Free Shatter (Club Grit Trilogy) by Brooke Jaxsen

was acting, the way that I was, but for what audience? It was just the two of us, in private, and there was no reason to put on airs. Somebody had to stop this charade, had to stop the game we were playing, which was just keeping us apart when all we wanted to be was together, more now than ever before.
    I knew that somebody had to be me, after what had happened last night, or rather, what hadn’t happened; given the fact I’d skipped out on our date before it even started. Being a no-show wasn’t exactly the greatest start to whatever it was we had, no matter how scared I’d been about learning the truth about Lawrence, no matter how nervous, no matter how worried. I reached my hand to his pants, but I didn’t slip under them, instead, tracing a trail along the waistband, to the pockets, and then, the stitching that lead to his groin. “I guess your dick just might love Monopoly, then?” I said, running a single finger along the contours of the prominent bulge, and I saw him bite his lower lip and close his eyes for a split second.
    “Right now, the only Monopoly I care about is the one you have...on the space between your legs,” he half-said, half-growled. “That is, if you’ll have me.” He raised a single brow and I knew in that moment that yes, I needed him, and it wasn’t just about the sex, about desiring his body, but about requiring his will, about desperately needing him to want me as much as I needed him.
    “Are you sure it’s going to be...private in here?” I asked meekly. The last thing I wanted was to see one of the perfect employees enter here in their designer clothes and perfect hair, for them to see me vulnerable, to see me being fucked. I was always the watcher, never the watched, and I didn’t want that to change.
    “Yes, my employees know not to bother me unless there is an emergency,” he said with a smile. “Right now, the only thing that’s emerging is this dick, though,” he said, grabbing his crotch and raising a single sexy eyebrow.
    “Then, if you’ll have me–,” I said, borrowing his line, but I didn’t have a chance to finish my sentence. Lawrence pressed his lips onto mine and pulled me off the sheets of the soft black bed, pulling over one of the luxurious pillows, black and shiny with black matte stripes running over it top to bottom, and pressed it under the small of my back, as I unbuttoned his pants. Underneath his designer suit was a pair of black boxers, and I resisted the urge to remove them too, instead, helping him unbutton his white shirt. One of the buttons on the shirt popped off.
    “Your button –,” I started. I didn’t know where it had rolled off to but I knew that he couldn’t just go to JoAnn’s, pick out another black button, and have it go unnoticed. He wasn’t the kind of guy who wore jeans that read “YKK”.
    He kissed me quiet. “I’d rip this shirt off if I had to.” And as quickly as he got it off, he might as well have. There was no tank top or shirt underneath, just his perfectly smooth chest, glistening with a light glaze of moisture, a few beads of sweat on his collar bone, ready to fall like the tears of an innocent down his pectorals like a waterfall in July: the only possible thing that could quench the heat of my body, as I kissed at his saltiness, and was then abruptly pushed down as I moved my hands to his waist.
    “Not yet,” he said, pulling my tube dress up above my head. My pin-straight hair was left sprawled on the bed like the tentacles of an octopus, melting into the black silk sheets of the bed, the bed we’d spent so much time on, but never actually used for its traditional purpose. The black sheers around the bed were like another layer of protecting from the outside world.
    Finally, there he was: my billionaire, his cool-toned salt and pepper hair lit from behind by the lights of the club, his firm, muscular and tall body like the silhouette of a Greek statue, a statue that reached not to some absent