Page 22 of Just My Luck

The kiss was desperate. Raw. Hard. I didn’t want it to stop. I wanted him to take me, here, now, against the door, with god knows who still outside in the office. I didn’t care.

I needed to feel him against me. Skin to skin.

“Jax,” I whispered softly against his lips. Then, the kiss turned soft, slow, passionate with promises, so many promises, and I lost any ability to fight him.

Then the sharp, shrill ring of his cell phone shattered the moment.

He leaned back a little and rested his forehead against mine for a second, his dark blue eyes searching my face with a quiet, desperate plea. But the phone kept ringing—a priority tone reserved strictly for family.

Swallowing hard, he reached into his jacket pocket with a reluctant sigh and slid the screen open, pressing the phone to his ear without taking his gaze off me.

“Jax here,” he said, his voice still low and breathless.

A second passed. Then two.

I watched the color drain from his face in real time. The desperate warmth in his eyes vanished, replaced by a sudden, terrifying emptiness. His grip on my waist went completely slack. His arm dropping to his side as his breathing hitched.

“What?” Jax choked out, his voice cracking on the single syllable. “Where? Which hospital?”

Panic spiked through my blood. I grabbed his forearm, leaning in close. “Jax? What is it? What happened?”

Jax lowered the phone slowly, his hands trembling violently as he stared at me, looking completely shattered.

“It’s my dad,” he whispered, the words barely carrying across the small space between us. “He had a massive heart attack on the golf course.”

The two weeks following that phone call blurred into a bleak, exhausting haze.

I was there for every agonizing milestone—the sterile, frantic hours in the hospital waiting room, the crushing silence when Jax’s mother finally walked out to deliver the sad news, and the rainy, suffocating afternoon of James Mylonas’s funeral. Jax had stood like a stone statue beside his mother and brothers, carrying the quiet, crushing weight of his grief on his shoulders.

I stayed close without being intrusive. I held his hand when he’d let me, cleared away untouched plates of food at his parents’ house, and spent a few quiet, heavy nights at his townhouse, just holding him while he stared at the ceiling in complete silence. But as the days rolled on, Jax threw himself entirely into taking care of his mother and managing the mountain of estate paperwork alongside Rick. He was constantly surrounded by family, and, as much as I loved him, I forced myself to step back. I didn’t want to get in the way, and I didn’t want to force him to manage us on top of his grief.

Even with the distance, and even with the heavy, unspoken grief hanging between us, the fear I’d felt before the heart attack was completely gone.

I knew where we stood now. I knew how hard he’d held onto me in his office right before the world shattered, even if he hadn’t spoken the words I’d needed to hear. Whatever came next—whatever corporate storms were created, whatever fallout came from Onyx, or however long it took Jax to heal—I knew we would make it past it. Together.

It was a quiet Tuesday evening when the silence finally broke.

I was sitting on my living room couch, a cold iced coffee resting in my hands while my laptop hummed on the coffee table. I hadn’t seen Jax in three days, though we’d exchanged brief, tender text messages every morning and night.

The soft, familiar chime of my apartment doorbell cut through the quiet room.

My heart instantly skipped a beat. Setting my mug down, I walked over to the front door and unlocked it.

Jax was standing in the brightly lit hallway. He looked completely worn out. His dark tie hung loosely around his neck. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up to his elbows, and there were shadows purpling the skin beneath his blue eyes. But when his gaze lifted to meet mine, the cold, distant shutter he’d carried since his father’s death disappeared.

“Hey,” he said, his voice low and gravelly.

“Hey,” I whispered, stepping back to let him inside.

Before I could even close the door, he reached out, his fingers wrapping around my wrist as he gently pulled me to his chest. He kicked the door the rest of the way shut with his heel, wrapped both arms tightly around my waist, and buried his face into the crook of my neck, letting out a long breath that sounded like he’d been holding it for weeks.

“I missed you,” he murmured against my skin, his hands pressing warm and solid into the small of my back. “God, Nova, I missed you so much.”

I wrapped my arms around his shoulders, burying my hands in his hair, pulling him as close as physically possible. “I’m right here, Jax. I’m not going anywhere.”

We’d gone slow. We’d taken things fast. This, now, was something else. This was pure comfort.

Our eyes locked as we undressed one another. We talked about our likes and dislikes. We teased. We laughed, moaned, cried out, and, in the end, hit our peaks in unison.