To my surprise, Walsh steps back from me and gestures toward the door. “You should get going.”
My eyes slide up and lock with his for a moment. Then I nod and turn for the door.
“Jorie.” My name comes out on a sigh, and I turn to look over my shoulder. “You were magnificent. Best sex of my life.”
I give him a small smile. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that is the Walsh I know. He would be the one who would do whatever he could to take away my pain.
I also know that from personal experience.
“Thanks,” I say before I walk out the door.
CHAPTER 5
Walsh
I pour myself some vodka and add a few ice cubes to the glass. As I sip at it, I flip through my playlist, choosing some Fiona Apple. She filters through my apartment on Bluetooth speakers.
My mind is all kinds of fucked up over what happened tonight.
I wasn’t lying to Jorie. Best sex ever.
Most wrong sex ever.
I don’t want to even think about the fact I sent her brother a fucking picture of her.
Picking up my glass, I pad through my living room with its floor-to-ceiling glass walls that look out over Vegas, then into my bedroom. I should take a shower but sick bastard that I am, I don’t want to wash the smell of Jorie off me just yet. I’ve lusted after her for as long as I knew what true lust was, and when that first happened, she was way too young for me to be thinking those things. The differences in our age assured that.
Jorie had been a constant in my life for a very long time, right along with her brother Micah. Even though there’s an eight-year age difference between Jorie and me, there’s just a two-year gap between Micah and me. We were neighbors and because Jorie’s mom died having her, Micah had a lot of babysitting duty as he got older. It was unfair to put that burden on a kid, but Jorie’s father, Gregory, was practically absent from their lives.
He was an attorney who had met and married Micah’s mom, who was a Vegas showgirl. She left the life to move to the suburbs of Henderson, bringing her five-year-old son with her. Gregory never did really take to Micah even though he adopted him and gave him his last name. He was more interested in the beautiful wife he got in Rhonda Webb, and I’m guessing he adopted her son to make her happy. Micah and I talked about that a lot as we were growing up because he spent most of his time at my house next door. His biological dad had been a one-night stand, so he never knew who he was. Micah’s mom died so young that my parents naturally took him under their wing. That was just their way.
I have no clue if Gregory ever really wanted Rhonda to get pregnant, but she did, and Jorie came into this world looking just like her mom and brother. In fairness to Gregory, he may have ignored Micah most of the time, but he doted on Jorie whenever the nanny was off duty.
And Micah never held that against his little sister. On the contrary, he was and still is very close to her, despite their age difference. Because Micah was often left in charge of Jorie whenever Gregory was too busy to be bothered, I was right there alongside him, helping to watch the little black-haired, green-eyed terror who grew into an immense beauty. She may have been a pain in our asses on most occasions, but I adored her the same as Micah.
Micah and Jorie’s bond is tight, made even more so when Jorie’s dad died just as she entered her senior year in high school. Micah left his job in Michigan to move back to Henderson as her guardian so she could finish school where all her friends were. After she went off to UCLA, he went on to San Francisco, where he’s been ever since.
Setting my glass on the nightstand, I take my clothes off and just let them drop to the floor. I crawl naked into bed, giving a brief glance to my well satisfied dick before I flip the sheet over my lap.
Seeing those goddamn scars on Jorie’s breast threw me over hard tonight. I was in mid-orgasm when I saw them, overwhelmed with rage over what had caused those scars, and having my climax fire up for a second time as I realized it was Jorie on my cock.
Talk about a mind fuck, but then again, I’d always wanted her.
She was only fifteen when I first masturbated to dirty thoughts about her. I was fucking twenty-three and jerking off because I’d come home to visit my parents and saw Jorie in the backyard in her bathing suit. She’s always been pale—can’t tan to save her life—and she was utterly fucking delectable. She’d developed early, and her breasts were practically spilling out of her top. I fucking craved a taste of her… wanted to put my mouth between her legs, and that’s what I imagined as I jacked myself off in the shower.
Goddamn perverted is what it was.
Of course, I shut that shit firmly down after what happened to her just a year later when she was sixteen. My stomach churns as I remember her call to me.
“Jorie?” I’d answered hesitantly. She never called me, not because I didn’t care about her or vice-versa, but we weren’t friends. She was just the little toddler who would chase Micah and me around the yard. She was the middle-school kid who needed help with her science project, and Micah and I did the whole thing for her. And yeah, she was the teenage girl I fantasized about a few times because she was hot as hell and totally off-limits, which made her even hotter for some reason.
I didn’t hear anything at first, but then her voice came across so frail. “I need help, Walsh.”
She was in a hotel suite not too far from my office. I’d gotten into real-estate development and worked for a major firm in Vegas trying to soak up all the knowledge I could with the goal one day to own my own business. I was working super late, which was par for the course for me.
When I arrived, I noted the suite had been cleared of the thirty-plus high schoolers who had been partying there that night to celebrate the end of their junior year. I found Jorie covered in blood in the bathroom, holding a towel to her breast. The long, twelve-inch piece of glass that had broken from a vase in the shape of a dagger lay on the floor beside her.
It never once occurred to me that Jorie had tried to harm herself. I knew her well enough to know that wasn’t what happened.
I didn’t think someone tried to stab her, either.
By the torn panties wrapped around one of her ankles and the shattered vase, I got what happened. She’d been attacked and hurt in the struggle.
“Oh, Jesus fuck,” I’d groaned when I saw her sitting against the vanity, clutching the bloody towel to her chest. I went down to my knees beside her, shards of glass cutting through my dress pants and into my skin. “What happened, Jorie?”
Her teeth were chattering so badly she couldn’t talk at first, but then she managed to say, “There were two of them, but I fought them off. They got scared when they saw the blood and took off.”
Relief flooded through me. She’d not been raped, but those white panties around her ankle told me she’d come damn close.
“Let me see,” I said as I gently pulled her hands away from the towel. She winced as I did so, and I took in the two wounds, surmising that when the vase broke, that long piece went through her breast like a damned sword. But it clearly wasn’t life threatening as the bleeding seemed to be contained.
I pressed the towel back and assured her, “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.”
She never cried. Only her teeth chattered as I lifted her up and carried her through the broken glass. I laid her on a couch in the main living area and called an ambulance.