by Joss Wood
She wasn’t the carefree woman she’d been a year and a half back, though. She had responsibilities now. This wasn’t about her and what she wanted—hot, curl-her-toes and burn-her-sheets sex.
So stop imagining him naked and think!
He had an ironclad good excuse for not contacting her after Milan, and his explanation went some way toward erasing the anger and hurt she’d lived with for so long. But did it fundamentally change anything?
Piper couldn’t see that it did.
She still needed to sell her sapphires to save her house and provide the stable, calm environment she needed to raise Ty. Her life before Simms’s visit was good for a single mom juggling a career. She loved living in this house; she paid the bills; she had people she trusted with Ty.
She needed to keep doing that.
Should she tell Jaeger about Ty?
Not now, was her gut instinct. She needed to tackle one problem at a time. Securing her house was her priority, and she didn’t want the negotiations around her stones clouded by any emotions—panic, guilt, responsibility—that Jaeger might experience after hearing she was the mother of his son.
Unlike her own mother, she would not spend her life waiting for the father of her child to discover his daddy-and-husband instincts.
“I’m sorry about your hassles with security, but they had no way of knowing you were trying to sell me some stunning sapphires.”
Piper forced her attention back to their conversation and slowly nodded. Sure, that. Let’s go with the sapphire excuse and pretend I wasn’t also trying to find the courage to tell you I was carrying your baby.
“Wonderful.”
Jaeger’s hand pushing a curl behind her ear jerked her attention back to reality. Oh, God, he was now standing a couple of inches from her, and with every breath she took, she inhaled his soap and cologne smell, his Jaeger-ness. So close she could see the flecks of silver in his eyes, the tiny scar bisecting his right eyebrow, another on his top lip...
How could she still be so attracted to him? Why was she desperate to feel his lips on hers, his hands on her bare skin? Yet she wanted nothing more than to stand on her tiptoes and rest her lips against his.
Once more, just once...
“That night? Did we—?”
She couldn’t allow him to finish the question. She didn’t want to lie to him, so she stopped his words the only way she knew how: she pushed up onto her toes and slammed her lips on his.
Jaeger pulled away, looked at her in surprise, blinked once, then grabbed the front of her shirt and yanked her back into him. Piper sighed when his mouth moved against hers, expertly, seductively. Without thought, she moved closer to him, her hands lifting to hold his strong neck, her fingers playing with the waves at the back of his head.
She sighed. This was what she’d been missing, dreaming of—enjoying Jaeger’s broad hands on her hips, his erection pushing into her stomach. Piper made a tiny noise in the back of her throat, and Jaeger dialed the kiss up from immensely enjoyable to combustible. His tongue swept into her mouth and his hand on the top of her butt pulled her into him, so close a piece of paper couldn’t have slid between them. His mouth created havoc on hers, and she felt herself falling into the magical space she’d visited eighteen months ago.
Jaeger was kissing her—his hand was holding the curve of her butt, his other hand was holding the back of her head—and he was kissing her with equal parts skill and desperation.
Then Piper felt one of Jaeger’s hands sneak under her shirt, dance over her skin, and she shivered. His fingers moved slowly up her rib cage and flirted with the sides of her breasts. His thumb swiped her nipple through the lace of her bra, and God, he felt so incredibly good...
The front door opened. Ceri’s “We’re home” had Piper jerking away from Jaeger. Whirling around and stepping away from Jaeger, she looked across the living room to the front door, to where Ceri stood, Ty on her hip.
Something was wrong, Piper thought, instantly morphing from lover to mother. She narrowed her eyes. Ty had his head on Ceri’s shoulder and he looked a little pale, almost listless. Ignoring Jaeger, Piper hurried toward them. Ty saw her and held his arms out, leaning forward, a silent plea for her to take him. Piper gathered him into her and held his head against her shoulder. “Hey, baby boy. What’s the matter, huh?”
Ceri bit her bottom lip. “I think he might have an earache. He’s bumping his hand against his ear. He doesn’t have a fever, but he’s not himself.” Ceri looked at her watch and grimaced. “I need to go, but call me if I can help or if he gets worse.”
“Thanks, Ceri.”
Ceri closed the front door behind her as Piper held the back of her hand to Ty’s forehead, to his cheek. Ceri was right, he didn’t have a fever, but his eyes seemed dull. She cuddled him close and rocked on her feet, inhaling his little boy smell, feeling his breath against her neck.
“Love you to the moon and back,” she murmured, her hand rubbing circles on his back. “My beautiful, beautiful, boy.”
“Everything okay?”
The deep voice drifted over, and Piper spun around. Jaeger pressed his shoulder into the door frame of the den, his face inscrutable. Her boy got all his beauty from his father, she thought again. Piper rested her cheek on Ty’s head. “Ty isn’t feeling too well.”
“So he’s yours and doesn’t belong to the kids downstairs?”
“Yep.” Being Ty’s mommy wasn’t something she could keep secret, even if she wanted to. Being a mother, Ty’s mother, was her biggest achievement. Everything—her master’s degree in art history, her pre-Ty career, traveling the world looking at great art—paled to insignificance beside the importance of raising her son.
“So, who was the young guy?”
“Ceri and Rainn are twins. Ceri is my nanny, but Rainn also helps out. They live in the apartment downstairs,” Piper replied, pulling a curl from Ty’s fist. “In between being a nanny, she works as an illustrator for children’s books. Rainn is studying medicine. I give them a kick-ass subsidy on their rent and they look after Ty when I need to work. They have six brothers and sisters, all a lot younger than them, and their parents also take in foster kids. They’ve taught me more about babies than I’ve learned from books.”
Piper looked at her watch. She needed to feed and bathe Ty. She and Ty had a schedule, and Jaeger’s presence messed with her routine and with—well—her head.
She’d just kissed the hell out of her baby’s daddy in her den. What was wrong with her?
Uh, sexy guy, good kisser, been a long drought?
She needed to give Ty her full attention. He was, thank God, the easiest child on the planet, but he was rarely sick. She felt a surge of panic hit the back of her throat. He was just a little off-color right now and if he became sicker, she could handle it. That was why God made drugs and doctor’s offices. She was in Brooklyn, dammit, not in a shack in outer Mongolia.
Piper picked up a soft toy from out of Ty’s playpen, handed it to Ty and closed her eyes.
Needing some space and distance between her and Jaeger, she patted Ty’s bottom. “I need to change him.” She darted a look at Jaeger and silently cursed when she saw he was as cool and composed as he always was, like he hadn’t had a wild woman sucking the life out of him just a few moments before. “Can you let yourself out?”
Jaeger’s eyes bounced between her and Ty, and he eventually nodded his head. “Yeah.” He gestured to Ty. “I hope he’ll be okay.”
“He’ll be fine,” Piper said. Piper looked at her feet before forcing her eyes back to Jaeger’s. She glanced at his mouth, sighed and wished he’d kiss her again.
No kissing Jaeger, she told herself. This was a complicated situation as it was. She didn’t need to add a truckload of sexual tension to the growing pile of craziness.
“Look,” she sa
id, “I think we need to forget that kiss, pretend it never happened.”
Jaeger slowly shook his head. “Not an option. There are too many things I’ve already forgotten. I’m not adding kissing you to that list.”
Four
In his West Street penthouse, Jaeger rolled out of his empty bed and padded to the kitchen, glancing at the Hudson River through the massive windows that were a key feature of the apartment. This place was ridiculously big for one person, but he liked returning to light and space and quiet after his trips abroad.
A lot of light, space and quiet, Jaeger thought. Thanks, Uncle Connor.
Connor had left everything he owned to his four adopted children, including property and equal shares in Ballantyne International, with its many subsidiaries, the most important of which were the exclusive jewelry stores around the world. Their childhood home, a brownstone on the Upper East Side, was also jointly owned by the four of them, but he and Beckett retained their own residences. Beckett had offered his place to family friends from London visiting the city for a month, so he was temporarily living in Jaeger’s apartment. Jaeger didn’t mind. It wasn’t like he didn’t have the room.
He liked this apartment, but its designer perfection was wasted on him. He was hardly here, and it felt sterile and cold. He preferred Piper’s relaxed bohemian style, a mishmash of old and new furniture, interesting art and the ordinary household items indicating people used the space, lived and loved there. An open book, a corked wine bottle, magnets on the fridge, a playpen in the corner...
God, she had a kid.
He’d met her yesterday, so he couldn’t exactly ask, but Jaeger wondered who Ty’s father was and whether he was in the picture. Were they together when he and Piper had dinner in Milan? Piper didn’t seem like the type to cheat on her man, but Jaeger knew how wrong he could be when he made assumptions.
He’d thought Jess would live past six weeks, never imagined she’d be a victim of sudden infant death syndrome. He’d assumed he and Andrea needed time to grieve and they’d find their way back to each other.
And he’d never believed that he could forget a chunk of his life.
God, he’d been so lucky. What if he’d forgotten more? What if he’d had no memories of his parents, his childhood, Connor... God, no memories of Jess? As it always did when he thought too long about his amnesia, panic bubbled and boiled. It was a couple of months of his life lost, but to Jaeger, it was symbolic of everything that went away.
Like his parents, Jess, Connor...those memories were inaccessible.
His body had healed quickly, but his mind hadn’t. He coped with the uncertainty by minimizing risk, particularly in his personal life. No relationships, no kids, no connections. He was never going to bring someone new into his life, since life had this habit of whisking away the people he loved.
Few people knew what it felt like when grief plunged its icy hand into your rib cage and ripped out your heart. He couldn’t even call it pain; it went beyond that. He’d had his heart replaced with an organ pumping cold regret, hot anger, crippling guilt and searing agony all at the same time. Those emotions gradually faded, but he remembered enough to want not to go there again.
Besides, even if he desired to revisit that madness—he didn’t; he’d rather have been stabbed in the eye with a red-hot poker—the nature of his work made it difficult to sustain a relationship. He dropped in and out of New York like a yo-yo, and his schedule could turn on a dime. If he received a tip from any of his numerous contacts around the world, he was on the next plane out, hoping to be the first to do the deal. He had no illusions about the loyalty of his contacts—they passed the same information to his rivals—but they generally gave him a head start, probably because he paid them a slightly higher commission than his competitors did.
International gem dealing was a cutthroat business, and Jaeger cut throats, metaphorically, very well indeed. He was ruthless, demanding and persistent. He liked his life, liked the opportunity to see places few people did, to meet with people from different cultures, to visit villages where time stood still. He liked the freedom his work gave him, and he loved the adrenaline of making a deal.
He’d never, not for a single second, thought he’d find the same adrenaline kissing Piper, someone he’d met before but whom he couldn’t remember, a woman with a kid.
A baby...a species he’d vowed to avoid after he’d chosen a tiny white coffin painted with delicate pink roses.
“Bro.”
Jaeger turned to see his younger brother walking into his kitchen, scratching his bare chest. Beckett looked like someone had dragged him backward through a bush, but his blue eyes, darker than Jaeger’s, looked lazy and satisfied.
“Is she still here?”
Beck shook his head. “Nope, she left a half hour ago.”
Thank God, Jaeger thought, not in the mood to make small talk with one of Beckett’s short-term women. Hypocrite, his inner voice mocked. Until eighteen months ago, their women would’ve bumped into each other in the kitchen. But since his accident, the revolving door to his bedroom was broken, and he’d slept with only a select few. He hadn’t lost his libido—it was working just fine—but he wanted something more than a quick bang, a roll in the sack.
He didn’t want a relationship, though, which left him in no man’s—or little sex—land.
“Jay, coffee?”
Jaeger nodded and walked into the kitchen. He sat on one of the uncomfortable seats at the sleek granite island separating the kitchen from the rest of the open-plan apartment.
Jaeger watched Beckett, who was far more at home in his kitchen than he was, make coffee.
“Do you really think those sapphires you saw yesterday could be part of the Kashmir Blues?” Beckett asked, pushing a cup of coffee over the counter toward him. Jaeger nodded his thanks and lifted the cup to his mouth.
“There’s a good possibility.” Jaeger smiled as excitement jumped into Beckett’s eyes. Although he was their director of finance and their master strategist, Beck loved the hunt for gems as much as Jaeger did. He knew finding the Kashmir Blues was a freakin’ big deal.
“Holy crap, Jay, that’s unbelievable.”
Jaeger told Beck about Piper, about them meeting in Milan, that Ballantyne security had kept her away when he’d been in the hospital and afterward.
“She must’ve been desperate to sell those sapphires,” Beck stated, leaning against a counter and crossing his legs at the ankles. “But if she was, why didn’t she sell them to someone else?”
“It would be easier to answer that question if I could remember meeting her in Milan.”
“The doctors say you probably never will.”
And that pissed him off. He wanted to remember Piper, wanted to remember what they spoke about, talked about, whether there was something else he was missing. And dammit, he really felt like he was missing something. Something huge.
“Could the sapphires be stolen?” Beck asked, pulling Jaeger back to the present.
He wanted to say no, but he wasn’t sure. “I’m running a background check.”
“If the sapphs are the Kashmir Blues then we are looking at paying her five million or more. That’s a hell of a payout, but we’d make a massive return.”
Yeah, he was aware.
Beck tapped Jaeger’s shoulder as he walked out of the kitchen to shower and dress. Jaeger thought he should get ready, too. He had a busy day ahead. He was valuing a collection of vintage jewelry belonging to a rapacious, childless scion of New York society. He couldn’t wait to see what Amelia Grant-Childs had in her vault.
His thoughts wandered back to his own vault and the sapphires within it. From there it was a mini-jump to Piper, remembering her slim body in his arms, her soft lips, her spicy mouth, the passion that flashed and ignited when he kissed her.
No married women. No kids.
He ignored the mantra in his head, walked back into his bedroom and picked up his phone off the credenza where he’d left it to recharge. Piper’s card was under the phone, and he quickly dialed her number and waited for it to ring. Calling her just because he wanted to hear her voice was pathetic.
That didn’t stop him.
“Hello?” She sounded exhausted, Jaeger realized.
“Hi, it’s me... Jaeger.”
“Oh, hi. Listen, it’s really not a good time for me. We’re just walking in, Ty is screaming for me and I need to give him some medicine.”
“Walking in from where?” It was barely seven, for God’s sake!
“Ty took a turn for the worse late last night. I took him to an after-hours clinic at around four this morning. He had a miserable night.”
“Is he okay?” Jaeger asked, his heart lurching. His thoughts immediately went to a tiny white coffin with pink painted roses.
“He has an ear infection and it’s nothing serious,” Piper replied. “Ceri says he’ll be fine in a day or so.”
“I find it incredible that your source for all things baby is a twenty-year-old with a nose ring,” Jaeger said, smiling as he sat on the edge of his bed.
“My parents are dead and I’m a single mom. My friends, the ones who didn’t ease away after I became pregnant, have even less experience with babies than I do. I don’t have time to attend mommy groups, so Ceri, Rainn, the internet and a massive book on the subject are what I use.”
She shouldn’t be dealing with this alone, Jaeger thought.
“Anyway, you called me. How can I help you?”
Jaeger did some fast thinking to come up with an excuse. “I was wondering if you have any documentation on the sapphires?”
“Provenance. I should have thought of that. Well, there are boxes of stuff my mom inherited from her mom in the attic. I’ll go up there and get them down. She was a hoarder, so if she had anything on the sapphires, then it’ll be in there. Actually, I might need Rainn’s help to get the boxes down, so depending on his schedule, I’ll let you know when I’ve been through them.”