by Joss Wood
“I’m thinking that you are absolutely perfect and that I’m desperate to touch you, taste you.” Ryan was surprised to hear the tremble in his voice. This was just sex, he reminded himself. He was just getting caught up in the moment, imagining more than what was actually there.
Except that Jaci was naked, open to his gaze, her face soft and her eyes blazing with desire. And trust. He could do anything right now, suggest anything, and she’d probably acquiesce. She was that into him and he was that crazy about her.
Jaci sat up and placed an openmouthed kiss on his lips. He put his hand on the back of her head to hold her there as her fingers went to the buttons on his black-and-white-checked shirt, ripping one or two off in her haste to get her hands on his skin. Then her small hands, cool and clever, pushed the shirt off his shoulders and danced across his skin, over his nipples, down his chest to tug on the waistband of his pants. Her mouth lifted off his and he felt bereft, wanting—no, needing—more.
“Need you naked.” Jaci tugged on his pants again.
He summoned up enough willpower to resist her, wanting to keep her naked while he explored her body. He’d had a plan and that was to torture Jaci with his tongue and hands, kissing and loving those secret places and making her scream at least twice before he slid on home...
He shrugged out of his shirt and removed his socks and shoes, but his pants were staying on because discovering Jaci, pleasing Jaci, was more important than a quick orgasm. It took all of his willpower to grab her hand and pull it from his dick. He gently gripped her wrists and pushed them behind her back, holding them there while he dropped his head to suck a nipple into his mouth. From somewhere above him Jaci whimpered and arched her back, pushing her nipple against the roof of his mouth. Releasing her hands, he pushed her back and spent some time alternating between the two, licking and blowing and sucking.
He could make her come by just doing this, he realized, slightly awed. But he wanted more for her, from her. Leaving her breasts, he trailed his mouth across her ribs, down her stomach, probed her cute belly button with his tongue. He licked the path on each side of her landing strip and, feeling her tense, dipped between her folds and touched her, tasted her, circling her little nub with the tip of his tongue.
It all happened at once. He slid his finger inside her hot channel, Jaci screamed, his tongue swirled in response and then she was pulsing and clenching around his fingers, thrusting her hips in a silent demand for more. He sucked again, pushed again and she arched her back and hips and shattered, again and again.
Ryan pulled out and dropped a kiss on her stomach before hand-walking his way up the bed to look into her feverish eyes. “Good?” he asked, balancing himself on one hand, biceps bulging, to push her hair out of her eyes.
“So good.” Jaci linked her hands around his neck, her face flushed with pleasure and...yeah, awe.
He’d made her scream, he’d pushed her to heights he was pretty sure—judging by the dazed, surprised look on her face—that she hadn’t felt before. Mission so accomplished.
Jaci’s hands skimmed down his neck, down his sides to grip his hips, her thumbs skating over his obliques before she clasped him in both hands. He jerked and sighed and pushed himself into her hands. “Let me in,” he begged. Begged! He’d never begged in his life.
“Nah.” Jaci smiled that feminine smile that told him that he was in deep, deep trouble. The best type of trouble. “My turn to drive you crazy.”
He knew that he was toast when, in the middle of fantastic, mind-altering sex he realized that this wasn’t just sex. It was sex on steroids and that happened to him only when he became emotionally attached. Well, that had to stop, immediately. Well, maybe after she’d driven him crazy.
Maybe then.
Nine
Sunlight danced behind the blinds in Ryan’s room as Jaci forced her eyes open the next morning. She was lying, as was her habit, on her stomach, limbs sprawled across the bed. And she was naked, which was not her habit. Jaci squinted across the wide expanse that was Ryan’s chest and realized that her knee was nestled up against a very delicate part of his anatomy and that her arm was lying across his hips, his happy-to-see-you morning erection pressing into her skin.
She gazed at his profile and noticed that he looked a lot younger when his face was softened by sleep and a night of spectacular sex. Spectacular sex... Jaci pulled in a breath and closed her eyes as second and third and tenth thoughts slammed into her brain.
Why was she still lying in bed with him in a tangle of limbs and postorgasmic haze? She was smart enough to know that she should’ve taken the many orgasms he’d given her last night, politely said thank you and hightailed it out of his apartment with a breezy smile and a “see you around.” She shouldn’t have allowed him to wrap his big arm around her waist or to haul her into a spooning position, her bottom perfectly nestled in his hips. She shouldn’t have allowed herself to drift, sated and secure, feeling his nose in her hair, reveling in the soft kisses he placed on her shoulders, into her neck. She shouldn’t have allowed herself the pleasure of falling asleep in his arms.
Straight sex, uncomplicated sex, wham-bam sex she could handle; she knew what that was and how to deal with it. It was the optional extras that sent her into a spiral. The hand drifting over her hip, his foot caressing her calf, his thick biceps a pillow under her head. His easy affection scared the pants off her—well, they would if she were wearing any—and generated thoughts of what if and I could get used to this.
This wouldn’t do, Jaci told herself, and gently—and reluctantly—removed her limbs from his body. Nothing had changed between them. They had just shared a physical experience they’d both enjoyed. She was not going to get too anal about this. She wasn’t going to overthink this. This was just sex, and it had nothing to do with the fact that they were boss and employee or even that they were becoming friends.
Sex was sex. Not to be confused with affection or caring or emotion or, God forbid, love. She’d learned that lesson and, by God, she’d learned it well. Jaci slipped out of bed, looking around for something to wear. Unable to bear the thought of slipping into her dress from the night before—she’d be experiencing another walk of shame through Ryan’s apartment lobby soon enough—she picked up his shirt from the night before and pulled it over her head, grimacing as the cuffs fell a foot over her hands. She was such a cliché, she thought, roughly rolling back the fabric. The good girl in the bad boy’s bedroom, wearing his shirt...
After checking that Ryan was still asleep, Jaci rolled her shoulders and looked around Ryan’s room, taking in the details she’d missed before. The bed, with its leather headboard, dominated the room and complemented the other two pieces of furniture: a black wing-back chair and four-drawer credenza with a large mirror above it. Jaci tipped her head as she noticed that there were photograph frames on the credenza but they were all facedown and looked as if they’d been that way for a while. Curious, she padded across the room, past the half-open door that led to a walk-in closet, and stood in front of the credenza. Her reflection in the mirror caused her to wince. Her hair was a mess. She had flecks of mascara on her eyelids, and on her jaw she could see red splotches from Ryan rubbing his stubble-covered chin across her skin. Her eyes were baggy and her face was pale with fatigue.
The morning after the night before, she thought, rubbing her thumb over her eyes to remove the mascara. When the mascara refused to budge, she shrugged and turned her attention back to the frames. Silver, she thought, and a matching set. She lifted the first one up and her breath caught in her throat as the golden image of Ben, bubbling with life, grinned back at her. He looked as if he was ready to step out of the frame, handsome and sexy and so, well, alive. Hard to believe that he was gone, Jaci thought. And if she found it hard, then his brother would find it impossible, and she understood why Ryan wouldn’t want to be slapped in the face with the image of
Ben, who was no more real than fairy dust.
And photograph number two? Jaci lifted up the frame and turned it over, then puzzled at the image of a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who looked vaguely familiar. Who was this and why did she warrant being in an ornate, antique silver frame? She couldn’t be Ryan’s mother. This was a twenty-first-century woman through and through. Was she one of Ryan’s previous lovers, possibly one who got away? But Ryan, according to the press, didn’t have long-term relationships and she couldn’t imagine that he’d keep a photo of a woman he’d had a brief affair with. Jaci felt the acid burn of jealously and wished she could will it away. You had to care about someone to be jealous and she didn’t want to care about Ryan...not like that, anyway.
Jaci replaced the frame and when she looked at her reflection in the mirror, she saw that Ryan was standing behind her and that a curtain had fallen within his fabulous eyes. Her affectionate lover was gone.
“Don’t bother asking,” Ryan told her in a low, determined voice. He was as naked as a jaybird but his emotions were fully concealed. He might as well have been wearing a full suit of armor, Jaci thought. She couldn’t help feeling hurt at his back-off expression; she found it so easy to talk to him but he, obviously, didn’t feel the same.
Maybe she’d read this situation wrong; maybe they weren’t even friends. Maybe the benefits they’d shared were exactly that, just benefits. The thought made her feel a little sad. And, surprisingly, deeply annoyed. How dare he make incredible, tender-but-hot love to her all night and then freeze her out before she’d even said good-morning?
The old Jaci, Lyon House Jaci, would just put her tail between her legs, scramble into her dress and apologize for upsetting him. New York Jaci had no intention of doing the same.
“That’s it?” she demanded, hands on her hips. “That’s all you’re going to say?”
Ryan pushed a hand through his dark hair and Jaci couldn’t miss his look of frustration. “I am not starting off the morning by having a discussion about her.”
“Who is she?” Jaci demanded.
Ryan narrowed his eyes at her. “What part of ‘not discussing this’ didn’t you hear?” He reached for a pair of jeans that draped across the back of his chair and pulled them on.
Jaci matched his frown with one of her own. “So it’s okay for you to get me to spill my guts about my waste-of-space ex and his infidelities but you can’t even open up enough to tell me who she is and why she’s on your dresser?”
“Yes.”
Jaci blinked at him.
“Yes, it’s okay for you to do that and me not to,” Ryan retorted. “I didn’t torture you into telling me. It was your choice. Not telling you is mine.”
Jaci pressed the ball of her hands to her temples. How had her almost perfect night morphed into something so... She wanted to say ugly but that wasn’t the right word. Awkward? Unsettling? Uncomfortable? She desperately wanted to argue with him, to insist that they were friends, that he owed her an explanation, but she knew that he was right; it was his choice and he owed her nothing. He’d given her physical pleasure but there had been no promises to give her his trust, to let her breach his emotional walls. His past was his past, the girl in the photograph his business.
If his reluctance to talk, to confide in her, made her feel as if she was just another warm body for him to play with during the night, then that was her problem, not his. She would not be that demanding, insecure, irritating woman who’d push and pry and look to him to give more than he wanted to.
He’d wanted sex. He’d received sex and quite a lot of it. It had been fun, a physical release, and it was way past time for her to leave. Jaci dropped her eyes from his hard face, nodded quickly and managed to dredge up a cool smile and an even cooler tone. “Of course. Excuse me, I didn’t mean to pry.” She walked across the room, picked up her dress and her shoes, and gestured to the door to the en suite bathroom. “If I may?”
Ryan rubbed the back of his neck and sent her a hot look. “Don’t use that snotty tone of voice with me. Just use the damn bathroom, Jace.”
Hell, she just couldn’t say the right thing this morning, Jaci thought. It was better if she just said nothing at all. Jaci walked toward the bathroom without looking at him again, silently cursing herself and calling herself all kinds of a fool.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. She should’ve left last night and avoided this morning-after-the-night-before awkwardness.
Lesson learned.
* * *
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Ryan gripped the edge of the credenza with white-knuckled hands and straightened his arms, dropping his head to stare at the wooden floor beneath his bare feet. You handled that with all the sophistication of a pot plant, moron. She’d asked a simple question to which there was a simple answer.
Who is she?
There were many answers to that, some simple, some a great deal more complicated. She was someone who was, once, important to me. Or... She was an ex-girlfriend. Or that, She was my fiancée. Or, if he really wanted to stir up a hornets’ nest, he could’ve said that she was Ben’s lover.
All truth.
What a complete mess of the morning, Ryan thought, straightening. He stepped over to the window and yanked up the blind and looked down onto the greenery of Central Park in spring. It was a view he never failed to enjoy, but this morning he couldn’t even do that, his thoughts too full of the woman—who was probably naked—in the next room.
Instead of slipping out of bed and getting dressed long before his lover woke up, this morning he’d opened his eyes on a cloud of contentment and had instinctively rolled over to pull her back into his arms. The empty space had been a shock to his system, a metaphorical bucket of icy water that instantly shriveled his morning erection. She’d left him, he’d thought, and the wave of disappointment that followed was even more of a shock. He did the leaving, he was in control, and the fact that he was scrambling to find his mental equilibrium floored him. He didn’t like it.
At all.
He’d long ago perfected his morning-after routine, but nothing with Jaci was the same as those mindless, almost faceless encounters in his past. Last night had been the most intense sexual experience of his life to date and he hated that she’d had such an effect on him. He wanted to treat her like all those other encounters but he couldn’t. She made him want things that he’d convinced himself he had no need for, things such as trust and comfort and support. She made him feel everything too intensely, made him question whether it was time to remove the barbed wire he’d wrapped his heart in.
Seeing her holding Kelly’s photograph made him angry and, worse, confused. There was a damn good reason why he kept their photographs in a prominent place. Seeing them there every morning, even facedown, was like being flogged with a leather strap, but after the initial flash of pain, it was a good and solid reminder of why he chose to live his life the way he did. People couldn’t be trusted; especially the people who were supposed to love you the most.
Yet a part of him insisted that Jaci was not another Kelly, that she’d never mangle his heart as she’d done, but then his common sense took over and reminded him that he couldn’t take the chance. Love and trust—he’d never run the risk of having either of those emotions thrown back at him as if they meant nothing.
They meant something to him and he’d never risk them again.
It was better this way, Ryan told himself, sliding a glance toward the still-closed bathroom door. It was better that he and Jaci put some distance between them, allowed some time to dilute the crazy passion that swirled between them whenever they were alone. Because passion had a sneaky way of making you want more, tempting you to risk more than was healthy.
No, they needed that distance, and the sooner the better. Ryan walked into his closet, grabbed a T-shirt and shoved his feet into a pair of batter
ed athletic shoes. He raked his hands through his hair, walked back into his bedroom and picked up his wallet from the credenza, in front of the now-upright photo of Ben.
“Hey, Jaci?” Ryan waited for her response before speaking again in an almost jovial voice. God, the last thing in the world he felt was jovial. He felt horny, and frustrated and a little sick, but not jovial. “I’m running out for bagels and coffee. I’ll be back in ten.”
He already knew how she’d respond and she didn’t disappoint. “I won’t be here when you get back. I’ve got a...thing.”
She didn’t have a thing any more than he wanted bagels and coffee but it was an out and he’d take it. “Okay. Later.”
Later? Ryan saw that his hand was heading for the doorknob and he ruthlessly jerked it back. He was not going in there. If he saw Jaci again he’d want to take her to bed and that would lead to more confusing...well, feelings, and he didn’t need this touchy-feely crap.
Keep telling yourself that, Jackson. Maybe you’ll start to believe it sometime soon.
* * *
It was spring and the sprawling gardens at Lyon House, Shropshire, had never looked so beautiful with beds of daffodils and bluebells nodding in the temperate breeze. At the far edge of the lawn, behind the wedding tent, it looked as if a gardener had taken a sponge and dabbed the landscape with colored splotches of rhododendron and azalea bushes, a mishmash of brilliant color that hurt the eyes.
It was beautiful, it was home.
And she was miserable.
Sitting in the chapel that had stood for centuries adjacent to Lyon House, Jaci rolled her head to work out the kinks in her neck. If she looked out the tiny window to her left, she could see the copse of trees that separated the house from the chapel, and beyond that the enormous white designer fairy-tale tent—with its own dance floor—that occupied most of the back lawn. It was fairly close to what she’d planned for her own wedding, which had been scheduled for six weeks from now. Like the bride, she would’ve dressed at Lyon House, in her old room, and her mother would’ve bossed everyone about as she had been doing all day. The grounds would have been as spectacular, and she would’ve had as many guests. Like Neil, her groom would’ve been expectant, nervous, excited.