His voice grew thick with love as he spoke of his family, yet he’d never left Wallaby Station in the year he’d been here.
Who was the real Jake Connors?
Somewhere in his terse, unvarnished story lay the whole truth. He’d tossed her only a few jagged pieces today—pieces hard and sharp enough for her to cut the remains of her sensual daydreams of him into bloodied shreds.
But it hadn’t worked. Something inside her told her that nothing designed to turn her away from Jake would ever work. Even if she married a nice, average guy, got the house and kids and a picket fence around her vet practice, she’d remain utterly fascinated by, and helplessly drawn to Jake Connors until the day she died.
She couldn’t let him leave, not when she knew she’d spend every day of the next fifty years waiting, hoping he’d come to her so she could see him one more time, just as she’d done every day and night of the past year…
“Jake!” she cried, bolting into the thick, warm evening, heavy with fast-moving gray clouds: the promise of rain that never seemed to fall, and wouldn’t fall tonight. “Jake! Jake!”
He’d almost reached the men’s quarters, the old shearers’ rooms painted and remodeled with the most basic of comforts, and a communal TV/games room. He halted when she cried his name, but he didn’t turn around, didn’t speak. Waiting.
A fork of lightning split the velvet-purple sky with shreds of turbulent cloud, landing with a violent crack somewhere behind the century-old, tumbledown shearers’ huts. With a long, tearing sound, a branch fell to earth.
Jake seemed to be part of the earth and night and sky—even the night storm. Stark and hot, he was a man beautiful beyond her every dream or imagining, untamed and untamable.
What arrogance or stupidity had made her believe a man like Jake could ever be hers? He was as far out of her reach as a comet, too fast and too high for a mortal like her to grasp; but like an obsessed astronomer, she kept gazing upward at what she could never have or hold.
Dumbstruck, awestruck, rapt and terrified, Laila stared, trying to form words, but none came to her clumsy mouth.
“What is it?” He didn’t turn. His voice was curt, as tight as his body.
She couldn’t remember; the need was back, the terrible, wonderful ache that always filled her when she was near him. Poles apart they might be, but north was heading south at warp speed, and even with all she thought she knew about him, she couldn’t do a thing to stop it.
One step, two, and then she was running, stumbling to him, her rebel mouth rasping his name with all the anguished craving he inspired in her. His past and his rejections didn’t matter, not now, when the waves of need hitting her were coming back as strongly from him.
She’d never hold him for long; but right now the coming heartache didn’t matter, either. As he had that first night, he needed her tonight, and that was enough. She’d make it be enough. She cannoned into his body, and wrapped her arms around his stone-hard form from behind.
“I was wrong,” she whispered into his taut back, reveling in the touch, the heat searing her even through his rough clothes. “I don’t want average.”
His voice was like a saw across hardwood, cutting them both. “Your dreams will die with me, Laila. You’ll regret this—maybe not tomorrow, next week or next year—but one day, you’ll wish you’d never met me. Please, just take what I’m offering and stop wanting more.” His voice was gravel-sharp, and just as unbending. “I know you want more—and I’ll only hurt you.”
“I know,” she said hopelessly. “But you’ve put a padlock on my soul, and I can’t take it off. I’m bound to you, Jake. I don’t know why,” she cried softly. “I don’t want to be, but one look at you and I’m gone.”
“Gone.” He gave one of those awful, mirthless laughs that pierced her heart. “That’s a good term for the effect I have on people. They’re gone—or they wish I was, before long.”
“Stop it,” she cried fiercely. “You won’t push me away, not tonight.”
He turned in her arms, and tipped up her face with a finger: the only connection he would give, but it streaked through her with the searing, melting heat of a bushfire. “You’ll regret it.”
“Maybe I will,” she admitted, “but right now all I think about is you, all I want is you.”
He held her off, and wouldn’t touch her, or hold her—but the look in his eyes was molten with need, just as it had been the night they’d made love…
So she moved into his body, becoming the aggressor.
“Just give me now, Jake,” she mumbled between the kisses he miraculously wasn’t stopping. Oh, thank you, thank you God, he was lifting his throat, drinking in her kisses; the low growls weren’t from a man in the grip of tortured rejection, but the darkest of pleasure…
His hands were a bare half-inch from her skin, and at the feel of the radiant heat coming from inside him, her body pounded out a primitive tattoo from deep inside her, sending out the subtle, drenched scent of a woman who wants a man. Touch me, Jake, touch me…
Another fork of lightning clove the heat of the night in two, tearing it down with an earsplitting dry crack. But Laila wouldn’t even have noticed had its electrifying light not brought his face to vivid, stark life. Jake suddenly became living flesh, all fierce, savage male, a man wired on a knife’s edge—and the flashpoint of heat in his eyes told her that he’d seen, felt, taken in the scent of her need. Man to woman, basic and primal.
Finally, oh, at last he stopped fighting it, hauled her up hard against him and kissed her.
CHAPTER FOUR
LAILA STAGGERED back under the raw power he unleashed on her—dear God, the man could kiss when he lost control.
Glorious insanity, insatiable hunger, a blaze burning all it touched in high, raging winds—it was all that and more. He kissed her as if he wanted to eat her alive, and she was devouring him in return, mouth-to-mouth.
It had been like this last time—this uncontrollable, unstoppable, perfect passion. It was everything she’d read about and dreamed of, but had never known with any man until Jake.
He couldn’t hide it now, and didn’t try. The kiss was drugging her with its intensity, with the raw male need coming from him, bringing her long-hidden femininity to glorious life. She moaned and arched her ripening body against his, hearing his growl of satisfaction with a rippling thrill. He pulled her even closer, his hands all over her, leaving her alive and aching and filled with blazing heat, wanting more…
Muted laughter came from the big, barnlike structure used as a communal dining room. A voice floated toward where they held and touched each other, challenging someone else to a game of pool.
Jake tore his mouth from hers; and, weak and limp and shocked, burned alive by the depths of her fire when he touched her, Laila let her head fall to his shoulder.
“Go,” he grated. “Go home where you’re safe, before we do something you’ll regret.”
At that, her head snapped back up, and she laughed, because he meant it. “How can it damage me any further, Jake? The horse has already bolted. I’m pregnant.” She heard the unsteady tone in her voice, but didn’t care. After that kiss, she couldn’t be sure of anything except that her knees had given way, her body was hollow with pain-filled need, and she was more gloriously alive than she’d ever been.
“This isn’t part of the deal.” He pushed himself back from her, but keeping his hands at her waist to be sure she didn’t fall. Protecting her even when she threw that offer back in his face. “I’m giving you my name. My protection. That’s all.”
She gaped for a moment before she let out another peal of laughter: a sound tinged with hysteria. “You almost made love to me standing up against a wall, and you’re still offering only a marriage of convenience?”
For once, he was in the light and she was in shadow. By the soft beams of a slow-rising moon and the wild cracks of lightning now moving north, she saw his jaw harden, chiseled in the granite of his innate stubbornness. “It won’
t happen again. I won’t let it happen again.”
She kept laughing, but it was weaker now, tired. “That’s it, keep lying to yourself. Maybe, eventually, I’ll believe it, too.”
His nostrils flared, and she knew she’d pushed him too far. “That’s all I’m willing to give. I’ll act like I’m crazy about you for your family’s sake. I’ll give you a home and security and you can finish your degree. I’ll work my schedule around yours to mind the baby when it comes. I’ll do whatever it takes to make your life right—you deserve all that, and more—but I won’t make love to you. You either agree to that now, or I pack my things and leave Wallaby tonight, and you go in there and face your family alone, with the truth.”
A chill snaked through her at the thought, because she knew he’d do it. Fool! She’d pushed him too far. He wasn’t ready to hear the truth of what they could be, or even what he wanted. So typical of her to want it all, and to do whatever it took to get it now.
Would she never learn to wait?
She’d never been a coward, but to face her family with the truth—to see all her family’s pride in her achievements, and their rainbow-shaded illusions about her, shatter in an instant…
“All right,” she said quietly. She felt vulnerable and emotional, and, apart from disappearing, having her baby elsewhere and giving it up for adoption, Jake had given her the only way out she could consider taking.
“All right? That’s it?” His gaze narrowed on her, as if searching for a legal loophole in her simple words, but Laila kept her expression meek, without challenge.
“That’s it,” she answered, wondering to herself if he’d even noticed that his hands were no longer just holding her up, but were caressing her waist and hips, keeping that slow melt inside her alive, pooling the heat, stoking the fire.
“You’ll marry me?” he asked, his gaze dark and intent on hers.
She drew in a breath. “No. I accept that what you say is true for you. And I ask for you to accept that to me, that’s completely inadequate. I don’t know who you are, where you come from or what you want in life—and what you’re offering under the circumstances is nowhere near enough, not for me. I won’t marry a martyr. I will accept your role in life with our child, and an acknowledgment of paternity for my family—but that’s all.”
The silence was absolute. He didn’t move, but in the light of a wild cracking fork of lightning, she saw the moment his face changed: the vulnerability he’d hidden from the world shone through. Despite his assertions, maybe deep down in his heart, where he didn’t dare to look, or acknowledge his desires, he did want something more…
He leaned a clenched fist against the wall of the communal room, his breathing uneven. The touch of some deeper emotion at her rejection—dare she call it devastation?—in his eyes resonated in her heart, making him want to take it all back, and say yes, she’d marry him, give him this baby, anything to make him feel safe and happy again.
“I’ll let you know when I’m ready to tell my family,” she said, fighting to keep her voice—and her resolve—steady.
He looked at her, the anguish not yet under control—and her rebel heart ached and burned to say the words that would make him smile. But she couldn’t risk the ultimate happiness of all three of them. To be a true family—to have that wonderful joy of a loving family—she had to fight. She would accept nothing less.
“I will change your mind, Laila.” His voice was rough velvet.
A shiver ran up her spine in response, as she wondered just how many times she could make him try to change her mind by means of those addicting kisses and rough, sensual touch. Jake was like the land they both loved: hot, unbending, with sudden, total changes in nature, and sometimes cruel in its savagery—but like the land, she couldn’t walk from him. There was so much more to Jake Connors than he showed to the world. “Maybe I’ll change yours instead,” she said softly. “Every time you’re working on bringing me around to your point of view, Jake Connors, I’ll be working on making you want what I want. Take that as a warning. I want happiness…and I won’t take anything less.”
If anything, his face grew even darker. Without a word, he pushed off the wall, turned, and walked into the communal room.
Well, she’d thrown down the gauntlet. The challenge was on—and given that she knew now how badly he wanted her, she hoped she knew where to place her bets.
From alone and terrified, within a few hours, she’d found a few unexpected aces inside her sleeve. He honestly believed this marriage he wanted would be a passionless arrangement, a marriage in name only to give her baby a name and a father—but she wanted him and he wanted her, and it was going to happen. The passion hovering in the air between them, like the lightning cracking from the dry clouds above, would explode one day, and soon.
He might not think he deserved anything good from this crazy, selfless offer, but she was going to show him just how much he deserved.
There was so much about him she didn’t know, including what had happened to him to make him the intense, withdrawn man she knew had once been foreign to his nature. She would find the whole truth, would come to know the man inside this fascinating enigma. She’d make him want to be her lover, as well as a father for their baby.
She smiled, but it soon faded at the thought of the real, monumental task before her: telling the family. Could she face them with the cover story Jake had hinted at? She hadn’t lied to them since childhood escapades, and over something so important—
For their sakes, for their affectionate illusions of her, she had to try.
I can’t do it.
She’d almost convinced herself it was the right thing to pretend she and Jake were in love, to protect them from the consequences of her stupidity. But faced with the loving, anxious faces surrounding her—the men who’d dedicated their lives to protecting her, and the woman who’d given her mother-love and freedom—Laila couldn’t go through with the lines she had rehearsed the past two weeks.
If she gave them the cover story, not only would she wind up hurting them more later when they knew the truth, but she knew she’d wind up married to Jake within a week.
She glanced at Jake—and suddenly, the thought of being the wife of a man who claimed he could never love her sent exploding pain through her chest. While it would help her now, the reality of her life would be intolerable, unbearable. She had been kidding herself. How could she live with a man who barely even liked her? He might want her, but it wasn’t as if she had a lot of competition out here.
She was having his child but didn’t even know him well enough to be sure if he’d wanted her in truth, or because he was a man and there were no other candidates to take care of his needs. She didn’t know him at all, because he didn’t let her in—and she couldn’t bear to be forever standing by him, waiting just outside the barricaded doors of his heart, aching for what would never happen.
I’m sorry, Dar, Marcie…I just can’t go through with this, even for your sakes.
Jake had never met such a hardheaded, stubborn woman in all his days.
Facing her father, stepmother and brothers with the news, Jake fumed in silence. He’d expected her to come around to his plans within a week or two. He’d banked on what he knew: Laila wasn’t the kind of person to blithely tell her conservative and overprotective family that she was about to become a single mother—
But that’s what she’d just done.
She hadn’t exactly been blithe about it, but if she was anxious, she was hiding it well. She’d just sat down beside her father in the living room where she’d called the family conference, took his hand, and said, “I know you’re worried about me. I’m sorry for that. I need to tell you all what’s been going on.”
Glenn, the more blunt-spoken of her brothers—the most like her—frowned, looking at him, Jake. “What’s he doing here?”
Brian said quietly, “I have a feeling he’s involved in the problem…right, Laila?” The soft tones in no way hid the grimness with
in. His gaze speared Jake like twin laser sights.
Laila said softly, “You know, don’t you, Dar?”
His gaze still on Jake, Brian nodded. The look was hard and unrelenting. “Marcie said you’d tell us in your time. Or maybe it was in his time.” He jerked his head toward Jake.
Laila’s smile was faint. “You should know me better than that, Dar. When did I ever do anything in someone else’s time or way?”
“Well, if it was ever in my time or way, Princess, I missed the moment.”
Seeing the hurt flash in Laila’s eyes, Jake found himself wanting to jump in and defend her—but he was the outsider here, and he had a feeling Laila needed to do this alone; but for a self-contained man, keeping his mouth shut had never been a harder task.
“But that’s the trouble, Dar.” Laila’s voice was soft, sad, yet definite. “I might have fought it, but life has always been your time, your way. I might not have gone to your university or chose the course you wanted me to do, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone knows who I am—or, more to the point, who you are. Your wings are always over me—overshadowing me.” She looked around Brian to Marcie, who was sitting in silence on her husband’s other side, willing her stepmother to support her. “No matter what I do, you define me. People see me as the great Brian Robbins’s daughter. Nothing that I can say or do seems to change it.” She cocked her head over toward Jake. “Even he believes it. Especially him.”
Identical hurt, flash for flash, father to daughter—and then reluctant understanding came into Brian’s eyes. “So you got pregnant to change your image, to escape my shadow? Did you have to prove to him who you are in such a personal way?”
The rough tones were full of too much pain for Jake to take offence at Brian’s reasons why Laila had come to him that night.
Laila’s brothers both made identical growling sounds, and glared at Jake.
“You know better than that, too.” Laila sighed. “If it was about escaping, or establishing my identity, all I had to do was to finish my course and start a veterinary practice far away from here or the Ghost Gum estate. That would have hurt you enough—but I never wanted to hurt you. I just wanted to find a way to live my life, my way—and on the way I made a mistake. The pregnancy was unplanned.”
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