by Julia London
Robin stepped out of his embrace, leaned against his bike, holding on to the handlebar. A soft smile spread across her lips as he gazed down at the lush fullness of her breasts beneath a thin camisole. Slowly, carefully, he lifted his hand, let his palm graze her breast on a whisper. Robin moaned, unthinkingly lifted her breasts, seeking his palm, and Jake obliged her, his fingers closing around the pliable mound, his thumb brushing across the turgid nipple. Robin’s eyes fluttered shut; her head lolled back as he moved his hand over and around her breast.
Her breath was coming quicker now and his cock was throbbing against the prison of his jeans. Yet as much as he wanted her, as much as he wanted to be deep inside her, he wanted to prolong the moment for as long as he could, to admire, with all due reverence, the beautiful woman who had come to say she loved him. His hand drifted over the camisole again. “Take it off,” he whispered gruffly.
Robin reached for the hem, slowly lifted it over her head, revealing two perfect globes as she settled back on the seat of his bike. Jake stood motionless, marveling at his sheer dumb luck. With a dip of her head and a wicked smile that would have sent lesser men to their knees, Robin propped one leg on the gas tank, the other against the floor as her fingers fluttered over her breast, against the dark, almond nipples. One hand drifted down her bare belly, to the top of her jeans, which she easily unsnapped.
Jake’s heart was pounding like a drum now.
She quickly undid the rest as Jake removed his shirt, her eyes never leaving his, her hand never leaving its careless play with her breast. And when she slipped her hand inside her jeans and moaned softly, Jake thought he might come before he ever even touched her.
“Do you know how hot you make me?” she whispered. “When I look at you, I get so wet—”
He was groping for her now, managing to encircle her in his arms as his mouth landed on her breast, suckling it, nibbling it, desperate to consume it. Robin withdrew her hand from her jeans and placed her damp fingers against his mouth. Every fiber of him filled with her scent; his lips tasted the fragrance, and his groin somersaulted in one giant, sensuous leap. He grabbed her hips, lifted her with one hand as he pulled at her jeans with the other. Robin was laughing deep in her throat, helping him to rid her of the denims until she was sitting on his bike, completely naked, her skin made milky blue by the thin light of a street lamp.
“I love you, Jake,” she whispered. “I love the way you make me feel.”
Oh God, dear God. The rain was beating a steady rhythm to the passion mounting in him; coarse desire mixed with tender feelings of devotion, the likes of which he had never felt in all his life. The tumult of emotions within him drove him to his knees, between her legs sprawled across the bike, and enticed by her scent, he buried his face between her legs. Ah yes . . . hot, wet.
Robin moaned above him as he began to delve between the delicate folds of her flesh, reaching deeper, lapping her up. Her hands fluttered about his head pushing at him, but not hard enough to dislodge him, while she struggled to lift her hips to his seeking mouth. The smoky scent of her, the lush taste was driving him mad, tantalizing him beyond reason, making him want more. Suddenly Robin cried out, her voice lost against the sound of rain on the metal roof above them, her body shuddering against his mouth as her hips lifted one last time and her thighs closed tightly around his head. And then her hands were grasping at his head and shoulders, lifting him up.
Completely unconscious of how he managed to discard his jeans, Jake was only aware that he was suddenly thrusting deep in her liquid heat, feeling her warmth close tightly around him. He straddled the bike, held himself above her, and Robin propped her legs against the handlebars, her hips rocking back and forth to meet each powerful surge. She moved like silk over his body, over every inch of his flesh, urging him to feel every inch of her.
Swept away into his own private oblivion, Jake’s heart and body responded, harder and deeper, to the need to possess her, until he cried out, erupting deep inside her with pent-up longing. Pure bliss rained down on him, covered them both in the dark garage, and gasping for air, Jake lowered his forehead to hers, held on to the moment of ecstasy for as long as he could. Her breathing was ragged; she softly caressed him, murmured his name.
When at last they dislodged themselves from the bike and found their clothing scattered about the oil-stained garage, Robin slipped her hand around his waist and leaned into him. “This is what it is to feel love.”
If only she knew. If only she knew how this moment would bear down so deeply in his conscience that it would create a scar, beyond which there would be no room for the past. Only the future.
Chapter Twenty-nine
In the days that followed that rainy evening, Jake and Robin fell into a comfortable, unspoken truce. Jake didn’t press Robin for more than she had given him. He was content for a time that she had declared her feelings for him, at least until the doubts began to creep in and he realized he was working very hard to convince himself that her declaration of love was the big bang he had been waiting for.
But it wasn’t.
As the next few weeks went by, Jake realized that the uneasy fit of his skin was not a disease but simply the physiological effects of being crazy in love with Robin. He had it so bad he rarely knew which end was up. He thought about her in the morning and at night, and all the hours in between. The workday went by too slowly where it had once zipped along. He was happiest just hanging out with her, watching baseball, laughing together at Elmer Stanton’s latest repair scheme, taking Cole out for a burger. They were relaxed in one another’s company, as comfortable as an old pair of shoes. And although Robin seemed to love him, too, maybe just as crazily at times, there was one thing lurking on the fringe of his consciousness.
That thing finally hit him like a bolt of lightning that knocked him square on his ass one night over dinner at another zealously priced restaurant, courtesy Planet Robin. It happened as Jake was relating his conversation with Cole’s court-appointed counselor. In truth, Cole had been doing pretty well the last few weeks. It helped that Tara seemed to like her perfume and had selected Cole as her favorite for the time being. But Jake couldn’t help worry that perhaps Cole was doing too well. His highs were off the charts as were his lows—there was absolutely no middle ground with the kid. And while Jake could appreciate part of that came with the teenage territory, he wondered what would happen when Tara decided she wanted a new boyfriend. Cole’s counselor had confirmed his fears.
“She says Cole does pretty well, but that he can’t handle any sort of rejection, especially from a female,” he said to Robin over a plate of prime rib that cost right around what he figured a whole prize steer would bring. “Sort of a throwback to his missing mother, I guess. Anyway, the counselor says I need to work with him on that.”
“On what?” Robin asked.
“Rejection. Because he doesn’t handle it very well.”
Robin snorted. “Who does?”
“Well, Cole does tend to overreact. And girls can be brutal.”
“Girls can be brutal? What about boys?”
“What about them?”
Robin lowered her fork, glared at him from across the table. “Boys are mean. Boys will use girls just to get what they want. Sex, money, you name it. A few sweet nothings, then bam, he gets what he wants and he’s outta there.”
“Wow. That’s pretty harsh.”
“You don’t know harsh,” she muttered irritably, retrieving her fork. “I know harsh.”
Jake watched her take a bite of lamb, debated asking her to explain, then thought the better of it. “Okay, kids can be cruel, male or female. But as far as Cole goes, his counselor says that he really needs special attention on this subject. She thinks I should give it to him. It sort of supports my theory that he should come and live with me.”
Robin glanced up at him. “What about your mom? What would she say?”
His mother would have a lot to say, and none of it good, but what else w
as new? “I don’t know. But Cole needs a strong hand right now, and she doesn’t really have that with him. Now me, that’s a whole other ball game.” Sort of. He really felt pretty clueless, had no idea why the counselor thought he was the right man for the job.
Robin chewed thoughtfully, nodding after a moment. “You’re right. He does need a strong hand. I am sure you two can work it out. You’ve got enough room in your house, don’t you? You guys will be okay, I think.”
That was when it hit Jake smack between the eyes. Her statement was really very innocuous, but it struck him that it was the same thing she said every time the subject of a future cropped up. It was suddenly very clear—she didn’t see herself as part of his future. She said she loved him; okay, he believed that she did—but she hadn’t taken that extra step toward a long-term commitment. It was that simple. It was that disturbing.
Why it had taken him so long to figure out the root of his vague discomfort he couldn’t begin to guess, but at that moment, sitting in that stuffy, overpriced, overly-pleased-with-themselves restaurant, he could see it as clearly as the nose on his face.
“What?” she said, curious as to why he was staring at her.
“I was sort of thinking all of us would be okay. You. Me. Cole.”
Her cheeks darkened; she glanced at her plate with a slight frown. “I was just talking about the long run.”
“Yeah. So was I.”
Robin didn’t say anything. She avoided his gaze, attacked her lamb, and remarked that the wine seemed a little flat.
And Jake was too stung to press it any further right then—after all, there was the inevitable arguing over the check, which he won (but not without some polite scuffling and an instant coronary upon seeing the total). And there was the ride home, and the inevitable question of whose house they would go to.
Nor did Jake press the issue over the next several days as he tried to balance the end of the semester finals, Cole’s counseling sessions, and finishing up the work at Robin’s house. The problem was too big, too fundamental to be handled casually, and though he tried to push it down, the damn thing wiggled its way back up until it was playing major head games with him, finally weighing him down like some friggin’ mental boulder.
It was not an issue he wanted to face. But he was once again conscious that he and Robin had, in his humble opinion, crossed over that line where the relationship demanded an explanation of intent, at least a road map. Anything to indicate where they were going.
Except that he wasn’t sure he could handle the answer.
And oh, the irony of his anxiety was not lost on him, not by a long shot. He was the one who had never been able to maintain a relationship more than a while, and Lord knew the only thing he had ever committed to was his Visa bill. Yet here he sat, floundering about like a fish on a hook, so lousy at the relationship thing that he really didn’t know how to go about the next step.
Worse, he wasn’t certain Robin even knew there was a next step.
And there to help him through the minefield was the ever-helpful, ever-present Evan Iverson. If there was one person who personified the differences that loomed so huge between Jake and Robin, it was him—capital A, capital Hole. God knew there were enough reminders without Evan. For starters, Aaron Lear, who hadn’t called his daughter since Robin had decided to choose the course of her own life. Norma Manning, who lectured Jake about the perils and pitfalls of loving a woman with more money than God. Mia and Michael, permanent and empty fixtures in Robin’s living room, a perpetual sneer on their surgically enhanced faces. Lucy and Zaney, smart people that they were, who came from the same place as Jake, but were not, as far as he could see, stupid enough to aspire to Robin’s world like him.
But among all of those contenders, it was Evan who magnified their differences and held them up for inspection. Evan, who could, just by walking in the room, spotlight all of Jake’s glaring inadequacies. And as Evan and Robin happily plotted the last stages of her grand acquisition, the man came to embody for Jake all the reasons why Robin would never—should never—commit to him.
It was not any single thing Evan did, but every thing he did. From the little gifts he foisted on Robin, to his ability to sound so damned smart about this acquisition thing. It was the way he dressed in clothes that cost more than a house, or the fact that he did not appear to have even an ounce of fat on him. It was the way he looked at Jake with complete contempt, as if he was a mass murderer pretending to be a choirboy.
His little gifts came under the guise of congratulating Robin on her work, or thanking her for some silly thing. Gifts like tropical flowers, imported candy, and trinkets in silk-covered boxes that came waltzing in, just so Robin could ignore them or eye them dispassionately. Gifts that bored her, gifts that Jake couldn’t contemplate affording on his annual income, much less on a whim.
He tried to take solace in the fact that he wasn’t the only one to be disgusted. On the days Lucy came to the house, she, too, seemed pretty put off by the whole gift scene. “What a waste of money,” she said one day as she looked in a blue Tiffany box that had arrived the day before.
“I know,” Robin muttered absently.
Lucy pulled a little porcelain something or other out of the box; it looked too small to be anything practical. “You know,” Lucy remarked, “for what he probably paid for this, you could buy Z a new brain or something.” She was, of course, referring to Zaney, now known as simply “Z” within the bounds of their improbable friendship. Lucy was always one to call them as she saw them, and on this point, Jake couldn’t have agreed with her more.
And Jake hated the way Robin and Evan would pore over work papers, their heads so close to one another as they punched numbers into a calculator. He hated the way Robin would look at Evan at times when he explained things, hated it so much that he could not wait to finish the job, get out of her house, and onto something where he could feel himself again.
Right. And when exactly did he expect to feel himself again? There would still be the issue of money between them. Not his lack of it, precisely, but Material Girl’s irreverence of it. She bought whatever, whenever, whether she needed it or not, and every time she came home with a handful of brightly colored bags, that old Madonna song would jingle in his head. All right, he knew she had a lot of dough, an amount he was pretty sure was too huge for his brain to even conceive. Every time she paid according to their contract, she rounded up to the nearest thousand. The nearest thousand. “You never know what might crop up,” she said airily when he protested. Any other job, he would have been stunned and relieved. But on this job, it made him feel like a charity case.
Yep, the money thing was really beginning to grate.
Robin never seemed to think of it all, just acted as if it would always be there, and in mass quantities. The weekend Robin called her sister Rachel on a whim and suggested they meet in Chicago for a “jazz thingie” alarmed him. The week she and Mia took off for Paris (not Paris, Texas—Paris, France) for a little shopping astounded him. “We’ll be back before you know it,” she had said, kissing him as she flew out the door.
And if that wasn’t enough, it bothered him greatly that her money bothered him at all. Jake really, honestly, didn’t begrudge her a dime of what she had—he just wished she would appreciate it. Even her father’s threat of cutting her off had not seemed to make an impression—she continued to spend freely.
And just what was he going to do about the money thing? He could hardly ask her to denounce it all and live in true Manning fashion, contract to contract, month to month. But on the other hand, he could not seem to get used to the idea of her having so much more resource than him. Between Evan, her endless stream of money, and her questionable commitment to them—to Robin and Jake, The Couple—Jake was starting to wonder all over again if he was living in a dream—fantasy or nightmare.
He would have been very surprised to know he wasn’t alone in his bewilderment.
Robin was also figuring she had s
omehow managed to get herself locked in some parallel universe where she had actually fallen in love, money was an object, and she was struggling to understand a business she had once thought was hers by birthright alone. This was definitely not the world as she knew it.
First and foremost was this business of having gone off and fallen in love, the one thing she had always believed would never happen to someone who was alternately known as The Man-eater. But the night they had come back from the ranch and Jake had left her looking hurt and angry and really, plain disappointed, had undone her, affecting her in one of those buried places within her. She couldn’t sleep that night and spent the next day wandering irritably from room to room (as she was prone to do when he wasn’t around), pretty much hating her big empty house. Pretty much being mad at him. She thought he was a baby. She thought he was asking too much of her. How hard would it have been to let it go, to let her nurse the wounds her father had inflicted?
It was the tiny initials, the LH and DD forevermore, carved so carefully in the wood trim of the master bedroom that had finally cracked her hard veneer. She imagined that the tiny little inscription, but monstrously huge sentiment (if Jake’s theory was correct) was all that was left of two people’s lives, not this house, or the many things LH and DD might have had. Lockstep into eternity. How wonderful to be so completely devoted to someone that you would wish forevermore. And gazing at it, Robin had sunk down onto the window seat, had felt her hard heart shatter, brick by brick, until there was nothing left but the raw pink thing underneath, eager for someone to hold it. Not just anyone. Jacob Manning. Forevermore.
It was, as they say, an epiphanous moment. So epiphanous and gushing that Robin had sat on his front porch for almost two hours, waiting to say she loved him, that she needed him and his strength, his comfort, his affection. Worried that he might have dumped her and called Lindy in a fit of frustration. Fearing that she would have to retreat from this feeling and from his porch when the clouds started rolling in, but unwilling to give in, she had waited until the last possible moment.