by Jan Irving
She took his arm, squeezed it so he’d take her seriously. “No, I mean… Dharma and Sian made me wonder if you might be hiding a part of yourself from me, maybe because you thought I couldn’t accept it, so I came over here to root around.”
He shook off her hand. “What exactly did they say?” God damn them. Women were always interfering—
He gusted out a sigh. No. No. He wasn’t going to think that way anymore. Jenny was a woman and she was honest with him, even when she knew it would cost her.
And he knew Sian and Dharma were only trying to help her. They could see how innocent she was. God knew Taz should keep his dirty hands off her.
“Well?” He couldn’t help that his voice was testy.
Jenny had her hands on her hips now, looking him in the eye. “They’re right, aren’t they? I’ve always felt like you were protecting me from something about yourself. It would explain why you were such an asshole to me for so long.”
His throat closed up. “Did you go into my playroom, Jenny?” he asked, very softly. If she’d gone in there without him, unprepared… What would she think of him?
She pushed her hair back, tension sagging from her shoulders. “No. I… When I found the locked door I knew I could probably find my way inside, but that’s not what I wanted.”
He crossed his arms, knowing he looked intimidating, but that was okay. She’d pushed this. She wanted to know his secret? Well, they’d both see. “What did you want?”
“To ask you about it. To not just invade your privacy because you’ve been so good and kind to me and you don’t deserve that, me just going behind your back.”
“Oh, Jen.” And just like that she melted him. “Come here.” He cupped the side of her face, brought her close enough so he could rest his forehead against hers. It had to be so scary for her, getting close to a man like him.
Of course she’d want to know what he was hiding.
“Everything Dharma told you about me, everything you’re afraid of is true,” he said. “I’m not the man for you.”
Instead of getting tearful the way he’d half expected, Jenny crossed her arms. “I am tired of people assuming that a—poor little Jenny is a basket case and will never be strong again, because I’m healing, damn it, and I plan to be stronger than ever, and b—that you’re a total asshole. Are we clear?”
Taz blinked. “Uh. Sure.”
“All right then.” She raised a brow. “Planning on sharing your dark secret before we both collapse from lack of sleep?”
He surprised himself by giving a crack of laughter. He tugged her close again. “Come here, you.” His heart was thudding and he felt a little sick. Because he was beginning to think that maybe she might not be the only one who could fall in love here.
“Is he done?” He nodded to Jet, who’d collapsed on his back, snoring in the grass.
Jenny’s eyes softened. “Aw.”
Taz rolled his. “I knew this would happen. You’ll be that puppy’s slave.”
“I look forward to my servitude.”
Taz hefted the pup in his arms. He was a solid, warm weight as he carried his dog and led his woman back into his house. When he put Jet in his dog bed, he again offered his hand to Jenny. Fuck, his palm was sweaty. He tried to comfort himself with the memory of their lovemaking. She’d enjoyed being submissive to him. She’d liked the way he’d taken control in the shower too.
“You liked the stuff we did. Sexually, I mean.” Gently he led her to the basement door, dread gathered like a ball in his gut. He couldn’t lose her. If she couldn’t accept him for who he was… What would he do?
Her eyes warmed. “Yes, although the girls said the spreader bar was a new one on them.”
“You told them about that?”
Jenny snickered and jabbed a finger in his chest. “No. Gotcha.”
“Wench.”
“Hey, wench sounds powerful and sexy. Better than some of your ideas about women.”
“Um.” He decided not to touch on those. He knew he still had a lot of edges she’d want smoothed.
He took a key out and opened the door to his playroom, switching on the light before he lost his nerve.
Then he stepped back and let Jenny make up her mind about whether she wanted to enter his world or not.
Chapter Eleven
Jenny wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting. Some kind of dark red leather hangout? Silver spikes and face masks and whips?
“It’s…beautiful.”
The room wasn’t large but it was cozy. A tall wooden four-poster bed was in one corner with an empty fireplace in front of it. With the climate so often hot, it would not often be chilly enough to light, even in a basement.
“It’s electric,” Taz said. “It doesn’t give off heat.”
Jenny looked over her shoulder at him. He was still hovering in the doorway, tension riding his shoulders. His face had dirt streaks and his eye was the color of the planet Mars, reddish and sore. “So you like the ambience of firelight?” She deliberately chose the word ‘ambience’ rather than the one that came to mind—romance. Taz already looked spooked, though she didn’t know why.
He couldn’t be worried what she thought of this place, could he? Her confident, fuck-the-world Taz? He was so rude and crude, but also so sure of himself, like the bedrock that built their coastline.
An Elizabethan style sideboard had handsome brass candlesticks with pink candles in them. Pink seemed incongruous. Again, shouldn’t they be black or red? Something macho? As if reading her thoughts, Taz’s lips quirked. “Women like the pink. They are also unexpected, which is disarming.”
“Ah. Crafty devil.”
He watched her, his eyes sharpening to something that looked almost…predatory. A shiver ran down her back. She had the strangest impression that now she was here in this mysterious room that he didn’t want to let her out.
That he wanted to keep her here, trap her here and do with her things that would suit heavy silk brocade wallpaper and the pendulous Fortuny chandelier sitting over a marble dining table.
She swallowed audibly.
Taz stepped into the room and shut the door quietly behind him.
“You’re not afraid,” he said. “You should be.”
She stood her ground, sensing that he was testing her for some reason. If she backed away, if she showed her nerves, he’d be back to coddling her again, the way he had right after she’d gotten out of the hospital.
And she didn’t want that. Not anymore. At first he’d been her protector, her guardian, and she hadn’t let herself see him as sexual for a long time. He’d held her when she would wake up disorientated and break into hot, silent tears.
He’d been with her through her worst.
But she wasn’t so broken anymore. Every day she got stronger. She’d made a date with Dharma to visit the local spa for a mani and pedi—just as if she hadn’t stopped visiting for months. Somehow she was going to get in her car and go and if she was keyed up, she’d still make herself stay and enjoy it, damn it.
“I went to the corner store,” she said, holding Taz’s challenging gaze. She could feel that under his show of intimidation some part of him ached for her, woman for his man. Was she ready for that?
His eyes widened. “You drove out there by yourself? Jenny, you should have waited until I was home! I would have got anything you needed.”
“Yes, you would. Everything except a backbone, Taz,” she said, lifting her chin. “It was time. I was scared. I did forget half the things I meant to pick up. But I will go again, and I’ll do it alone.”
His eyes softened, then heated. With pride, in her.
Jenny gestured around the room. “It’s like a Victorian brothel.”
Taz nodded, face contemplative now as he looked around. She preferred it to the tension.
“I feel like I’m in a fairy tale, like I only found this room now because I was ready to find it.”
His gaze sharpened on hers. “Jenny, I have tied
up both men and women here. I like to do dark, dirty things to them. But what I want most of all is to do them to you.”
Jenny blinked.
And, okay, Taz inwardly winced. Did he have to be so goddamned blatant about what he wanted from her?
As soon as he’d seen her in this room, he’d stopped denying that all along he’d hungered for her here…in chains…and under his command.
Jenny touched the beaded trim on a lamp, making it tinkle, the soft sound somehow suggestive, almost flirtatious. But it couldn’t be. She’d run from him any moment. “You do realize that this is your secret garden?”
“Garden?” He frowned. “I don’t have any flowers in here.”
“Um, yes, that is an oversight. But you’re missing the point. My garden isn’t just a physical place, it’s where my heart is. I pour my bad days into the soil. I’ve bled there, and I’ve…let myself be broken there.” Her voice hitched then she swallowed and lifted her chin again. “You have to let go of the past to heal and part of that is grief.”
He went to her, but she held up a hand. “No. No more coddling, Taz. What I meant is, this is your place to go after a bad day, isn’t it? It’s your place to feel safe and passionate. Your place to celebrate your sexuality instead of being made to feel shame for it.”
Oh, Christ.
Why had he ever thought her a simple, defenseless woman? She saw too much.
To the heart of him.
He cleared his throat. “I don’t feel ashamed. Not anymore.”
She smiled, radiant as one of her sunflowers in August. “No, and that’s the point. I use my garden to heal. And that’s what you’ve done here. This isn’t a dirty place, it’s beautiful, full of life. Now I see why the rest of your house is so empty. It’s not where you live.” She ran a finger over the side table. It came up grimy. “But you haven’t been here for months, have you?”
He shook his head. “There’s been no one else since the night in the hospital. Do you think I could think about sex when you wake up screaming?”
She held his gaze. “You needed to heal me like you healed yourself, but you didn’t know how. Obviously the same method you used wouldn’t work for me.”
“Uh, no.” Was he blushing?
Dangerous, she was dangerous because he’d never be the same, not since he’d held her in the mud of her garden, listening to her heart break one shovel of dirt at a time, not since he’d led her into this place, his secret heart.
“Will you be with me here?” He felt like he’d waited forever to ask her, forever to have her here.
She nodded. Jenny Ann Green wanted him, for who he was. “Yes…but Taz? What’s that weird smell?”
“It’s, um, the other half of my secret.”
And he opened the large wardrobe cabinet, watching her face as he revealed what was inside.
Jenny stared, unable to comprehend what she was seeing. “You paint? Wow, you paint a lot.” The smell was turpentine and oil. She saw scattered color-smeared tubes, a palette tray with dried paint, a knife and brushes and paper towels.
Then she saw the canvases hidden in the bottom portion of the wardrobe.
What he painted! She couldn’t stop herself from blushing as she caught a hint of what he liked to paint, but she was going to see Taz for who he was, damn it. She was through adoring him from a distance. She wanted to know him. “May I?”
“Ah…sure.”
Now he looked uncertain of himself. A little like how he’d been in the shoe store as she had looked at shoe after shoe. Adorable.
It helped to think about that and not about the painting of a beautiful brunette woman looking over her shoulder enticingly at Taz. Her hands and feet were tied to the scarlet tufted bench Jenny had glimpsed at the end of the bed in this room, leaving her sex open to the viewer of the painting. One heavy breast was revealed and her rear end was a suggestive pink, as if she’d just been spanked.
And her eyes… Her eyes were the same moss green as Jenny’s.
“You painted me in here?”
Taz closed his eyes and sagged against the door. “Yes,” he whispered.
“But…”
His eyes snapped open, gleaming, animalistic. “You think I could tell you how I felt, how I wanted you? I’ve been painting you for months. And before I did that, I had women here who looked like you. I’m surprised you never noticed.”
Jenny’s eyes rounded. Oh, God. She had, just not consciously. But when she thought back to those last days before her attack, she’d seen him only with brunettes.
“I couldn’t get you out of my head. I couldn’t go near you.” He laughed, an edge of frustration. “Even a bastard like me doesn’t want to hurt the innocent.”
Jenny wetted her lips. She knew she had to handle him carefully. Because her protector was wounded too, had been wounded a long time. “I’m not innocent anymore.”
“You are.” Pain twisted like a lightning strike across his face. “It was enough at first just to take care of you. To know you hurt less every day, that you would heal, but I couldn’t… I couldn’t stop thinking of you here with me.”
Jenny reached for another painting. It was her on the bed, scarlet silk wrapped around her wrists and ankles, her legs spread lewdly even as her eyes were shining. He’d captured shyness and eroticism in the same work.
As she went through the paintings she found sketches of herself sleeping naked in her garden, her hair tangled as if from a man’s hands. In all of them she looked whole, healed, utterly female.
Throat aching, she let the paintings fall back into their hiding place.
Taz wasn’t looking at her, his gaze on the floor. “Just go if you’re going to. I won’t try to stop you.”
Jenny frowned. Then made herself go to him. “Why would I go?”
His gaze snapped to hers. “You think I don’t know those are just fantasies?”
Courage. She was going to have to find her courage if she wanted Taz for her own. She held his gaze. “What if they’re my fantasies too?”
Taz swallowed. Pain, confusion… Yearning.
“They couldn’t be.”
“Why not?”
His head fell back. “Because I’m close to you now. Close, do you understand me, Jenny? And I’ve never been close to anyone, not in all my life.”
Tears pricked her eyes. “I do understand. I feel the same way about you.” She squeezed his hands. In a hushed voice she asked, “What if my being here with you would only make us closer?”
Heat flared in his eyes like a match igniting. His nostrils flared and on a primitive level she felt as if he were taking in her scent, taking in her readiness, her want of him.
“Yes, Taz.”
“I’d be afraid of…scaring you.”
“You’ve never done that. You’ve always taken care of me.” She looked into his eyes, willing him to believe. “In all these months, I’ve learned to trust you. You’ve picked up the pieces, held me when I vomited, cooked for me when I thought I wasn’t hungry, taken me shoe shopping and helped me take a risk on a puppy.”
Taz swallowed, looking utterly caught by her.
“I trust you. You would have to lead me because I don’t know my way in this world, but I want to try. I want to be the woman I see in your paintings.”
Chapter Twelve
Jenny moved restlessly in his arms.
Taz stiffened, pulling her close. He knew what was happening.
She was having the nightmare again. Soon she’d leave his bed and go out to the garden, trying to bury her pain working there, her subconscious looking for the place she would feel safest.
He sat up, running a hand through his hair. They’d only managed a couple of hours of sleep. He ached from fatigue. Worse, he felt lost. How could he help her? How could he finally kill her ghosts so she’d be free?
When her eyes snapped open he jumped. Her face was impassive, her eyes wide. Seeing and yet not seeing.
She moved to get out of his bed.
He couldn’t have it. He couldn’t watch her go through this anymore. It was tearing away parts of him, exposing a wound he’d thought long closed.
She had to stop hurting so he could stop hurting.
They’d decided they wouldn’t use his playroom or do anything kinky until they’d caught up on their sleep, but what he had in mind couldn’t be put off for a better time. “There is no better time,” he muttered.
Not as long as his Jenny still suffered.
Somehow he had to free her.
His eyes widened as he remembered what she’d told him she remembered of her attack. Shadows… More than one man…
He reached for his phone even as he looped a possessive arm around Jenny, keeping her from leaving his protection.
* * * *
Zane stared at Taz in disbelief. His sea green eyes were bloodshot. He had to be as exhausted as Taz, but he’d come when Taz had called him.
“You want me to what?”
“Hold Jenny while I kiss her. It’s not that hard a concept,” Taz growled. He’d explained himself twice. He wasn’t doing it a third time.
“Taz, it’s three in the morning.”
“So you said. Twice. Just do what I told you to do, rook. Come on, I know you like her. This is your chance to be a hero and help her from these nightmares.”
“Whoa. You’re in love with her,” Zane said.
And Taz had…nothing. He couldn’t automatically and sarcastically put the rookie in his place because the truth was that he’d been in love with Jenny Ann Green for a long time.
He hadn’t been man enough to let himself see it.
“She was attacked by three men.” Taz’s voice broke. This was so fucking hard to talk about. But he had to do it. For Jenny. “I want to eclipse that experience, give her subconscious something else to think about.”
They were in Jenny’s garden. She was digging, her blank concentration a little spooky. She might as well have been alone in her own world.
Zane looked at her and anguish twisted his face. “I don’t know if I can do it. She looks…”
“You’ll be helping her,” Taz pushed. “She doesn’t want to be like this anymore.”