God, if she knew the forcible difference I made in their lives this time around, she wouldn’t be giving me that gorgeous smile. More than likely, she’d be cursing me to the devil and running out the door. No. I can’t let it happen. Without her, I’m dead inside. This foreign hopefulness I’m learning to embrace—the anticipation over seeing her each morning—will fade to black. “We can do both. Rent the theater and donate the equipment.” I clear my throat. “Anything you want, angel. I’ll just make some calls.”
Brightening, she runs toward me and leaps, wrapping her legs around my waist, laying a smacking kiss on both of my cheeks. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”
Something sharp turns over in my chest. I know she doesn’t mean it in the deepest sense, but I’m taking the words and running with them anyway. I’ll devote my life to hearing them over and over.
And praying what I’ve done won’t cause her to say the reverse: I hate you.
Chapter Eight
I’m horny. God, I’m horny. I’m living in a constant state of arousal so thick, I can barely zip my pants over the hard-on I sport every moment of the day. It’s Sunday morning, and since Veda and I returned home late from bringing two hundred kids from the youth center to the movies—and she couldn’t keep her eyes open afterward—I haven’t been inside her since the very first time.
An image of her spread legs on the floor of my limousine makes me groan, but I disguise it with a cough, out of necessity. After all, I’m sitting around a conference table with eight of my employees. Thanks to a last minute investment opportunity in Tokyo, I was forced to climb out of bed and dress for a meeting, leaving a sleeping Veda. Talking business is the last thing I want to be doing, even if it is taking place in my home conference room.
What I need is to be buried in the little, fuck-tight blonde who was tangled up in my sheets last time I saw her. And I need it now. Unfortunately, there are a few more issues to resolve at this meeting before I can seek her out.
Damn, Veda was something else last night. There’s no other way to describe her but magical. She attracted too much male attention floating up and down the aisles in the sporting goods store, picking out equipment to donate, so I paid the manager to close down the store while we shopped, plus take his gawking employees to the break room until we finished. Then I was her sole audience and she was definitely a crowd pleaser, riding on my back, asking me with little kisses to retrieve things on the higher shelves, skipping rope in the exercise aisle in a way that made her tits bounce and my cock go achingly stiff.
If I hadn’t been so determined to give her more than just sex, there would have been hell to pay for her incessant teasing. I appeased myself with the knowledge my schedule was clear today and I could spend it giving her orgasms—and that is still the plan. As soon as this goddamn meeting is over.
I try to focus on what Allison, my head of marketing, is saying, but all I can think of is Veda’s excitement last night. How she walked through the theater, making sure everyone was enjoying themselves, passing out popcorn to the kids, laying a kiss on my cheek every time she passed me, where I sat in the back row—watching her. Always watching. Some day, when she’s old enough to be presented to the world as mine, she’s going to be the kind of wife men never dare hope for. Stunningly sexy and intelligent with a generous soul. Hot as sin, once you get her wet. She’s incredible.
Allison switches the graphic on her presentation and launches into another long-winded explanation of current market trends, but she breaks off when someone shouts my name outside the office. Not someone, though. It’s Veda. And she sounds distraught.
Once again, she shouts my name through the door and it’s even more frantic sounding this time. There’s no thinking on my end, only movement. Only the need to get to her and fix what’s wrong. Urgency is alive in my gut as I push back my chair and stride to the door.
It opens just as I get there and Veda throws herself at me through the entrance. I only have a second to take stock, noting she’s wrapped in a towel, the ties from her bikini visible at the top—and I surmise she must have been swimming.
“Ramsey,” she sobs brokenly into my chest. “My locket. My mom’s locket. It fell off in the pool and I kept diving down but I couldn’t find it.” Her head lifts, big, wet blue eyes stabbing me square in the heart. “I didn’t want to interrupt, but I dialed number one on the phone—like you told me—and the housekeeper said it probably got sucked in by the drain. And we wouldn’t be able to get it back.”