Cara put her palms on his chest. His skin burned her through the fabric of the casual cotton polo he wore. So hot, always so hot. She licked her lips, her throat suddenly as dry as a desert.
She had a choice. She could pretend none of this had happened, pretend she wasn’t hurt by his unwillingness to share more with her—or she could go to bed alone. It wasn’t an easy choice, but she had to stand up for herself. She wasn’t simply his sex toy. She wasn’t here just to fulfill his physical needs. She was worth more than that. If not to him, then at least to herself.
His mouth was magical where it skimmed along her throat. Another few moments, and she’d never be able to say no. Cara’s fists curled into his shirt.
“I’m tired, Jack. It’s been a long few days.”
He stiffened. She wasn’t sure what he would do, what he would say, but he let her go and stepped back. His eyes were pewter in the evening light. Already, she was regretting that she’d pushed him away. She wanted to press a kiss to his hard jaw, wanted him to soften and smile again. But she wouldn’t do it. Not tonight, not with her heart breaking like this.
“Then I’ll say good-night,” he said. She waited for him to say something else, prayed he would say something else, but he didn’t. He left her standing alone on the balcony with the night sounds of London ringing in her ears.
* * *
What had Jacob wanted? That was the billiondollar question so far as Jack was concerned. There was nothing Jacob could say that would ever erase the pain and anger of his abandonment. So why was Jack now wondering what his brother wanted?
And why was he thinking of Cara and the way she’d looked at him when he’d told her he didn’t know and didn’t care?
Damn her for making him wonder! Damn her for making him question his own reaction. He hadn’t been able to control the rage that had burst from him at the sight of his brother, of that face he’d once loved and admired so much. He’d felt every sick moment of Jacob’s betrayal then. The panic and fear when they’d discovered that Jacob was gone, that all he’d left was a note and that he wasn’t coming back again.
It had hurt so much back then. He’d thought he was over it, but the moment he’d seen Jacob again, everything inside him had boiled over.
How could he explain it to Cara? Why would he want to? This thing with Jacob had nothing to do with the two of them. He resented her for making it into an issue between them. He didn’t want her to know about the ugliness of his life before, didn’t want to have to see her pitying expression when he told her about it.
Jack threw down the pen he was holding and put his head in his hands. It was two in the morning and he was still thinking about this. Still thinking about her. He wanted to go to her, wanted to explain why he couldn’t talk about this.
But why should he have to do that at all? What happened years ago had nothing to do with right now.
Goddammit. He wasn’t doing this. He wasn’t sitting here and beating himself up over it. It was his life and he’d do what he damn well wanted. What he’d always done.
Jack tapped a key on his computer, brought up the Japanese markets. They were already well into the trading day, but that wouldn’t stop him from making a killing before it was over.
When Cara awoke, light was streaming through the shades and across the bed where she lay. She turned her head. She was alone. Jack’s side of the bed hadn’t even been slept in. Guilt shafted through her. Had he slept on the couch? Slept in his office?
Or had he left during the night?
Cara flipped the covers back and grabbed her robe. He wouldn’t dare leave her alone here, would he? She didn’t know why, but panic unwound inside her at the thought. She didn’t pause to analyze it.
She burst from the bedroom and hurried through the vast apartment. He wasn’t in the kitchen, the living room or on the balcony that ran the length of the apartment. She stopped, straining to hear any sound—and realized he was in his office. She could hear the clackety-clack of a keyboard as she got closer. Pushing the door open, she stopped and watched him.
“Have you slept at all?” she said, her voice rusty.
His head snapped up. And then he turned to look at the skyline outside his window, as if he’d only just realized it was broad daylight. Another click of the keys and then he was pushing back from the computer.
“I lost track of time,” he said, as if it made perfect sense that he would do so.
“So you’ve been at the computer all night?”
“Technically, I suppose so. But it’s the end of the trading day in Asia.”
“Trading,” she repeated. He was up all night trading? Trading what? Not baseball cards, surely. As if a British man would be interested in baseball, she thought.
The shadow of his beard had grown into a day’s worth of stubble. Why did he look so unbearably sexy unshaven? And why did she want to go over and pull his head down to hers, kiss him until neither one of them could breathe?
Stocks. The word popped into her head, and she felt silly for not thinking of it sooner. Jack owned an investment firm. He’d told her that, and yet she kept seeing him as this maverick card shark, this daredevil who lived life on the edge.
Though perhaps trading stocks was a bit daredevilish.
“Did you make any money?” she asked.
He smiled. He didn’t look in the least bit weary. If not for his rumpled clothing and day’s growth of beard, she wouldn’t know he’d been up all night.
“A killing,” he said. “As usual.”
He had a knack for making money, no doubt about it. “I’m sure your clients appreciate your ability,” she said softly.
“They do. But I wasn’t using the firm’s money.”
Just as she’d thought, he risked everything on the vagaries of the market. Chance was Jack’s constant companion. She didn’t understand how he could stomach the uncertainty. But then, that was Jack.
“Then I guess it’s good you won.”
“It will be for a lot of people.”
Cara shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
Jack shoved his hands in his pockets, almost as if he were embarrassed somehow. “I don’t need the money,” he said. “I like to use it where it’ll do the most good.”
Cara’s heart was thundering for an entirely different reason now. “You’re giving money to charity?”
His brows drew down as he studied her. “You seem surprised.”
“No, not at all,” she hastened to reassure him. But she was surprised, and it shamed her. Why had she thought he only cared for himself? That he was irresponsible with money and unaware of how lucky he was to have so much of it? She should have known better. The man who’d charged in—at great risk to himself—because he’d thought she needed rescuing was not the sort of man who would turn a blind eye to the suffering of others.
Jack shrugged as he shoved a hand through his hair. “No, it’s all right. I understand. I’ve given you little reason to think otherwise, have I?”
Cara hugged her body as the heat of a blush flooded her. “I think I said before that we don’t really know each other very well. Everything has been backward.”
“Maybe we should work on that.”
Happiness was a tangible force inside her. “Do you mean it, Jack?”
He reached out and stroked two fingers along her cheek, her jaw, down her throat. She shivered with the contact. How did he do this to her? How did he make her want to forget everything she’d ever learned about relying only on herself?
“I want to make love to you, Cara. But I want to know you, too. I want to know what makes you the way you are.”
“The way I am?”
“Fierce. Independent. Unwilling to accept help when you need it.”
“I didn’t need your help,” she said, knowing instinctively that he was talking about the night in the casino. “You made everything worse by coming after me.”
He snorted. “You don’t still believe that fiction, do you? Bobby
Gold isn’t a nice man, Cara. And you cost him fifteen million euros.”
She thrust her chin up. She didn’t want to admit that he had a point, because to do so would be to admit that maybe she wasn’t as in control as she liked to think. She was so used to taking care of herself, taking care of her family, that she’d never considered she wouldn’t manage in that situation. But what if she hadn’t? What if Bobby had decided to use her as an example for his other employees? If she’d disappeared in a foreign country, how long would it have taken for anyone to notice? It wasn’t like she was a tourist, or that she called Mama every night.
“Fine,” Cara admitted. “Maybe I didn’t have it under control. But I didn’t really cost him fifteen million. He kept it, remember? And he’d have found a way to do so regardless of whether or not you followed me. You’d have never made it out of the casino with the money. And you know it.”
He was glowering at her, but then he suddenly grinned. It was as if a summer thunderstorm had unexpectedly broke apart and let the sun shine down. “Then maybe we helped each other, hmm?”
“Maybe so.”
“Are you hungry?” he asked. Cara nodded.
“Get dressed and we’ll go out for breakfast.”
“But aren’t you tired?” she asked incredulously. “I’ll sleep later.”
Cara showered and dressed in a pair of tan slacks and a pearl knit top. Jack was waiting for her when she emerged from the bedroom. He’d also showered and changed, and his face was freshly shaven. He looked happier this morning, as if a good night’s sleep had done wonders for him.
Except that he hadn’t slept. Cara frowned, but he showed no signs of slowing down. Instead of hailing a cab, they walked the short distance to a café he swore had the best coffee in all of London. Over a meal of bacon, eggs, toast, grilled tomatoes and coffee, they talked about mundane things like the temperature and the clear sky. It seemed odd after their charged evening, but Cara decided to just enjoy it for the moment.
She liked talking to him, even if it was about nothing.
“Tell me about you,” Jack said after she’d commented on a woman and her dog in the small park across the street. The dog was wearing a pink dress with a ruffle, which Cara found hilarious.
She swung around to look at him. “Dogs don’t wear pink dresses where I come from,” she said with a smile.
Jack’s silvery gaze was piercing, as if he’d wanted more from her than that. “It’s a crime against nature,” he agreed. He reached for her hand, threaded his fingers through hers—and she knew she’d been right. “But that’s not what I want to know.”
Her heart began to flutter. “What do you want to know?”
“Why you think you have to do everything yourself. Why you don’t want to accept help from anyone.”
Cara swallowed. “I can accept help. I’m just used to taking care of myself.”
“But why? What happened to you that you have such a strong need to be independent?”
Her skin prickled with heat. “Who said anything happened? I prefer relying on myself, is all. I wasn’t born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”
“Like I was, right?” His voice was a little harder, a little flatter.
“I didn’t say that at all.” She hadn’t even thought it when she’d spoken, but she understood how he could see it as a dig at him. She’d just meant that she’d always known what it was to work, whether it was watching her parents do so or getting her first job as a cashier when she was sixteen.
“This is supposed to be about you,” he said, as if he were accusing her of trying to turn the conversation.
And maybe she was, she admitted. But conversation was a two-way street. Give a little, get a little.
“No,” she said. “It’s supposed to be about us getting to know each other better.”
He let go of her hand and leaned back against his seat, his eyes hard. She didn’t feel like she’d won a victory. Instead, she felt as if she’d taken a wrong turn on a dark road.
“Fine,” he said, his voice clipped. “I was indeed born rich. It was a bit of a chaotic childhood, however.”
“Because your mother died and you hated your father,” she said softly, annoyed now that she’d pushed him down this path.
“My father was a tyrant,” he snapped out. “A beast with a temper. You asked how I could tell my ribs were bruised and not broken. I learned it from my father.”
Her heart constricted at the thought of him cowering from his father’s rage. What kind of man could beat children so severely? For all her father’s faults, he’d never been violent. A liar, yes. Violent, no.
“I’m so sorry, Jack.”
He looked murderously angry. His eyes burned so hot they seared her. But this time the heat wasn’t good. It wasn’t the flame of desire and passion, but the frozen burn of despair and pain.
She hurt so much for him she physically ached. And she suddenly knew she didn’t need him to say another word. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I hated him,” he bit out. “If I’d been the one who killed him, I wouldn’t have run away.” He leaned forward, his eyes still burning. “He scarred Annabelle for life, Cara. He beat her so severely with a whip that she almost died.”
Tears filled her eyes. She couldn’t stop one from escaping and slipping down her cheek.
Jack’s gaze hardened, but he didn’t cease talking. “Jacob tried to stop him. He fell and hit his head and died instantly. It was an accident.” He sucked in a breath as his fingers clenched into a fist on the table. “But you know the worst part, Cara? I’d have gladly killed him myself if I’d been there instead of Jacob.”
“Don’t say that, Jack—”
He shoved away from the table and stood. He was breathing hard now, as if he’d fought his way through a jungle. She imagined that he had. A jungle of dark memories and bitter emotions that he couldn’t escape no matter how he tried.
“No. That’s the kind of man I am, Cara. You wanted to know the truth about me. Now you’ve got it.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SHE let him hide out in his office for several hours before she decided enough was enough. Cara put down the book she’d been reading—she wasn’t doing a very good job of distracting herself anyway—and marched down the hall to Jack’s office. She could hear him behind the door, hear the clicking of the keys and the smooth timbre of his voice as he spoke to someone on the phone. She pressed a hand to the door and just listened.
He’d been awake for hours now, working nonstop, and she was worried about him. After his confession at breakfast, they’d returned to the apartment. He’d gone out for a while—on business, he’d said—but when he’d returned, he’d retreated to his office with hardly a word.
She’d wanted to give him his space. He’d pushed her away earlier; perhaps he thought he’d pushed her away for good with that confession about his father, but it was time she disabused him of the notion.
She hurt for him so much. If she could, she would take his pain way. It had horrified her when he’d said he’d have killed his father if he could have, but she understood where that kind of emotion came from. She’d never wanted to kill her father, but she’d been so angry with him for what he’d done. It had taken months to explain it to Remy, who only knew that his routine had been upset. He didn’t understand why Daddy was gone, had cried and screamed endlessly when Daddy didn’t come home as expected.
Cara shuddered with the memory. Then she gathered herself and pushed open the door. No knocking, because she wouldn’t give him the chance to rebuff her.
He looked up as she entered. He was still on the phone, but she didn’t care. She knew enough about Jack to know he always got what he wanted when it came to money. If the call were important, he’d find another way to complete the transaction later.
He looked so starkly handsome behind his desk, with the city spread out behind him. She walked over to the windows and calmly closed the blinds. Jack’s eyes followed her, but he stil
l hadn’t put down the phone.
Cara began to unbutton the long sheath dress she’d put on this morning. Buttons ran down the entire front of the formfitting black cotton.
“Yes,” Jack said to the person on the other end of the line. But his eyes were glued to her. Cara smiled wickedly as she peeled the first part of the dress open to reveal the red lacy bra she’d put on beneath it.
“Um, whatever you say.”
Cara unbuttoned the dress enough to step out of it. Then she turned around and laid it over a chair, knowing he would get an eyeful because of the matching red thong she’d worn.
“No, no. Nothing’s wrong,” he said, but his voice sounded strained. “Look, can I call you back?”
Turning, she marched over to him, reaching him right as he hung up the phone. She didn’t give him a chance to say a thing before she pushed his chair back and straddled him. Gripping his face in her hands, she tilted his head back and crushed her mouth down on his.
Their lovemaking was not in the least bit tame. Cara tore at his clothes as he filled his hands with her breasts. He pulled the cups down and tweaked her nipples into tight points while she kissed him. Then he slipped a finger beneath the lace of her panty and began stroking her in that most sensitive of places. Cara shuddered and ground her hips against him.
But as much as she wanted to let him bring her to fulfillment, she wanted to take care of him first. This was about him, about how much she wanted him to understand that nothing he could ever tell her about himself would scare her away.
She shoved his shirt off his shoulders, then started to unbutton his pants. The instant she’d unzipped him, she slipped down his body and took him in her mouth.
“Cara,” he gasped as she swirled her tongue around his hot shaft. She loved the size of him, the feel, the way he bucked against her tongue. It turned her on to know she was doing this to him, that he was fisting his hands in her hair and groaning because of the way she made him feel.
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