by BETH KERY
She rolled over on the pillows, swiping her hair out of her face. He pushed with his arms in a powerful gesture and came off both her and the chaise lounge in one fluid movement. She watched him as he quickly and casually removed the condom. Her breath caught. He still wore the cobalt blue button-down shirt. His glistening, long cock protruded from beneath the hemline of his shirt as he walked past the lounge toward a door behind the bar.
A flicker of unease went through her when he didn’t look her way or say anything before he disappeared behind the bathroom door. She sat up partially on the chaise lounge, suddenly very aware of her nakedness . . .
Of being alone.
Her thighs were splayed on the cushion. She shut her legs. The sun had completely set now. The pool lights and a light behind the bar illuminated the deck. It had cooled off, and her body was covered in a light sheen of sweat. A breeze swirled around her. She shivered.
She heard him come out of the bathroom and instinctively reached for one of the pillows they’d tossed about while having sex. He walked toward her, looking down as he reached for the buttons on his shirt. She glimpsed his muscular chest and golden brown, flat abdomen. It didn’t seem fair somehow, that she found him so starkly appealing, when she was increasingly confused by his manner. Shock popped through her when she realized he was buttoning his shirt up, not down. He glanced up, his gaze snagging on the pillow she’d placed in front of her belly and breasts.
Something crossed his handsome face and then . . . froze. She couldn’t think of how else to describe his expression. He suddenly seemed as cold and aloof as he’d been on the beach during their first meeting.
“Are you all right?” he asked quietly, sitting on the edge of the mattress and turning in her direction. His face looked shadowed, but she could make out the glint of the gold in his eyes beneath his lowered brow.
“Yes,” she replied with a fake laugh. She felt cast at sea. The way he’d made love to her, the way he’d touched her with such a single-minded focus earlier, had seemed almost alarming intimate and exciting. Now he was back to being polite? “Are you all right?” she countered uneasily.
She couldn’t read his expression. Her discomfort grew when he didn’t reply for a moment. Then he turned away from her.
“I’m fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
She made a sound of disbelief at his sharp tone. He heard her, and his head whipped around.
“I just meant—” he began, then just as abruptly cut himself off. His mouth pressed into a rigid line. “I just meant,” he repeated, this time more evenly. “I was very hard on you. I’m sorry.”
“You are?” she asked shakily.
“I meant to show you I could be patient.”
“Were you even there?”
“What?” he asked, his brows slanting dangerously.
“I enjoyed it. All of it,” she snapped, highly aware of her understatement. She’d loved it. The first thought she’d had when she her brain was once again capable of logic was that she wanted to do it again. Now he was treating her like a stranger.
Which—face it, Harper—was what they were to each other, for the most part.
Then why had he felt like the opposite of that earlier? She’d allowed her imagination and her lust to mislead her yet again.
He didn’t respond. He just stared at her, his jaw tight, his face like a shadowed, hard mask.
“Jacob?” she whispered, searching his face for some hint of their former, charged . . . amazing connection.
“I’m sorry. I’m not very good at this,” he said.
It stung more than she either expected or liked, that he could be so aloof after what had just happened. Annoyed at herself for making more of their sexual encounter than she should have, she shoved her feet off the lounger in the opposite direction from him and tossed the pillow aside. She grabbed her discarded dress and stood. Pointedly avoiding looking at him, she stepped into the opening of the garment and slipped it up over her arms.
Why didn’t he say anything? What was he, some kind of a robot, to make love to her with such pointed tenderness and heat, and then to act so coldly?
What was she? An idiot, to have been so taken in by him?
“I didn’t mean to offend you.”
She looked up from buttoning her dress.
“Then why are you acting so distant all of sudden?” she demanded, fury making her voice tremble slightly. She felt very vulnerable. “I mean, granted, we agreed this was just sex, but really? Talk about running hot and cold, with nothing in between.” She bent to grab her discarded sweater, the garment making the memory of his touching it and her breasts at once, of his wry teasing about a sweater fetish, rush into her consciousness.
“You don’t understand,” he said. His terse tone struck her as condescending, like she was a stupid child.
“No,” she agreed hotly, shoving her hands into the armholes of her sweater. “I don’t understand you. So why don’t you just take me home?” She bent and snagged her underwear and walked to the front of the chaise lounge, where she snapped up her sandals. “I’ll be downstairs.”
“Harper—” he said sharply, and yes. There it was. There was barely restrained fury in his tone. What did he have to be mad about? She turned around, completely confused, but half-hopeful he’d say something to apply a bandage to their quickly unraveling date. She couldn’t figure out how things had gotten so volatile.
“Don’t walk away from me.”
“Why?” she demanded after a pause. “What is it you want to say? Jacob?”
His mouth remained hard, his posture stiff. She waited. Apparently, he didn’t want to say anything. He just didn’t like it when people walked away from him. Undoubtedly he was the one used to doing the walking.
“Never mind. Just take me back,” she said, straining to keep her tone even. He didn’t deserve to see how upset he was making her. She was dizzy with confusion. The only thing she knew for sure was that this had been a mistake. “Please. Now,” she grated out before she turned and around and took the steps to the lower deck two at a time.
Look for Part 3, MAKE ME SAY IT, available from InterMix on April 19, 2016.
Keep reading for a preview from Beth Kery’s suspenseful and sensual novel, GLOW. Available now from Berkley.
It was the second time in a week that Dylan awoke in the dark room to find his arms empty. Instinct told him that it was still too early for him to escort Alice to the camp, a clandestine ritual they went through every morning before dawn. Neither of them wanted the Durand managers to know that Alice, who was a candidate to become a Durand executive, had taken up with the CEO of the company. What was between Alice and him was complicated, and it was their business alone.
At least for now it was. Dylan wasn’t sure how long he could keep Alice and Durand Enterprises in separate spheres. For all intents and purposes, Alice was Durand Enterprises. She just didn’t want to—or couldn’t—accept that reality as of yet.
He reached blindly, finding his cell phone on the bedside table. He squinted at the time. No, he’d been correct. It was only a few minutes past two in the morning, way too early for Alice to be up and preparing to return to the camp.
He rose from the bed with just as much haste and alarm as that first time, but on this occasion with more certainty that he knew where to find her. The knowledge didn’t quiet his worry any. He flipped on a bedside lamp and hauled on some jeans.
On that other night, he’d found a half-wild, disoriented Alice blindly seeking in the pitch darkness of the west hallway. When he’d flipped on the hall light, he’d cringed at the vision of her searching hands, pale face, and huge haunted eyes. The ghosts of the past could come so close to her at times—even leap from the deepest recesses of her unconscious mind until they seemingly took form in front of her. Alice had said she’d seen a woman in that hallway on that night, a woman that Dylan
knew for a fact had died nearly two decades before.
The human mind was as mysterious and vast as the night sky.
That night, Alice had seen her biological mother. It was as if her long-buried, resurging memories were too foreign to process in her everyday consciousness. Instead, those memories had been projected into her nightmares and even into the solid reality of her surroundings, like a weird unconscious hologram effect or a ghost taking shape. Or at least that’s how psychiatrist Sidney Gates had tried to explain it Dylan.
Presently, he found Alice standing square in the middle of the large empty bedroom suite in the west hall. Her long, toned legs were naked. They looked especially vulnerable in the bright glow of the overhead chandelier.
Tension coiled tight in his muscles. It was so hard at times, not knowing what to expect from her from one moment to the next. Sometimes he felt like he could only be certain of her when he was making love to her, and he felt her to be entirely present in the moment with him, abandoning herself wholesale to pleasure.
To him.
“Do you remember to whom this room belonged now?” he asked from behind her, his voice echoing off the bare walls in the mostly empty room. She’d accused him of manipulation and lying when she’d realized he’d purposefully kept her from entering this room. That was before he’d told her the truth of her identity.
He was glad when she started slightly and turned her head, meeting his stare. Since Alice had come to Durand Castle, there were a few times when she’d go utterly still in his presence, and he’d seen the ghosts of her past flicker eerily in the depths of her eyes.
Is that what he was to her? A ghost?
“Was it Addie Durand’s room?” she asked slowly, her low, hoarse voice causing his skin to roughen.
His heart knocked uncomfortably against his sternum, even though he knew his appearance remained calm. No matter how hard he was trying—no matter how much he understood—he couldn’t entirely adjust to Alice’s distant, disconnected attitude about what he’d told her about Adelaide Durand.
He nodded and stepped toward her. “It was originally Addie’s nursery, and it had just been remodeled for her before she was taken. Are you remembering?” he asked her again cautiously.
She shook her head adamantly. Her short, dark hair was growing some. Her spiky bangs fell into her eyes. She stuck out her bottom lip and blew up on them to clear her vision. The uncontrived, potently sexy gesture distracted him.
Just like almost everything about Alice did.
“I don’t remember anything,” she said
Despite her quick, firm denial, he wasn’t entirely sure he believed her. “Then why did you come here?”
“I was curious,” she replied, her eyebrows arched in response to his quiet challenge.
“And how did you guess this was Addie’s room?”
She shrugged. “You tried to keep me from it. And it’s the most ideally situated in the house, so large and airy . . .” She faded off, glancing around at the ornate crown molding, the bluish-silver silk wallpaper and the enormous bay window with a built-in, curving cushioned bench that looked down on the gardens, and the sharp drop-off the dune to Lake Michigan. Because it was night, only their reflections and that of the chandelier’s glowed in the black glass. The room was nearly empty, only a few of his personal items remaining from his recent occupancy. He saw Alice’s neck convulse as she swallowed. “You and Sidney had suggested how the Durands prized Addie so much, always giving her the best. I just guessed it’d belonged to her. And to you. Alan Durand prized you, as well,” she added, once again meeting his stare.
Slowly, she spun to face him. She wore only the fitted T-shirt she’d had on last night during the storm and a semi-transparent pair of white cotton panties. Instinctively, his gaze dropped over her, trailing along her elegantly sloping shoulders, the full, thrusting breasts that stood in such erotic contrast to her slender limbs and narrow waist and hips. His gaze lingered between her thighs. Alice dyed the hair on her head to an obscuring, near-black color, but her true shade was a dark red-gold, a combination of her father’s blond and her mother’s auburn. He was reminded of that yet again as he spied the triangle of light brownish-red pubic hair visible beneath her thin panties. Despite the tension of the moment, he felt his sex flicker in arousal. There was something about the contrast of Alice’s tough-girl strength and her potent vulnerability that lit a fire in him, something elemental and strong. The paradox was singularly powerful.
He dragged his gaze to her face.
“It must be strange for you, thinking of me living in Addie’s room. Here. In the Durand’s house,” he added, taking another step toward her. It struck him that he was often approaching Alice like he might a half-wild animal forced into some domestic confine, highly aware that she might bolt at any moment.
He was determined to catch her, no matter what move she made.
She shook her head. She wore not a trace of makeup. Without the heavy eyeliner and mascara she often wore to obfuscate or intimidate—or both—her dark blue eyes looked enormous in her delicate face. Jesus, what he’d experienced when she’d walked into that office last May, so awkward and yet so defiant in her inexpensive new interview suit. The truth had slammed home, jarring him, rattling him to the center of his bones, even though he’d taken great pains to hide it. He had seen those eyes before.
But even if it had been the first time Dylan had ever seen her, he suspected he might have been nearly as shaken. No wonder she’d been drawn to the eye-goop. Her eyes would draw men with the noblest intentions.
And the foulest.
“No, it doesn’t seem strange to me at all. I can see you in this room.” Her chin tilted and her eyes sparked in that familiar defiant gesture. “You moved out of it because of me, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know what to expect. Sidney thought we should cautiously expose you to the surroundings,” he admitted. Sidney was familiar with Adelaide Durand’s history and had been friends with Alan and Lynn. He’d brought his psychological expertise to bear on Alice’s unique situation, once Dylan had finally tracked her down after nearly two decades of searching. It was Sidney who had suggested bringing her to the estate under the pretense of hiring her as a Durand Camp counselor. In that scenario, Dylan could keep an eye on what she recalled and how she would react, monitor her for signs of trauma. If not him personally, then the two Durand security employees Dylan had hired to watch her could do the job.
“I was familiar with Addie Durand’s habits,” he began slowly. “There are a few rooms that I worried might be more likely to trigger something . . . undesirable. This one. Alan and Lynn’s suite. The den, the original living room . . . and the dining room. With few exceptions, the entry hall, the kitchen, the terrace gardens, and the media room have been extensively renovated, so I didn’t worry as much about that. Most of the other rooms here weren’t used much—either by the Durands or by me, so they weren’t of any concern.” He hesitated.
“I never imagined you’d inadvertently find your way into the dining room that first night you arrived here at the castle. Or the woods and stables the next day,” Dylan told her, choosing his words carefully. Alice had made it very clear to him that while she would discuss the details of Addie Durand, her kidnapping, and Dylan’s part in the tragedy, she wouldn’t talk about Addie and herself as if they were the same person. The recent revelation still seemed too overwhelming for her to assimilate. Currently, they were treading on dangerous ground.
Her eyelids narrowed slightly, and he knew he’d made some kind of misstep, despite his caution. “You suspected I was going to be in your bedroom, even before I came here? And so you moved suites, in order not to trigger any . . .” She faded off uncertainly, aware she was skimming close to the fire. Her defiant expression made a quick resurgence. “I thought you said that you hadn’t planned for anything sexual between us . . . that it just happen
ed that morning in the stables?”
“That’s true. And since you seem to need a reminder, you’re the one who seduced me, Alice,” he said with a hard, pointed glance meant to quash her suspicion immediately. It didn’t work. He mentally damned her defensive posture and angry expression and closed the space between them. Satisfaction went through him when he took her into his arms, and she pressed her front against him.
“If that’s what you want to call the first three seconds of our being together. It was all you after that, baby,” she grumbled under her breath.
“I didn’t hear you complaining.”
Her eyes flashed up at him defiantly.
“I’m telling you the truth, Alice. I didn’t plan for us to be together in the stables that morning. How could I have? I didn’t know you’d show up there. I didn’t plan for us to get involved that way when you came here.”
“Then why would you worry about me being here . . . in this room? Why did you pack up most of your things and decorate a whole new suite if you didn’t plan on us sleeping together from the first? Why else would I be in Dylan Fall’s bedroom if not for sex?” she demanded.
Dylan suppressed a sigh. Despite the fact that she grasped his waist and lightly pressed her breasts and belly against him in a tempting gesture, her trademark wary expression remained as she stared up at him.
“I didn’t move out because I had plans to seduce you,” he told her with an air of finality, mapping her elegant, supple spine and the tight curve of her hips with his hands. He felt his need for her mount. How would all of this have played out if this powerful attraction hadn’t been there? It was so hard to say, but he would have contrived something to bring her closer to him.
“Why, then?” she insisted, undaunted by a tone that Dylan used regularly to subdue some of the most tried and hard-boiled executives in the world. Of course it didn’t faze Alice. He closed his eyes briefly. Dammit, she could be impossible.
“Dylan?”