The thought made her thighs grow even damper. Knowing that J.T. had been in town for a prolonged period presented her with a whole different viewpoint. Partly because she’d known that when he’d left sixteen months ago, he’d left town completely and she’d figured he’d never come back.
But he had. And for more than a day.
And now he was sitting in her car making her remember with vivid clarity how sweet it was to kiss his skillful mouth. How thrilling it was to have his arms around her.
How very wrong it was for her to want both.
“Dan and I are reconciling,” she said.
That got a response from him. He dropped his gaze then squinted through the windshield, headlights from a passing car flickering over his granite features. “You divorced?”
Leah caught her bottom lip between her teeth and also looked away. She nodded, wondering how wise it was to reveal that she was free.
Oh, free was so wrong a word it made her wince. She wasn’t any freer now than she had been back then. She and Dan were reconciling. For God’s sake, they were even now discussing the date when he might move back into the house. Her daughter, Sami, talked about her father’s return nonstop. Her family had come to accept the reconciliation and plans were being made for a family dinner on Easter, mere weeks away.
And she still wanted the man sitting next to her with a ferocity that scared her to death.
Leah felt J.T.’s hand on her cheek. The thick, callused pad of his thumb felt so natural against her skin that rather than pulling back, she allowed her eyes to drift close and her head to lean into his touch.
“Do you love him?”
Leah felt her chest cave in on her heart. She blinked to look into J.T.’s intense gaze. He’d asked the question of her before. The night they’d first met.
She hadn’t answered him then. And she had never asked herself the question again.
“J.T., I don’t think this is such a good idea. Sami’s waiting for me to get home. I’m glad to see you, happy you’re doing well…”
“Kiss me, Leah.”
The words were so simple, so straightforward. And had the effect of a bulldozer on all her good intentions.
She crossed the mere inches separating them and did as he requested.
Oh God, oh God, oh God…
He tasted so good. Better than she remembered. Like butterscotch candy and hot, hot man. His lips were soft and malleable. His tongue like a lick of fire as it entered her mouth.
Leah’s breath quickened, her blood flowed through her veins enticing her limbs to action. Her fingers found their way to J.T.’s damp hair. Her chest found a way to crush against his across the narrow console. Her mouth slipped and bit and devoured his lips until she was afraid that the fire of his tongue would ignite her entire body.
He caught her chin in his hand and held her steady for long, silent moments, staring into her eyes. “Are you sure this is what you want?” he asked.
Yes.
No!
Leah didn’t know what she wanted. She just wanted what she was feeling never to stop.
Her silence appeared all the answer he needed as he hauled her across the console until her bottom rested in his lap and her legs dangled over into the driver’s seat. She became instantly aware of his erection, long and hard against her bottom. She moaned and melded her mouth to his, afraid of what might happen if they continued, afraid of what might happen if they didn’t. Her fingers found their way to his jacket and pushed open the leather, then shoved up the soft cotton of his T-shirt. She remembered that he was rock-hard everywhere and she quickly discovered that hadn’t changed. Except that he seemed to be even more solidly muscular. Leaner. A dangerous energy emanated from him that caught her up in its conflicting current.
She didn’t realize he’d opened her blouse until she felt his tongue against the upper swell of her right breast. Leah stretched her neck and gritted her teeth together, shivers traveling down her back then up again, making her tremble from head to foot. J.T. cupped her breast, then squeezed, forcing the flesh upward from the lacy demi cup. He fastened his mouth over her painfully distended nipple and she cried out, digging her fingers deeply into the flesh of his shoulders. She knew a need so powerful it rocked her to the core.
She fumbled for and found his zipper, tugging it down and sliding her fingers inside the cotton of his boxers until she held the very essence of him. His turgid flesh was so long. So thick. So hard. Her mouth watered with the desire to taste him. To coax out his bittersweet semen. To hear him call out her name, his fingers entwined in her hair, tightly holding her to him.
With some awkwardness, she helped him rid her of her slacks and then straddled him, her right knee hitting the console, her left wedged tightly against the door. But she didn’t care. All she could concentrate on was how badly she wanted this one man. How hot she was, how hot he was, and how she knew that only he could put out the fire twisting and turning inside her.
She reached to position him against her hungry flesh. She gasped when he grabbed her wrist in a viselike grip.
“No,” he ground out.
The air disappeared from Leah’s lungs.
“Not like this. Not in a car. Not so soon.”
Leah blinked at him, incapable of speech.
J.T. stared at her for a long moment then deposited her back onto the driver’s seat. She watched, dumbstruck, as he adjusted his clothing with the same control he did everything else, then he sat back and looked at her, his eyes full of question and mystery.
“It was good seeing you, Leah,” he murmured.
Then he climbed out of the car and slammed the door.
J.T. STOOD ALONE in the parking lot, the cool spring rain washing over him as he watched Leah’s taillights disappear into the damp night. She had turned toward the big, warm house waiting for her a few miles to the west. The house that over the past twelve years she’d made a home. A place not unlike the hulking house she’d grown up in. He’d visited both places only once and had known instantly that he didn’t belong in either. Just as he’d known that Leah hadn’t belonged in either his father’s rusty trailer or the shabby, no-star motels he’d recently called home.
But if there was one thing he’d come to understand during his thirty-two years—and especially in the past year and a half—it was that outer trappings had very little to do with basic human wants and needs. And if the past thirty minutes were any indication, he wanted…needed Leah on a level he couldn’t begin to understand. All he knew was that he had to explore what it was. If for no other reason than to tuck her and whatever existed between them neatly into the past, where so far it had refused to rest.
Water dripped down over his face, soaking his T-shirt, running over his jacket, but still he couldn’t bring himself to move. What he’d experienced with Leah before had been profound. But what had passed between them a few minutes ago had shaken him to the bone. He hadn’t had sex in a car since he was eighteen. And, curiously enough, it had been with Leah. He’d been a hairbreadth away from taking what Leah had just so generously, hungrily offered. Had known such a ferocious desire to bury himself in her sweet, hot flesh that in that one moment everything else had emerged irrelevant.
Even his freedom.
His gaze cut to a car entering the parking lot from the opposite direction. A white and blue cruiser emblazoned with the words Toledo City Police Department. J.T. shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans, then turned and made his way toward his bike. He heard the cruiser slowly pass by him, then continue on as he put on his helmet. He watched as the officers turned at the end of the lane then he straddled the wet Harley. He was less than a mile away from the city line. The cruiser exited the parking lot onto Secor Road, then disappeared from site. But the significance of his reaction to it lingered on, pounding against J.T. much like the rain.
If he’d needed a reminder of how much he was putting on the line by coming back to Toledo, by staying in one place for longer than he k
new to be safe, the innocuous drive-by was it. While the cruiser and the officers in it hadn’t been looking for him, they might be tomorrow. Or the day after that. Which didn’t leave him much time to accomplish what he needed to.
The powerful bike started up with a quiet roar, echoing the emotions pulsing through him. So much at stake. With no guarantees. But he needed to find out if she was a bored middle-upper class housewife seeking a bit of fun with a bad boy from her younger days. Or if Leah Dubois Burger loved him. And he wasn’t leaving until he found out.
3
“I NEED THAT PERMISSION SLIP for the class trip today. And I can’t find my blue volleyball shorts.”
Leah squinted against the early-morning sun slanting in through the French doors as she stacked thinly sliced pieces of turkey breast onto a whole-wheat slice of bread. Bread that she had picked up at the market the night before last. Bread that had been the cause of long, restless nights filled with yearnings for a man she shouldn’t be yearning for.
“You can’t find your volleyball shorts because they’re in the laundry room waiting to be washed.” She tore lettuce apart and added it to the sandwich. “And what class trip?”
“You didn’t wash my shorts?”
Sami finally stepped out of the glare of the light. It never ceased to amaze Leah that an eleven-year-old girl could have so much to be angry about. Her daughter’s blue eyes flashed and her light brown hair seemed to crackle with electricity.
“No,” Leah said carefully, cutting the sandwich into two even halves then putting it into a baggie. “I didn’t wash your shorts, Sam. And you didn’t answer me about the trip.”
Her daughter continued to ignore her question, turning on her heel and stalking to the laundry room just off the dining area. Leah put the sandwich into a backpack along with a pear, carrot sticks and a juice pack and watched Sami pick through the laundry basket for her shorts. The navy blue material was wrinkled but otherwise unsoiled.
“I can’t possibly wear these!” Sami cried.
Leah stretched her neck, looked at her watch and asked again, “What class trip?”
Sami glared at her, stalked back across the kitchen to the crowded desk built into the cabinets, then fished out a slip of paper in among the bills. “This one.”
Sami slapped the paper onto the counter into a dollop of mustard then stalked from the room. Leah read the slip as she wiped the mustard from the back of it. It seemed two weeks ago her daughter’s History teacher had requested permission for Sami to go on a class trip to the Toledo Museum of Art. Leah was pretty certain she didn’t remember her daughter saying anything about the trip. And she’d gone through the bills stacked on her desk two nights ago and hadn’t seen the slip. But considering her own state of mind as of late, she couldn’t bring herself to lay the blame completely on her daughter. To say she hadn’t been on top of things recently would be akin to saying coffee was black.
Speaking of coffee…
She stared longingly at the empty carafe on the counter behind her, then winced at the sound of her daughter’s bedroom door slamming.
Leah briefly closed her eyes, trying to remember that it wasn’t all that long ago that she and Sami had been best friends. Well, okay, not best friends. But there had been a level of respect and trust and warmth there that Leah had once shared with her own mother.
Now it seemed she could do nothing right in the eleven-year-old’s eyes. If she breathed, she was doing it wrong. And on some days she found herself teetering between wanting to lock the girl in the basement or run away entirely.
Of course, she’d known the exact moment when the tides had turned. The night nearly a year and a half ago when she had sat Sami down and told her that she and her father were separating.
And the reason for their separation had been the very man who was causing her distraction now.
Two days had passed since she’d run into J. T. West at the market. Two days since he’d climbed into her car and she’d remembered all at once what it was be like to just…be. To feel like a woman. Not somebody’s mother. Not somebody’s daughter. Not somebody’s ex working toward reconciliation. Then she’d practically mauled him in the front seat.
It had been two days since she’d heard from him and was left to wonder if he was still in town. Two days since she’d told herself that nothing had really happened between them. They’d merely kissed. Nothing more. Nothing less. And there was nothing wrong in that because, technically, she and Dan weren’t reconciled yet. They were still divorced. He didn’t live in the house.
And her arguments weren’t making a dent in the enormous guilt that coated her insides like thick, black tar.
Leah squeezed her eyes shut. Worse than the guilt, though, were thoughts of J.T. that could be called nothing but carnal. And burned in her mind was the memory of his face when she first caught sight of him in that supermarket. At that moment it had seemed like barely a day had passed since she’d last seen him, rather than sixteen long, brutal months. Months when she’d tried to pick up the pieces of her broken heart and her broken life and glue them back together, even though she was convinced there wasn’t enough superglue in the world to handle the monumental job.
She slowly licked her lips, remembering that when she’d kissed J.T.’s mouth her desire had skyrocketed, dampened not at all by the time that had passed, by everything that had happened between then and now. If anything, she wanted him even worse now than ever.
And for two full nights she had twisted and turned in bed, wanting him with an intensity that left her breathless.
“I’m borrowing your blue sweatpants for the game.”
Leah blinked Sami’s angry face into focus. Her daughter narrowed her eyes at her as she shook the pants in question. The jersey pants were part of a lounge set, not true sweatpants, but she wasn’t up to arguing the point that Sami had at least two pair of acceptable shorts tucked away somewhere in her own dresser drawers.
Leah signed the permission slip then put it in the front zipper of the backpack. She handed the pack to her daughter. “Fine.”
“You’re not driving me to school this morning?”
The day was warm and sunny. The elementary school Sami attended wasn’t a third of a mile away. Yet she normally did drive her daughter.
She turned and gathered her own lunch, which consisted of a tuna salad. “No, I’m going in the opposite direction. I have an early class.”
Sami sighed and rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why you have to go to school. School is for kids. And you’re not a kid.”
Like she needed to be told that.
But shortly after Dan had left, while she’d still been trying to figure out her affair with J.T., she’d decided she wanted to go back and finish the business degree she’d given up when she’d married Dan and had Sami.
“Maybe you’ll understand when you’re older,” she said. “You’d better get going or you’ll be late.”
“I can’t wait until Dad comes back so this house can get back to normal,” Sami mumbled, then grabbed her sweater from the coatrack near the front door and slammed out of the house.
Leah stared after her, suppressing a full body shudder. Normal? She wanted to ask her daughter what exactly constituted normal. Leah living her life strictly for her husband and child? Making sure jerseys and shorts were clean, appointments kept, the gas tank full so she could run errands to pick up their things, do their errands, take them to school and to work?
It appeared she and Sami were overdue for another talk. Not that she thought it would make a difference. Leah had the sinking sensation that her daughter and she would never see eye to eye again.
She grabbed her own jacket and shrugged into it while holding her books and lunch and juggling the keys to lock the door after herself. The Lexus SUV sat in the driveway instead of the garage because Sami had decided to paint her bike and the still-wet bike in question was sitting where Leah’s car usually sat.
She opened the back door of the ca
r and dropped her lunch and books onto the seat, then she slid into the driver’s seat. She started the car, her gaze drawn to the passenger seat where J.T. had sat two nights before. But he wasn’t sitting there now. Instead a small white bag bearing the logo of a nearby bakery along with an extra-large cup of coffee and a single peach-colored rose sat in the middle of the seat.
Leah’s heart turned over in her chest as she breathed in the aroma of fresh pastry and coffee filling the car. The sound of a motorcycle motor pulled her attention to the street behind her. Was J.T. there? Was he watching to see her reaction to finding his little surprise? She didn’t see anything but the regular morning activity of neighbors leaving for work, kids walking to school, the newsboy delivering newspapers.
She knew a moment of anticipation so overwhelming her thighs trembled.
J.T. was still in town….
And the prospect of seeing him made her hot all over…and more than a little scared.
J.T. SAT PARKED UNDER A TREE and behind a minivan a half block up and watched Leah scan the street, undoubtedly looking for him. He knew from having gotten some idea of her routine the past week that she had an early class this morning. And after watching her light go on and off every half hour between eleven and one before he’d headed home last night, he suspected she needed a jolt of caffeine this morning. Seeing her daughter storm from the house, glare at the closed door then stalk off, told him his efforts were likely doubly appreciated.
J.T.’s fingers tightened on the handgrips of the old bike. Of course the surprise had been more than a thoughtful gesture. In truth, he’d wanted Leah to know that he was still there, and that he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
Since kissing her again after so long, and discovering that the explosive attraction that had originally drawn them together was still there, he realized that his mission might take more time than he’d thought. It was going to be a challenge to dig deep beyond that molten attraction and see if something more substantial, more significant, more binding existed. And time was what he intended to give himself. Despite the deep craving that burrowed inside him every time he thought of her, saw her, what he needed transcended the physical.
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