Ally smiled up at him. Sadness crept into her eyes, but her smile remained bright. “I’ve always been yours, Jesse. I never stopped. But something happened when I realized I couldn’t go back and change my answer. I just started… surviving. I didn’t know what else to do.”
“And now?”
“You’re here. You still love me. You’re protecting me. What else could I ask for?”
“Happiness? Do you have that? There’s a part of you that’s still sad. I can’t figure out why, either.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I’d said yes, where we’d be today. We’d have two and a half kids and the white picket fence. Or what if we grew apart? Maybe those two and a half kids would belong to someone else, or someone else loved you more than I did. I get overwhelmed when I think about it.”
“Did Michael make you believe that you weren’t good enough for me?” His grip on her tightened. How could she ever believe that he’d love someone else the way he loved her?
“No. At least not that I realized. Maybe he did. I just know I’m terrified that we’ve wasted time, and you might not like who I am now.”
“I love you, Ally. There’s nothing else I can say other than I’m not going anywhere. When I look at you, nothing’s changed. Yes, we’re different people because of our experiences, but that doesn’t change our attraction to each other, or my desire to know everything about you. I’ll stick around until I’m eighty if I have to. I want to know what makes you tick.”
“You don’t think we’re rushing into this? I mean, all the I-love-you’s, making out like teenagers… I’m scared we’re going to take it for granted again.”
“If you weren’t scared, I’d be worried. The fact is we’re both terrified. We were both hurt in our own way back then. But I like to think that we can get past that and enjoy each other again.”
Ally smiled and laid her head on his chest. He cupped her head and held her close to him, hoping that she heard his heartbeat. Just being near her brought out the intense need to protect her, to hold her. Even with all the baggage between them, that had never changed.
“Let’s get you off your knee, buster. I need you to be able to protect me apparently.”
Jesse gave a soft chuckle. With his finger, he urged her chin upward so that she was forced to look at him. No words were needed. He simply placed his lips over hers in a kiss meant to reassure and comfort. Whatever was going on with her was deeper than their relationship or Michael. He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like it one bit, either.
****
Ally rolled over and stretched, throwing her arms wide.
“OW!” came Jesse’s muffled voice next to her. “Talk about a rude awakening.” He lay on his stomach and popped his head up once she moved her arm. “Seriously?”
“Sorry,” she said with a giggle. “I forgot where I was.”
“Clearly. Now get out of my bed and get normal clothes on before I finished what we started last night.”
Ally glanced at her oversized t-shirt and tugged self-consciously at the hem. “Sorry.” But what a memory last night had been. Even with an injury, Jesse was capable of eliciting some serious feelings. The air cast hadn’t hindered him at all from getting her hot and bothered, a point she was sure to pay him back for later when she was more awake.
She slipped from the covers, still pulling at the hem of the shirt.
“What are you all shy for? It’s not like I haven’t seen it before.” Jesse flipped over on his back, putting his hands behind his head and watched her walk across the room.
“I don’t know. Shut up.” Despite not being a morning person, she grinned. “Why don’t you strut around half naked and see how it feels.”
Jesse pouted. “Just half naked?”
Ally let out an exaggerated sigh. “This whole protection thing isn’t going to work. If I have to stay with you, I’m going to wind up knocked up and you’ll be looking down the business end of Daddy’s shotgun at the altar.”
Jesse gave a careless shrug. “We do have a lot of time to make up for.”
Ally studied him for a moment and decided he was kidding. “Let’s just focus on keeping me alive right now. I hardly slept at all last night. I kept hearing things, and it wasn’t just your snoring.”
“I so don’t snore.”
“You so do. In fact, I contemplated putting a pillow over your head to end my misery.”
Jesse narrowed his eyes in a playful glare. “If you weren’t so sexy, and I wasn’t injured, I’d come over there and show you who’s boss.”
Ally just rolled her eyes and gathered her things from the chair in the corner of the room. She tried to ignore the fact that Jesse’s eyes followed her every movement. “Do you need anything before I get a shower?”
His eyes drifted closed and he swallowed. “Oh honey, that imagery in my mind right now is all I need if I can’t have the real thing.”
“Will you get serious? I’m on someone’s hit list and all you’re thinking about is sex.” Despite the truth in her words, she couldn’t make herself be angry at him.
“I’m a man. If you need proof…”
“Ibuprofen is on your nightstand if you need it, dork.” She walked into the bathroom and closed the door. Then she locked it for good measure. A grin spread across her face. She was starting to feel more like herself. Too bad she would probably die before she got to enjoy it.
Chapter 8
“Lucky, did you get any fingerprints at Ally’s house?” Jesse asked, looking over the report.
“Not a single one. Must have been wearing gloves.”
“Or burned off his own fingerprints.”
Lucky stood upright. “What makes you think that?”
“The smudge on the frame. It’s consistent with an injury. It seems to be the perfect size for a fingerprint, but the print itself is missing.”
“You don’t think gloves could leave that behind?”
“No, because we have the oils from the skin. See?” Lucky leaned over Jesse as Jesse pointed to the report. “Oils and salts found on the frame are consistent with material produced from the sebaceous gland found in fingerprint residue. However, no full or partial fingerprint emerged during dusting.”
“Now that’s interesting. Any DNA left behind?”
“Nope. Says nothing to identify anyone other than the owner of the frame was found. So we’ve got Ally’s prints and a foreign oils from someone else.”
Lucky stared at the piece of paper hard. Jesse finally placed it on the table in front of him. “What if I can’t protect her?”
“You can. She’ll be fine.”
“Is that how you felt when James kidnapped Lily?”
“No. But what I felt isn’t something I can put words to. I just knew I’d die trying to get her back. She was my baby, not his.”
“Just not sure where to go from here. I keep thinking that we’ll just magically catch this guy, or it’ll become obvious who he is, but then I remember the look on Ally’s face when we walked into her house. She wasn’t finished making it a home and he took that from her.”
“I’m working as hard as I can to get it figured out. Now that you’re off the case, you can do some patrolling for me if you want, or I can put you on leave if you want to spend all your time with Ally making sure she’s safe. I know you need to take care of that knee.”
“I just started this job. I don’t want to be a flake.”
“I think you know me well enough to know I’d tell you if I wasn’t okay with it. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in your shoes. Take some time off and be with Ally. And most importantly, don’t leave home without your gun.”
Jesse glanced at Lucky. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. You’re doing me a favor by keeping her occupied. Lana isn’t okay with her not staying with us and as long as she’s with you, Lana stays calm. If Lana is calm, I can concentrate.”
Jesse stood and gathered his coat and some files he could work on in the evening.
/> “Jesse? There’s a cabin in the woods just outside of town that I took Lana to on our honeymoon. It might be a good place for you guys to get away for a long weekend and get to know each other again. I can contact the owner if you’d like me to. It’s also a good place to lay low.”
Jesse thought about it for a second. Would Ally see it as too forward? Or would it be exactly what they needed during the stress of the murder? “You know what? That sounds great, man. I’d appreciate that.”
“I’ll get right on it.”
Jesse shook Lucky’s hand and gave him a pat on the back. They gave each other a knowing look, and Jesse sent a silent prayer of thanks upward that Lucky was his boss and not someone else who had never experienced what he was going through. Just being away from Ally for ten minutes was too much right now. And leaving her with her father, a seventy-something-year-old man was not his idea of protection, although he’d learned the hard way at nineteen that the man wasn’t afraid to use his shotgun to scare the pants off – or rather back on – someone.
Jesse grinned. Maybe she wasn’t in such bad hands after all.
****
Ally took Jesse’s advice and explored his house. It was absolutely massive. Never in her life had she been in a house so large.
The study alone was probably half of her small house. She ran her fingers along each of the book-lined shelves, and took out a few to look at them. She sat in Jesse’s oversized chair behind his desk and ran her fingers against the glass-covered top. The wood was intricately carved with lions’ heads on the top corners of the wood. Several papers scattered the top of the desk, but what Ally instantly noticed was the picture of her and Jesse that fateful summer. She was hugging him around his middle and somehow, the camera had caught such tenderness in his eyes as he looked down at her that Ally found herself sniffing.
Moving her gaze to herself, Ally noticed how truly happy she looked in the photograph. She was looking straight at the camera. She supposed the last time she had been truly happy had been that summer five years ago. She remembered the photo well. They had gone camping with his family and they had stayed up all night talking about their lives, their future after college and anything else that had kept them awake. They had even shared a tent that night and told ghost stories after everyone was asleep. Ally had pretended to be scared just so she could cuddle with Jesse.
Ally replaced the photograph where she had found it and slipped out of the study to the upstairs. It was even bigger than she had anticipated. She counted five bedrooms, four bathrooms and a smaller study, each decorated with the same elegant taste. She walked up the second set of stairs and immediately saw Jesse’s master suite. It looked like something out of a fairy tale. The whole house did, in fact. She walked in and instantly heard the water running from a bathroom off to the left.
Smiling, she pictured Jesse naked under the steam of a hot shower. Her body instantly responded to the thought but a mischievous idea came into her mind.
She looked over and saw the door was slightly ajar. She pushed it open, careful not to make a sound. The bathroom was monstrous, but she could still make out Jesse and his beautiful form under the showerhead. His buttocks curved in a perfectly shaped bubble that extended down to legs much more muscular than she ever thought possible.
Grinning to herself she slipped over to the toilet and stopped. Surely in an old house like this the plumbing was a little off. Jesse hadn’t been in it long enough to have it redone. If she just flushed the toilet, would the water run cold? Ally decided to give it a shot. At the sound of the flush, she saw his body turn her way and Ally made a mad dash for the door.
“Ally! Hey!” he yelled, way higher pitched than normal, and the water shut off. The sound of wet feet hitting the ceramic tile invaded her ears, and she knew she was in trouble. She looked for a place to hide but the whole room was so open, she would be discovered immediately. Instead she plopped down on top of his sofa and pretended to be looking over her nails. When he exited the bathroom, he looked right at her, an I-can’t-believe-you-just-did-that smile on his lips. She tried to look at him innocently.
“What did you do that for?”
But Ally couldn’t speak. She saw that he was holding a towel around his waist but hadn’t bothered to dry off. Water glistened on his chest. The hair there wasn’t too much but just enough to give him a sexy appeal. It thinned into a small line, exploded around his belly button, thinned again and disappeared under the towel. His arms had a dusting of dark hair on them, and his skin was darker than it had been years ago. His pecks were bulging, and he definitely had rock-hard abs. His dark hair was tousled and dripping water and his glasses had specks of water on them, too.
Ally swallowed hard and tried to divert her attention to his face, but that was no good either. His eyes had grown dark and full of desire as well and when she didn’t immediately respond, he ground out her name softly.
Before long, he shook his head and moved back into the bathroom, finishing his shower. When he came back out, he was dressed and mostly dry, with the exception of his towel-tousled hair.
“The security system will be installed today,” Jesse told Ally as if Ally hadn’t just seen him in his birthday suit. “And Lucky gave me some time off so I could take care of the knee.”
“So it’s just you and me. Here. Together. Alone.”
Jesse grinned slowly. “Oh, yeah. And you don’t belong to Michael anymore.”
****
Ally crossed her arms across her chest, centering his focus on the rather pert objects beneath her shirt. “I’ll never belong to anyone, Jesse. Get that through your head right now.”
Jesse stood with a grimace. The swelling in his knee was worse today that it had been at the hospital, and it hurt more than he wanted to admit. When he finally hobbled to her and took her in his arms, he sighed. “I think we both know better,” he said, bending his head to kiss her right beneath her ear.
“Jesse, I didn’t agree to stay with you so you could seduce me.”
“Then why did you stay?” he mumbled against her jaw.
“For protection.”
Jesse couldn’t help the snort that escaped. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m pretty useless in the self-defense category. I have a lame leg. Makes it hard to protect you.”
“I never said anything about you protecting me. I think it’s you that needs protection.”
Jesse threw his head back and laughed. But there was some truth to her words. Was he going to allow this to continue? Could he? He knew if he lost her again, he’d never be whole. He simply couldn’t risk it until he was sure she wanted to move forward.
“Let’s get away, Ally. Lucky told me about this cabin in the woods we could go to and lay low.”
“Uh, no! Haven’t you ever seen Deliverance? Going into the woods would be asking for trouble if someone really is after me. I’d prefer to stay here with that dinky state of the art security system that’s being installed today.”
She had a point, and Jesse nodded. She looped her arms around his neck and kissed his nose as the thought on how the next few weeks would go with her under his roof. Could they behave themselves? Should they?
Jesse looked at her and found her smiling. “What?”
“What are you thinking?”
He tightened his grip on her slender waist. “I’m thinking it’s going to be really hard to keep my hands to myself with you under my roof.”
Ally sobered. “I trust you, Jesse. We made a lot of mistakes when were kids and we need to learn from them. Even with our physical attraction so strong, I think we’d be wise to wait before jumping into anything.”
“I agree. But can we actually do that?”
With a grin, Ally leaned in and pecked him on the lips. “I guess we’ll see.”
He couldn’t take it anymore. He claimed her lips as his own and molded them to his, kissing her softly yet urgently as she responded with a moan.
Turning her head to the side, he heard her giggl
e before she playfully pushed at his chest. “We’re not off to a very good start,” she said in his ear.
Like an explosion of heat had just rocketed through him, he sucked in air and clenched his teeth. Grabbing her bottom, he lifted her against him and pinned her against the wall directly behind her. She gave a feminine squeal and giggled.
“You’re right,” he whispered. “I can do better.”
Intent on making her regret that resolution to wait for him, he linked their fingers together, raising them above her head and pushing his body into hers. Someone let out a feral groan, and he wasn’t sure if it was him or her. He decided he didn’t care just as the doorbell chimed.
“Mmm mmm,” he mumbled into her mouth, delirious with her against him, warm, willing and so very perfect.
Ally broke the kiss and tugged her hands from his. “Jesse Richards, get off me. That’s probably the security people.”
Jesse let her slide down his body so that she felt every inch of him. He realized, too, that when he opened that door, they were both going to look like they were up to no good. Good thing he didn’t know anyone on the installation team.
“Who is it?” Jesse called, just to be careful.
“A & C Security Installation Team, Detective.”
Jesse opened the door and nodded to the man holding a toolbox. Three other men were with him.
“Son of a—”
“Relax, I’m here to do a job, man.” Michael looked a little too smug for Jesse’s taste. What he’d give to mess up his pretty little face.
“Michael?” Ally asked from behind Jesse. “What are you doing here?”
“I never got to tell you I got a new job. That was what the business trip over the holidays was for. I had an interview at company headquarters in Colorado. I got the job, but they want me in the field for three months before I start working at corporate downtown.”
“Oh.” Ally looked confused. “Congratulations on the new job, Michael.”
The men pushed inside and looked around. “Yeah, well, at least he’s going to take care of you. This system is the best on the market.”
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