Loving Sarah (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour)

by Julie Shelton

  “Together!” He spat the word venomously. “Are you that naïve, or just plain stupid? Your father would never allow us to be together!”

  “My father would have no say in the matter,” she retorted. “I’m an adult, I can do whatever I want! And I want to be with you!” She stared at him defiantly until slowly, gradually, her face began to crumple and tears filled her eyes. “God, Jesse, I’ve loved you for so long, I—”

  Ear-splitting sirens had both their heads jerking around.

  “Cops!” Sarah frowned up at him. “What are they doing here? I didn’t call them.”

  “I did.”

  “Jesse!” Sarah shrieked in panic, coming up off the sofa like a shot. “I—I’m naked! I can’t let them see me like this!”

  “I know, I know, just…gimme a minute, here, okay?” Striding over to the door, Jesse unlocked it and thrust his head out into the hallway to check on Ryder. The big man was still on the floor in the hallway, groaning and struggling to pull himself up into a sitting position. “Run upstairs and put on some clothes. I’ll let the cops in.”

  By the time Sarah came back downstairs, her body still humming with residual pleasure, the hallway was milling with cops, bikini-clad cheerleaders, and men in handcuffs—four of them—including Jesse!

  “No! No!” Sarah ran right up to him, putting her hand on his arm and glaring at the uniformed officer holding him by the elbow. “You take these off him right now!”

  “Sorry, Miss, no can do. He’s under arrest.”

  “But he didn’t do anything! He saved me!” She pointed at Ryder. “That’s the asshole who attacked me!”

  “Stupid bitch,” Ryder gave a nasty laugh. “You wanted it. You were asking for it.”

  “Liar!” she shrieked. “You tried to rape me, you—you—”

  Two cops were frantically trying to pry her away from him just as a furious Judge Arthur Chamberlain Marshall came striding down the hallway. “What the hell is going on here?” he demanded in his most authoritarian voice. “Somebody better have an explanation for this, and it better be a goddamn good one.” He glowered at her. “Sarah, what have you done now?”

  All eyes turned to her. Red-faced with humiliation and shaking with anger at her father’s unjust assumption that she was somehow at fault, she described in painfully halting sentences both Ryder’s attack and Jesse’s subsequent rescue. In spite of her tearful entreaties, she was unable to keep the cops from hauling Jesse off to jail with the rest of the culprits. “Just till we get this all sorted out,” they had explained.

  The next day Jesse was gone. Totally, completely gone, along with the twenty-five-thousand-dollar check her father had given him, leaving Sarah to struggle with a grief so huge, so…monstrous, it burned through her like acid, eating away at tissue and bone until there was nothing left of her but an empty, hollowed-out shell. This time her heart wasn’t just battered and bruised, as it had been three years earlier. This time it was broken, along with her spirit.

  * * * *

  Present day

  The water pelting her skin had turned ice cold, like pellets of wind-driven sleet. Turning off the water, she opened the shower door and grabbed a towel, twisting it around her head.

  Wrapping herself in a second towel, she stepped out onto the bath mat. As she dried herself off she considered her options. Evidently, she only had two. Staying…or leaving.

  Staying would most certainly involve interacting with Jesse on almost a daily basis, hearing the sexy rasp of his voice, seeing him with other women. According to rumor, there had been plenty of those, although she, herself, had actually only seen one. It had been a week after Malone, Blanchard, and Rendell had almost kidnapped from the playground. She’d been in the limo on her way to school, when the distinctive throaty roar of a Harley-Davidson pulling up beside them at a red light had sent her scooting forward in her seat to look out the window. Jesse was there, dressed in his customary worn jeans, black T-shirt, and kick-ass biker boots. In lieu of a helmet, he’d tied a blue-and-white bandanna around his head, a look that upped his sexiness quotient by about a million. Fingerless leather gloves and mirrored aviator sunglasses completed his bad-boy biker look. Heart racing, mouth watering, she’d stared at him hungrily as everything inside her softened and melted away to nothing, like hot wax.

  Then she’d noticed the woman on the bitch seat behind him. A platinum blonde—bleached, Sarah had thought uncharitably—whose black roots were in desperate need of a touch-up—eight months ago—her enormous breasts—implants—were practically falling out of the tube top and denim cutoffs she’d stuffed herself into—fat cow. The woman’s skin was the color and texture of a cowhide sofa. Seriously, hadn’t she ever heard of sun block? And, Holy Moley, who did her makeup, Ringling Brothers’ Clown College?

  Dismissing the woman as unimportant, Sarah had turned her gaze back to Jesse. God, he was just so…yummy! All bunching, rippling muscles and savage outlaw attitude.

  Right before the light changed to green, he’d turned his head and looked directly at Sarah. Pinioned by his gaze, like a butterfly stuck on a pin, she could only stare in mounting horror as, without taking his eyes off of her, he’d deliberately reached back, pulled the blonde bimbo’s head forward roughly and ground his mouth against hers in a brutal, open-mouthed, tongue-tangling kiss that had shocked Sarah with its raw carnality. Jealousy had boiled through her veins, leaving her gasping and shaking with outrage. How dare that woman even touch Jesse. He was hers, damn it. She’d actually growled as she’d watched them take off, her hands clenching and unclenching against the smooth pane of glass. She’d wanted to scream. She’d wanted to beat him with her fists. But mostly she’d just wanted to curl up and die.

  Because it hadn’t been her on the back of that Harley, being kissed by Jesse Colter.

  The rest of that school year she’d ridden to and from school with her nose in a book.

  Giving herself a mental shake, Sarah hung up her towel, took her nightgown from its peg and worked her arms through the straps, shivering as the waterfall of cool, silky material cascaded down over her body. She just stood there, staring sightlessly at her reflection in the vanity mirror. Okay. So. Staying had been eliminated from her list of options. Loving Jesse the way she did, she’d never survive the pain of seeing him every day knowing he’d never love her back. So that only left…Leaving. Going back to Boston.

  C’mon, it won’t be all bad, she reasoned with herself, you still have lots of friends there. Good friends, whom she’d missed terribly over the past year, in spite of a continual stream of emails, text messages and phone calls. And, as an Honors graduate of Harvard Law, she’d have no trouble finding a job. Shivering uncontrollably, she stood abruptly, knowing what she had to do. She had to leave Marshall’s Creek. She had to say good-bye to Jesse Colter. She had start living her life in the present instead of the past. End this morbid obsession for the one man she could never have.

  A sense of excitement shivered through her along with the chill in the air. Could she actually do this? Could she finally take herself in hand and get her life on a better track? Could she quit secretly yearning for something that she now realized was never going to happen? Quit waiting for a man who obviously didn’t want her?

  She was smart, attractive, young—hell, she was only twenty-six. Surely there was a man out there for her. A man who could melt her panties and make her heart sing. A man who would love her as much as she loved him. A man who was not Jesse Colter.

  Wasn’t there?

  Chapter Two

  Fuck!

  Jesse sat in the darkness of his living room, forearms resting on his knees, rolling the frosty cold beer bottle between his palms. Still reeling from this afternoon’s encounter with Sarah, he couldn’t sleep. What had he been thinking? How could he have treated her like that? Especially when it had been all he could do not to take her in his arms, bend her over the hood of her car, and make love to her right there on the street until they were both weeping
with pleasure.

  With a low groan, he lifted the bottle to rub the icy condensation against his sweating forehead. Christ, he couldn’t stop his hands from shaking.

  Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!

  Memories rampaged through his mind like a flash flood through an arroyo. Memories of Sarah. The way she’d looked the first time he ever laid eyes on her, freckle faced and pigtailed, and heartbreakingly beautiful even at age thirteen. The images tumbled over each other, vying for his attention. Sarah, dangling precariously upside down from that tree limb, thirty feet above the ground. Sarah, injured and bloody, her tiny body trembling in his arms as they’d waited for the fire department to come get them down. Sarah at the hospital, begging him to stay with her while she was being stitched up. He’d lost a good ten years of his life that day. But he’d gained something even more precious than that—Sarah.

  Sarah, holding on for dear life, laughing and giggling helplessly as he zigzagged her around the estate on an old handcart. Sarah, picking buttercups and daisies, tucking them in her hair. Tucking them in his hair. Sarah, running across the grass, hollering with delight, an enormous, wobbly soap bubble trailing from the wand in her hand. Beating him at Texas Hold ’Em, a growing mound of Cheerios on the table beside her. Chewing her lower lip in fierce concentration as she baited her fishhook with a fat, wiggling worm.

  Jesse had never met anyone like Sarah Marshall. She was a unique combination of sophisticated adult and little girl with skinned knees. He was astounded at how smart she was, and blown away that she sought out his opinions on everything from apartheid to who was hotter, Johnny Depp or Orlando Bloom—no contest, Orlando was wa-a-ay hotter. Nobody had ever cared what Jesse Colter thought about anything—until Sarah.

  And books! Christ! She’d made him read all her favorite books just so she’d have someone to talk with about them. And in spite of his grumbling, he’d loved them all, starting with Watership Down—a book about fuckin’ rabbits, for chrissakes! If anyone in his life had ever even hinted that not only would he be reading a five-hundred-page book about rabbits, but enjoying it so much he never wanted it to end, he’d have decked them. He’d devoured everything from Tolkien’s complete works to stuff you couldn’t have paid him to read before that summer. Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Moliere, Sartre, Tolstoy—even Harry fuckin’ Potter!

  He looked around his spacious, two-story great room. Thanks to Sarah, he was now an avid reader. The entire front wall of the house was lined with floor-to-ceiling mahogany bookshelves built around the openings for the front door and the large bay windows flanking it. Mahogany bookshelves stuffed with all his favorite books. A cozy reading corner featuring comfortable overstuffed recliners was an open invitation to curl up and while away the afternoon with a good book.

  Sarah…

  Despite the fact that she had grown up in the lap of luxury and he in a derelict mobile home park on the edge of town, her childhood had been just as barren and blighted as his own—except for the daily beatings, of course. While her father had been cold and severe, controlling and judgmental, at least the judge had never struck his daughter. Unlike Harry Colter, who had beaten Jesse nearly every day of his life.

  Shit.

  Jesse closed his eyes, abruptly slamming a lid on the vision of Harry Colter looming over him, belt hanging from his beefy hand, bleary-eyed and stinking of booze, reminding his son with every blow what a loser he was and how he’d never amount to anything.

  He gasped and his eyes flew open. His lungs were sucking in huge gulps of air in an attempt to steady his breathing and slow his pounding heart. For an instant, he had been back there, in that grimy trailer, accepting the blows from his father’s belt. For an instant, for just that tiny, infinitesimal fraction of a second, he had been back inside that frightened boy’s bruised, aching body and lonely, desolate soul.

  No! Never again would he allow himself to be at anyone’s mercy like that. Never again would anyone denigrate or belittle him. Not for his heritage, not for the accident of his birth, not for the failures and shortcomings of his brute of a father. He was a Navy SEAL, by God, a member of the warrior elite of the United States armed services. Part of a brotherhood whose closeness and loyalty knew no bounds. Releasing his breath with a groan, he shook his head, trying to clear his vision.

  Sarah…

  She’d never treated him like the worthless piece of trailer-park trash he actually was. She hadn’t cared about his background. Or his pedigree. She hadn’t cared that she was the descendant of English aristocracy, while he was the bastard son of an Indian whore and the town drunk. Nor had it mattered to her that she lived in a gracious mansion, while he lived in a sagging, leaking Airstream. She’d welcomed him as a friend and an equal, recognizing in him a soul as lonely as her own. She’d only been thirteen, and she had changed his life in ways she couldn’t possibly begin to realize or appreciate. Even though still a child, she’d been one of the wisest people he’d ever met. And he cherished every moment he’d spent with her that magical, long-ago summer.

  By the time he showed up for work the following summer, she had begun blossoming with a feminine beauty that made his teeth itch. At fourteen, Sarah Marshall was part woman, part child. All special.

  She was certainly special to him. The most special person he’d ever known. The only true friend he’d ever had. The one thing he treasured most in his lousy fucking life. But he was a sexual dominant, for chrissakes, ruled by dark desires and even darker needs. Needs that were best served by women who were old enough and sophisticated enough to know the score. When he left at the end of the summer, he knew he would never be back. And that thought left a vast, yearning emptiness deep in his soul.

  A groan ripped from his throat and his chest tightened. Shit! What had he been thinking, going after her like that this afternoon? Sure, he’d been angry at her for ducking out of their meeting. But giving her a goddamn ticket? Treating her like a total stranger? Jesus, he was such a fuck-up. She made him so crazy!

  Strangling an oath, he let out a low moan and let his head drop between his knees as the memories kept lapping at him, leaking through his hastily erected barriers like a relentlessly cresting river leaking through sandbags.

  * * * *

  Eleven years ago

  Shivering in spite of his heavy denim jacket, Jesse walked toward his Harley, parked across the street from the high school playground, when he noticed Ryder Malone, Jacob Rendell, and Tucker Blanchard teasing someone in the playground. Ordinarily Jesse wouldn’t have paid any attention, figuring any girl who hung around with those three losers deserved what she got. But something about the furtive way they kept looking around had the hairs standing up on the back of his neck.

  Concealing himself behind the mottled trunk of one of the sycamore trees lining the shady street, he watched as their teasing banter quickly turned into something a hell of a lot more menacing. Something that had the girl jumping up, slapping at their hands and yelling at them to stop. Jesus Christ, that was Sarah! His Sarah! Fuck, what was she doin’ with those—? As if he’d been shot from a cannon, Jesse sprinted toward his Harley.

  By the time the three punks stepped through the gate, pushing Sarah toward a battered, green pickup, Jesse came roaring up the leaf-covered sidewalk, straight at them. Startled, they stumbled backward, dropping Sarah like a stone. Before she could fall, Jesse grabbed her, yanking her up onto the bitch seat behind him. Two minutes later he pulled into the local park and turned off the engine. “Get off.” His voice was hard and tight. Kicking out the kickstand, he climbed off, letting the heavy bike settle before releasing the handlebars.

  “Jesse—” She was shivering so hard her teeth chattered.

  “Shut up.” Both hands scrubbed up and down his face. He couldn’t look at her. He was too terrified and too angry. If he looked at her, he’d shake her to within an inch of her life.

  Jesus Fuckin’ H. Christ!

  His heart was pounding so hard, he half expected it to burst thro
ugh his chest. The massive amount of adrenaline pumping through his system made him want to rip something apart with his bare hands. Like the Manhattan phone book. Or a brick wall. Clenching his fists in impotent fury, he jammed them into the front pockets of his jeans, struggling to get himself under control. “Jesus, Sarah, do you have any idea what those guys were about to do to you?”

  “They were just—just going to give me a ride h-home.” Her tone was subdued, but defiant, and she couldn’t meet his eyes. Oh, my God, she knew! She knew exactly what those guys had been about to do to her. Just the thought that she’d placed herself in such danger made his hands itch to throttle her.

  “Like hell they were! They were gonna rape you! Possibly even kill you to keep you from goin’ to the cops! Christ, Sarah, what were you thinkin’?” Anguish roughened his voice. “How could you have been so stupid?”

  She started to cry. “I told them ‘no’ over and over, but they just ignored me. And when they picked me up and started carrying me toward the gate—God, Jesse, I was so scared—” She broke off, her hand flying up to cover her mouth. “Jesse—” It was a sound of complete panic. “I’m—I’m—oh, God, I’m going to be sick—”

  She fell to her knees as her stomach heaved and she vomited onto the grass. Uncertain what to do, Jesse hunkered down beside her, stroking his hand up and down her back in an awkward attempt to comfort her. “It’s okay, Princess, you’re safe. I won’t let ’em hurt you.” He stayed with her through the dry heaves, then pulled her up and away from the mess. Blindly searching through his pockets, he pulled out an old, wrinkled bandana. “Here, sugar, let me—” Tentatively, he dabbed at the corner of her mouth. “It’s clean—Don’t—I’m just gonna—”