Page 6 of Embrace
I tried to rub the tension out of my temples. “Si? Si…” I repeated lowly. “Simon Brown. Chief Brown? You refer to him as Si?”
Suddenly, Jake took me by the waist and guided me to lean against the brick wall beneath an awning. As my head tilted back, our mouths nearly touched, and I could feel his warm breath ease into my mouth past my parted lips.
“You say you want to know more about me, then get ready, because there’s a lot, and not much of it is good.”
I swallowed. “I can handle it,” I whispered.
As we stared into each other’s eyes, those passing by us didn’t exist. The hums and roars of cars making their way up and down the street were mute.Do we kiss?And if so, should it be deep, hard, and long?
Jake was keeping his hard body away from mine. Rarely had I brushed up against him or felt him without him being at some stage of an erection. We were in the beginning stages of a fast-burning relationship and couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Even during the moments when he lay beside me in bed, we rubbed, touched, and groped each other. And now we were forced to remain at a suitable distance from each other.
“I’ll confess so this can pass,” Jake said.
I gulped, hypnotized by the penetrating eye contact we held. “So what can pass?”
His fingers trailed down one side of my face until his thumb slid down the middle of my lower lip. “Soft… I want to kiss you.”
I was overly sensitive to his touch as I croaked, “Me too.” I cleared my throat. “We can’t do anything about it except let it all pass. We’re only human, Jake. It will—”
Without warning, his lips gently touched mine. The kiss wasn’t lengthy or passionate, but it was still sensual, transmitting our love and longing for each other.
“There.” He sighed with his eyes closed, as if he had to compose himself. A grunt that sounded deep in the back of his throat escaped him, then he tasted his bottom lip. “We should walk.”
I nodded, only neither of us moved. The longer we stood there, the more anxious I became. I realized I had to take the lead when it came to breaking free from the strong magnetic current that linked us.
My head felt loopy as I walked. Jake was right by my side. We didn’t hold hands, and we kept enough distance to appear like two people who had a casual connection walking on the sidewalk.
“So…” I checked over both my shoulders. “You don’t want me to refer to you as Asher?”
“No.” His answer was firm.
“Not even in private?”
“No.”
“You don’t like the name?”
I studied his pinched expression as he glared ahead, and I recalled the comment he’d made during our first dinner together. He said he didn’t like his name, and I’d thought he meant Jake Sparrow, but I was sure he was referring to Asher Christmas.
I checked around us again. “But Jake Sparrow is a fake name?” I whispered.
“Not for long,” he muttered.
“You’re going to make it real?”
He sucked air sharply between his teeth. “Penina, so many questions, babe.”
I raised a finger in objection. “No, Jake. You can’t refer to me as babe.”
He smirked. “I can always refer to you as babe. We’re going to figure this out regardless of the results.”
I scowled at the ground. That was the second time he’d claimed we were going to “figure it out.” I didn’t know about him, but I, for one, wasn’t going to knowingly fuck my brother, period. “Where are you taking me anyway?”
“It’s on Dauphine,” he said as we walked past parked cars and lots of people. We were in the touristy part of town, down on the lower edge of the French Quarter. I hadn’t visited the area in a while. We kept moving away then back together while making space for other pedestrians to pass, so we didn’t have to worry about maintaining a platonic distance. Shuffling past crowds of horny college students and drunken boys from every sort of fraternity under the sun, we conversed about some of the incidences from the past that Christine told me about but I couldn’t remember.
“The brain has a way of self-protecting, doesn’t it?” he said then trotted ahead of me to open the door of a bookstore.
“Yes, it does, but—” I raised my eyebrows and held them high. “You wanted to show me books?”
