KadenShe nodded, the guardedness in her eyes coming down. “I love you, Kaden Marx. Please trust me when I tell you I don’t want any distance between us.”“I spoke to Ryan,” I said, thinking back to our conversation at lunch the other day.Confidential stuff at work I could understand, but it still didn’t feel like the whole story. The nature of our work was such that we had to keep our secrets to ourselves, keep our play cards close to our chests.I didn’t blame Ember for having to keep them from me. It was a natural consequence of no longer working together, but I needed to be sure that was all it was. “He told me one of your friends is going through a tough time. Want to talk about it?”She shook her head, her fingers tightening their grip in my hair. “No, I don’t. Not now.”Her fingernails scraped against my scalp, her eyes not leaving mine. Desire and want burned in them. Groaning, I stopped trying to fight against her touch. It was useless anyway. Leaning my head into her hands,
EMBERKaden and I ripped at each other’s clothes, each getting the other naked in record time. After days of not seeing him or speaking to him at all, I needed him so badly it hurt. Just to be with him, to be close to him. To be held by him and loved by him.The culmination of all those things was making love to him, and I wanted that more than I wanted anything else in life at this very moment. It was about more than pleasure or sex. It was about the connection of bodies, hearts, and souls. It was a connection I craved desperately. One I needed to reassure myself and to enable myself to believe he really had forgiven me.Okay, and there was also a small part of me, a part below my waistline which was currently aching for his attention, that wanted the pleasure I knew only he could bring me, too. After months of him bestowing that pleasure on me every chance he got, I felt starved of it after nearly a week without.The thing about Kaden was that he awoke and enlivened every part of me
EmberI rocked my hips in time with his, my hands roaming over his back, down to cup his gloriously tight ass. Holding him to me, I lifted my chin to look at him. Kaden’s eyes were screwed shut, his lips parted, and a thin crease sat between his eyebrows.He was so damn beautiful like this, walking the fine line between euphoria and agony for trying to hold back. I could look at him for days, but seeing him like this was too much for me to bear. Already, I felt the familiar knot of tension tightening again.Each one of Kaden’s thrusts hit me exactly right to build on the tension, to pull it so tightly I had no choice but to let it unravel. I cried out when the final threads snapped and pleasure so intense it brought tears to my eyes swept through me, lighting up the world in a bright white as my head dug into the pillow and my muscles quivered.“Kitten. Yes.” Kaden trembled against me, his thrusts erratic and losing their perfect rhythm as he found his release. We kissed and clawed an
KADENAll was well in my world now that Ember and I were okay again. We stayed up half the night last night talking, eventually making our way back to the kitchen to finish our dinner. After that, we had a couple of glasses of wine out on the balcony before going back to the room and making love again.Ember’s alarm woke us only a few hours after we eventually went to sleep. She was out of bed in a flash, remembering she had to swing by her apartment to get dressed since she hadn’t brought a change of clothes over.There wasn’t time to talk to her about that drawer I offered her again, but I would have my chance soon enough. Later that day, she texted me to let me know she was almost done at work, so I was getting ready to meet her.Pulling on a pair of dark jeans and a light blue button-up shirt, I fastened the cuffs when I was done and was ready to go.I didn’t think driving to Marx Inc., knowing I wasn’t actually going to work, was ever going to stop feeling weird. It was almost li
KadenSwiping the card over the reader, I took the stairs two at a time and cradled the flowers in my arm to protect them. Once I reached the top, I opened the door with a bang and contemplated hiding from Ember around the corner—all in the name of the game.I was so deep in thought I almost missed the broad pair of shoulders turning so their owner could see who had caused such a racket bursting through the door. Even if he never completed that turn, I would have known it was my dad.My heart smacked angrily against the inside of my chest, my blood running cold in shock and then hot with rage all in the space of the few seconds it took me to comprehend who I was looking at.Ember was wrong. My dad wasn’t on a trip. His car wasn’t here because he’d been driven to the airport from here. It was here because he was. Which begged the question: was she wrong, or had she lied to me?I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt. I really did, but there were several irrefutable facts I had to
EMBERAfter a night of tossing and turning, I arrived at the office on Friday morning wearing sunglasses almost as big as my head and carrying a coffee even bigger. I got the biggest, strongest cup I could find, but I was still running on fumes.Two nights of little sleep in a row made Ember a very dull girl. A very dull girl who still hadn’t heard from her boyfriend, even though it’d been more than twelve hours since he had arrived at the office and hopefully found and talked to his dad on the roof.Twelve hours, forty-seven minutes to be exact. I asked security discreetly this morning at what time he’d entered the parking lot and was now counting. I figured if I still hadn’t heard from him when we hit the fourteen-hour mark, I was calling him.I also checked the logs with security to see if Mr. Marx had been up on the roof last night, and they confirmed he was. Under the circumstances, I was fairly certain Kaden and his dad would have run into each other.The question was whether th
EmberThanking my lucky stars for having a best friend like Gracie, I jumped in and told her everything. Once I had spilled my guts and was lying broken and bleeding on the floor, Gracie cleared her throat. “So let me get this straight. You find out your boyfriend’s dad is dying, but your boyfriend doesn’t know, and you don’t tell him. Instead, you orchestrate a meeting for them in a place they both hold sacred when you know he’s not talking to his dad, and now you’re hoping they haven’t killed each other?”“Pretty much.” I sat back in my chair, spinning it around to face the city skyline and wishing phones still had cords so I would have something to wrap around my finger. Or my neck. “When you say it that way, it sounds really bad. I should have just encouraged him to return his dad’s calls, huh?”“Probably,” she said. “But on the other hand, news like that has to be delivered face to face, so they would have had to end up in the same room at some point. Also, maybe Kaden hasn’t cal
KADENSlamming down the lid on my medium-sized suitcase, I wheeled it to my front door while scrolling through flights on my phone. Ryan was right. I needed a vacation. I needed to get away. I thought I wanted to get away with Ember, but right now, I needed to get away from her. From her, from my dad, from New York. I just needed to get away.I barely slept a wink after getting home from the office last night. The conversation with my dad played over and over in my head. Well, calling it a conversation was probably a stretch since I hadn’t let him get a word in edgewise.But I couldn’t stop thinking about everything I said to him, almost wishing I’d let him reply so I would know what he had to say for himself. Although it was highly unlikely he would say anything other than how my outburst proved his point about me. That I was immature and should’ve been able to bury all those feelings I had like a man.Burying it all, my ass. In my opinion, men were allowed to feel things too. We you
KadenAs an adult, I’d always been too busy to spend too much time on hypotheticals like if I wanted to settle down and have a family someday. I used protection religiously to avoid conceiving a child with a woman I didn’t really know in my younger days, and after that, I kind of gave up on ever finding a woman I could imagine myself spending the rest of my life and having kids with.Until Ember.Everything I used to want, worry about, think, or believe changed the day she walked back into my life. She still teased me some about my previous life of being a jerk as a kid or a player, but I could hardly remember what that was like either. Just like with my apartment, those were vague memories I didn’t care to recall.All my life, I’d heard people say you couldn’t change. I was living proof those people were wrong. To be fair, I’d started making changes before I even met Ember, but the guy I used to be wouldn’t have taken the whole day off work to go to the doctor and then to stock up on
KADEN“Everything is looking good so far,” Doctor Kruger told us, holding the ultrasound wand still on Ember’s growing stomach. She was really starting to show now and thought she looked more and more like a whale every day. I couldn’t disagree with her more. “The baby is growing well, and everything looks the way it should at around twenty-four weeks.”Doctor Kruger was the gynecologist Ember chose. She came highly recommended by the girls at the office. She looked a little bit like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, with hair so thin you could see most of her scalp, but there was a whole wall of awards in her office speaking to her ability.Ember smiled up at her, squeezing my hand tightly. Her eyes were glued to the screen beside her though, as were mine. It was hard to believe the black and white smudges we saw was an actual baby growing in Ember, but now and then, we could make out a hand or a foot or something that drove the point home.The doctor moved the wand higher, squeezing ou
Ember“Have you felt it move yet?” Kaden asked, dragging his chair around to my side of the table so he would be next to me instead of across from me. “And should we be eating Mexican? Isn’t it too spicy?”“I ordered it mild,” I reminded him. “But I don’t think eating Mexican is a problem. Sushi is probably a no-no for me until the baby comes, though.”He nodded, and I could practically see him adding the information to some kind of mental checklist. “So, you didn’t tell me if you’d felt it move yet.”“Not yet,” I said honestly. “I would have told you immediately if I had.”That much was true. Despite my misgivings about his reaction, I wouldn’t have kept him from anything involving his child. Something as major as feeling it move for the first time especially.“When do you think you’ll feel it?” he asked, cocking his head and shifting back on his chair to make space for him to get his phone out of his pocket.I lifted my shoulders, shaking my head. “No idea, but it will probably be s
EMBERFor four weeks, I had been waiting to find the right time to talk to Kaden about this. There just never seemed to be enough time. Though we were practically living together and had adjoining offices now, we were also busy and running around for work.My heart hammered against my ribcage so hard it was almost painful as I leaned forward, forcing myself to look into Kaden’s eyes. I had no idea how he was going to take this news. We had so much on our plates as it was, and we’d never even come close to talking about anything like this.Every word I knew suddenly disappeared from my brain as I looked into his gorgeous eyes, questions darkening them while he waited for me to tell him what I’d been waiting for the right time to talk to him about.Grasping for words, any words at this point, I ended up just blurting it out. “I’m four months pregnant.”Kaden paled, his eyes going huge. His jaw loosened, and his throat worked. Oh crap.This was exactly the reaction I’d been afraid of. Me
KadenA faint line appeared between Carol’s eyebrows before she schooled her expression, shaking my free hand again. “We’ll be in touch soon, I assume? If you could email the paperwork to my assistant, the same one who set up this meeting, I’ll have the lawyers look it over and send it right back.”“It will be in your inbox before the end of the day tomorrow,” Ember promised. If I knew her, she was already planning on firing off a text to Scotty as soon as we were out of Carol’s sight.Ember and I were sharing Scotty as our main assistant now. We each had a second assistant working under Scotty, but he was our go-to guy and the one who organized our respective second assistants. It was a system that was working really well for us.Once we were settled in my car, I glanced at her before putting my hand on her headrest and backing out of the parking space. “Did you ask Scotty to send her the documents yet?”She smiled, holding up her phone to show me the text she was typing. “Just about
KADEN“If you consider we only started putting this together for you last week, I think you’ll appreciate the growth you would already have seen if we’d started making these moves only a few days ago.” I was speaking to our new potential client, an older woman with her dyed black hair pulled back in a severe bun.She was the CEO of a hotel group that was starting to pop up everywhere. The company was only a few years old, but they were expanding at an impressive rate, and Ember and I both really wanted to sign her.“We can do great things together, Carol,” Ember added, clicking a button on the remote in her hand to move onto the next slide we had prepared for her. “Both our companies have shown exponential growth over the last six months, and together, I think we can keep that trajectory going.”I could feel Ember’s excitement coming off her in waves from where she was sitting next to me at a mahogany conference table at one of Carol’s group’s hotels. The group had two new boutique ho
EMBERWhen Kaden’s lips crashed into mine, it was with such passion and fervor that a fresh wave of tears welled up behind my eyes. Different tears this time, happy tears. I couldn’t believe he was here, that he was in my arms and kissing me the way he was.An hour ago, I was convinced our relationship was toast. When I didn’t hear from Ryan, I thought the worst. I thought Kaden was so mad at me, he’d convinced Ryan he was right, and I was wrong. I thought Ryan wasn’t going to speak to me ever again either.I thought so many things, all of which were apparently wrong. It was hard to have faith in people when you felt as guilty and as badly as I did, though. In my defense, those weren’t feelings I had much experience with, and now that I’d felt them in their fullest glory, I had no intention of ever finding myself in a position like that ever again.From now on, I was going back to honesty. I still regretted the way I handled things with Mr. Marx, but I’d also learned from it. With Kad
KadenShit. I even made her promise to stop avoiding me. I shoved her even deeper into the impossible corner she was already in. I made her look me in the eyes and sleep in my bed, even when she couldn’t do it, and now I was pissed at her for doing exactly that?I groaned out loud, bringing my forehead to my desk.As if Ryan could tell what I was thinking, he said, “She loves you, Kaden. She loves you more than anything in the world. You’re everything to her. Trust me when I tell you she never meant to hurt you. She was stuck in purgatory about this for weeks.”Lifting my head only enough to catch a glimpse of his eyes, I frowned. “Is this a big brother talk? Because I don’t think I can stomach one of those right now.”I really couldn’t bear to hear him tell me how much she loved me after the way I acted. Sure, I was shocked, and she shouldn’t have done what she did, but I honestly didn’t know what else I could have expected her to do under the circumstances.Even if she did, would sh
KADENMy head was spinning. I felt nauseous, my stomach twisting and turning as I tried to focus on the screen in front of me. I was trying to get everything with Ember out of my head and get some work done, but it was proving to be harder than I thought it would be.Despite everything, I still didn’t want to let my dad down. Sure, he told my girl he was dying and not me, but—“Fuck,” I muttered, dragging my hands through my hair. Again. I shuddered to think what I looked like by now. At least no one was bothering me.Scotty was keeping his distance, and most people would probably be leaving soon. They were giving me the day to get settled in, which was a fucking blessing since I had no idea how I would be able to handle meetings or making any big decisions today.I’d been so damn optimistic just this morning, determined to make this work no matter what. I was so damn sure I had this under control, that I was going to walk in as CEO and things would just fall in place.I was prepared