Page 29 of Hardcore Vanilla
And why the hell was Sharon inviting her ex to a wedding right in front of Jake?
“My cousin’s,” Sharon said with a sigh, shifting back and forth on her feet as she eyed him. Her expression was fairly blank, but he could see the warning in her eyes. If they didn’t want their friends to know anything was going on between them, he needed to let it go. Hell, he needed to have not said anything in the first place, because he could practically feel the change in all of them even though he was deliberately not looking at any of them. “It’s in a couple of weeks and I need a date.”
“So you’re inviting your ex?” Yeah, he was not doing a good job of keeping his cool, but he was finding it hard to care that everyone was now looking between him and Sharon with various degrees of confusion and speculation. They might not be in a relationship, but he still couldn’t help but feel a little insulted.
Okay, he could admit it, he felt a little possessive too. He didn’t like the idea of her taking her most recent ex to a family wedding. Why he felt that way... Well, he wasn't going to examine that too closely. They were having sex, after all. A lot of it. It made sense that he would feel abitpossessive.
“Why do you care?” Lexie asked, leaning forward to catch his eye. She was sitting on Patrick’s lap and his best friend was smirking from behind her.
“Yeah, why do you care?” Andrew chimed in from the other side of the table, crossing his arms over his chest.
Jake ignored both of them, looking directly at Sharon. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
The look she gave him was pure exasperation, her answer laced with barely repressed annoyance. “Yeah, sure, why not.”
He purposefully didn’t look at anyone else as he moved around the table to follow Sharon; she’d turned on her heel and was stalking towards the staircase – or maybe the hallway to the gardens – where they could have a little privacy. Even before he’d fully stepped away all of their friends were leaning forward over the table, murmuring to each other, and he didn’t doubt he’d just blown his and Sharon’s cover to hell.
There were going to be a lot of questions.
He didn’t have the answers because he didn’t really know what he was doing. He didn’t know why he was so irked.
The only thing he did know was that if anyone was going with Sharon to her cousin’s wedding as her date, it was going to be him.
******
Mother fucking fuckwit! What the hell is Jake thinking?!
She didn't even need to look over her shoulder to know that their friends were all abuzz. Sharon wouldn't be surprised to see one of them running for the front desk to grab their phone and start updating everyone who hadn't made it out tonight. Especially since Angel had demanded that she be kept in the loop.
She wanted to bang her head against the wall.
Or bang Jake's head against the wall.
Maybe it was kind of rude to go and ask another man to a wedding right in front of the man she was currently fucking but come on. They'd agreed to keep things both casual and on the downlow!
Stomping into the back hallway, she whirled around, glaring up at him as she planted her hands on her hips. The hallway wasn't dark, but it wasn't exactly well-lit either, and he loomed over her, crossing his arms over his chest. At least he wasn't half-naked like most of the Doms in the club. Jake always wore regular clothes to Stronghold, as if to drive home the point that he wasn't a Dom.
Even if he acted kind of like one sometimes.
"What the hell was that?" she asked, glaring even harder. Since he wasn't a Dom, she didn't have to worry about her tone of voice or cursing at him. She jabbed her finger, pointing past him and back at their friends, even though she couldn't see them because of his broad shoulders. "Do you have any idea what they're all thinking right now?"
"I don't really care what they're thinking," he said tightly. Even though his eyes were somewhat shadowed with his head tilted down toward her, she could feel his gaze boring into her. Her body stirred with interest.Dammit.It was like he'd trained her pussy like a Pavlovian dog. One dark, intimate look and her whole body tingled. "I want to know what you're thinking. A wedding date with your ex? Why not ask me to go?"
"Seriously?" She rolled her eyes. "We were trying to keep our friends from butting in. How fast do you think they'd be on us if I'd invited you to my cousin's wedding?Hmm?" She tapped a finger against the side of her lips, tilting her head, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Probably about as quickly as they are since you've gone all Captain Caveman in front of them."
Other than a little growl at hearing his new nickname, Jake didn't react to it, which was kind of disappointing.
"You could have asked me as a friend."
"We haven't exactly ever been super friendly," she pointed out, thoroughly exasperated. Throwing her hands up in the air, she resisted the urge to smack some sense into him. Dom or not, there was no way he'd tolerate that. "What the hell do you want from me?"
"I want you to take me as your date and not your ex."
"Oh, so we're dating now?"
She asked the question sarcastically, but Jake's reaction was nothing like she expected. His shoulders softened slightly, his mouth opened and closed without answering, and she blinked as she realized...
"Wait, you want to date me?"
