Suck and Blow: Party Games, Book 1 (8 page)

Dayne snapped off a sharp salute. “Yes, ma’am.”

Frankie rolled her eyes. “Always the funny bastard.”

He grinned. “That’s me.”

Like with Grant, Frankie was giving Dayne a kiss on the cheek before she realized it. “Be patient with her,” she murmured against his warm skin. “She’s been through hell.”

Dayne sucked in a quick breath and then gave Frankie a small nod. “We will be,” he murmured back.

We.

The plural personal pronoun wasn’t lost on Frankie. Nor was the clear emotion in Dayne’s eyes as he walked her to the front door. She suppressed a wry chuckle. If it had been any other two guys making obvious designs on Miki, Frankie would have torn them a new one and left them strung up by their balls from the Sydney Harbour Bridge. But Grant and Dayne… Well, if nothing else, they knew their fate if they messed up.

Oh, such a tough-girl swagger, Francesca. Who would have thought it was all a façade?

“Shut up,” she snarled at herself, storming back to Lil’s house. The revelry had not ended in her time away. In fact, the noise coming from the house seemed to be louder, more raucous. The word “scull” wafted from the open door and windows in various laughing chants, the low throb of music a counter beat to the fun.

Frankie stood on the footpath, staring at the house. Inside, waiting at the bar in the living room, was Alec Harris. Waiting for her.

Her pussy contracted. Her pulse quickened. Her nipples grew tight. Every nerve ending and fibre and cell in her body told her to walk inside, find Alec and fuck him senseless, even as her stupid, prideful brain screamed at her to call a cab. Now. Right now. Call a cab, climb in it and go home to her vibrator. The one that didn’t come with complication and back-story and confusion. The one that filled the need her body was craving—if only on a superficial, physical level.

Her heart however…

Frankie let out a strangled groan, glaring at the luxurious house before her. Damn it, when did she ever,
ever
listen to her heart?

Alec stared at the drink in his hand, ignoring the rather agitated grumblings from his older brother to his left. Mac, it seemed, wasn’t going to let up on this US contract offer, repeating his advice for Alec to sign it as soon as possible. “Hell, Al—” he gave Alec an exasperated look ten minutes into the wholly one-sided conversation, “—why are you even
thinking
about it? The contract is amazing. It’ll propel Going Bush Landscape and Design into a whole new stratosphere of demand. You’ll be so damn successful I’ll need to make an appointment just to talk to you.”

Alec grunted a wordless reply. He didn’t feel like talking about this at all. Mac however, was like a dog with a bone. He went off on a whole new spiel about the offer from the US television talk-show queen, a spiel that at one point veered off into a highly surreal rant about Lillian McDermott’s career and the sleazy photographer shooting her latest advertising campaign before circling back to the original topic of Alec’s growing fame and fortune and success with no apparent segue.

Alec couldn’t give two flying fucks about the television queen’s desires, nor the contract Mac was so hung up about. Not at the moment. He didn’t want to be famous, he didn’t want to be on television and he sure as hell didn’t want to be thinking about signing a large chunk of his life and time away. Only one thing played on his mind. One thing only.

She wasn’t coming back.

The Gun wasn’t coming back. She’d loaded both barrels, shot him straight in the chest and left him for dead.

Fuck a duck, mate, how pathetic do you have to be to resort to a pun like that?

Pretty bloody pathetic. Pathetic enough to wish Mac, the brother he loved with all his heart, would shut the hell up and leave him alone with his lukewarm drink and aching balls.

“I can’t even find Lily,” Mac ground out, and Alec blinked, realizing his brother was back on the topic of the supermodel. “She could be anywhere…with anyone!”

Alec shot him a sideward frown. “Why the hell the sudden carry on over what Lillian McDermott does? And with whom? Isn’t she just your best friend’s sister? I mean, the three of you have been sharing a house together for what, a few years now, right?”

Mac let out a barely audible growl. “Don’t worry about it,” he mumbled, sounding very un-Mackenzie like, before lifting his beer to his mouth and taking a sharp pull.

It was the second time tonight that Alec’s control-freak brother had come unruffled thanks to Lillian McDermott, and if Alec wasn’t so self-absorbed with his own apparent failure to convince Frankie he was worth a second go, he would have been worried.

As it was now, he wished Mac would find the balls to go look for the supermodel and take the bloody US contract with him.

So what? You can sit here and mope?

No. So he could design his next phase of what was fast being called Project Winchester in his head.

He wasn’t giving up. He didn’t give up. His parents hadn’t raised him to be a quitter, and just because Frankie hadn’t returned to him didn’t mean he would roll over and show his belly to defeat. Hell, he’d spent too many years of his life beating her to stop now.

Okay, that didn’t sound quite as heroic and romantic as he’d intended it. But damn it, there wasn’t a single doubt in his mind that he and Frankie were meant to…

He paused, gripping his glass tighter. To what? Fuck each other senseless? Be together forever?

Be in love?

“You okay, bro?” Mac’s sudden question—spoken with worried haste—made Alec start. Again.

He turned to his brother. “I think I fucked up a chance with someone special, Mac.”

Mac raised an eyebrow. “Really? I didn’t know there
was
someone special.”

Alec snorted a wry chuckle, turning back to his untouched drink. “You remember Francesca Winchester?”

“The Gun?” Alec could hear the incredulous mirth in his brother’s voice. “I thought you’d gotten over her back in high school, mate?”

Alec let out a ragged sigh. “Me too. Apparently, I hadn’t.”

“So when I saw you talking together earlier…”

“It was the beginning of the end of my sanity.”

“I’m pretty certain you lost your sanity somewhere around the time you turned fifteen,” Mac said, the words laced with laughter. “The day your balls dropped and you realized Francesca Winchester looked damn fine in a pair of tight jeans.”

Alec shot his brother another sideward frown, accompanying it with a shake of head and grunt. “You’re not helping, Mackenzie.”

Mac grinned, a wide goofy grin Alec bet no one in any courtroom in the country ever got to see. “Okay, sorry. Let me ask you a question then. If you’re designing a garden for the latest celebrity sensation—still think you need to sign that contract, by the way—and there’s a tree growing where you want to locate an arty-farty water feature, what do you do?”

Alec raised his eyebrows. “Arty-farty?”

Mac waved a dismissive hand, very much the ruthless lawyer for a split second. “Shut up and answer the question, squirt.”

Alec chuckled. “Okay, depending on how well it fit with my design, I’d do one of two things. I’d either pull it out and replant it elsewhere, or redesign the garden around it.”

Mac looked at him. “And how well does The Gun fit with
your
design, Alec? You know the one I’m talking about? The design that takes the rest of your life to finish? How well does she fit with
that
design? Are you going to rip her out of it and plant her somewhere else you don’t have to water or tend, or approach the whole…thing…from a different perspective?”

“You know,” a very husky, very feminine, very familiar voice murmured behind Alec and Mac. “I’ve been compared to many things in my life, but never a tree. It’s a first for me.”

Alec jumped and spun around on his bar stool to stare at Frankie standing but a mere metre away from him. Her lips curled in a small smile, her eyes holding his in an unreadable gaze.

Mac laughed, rising from his own stool and dipping slightly at the waist. “And a beautiful tree it is.”

Frankie’s reaction was to raise one of her eyebrows. A little.

Mac laughed again. “And on that note, I shall leave talk of gardening to you both. There’s a supermodel somewhere in this party I need to have a few words with.”

He left. Or at least, Alec assumed he did. Alec didn’t take his attention from Frankie long enough to be sure. His heart thumped in his chest as if it were a sledgehammer trying to splinter a stubborn tree root.

He swallowed. She’d come back. But for the reason he hoped? Or to tell him the powder room was a mistake.

Too bad. If that’s what she’s thinking, I’ll do whatever it takes to change her—

“So—” she took a minute step closer to him, her smile curling wider, “—any chance you’re up for another round of Suck and Blow?”

Alec stood, pushed himself from the bar and destroyed the distance between them with one step. He slid his hands over her hips to the small of her back and tugged her to him, pressing her hips to his as he lowered his face to hers. “I think,” he murmured against her lips, “there’s a very good chance.”

Chapter Five

Frankie pressed her hands to his hard chest, reveling in the pounding rhythm of his heart under her palms. The second she’d seen him sitting at the bar, his back so broad, so wide, his hips so lean… The second she’d heard his voice, heard its wrought frustration as he talked about gardening of all things, she’d known she wanted more of him. No, not just more of him. All of him.

“How does my place sound?” She slid her hands over his nipples, her pussy squeezing when they grew taut under the material of his shirt. “I’ve got an apartment on the harbour. We could be there in…”

Her suggestion faded on her lips as he shook his head. “My place.”

Frankie’s heart thumped into her throat and she stared into his smiling eyes. His place…

She’d never gone back to a lover’s house before. It was always her place—where she was in control. Going back to Alec’s house…

“Okay,” she agreed, dragging her thumb over his hard nipple again.

With a strained chuckle, Alec smoothed his hands up her arms. “I take it you found Miki?”

Frankie nodded. “She’s in good hands for the night.”

His lips brushed hers—a teasing caress that made her pussy flutter some more. “So are you.”

Her pulse danced in her neck, her sex fluttering anew. It wouldn’t matter what his home was like. She didn’t care they weren’t going to be fucking in her massive king-size bed with its multi-million dollar views of the harbour. All that mattered was stripping his clothes from his body and impaling herself on his oh-so-amazing cock again. Soon.

“C’mon,” he said, his voice stroking at her senses, “I’m parked just down the street.”

He folded his hand around hers, holding it the way young lovers do—their fingers threaded, their wrists and arms pressed together. They walked from the party without passing a word to each other, and Frankie couldn’t stop the wild rhythm of her heart increasing with each step from Lil’s house. BMWs, Mercs, an Aston Martin, even a Ferrari or two sat parked in the quiet street, each one proclaiming their owner’s wealth louder than a bullhorn. They passed Frankie’s beloved Audi R8, the black supercar somehow striking her for the first time since buying it as ridiculously ostentatious. “Think about how much fucking money I must have to drive a car like this,” it said loudly and proudly.

She cast it a sideward glance, and as if Alec sensed her unexpected disquiet, his fingers squeezed hers gently before he disengaged his hand from her grip and slipped his arm around her waist, holding her close.

Frankie drew in a slow breath, the sweet scent of summer night streaming into her body doing nothing to calm her nerves.

Nerves? Why the hell was she nervous?

“Here we are.”

Alec’s calm murmur jolted Frankie from the confronting question and she looked around herself, her gaze falling on a new model, top-of-the-line ute parked beside her. “This is yours?”

Alec gave her a nod.

She turned back to it, a strange knot in her belly. She knew how much it was worth—close to seventy thousand dollars—yet it wasn’t the price tag that caught her attention, but rather the subtle business signage on the passenger’s door.
Going Bush Landscape and Design.

A frown pulled at Frankie’s eyebrows and she caught her bottom lip with her teeth. She knew that name for some reason. Why? She didn’t have a garden herself, living six stories above the harbour as she did—and she was lucky if she could keep a potted plant alive. So why did she know that business name?

Didn’t Nick Blackthorne tell you he was getting his gardens redesigned by some hugely in-demand landscaper?

Frankie narrowed her eyes, trying to remember the conversation she’d had with her client the last time he was back in Australia. The world’s biggest rock star had raved on and on about the guy, extolling his genius and talent, never referring to him as anything but the Cat. She’d thought it really odd, but in a pretty cool kind of way. Nick never settled for anything but the best, so bizarre nickname or not, the landscape designer must have been the—

Her gaze fell on the logo sitting beside the business name—a scruffy-looking alley cat asleep on a fallen tree log, surrounded by lush fern fronds.

Cat.

Alley Cat.

A heavy pressure wrapped around Frankie’s chest. She swung her stare to Alec, catching him watching her, the shadows of the dark street making it impossible to see his expression clearly. Her mouth felt dry. “This is you?”

Alec nodded. Again.

She looked back at the logo, the significance of the cat not lost on her. An alley cat, the very nickname she’d given to him all those years ago. A nickname once intended as a barbed insult from an immature, resentful teenager was now something else. Something far more…unnerving.

Her
name for him had become
his
identity. The landscape gardener to the stars, the guy Nick Blackthorne had paid forty-two thousand dollars to redesign his garden, had taken her with him into his highly successful career.