J. Ward - Covet

Ford F-150s were not exactly great for hooking up, but there was enough room if you needed it— and more to the point, the truck was all he had to offer. Jim helped her inside and then went around and got behind the wheel. The engine started quick and he turned the fan off, halting the blast of frigid air until things heated up.

She moved across the seat to him, her breasts rising above the tight bands of her dress as she got closer. “You're very kind.”

Kind was not he way he saw himself. Especially not now, given what was on his mind. “Can't have a lady cold.”

Jim ran his eyes all over her. She was huddled in his beat-to-shit leather jacket, her face turned down, her long hair falling over her shoulder and curling up into her cleavage. She might have come across as a seducer, but the truth was she was a good girl who was in over her head.

“Do you want to talk?” he said, because she deserved better than what he wanted from her.

“No.” She shook her head. “No, I want to do…something.”

Okay, Jim was definitely not kind. He was a man who was a palm's reach away from a beautiful woman, and even though she was giving off vulnerable vibes, playing therapist with her was not the sort of horizontal he was after.

As her eyes lifted, they were orphan sad. “Please…kiss me?”

Jim held back, her expression putting the brakes on him and then some. “You sure about this?”

She swept her hair over her shoulder and tucked it behind her ear. When she nodded, the dime-size diamond in her lobe flashed. “Yes…very. Kiss me.”

When she held his stare and didn't look away, Jim leaned in, feeling ensnared and not minding in the slightest. “I'll go slow.”

Oh…God…

Her lips were every bit as soft as he'd imagined, and he stroked her mouth carefully with his own, afraid he would crush her. She was sweet, she was warm, and she trusted him to set the careful pace, welcoming his tongue inside of her, then later shifting back so that his palm could ease down from her face to her collarbone…to her full breast.

Which changed the tempo of things.

Abruptly, she sat up and took off his jacket. “Zipper's in the back.”

His rough workman's hands found it quick, and he worried about marring the blue dress as he drew the fastening downward. And then he stopped thinking as she took the top from her breasts herself, revealing a satin-and-lace bra that probably cost as much as his truck.

Through the fine material, her nipples were peaked, and in the shadows thrown by the dim light of the dash, they were feast-for-the-starved spectacular.

“My breasts are real,” she said softly. “He wanted me to get implants, but I…I don't want them.”

Jim frowned, thinking that whatever pig asshole had come up with that one deserved an eye operation—performed by a tire iron. “Don't do it. You're beautiful.”

“Really?” Her voice wavered.

“Truly.”

Her shy smile meant too much to him, piercing through his chest, going too deep. He knew all about the ugly side of life, had been through the kinds of things that could make a single day feel like it lasted a month, and he wished her none of that. Seemed, though, she'd had plenty of hard cracks herself.

Jim reached over and turned the heater on to warm her.

When he eased back, she swept aside one of the bra's cups and framed herself with her hand, offering the nipple to him.

“You're amazing,” he whispered.

Jim bent down and captured her flesh with his lips, sucking on her gently. As she gasped and thrust her hands into his hair, her breast cushioned his mouth and he had a moment of raw lust, the kind that turned men into animals.

Except then he remembered the way she'd looked at him, and he knew he wasn't going to have sex with her. He was going to take care of her, here in the truck cab, with the heater going and the windows fogging up. He was going to show her how beautiful she was and how perfect her body looked and felt and…tasted. But he wasn't taking anything for himself.

Hell, maybe he wasn't all bad.

You sure about that? his inner voice cut in. Are you really sure about that? No, he wasn't. But Jim laid her down on the seat and wadded his leather jacket into a pillow for her head and vowed to do the right thing.

Man…she was drop-dead gorgeous, a lost, exotic bird who'd found a chicken coop for shelter. Why on God's green earth did she want him? “Kiss me,” she breathed.

Just as he braced his weight on his heavy arms and leaned over her, he caught sight of the digital clock on the dash: 11:59. The very minute he had been born forty years before. What a happy birthday this had turned out to be.

Vin diPietro sat on a silk-covered sofa in a living room decorated in gold, red and creamy white. The black marble floors were covered with antique rugs, the bookcases were filled with first editions, and all around his collection of crystal, ebony, and bronze statuary gleamed. But the real showstopper was the view of the city over to the right.

Thanks to a glass wall that ran the entire length of the room, Caldwell's twin bridges and all of its skyscrapers were as much a part of the decorations as the drapes and the floor coverings and the objets d'art. The sprawling vista was urban splendor at its best, a vast, glimmering landscape that was never the same, even though the buildings didn't change.

Vin's duplex in the Commodore took up all of the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth floors of the luxury high-rise, for a total of ten thousand square feet. He had six bedrooms, a maid's suite, an exercise room, and a movie theater. Eight bathrooms. Four parking spaces in the underground parking garage. And inside everything was exactly as he wanted it, every square of marble, slab of granite, yard of fabric, plank of hardwood, foot of carpet—all of it had been handpicked from the best of the best by him.

He was ready to move out.

With the way things were going, he figured he'd be ready to hand over the keys to its next owner in another four months. Maybe three, depending on how fast the crews were at the construction site.

If this condo was nice, what Vin was building on the banks of the Hudson River was going to make the duplex look like subsidized housing. He'd had to buy up a half dozen old hunting lodges and camps to get the kind of acreage and shoreline he wanted, but everything had fallen into place. He'd razed the shacks, cleared the land, and dug a cellar hole big enough to play football in. The crew was framing now and working on the roof; then his fleet of electricians would install the house's central nervous system and his plumbers would put in the arteries. Finally, it would be the detail crap with thecounters and tiles, the appliances and fixtures, and the decorators.

It was all coming together, just like magic. And not only about where he would live.

In front of him, on the glass-topped table, was the velvet box from Reinhardt's.

As the grandfather clock in the hall struck midnight, Vin sat back into the sofa cushions and crossed his legs. He was not a romantic, never had been, and neither was Devina—which was only one of the reasons they were perfect together. She gave him his space, kept herself busy, and was always ready to hop on a plane when he needed her to. And she didn't want children, which was a huge plus.

He couldn't go there. Sins of the fathers and all that.

He and Devina hadn't known each other for all that long, but when it was right, it was right. Kind of like buying land to develop. You just knew as you stared over the ground that here is where I need to be building.

Looking out at the city from a perch high above so many others, he thought of the house he'd grown up in. Back then, his view had been of the crappy little two-story next door, and he'd spent a lot of nights trying to see past where he was from. Over the din of his mother and father's drunken fighting, the only thing he'd wanted was out. Out from under his parents. Out of that pathetic lower-middleclass neighborhood. Out of himself and what separated him from everyone else. And what do you know, that was exactly what had happened.