been crabby lately. He’s having tax trouble. I file that away in my head and round the corner, entering his office like I didn’t just hear his conversation.

“What?” he demands, swirling in his chair to stare at me.

“I just needed to get the clipboard for the weights,” I tell him, grabbing it from its hook and heading toward the door.