Chapter 460 | I Don’t Want to Marry Him

Chapter 460: 460 | I Don’t Want to Marry Him

Jordan waited, and she kept going without being asked.

"She bought an empty box, Jordan, and she keeps it on her vanity next to her perfume." Alexis let out a laugh that had nothing funny in it. "Yesterday I caught her polishing it, and she told me the box is from Graff, which means the ring will be from Graff, so I should be grateful, and I stood there nodding."

"Did you want to throw it off a balcony?"

"I wanted to throw her off a balcony, which is a much bigger problem." She pulled the sunglasses off, and her blue eyes looked red at the rims and shadowed underneath, the skin there thin and bruised from lost sleep. "I sent you that message at four-thirty in the morning because I was sitting on my closet floor in your stupid shirt, and I realized I haven’t wanted anything for myself since I was fourteen."

The wind picked up, and she rubbed the side of her neck with two fingers. It was a small movement, the kind she probably did a hundred times a day without noticing, but her shoulder jerked up toward her ear when she did it, and her mouth pulled tight for half a second.

Jordan’s palms went warm on his knees. The skill had been sitting under his skin since Tuesday night, quiet until it saw something broken, and now it saw plenty. It read her from the bench like an X-ray, showing him a knot below her left trapezius stacked hard as a walnut, a cord running from her collarbone up behind her ear, and a band across her upper back from sitting upright at fancy dinners while Harrison explained foam.

"Your neck is wrecked," he said, flat and honest, because there was no smooth way to announce it. "Your left trap has a knot in it big enough to anchor a yacht."

"Excuse me?" Alexis pressed her hand flat over the spot, offended on its behalf.

"I can fix it, but give me thirty seconds first." He pulled out his phone before she could answer.

He had rules now, typed into a document by his pregnant girlfriend with his other girlfriend’s hand on his knee, and rule number five said nobody lied. He typed fast to Chloe. "Alexis’s neck is destroyed from stress. I can see it. Massage only, shoulders, over the sweater. Okay?"

The typing dots appeared, vanished, and returned. He could picture Chloe on the couch in his shirt with her eyes narrowed, running the math on how much she trusted him against how much she liked Alexis.

"Shoulders only," Chloe wrote back. "Ten minutes, and I’m timing you. If she makes the noise Kumiko made this morning, you owe me dinner."

Jordan put the phone away and looked at Alexis, who had watched the entire exchange with her eyebrows climbing higher by the second.

"Did you just ask your girlfriend for permission to touch my shoulders?"

"I asked her for ten minutes, and she said yes." He stood up and walked around behind the bench. "You can say no, which is fine, and then we sit here and talk about Graff."

Alexis stared at the ocean for five full seconds. Then she reached back, unclipped her hair, let it fall down her spine in a heavy gold sheet, and swept all of it forward over her right shoulder.

"If you make it weird, I’ll have you killed," she said, and her voice shook on the last word.

Jordan set both palms on her shoulders over the cashmere, and the skill turned on under his hands like someone had flipped a breaker.

Heat poured out of him in a slow flood. It went through the sweater and into her skin, and he felt it find the walnut knot and wrap around it. Alexis went rigid under his hands, every muscle in her back locking up in shock, and a sharp little breath shot out of her.

"Hah! What is that? Why are your hands that hot?"

"Breathe out for me, princess, and let your shoulders drop."

"I told you not to use that word," she snapped, but her shoulders dropped an inch anyway, and she made a small, strangled sound when they did. "Nnh. That is unfair, and I want it on record that it’s unfair."

He pressed his thumb into the knot and moved it in a slow circle. The muscle fought him for three seconds, stubborn and furious, exactly like its owner, and then it gave. It cracked open under his thumb, and heat rushed in behind it.

Alexis gasped and tipped forward, her hands grabbing the edge of the bench so hard her knuckles went white. "Ahh! Oh my God, oh my God, Jordan, wait, stop. No, don’t stop, I didn’t mean stop. Hnnh."

A jogger in neon shorts slowed down on the path, glanced at the blonde girl gasping on a public bench, and then sped up again. Jordan kept his face perfectly calm, which took every ounce of acting ability he had stolen from watching Chloe for six weeks.

"You’re doing great, and nobody’s staring," he lied through a straight face.

"Everyone is staring, and I’m going to have that man deported." She dropped her head forward, and the gold hair slid off her shoulder and hung down past her knees. "Mmh. Do the other side, before I lose my will to be angry about this."

He moved to the cord running up the side of her neck. It was thin and tight enough to pluck like a guitar string, and he stroked his thumb along it from collarbone to ear, slow and steady, letting the heat sink in. Alexis’s whole body shivered from her scalp down to her heels. Her breath went ragged, coming out in soft little hitches that she kept trying to swallow and kept failing to hide.

"Haa, haa. I sat through three Michelin courses of foam for this," she mumbled into her own lap. "I wore the Zimmermann, and my mother said Chanel, and none of it mattered, because apparently all I needed was a boy from a convenience store family with lava in his hands."

"Three convenience stores, princess, so show some respect for the franchise."

Her laugh came out wet and cracked in half, and it turned into a moan halfway through when his thumbs found the band across her upper back. He pressed down on both sides of her spine at once, and the skill surged hot and heavy, and something eighteen years deep in Alexis Van Der Berg finally let go.

"Ahhn! Mmh, ah, ahh!"

The sound bounced off the cliff and rolled out over the cove. Two gulls took off from the railing in a panic. Alexis slapped both hands over her mouth, her face burning scarlet from her hairline all the way down into the collar of her sweater, and her shoulders shook under his palms. Down below, the waves crashed against the rocks with a boom, which did nothing to cover what she had just done in front of a golden doodle and its horrified owner.

Jordan lifted his hands off her and stepped back. His phone vibrated against his hip in a long, insistent pulse, and he ignored it, because he could guess exactly what golden nonsense it wanted to show him, and he did not want to see her as a percentage right now.

Alexis sat hunched over with her face in her hands for a long moment. Her hair spilled everywhere, and the stolen henley cuff peeked out from her sleeve. When she finally sat up, her cheeks were blotchy red, her eyes were wet, and her sunglasses lay crooked on the bench beside her where they had fallen.

"That was the most humiliating experience of my entire life," she told the ocean with enormous dignity. "I want it again on Tuesday."

"You’ll have to clear it with Chloe, since she’s timing me."

"I’ll clear it with Chloe, then, because I’m not an idiot." Alexis wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist, smearing her mascara into a mess she would have murdered anyone else for seeing. Then she went still, her hand resting on the frayed cuff of his shirt, and she turned her head and looked right at him without the sunglasses or the armor or the aristocratic sneer.

"I don’t want to marry him, Jordan, and that’s the real thing I drove down here to say."