Second Act

by Herkness, Nancy

  “The storage closet is private,” he said. “All we need is something to brace under the handle. There has to be a broom here somewhere.”

  “Hugh! We can’t!” But her voice was a breathless rasp.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to suck on your breasts while I drive into you over and over again until your orgasm explodes through you?” He put every ounce of seduction he could command into his voice.

  She went still in his arms for a long moment while he waited. “I know where the cleaning supplies are,” she said at last.

  “I adore you,” he said, giving her a fast, hard kiss before he slid his hands out from under the green fabric of her scrubs. “Lead the way.”

  They retrieved a broom, and Hugh shoved it under the doorknob of the storage room before he ripped his jacket off and tossed it on the dog bed. Jessica shrugged out of her lab coat and added it to the pile. Then Hugh lost track of who unbuttoned, untied, unbuckled, and unzipped what until they were naked and Jessica had stroked a condom onto his cock.

  “I’m not using that dog bed,” he growled.

  “It’s more comfortable than you think,” she said, reaching down to cup his balls.

  “The corner,” he hissed, walking her backward while her fingers danced over his sensitive skin and made him almost unable to think. He slid his hands under her naked buttocks and lifted her so she could wrap her legs around his waist, the hot, slippery center of her hitting his erection with the power of a stun gun, but one that gave pleasure, not pain. She levered herself up with her hands on his shoulders and let him slide into her in one swift movement.

  “Jess,” he hissed through clenched teeth as he felt her heat envelop him. “I want you so much.”

  “Yes!” she said, her inner muscles doing something wonderful to his cock. He took handfuls of her firm, round bottom to lift her so he could move, pushing up and half withdrawing, feeling the drag of her taut nipples against his chest, the bite of her fingers on his straining shoulder muscles, and the moist huff of her breath as she said his name every time he came into her.

  Then all he could do was feel, as his world narrowed and focused on the place where the two of them joined, the tension building with each shift and thrust. She arched back, her body completely still for one suspended moment, and then she clenched around him, her orgasm stroking and kneading his cock so hard he had to fight not to come with her. He wanted to absorb every ounce of her pleasure before he took his.

  As soon as she dropped her head onto his shoulder in completion, he let himself go, driving deep into her before his release tore through him, blanking his mind to everything except the detonation between his thighs.

  As he held them both upright against the wall while they recovered, he realized he had been right. Things had changed. This time, there had been nothing held back, no barriers between them. “Jess, will you come to the hotel with me tonight? I want to have you in my bed, to sleep with you in my arms.” He’d kept the penthouse suite in the hope that she might spend another night with him.

  “Yes,” she breathed against his bare shoulder without a moment’s hesitation. “I want that, too.”

  His heart felt as though someone had made a fist around it and squeezed. Strangely, it felt as much like fear as joy.

  He eased her feet down to the floor, relishing the slide of her skin along his. She leaned against him, her arms around his neck. “I have to get back to the set,” he said, his hands on her waist. “I promised Bryan I’d return as soon as I could.”

  “You didn’t, though.” He could hear pleasure in her voice. “You came here instead.” She chortled at her joke, and his fear evaporated.

  “You always complained about my puns,” he said, brushing his fingers over her ribs to tickle her.

  She giggled and jerked away. “It’s evil to tickle the woman you just made come until her muscles turned to mush.”

  “It was the only way I could get you to let go of me,” he teased, scooping her panties off the messy pile of their clothing and handing them to her before he hurried into his own clothes.

  “Well, that was way too fast,” she said, still wearing only her lingerie.

  Perplexed, he looked up from buckling his belt. “What was? The sex?” She had seemed just as eager as he was.

  “No, you covering up that gorgeous body of yours.”

  He grinned with relief. “Practice born of many costume changes.” He pulled her to him and ran his hands over her still-bare shoulders and back. “I’m glad you haven’t covered yours up yet.” He lowered his mouth to where one breast swelled above the lace of her bra and licked along the edge of the fabric.

  “Hu-u-ugh,” she breathed out, her hands clutching his upper arms.

  “Hold that thought until tonight.” He shifted upward to kiss her soft, pliant lips. “And bring your lab coat, so you can wear it and nothing else.”

  Desire heated her eyes as he set her away from him. “Shall I bring the stethoscope, too, and we can play doctor?”

  He laughed and shrugged into his suit jacket.

  “You were amazing with Ms. Washington.” Her lips curved into a smile as she straightened his tie. “Tonight you have to tell me how much of what you said about your foundation is true. I kind of like the idea of being a veterinary adviser to the stars. Well, one star.”

  “Yes, one star only. I’m not big on sharing.”

  Jessica combed her fingers through his hair and sighed. “You still never have a bad hair day. So unfair.”

  “You can do your level best to mess it up tonight.”

  “I accept the challenge.”

  Her laughter followed him as he strode down the hallway. Never had he wanted to return to work less than at this moment.

  Chapter 17

  Jessica lay beside Hugh in the rumpled hotel bed, Manhattan’s neon lights painting a kaleidoscope of colors across the sheets and their naked bodies. She shifted slightly to pull her stethoscope out from under her shoulder.

  “If we damaged it, I’ll buy you a new one,” Hugh said as he took it from her to place it on the bedside table.

  “Stethoscopes are pretty sturdy. They have to be.” She snuggled in as he pulled her against his slightly sweaty side.

  “Except I’m fairly certain the manufacturer wasn’t expecting it to be used quite the way we did.”

  Jessica chuckled and spread her fingers over Hugh’s chest, the rise and fall of his breath still noticeable after his exertions. “At least we know your heart is pumping just fine.”

  “A few other things pumped just fine, too.” She nipped at his shoulder, making him growl, “It’s your patients who are supposed to bite, not you.”

  She closed her eyes to bask in the press of his ribs against her breasts, the hard muscle of his thigh under the crook of her knee, the warm steel of his arm around her shoulders. If she’d thought her body was humming before, now it was singing an aria of sexual satisfaction, the music welling up from deep inside her. “I feel so good,” she said on a sigh.

  He traced a finger along her shoulder and down her arm. “You certainly do.”

  But that wasn’t enough. No matter how hard she tried to convince herself it shouldn’t be necessary, she couldn’t let go of her need to have Hugh put whatever he felt into words. As Aidan said, it was going to hurt if he told her this was just an interlude because they happened to be in the same city at the same time. However, she wanted to know that right up front.

  She levered herself up on one elbow so she could see his face. Its angles seemed less stark and hard edged somehow, and she brushed a fingertip along his cheekbone where it was lit by a slash of scarlet neon.

  “You look like you have something to say.” For a moment she didn’t recognize the emotion that flickered in his eyes. Then she identified it as fear.

  “Something good.” She hoped, swallowing against the nerves that made her throat constrict. “It’s different between us tonight, isn’t it? We’re more . . . open with each
other, less cautious.”

  He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, hesitating before he spoke. “Jess, I know it won’t be easy, but I want to try again with you, with us. Would you be willing to do that?”

  Disbelief waltzed with joy, so she was spun in the grip of first one and then the other, leaving her uncertain of what she wanted to say except “Yes!”

  “Did you say yes without stopping to think about it?” He pushed up to a sitting position, taking her with him. Now he sounded jubilant.

  “No, I’ve been thinking about us quite a bit, but I did say yes.”

  He shook his head, but he was smiling. “You’re confusing me. Just say yes again.”

  She took his face between her hands and held it while she locked her eyes on his. “Yes!”

  He wrapped his arms around her and kissed her with a tenderness that made her want to cry. When he released her lips, he drew back only a couple of inches. “We’ll make it work this time. I’ll make it work, I swear.”

  His vehemence was almost daunting, as though he would overwhelm any problem they might have through sheer force of will.

  “That’s something else I’ve been thinking about,” she said. “It wasn’t just you back then. I could have been more understanding.”

  “Don’t say that. I’ve kept important things about my past from you.” He slid his hands down her arms to intertwine their fingers. “I should have been honest with you . . . and with myself.”

  “Let’s forget about that tonight and just enjoy the present.” She wanted to hold on to the sweetness of the moment a little longer.

  “Do you know how much I want to do that? But we can’t move forward until I’ve repaired the damage from the past.” He shook his head. “I owe you a full explanation for my unforgivable behavior over the past eight years, because there’s more you don’t know.”

  All the softness in his face was gone now. “Tomorrow,” she said, still trying to spare him the pain.

  He looked down at where their hands were joined and said in a raw voice, “I don’t know if I’ll have the courage tomorrow. Right now, I believe in your love.”

  “You should always believe in it.”

  His grip tightened. “I’m trying.” He released her hands and shifted on the bed so he was silhouetted against the city lights, his face in shadow.

  His deliberate obscuring of his expression made her feel strangely vulnerable, so she pulled the sheet up over her breasts.

  “I told you that my parents dropped me at a foster-care center and never came back. That’s not accurate.” He looked away so she could see the sharp lines of his profile outlined by the lights of the skyscrapers behind him. “My father wasn’t in the picture from the start. He was a brief relationship that ended when Ma discovered she was pregnant. I never met him and never want to, although she often told me how much I look like him.”

  Jessica said nothing about it but she noted his use of the word often, which seemed out of place in the story. “I don’t know if that’s better or worse than him abandoning you after you were born. Maybe better?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s just a fact in a sordid story.”

  “Not sordid,” she said, hating his belittling of his history. “A tragic and terrible story.”

  He shrugged. “My mother took me to the foster-care center but made it clear that the situation was only temporary. She told them—and me—she was going to come back for me.”

  “Oh no.” Jessica’s heart contracted painfully. Despite his withdrawal, she needed to offer comfort and reached forward to lay her hand on the back of his where it rested on the bed. “That was cruel, even if her intentions were good.”

  He looked down at her touch but didn’t acknowledge it in any other way. “Ah, but she did come back. More than once. I would get settled with a set of foster parents, and then she would show up on the doorstep, demanding my return.”

  “What? She could do that?” She tried to imagine how Hugh would have felt as a small boy when that happened.

  “She wouldn’t relinquish her parental rights because she was sure she could be a good mother to me . . . if she could just stop drinking.”

  He’d never told her why he had been put in foster care. Jessica had assumed his irresponsible parents just didn’t want to be saddled with a child. “Did you want to go with her?”

  “I couldn’t pack my garbage bag fast enough every time. It didn’t matter if I liked the foster family or not—she was my mother and she had come back for me.”

  “But she didn’t keep you.” So he had been whipsawed between joy at his mother’s return and what? Crushing hurt and disappointment when she threw him back? Jessica forced herself to do nothing more than squeeze Hugh’s hand when she wanted to throw her arms around him and rock him like the child she was picturing.

  “Ma would go to AA meetings for a while. Then something would happen to upset her at work—she mostly waitressed—and she’d quit. Or I’d get sick and she’d have to use part of the rent money for the doctor and meds, so the latest landlord would get nasty. It always started with just one little drink to take the edge off her problems.” He shrugged again. “But an alcoholic never stops at one.”

  “How old were you the first time it happened?”

  “I’m not sure. Young enough not to remember much about it, except that she gave me back.” His last words were raw with a pain that scraped over Jessica’s nerves like a knife blade.

  “You thought she didn’t want you.” She could barely speak through the heartbreak she felt for that little boy.

  “The next time I was old enough to understand what would happen if she started drinking. I did everything I could think of to prevent it. I made the beds every day. I washed the dishes. I helped her clean the apartment. I took out the trash. I kept ‘quiet as a mouse,’ as she always admonished me when she left for work, because there was no babysitter, of course. She couldn’t afford one.”

  Jessica winced. “How old were you?”

  “About eight or nine, I think.”

  “Oh dear God!” She pictured the boy doing chores beyond his years because he thought it would help his mother stay sober. Tears burned in her throat.

  “I didn’t need a babysitter. The apartment was perfectly safe.” His voice was harsh as he defended his mother.

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking of. It was you”—her voice broke on a sob—“working so hard to be perfect, believing you could change her behavior when her problems had nothing to do with you. I want to take that little boy in my arms and tell him none of it was his fault.”

  “But I was never good enough.” Now his voice was harsh for a different reason. “Never good enough to make her want to stop drinking, so she could keep me.”

  Tears ran down Jessica’s cheeks. “You know that’s not true. She had a disease. That’s what alcoholism is. She did want to keep you—look at how often she tried!—but the disease prevented it.”

  He let out a long breath. “It didn’t feel that way at the time.” Suddenly, he turned his hand under hers and clasped her fingers. “She screwed up my chances of being adopted by a stable family. I screwed up my chances, too, because I refused to cooperate in case she wanted me back again. At the same time, I still hoped someone would want to adopt me, just because it would prove that there wasn’t something wrong with me.”

  “Who could blame you?” Jessica fought down another sob. “When was the last time you saw your mother?”

  His grip on her hand became convulsive. “Six years ago. At the morgue in West Covina to confirm her identity. She’d been hit by a car. Her blood alcohol level was .21.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Jessica whispered, the words inadequate to acknowledge his terrible loss. Her death meant that there was no chance for Hugh to ever have a real relationship with his mother.

  He reached for her other hand and faced her, angled so she could see half of his face while the other half was still in shadow. “I didn’t tell you this t
o make you pity me. I told you because that’s why I reacted the way I did when you broke our engagement. Because I felt like that child who’d been abandoned all over again.”

  She nodded. “I understand.”

  “It wasn’t your fault any more than my mother’s alcoholism was mine. You had every right to feel the way you did. But when you left, I reverted back to that nine-year-old. Even worse, I refused to admit it to myself. I rationalized not contacting you with all kinds of lame reasons. Then too much time passed, and I couldn’t break through my own stupid pride. I told myself you’d moved on.” He ran his thumbs over the back of her hands. “But I never did. I couldn’t, because I didn’t have the guts to face what I had done.”

  His words sent a little shiver of disquiet through her. Was this just atonement for their past or did he want her now?

  “Neither of us felt that we were good enough for the other,” she said. “Kind of ironic. Except I was used to excelling at whatever I did, so I couldn’t accept being less than the perfect partner. I felt like a failure all the time, and that made me miserable.”

  “That’s on me. You were brilliant, but in your own wonderful way. I was too scared and blinded by the attention to see that.” He dropped her hands and shifted close enough to hold her bare shoulders. “I meant it when I said you could wear scrubs on the red carpet as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Will Tiffany loan me a diamond necklace to go with them?” she teased.

  “I’ll buy you a necklace. You are the woman I want exactly as you are. Don’t change. Ever.”

  “Change is part of life.”

  “Your compassion and integrity and capacity for love will never change. That’s what I treasure.”

  His words burrowed deep inside her, soothing the old wounds and swelling the love for him she was beginning to be a little afraid of. It was so overwhelming and without restraint. She still knew so little of this older Hugh and how he lived and what he thought. To fall so completely in love with him again seemed dangerous.