by Dani Collins
“That was fast. How much?”
“Asking price.”
“Are you serious?” They had talked about dropping it after losing the first sale, but their agent had encouraged them to give it a few weeks at the original price.
“Preapproved mortgage. No subjects.”
“Shut the front door.”
“And lock it and hand over the keys, baby.” She sashayed away, twirling her empty tray on her finger like a basketball.
Dodson slapped him on the back. “There you go. Congratulations.”
“Not until the fat lady sings,” Vin said, but the huge weight on his shoulders lightened. Possibility hovered like the sun creeping up to brighten the horizon.
A cheer went up across the bar and he turned to see it was the women at the table where Jacqui sat. Tori had just given Jacqui a fresh glass of wine and obviously imparted the news.
Jacqui glanced back at him.
He could hear what she was silently asking. Did this mean he was buying her house after all?
*
Jacqui was tipsy. As far as foods that absorbed alcohol went, salads were useless. She should have had a steak sandwich and cross-tracks with gravy. But she had only planned to have one glass of wine until Tori had surprised her with that celebratory second. Miranda had already promised to drive her home, so she had indulged herself.
She carried that glass half-finished to the back of the bar and touched the round bottom of her glass to the side of Vin’s. His looked like a Bloody Mary, but might have just been tomato juice with a salted rim and a stick of celery.
“Congratulations,” she said.
“Thanks.” The way his flinty gaze skipped over her head told her they were being observed. She didn’t think anyone could hear them, though. Pool balls were clinking, the place was full and everyone was talking. She could barely hear the twang of whatever was being played on the jukebox and she knew the volume was turned up to max on nights like this.
“What does this mean for us?” she asked Vin.
“It means that once the sale closes and my portion is in my bank account, you and I can talk again.”
She knew he meant the house, but still lifted her brows and asked with more than a little offense, “Until then, I can continue to expect the silent treatment?”
It must have struck a nerve. His jaw hardened along with the blue of his eyes. “Come on, Jac.”
“Come on where? I’ll go, you know. I’ll go anywhere you’ll take me.”
“Don’t.” He warned through his teeth.
Why would she listen to caution? The last time he’d dared her to come for him she had got exactly what she was looking for.
Okay, maybe not exactly, but parts of it had been really freaking fantastic. Hadn’t they? He had implied that he’d liked it, but then he’d left her wallowing in despondency.
“Don’t you think about it at all?” she asked. “Or is it always like that for you? I mean, you’re the one who said one-night stands aren’t that great, but I thought ours was. Is this why you think I’m not built for them? Because all I can think about is how good we might be together in the long haul if we gave it a shot—”
“I said, don’t.”
“They all know,” she said, waving her glass at the room and feeling her wine spill over the rim to wet her knuckles. “They’re all asking if something is up between us. So why can’t there be?”
“How much have you had to drink?” His mouth was tight.
“Not enough, okay? This isn’t me drunk, Vin.” Irrational, maybe. Driven there by an excess of pent-up emotion. “It’s me trying to figure out why—”
“Because you’re grieving.” His gaze sliced a swath around them again. “You don’t want me. You miss Russ and want a warm body in your bed.”
She dropped her hand to her side, forgetting that she was holding the wine. The glass slipped from her grip, hitting the floor with a small shatter of glass and a splash of liquid.
Conversation thinned around them as everyone turned to look.
Vin didn’t shift his stare from hers. “I should take you home.”
“Oh, don’t do me any favors. Is that really what you think I was doing?” She demanded shakily. “Auditioning a stand in?”
He was a glacier of a man, muscles layered with tension, eyes piercing blue.
The music sounded overloud, lyrics droning on about lips tasting like sangria as the crowd strained to hear his response.
“Let’s go. Now.”
“Because I loved him so much, right?” If the spotlight was upon her, then she was damned well going to play this loud, all the way for the cheap seats to hear. “You know what the saddest part of the funeral was for me?” She demanded in a ragged voice. “How many people said they were sorry because they knew how much I loved Russ. And not one person, not one, fucking person—”
Her voice caught like a barbed hook in her throat. Tears flooded her eyes as she held up that single finger, that symbol of the one tiny piece of evidence she’d yearned for the entire time that she had loved her idol, then her boyfriend, then her fiancé, and finally her husband.
“Not one person ever made the observation that Russ loved me. Because he didn’t.”
Vin’s expression fell in shock and his brows pulled with consternation, maybe even protest as he realized exactly what a wasteland her marriage had been. Saw how devastated she was.
He swore under his breath and reached for her elbow.
She shook him off.
“So you’re wrong. I do not want to replace that. I want a man who actually loves me. If that’s not you, good. Fine. Thanks for clearing that up.” Go to hell and take your silent treatment and fear of gossip and double standards with you.
She turned away and saw the blur of Miranda’s red hair and creamy skin.
“Let me drive you home, Jac,” Miranda said.
Jacqui leaned into the taller woman and let her lead her from the bar.
*
You were always the outsider when you were a foster kid. The minute that fact was known, you were different in people’s eyes.
Once Vin had become an adult, it was less of an issue, especially in a group like firefighters where he was judged on how well he supported his brothers and sisters in the field. They had become his family and he wasn’t alone anymore.
Except when he fucked up. Then he was that useless foster kid again.
Vin had that feeling now. He had not only slept with the boss’s wife, he’d stood on her heart and bounced a few times.
Oddly, as humiliating as that was, the greater pain inside him was for Jacqui. He relived all those little moments where her gaze had clouded, when she had talked about her limited experience with men, when she had said she thought Russ had chased a girl to Marietta, as if she had wondered what that might be like—to have a man want her bad enough to drive off the map to find her.
He remembered her calling herself a pity fuck.
She couldn’t have meant Russ when she said that. Russ had loved her.
Hadn’t he?
Not meeting any eyes, Vin took a few bills out of his wallet, threw them on the table and left.
*
When Jacqui heard the door from the garage into the house, she assumed Miranda had forgotten something. She didn’t get up from the couch, only called, “Did you leave your keys?”
“It’s me.”
His deep voice went into her like a sonic vibration.
She squished her fingers deeper into Muttley’s ruff, not moving off the sofa. Barely breathing. If an eagle had taken hold of her shoulders and dug talons into the tendons on either side of her neck, she couldn’t be more tense and fixed by pain.
“Am I allowed to be here?” Vin paused in the archway from the kitchen.
“I’ve told you a hundred times, it’s your house.”
She stared at the screen that was a silent selection of inane comedies she had yet to choose between. Maybe she should turn it onto th
e channel that showed shorelines or fountains while playing lazy instrumentals. She could pretend she was in Spain or on the Amalfi coast. Was there something that might transport her to Pluto? It would be awesome to disappear to the far reaches of the universe right this second.
Vin came to sit down on the coffee table facing her, plucked the remote from her loose grip and turned off the TV.
She dropped her gaze to Mutt’s black nose.
Vin braced his forearms on his thighs, body warmth seeping toward her calf.
She pretended it didn’t make her feel like all the molecules in her body realigned so they were magnetized to all the little ions or whatever they were that attracted her to him.
“He loved you, Jacqui,” Vin said with quiet sincerity. “Whatever you’ve been telling yourself about how we love our jobs more than the women in our lives—”
“You weren’t here, Vin. This isn’t about the way he died or even the fact that he did die. I know what my marriage was, and it wasn’t what it looked like to everyone else. The problems weren’t because of his job. It was because he was too fucking nice to reject me before we were in too deep.”
Silence.
A really long, damning silence because Vin knew as well as she did that Russ had been loyal and generous and could very well have shouldered a responsibility like marrying the girl who loved him because it looked like the right thing to do.
Worse, when she looked up at Vin, he wasn’t trying to say anything. He was trying to read her. He was trying to see how bad this was ripping her apart so he could somehow make it stop.
Her lips trembled.
He flinched and his hands moved restlessly, sliding up and down his thighs.
“I don’t know what to say, Jac.”
“There’s nothing to say. Quite honestly, I think he was comfortable with not caring as much as I did. It meant I worked harder to keep him happy. He didn’t have any regrets when he left for a jump because he wasn’t worried I would leave him. If I did, well, he wouldn’t be the bad guy, would he?”
“Even I think that’s too cynical.”
She swallowed. “He always wanted people around as a buffer. He didn’t want to have kids, even though he loved kids, because he didn’t want them with me. He didn’t want that permanent tie because he didn’t think we’d last. He was a man worth loving and I’m not sorry I did, but I’m tired, Vin. I’m tired of pretending our marriage was perfect. I’m tired of being the woman who carried a torch. People said I was too young to get married. Russ said it. I didn’t listen, but I guess I was.”
She let her head fall back against the sofa, releasing a noise of despair.
His hand settled on her shin, warm and heavy. “He was lucky to have been loved that much. If he was destined to die young, well, at least he had that.”
She rolled her head to look at him. “From anyone else, I would think that was the corniest cliché you could possibly come up with.”
“I mean it. He was really lucky.”
“I know you do.” She met the pensive blue of his gaze, heard what sounded like deep sincerity, and leapt into the void. “I love you.”
His breath hissed in. He took his hand from her leg and rocked back in a small recoil, hands curling into fists on his thighs. “Jac—”
“In case you die young, too. I want you to know.”
“Jacqui.” He didn’t believe her. He wanted to, she could see it in his agonized expression, but he wouldn’t allow himself to.
She held her open palm toward him. “If you want to believe it’s just as a friend, that’s okay.”
“I don’t,” he admitted tightly. “I want it to be the real thing.” He set his elbows on his thighs and pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “I couldn’t stand being here, knowing he was the one you loved. How could you care for me even half that much? Ever? But I don’t care if it’s a quarter. I don’t care if you’re using me to scratch an itch.” The words were pouring out of him like a dam letting go. “I want to be with you in any way you’ll have me.”
He lifted his head out of his hands.
“That’s not fair to you, though. Not after what you just said about thinking Russ didn’t care. I could say the words, Jac. I could. But I would feel like, Christ, like it would jinx it or something. Love makes things so fucking fragile. What you and I have…” He held something invisible in his hands and stared at it. “I don’t want it to be fragile. I need to know it’s going to withstand whatever you and I try to do here tonight.”
Try.
She blinked, ready to go all-in with her own heart. Everything in her yearned for him to match it, but she was moved at the same time. It meant something that Vin wanted to protect not just himself, but them.
She left the sofa and slid onto his thighs.
The coffee table groaned and he closed his arms around her, shifting so he sat on the couch with her in his lap.
She nuzzled closer, yearning for him to love her, hoping that he could, but at least she was starting from a deeper level of honesty than she’d had with Russ.
Vin gathered her closer, kissing the lips she offered.
It was hot, but sweet. Urgent, but unhurried. Thorough.
After a moment, with a muted groan, he gave the dog a nudge to push him off the sofa and flattened her beneath him on the cushions.
“I do think of it,” he said into her neck. “Us. That day that you blew the walls off my mind,” he lifted his head. “I think of it all the time. It was the best ever, Jac.” He fiddled with the button between her breasts, but didn’t open it. “Exactly how drunk are you?”
“Sober enough to be horrified that I flipped my shit at The Drop Zone.” She draped her hand over the back of his neck, fingers exploring for the tiny stubble in the hollow beneath the back of his skull. “You could lie and tell me it will be fine, that nobody was paying attention. Maybe kiss me and make it better.”
“We’re both going to be in for it,” he said with mild disgust. “Let’s never leave the house.”
“Deal.”
He kissed her and they settled their bodies into closer alignment. She crooked her knee, inviting him between her legs and he sighed, shuddering lightly, already hard as he nestled into the space. They began burrowing under clothing like a pair of teenagers and pretty soon they were panting, pants open and shirts askew.
“I don’t have a condom on me.” He drew back. “You wanna go upstairs?”
“Yes.”
He grinned at her prompt reply and dragged her to her feet, then pushed her up the stairs ahead of him. When he steered her toward the door of the room he’d been using, she paused.
“Have you brought any women here?”
“What? No. Of course not.”
The way he said it, kind of insulted, made her snicker. “I wasn’t judging. You’ve been staying here all winter. You were allowed to have sleepovers. I just thought we’d go to my place if you had.”
“Which place? Across the hall? You’re still not in the master bedroom?”
“I told you…”
He leaned on the jam of his door, hands on her hips as he gave her a considering look. “If I move into that room like you want, are you going to sleep with me in there?”
“That depends on whether we’re doing anything worth staying awake for, doesn’t it?”
“I can do stuff,” he said confidently, pivoting her into his room and backing her toward his bed.
“I’d love to see it, because all I’m getting right now is conversation…”
He nudged her chest so she fell backward onto his fluffy duvet. Her pants were already open, so he caught the ends of her pant legs and tugged.
She pulled her legs free one at a time and set the flats of her feet on the edge of the mattress, knees open. Then she hooked her thumb in the front of her undies, liking the way his gaze zeroed in on what she was doing.
Slowly she unbuttoned her top with her other hand, watching his lashes flicker as he shifted
his attention to the strip of skin she exposed. Slipping one hand beneath the edge of her shirt, she palmed her own breast. At the same time, she slid her fingers into her underwear and stimulated herself, smiling at how the act that was both blatant and modestly shielded held him arrested.
He said nothing, nostrils twitching, seemingly mesmerized as he absently peeled off his shirt and shucked his jeans. His gaze grew hotter and hotter until it nearly seared her, tracking over her like that.
His boxers got tossed to the side and he curled a strong fist around his shaft, pumped slowly up the length and back. He seemed enthralled with the way her hips danced under her own touch.
“Are you gonna let me watch you come?” His voice was so low and rasped with arousal; it thrummed her with an extra pang of intensity. She had to bite her lip and stop rubbing herself.
“I want you too much.” She used both hands to open her shirt, arching to remove it.
He sidestepped to get a box of condoms out of the top drawer of his dresser, then came back to drop to his knees beside the bed. He dragged her hips close, hooking his arms under her thighs and leaning down to lightly bite at her through her underwear, making her sob as he grazed her clit.
“You get so wet,” he said, nuzzling alongside the damp placket.
“You make me wet. I get wet every time I think about you.”
“Don’t tell me shit like that, Jac. I’ll be texting you a hundred times a day, just to make sure you’re thinking about me.” He caught at her panties and peeled them away in a swift move, then rolled on a condom and rose to cover her.
“This is what I’ve thought about,” he muttered, lining up at her entrance and pressing in. “I wanted a do-over, where I wasn’t such a fucking animal—Ah! Damn, Jac!” He made a jagged noise as he met no resistance, just plunged into silky, slippery welcome with the help of her heel in his butt and her hips tilting to receive him.
“Don’t hold back, Vin. Please.” She gasped. “I like knowing you’re as turned on as I am. That you want me so much.”
He reared up enough to look at her with a feral kind of lust. “Be careful what you wish for.”
*
They moved into her room after a sauna and a shower and a fresh bout of lovemaking that left his sheets damp. They were dozing in the dark, his arms around her and her lips were pressed to the ‘g’ in Ignis, when she felt him jerk.