by Maisey Yates
“Oh,” she said, “I don’t need much.”
He ignored her, filling the plate completely, then filling his own. After that, he went to the fridge and pulled out a beer. “Want one?”
She shook her head. “I don’t drink.”
He frowned, then looked back into the fridge. “I don’t have anything else.”
“Water is fine.”
He got her a glass and poured some water from the spigot in the fridge. He handed it to her, regarding her like she was some kind of alien life-form. The small conversation had really highlighted the gulf between them.
It should make him feel even more ashamed about looking at her butt.
Except shame was pretty hard for him to come by.
“Tell me what you think about people, Hayley.” He took a bite of the roast and nearly gave her a raise then and there.
“No matter what things look like on the surface, you never know what someone is going through. It surprised me how often someone who had been smiling on Sunday would come into the office and break down in tears on Tuesday afternoon, saying they needed to talk to the pastor. Everyone has problems, and I do my best not to add to them.”
“That’s a hell of a lot nicer than most people deserve.”
“Okay, what do you think about people?” she asked, clasping her hands in front of her and looking so damn interested and sincere he wasn’t quite sure how to react.
“I think they’re a bunch of self-interested bastards. And that’s fair enough, because so am I. But whenever somebody asks for something, or offers me something, I ask myself what they will get out of it. If I can’t figure out how they’ll benefit, that’s when I get worried.”
“Not everyone is after money or power,” she said. He could see she really believed what she said. He wasn’t sure what to make of that.
“All right,” he conceded, “maybe they aren’t all after money. But they are looking to gain something. Everyone is. You can’t get through life any other way. Trust me.”
“I don’t know. I never thought of it that way. In terms of who could get me what. At least, that’s not how I’ve lived.”
“Then you’re an anomaly.”
She shook her head. “My father is like that, too. He really does want to help people. He cares. Pastoring a small church in a little town doesn’t net you much power or money.”
“Of course it does. You hold the power of people’s salvation in your hands. Pass around the plate every week. Of course you get power and money.” Jonathan shook his head. “Being the leader of local spirituality is power, honey, trust me.”
Her cheeks turned pink. “Okay. You might have a point. But my father doesn’t claim to have the key to anyone’s salvation. And the money in that basket goes right back into the community. Or into keeping the doors of the church open. My father believes in living the same way the community lives. Not higher up. So whatever baggage you might have about church, that’s specific to your experience. It has nothing to do with my father or his faith.”
She spoke with such raw certainty that Jonathan was tempted to believe her. But he knew too much about human nature.
Still, he liked all that conviction burning inside her. He liked that she believed what she said, even if he couldn’t.
If he had been born with any ideals, he couldn’t remember them now. He’d never had the luxury of having faith in humanity, as Hayley seemed to have. No, his earliest memory of his father was the old man’s fist connecting with his face. Jonathan had never had the chance to believe the best of anybody.
He had been introduced to the worst far too early.
And he didn’t know very many people who’d had different experiences.
The optimism she seemed to carry, the softness combined with strength, fascinated him. He wanted to draw closer to it, to her, to touch her skin, to see if she was strong enough to take the physical demands he put on a woman who shared his bed.
To see how shocked she might be when he told her what those demands were. In explicit detail.
He clenched his jaw tight, clamping his teeth down hard. He was not going to find out, for a couple reasons. The first being that she was his employee, and off-limits. The second being that all those things that fascinated him would be destroyed if he got close, if he laid even one finger on her.
Cynicism bled from his pores, and he damn well knew it. He had earned it. He wasn’t one of those bored rich people overcome by ennui just because life had gone so well he wanted to create problems so he had something to battle against.
No. He had fought every step of the way, and he had been disappointed by people in every way imaginable. He had earned his feelings about people, that was for damn sure.
But he wasn’t certain he wanted to pass that cynicism on to Hayley. No, she was like a pristine wilderness area. Unspoiled by humans. And his first inclination was to explore every last inch, to experience all that beauty, all that majesty. But he had to leave it alone. He had to leave it looked at, not touched.
Hayley Thompson was the same. Untouched. He had to leave her unspoiled. Exploring that beauty would only leave it ruined, and he couldn’t do that. He wouldn’t.
“I think it’s sad,” she said, her voice muted. “That you can’t see the good in other people.”
“I’ve been bitten in the ass too many times,” he said, his tone harder than he’d intended it to be. “I’m glad you haven’t been.”
“I haven’t had the chance to be. But that’s kind of the point of what I’m doing. Going out, maybe getting bitten in the ass.” Her cheeks turned bright red. “I can’t believe I said that.”
“What?”
“That word.”
That made his stomach feel like it had been hollowed out. “Ass?”
Her cheeks turned even redder. “Yes. I don’t say things like that.”
“I guess not... Being the church secretary and all.”
Now he just felt... Well, she made him feel rough and uncultured, dirty and hard and unbending as steel. Everything she was not. She was small, delicate and probably far too easy to break. Just like he’d imagined earlier, she was...set apart. Unspoiled. And here he had already spoiled her a little bit. She’d said ass, right there in his kitchen.
And she’d looked shocked as hell by her own behavior.
“You don’t have to say things like that if you don’t want to,” he said. “Not every experience is a good experience. You shouldn’t try things just to try them. Hell, if I’d had the choice of staying innocent of human nature, maybe I would have taken that route instead. Don’t ruin that nice vision of the world you have.”
She frowned. “You know, everybody talks about going out and experiencing things...”
“Sure. But when people say that, they want control over those experiences. Believe me, having the blinders ripped off is not necessarily the best thing.”
She nodded slowly. “I guess I understand that. What kinds of experiences do you think are bad?”
Immediately, he thought of about a hundred bad things he wanted to do to her. Most of them in bed, all of them naked. He sucked in a sharp breath through his teeth. “I don’t think we need to get into that.”
“I’m curious.”
“You know what they say about curiosity and the cat, right?”
“But I’m not a cat.”
“No,” he said, “you are Hayley, and you should be grateful for the things you’ve been spared. Maybe you should even go back to the church office.”
“No,” she said, frowning. “I don’t want to. Maybe I don’t want to experience everything—I can see how you’re probably right about that. But I can’t just stay in one place, sheltered for the rest of my life. I have to figure out...who I am and what I want.”
That made him laugh, because it was such a naive sentiment. He had never stood back and asked himself who the hell Jonathan Bear was, and what he wanted out of life. He hadn’t given a damn how he made his money as long as he made it.<
br />
As far as he was concerned, dreams were for people with a lot of time on their hands. He had to do. Even as a kid, he couldn’t think, couldn’t wonder; he had to act.
She might as well be speaking a foreign language. “You’ll have to tell me what that’s like.”
“What?”
“That quest to find yourself. Let me know if it’s any more effective than just living your life and seeing what happens.”
“Okay, now you’ve made me feel silly.”
He took another bite of dinner. Maybe he should back down, because he didn’t want her to quit. He would like to continue eating her food. And, frankly, he would like to keep looking at her.
Just because he should back down didn’t mean he was going to.
“There was no safety net in my life,” he said, not bothering to reassure her. “There never has been. I had to work my ass off from the moment I was old enough to get paid to do something. Hell, even before then. I would get what I could from the store, expired products, whatever, so we would have something to eat. That teaches you a lot about yourself. You don’t have to go looking. In those situations, you find out whether you’re a survivor or not. Turns out I am. And I’ve never really seen what more I needed to know.”
“I don’t... I don’t have anything to say to that.”
“Yeah,” he returned. “My life story is kind of a bummer.”
“Not now,” she said softly. “You have all this. You have the business, you have this house.”
“Yeah, I expect a man could find himself here. Well, unless he got lost because it was so big.” He smiled at her, but she didn’t look at all disarmed by the gesture. Instead, she looked thoughtful, and that made his stomach feel tight.
He didn’t really do meaningful conversation. He especially didn’t do it with women.
Yet here he was, telling this woman more about himself than he could remember telling anyone. Rebecca knew everything, of course. Well, as much as she’d observed while being a kid in that situation. They didn’t need to talk about it. It was just life. But other people... Well, he didn’t see the point in talking about the deficit he’d started with. He preferred people assume he’d sprung out of the ground powerful and successful. They took him more seriously.
He’d had enough disadvantages, and he wouldn’t set himself up for any more.
But there was something about Hayley—her openness, her honesty—that made him want to talk. That made him feel bad for being insincere. Because she was just so...so damn real.
How would he have been if he’d had a softer existence? Maybe he wouldn’t be as hard. Maybe a different life would have meant not breaking a woman like this the moment he put his hands on her.
It was moot. Because he hadn’t had a different life. And if he had, he probably wouldn’t have made half as much of himself.
“You don’t have to feel bad for wanting more,” he said finally. “Just because other people don’t have it easy, doesn’t mean you don’t have your own kind of hard.”
“It’s just difficult to decide what to do when other people’s expectations feel so much bigger than your own dreams.”
“I know a little something about that. Only in my case, the expectations other people had for me were that I would end up dead of a drug overdose or in prison. So, all things considered, I figured I would blow past those expectations and give people something to talk about.”
“I just want to travel.”
“Is that it?”
A smile played in the corner of her lips, and he found himself wondering what it might be like to taste that smile. “Okay. And see a famous landmark. Like the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben. And I want to dance.”
“Have you never danced?”
“No!” She looked almost comically horrified. “Where would I have danced?”
“Well, your brother does own a bar. And there is line dancing.”
“I can’t even go into Ace’s bar. My parents don’t go. We can go to the brewery. Because they serve more food there. And it’s not called a bar.”
“That seems like some arbitrary shit.”
Her cheeks colored, and he didn’t know if it was because he’d pointed out a flaw in her parents’ logic or because he had cursed. “Maybe. But I follow their lead. It’s important for us to keep away from the appearance of evil.”
“Now, that I don’t know anything about. Because nobody cares much about my appearance.”
She cleared her throat. “So,” she said. “Dancing.”
Suddenly, an impulse stole over him, one he couldn’t quite understand or control. Before he knew it, he was pushing his chair back and standing up, extending his hand. “All right, Hayley Thompson, Paris has to wait awhile. But we can take care of the dancing right now.”
“What?” Her pretty eyes flew wide, her soft lips rounded into a perfect O.
“Dance with me, Hayley.”
Four
Hayley was pretty sure she was hallucinating.
Because there was no way her stern boss was standing there, his large, work-worn hand stretched toward her, his dark eyes glittering with an intensity she could only guess at the meaning of, having just asked her to dance. Except, no matter how many times she blinked, he was still standing there. And the words were still echoing in her head.
“There’s no music.”
He took his cell phone out of his pocket, opened an app and set the phone on the table, a slow country song filling the air. “There,” he said. “Music accomplished. Now, dance with me.”
“I thought men asked for a dance, I didn’t think they demanded one.”
“Some men, maybe. But not me. But remember, I don’t give a damn about appearances.”
“I think I might admire that about you.”
“You should,” he said, his tone grave.
She felt... Well, she felt breathless and fluttery, and she didn’t know what to do. But if she said no, then he would know just how inexperienced she was. He would know she was making a giant internal deal about his hand touching hers, about the possibility of being held against his body. That she felt strange, unnerving sensations skittering over her skin when she looked at him. She was afraid he could see her too clearly.
Isn’t this what you wanted? To reach out? To take a chance?
It was. So she did.
She took his hand. She was still acclimating to his heat, to being touched by him, skin to skin, when she found herself pressed flush against his chest, his hand enveloping hers. He wrapped his arm around her waist, his palm hot on her lower back.
She shivered. She didn’t know why. Because she wasn’t cold. No. She was hot. And so was he. Hot and hard, so much harder than she had imagined another person could be.
She had never, ever been this close to a man before. Had never felt a man’s skin against hers. His hand was rough, from all that hard work. What might it feel like if he touched her skin elsewhere? If he pushed his other hand beneath her shirt and slid his fingertips against her lower back?
That thought sent a sharp pang straight to her stomach, unfurling something inside her, making her blood run faster.
She stared straight at his shoulder, at an innocuous spot on his flannel shirt. Because she couldn’t bring herself to raise her eyes and look at that hard, lean face, at the raw beauty she had never fully appreciated before.
He would probably be offended to be characterized as beautiful. But he was. In the same way that a mountain was beautiful. Tall, strong and unmoving.
She gingerly curled her fingers around his shoulder, while he took the lead, his hold on her firm and sure as he established a rhythm she could follow.
The grace in his steps surprised her. Caused her to meet his gaze. She both regretted it and relished it at the same time. Because it was a shame to stare at flannel when she could be looking into those dark eyes, but they also made her feel...absolutely and completely undone.
“Where did you learn to dance?” she asked, her voice sou
nding as breathless as she had feared it might.
But she was curious about this man who had grown up in such harsh circumstances, who had clearly devoted most of his life to hard work with no frills, who had learned to do this.
“A woman,” he said, a small smile tugging at the edges of his lips.
She was shocked by the sudden, sour turn in her stomach. It was deeply unpleasant, and she didn’t know what to do to make it stop. Imagining what other woman he might have learned this from, how he might have held her...
It hurt. In the strangest way.
“Was she...somebody special to you? Did you love her?”
His smile widened. “No. I’ve never loved anybody. Not anybody besides my sister. But I sure as hell wanted something from that woman, and she wanted to dance.”
It took Hayley a while to figure out the meaning behind those words. “Oh,” she said, “she wanted to dance and you wanted...” That feeling in her stomach intensified, but along with it came a strange sort of heat. Because he was holding her now, dancing with her. She wanted to dance. Did that mean that he...?
“Don’t look at me like that, Hayley. This,” he said, tightening his hold on her and dipping her slightly, his face moving closer to hers, “is just a dance.”
She was a tangle of unidentified feelings—knots in her stomach, an ache between her thighs—and she didn’t want to figure out what any of it meant.
“Good,” she said, wishing she could have infused some conviction into that word.
The music slowed, the bass got heavier. And he matched the song effortlessly, his hips moving firmly against hers with every deep pulse of the beat.
This time, she couldn’t ignore the lyrics. About two people and the fire they created together. She wouldn’t have fully understood what that meant even a few minutes ago, but in Jonathan’s arms, with the heat that burned from his body, fire was what she felt.
Like her nerve endings had been set ablaze, like a spark had been stoked low inside her. If he moved in just the wrong way—or just the right way—the flames in him would catch hold of that spark in her and they would combust.
She let her eyes flutter closed, gave herself over to the moment, to the song, to the feel of him, the scent of him. She was dancing. And she liked it a lot more than she had anticipated and in a way she hadn’t imagined she could.