She suspected it was all those things, but throw in a very sexy, intense Jonathan Lyons sitting across from her? Sleep was impossible. He was wearing another blazer over a T-shirt and jeans, and the effect was overtly masculine and confidently casual at the same time.
Sad to say, she was still affected by his presence. Their sexual relationship was ten years in the past, but the way her nipples seemed to react, you’d think it was just yesterday that he’d had his mouth on them. Of course, she couldn’t blame her nipples—not when the rest of her body wasn’t playing fair, either. There was an ache between her legs that wouldn’t go away, and her skin prickled with awareness whenever he drew close enough for her to smell his aftershave.
Her mind was the most traitorous of all, because every time Violet closed her eyes, she saw Jonathan’s body moving over hers. It wasn’t the nineteen-year-old Jonathan, either. It was the man seated across from her, hard with muscle, eyes world-weary and intense all at once. He’d been sexy as a college boy, but he was utterly devastating as an adult man.
And it was making her antsy as hell.
She shifted in her chair again.
“Can’t sleep?” Jonathan asked, and his foot nudged her leg from across the aisle.
Well, no sense in pretending any longer. She straightened up and propped her chin on her hand. “Something tells me that all that Starbucks earlier was a bad call.” Your proximity isn’t helping. She didn’t say that aloud, though. Not while they were on neutral ground. But still, the man should have guessed that his sitting directly across from her in a plane with at least a dozen other empty seats would rattle her, right? Or he should have known that when he sat with his legs open and sprawled as if he owned the place, it would make her body break out in goose bumps.
Heck, he probably did own the place. “Too much coffee,” she muttered when a new round of goose bumps pricked her arms and she rubbed them.
The smile he gave her was slow, gorgeous, his gaze utterly focused on her. “You’ll wind down in a bit.”
For some reason, she felt nervous and fluttery under that intense stare. “I suppose.” Now that they’d vowed to just be friends, it seemed her body—stupid, stupid body—was fixated on other, non-friend-like things.
“Can I ask you a question?”
Her heart started thumping faster, and her gaze went to his sensual mouth. She tried to play it casual, though. “Oh, um . . . question? Sure?”
“How many do you think there will be?”
For the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. “How many what?”
“Letters? Clues to follow?”
“Oh!” Her mind had been anywhere but on their actual business together. “Usually there were about four.”
“Mmm. So we’re looking at two more.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
Violet found herself staring at his long fingers as he rubbed. She flexed her own. Down, girl. It’s still Jonathan, jerk at heart. Except she wasn’t so sure she believed that anymore. “Don’t get too excited,” she blurted. “I’ve found every single one of these chases to be a disappointment at the end.”
“Even so.” He continued to rub his chin idly, and she had to hold back the urge to snatch his hand away from his jaw. That slow, thoughtful rubbing was driving her to distraction. “There has to be a point to this little postmortem game of his. Even if we discount the fact that he hid his journals, it’s not like Dr. DeWitt to steal from an excavation site.”
“I told you the point already,” Violet said, her irritation ratcheting up a notch. “He wants to get me back in your life so you’ll continue to fund all of his projects. My face in front of yours will be a nice little reminder of what he wants. This is all just more maneuvering from him.”
“Mmm. You sound angry. He wasn’t a very good father to you, was he?”
She sighed. “Are we going to talk about this now?”
“What’s wrong with now? Was I keeping you from your sleep?” Damn it, now he was aiming that lethal smile at her again, as if they were sharing a secret.
“No,” she snapped, her tone a little more brusque than it should have been. Violet straightened in her chair again. “But of the two of us, you’re the only one who seems to have pleasant memories of him.”
“I don’t recall you hating him that summer—”
“That was a fluke,” she interrupted. She knew exactly how she felt about her father, and didn’t need anyone else reminding her. “That was back when I still thought I could get him to care about me. I learned my lesson and didn’t make that mistake again.”
“I find it hard to believe he didn’t care about you at all,” Jonathan said in a quiet voice. “In fact, I find it almost impossible to conceive of anyone willfully disliking you.”
She squirmed in her seat. Surely she’d mistaken the heat in his tone. It was her own imagination running away from her. “My father cared about one person and one person alone. Himself. Everything he did was to further his own ambitions. He destroyed my mother with his neglect.”
Jonathan tilted his head, regarding her. “Dr. DeWitt never talked about your mother.”
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why?”
“Well, what’s there to talk about?” Violet rested her head against the back of the chair and tried to think of her mother without tears in her eyes. It was surprisingly difficult; all her lingering memories of Connie DeWitt involved her depression, her drinking, and how it had affected Violet. “She married him when she was twenty and he was fifty. My mom was one of his students, back when he still taught at the university. She was young and pretty and totally in love with him. He was, well . . . He was an old perv.”
Jonathan didn’t laugh.
Violet shrugged and went on. “They had me a few years later, and pretty much after that, my dad grew more and more famous, and the more famous he got, the less he came home. He drove my mother to depression, and when the drugs didn’t work, she drank herself into a stupor. She cried over everything.” Her throat went dry and she thought of her lonely childhood, full of dark rooms and tiptoeing quietly through the living room because Mom was passed out drunk on the couch. At least when Mom was asleep, she wasn’t weeping. The weeping was worse than anything. “My father would show up a few months later and everything would be great for about a day or two. Then they’d start fighting, my mother would cry and get depressed all over again, and then my father would leave as soon as he could get out the door.”
“I’m guessing that’s why it’s so hard for you to trust people.”
She gave him a sharp look, her hands twisting in her lap. But there was no judgment in Jonathan’s gaze, no reproach, just that wicked intensity she found so enthralling. Like she was a puzzle he’d put aside for ten years and had decided to solve again. Except she didn’t need solving, or saving. She was doing just fine on her own. “I’m sure my father seemed like a paragon to you, but he was only good to people who could get him what he wanted. The rest of us, he just didn’t give a crap about.”
“I never knew,” he said softly.
“That’s because I never let anyone know that it bothered me,” Violet confessed, and was surprised to hear those words coming out of her own mouth. How many years of therapy had it taken for her to get there? Violet knew she wasn’t good at sharing. Hell, she sucked at it. She expected everyone around her to come after her with an agenda.
No wonder she’d assumed the worst about Jonathan.
You don’t know that it’s not true, she chided herself. Still, she kept thinking about his days-long drinking binge and how upset he’d been when she’d attacked him. Drinking yourself into a stupor wasn’t the action of a happy person. She knew that from experience with her mother. You drank to forget the world.
Maybe she’d withheld too much of herself from him once upon a time.
; Maybe it wasn’t entirely Jonathan’s fault that he hadn’t come after her. Maybe she hadn’t made her feelings clear enough. Hell, maybe she hadn’t been clear enough about the baby. At nineteen, dancing around the topic of marriage and family and then sending a note had seemed obvious. Ten years later, it just seemed childish. Maybe she hadn’t let him in long enough to have him see the real girl underneath all the armor, the scared, lonely pregnant teenager who just wanted a family of her own that wouldn’t drink or disappear on her.
She bit her lip. God, she hated thinking about the past. Violet glanced back at Jonathan. “So . . . how have the last ten years treated you?”
“They’ve been lonely.”
She knew why. He said he’d missed her. It made her . . . uncomfortable. And also breathless and excited, even though she knew she shouldn’t be. And angry at herself for being breathless and excited. Violet waved a hand. “Other than that, I mean.”
“I’ve been busy with projects. The first two years after I got out of college, I spent getting the car company back on its feet. It mostly took some shuffling of management and some new ideas.”
“Now you’re being modest,” she told him. She’d read the Time magazine articles about how his creative ideas and smart investments had turned Lyons Motors around and made them a force to be reckoned with.
He shrugged. “It’s just work. It’s not where my heart is. As soon as Lyons Motors could run itself, I started traveling.”
“Traveling?” she asked, a touch wistful. Once upon a time, she’d wanted to travel as much as he had. “Where did you go?”
A flash of real pleasure crossed his face, and her body reacted to see that. “Where haven’t I gone?” Jonathan said, and to her surprise, he got up out of his chair and sat down on the seat next to her own. She started to protest until he pulled out his tablet computer and began to show her photos of his travels.
And then, she was just fascinated.
“You went to Macchu Picchu?” She grabbed his hand, stopping him on the current photo before he could scroll past it. His fingers locked and twined with hers, something she tried not to notice.
“I’ve been twice,” Jonathan told her. “It’s fascinating but not quite as untouched as the Galapagos or even Easter Island.”
Her breath caught in her throat. “You’ve been to Easter Island?”
He nodded and looked over at her, and his thumb rubbed against one of her fingers still tangled with his. An accident, she told herself. “Want to see pictures?”
She nodded.
He pulled his hand from hers—almost reluctantly—and began to swipe through the photos again.
For the next couple of hours, Jonathan showed her photos and told her stories of his travels. While she’d been struggling through college and working shit jobs to make ends meet, he’d been traveling up one side of the world and down the other. There were photos of Antarctica, Tibet, the Great Wall, the Australian Outback, water caves in Thailand, Mongolian steppes, and more incredible locations. Each place had a story with it, and Jonathan filled her in on the details. How crisp the water tasted in Iceland, how you couldn’t toss any of your waste—even human waste—in the Antarctic. How nomadic peoples still crossed the steppes in Asia. How Tokyo seemed to be lit up like Christmas at every hour of the day.
It was all wonderful, and the way he described it with such enthusiasm made her imagine she was right there with him, snorkeling off the Great Barrier Reef, skydiving over the Grand Canyon, marathoning in the Antarctic. She snuggled against his shoulder and peered at the pictures as he talked, and dreamed of being there with him, living life to its fullest.
Eventually, though, her head began to nod and she yawned.
Jonathan put the tablet away but didn’t get up. “Get some sleep, Violet. We have a long flight tonight.”
“Mm, I should. The chair’s uncomfortable though. It’s not made for short people.” She’d curled her legs up under her now that she could lean on Jonathan, but as soon as he got up, she’d be without a prop to snuggle up against.
“You can use my arm as a pillow. I don’t mind.” His voice was low and soft and seemed just as sleepy as her own.
It occurred to Violet that she should protest and lean against the window or something. But Jonathan was warm and smelled good and he was right there already. She didn’t even have to move, really. Just close her eyes and doze off and let Jonathan’s strong arms handle things.
She shouldn’t lean against him, but she didn’t move. She didn’t want to. As she drifted off to sleep, it occurred to her that she never got to ask Jonathan the things she’d really wanted to ask him about the last ten years. Things like if he’d had a girlfriend, or a wife, or any children. Important things.
But then she fell asleep, and it didn’t matter.
—
Jonathan didn’t move a muscle as Violet curled against him and slept, as trusting as a kitten. Her dark hair lay against her cheek, so shiny and soft that he longed to touch it. But he wouldn’t move, lest she wake up, realize how close she’d tucked her body against his, and come to her senses.
He just savored the moment instead. The warm feel of her smaller form against his. Her soft skin where it brushed against his hand. The even breaths she took, even the tiny little snore she emitted when her head tilted back a bit. He loved all of it.
He thought about their conversations tonight. It had been rough on him to see the longing in her eyes as he showed her pictures of his travels. He’d avoided showing her pictures of the trips he’d taken with her father, unwilling to sour her mood. He’d showed her his personal trips instead, trips all over the world with friends, family, and sometimes by himself. To her, they represented adventures. To him, they were just distractions—another diversion to try to stop him from dwelling on his aching loneliness and the longing he had for Violet.
But he wasn’t lonely any longer. She was here, and she was curled up at his side. His heart felt so full that he might explode from the sheer joy of it.
He thought about DeWitt and his envelopes. Four rounds of these. Five, if he was lucky. That wasn’t enough time. There’d never be enough time. He’d have to figure out some way to stretch things out, to make his time with Violet last for as long as possible . . . without raising her suspicions, of course.
In her sleep, she sighed and burrowed against his arm, mumbling something under her breath.
Greatly daring, Jonathan reached with his free hand and gently brushed a lock of dark hair off of her forehead. She didn’t stir, just continued sleeping.
If there was a way to extend this to keep Violet at his side, he’d do it. He’d do anything.
SEVEN
This is Higginson Park,” Violet said, reading the tourism site she’d found online. Her fingers brushed over the tablet’s surface. “I think it’s where we need to be.”
“Sounds good,” Jonathan said, motioning to the cab driver. He offered the man money as they pulled over on High Street. “Wait here and we’ll be back shortly.”
They exited the cab and headed to the park together. Violet was practically trembling with excitement. It seemed stupid to get worked up over one of her father’s letters, but she was here in the United Kingdom, about to search under a two-hundred-year-old bridge for a clue that her father had left behind, after his death. She’d have to be a statue not to get a little antsy over that.
Couple it with the fact that she’d had more erotic dreams about Jonathan on the plane ride and had woken up to find her hand on his thigh? Well. That didn’t help her nerves any.
Violet smoothed her hair behind one ear and decided to ignore Jonathan and concentrate on her surroundings. There were trees, flowers, and greenery everywhere. It was early in the morning, and the skies were overcast and gray. A light fog hovered over the grounds, and along one of the paths she could see a decorative sign that read Thames F
ootpath. She pointed to it and Jonathan nodded. There were a few vendors just setting up down the road, and Violet suppressed a yawn. Maybe after they found her father’s envelope, they could head to a nearby coffee shop and get something to wake her up.
As they approached the river, several ducks began to swim toward them, quacking. “Oh, dear,” Violet said with a laugh as the ducks continued to follow them as they walked. “I think they’re expecting a handout.”
“Unless they want a stick of gum, I don’t have anything for them.”
She laughed again, tucking another lock of hair behind her ears. The laugh died when she saw the intense, almost hungry look Jonathan cast in her direction. God, how had she ever thought that they could hang out together as friends? Jonathan didn’t know how to be friendly with a woman. All he knew how to do was devour her with his eyes.
Like he was doing right now.
Averting her gaze, she took another experimental step forward, and the ducks continued to swim alongside. “We should get something to distract them,” she told him. And you. “Do you want to go to a nearby coffee shop and get something to eat?”
“I suppose I could,” he said slowly. “Do you want something, too?”
“That’d be lovely,” she told him, flashing him a smile. “Three sugars, extra cream?”
He nodded and jogged down the path, heading in the opposite direction from where she stood. She watched him go, admiring the lines of his shoulders in his jacket and the way his ass filled out the back of his jeans. Damn you for not having a potbelly and a bald spot, she thought with a self-deprecating grin. Then, she turned and marched toward the Marlow Bridge, tablet clutched tightly in hand.
Following the footpath, she soon came to the bridge and edged toward a plaque set amongst the bricks, curious despite herself. Marlow Suspension Bridge, it read, along with the name of the designer. She scanned it but there was no mention of “Ozymandias,” no mention of Percy Shelley, and she felt a bit of doubt. What if they were grasping at straws? Surely her father hadn’t meant for them to take thirteen steps underneath the bridge?
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