James could see the mental war raging in her eyes.
“Can I think about it?” Mak finally said.
“Of course you can—for as long you need,” he said, looking straight into her eyes. He wouldn’t force her to make a decision until she was ready to, especially not one she might soon come to regret.
She gave him a small smile.
James felt his phone vibrate in his pocket: Deacon Thomas.
James didn’t know why he was calling, but he wasn’t expecting the news to be good.
CHAPTER TWENTY –
MAK ASHWOOD
Mak ate the remainder of her omelet but her attention was on James. She’d noticed his telephone conversations were almost always a combination of one-syllable words: yes, or no, or fine. Every now and then he strung a sentence together, giving away the only clues to the conversation.
“Ah, I’m not sure. I’ll have to check with Cami to see what she has planned. I’ll give her a call and get back to you,” James said, and then hung up and put his phone on the bench top.
“What are your plans this weekend?” he asked her.
“Me?” Mak asked, surprised.
“Yes, you. The client Deacon is with wants to go for an unscheduled trip this weekend, and wants Deacon to accompany him. But depending on what you’re doing, I might need him here.”
Did both James and Deacon watch her all the time?
“I haven’t gotten that far. Given the trial is done, I just want to relax, go to Barre…have a quiet weekend.”
“If I tell Deacon to go, you have to have a very quiet weekend,” James said.
“How do you define a very quiet weekend? I’m starting to think I need a Terms and Conditions document to go with your requirements.”
James gave her that sexy smirk that she loved. “It means that you stay in this building for majority of the weekend.”
She brought the tip of her thumb to her lips, thinking it over. What was she going to do in this building all weekend? “Well, that depends. While I think over this travel requirement, are we going to spend time together?”
He didn’t answer her immediately and she knew what he was thinking: there’s no point getting to know each other if it wasn’t going anywhere. But at the same time, she wasn’t going to sit in her apartment all weekend with nothing to do but roam the Internet. If she wasn’t going to be with him, she was definitely going out.
“For this weekend, yes,” he said finally.
Mak nodded her head. “Tell him to go, then.”
James brought the phone back to his ear, holding it in place with his shoulder while he loaded their plates and cutlery into the dishwasher.
Mak listened as he told Deacon she was ‘more or less’ staying in for the weekend. She noted he didn’t say he’d spoken with Cami, or that he’d spoken with Mak—he omitted that part of the conversation completely, leaving Deacon to assume the route he’d taken. Crafty move, Thomas.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” James said with an odd expression on his face.
Mak shrugged her shoulders, playing dumb. “Like what?” She knew with a man like James it was best if he didn’t know what she was thinking—the more she could put together about him, without him realizing, the better. There was a lot you could learn about a person via keen observation.
He tilted his head to the side, studying her now. She gave him nothing, and then, when he’d obviously given up, he walked around the island and sat down on the bench seat next to her, his legs forming a V around her.
“Are you tired?” James asked.
Mak looked at the time on the oven clock, seeing it was well after midnight. She was exhausted after the week she’d had but she wasn’t quite ready to say goodnight either.
“Not particularly,” she said.
“You’re a good liar,” he whispered as he leaned in to kiss her.
She brushed her lips over his and she felt her chest flower with lust. She closed her eyes and kissed him. He moaned and then dragged her stool closer. He took control of the kiss, exploring her mouth with his fluid tongue. When he said her name, it sounded equal parts lust and torture.
“I’m finding it very difficult to get to know you without ripping your clothes off,” James said.
Mak chuckled. “We can just make out like teenagers do,” she said, her tongue peeking out between her lips.
His eyes dropped to her lips, and then he stood up, holding out his hand. He led her to the couch in the living room and wrapped his arms around her waist. He thrust his tongue into her mouth, and lowered their bodies down onto the couch, holding her in one arm and steadying himself with the other. He did it so effortlessly, so seamlessly, and before she knew it she was beneath him, her head resting on the cushion.
The weight of his body on top of her fueled the arousal building in her body and she felt her cheeks flush. He kissed the hollow behind her ear and she closed her eyes, enjoying the moment.
All Mak had to do was agree to the one last requirement, but she felt like she was betraying herself and giving up her independence. What woman couldn’t go away with her family, or on a girls’ weekend without her boyfriend coming along? What girl had cameras in her house, bodyguards, and her boyfriend and his brother following her every move? A girl who dated James Thomas, that’s who.
“I’m never going to ask you to say yes, Mak,” James whispered. “I’m never going to beg you to give up so much just to be with me. I won’t do that.”
She respected him for that but with a mind clouded by arousal she wished he would ask her.
“I know,” Mak said with resignation. She adjusted the cushion beneath her head so that they could talk. “I would be able to go away whenever I want, though, right? I just have to have you with me if it’s international.”
He thought it through before he answered. “As long as I can go with you, yes. But there are some countries that are completely off limits and I don’t want you to go there at all.”
Mak raised her eyebrows—she knew she needed a fine-print document. “Such as?”
“I would prefer not to say at this stage,” he said with a straight face. “But I wouldn’t imagine they are countries you’d be intending to visit anyway, so I don’t see it being an issue.”
“I think perhaps you should say,” Mak said.
James sighed. “Well, to begin with, any country that is in war is completely off limits. And then Belarus, Lithuania…and neighboring countries would also not be a good idea.” James rolled onto his side, squeezing between her and the cushions, and rested up on his elbow.
Mak needed to brush up on her geography skills, but she couldn’t foresee wanting to visit any such countries.
She searched her mind for an alternative, a compromise that would make this requirement bearable. “So, if you can travel with me, and it’s to a country you approve of, then we could go on a group trip, right?”
His eyebrows threaded together. “A group trip?”
“Yes. Like a couple’s trip? We could go with Maya and her fiancé, and even Zahra and Jayce. Jayce travels with security anyway, right?”
He looked bemused.
“What?” Mak asked.
He shook his head, smiling. “I’ve never done a couple’s trip in my life. And not once while I was working with Jayce did I think that in the future we might end up holidaying together with our girlfriends,” he said, laughing.
“You’ve got to get out more, James,” Mak joked.
“Yes, we could do couple’s trips. But we stay in the hotel of my choice, and we fly private.”
“Fly private? Perhaps you are Jayce Tohmatsu,” Mak said, laughing softly.
James grinned. “Actually, Jayce rarely uses their jet unless there is a group on board—he’s quite a conservative spender, given his wealth. I’m sure he’ll use it more now that he has Zahra, though. But I’m not concerned with the luxuries of it as much as the security benefits. It’s logistically much easier, and it makes it le
ss likely for anyone to track our movements.”
“I see,” Mak said. It was an alternative, a very enticing one, but it was still a compromise on her independence.
“I don’t want you to make a decision tonight. It’s not a choice you should make lightly,” James said, squeezing her hand. His fingers brushed over her bare right ring finger and this time she could read his thoughts.
“I took it off,” Mak said.
“I noticed…while you were having drinks. Is that ring your wedding band?”
“It is,” Mak said, quietly. “Does it bother you that I wear it—wore it?” Mak said, correcting herself. She had no intention of wearing it again.
“Maybe it should but it doesn’t,” he said casually. “To be honest, I just don’t think of you as a married woman. Perhaps because I never knew you back then.”
“I started wearing my wedding band on my right hand a little while after Eric went missing, mostly just to avoid the questions that came with having a husband who disappeared…It generates some uncomfortable conversations,” Mak said. “I think from there I wore it out of obligation…maybe trying to convince myself I was a good wife when I had never been.”
It was easy to be open with James, despite the world of secrets that lived between them. He never seemed to judge her, he just listened, and there was something very beautiful about that.
“Anyway,” Mak said, “that chapter is well and truly closed now.”
“Do you want to get married again? Do you want a family?” James asked.
She’d given a lot of consideration to both of those questions. “I don’t need to get married again. It’s not that I don’t believe in commitment, but I don’t think you need a certificate to prove it. Children…I don’t know. I really can’t imagine myself as a mother. I can’t imagine going to the playground and doing all of those kinds of things. I just want to work—I want to be a good lawyer, and that’s how I want to spend my time. Is that a bad thing? Does that make me selfish?”
James gently cupped her cheek, turning her face to him. He leaned forward to place a gentle kiss on her lips. “No, it doesn’t. You don’t have to want children, and there’s nothing wrong with you if you don’t.”
“Do you want to get married? Do you want children?” Mak reciprocated the questions.
He relaxed his arm over her stomach, letting it rest there. “I’d never thought marriage was an option—I’m still barely convinced having a girlfriend is an option. Marriage might be doable, but children…I don’t want to have children, Mak. You can make a choice to be part of my life or not, with the information that I can give you. But children are innocent and they can’t make the kind of choice you’re making…I don’t want to bring a child into my world.”
“Okay,” Mak said. Not having children wasn’t a big deal to her, and in some way it was a relief to hear he would never ask her for it—a further confirmation motherhood was not her thing.
“While we’re on this subject…I know that you’re on the contraceptive pill—we have a list of medications for all of our clients—but if we end up going further I will always wear a condom. The pill isn’t one hundred percent effective, or you could accidentally forget to take it. It’s just a risk I won’t take.”
He looked like he was expecting some kind of reaction from her. She thought it was a little over precautious, but otherwise it didn’t particularly worry her.
“What if I were to get an IUD? Would that make it easier? It would eliminate the risk of me forgetting to take it,” Mak said.
“They’re still not one hundred percent effective. I could at some stage get a vasectomy, but the recovery period, however minor, concerns me given my lifestyle and the fact that things can potentially erupt at any moment, for any of our clients.”
Mak nodded her head.
It would mean that he would never get to truly feel her, though, and vice versa. “Not even once, just to feel things properly?”
James didn’t look offended, or agitated, or anything else. He was his signature calm. He simply shook his head.
“Okay, if that makes you feel better, that’s fine,” Mak said.
James rolled back on top of her and Mak wrapped her arms around his back, feeling his muscles flex with just the slightest movement.
She felt the heaviness pooling in her pelvis as he sucked on her neck again. Mak closed her eyes, drowning in the sensation. She couldn’t stand the teasing, but she didn’t want him to stop, either.
James groaned and pulled back. “In so many ways we are perfect for each other, and in so many ways we’re so wrong. Or I’m so wrong for you, to be correct. I’ve made peace with my past and most of the things I’ve done, but I never knew how much it would impact my future. My past is, and always will be, a wedge between us and there is nothing I can do to make it any better.”
“If not for your past, we may never have met,” Mak said, stroking his head.
“Maybe not. Or maybe. Life is the master of organization, and it always gets what it wants.”
“Do you think we would’ve ended up meeting, regardless?”
“I think it’s possible. Maybe life is using my past to punish me now. It would be fair, if that’s what’s happening,” James said.
“Do you think you’re a bad person?”
“No. I’ve done some bad things, but I don’t think I’m a bad person. And I can’t change the past now, so I don’t see any point in living in regret.”
Mak considered it. “I don’t think there is any point.”
James slid one leg between hers. He looked into her eyes and she leaned in to kiss his lips. He opened his mouth, thrusting his tongue in. She felt that pooling sensation in her hips again and she wanted more, but she knew she wasn’t going to get it.
“Out of all the potential problems we might have, I don’t think the sex is going to be one of them,” James said with a voice like gravel.
Mak smiled as she rolled on to her side, facing him. Their bodies were flush and she kissed his chest. She loved the smell of his cologne and she inhaled deeply.
He ran his fingers through her hair and kissed the crown of her head.
We could be so good together, Mak thought, but there were so many obstacles in their path.
Mak closed her eyes. She felt her body relax, warm and cozy. It was late, and she’d just lived the most intense week of her life, but in the security of his arms it was easy to drift to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE –
JAMES THOMAS
She slept with the peacefulness of an innocent child. No tension in her face, no tremors in her body.
James lay on the couch, looking at the women in his arms. How many more nights was he going to get to do this? How long before he would have to let her go? There was a chance, a slim chance, that she would agree to his requirements but that meant she had to give up a lot. She was a grown, successful woman and she should be able to do whatever she wanted. But if she wanted him, she had to give up some of her independence. And for Mak Ashwood that was going to be a hard task.
He grabbed the throw rug from the back of the couch and draped it over them. James closed his eyes but he didn’t want to sleep. That foreboding feeling of uncertainty, that something was wrong, was back. He’d felt it earlier today, and the unease gripped him again now that he had a clear head. He didn’t want to think it, but something told him they weren’t going to get many more nights like this.
At some point James must have dozed off because his phone woke him. He looked at the time—unbelievably, it was after ten in the morning. His body clock had completely failed him. Or, perhaps, it also knew to make the most of the calm night.
“Cami,” James whispered. He knew where this call was going.
“Why are you whispering, James?”
“She’s with me,” James said.
Cami had made several observations over the past few days, and James thought it would come as no surprise that Mak was with him.
“Yes
, I thought she must be. I was going to see if she wanted a coffee…Does Deacon know about this?”
“Hang on,” James said, trying to disentangle himself without waking up Mak. He kept Cami waiting until he was in his bedroom. “No, he doesn’t. I’m giving Mak the choice, with a list of requirements she has to agree to. If she decides that this is what she wants and things move forward, I will tell him. But right now, other than her sleeping on my couch, and that is literally all that’s going on, I have little to tell Deacon that he doesn’t already know.”
Cami whistled. “It’s going to be your funeral.”
“No, it’s my life and he will have to come to accept it,” James said. “Anyway, can you be nice and bring us some coffees?”
“I’m always nice. Look, I don’t think what you’re doing is a brilliant idea, and even you know it’s not, but if you decide to do this you know that I’ll support you and help you to protect her.”
James smiled. They were a dysfunctional family, but they were always there for each other. “Thank you, and I mean that, Cami.”
“Yeah, yeah, she’s making you soft already!”
James laughed. “Mission impossible. I’ll wake her up now, so we’ll see you soon.”
“Catch ya,” Cami said, ending the phone call.
James went into the kitchen, downed a glass of water, and then went back into the living room. Mak was curled up in a tight ball and she had her hands bundled up under her chin, with a slight smile on her lips. She looked beautiful. He took one more lingering look before he attempted to wake her up—it was quite a process.
“Mak.”
“Mak.”
“Mak, wake up,” James said, shaking her shoulder now.
She opened her eyes, smiled, and then her eyes rolled back in her head.
James chuckled. “I’ve got coffee,” he said.
“Coffee?” Her eyes opened again and then traveled around the room as if she forgot where she was.
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