Too Hot to Handle (Romancing the Clarksons #1)(74)

“No.” He pressed their foreheads together. “I don’t want you to catch it. I want it to stay lost and I want to be the man who steals it. All day, every day. Forever. Stay with me right here.”

“I want to say yes,” Rita said with her eyes closed. “It’s crazy after only three days to—to toss everything aside and start a new life. And I still want to say yes. But somewhere over time, I lost my family and I’m just starting to get them back. They…I think they need me. I think we need each other. I don’t know if I can just say good-bye when we’re on this road I never expected.”

Jasper found her so achingly gorgeous in that moment with honesty pushing at all her seams and tears falling down her cheeks. How could something so beautiful rip his soul out and stomp on it, even if it wasn’t on purpose?

“I lost myself in the kitchen.” She shook her head. “What if I lost myself in this one, too?”

“I wouldn’t let you.”

“Jasper—”

“You don’t have to work the kitchen,” he rushed to say, even though it stung. “You don’t have to work here at all.”

Rita only looked saddened by his words. “Then I’d be denying this place. This place you already adore, whether you know it or not.” She glanced down. “How can I set them on this journey and desert them? How can I burn down my mother’s life’s work and disregard her final wish? I’d be a terrible person. I wouldn’t be the person you—”

“Say it.” He gathered her hair in two fists and spoke right against her forehead. “Say it. You know how I feel about you. Say the words.”

Rita shook her head, lips clamped together. “Let me think. Give me a secon—”

“No,” Jasper growled, ripping the white tank top over her head. For a breathless beat of time, they ran eyes over one another. Confused, aching, heartsick eyes. And then Rita surged off the desk, pushing Jasper back into the armless office chair facing his desk. While Rita made quick work of her pants and slinky little underwear, Jasper unfastened his jeans, taking out his cock. “Come on, then. You won’t say the words, do the deed. Use that body that makes me fucking crazy and show me what we already know.”

Hurt clouded her expression, but their need was too thick in the air, the pull too strong, and they both had to feel it. Rita straddled Jasper’s lap, taking his hand and pressing it over her mouth. A safety measure against the scream that ripped past her lips as she sank down onto his ready cock. “Oh my God,” came the muffled words, branding his palm. “Jasper. Oh, God.”

Maybe someone should have covered his mouth, too, because hell if he didn’t almost curse the walls down. How many times had they abused one another’s bodies last night and still—still—he might as well have been living like a monk for ten years, the way his cock hurt. “If this is going to be good-bye, Rita, you better make it count.” He gave her tight bottom a slap. “But remember, I’m already going to be desperate for you the second this ends. I’ll spend my whole life this way. Desperate and dying for Rita. In my bed, in my house, riding my dick. All of it. All of you.”

“Stop, please, stop,” Rita demanded, wrapping her arms around his head, giving his mouth perfect access to her tits, which he sucked out of pure necessity. Her hips were a thing of magic, bucking and rolling, knowing when he needed easy to rein in his impending release, knowing when he wanted a few rough bounces. “So good,” she breathed, already beginning to shudder, her teeth chattering.

Jasper’s mouth moved over every inch of Rita’s skin, tasting, trying to memorize the feel of life pulsing beneath her flesh, tucking her scent into his memory bank and locking it away. “It’s so good because I love you, Rita,” Jasper confessed through stiff lips. “It’s good because you love me back. Fuck the amount of time it took. When it’s right, it’s right. We’re above time.”

Her face fell into his neck with a sob, but she didn’t respond.

The helplessness wrought by Rita’s silence forced Jasper to regain power and self-respect some other way. He lunged to his feet, taking her with him. When her back hit the wall, Jasper kept pumping, trying to imprint himself on her body, inside and out. Giving up a little more of his soul with every rough movement. “Remember how good it was. Remember who would always give it to you like this, even if it meant giving up his final breath. You hear me?”

“Yes,” she clenched around him, her sweet mouth falling open in a silent rendition of his name, her pussy milking him down below, so tight, so eager, there was no choice but to take his own climax, groaning into her shoulder as it drained him. They stayed that way for an unknown length of time, Jasper trying to will her into repeating back the three words he’d let fly free of his heart. But when her legs slipped down his sides and her back straightened, she still hadn’t said them.





Chapter Thirty-Four



Rita walked on shaking legs back to the kitchen. Nothing compared to the quaking behind her ribs, though. The pounding in her head. Jasper had crucified her against that door and she hadn’t given him what he needed—to be crucified in return. Or maybe she had, only in a different way. A way that felt like betrayal, no matter from which angle she looked at it.

Jasper loved her. Wanted her to stay in Hurley and share his life. His livelihood. Her own life’s recipe hadn’t called for him as an ingredient when she’d left San Diego. Now she was mired in that state of uncertainty, caught between the menu she’d chosen and a new one that called to something unfamiliar and wild inside her. But the last time she’d gone for the unknown and reached outside her capabilities, she’d fucked up bad enough to burn down a restaurant.