Taste (Sovereign Book 2) Read online

  TASTE

  Copyright © 2015 by BJ Harvey

  Edited by Lauren McKellar

  Cover Designed by BJ Harvey

  Photo sourced from Dollar Photo Club

  ISBN: Epub - 978-0-9941257-8-1

  ISBN: Mobi – 978-0-9941257-5-0

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the above author of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Sneak Preview: Feel

  About the Author

  Author Links

  Other Books by BJ Harvey

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  I checked into another hotel under my mom’s maiden name a few hours after leaving Barrett and Gavin in the restaurant corridor. I’d called the Sovereign reception desk from the taxi, asking them to collect my things and check me out. The last thing I wanted was Gavin to get involved. Half an hour later, my taxi swung back into the hotel driveway, and as requested, Bart stood on the curb with my luggage.

  Hiding away from everyone was for my peace of mind more than anything else. Whatever Gavin had hired Barrett to do, it included circumventing normal hotel security to get to me. At the time it had not struck me as being anything other than a determined and enterprising mind. I should’ve been more suspicious and questioned him further over his evasive answers to my questions. When I thought about it, I wondered if he had ever given me a straight honest answer.

  After the events at lunchtime, I felt deceived and betrayed. For a woman who was normally self-sufficient, confident and not easily rattled, I felt uneasy, even with Aiden’s assurances that he would find out everything there was to know about Barrett Matthews.

  Aiden offered to come straight to me, volunteering to jump on the next plane and be at my side in mere hours. I couldn’t tell him what had happened; I was too embarrassed. A thirty-one year old independent woman getting conned—however that may have come about—was too much for me to admit to. Aiden didn’t ask me any questions, just promised to run the check and get back to me in a few hours with the preliminary findings.

  That gave me some relief. Enough that I poured myself a glass of white wine and a deep bubble bath to try and take care of at least some of the tension that pulled my body tight.

  I’d sent my mom a text in the car and explained that I wasn’t feeling well and would call her tomorrow before my flight home. Then I turned my phone off. I already had three missed calls from Barrett by then, and I didn’t want the torture of seeing his name flash on my screen. I hated lying to her, but I didn’t have it in me to rain on her parade and sour her good mood. Whatever I found out about Gavin and Barrett, I wanted to know everything before I told her what had happened.

  There was a small part of me that still held on to the hope that I’d misconstrued what I heard. That somehow it was taken out of context and that—in time—Gavin would explain exactly what he’d meant. It would still never excuse what Barrett had done.

  Unfortunately, there was a larger part of me that was more realistic, well-worn from years of working as a top-level executive—and now owner—of a typically male-dominated environment. I should’ve been suspicious of Barrett’s dogged pursuit of me. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been the object of male attention in the past, just never from one as fervent as Barrett. I was too swayed by lust and need whenever I was around him. I should’ve remembered what my father always said: ‘Even if it walks like a duck, and talks like a duck . . . it still might not be a duck.’

  It was later—much later—when a hard, loud knock at my hotel room door woke me. I got up off my bed, looking down to see a white toweling robe and nothing else. When the knock came again, this time louder, harder, and definitely more impatient-sounding, I had my fingers wrapped around the handle.

  Looking through the peephole, I was shocked to see an incensed Barrett glaring back at me. He wore the same clothes from the restaurant—a tailored dark gray shirt, black tie loose and askew, and black slacks. In short, he looked irresistible.

  Having stewed on everything for hours, I saw red, and I didn’t think before I swung the door open and came face to face with him.

  “You have some n—” I didn’t get any more words out because he stormed in, hooked an arm around my waist and swallowed the sound of my shocked gasp by sticking his tongue in my mouth. The hotel door slammed shut under the power of his foot, and then walked forward, taking me with him until my back hit the wall.

  My hands gripped his shoulders and my nails dug into his shirt. They were pulled loose before he laced our fingers together and pressed them into the wall beside my head. Barrett devoured my mouth, setting my entire body ablaze. With his thigh wedged high between my legs, he pushed harder against me until we had full hip to chest contact.

  It wasn’t a soft or anywhere near gentle exchange—it was the physical manifestation of the raw, carnal need exploding between us. As he held my body prisoner, he set out to take everything he wanted from my mouth. Unable to stop myself, I surrendered, and our tongues began the battle for supremacy.

  My anger returned in full force and I bit his bottom lip and pushed him back. “No, Barrett. There’s nothing you could say to me that will make this okay anymore.” Everything he’d done and said to me over the past two days flashed in my mind and I shoved him back further. “You lied to me. You used me!”

  “I can’t tell you about it, any of it.” He took a deep breath before he leveled me with a somber stare. “I’m sorry, Lys. I just can’t tell you anything right now, but I had to see you.”

  “You took your time for someone who found me so easily the first time.”

  “I’ve been waiting. When you didn’t answer my calls, I knew you needed time.”

  “How very thoughtful of you,” I scathed.

  When he spoke next his voice was gentle. “The only way to tell you how I feel is to show you.”

  A scathing laugh escapes me. “You think I’d still want to sleep with you after hearing you say you’re a ‘rent a cock’?”

  “I’m not being paid to fuck you, Lys,” he retorts sternly on a growl.

  “I wouldn’t know, would I? There must be something you need from me, and Gavin told you to do whatever you had to do. That means me, right?” I threw my arms out wildly in front of my body. My voice was full of spite and resentment, only shaking on the last word. I swallowed back the hard lump in my throat that threatened to choke me.

  “Alyssa,” he groaned. He ran his fingers through his hair and tilted his head to the side. “I never meant to hurt you. I want you. Just you.” His heated glare pinned me to the spot. His deep blue eyes were not hiding anything. It was as if he wanted me to see his sincerity.

  I was lost for words. Everything I had imagined saying to him if I ever saw him again escaped me. My body had been set alight by the taste of his mouth and the thrum of lust coursing through my veins. I subconsciously licked along
my bottom lip and in the blink of an eye he took a step forward, pressed me back against the wall and cupped my jaw. His body was hard against mine and his tongue traced the same trail mine had just taken.

  Unable to stop it, my body melted. Something in him snapped and he growled loud and rough into my mouth. Needing more, and losing all semblance of self-control, I bent my leg up and pushed us off the wall, wrenching my hands free from his. He went for my wrists again but I beat him to the punch, grabbing hold of his shirt before I ripped it open and used my two hands on his chest to push him onto the bed.

  Following him down, I moved my legs to straddle his hips. My robe fell open and my back arched as he fisted his hand in my hair. He tilted my head to the side and his mouth trailed along my neck to kiss his way roughly down my chest. His free hand ran up my side to cup one breast as he lifted it to his mouth and wrapped his lips around my hard nipple.

  Having his mouth on me was infinitesimally better than I had imagined, and my head fell back as I moaned, “Barrett . . .” Then he scraped his teeth against my sensitive peak as he released his mouth, and I cried out.

  “Fucking beautiful,” he said, before he gave my other nipple the same torturous treatment. I looked down and watched his face as he worshipped my breasts. It was rough yet gentle, hard yet soft. We hadn’t even gotten down to business and I was more turned on than I thought possible.

  “Barr—” His hand tugged my head down, my lips crashing into his, teeth clinking before our tongues entwined, and his hand snaked down between our bodies. I straddled his thighs with my knees and lifted my body above him. This gave his hand the room it needed to slide between my legs. He gutturally groaned into my mouth as his first finger trailed down to my entrance before he slowly pushed it inside me. “You’re so fucking wet, Lys. All for me,” he said as he pulled his finger out then back in, adding a second finger, then a third, filling me tight and full. His thumb moved around my clit in dizzying circles, teasing me by touching me everywhere except where he knew I needed him.

  His mouth found my nipple again and he pulsed his tongue in rhythm with the thrust of his fingers inside me. Then he moved his thumb to flick over my clit, and with the scrape of his nail over the sensitive nub, I was pushed over the edge, screaming his name as my climax tore through me. I shook violently for a long while until I slowly came back down to earth. He flipped me over and I expected—hoped—he’d slam his cock into me and go for number two. Instead, he peppered my chest and neck with soft open-mouthed kisses, slowly bringing me down from the high of the past few minutes.

  He shocked me when he kissed my forehead, then my nose, then placed a soft, closed-mouthed kiss on my lips and pushed himself up until he stood beside the bed. His shirt was ripped, his pants intact—although they were sporting a healthy bulge—and a conflicted look was stretched on his face.

  “You deserve better than this.”

  “What?” I asked dazedly.

  “There’s nothing more I want than to take you right now. I loved hearing you call out my name, and you’re fucking beautiful when I make you come, Lys. But you need more than just this,” he said, gesturing to his crotch.

  I propped myself up on my elbows to stare at him, my brows narrowed. “Barrett, whatever you were paid to do, you’re not going to get it from me. You can have my body and we can finally have the hot fuck we’ve both been wanting for the past twenty-four hours or else you can walk out that door and never see me again. So either come here and finish what you started or walk out that door. What’s it to be, Barrett?”

  Never have I felt a thick wave of anger hit a room so quickly as I did then. His mouth contorted into a snarl. “You have no fucking idea what I was paid to do. You have no fucking idea who the hell I am either. The worst thing to come out of all of this, Lys, is that the moment I saw you, I knew that this was never going to be just another job.”

  “Just tell me then!” I yelled as I sat up and grabbed at my robe to cover myself up.

  “I can’t!” he roared back.

  I stood up and moved toward him until we were nose to nose, and I hoarsely whispered, “Then don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

  Without looking back, I walked to the bathroom and slammed the door shut. I locked it behind me and slid my back down the wood until my knees were bent and my ass hit the floor. A dull, delicious ache between my legs reminded me of what Barrett just did to me, of how he’d made me feel and how crazy he’d driven me with just his mouth and fingers.

  Then the tears hit, and they hit hard. The sound of the hotel room door shutting set me off as I realized that he had, in fact, left the room and left me, and proved that I was just a job after all.

  And that hurt more than I ever thought it would.

  The next day I left Las Vegas, my thoughts torn between the events of the day—and night—before. I was resolute in my decision to find out what Barrett had been paid to do and what Gavin had to gain from it.

  Thanks to two nights of very little sleep—albeit for two different reasons, both caused by the same man—the moment I walked through my bedroom door, I dumped my bags on the floor and crawled into bed.

  I’d called my mother from the airport departure lounge, apologizing that we didn’t get to spend more time together.

  “Mom, are you sure about this?”

  “About what dear?” she asked.

  “Are you ready to get married again?”

  She laughed, “I wouldn’t have said yes to Gavin’s proposal if I wasn’t ready, Alyssa.”

  “But do you really know him?”

  “I’ve been with him for over a year. At my age, you know when you’ve met the right man.” Knowing what I knew and fearing what I didn’t, I was worried that neither of us knew Gavin—the real Gavin—at all.

  That last topic left a somewhat sour taste in my mouth. She sounded so happy. I didn’t want to ruin her newly engaged buzz by casting shade on her new fiancé. Until I knew what was going on and what the conversation I’d overheard meant, I had no reason to burst her bubble.

  I had nothing to go on. I couldn’t tell her that I was suspicious of her husband-to-be. All I knew was that he’d paid Barrett to get something out of me—whatever that may have been—for reasons still unknown to me. Not for long though.

  Having already decided that I needed to investigate both of them, I had given myself the task of hiring a private investigator once I had at least something to go on. I had hopes that Aiden’s background check on both Gavin and Barrett would give me a good starting point but after that, I wasn’t sure what I was even looking for.

  The only connection I could deduce was that Gavin was the owner of the Sovereign Hotel, and Barrett seemed to have unlimited access through his ‘contacts’ to make things go his way—like rooftop dream dates. That told me the how, but not the what, or more importantly—the why.

  Finding a needle in a haystack would’ve been an easier job than the one I had ahead of me, but if it meant protecting my mother and myself, then I planned on leaving no stone unturned.

  The day after I got back, I buried myself in my work while I waited to hear back from Aiden. I’d hoped that by keeping busy, I wouldn’t have any time to think about Barrett. It was semi successful but that was better than the alternative, which would’ve been driving myself crazy with conspiracy theories.

  Working long hours and late nights was my solution. You could say it was one of the advantages of being the boss; I could work for as long as I wanted, whenever I wanted.

  Even five years after being unexpectedly thrust into the top job, it still kicked my ass on a daily basis. After finishing high school, I had gone to Berkeley studying English and Media Studies, moving straight on to my MBA after that. It was in my blood; my father shared his passion with me as a child, and that love of the press and writing carried through to my adult life. Taking over the family business was a foregone conclusion; unfortunately it just happened far sooner than any of us ever thought it would.
/>   Jacobs Publishing was started by a Jacobs, and as my father stated in his will, needed to be run by a Jacobs. It was always going to be me. It has to be me. The company was my father’s pride and joy—his biggest achievement in life, other than marrying my mom and creating me.

  He’d started his company with one of his friends straight out of college. His friend gave up on the business, telling my father it was never going to work. Dad being stubborn and determined dedicated every waking moment to making the company a success and ensured it happened. It went from a small eight-page double spread newspaper they would hand deliver to two thousand letterboxes every month, to a million-dollar publishing company. We now had a collection of community newspapers and a monthly magazine that had a circulation in the hundreds of thousands. It was on the back of this success that I’d decided to branch out into new titles and interest areas.

  Five years ago, fresh out of college and expecting to work my way up to the top, I’d received the phone call I would not have wished on anyone. My father had gone out for his morning run and never returned. A few hours later, the police were on my mother’s doorstep telling her that her soul mate was gone.

  Until she met Gavin, my mom had been living under a shadow of grief.

  And after that weekend in Vegas, I now suspected her happiness was under threat because of an overheard conversation and the connection of two men.

  After racking my brain on it all week, by Friday night I’d decided it was that connection that I needed to focus on. I stepped out of the elevator on my floor with a plan to call Aiden when I got to my apartment, but stopped mid step when I saw the man himself standing at my front door.

  “Aly,” he greeted, his smile just as big and as beautiful as I remembered. He was wearing a pair of well-fitting jeans that hugged his thighs, an unzipped hooded jacket and a 49ers T-shirt—his standard off-duty attire.

  “Hi. This is a nice surprise. You said you weren’t coming back up for a month.”