Harder (Caroline & West #2)(69)

“School?”

He takes me by the hips and lifts me off him. “I better order. You want chicken fried rice and an egg roll?”

“Yep. And an orgasm.” He sits up quick and kisses me hard. By the time he’s done, I’m breathless. “Make that two orgasms.”

West flops down on the bed again, raking his hand through his hair. It’s long enough now that it sticks up when he pushes his fingers through it, which means it’s pretty much always sticking up. “You and me both.”

“How many hours until bedtime?”

“Four.”

I look at the clock. “Five, I bet. She hasn’t been to sleep before ten all week.”

He looks at the door.

He looks at my shirt.

Specifically, he looks at my nipples, then rubs his thumb back and forth over one. Back and forth, until I feel as though I’m turning to lava between my thighs.

“You’re killing me,” I whisper.

“No,” he says. “I’m killing me.”

Then I’m on my back again, and he’s over me. “Keep quiet, and I’ll give you that first orgasm right now.”

I’m about to tell him it’s not happening—not with his sister hovering out there—when he pulls my knee up and rocks into me, hard.

Oh. God. It’s so happening.

“If you’re not out in five minutes, I’m going to eat at Rikki and Laurie’s,” Frankie says through the door. “I’ll tell them you starved me. I’ll say you’re locked in the bedroom making dirty noises, and—”

West picks up a book off the nightstand and throws it at the door.

“Hey!” Frankie shouts.

“We’ll be out when we’re done with the laundry,” he says.

“Fine.”

I hear her footsteps retreating down the hall.

“We really should go,” I say, but it’s completely halfhearted. I can’t make myself mean it, because his eyes are blue in this light, dark and intent, and his hand is moving under my shirt.

“In a minute.”

“One minute?”

“Maybe two.”

“You can’t make me come in two minutes.”

“Watch me.”

His thumb finds my nipple again. My eyelids droop. I can’t keep them open—not when he’s touching me like this. Kissing me this way. Not when he’s unsnapping my jeans, lowering the zipper, finding me hot and wet and making me hotter and wetter.

He whispers dirty promises in my ear, licks and sucks me. He finds all my weak spots and exploits them.

“Ninety seconds,” he says after I come. There’s laughter in his voice. “Easy.”

“Don’t call me easy,” I rasp.

I sound so weak and soft, exhausted as though I’ve run a marathon when all I’ve actually done is breathe hard, tighten up against West’s fingers, and bite down on the noise while he makes my body sing.

West chuckles, clasping my wrists in his hands and collapsing on top of me.

We’ve only got thirty seconds left before Frankie’s back at the door, but they’re sweet.

So sweet.


By the time I get off the phone with the senator’s aide, I’m smiling. This is the third time I’ve talked to him this week and the first call when I felt like I was making solid progress.

“How are my toes coming along?” I ask Frankie.

“I’m doing the second clear coat.”

“Sweet.”

She concentrates on the motions of the little black nail-polish brush. I look up at the kitchen ceiling, walking back through the conversation.

I forgot to talk to him about fraud. All those sites that take customers’ money with the promise of wiping their reputations online—someone needs to stop that. I lost a bucketload of West’s money to one of them. And I need to see if— “Who’s Jane Doe?” Frankie asks.

“Hmm?”

“Who’s Jane Doe?”

It takes a minute for my attention to settle on the question. “It depends. It’s a name the government uses when they don’t know who someone is. Like, if you find a dead body and can’t identify it, if it’s a man, it’s John Doe, and if it’s a woman, you call her Jane Doe. But in legal cases, you use those names for when the victim wants to keep her identity a secret.”

“You told that man on the phone not to use the word victim.”

“I did. I like the word target better. But usually when we talk about crime, we talk about perpetrators and victims.”

Carefully, she brushes polish over my big toe. “So you were a victim, but you don’t want anyone to know?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“But you’re Jane Doe. That’s what West said.”

“For me it’s just a strategy,” I tell her. “It’s a way of keeping the records of the case sealed.”

Frankie puts the brush back into the bottle and twists the cap closed. “I wish I could do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make it so no one knows about Clint.”

“Is he still bothering you?”

“No, he stays away from me now. He has to. But when Mr. Gorham came to our class to talk about bullying, I think it was kind of like Jane Doe? Because he didn’t use my name or anything, only everyone knew he was talking about me anyway. I wish I could just … I don’t know. Erase what happened. Start over.”