YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME, YET
BILLY
Frankie’s hazel eyes seem darker, like pools of decadent caramel melting on a stovetop. She also, for the first time since I met her, seems needy. Desperate. If I tell her enough of the truth, she’ll let me touch her tonight,reallytouch her like I’ve wanted to since laying eyes on her as a stupid kid. Because she wants me as much as I want her. That realization gives me the strength I need to continue talking. “My mum snapped. The very night after we met, when I was supposed to meet you again at the beach. She was back in Australia, freaking out because I was supposed to race for the first time since he died the next weekend, which is why I was in Monaco, as you know.”
“You’d just rejoined your F2 team,” Frankie whispers. “My Dad was excited you’d decided to come back and were supposed to race the next one after Monaco. He followed your career closely at that point.”
“Because he was already thinking of making me an offer.” I nod slowly. “Anyway Mum wasn’t stable and she…”
Got news that confirmed my dad never loved her and had even given his heart to someone else…
“My mum tried to kill herself that weekend. My uncle found her unconscious on the floor of my childhood house after she swallowed half the medicine cabinet and called me as I was getting ready to meet you for that second date. Mum was in the ICU so I called my Team Principal and talked to my manager, who told the world I needed more time to grieve. Then I jumped on the next flight back to Australia, where I spent the next four weeks sorting out family shit, and visiting my mum in a mental health facility.”
Frankie is wide-eyed as she takes this all in. It’s weird that it feels like this is the first time she’s heard any of this. We’d managed to keep my mom’s situation out of the media, but my delayed return to racing made news everywhere. I missed out on the Barcelona and Amsterdam races. It made sports news around the globe, poor devastated son of a racing legend can’t get back behind the wheel, blah, blah, blah. I’m shocked she didn’t hear about it. But then I remember, Frankie overdosed too that very weekend and was shipped immediately to a rehab facility. She was there for months. By the time she reappeared, I was racing again, and it had already been announced I would move up to F1 the following season with Mirabella.
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know…” she whispers so quietly I can barely hear it above the soft night breeze and languid slosh of the water around us. “I was… I went away.”
“I know,” I whisper back and stop myself from saying more. I have questions. I always have since I heard the news, because the girl I’d spent twelve hours getting to know was strong and smart and confident and not at all someone with a drug problem so intense she would overdose twenty-four hours later.
She swallows hard and looks me dead in the eyes.
“I don’t regret much in life, but I do regret that,” I say, my voice low but even. “I feel like if I’d been there you wouldn’t have…”
“I didn’t,” Frankie replies in a confident, calm tone. It’s so matter-of-fact it’s confusing. What does she mean? How can she argue the fact that she overdosed? She was found aspirating on her own vomit in a bath tub on a party boat. “I don’t want to talk about that night.”
“Okay…”
“I don’t want to talk at all,” she says. Then she reaches out and touches the pad of her thumb to my cheek, grazing the damp stubble by my jaw until she skims over my lips. I part them and wrap them around her thumb, my teeth slowly biting down on the tiny fleshy pad. She shivers with desire. For me.
“Not your boss?” she whispers, repeating what I told her earlier.
I let go of her thumb. “Not yet.”
“You went home that night instead of meeting me. You left Monaco?”
“Yes. I went to Australia.” I nod. “Frankie… I can’t—”
“No talking,” she snaps, gentle but firm.
I smile. “Okay. Then I’m going to kiss you.”
“Good.”
I don’t even hesitate after that. My hands emerge from the water and slip into her tangled wet hair, gripping tightly on the back of her skull as I pull her face to mine. Our lips connect and I’m instantly tumbling into a vortex of lust I’ve kept locked tight inside me for nearly a decade. I knew I couldn’t have her, so I refused to let it out, but now… on the brink of nails being put in the box that holds these feelings, nails in the form of Frankie Castera becoming my boss, I’m being given the chance to fling it open and release all the pent-up frustration, so you bet your ass I’m not holding back.
I am shaking. I want this –her– that badly. Our lips crash together, and I immediately open her mouth with the pressure of my own, and my tongue slides in. This kiss is worth the decade-long hiatus. But at the same time, I am kicking myself even harder for playing it so cool back at seventeen. All we did was kiss that night, and we even waited right until dawn to do it. It had felt so right back then, so different. I was having sex already and getting it easy and fast, but Frankie had spent the night giving me something I wasn’t used to, a connection. So when she only gave me a kiss, albeit a searing one that wrapped itself around the deepest parts of me, and promised me there would be more if I played my cards right, I had nodded and acted cool. Because I thought in that very moment, that we had all the time in the world. I had no idea both our lives would turn upside down within twelve hours and never be the same again. I should have begged her for sex like a desperate forty-year-old virgin.
I’m going for it now, knowing tomorrow isn’t guaranteed, and even if it was, by next week she’s off limits forever. So I’m kissing her with the heat and passion of every lost moment, every regret, every secret, taboo thought I’ve had about her. And there have been more than I can count.
“That was a long time coming,” she gasps as the kiss finally ends.
“So is this,” I murmur, my lips precariously close to her ear, my stubble grazing her cheek. My hands grab her thighs again and I lift her up and rut myself right between her legs again.
This time she doesn’t push me away, she pulls me closer. She wraps her delicate but powerful arms around my neck and tilts her hips as she hooks her ankles behind my back, and her core, covered only with the thin glittery fabric of her tiny bikini bottom, glides right over my exposed and achingly hard cock. My groan is guttural, like an animal snared in a trap, and it brings a victorious smile to her lips.
“Don’t get cocky, love,” I whisper, moving my mouth to cover that smile.
I kiss her long, hard, and rough. This is not how I expected tonight to end up. Not in a million years. But it’s how I wished that first night, our only night, had ended. Hell, I’ve wished it a hundred times over in the years that have passed. God, this was worth the wait. She feels amazing pressed between my body and the wall of the pool, every inch of her skin sliding against every inch of mine. My dick is harder than the concrete pool deck, and as I bite down on her earlobe, she tilts her pelvis and rubs herself shamelessly along my shaft.
