GRIPPED (Romance Mystery & Suspense Box Set)

by Abbott, Alex

  He waited for the judgment or disgust. But what he saw in her eyes was complete disbelief. He could almost see a thought bubble over her head that read: What rubbish.

  She put a hand on the most enticing part of her hip “So, you’re trying to tell me that you’ve never—”

  “Had sex with less than two people at a time?” Jeremy interrupted, fighting down his predatory impulses. Not liking the sensation of revealing himself when it was to no purpose. “Yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  Kate was silent, staring at him, as if trying to dislodge the vision of him covered in a sea of writhing, nubile bodies. That’s not really how it usually happened for Jeremy. He liked much more controlled encounters. But he saw naked interest in her eyes that made him wonder if it was possible that Kate had fantasies like this…

  …No. He shouldn’t think about Kate’s sexual fantasies. Shouldn’t try to gauge her to see if she’d be interested in the kind of sexual sports he liked to play. Should definitely not let himself feel attraction to a girl who was mourning. Nevertheless, his self-control slipped a little and he asked, “Now you’re curious, aren’t you?”

  “Psshh. No,” she said, with such obvious discomfort that he knew she was lying.

  Jeremy patted the pool chair beside him. “It’s unusual. I know. So you get to be curious. And I was a wanker, so you get one more question. Make it good…”

  She sat down and their knees nearly touched, but then Kate pulled hers back as if scorched. “How the hell would you even manage that? You meet some girl, and… I just don’t see how you casually bring up threesomes to someone you just met at a club.”

  Jeremy leaned closer, losing the battle to fight his instincts of seduction. Especially since he felt as if Kate wanted to be seduced. Which made no sense under the circumstances, but there it was. “The only clubs I go to are ones where the women go for precisely such encounters.”

  “What kind of clubs are those? Sex clubs?”

  He could see that she really wanted to know. Her eyes widened. Her lips parted. She wet them. And he wanted to kiss them. He wanted to…well, it didn’t matter what he wanted. Now was not the time. And this was not the girl to be kissing. “Yes. Sex clubs. Clubs that are not for nice girls like you. Clubs where I can seek out precisely the kind of women—or couples—who would agree to such an arrangement without worrying about the paparazzi or my privacy.”

  “So that’s the only place you ever meet women? You never have sex with someone you meet anywhere else?”

  Jeremy smiled, leaned back, and took a deep breath. “Almost never. But if I met a woman somewhere else, and she was willing, then I would call a friend to join us…”

  He trailed off, when her mouth dropped open. When he could hear her heartbeat thumping. She’d suspected him of being a pervert…and now she knew he was, but not the kind she’d imagined. Not the kind that would have an affair with his father’s wife.

  Still, he could see that she believed him. He could see that. Even as she stammered, “But…but…threesomes are fine. Not that I know. I mean, I’m just saying, whatever floats your boat. But what’s wrong with having sex with just one person?”

  Because it’s not safe, he thought. Because one-on-one intimacy lead to the worst in human emotions. Because sex made people think that they owned each other, and being possessive of someone lead to danger. Jeremy remembered a time when he’d wanted his mother’s attention and affection all to himself—and the result had been tragic. He wouldn’t go there again. Wouldn’t let himself.

  Jeremy swallowed and shook his head as if to shake off the childhood trauma of losing his mother; of losing her in such a tragic and secret way that he would probably be fucked up for the rest of his life. “You already used up your questions, Kate. So, let’s just say that my way of having sex avoids jealous entanglements.”

  With that, he began to peel his shirt off in preparation of the swim he so badly needed.

  Her eyes trailed down his shoulders, to his biceps, over the flat plane of his stomach, and then she said, “Well, I can see why girls would get jealous, but it’s kind of ridiculous to avoid having relationships just to avoid entanglements.”

  There was nothing ridiculous about it. Not when violence came of jealousy. Not when you’d lost someone you love. But this was nothing that he was about to tell Kate. “And what makes you the expert on relationships?”

  She wrapped her arms around herself, thoughtfully. “Well, I’m not. But unlike you, at least I’ve had a few.”

  “I’ve had a few relationships, too,” he argued. “They just weren’t one-on-one.”

  “It doesn’t sound like those are relationships. It sounds like they’re transactions. Arrangements.”

  “Marriages are arrangements, too.”

  He loved the way she bit her lip, thoughtfully, and conceded, “Point. But isn’t it hard to live so completely without sexual spontaneity? I mean, I guess—what if I wanted—I mean, what if someone wanted to kiss you right now. Someone you were attracted to. You’d just blow it off? Not let nature take its course?”

  Jeremy felt the heat of arousal creep up his neck at the suggestion that she might want to kiss him. It took all the strength he had to turn from her, in search of swim trunks. “I’m not a great admirer of nature, Kate. I’ve seen all those shows with the lions that hunt down the gazelles, with the sharks that tear prey apart. I prefer not to live my life based on natural instinct.”

  Especially since his natural instincts were telling him to turn around, take her by the shoulders, and kiss her. Kiss her hard. Kiss her deeply. Kiss her soundly enough to release all the years of pent up attraction he’d been fighting.

  But those instincts, he reminded himself, were rubbish.

  Because she wasn’t just his stepsister—however distant that connection really was. She was also a girl who had just lost her mother.

  Chapter Five

  KATE

  I’d clearly lost my mind, I thought. Grief—or more accurately, my inability to let myself grieve—was making me crazy. I had, in the past twenty-four hours, showed up uninvited at the house of people who were now of only slight relation to me. Torn my mother’s room apart. Asked about an inheritance like a grasping money-grubber. Suspected my stepbrother of killing my mother. Actually accused him of fucking her.

  Then interrogated him about his sex life…

  …And accidentally flirted with him.

  If that didn’t fit the definition of mental illness, what did?

  Trying to put my psychology degree to some use, I told myself that I was acting this way to avoid doing the only thing I really could do for my mom. Write a eulogy. Put my feelings for her in some kind of coherent order. Pay respects to her, and figure out what to do with a life in which I would be completely alone from now on.

  That was a pretty big job—no wonder I’d been avoiding it with crazy suspicions and lunatic behavior. It had to stop.

  In my mom’s room, I fished my laptop out of my bag and propped it open, contemplating the eulogy. What could I say about my mom? Worse, what could I say in front of a crowd of people who would all be watching me with cold eyes?

  Because none of them really cared for her. I don’t think my mom had one genuine friend in the world. I guess I never did either. Maybe that’s why she always confided things in me that she shouldn’t have…

  I opened the laptop, and then I remembered why I’d been staying away from the Internet. Because every newspaper in the world was speculating on why my mom might have swallowed a bunch of pills, and I just couldn’t stomach it.

  In spite of my mom’s marriage, I’d lived most of my life sheltered from the press attention to the Kenyon family. But now I was getting a taste of it. And it was ugly.

  So I slammed the computer shut.

  Just then, Jeremy knocked on the slightly opened door. His hair was still wet from his swim but he’d dressed in slacks and a black pressed shirt. “You okay?” he asked, with genuine concern in
his voice.

  His hot-and-cold routine was pretty confusing, but maybe after our talk at the pool, he was feeling a little vulnerable. It’s not every day you have to defend your sex life to your stepsister, after all.

  “Sure,” I said, determined to hold it together.

  “Can I get you something?”

  “Paper and pen, maybe,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “I need to write the eulogy and I think I have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

  He frowned. “Our network’s secure, Kate. No matter the media frenzy, you don’t have to worry about people hacking into your private thoughts.”

  Well, I hadn’t been worried about it. But wow, now I was.

  I pressed my lips together, and then confessed, “I really have no idea what to write. What to say. I’m pretty sure that whatever happens, I’m going to burst into tears in front of everyone. And I really can’t let that happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not a big crier.”

  “But it’s natural to cry in these situations.”

  “I thought you weren’t a big fan of nature,” I countered. “Besides. Like I said. I don’t cry.”

  He leaned into the room. “You haven’t cried yet at all?”

  I shook my head. “I guess that makes me a horrible daughter.”

  “I think it makes you a time bomb ready to go off,” he said. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this. You’re the one studying psychology. But you’ve got to deal with it, Kate. Somehow. You’ve got to find some way of coping with the pain or it will destroy you.”

  “What the hell would you know about dealing with this kind of pain?” I snapped. And when he blanched, I felt like a total shit. Because I remembered that he’d lost his mom too, and had probably been dealing with it his whole life. “Oh, god. I’m sorry. I am horrible.”

  “You’re not,” he insisted, reaching for my hand. “You’re actually…quite strong. And I want you to know—I’m not going to fight the issue of the inheritance. Stuff about your mother’s extramarital affairs might come up and if my father finds out, things might get difficult. But it’s not my intention to hurt you and if you end up being cut out for some reason…I’m going to give you money from my own trust.”

  I gaped. “What? You don’t have to do that. Especially when I just said something that was really insensitive and stupid. I know you’ve been through grief of your own.”

  “Don’t give it another thought,” he said, though it had obviously done some damage, because he sat down next to me on the bed as if he needed to regain a little balance. “I lost my mom when I was a child. You’re going through something much harder. You knew your mother better.”

  “But you needed your mom more when you were a child.”

  He stared down at some imaginary speck on my mother’s pristine white bedspread. “It might help if you wrote two eulogies,” he finally said. “One for yourself. One for public consumption.”

  Public consumption. Unlike the Kenyon brothers, I’d lived most of my life in obscurity. Sure, I was the daughter of someone who had married into a fabulously wealthy family. But they’d been raised as the son of His Lordship. They’d been watched. Cataloged. Groomed. Scrutinized in every way since the day they were born. Which is why I hadn’t judged him for the way he handled his sex life; if I’d had to live without ever being able to trust the intentions of anyone in my bed, I might want to build a moat around my heart too.

  Also, we weren’t that different.

  As much as I’d pretended to be bewildered by Jeremy’s confession when I interrogated him, I actually kind of understood his sexual preferences. As the daughter of someone who the press had dubbed the a bimbo for the Brit, I’d striven to always be the opposite of my mom. I wasn’t a virgin. But when it came to sex, I’d always been as conservative as possible. I never wanted to be accused of being a slut or a gold-digger. So no matter what the wild thoughts in my head—and there was plenty of wild stuff that went on in my head—I always kept it to strictly missionary position, strictly in relationships, strictly in private, strictly as vanilla and blameless as possible.

  Which probably accounted for the fact that my fantasies were always so much better than what went on between my sheets. And I wondered if not living my life as a reaction to my mom would change me.

  I suspected it might.

  “I don’t…I don’t really do things for public consumption,” I said. “Maybe that’s why I’m having such a hard time knowing what to say at the funeral.”

  Jeremy let out a long breath. “I work in my father’s public relations department. We have a whole team of specialists on retainer if you’d like me to call them in.”

  My eyes bugged. “Yikes. One minute you’re being human, and the next you want to bring in a PR team?”

  Jeremy held up his hands. “I just want to help.”

  “Oh. God. I know you do. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said, rubbing at my face. “I keep swinging between anger and confusion and a thousand other emotions that I either can’t name, or which feel totally inappropriate under the circumstances.”

  Jeremy raised a brow. “Inappropriate feelings? Like what?”

  Like lust, I thought. Like the fact that I wanted to lean across the bed and kiss every line of his gorgeous face. Like the fact that I wanted to pull his shirt off, and get another look at that exquisitely carved torso. Like the fact that I wanted to crawl onto his body and fuck him blind. Fuck him until I forgot this horrible pain inside me…

  I almost said it, too. I almost spoke the words. But before I could, Jeremy cleared his throat as if he’d divined my thoughts. Then he got up, and went to the door.

  I blinked. “Where are you going?”

  “To get you that pen and paper.” Moments later, he returned with both. Our fingers touched in the handoff. And I wished they hadn’t. It wasn’t smart to touch him. I knew it wasn’t. Because the moment our fingers tangled, a brushfire of inexplicable arousal lit up my blood.

  God, I wanted him. Now more than ever. What the hell was wrong with me? It felt like an obsession. It felt like desperation. I felt like I was drowning, and touching him would be the only way I could breathe again. Should I dare?

  Jeremy settled into the chair opposite me as if he meant to stay. I knew I should tell him not to get comfortable. That I wanted to be alone. But the truth was I didn’t want to be alone. I was afraid to be alone with myself. I was afraid of what other crazy emotions might surface, and so all I said was, “Um…”

  “I’m not as good as a whole PR team, but I might be able to help, Kate. At least with the public eulogy. The one you write for yourself has to be honest.”

  “Are you saying that what I say to the crowd shouldn’t be?”

  Jeremy smirked. “It should be a lot of words that reveal nothing. Why are a bunch of strangers entitled to your truth?”

  That made my chin jerk up. “They’re not.” He was right. That bunch of strangers had sneered at my mom and me ever since the wedding. My mom really had loved His Lordship. At least in the beginning. Not that they believed her. And maybe that’s what killed the love…

  In any case, my mom had known enough not to give strangers her truth. She’d told them all that I was her sister, even though anyone could find out otherwise. It was a brazen lie. And, I realized, in her own way…a shot over the bow to people who thought they owned a piece of her because she was marrying someone rich and famous.

  Lies were her armor.

  And maybe I admired her for having some.

  Because I kind of lived my life the opposite way, and where had it gotten me? “A lot of words that reveal nothing,” I repeated, thoughtfully.

  Jeremy suggested, “Perhaps you can talk about how your mother grew up with very little but spent her adult life giving to charities.”

  Huh. That was true. My mom had been involved in a lot of charities. I’d always dismissed it as the kind of thing socialites did, but she didn’t have to do it. She
could’ve shopped all day every day for the rest of her life and not run out of money—and nobody would have said a thing about it.

  I wrote that down. But then I sat there staring at the page. “I guess I can say she’ll be missed. Even though I…I…” I felt like I was strangling suddenly. Because I would miss her.

  In spite of everything. I would.

  “It’s okay, Kate,” Jeremy said, reaching for my hand again and giving it a squeeze. “You can cry…”

  “No,” I said, throatily. “I can’t. Because if I cry, I’m going to fall apart. And there’s nothing and no one who would ever put me back together again. I don’t want to feel the loss right now. I want to feel anything but that. I’m not ready.”

  Jeremy nodded, and then took the pen from me and for a moment, I was certain he was going to kiss me. Our eyes met. His face came close to mine, his head bent. But then he took a breath and said, “Why don’t I make a few notes for you. And in the meantime, you can—”

  I kissed him. I didn’t think about it. I just did it. I did it because I felt alone and in pain. I kissed him for a thousand reasons that would make no sense to me if I was in my right mind.

  But I wasn’t. And I didn’t want to be.

  Our lips met in a frantic, searing way that added fuel to the brush fire already burning in my blood and sent heat rushing through my veins. His mouth was soft at first under mine. Hesitant. And he stayed perfectly still, as if he couldn’t decide whether to stop me or to let it happen.

  Maybe I should have stopped myself. But I couldn’t. Because the pleasure of that kiss was the first thing I’d felt other than pain in days. The first thing that I could hold onto in my shattering world. It was heated, mindless pleasure.

  When I took a breath, Jeremy whispered my name. “Kate.”

  Which made me only more determined to kiss him again. His lips parted as my tongue reached for his; he tasted a little bit like soap from the shower he must have taken after his swim. He smelled like soap too. But he felt—oh, he felt hot to the touch.

  But also strong. As if he was holding himself back. He was an unyielding wall against me that I wanted to crumble. Then he did. His arms came around my waist, drawing me against him. I dropped the paper and pen to the floor and straddled his legs, wrapping my arms around his neck, grasping his damp hair in my hands.