by Lily Everett
Jessica sprang to her feet, going toe to toe with him. “We’re not leaving Sanctuary!”
“Then answer the question!”
Something flickered in her gaze, a lightning flash that ratcheted the tension even higher. Logan wanted to taste the sneer that twisted her gorgeous lips. “It’s a ridiculous question. Have you honestly never considered that I turn you down because I’m not sexually attracted to you?”
The challenge snapped between them like a rubber band drawn tight. Everything in Logan’s blood leapt, speeding through his body and propelling him forward a step until they were close enough to share breath.
If she retreated or faltered, Logan told himself, he’d leave it alone. But Jessica never backed down for an instant. She tilted her head up a centimeter, heated defiance vibrating through her taut form, and Logan lost his always-tenuous grip on healthy, well-adjusted behavior.
“Let’s test that hypothesis,” he rasped. He wrapped his arms around her slim, arched back and seized her mouth in a deep, hungry kiss.
Chapter 4
The imprint of Logan’s strong fingers branded Jessica’s back with heat, his arms like ropes of fire binding her to him. She gasped, but not in surprise.
She should be surprised, she understood dimly through the maelstrom of desire his lips and tongue stoked in her body, but she wasn’t. They’d been heading toward this kiss ever since they first met. The only surprise was how long they’d held out.
Logan kissed the way he did everything else: with an intensity of focus and dedication to skill that made Jessica feel like the only woman in existence who’d ever gone weak in the knees at the taste of his mouth.
Of course, that wasn’t anything like the truth. The memory of exactly how diligently Logan had practiced his kissing technique was enough to stiffen her melting spine. She pushed out of his arms, shuddering at the brush of her clothes against overheated, sensitized skin. “That’s enough.”
Logan’s eyes darkened to cobalt blue, his blown pupils tracking her every move like a hawk hunting a field mouse. “No. One kiss is nowhere close to enough.”
Every sharp breath in was thick with the scent of him, male and aroused, and Jessica swallowed against the temptation to slip back into his arms and finish what he’d started.
Dismayed, she snapped herself upright. She was dangerously, terrifyingly close to breaking her cardinal rule of never mixing business and pleasure. She had to remember what was at stake if she succumbed to Logan’s seduction. And in case that wasn’t enough, maybe she could kill two birds with one stone.
If she answered his question as fully and honestly as he seemed to want, Logan would finally understand why she would never, could never allow any intimacy with him. He’d see how hopeless it was, and that he was better off sticking to his one-night stands back in the city.
The thought gave her an odd pang in the region of her heart, but she ignored it.
“One kiss is certainly enough to prove the hypothesis,” Jessica said, taking refuge in the dry, bland scientific language.
Logan arched a brow. “Or disprove it. You’re not going to argue that lack of sexual compatibility is your reason, after kissing me like that.”
You kissed me, she wanted to say, but the mischievous quirk at the corner of his mouth told her that was exactly what he wanted. Rather than argue about who kissed who and how passionate it had been, Jessica forged ahead. “You’re right, it would be pointless to claim I’m not attracted to you.”
Desire flared sharply across his gorgeous face, his eyes never leaving hers.
Before he could take more than a step toward her, Jessica held up a hand. She needed to preserve her distance if she had any hope of getting through this awful, humiliating story. “The fact that my body reacts to yours does not obligate me to act on that attraction.”
Throwing himself down to sit on the log she’d vacated, Logan was the picture of irritated frustration. “You know it’ll be good between us. Why don’t you just give in? It’s what we both want.”
Taking a deep breath, she let it out slowly. “Because what we want isn’t always good for us, Logan. For instance, office romance. I know—from bitter experience—exactly how badly an office romance can go.”
“That sounds like an interesting story.” His eyes sparkled with curiosity. “A story that just might answer my question and fulfill your requirement for yesterday.” Jessica nodded, her mouth suddenly uncomfortably dry.
“Okay then. Story time with Tink.” Without further ado, Logan reclined on the log more fully, twisting his back like a bear scratching an itch as he found a comfortable position. “Lay it on me.”
He looked oddly like the stereotype of a patient in a therapist’s office, fingers laced together and resting on his chest. She watched them rise and fall with the steady cadence of his breath, the expansion of his rib cage drawing her eyes to the lean, mouthwatering V of his torso, and bit back a smile.
Nervous as she was at what she was about to reveal, she couldn’t help being amused at the typical Harrington male way Logan took up every available inch of space. Even in the great outdoors, with the vastness of the ocean rolling out into the distant horizon, Logan Harrington was larger than life.
But he wasn’t the only man she’d ever known who sucked all the oxygen out of a room, simply by entering it.
Any urge to smile faded, and Jessica was abruptly glad Logan had taken over the seat. She needed to move around while she told this story, rather than feel stuck in one place. Trapped.
“Once upon a time,” she began, pacing beside the length of the fallen tree, down to the torn-up roots and back again, “there was a very young, very naïve Midwestern girl whose first job out of college was personal assistant to the CEO of a hotel chain in New York City.”
Jessica sneaked a glance at Logan’s face as she passed where he’d propped his head on a knot in the tree bark, but his eyes were closed. The fact that he wasn’t looking at her made it easier for Jessica to go on. “When the young girl met her new boss, she knew she’d gotten lucky. He was kind, considerate and handsome. He spent time with her one-on-one, every day, mentoring her. At least, that’s what she thought at first.”
But she was getting ahead of herself. Forcing her breath to slow and her hands to stop twisting the fabric at the hem of her sweatshirt, Jessica hesitated.
Without opening his eyes, Logan murmured, “What was the boss’s name?”
Heart pounding, Jessica felt a sick wash of shame as she spoke the name she hadn’t uttered in five years. “Russ. Russell Owens.”
Saying it out loud broke the numbing, distancing magic of treating this story like a fairy tale. Not that it was headed for a fairy tale ending. Stop being a child about this, she lectured herself silently. Just get it over with.
“I worked for Russ for three years, but it only took him three months to talk me into bed. He was good at talking me into things. He hated my apartment—a tiny studio walk-up on the fifth floor of a building in Astoria that probably ought to have been condemned—and Russell refused to stay over there. So he found me an apartment on the Upper West Side, a nice one-bedroom I saw for the first time when he gave me the key and told me it was already furnished and the rent paid up for the entire year. He bought me clothes for work, and when I tried to refuse, he hinted gently that my professional wardrobe reflected on him and his office, so I didn’t really have a choice.”
She had to pause, to get control of the unacceptable shake in her voice. “I know what you’re thinking. He doesn’t sound like a monster, does he? In fact, I’m the one who doesn’t come off so great in this story, letting this man pay my bills and help me professionally in return for sex. I know exactly how that sounds.”
“I promise you,” Logan said, with his eyes still closed though his voice was taut with suppressed emotion. “You have no idea what I’m thinking.”
Jessica laughed to break the tension, but it came out a little choked and raw. “Right, of course. You’
re a genius—how could I know what’s going on in that giant brain of yours?”
He sat up in a controlled rush, planting his feet widely on the ground and clenching his fingers on the rough wooden bark at his hips. “What I’m thinking is that Russell Owens is a dead man, if I ever meet him.”
Shock dried Jessica’s mouth. No one she’d ever told had reacted this way, including her own mother. “What?”
“He systematically took control of your entire life,” Logan snarled. “Let me guess at the next part of the story. He also monopolized your off-work hours so that you lost touch with your friends. Of course, you had to keep your relationship a secret at work, and I’d lay good money on him giving you some reason why you couldn’t discuss it with anyone else, either.”
Jessica swayed in the ocean breeze. A higher wind would have knocked her off her feet. “I didn’t have any friends in the city, actually. I moved there after college and got the job at Crown Hotels almost immediately. And the reason he asked me not to talk about our relationship with my parents was…”
She nearly gagged on the shame of it, the unbearable sense of having been stupid and weak, led astray from what she knew to be right, but this was the worst of it. Once she got this out, it was nearly over, and Logan would know everything.
The fact that he seemed to know, or to have intuited most of it already didn’t make it easier to force the words out.
“When I met Russ, he wore a wedding band.” Jessica wrapped her arms around her rib cage and held on for dear life. “The minute he saw that I’d noticed it, he gave me this sad smile and told me all about his marriage and how he and his wife were separated, in the process of getting divorced.”
“And if you mentioned your affair to anyone, it might complicate and delay the proceedings,” Logan guessed.
Miserable, Jessica nodded as she averted her gaze to stare blindly out to the horizon. “I never questioned it. He spent every evening at my apartment! Well, the apartment he’d paid for. He didn’t sleep over, but that was because he had a long-standing arrangement with the company to send a car to pick him up from his house, and if he asked them to pick him up from my place instead—God. He had an answer for everything, so smooth and plausible and reasonable. Eventually I stopped asking questions.”
“And then,” Logan prompted gently when she broke off.
Wearily, she lanced the rest of the wound and drained the last drop of poison out onto the ground between them. “And then, after three years of buying me earrings and bracelets to distract me from the fact that it was never the engagement ring he kept promising, I found out that he was still married. Not separated, not nearing the end of a long, drawn-out divorce. It was all a lie—and a clichéd, predictable lie, at that.”
Logan made a rough noise behind her, but she couldn’t bring herself to turn and face the pity or condemnation on his handsome, familiar features.
“I should have known better,” she said painfully. “Deep down, I did know better. I think that’s what hurts most of all. I compromised myself and my ethics. I bought into an elaborate but ultimately formulaic and obvious fiction, because I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that this smart, charismatic, wealthy man could fall in love with a nobody from Normal, Illinois. I thought I could have it all.”
Forcing herself to meet Logan’s gaze was one of the hardest things she’d ever done, but this was important. He needed to understand.
Storm clouds scudded over the blue of his eyes, darkening them with something that looked more like understanding than pity. Jessica swallowed.
“When it was all over, I had nothing. No friends, no job, no place to live. My parents—they’re very decent people, very religious. They certainly didn’t raise me to have a tawdry affair with a married man. In fact, they were so disappointed in me, they sent enough money for another apartment instead of letting me come back home to live with them. We don’t talk much, other than holidays and birthdays.”
“That’s … horribly sad,” Logan said, his voice oddly ragged. Or maybe it wasn’t so odd. He’d lost his parents when he was very young, Jessica remembered, and his relationships with his brothers weren’t exactly close. So maybe he did get it. But she hadn’t completely finished answering his question.
“I will never be that girl again,” Jessica told him, as starkly and strongly as she could. “I never want to be that naïve, that silly or easy to take advantage of. I never want to wake up in the morning aching with regrets. So that’s why I hold you at arm’s length, Logan. Because I am tempted … but if I were to give in to the fantasy of being with you, I’m smart enough now to know that I’d be giving something up in return. And I’m not willing to sacrifice my self-respect and my career for a moment’s passion.”
No matter how much the sight of his lean strength silhouetted against the ocean view made the blood throb in her veins.
Chapter 5
“Satisfied?” Jessica asked, her voice seductively hoarse from having talked for so long.
Not even close, beautiful.
Logan held himself still as he studied her, scrutinizing her tale from every angle like a multifaceted 3-D puzzle. “You’ve made your position very clear, and I accept it.”
The slim line of her shoulders relaxed infinitesimally, as if she’d been unsure he’d get the message. He almost hated to make her tense up again, but a deep, primal part of him couldn’t let this go without at least trying to address her concerns.
“But I feel I have to point out,” he continued gently, “that your position rests on faulty logic.”
Surprise widened her pretty green eyes. Pushing a strand of strawberry-blond hair out of her face, Jessica put her hands on her hips the way he loved, and stared him down. “Oh?”
Deliberately relaxing his posture to seem as unthreatening as possible, Logan assumed his driest, most professorial tone. “Yes. In fact, I spotted numerous irrationalities in the conclusions you drew from your past experiences. And while I don’t doubt that those experiences were traumatic…” He paused to breathe through the resurgence of his intense desire to track down one Russell Owens and take him apart, systematically, until there was nothing left.
“I’m not traumatized,” Jessica protested with a scathing curl of her lip. Good, he liked it when she got fiery. Anything was better than the resigned slump of her shoulders, the deadened tone of her voice, as she recited her litany of regrets. “I learned from my past mistakes. I grew up. Something you could stand to look into, yourself. Sir.”
Logan fought the reflexive scowl. He wouldn’t be derailed by her attempt to push him away and return to more formal footing—not when he could still taste the sharp honeyed sweetness of her kiss every time he licked his lips. “As I was saying. What happened to you sucked. Fair to say?”
She nodded shortly, and he went on. “But the lesson you seem to have learned is that you can’t have everything. That allowing yourself to feel desire means you risk losing the job you worked so hard for. That won’t happen. For one thing, I can’t fire you, whether we sleep together or not.”
“It’s not that I won’t allow myself to feel desire.” Jessica gave him an acid look. “I simply won’t act on it.”
“Because you wouldn’t be able to look yourself in the mirror the morning after,” Logan said dramatically, swooning backward to lean his hands on the far edge of the log.
Mottled pink tinged her cheeks, and her knuckles went white where she was digging her fingers into her hips. “Don’t make fun of me. Just because you have no conscience or morals to speak of…”
Logan grimaced, sitting up again. “No, sorry. I don’t mean to make fun, it’s just…” He spread his hands out to his sides in a helpless gesture of don’t-hate-me-because-I’m-trying-my-best-not-to-say-the-wrong-thing-and-failing-epically.
Her lips twitched, and he could tell she wanted to laugh. Or at least snort a little. Satisfied, he doggedly returned to his argument. “Look, I refuse to believe that you can’t have it all. You�
�re one of the most intelligent people I know. Honestly, you should be running a division at the company, not babysitting me.”
Jessica gasped soundlessly, betrayal showing in her narrowed gaze and thin lips. “I’m not interested in an unearned promotion. And I certainly have no intention of earning said promotion in bed.”
Logan almost fell off the log in his haste to stand up. “What? I take it back, you’re not intelligent, you’re a blithering idiot like all the rest of them. I’m not offering to promote you in exchange for sex! How did you get that from what I just said?”
Her shoulders were coiled tight with tension under his hands, but she didn’t shake off his touch. Logan was counting it as a win.
“I … sorry. Maybe I am a little traumatized.” Jessica’s attempt at a smile was the saddest thing Logan had ever seen. “Russ used to talk about how I was ‘going places’ in the company. ‘Stick with me, sweetness, and you’ll go right to the top.’”
Logan couldn’t decipher whether the disgust in her tone was aimed at herself or at the King of All Douche Bags, Russell Owens. “Don’t apologize. Seriously. I’m the one who should be sorry. I didn’t think about how it could sound. And anyway, you’re missing the point.”
“Oh?” She lifted her chin enough to get him thinking about how close their lips were, and if he tilted his head to the perfect forty-five degree angle, he could …
“Your point, Logan?” A bare hint of a smirk had one corner of her mouth dimpling distractingly.
Logan tightened his hands on her shoulders for an instant, savoring the warmth of her flesh through the thin, clingy material of her workout top. “The main point, and your most egregious failure of logic, is simply this. Russell Owens was—probably is, there’s no evidence he’s changed—a textbook sexual predator. He targeted an innocent, unworldly woman in a subordinate position, isolated you from anyone who could talk sense into you, established complete control over every aspect of your life and lied to you about his intentions. He knowingly, deliberately preyed on your desire to trust and your dreams for the future.”