by Ciji Ware
“It’s also foolhardy, reckless, and insane. The unvarnished truth is, I’ve never really trusted you, J.D. And I’m not sure I do even now.”
“Never trusted me about what?” he murmured into her ear.
His breath was warm and soothing. All thoughts of her father’s last poker game and the fate of women like poor Ling Lee flew out of her head. Amelia grasped for some shred of sanity while attempting unsuccessfully to ignore J.D.’s hand continuing to massage her right breast.
She heaved a small sigh and pushed her hips ever so gently against the swelling between his legs. “What we’re doing right now is also appallingly unprofessional. But it’s definitely real.”
“And you’re woman enough to admit it, aren’t you, because we both know the pleasure that’s in store.”
Oh yes, indeed… the pleasure, Amelia thought, while little charges of electricity surged through her limbs. For several delicious minutes, she surrendered to the pure sensation of J.D. kissing her on each eyelid, her earlobes, and a spot at the base of her neck where the spurts of current shifted to bolts of lightning.
“Yes… oh yes, please,” she sighed again as he began the task of freeing the top buttons on her shirtwaist. When his warm palm invaded her blouse and smoothed across her skin, she lost all sense of time or place, her heightened sensibilities blotting out everything except the astonishing feel of his hand cupping her flesh.
Finally, he stepped back and then led her through the doorway. Once inside his private rooms, he sat her on the bed, knelt, and slowly, deliberately removed her boots, stockings, and garters in turn. For a few moments, he massaged her calves and the soles of her feet.
Then he asked, “Stand for a moment, will you please?” He lifted her skirts and unfastened the button on the pair of man’s trouser she habitually wore on site. “Now, this is a first,” he said with a roguish smile as he pushed the cloth down the length of her slender legs. “Step out from them, please,” he ordered.
“Oh Lord…” Amelia said with a sigh as J.D. began to pay rapt attention to the small, silk-covered buttons that marched down the front of her shirtwaist. As he unhooked each fastening, he pressed his lips on the patch of skin thereby uncovered.
“So warm…” he murmured.
In the way the memory of her first night with Etienne drifted through her mind, she was now wondering if J.D. thought at all of Ling Lee. In the next instant, all rational thoughts of the past were banished by the simple act of his fingers undoing the solitary button on the waist of her workday skirt.
“There,” he said, the fabric falling to the floor. “That was easy.”
“In Paris, I abandoned my corsets, so the next part’s easy too.”
J.D. chuckled. “Such a woman of the twentieth century you are.” By this time, he had smoothed her petticoat over her hips and they both watched the garment pool at her feet next to her skirt and her father’s trousers. “And such lovely architecture, Amelia,” he whispered. His languid glance swept from her bare feet to her face. “So beautiful.” He lightly settled a hand on each breast, still covered by her thin chemise.
She could have stilled his kneading fingers, but she realized with some surprise that she wouldn’t dream of it. J.D. had been right a few minutes earlier. For better or for worse, she wanted exactly what he wanted and she watched him call forth sensations from her with a rising sense of anticipation and impatience. She helped him remove her remaining piece of clothing and then reached for his waistband.
“Here,” she murmured. “Let me do that. And while we’re on the subject of architecture, I’m longing to see…”
And then there were no more barriers of clothing or embarrassment or shyness, but merely a driving need to fall onto the mattress covering J.D.’s big brass bed. The room was chilly, as the hour approached midnight, but from somewhere, J.D. had secured a feather duvet that felt soft and welcoming when he gently eased her onto her back.
“The bed’s just like the one you had before the second hotel blew up.”
“Sears and Roebuck’s best, darling,” he said, bending forward to brush his lips against a sensitive spot below her breastbone. “When I like something, I never change my tastes.”
A faint aroma of verbena teased her nostrils as J.D. lowered himself beside her on the duvet. The lemony tang mixed with his masculine scent and a whiff of sea air seeping through window frames scheduled to be caulked the following week.
Amelia reached her arms over her head and grabbed the headboard’s bars, stretching contentedly, the champagne she’d consumed keeping her warm. “Remember the night of China Alley, when I sat next to you on the bed and gave you a cup of tea?”
“I don’t remember the tea. I just remember you. Sitting on my bed.”
How different tonight was from that time Angus and she had laid J.D.’s unclothed, beaten body on the bed. This night, she gazed boldly at his long, lean form, a man of thirty-six, in vibrant health—though his skin was scored by war and natural disaster. He lay beside her, hovering close with all his strength and power. She ran her fingertips along the scars on his rib cage and reached above his shoulders to touch the marks on his forehead for a second time. Then she allowed her right hand to drift downward, past his waist to his thigh where she found a patch of raised skin, the place a bullet entered his leg during the battle on San Juan Hill.
“You’ve lived a dangerous life, J.D. Thayer,” she murmured, and slid down his body to kiss the wound.
She felt his hands lightly touch the back of her head and then press her firmly against him. The fire that had destroyed that other bed, that mattress, that hotel, was now forgotten in the urgency of a newly kindled flame. He allowed her the freedom to explore, to stoke the flames until a moment of near crisis, when he reached down and lifted her toward the pillows at their head so he could gaze into her eyes.
“Amelia… Amelia. Such a kind and generous lady…”
She only had time to gasp before his fingers gently slipped into the warmth between her legs. “Do they do this in Paris, I wonder?” he murmured into her neck.
Amelia, of course, was powerless to offer him an answer, for he’d begun to coax, to tease, to torment her into a state of rampant desire that had only dimmest echoes of Paris or anywhere else.
She had no doubt that what they were doing was utter folly, fraught with future complications she could not, in her present state of unbridled thirst, even imagine. But J.D. easily drove those last, sensible thoughts clear out of her head and smothered any reservations she might weakly summon at this late state by pressing the length of his body against her own.
The consummate gambler, tonight J.D. played card trick after card trick in a high-stakes game calculated to provoke in her an avalanche of sensation as he marked every inch of her as his own. When, finally, he entered her with a sureness of his welcome and a dazzling display of skill, he repeatedly invoked her name, telling her of his unbounded pleasure and delight. In the end, she simply surrendered to the inevitability that she too had not changed her tastes for passion and risk-taking, nor would she decline this brazen invitation to feel fully and exquisitely human.
The earthquake and fire had nearly destroyed them, she thought, pulling him closer still, but fate obviously had another plan. Suddenly, Amelia couldn’t care less what Julia Morgan or anyone else might think of her. She was alive when she could easily have been dead. She could touch and taste and smell and virtually see the very essence of this fellow survivor. She was in this bed, with this man. In this most precious place where, strangely, she sensed her grandfather’s loving presence.
She luxuriated in the piercing feel of J.D. exhorting her to take the journey with him, and she knew, without a doubt, that the genie was well and truly out of the bottle—and might not ever be put back.
***
The next day dawned with the kind of harsh reality that Amelia had fully anticipated the previous evening.
“Does your head hurt as much as mine?” J.D. inquired o
f the prone form that lay buried beneath the bedcovers. Amelia’s unbound hair was completely covered by a pillow.
“It’s my brain that’s on a death march,” replied a muffled voice. “Don’t… even… whisper.”
“Sorry, Amelia, but it’s just come on daylight.” He lifted the pillow and gently pressed his lips against her shoulder blade. “If you don’t want your reputation as a straw boss shattered forever, you’d best make your way back to your own room.”
“Oh… Lord, J.D. We are such bad actors…”
Amelia painfully pulled herself into a sitting position and leaned her naked back against the headboard’s cold brass bars. She struggled to tuck the rumpled sheet under her arms. J.D.’s sparsely furnished sleeping quarters, filled only with his bed and a few discarded packing crates serving for furniture, made it seem in the cold light of dawn as if they’d made love in a deserted warehouse.
“Not exactly in the pink, are we?”
“No. No, we are not,” she mumbled. “And we are truly appalling people.”
“We are not appalling.”
“Well, reckless and foolhardy might be a more apt description… though I thoroughly enjoyed myself, Mr. Thayer.”
“I’m mighty flattered to hear that, Miss Bradshaw. So did I. Although, now I’m a bit concerned that I didn’t protect—”
“That’s very considerate of you,” intervened Amelia, “but in one regard, our timing was impeccable. I’m just about to have my—” She paused and vowed she would sound far more worldly than she felt. “There is no danger I’ll conceive.”
She swung her bare legs to the side of the bed and stared at the mound of clothing heaped in the middle of the cement floor as an avalanche of pleasurable moments with J.D. flashed through her mind. “Stay right where you are, will you, while I get dressed.”
He reached out and firmly took hold of her arm. “No, you stay where you are for just a moment.” He leaned over and lazily kissed her on the mouth. “That’s just a little reminder of what got us into this fix.”
For a few seconds, she allowed herself to luxuriate in the sheer masculinity of his naked chest pressed against her bare breasts. Then, reluctantly, she pushed against his shoulders and stood beside the bed. Aware of his avid scrutiny, she speedily donned her shift, tucked it and her wrinkled shirtwaist into her father’s trousers, and fumbled with the fastenings up to her neck.
“I’m so thirsty,” she said, and sank into a chair to hook the closures on her ankle boots.
“Sad to say, there’s not a drop of champagne left,” J.D. announced. He laid on his back, smiling broadly, hands behind his head, the sheet now chastely covering his mid-section.
Amelia’s fingers stilled, her bootlaces ignored. She raised her glance to meet the gaze of a man whom she now knew intimately, yet not in the manner that really counted. She did not yet know much more than before of J.D. Thayer’s true character—except that he was a skilled and generous lover—and amazingly enough, he hadn’t asked another word about Etienne.
She’d realized long before last night that she’d thoroughly recovered from her love affair with the wily Frenchman, chalking it up to part of her education abroad. J.D., on the other hand, hadn’t volunteered a single sentence about Ling Lee, a woman he had lived with for several years—or his feelings about five-year-old Wing. What could she assume except that he probably hadn’t completely recovered from his loss?
Interrupting thoughts intent on their death spiral, she said, “Please don’t purchase any more sparkling wine, J.D. We can’t afford it, and besides… we can’t afford it.”
“Ah, remorse… remorse the morning after.”
“I merely dread the complications of the ‘morning after.’” She combed her hair with her fingers and then secured her topknot with two hairpins she retrieved from the floor, along with her gored skirt, which she draped over her arm. “It may surprise you to hear this, but I do not regret one instant of last evening—although it pains me to note it merely took two nights—sleeping under one roof—for this to happen.
J.D. shook his head with an amused expression.
“Well, the one thing I know for a certainty about you, Amelia, is that I never know what you’ll say next.”
“It’s a new century, J.D. Women speak their minds, and besides, coyness never was my strong suit. But in the cold light of day we both know that we mustn’t allow this to happen again while we both are still working to build this hotel.”
“If we are discreet—”
She shook her head and then winced as her temple throbbed. “No. I know our brains are addled right now, but think! Liaisons like this always leak out. The workers won’t respect me if they consider me some floozy whose principal occupation is warming your bed. We have an obligation to everyone, including ourselves, to get this hotel finished as quickly as possible.” She paused. “And, of course, there’s Angus to consider.” They exchanged guilty looks.
“Even if he’s still a bit sweet on you, darling, Angus is a big boy—”
Darling…
But that almost made it worse, she thought.
“He’s been a wonderful friend to us both,” she said, “and it just adds another layer to everything. I may not be working for Julia Morgan any longer, but if I were my own employer, I’d discharge me for allowing an intimate relationship to develop with a client. I might not regret one moment of what happened in this bedroom, J.D., but the possible repercussions could be lethal. It’s the most unprofessional thing I could possibly do, and here I’ve gone and done it and—”
“Am I allowed to say why continuing this liaison, at this particular moment, is a foolhardy idea?”
Brought up short, Amelia put her hands on her hips. “Of course. Please do.”
“I’m supposed to be courting Matilda Kemp.”
“You’re what?”
“Shhh!” He pointed toward the other end of the building. “Courting two women simultaneously, especially when one is Ezra Kemp’s daughter, is extremely inadvisable, wouldn’t you agree?”
Amelia could only stare at him, dumbfounded. Then with an arch look she said, “I don’t think what you and I did last night could—in the wildest stretch of the imagination—be called ‘courting.’ I can’t believe you’re telling me this after… after…”
“Ah… I’m pleased to see that got your dander up. You’ve been sounding so cool and collected about everything.” He rose from the bed and stood naked in front of her, trying unsuccessfully to grasp her hand. “I only told Kemp I’d consider courting the poor creature when he tried to blackmail me even after I’d paid my share of the cost of building the gambling club by demanding I pay past due lumber bills for the hotel that burned. When I confronted him about sending his bullyboys, he said his next step would be to get his union hall cronies to cut off supplies for the current hotel that we can’t get elsewhere and prove we’ve been using Chinese labor right along. I have no doubt he could still attempt to make good on either of those threats, plus he also said he’d blackball me with the Committee of Fifty, including my father, so they’d call in the first loan. You must admit, the circumstances were rather dire.”
“My, my…” Amelia murmured, avoiding everything but J.D.’s dark eyes. “You know, in the heat of the moment, I’d really forgotten how convoluted your life is.”
The chickens in J.D.’s rather sordid life were definitely coming home to roast, she thought glumly. Here was a man who partnered with Ezra Kemp in a gambling and wenching establishment, no doubt trading on the charms of Chinese women to fill their coffers. If that weren’t enough, he’d consigned little Wing Lee to Donaldina Cameron’s care even before her mother had died, and now he was acknowledging that he was courting a young woman he wasn’t partial to as a means of paying past due bills for lumber!
She glanced down at his bare feet. Oh yes… James Diaz Thayer had certainly proved himself an exciting, inventive lover, but who was this man, really?
A cad and a cardsharp?
Possibly.
Yet, she had known this fact full well before she’d allowed him to take her to bed.
Have I lost my mind?
She remembered J.D. suggesting that plain, ordinary lust might be a factor in their unholy attraction. Lust and champagne and the excitement of finding a trunk full of treasure that would provide the funds to finish their dream hotel.
“Well, at least now you have funds to pay Kemp for the wood used in the hotel that burned. You won’t have to court Matilda Kemp—unless you want to…”
“Want to? Have you had a look at the poor woman?” J.D. shook his head. “You were right, all along, Amelia. Ezra Kemp and his cronies haven’t given up on attempting to wrest ownership of the Bay View from me.”
But J.D. himself had been one of Kemp’s cronies…
With a man like J.D. Thayer, a woman would be foolish, indeed, to assume she understood everything that was going on between the two men or to make more of the events of last night than were merited.
“Can he do that?” she asked, suddenly worried. “Get our sand and lime suppliers to refuse to sell to us? Most of them have never done business with Ezra Kemp.”
J.D. reached for his trousers that lay in a heap on the floor. “Let’s not concern ourselves with something that hasn’t happened yet. What say I make the coffee?”
She quickly finished tying the laces on her boots. “I’ll make the coffee. Take your time.”
“Wait, Amelia.” He buttoned his waist belt while she paused at the door. “Before you go, I’d just like to say—” Then he hesitated.
“Yes?”
She tried not to look at his bare chest or remember how the warm scent of him felt against her cheek. She wondered if she would now hear a full confession of his sins or a tardy acknowledgement of how much his late lover still meant to him. Amelia had the uneasy sensation that he was attempting to read her mood like an opponent’s hand of cards.
“Last night,” he began, “was… more than wonderful. But, now that I’m fully awake, I do agree with you that circumstances and that champagne bear part of the blame for what happened between us. Everything at the moment is rather complicated. The gold and jewels we’ve found will sort out things considerably, but I think you’re right.”