But I am determined. The next afternoon when his shift begins, I do my best to school my expression.
He meets me in my publicist Candi’s suite. She’s crisp, efficient, and has been fussing with my hair for the last minute. Pretty sure fussing is her favorite pastime.
“There. You’re Instagrammable,” she declares.
“That’s all you want of me.”
She pats my cheek, then squeezes. “You know me so well.”
When she lets go, she twists her sleek black hair into a bun, stabs a pencil through it to hold it in place, and rattles off the plan to Jackson. “Stone is visiting the community center that he’s donating ten percent of the concert proceeds to, then he has a five p.m. interview at the local radio station about his concert series. The station has been teasing it all day, so expect crowds. If you need help, I did my Krav Maga last night.”
“Thanks. I was hoping to sign you on as backup,” he says dryly.
She flashes him a grin. “You’ve got me, then, big guy.”
Big guy. If she only knew. He is big everywhere.
See? That’s the problem. Once you see somebody naked, you always see them naked.
As the three of us head to the elevator, Jackson walks next to me, and I make my first attempt to return to the way we were.
I make a show of looking at a watch I don’t wear. “Since it’s four in the afternoon, I’m guessing you already wrote a peace treaty, ran a marathon, and mastered Japanese?”
“I slept in till seven. So, the answer is no.”
Candi gives a comrade-in-arms laugh. “I hear ya. That flight last night wore me out too.”
I fight like hell to suppress a grin over Jackson’s tacit confession that he was so worn out from messing around that he slept later than usual.
I take that, clasp it in my hand, and steal it away for whenever I need a smile.
The next day I’m still working on the no-thoughts-of-my-bodyguard-naked cause when Jackson and I weave through the casino, and I make small talk to cover it. The chitchat keeps me from saying something I shouldn’t, like “Have I told you my brain made GIFs of the way you take your shirt off?”
I nod at the Aladdin slot machine as the character flies away on a magic carpet. “Do you play the slots?”
“Never.”
“Blackjack?”
Jackson shakes his head.
“Roulette? Craps? Baccarat?”
“No. No. No.”
“Fine. How about poker? I bet you play poker. Every dude likes poker.”
A small grin comes my way. “I like poker. But no big stakes.”
“Ah, I get it. You don’t like gambling.”
He turns his gaze to me, meeting me dead in the eyes. “You’re right. I don’t care for gambling.”
It comes out darkly, and all the latent sexy images fall from my head.
As he scans the joint, looking around, staying close by my side, I know there’s more to that statement.
“You’re not into risks?”
“Life is full of risks. The key to a good life is being smart enough to know which ones to take.”
I stop in my tracks. I swear not a second exists between when I cease moving and when he does—he’s that tuned into me. As I look him over, I’m tempted to joke, to say he sounds like a fortune cookie.
But the moment feels bigger than a wisecrack. “I’m getting the sense you know a little something about risk,” I say, and we resume our path through the casino to the car.
“A little.”
“And you don’t care for it?”
“Been burned by it. Don’t need to get burned again.”
“In love or business?” I ask, a little surprised that I’m diving in, but then I do want to know what makes this man tick. He has layers, and then his layers have layers. I want to peel them away and see under them, the same way I want to unravel a work of art, a poem, a song someone wrote that hits me right there in the chest.
A sigh falls from his lips as we reach the portico. “Love,” he answers. “Definitely love. So, sometimes that’s best avoided.”
I want to prod and poke at that answer. Jackson Pearce fascinates me. But Candi’s waiting for us, since we have another press interview.
We all slide into the limo and make small talk about the fantastic cake Candi ordered from room service. But soon my mind returns to the night before last, when Jackson and I were together.
The things he said.
He mentioned a past. Mentioned cleaning up the mistakes from it.
He said, too, that he hadn’t been with anyone in a while.
That all has to be part of the risk he’s talking about avoiding.
And if it’s been a long time since he was with anyone, what does that say about him and how he operates? Does he only hook up with people he’s serious about?
Except he’s not serious about me—that much is clear. So, that’s a no.
It’s more likely that someone hurt him.
My teeth clench at the horrible thought. My jaw ticks. And for the first time, I’m not thinking about him naked. I’m pissed that someone did that to one of the best men I know.
But is that a good sign? Does this mean I can stop thinking about him doing bad things to me all the time?
The answer is no.
The onslaught of dirty thoughts returns.
I wake up picturing his lips wrapped around my dick—something I’d very much like to experience.
And I don’t deviate from those thoughts the whole morning, even as I work out and do yoga.
Yeah, that’s fun—doing downward dog while thinking about being boned.
But I try my best to shove those filthy images to the far corner of my brain as I grab a drink with Callum at Speakeasy later that night.
“Tell me everything, lover boy,” I say over a scotch. Jackson is outside the bar, and I doubt he’s jelly of Callum anymore, now that he knows what went down and what didn’t that night.
“Everything? Like Marxist philosophy, the meaning of life, and the best Russian literature?” my longtime friend asks.
“Yes, let’s talk Tolstoy and love. But mostly love. How is everything with you and your woman?”
Callum grins. He tries to hide it, but he can’t. “She’s terrific. She’s the woman I’m going to marry.”
I hold up a palm to high-five. “Knew it. Called it. You two are destiny. I love it.”
“You did,” he says, lifting his glass to clink it with mine. “And thank you, Cupid. Now, what about you?”
My eyes drift to the front entrance. “That is a good question, my friend.”
A very good question, and I shift the topic because I don’t know how to answer it.
The next day, I go to lunch with Sage Carmichael, one of the co-owners of The Extravagant. Sage’s friend Eliza joins us, which I’m stoked about, since she’s one of the majority stakeholders of the Las Vegas Hawks football team and I’m not only a diehard fan but also a friend of Eliza’s co-owner, Nadia.
“Great to meet you,” I say to Eliza. “Officially. Nadia and I hung out a few times when I was in town the other month—rooting for the Hawks, of course, in her private suite at the stadium.”