Beautiful Bitch(20)

As if I would have stopped her.

I couldn’t really complain that it meant another hour of sleep lost, but now, when her hand reached blindly beneath the blankets, sweeping down my stomach to curl around my cock, I knew I had to stop her. I had a flight to catch, alone.

She was coming to France, but she was leaving a day after me, insisting with a stubbornness all her own that she needed the rest of Friday to get the last few things sorted. I would have waited for her, but because the flights were all last minute there weren’t any direct flights, nor were there any seats together anyway. Deciding to keep my flight, I figured I’d get there early and get us situated at Max’s place.

“I don’t think we have time,” I mumbled into her hair.

“Not buying it,” she said, voice croaky with sleep. “This guy,” she said, squeezing my erection in her grip, “thinks we have plenty of time.”

“The car is picking me up in fifteen minutes, and thanks to your appetite last night, I need another shower.”

“There was that one time you only needed two minutes to come. You’re telling me you don’t have two minutes?”

“Morning sex is never only two minutes,” I reminded her. “Not when you’re all sleepy and rumpled and warm.” I rolled out of bed and walked into my bathroom to the sound of her groan muffled by my stolen pillow.

When I emerged, clean and dressed, she sat up in bed, still hugging my pillow and sort-of-pretending she wasn’t upset that we had to fly separately to France.

“Don’t pout,” I murmured, bending to kiss the corner of her mouth. “You’ll just confirm what I’ve always suspected: you can’t function without me.”

I expected her to roll her eyes or pinch me playfully but she blinked down to my tie and reached to needlessly adjust it. “I can function without you. But I don’t like being away from you. It feels like you take my home with you when you go.”

Well, f*ck.

I laid my garment bag across the bed and took her face in my hands until she looked up, and could see the effect her words had on me. She smiled, tongue slipping out to wet her lips.

With one final kiss, I whispered, “I’ll see you in France.”



I would lose a day in transit, arriving on Saturday. Chloe’s flight was only twelve hours after mine, but because she couldn’t go direct she had to red-eye it to New York and then leave for Paris the following day, getting into Marseille on Monday. It would give me time to prepare for her arrival, but, knowing Max, the house would be spotless and stocked with food and drink and I would have nothing to do.

An idle Bennett . . . and all that.

I settled into the first class cabin, declining the champagne, and pulled out my phone to text Chloe.

Boarded. See you across the pond.

My phone buzzed several seconds later. Rethinking this whole trip. There’s a shoe sale at Dillons this weekend.

I laughed, choosing to ignore this one and slipping my phone back into my jacket pocket. Closing my eyes as the other passengers filed in past me, I remembered our past trips. We’d only traveled together a handful of times, but nothing ever went according to plan. Had I incurred some sort of vacation voodoo I wasn’t aware of? It seemed we were destined to be plagued by trips that went terribly off course, were taken separately, were colored by miserable arguments . . . or were canceled altogether.

My stomach turned when I remembered our attempt at a vacation last Thanksgiving. On impulse one weekend we’d purchased tickets to St. Bart’s and rented a house on the water. It was meant to be perfect but instead it led to the first time Chloe stopped speaking to me since our reconciliation.



“Motherf*cking cocksucking son of a whore.”

I looked up from my desk, my eyebrows inching to my hairline as Chloe slammed my door and stormed to my desk.

“Did the gimp escape the dungeon again, Miss Mills?”

“Close enough. Papadakis is pushing up launch.”

I stood so abruptly my chair skidded back and banged into the wall. “What?”

“January is the new March, apparently. The first press blast is set to go out January seventh.”

“That’s a horrible time to pitch something like this! Everyone is still drunk or cleaning up the holiday mess. No one is buying fancy apartments.”

“That’s what I told Big George.”

“Did you also tell him he needs to stick to counting his Benjamins and leave the marketing to us?”