by Linda Conrad
Her head swung back and forth. Her arms went around his back, trying to urge him down into her. He wanted what she seemed to want. To slam his body into hers and bring them to the quick ending they both craved. Why did he hesitate? It was a hell of time for another attack of conscience, but he was already up to his ears in guilt. He had to keep trying to make her listen.
Jake fisted his hands in her hair and forced her attention. “Are you sure? Sure it’s me you want? You don’t even know me.”
She stared up at him with heavy-lidded eyes, her lips slightly parted and her chest heaving. His mouth went dry as she bit on her bottom lip and tried to smile.
“Time doesn’t matter. I know you,” she managed on a hoarse laugh. “I chose you because you’re a good person. A kind and careful soul who cares about being somebody’s first.”
Jake started to shake his head, to deny what she’d said. He was far removed from anyone who resembled such a description. But she didn’t know it. Couldn’t know it.
Her internal canal began convulsing around him, milking him and seducing him to complete the lesson. “Mary. Damn it. I can’t do this.”
“Shush. Jake, please. I’m so close to something and I know it’s going to be spectacular. Please…”
She didn’t have time to complete her plea because Jake gave in to the temptation jolting through him. Dripping with sweat, he thrust hard into her and embedded himself to the hilt. He couldn’t think. Could only let go.
Could only cry out when he felt the contractions take her and she screamed his name in pleasure. He pumped hard into each one of her rolling earthquakes.
Faster and faster. Higher and higher. Until they were each a sobbing, shouting explosion.
As one, they shuddered and fell over the edge. Together in body—if not in mind.
Amazing.
Sprawled over the bed, tangled in Jake’s arms and legs, Mary waited for her heart rate to slow. She couldn’t move. Didn’t want to.
Unbelievable. Utterly unbelievable.
Why hadn’t she known about this before? But then again, she hadn’t met Jake before now. Grateful. Yes, totally grateful that she’d waited for him, she turned her head to make sure he was all right. His skin was damp, glistening with sweat. And his breathing was as erratic as her own.
“Thank God,” she murmured.
Jake opened his eyes and rolled to look at her. “For what?”
“Thank God you were the first.”
He shifted to one side, pulled her snugly against him and pressed a kiss to her hair. “You could’ve told me.”
She laid a palm on his chest, felt the pulse beat of his heart. “What? That I was a twenty-nine-year-old virgin? And how long would you have stuck around after hearing that?”
His chuckle rumbled up through her hand. “Maybe you’re right. And I would’ve hated missing what just happened here.”
“See? I have a lot of strikes against me. And I wanted you. Badly.”
“I wanted you from the first moment I laid eyes on you.” He kissed the tip of her nose, then raised her hand to his lips and kissed her fingertips. “I saw you in that sparkly orange top and nearly swallowed my tongue.”
“It’s burnt umber, not orange. Red-haired women aren’t supposed to wear orange.” But this red-haired woman was going to wear that top as much as possible from now on.
She started to turn over but winced with the discovery that lots of interesting places on her body ached.
Jake’s mouth pressed into a hard line. “I didn’t even manage to get your bra all the way off. Hell of a way for a first time to go.”
He rolled out of bed, ripped off his own rumpled shirt and then reached back and undid her bra. She started to follow him to her feet, but he put his hand down and held her still.
“Hold on. I know what you need right now.” He slid his hands under her body and lifted her into his arms. “Let me take care of you.”
Feeling like a princess, like her little mermaid, Mary grinned into his shoulder as she threw her arms around his neck and hung on.
He carried her into the bathroom and stepped with her into the bathtub. Then he turned on the shower tap, thankfully warm. The spray covered them in a shower of liquid calm.
Slowly, Jake lowered her down his body to stand on her own shaky legs. “Hang there a second.” He kept one arm tightly around her and reached for the soap. “You’re going to find out that good sex is always messy, Miss Mary Ariel.”
“I like the sound of that. I wish my parents had called me Ariel. Maybe I’ll change my name.” Along with her whole life—starting tonight.
He placed a wet kiss on the mermaid’s face and Mary laughed, feeling careless and coy.
The bar of soap rubbing across her breasts made her nipples tighten. Did he notice? Jake never changed the motion. His knuckles brushed the soft undersides of her breasts. He ran his hands down her spine and around her backside. He seemed intent on smoothing soap bubbles over her skin and she wasn’t sure he was paying attention.
Until…he reached between her legs. His touch was as light as a cloud, and he bent his head to place gentle lips against her wet temple.
An electric buzz rushed through her veins like a warm wind. Desire, close to the surface since their first kiss, kicked off her pulse again. Her heart pounded with the need, the heat.
“Jake…” The word was only a whisper of sound. A plea. A question.
But it didn’t have the desired effect.
He pulled his hand away and stepped back, studying her under the spray. Suddenly she felt more embarrassed than she had in her whole life and raised both palms to cover her breasts. No man had ever seen her stark naked before. It was one thing to have sex in bed—in the dark. It was quite another to be faced with full-frontal nudity under the bathroom’s fluorescent light.
Jake’s eyes clouded over and instead of ice blue, they looked gray and unfocused. “That’s it.” He handed her the soap, turned his back and pushed aside the shower curtain ready to step out of the tub.
“Is it me?” she asked quietly. “Now that you’ve seen me in the light are you regretting what we did?”
He shook his head, then turned back and reached for her. “Maybe I have some guilt. But I’ll never regret one moment of what we did. Don’t ever think that. You are a gorgeous woman. And if I had a choice…”
Pulling her close, he lasered a kiss across her lips. A kiss that spoke of need and desperation. A kiss that spoke of tomorrow.
By the time he let her go, his breathing was coming in hard pants and his erection was poking her in the stomach. “You’re going to be sore for a couple of days. You have lots of time left in your future to experience everything. Let’s take things slow for now.”
She sighed but nodded her acceptance of his decision. It wasn’t her first choice but if he could wait, so could she.
Jake stepped from the tub. “Take your time. When you get out we’ll have breakfast before we each head back to Honey Creek.”
He put a towel over the bar for her to use after the shower. “This is the only dry cloth left in the room, and it’s all yours. I’ll air-dry. Oh, and when you get out of the shower, you might want to make a decision about your clothes.”
“My…?”
He grinned and pointed to the pile by the sink.
“My new silk pants? And my brand-new heels? They look ruined.” The pants would probably be easy to replace, though she regretted the heels.
“Sorry you picked last night to wear your new clothes.”
“All my clothes are new.” Hmm. That sounded a little too sharp and full of self-pity and it wasn’t how she truly felt. “Besides, those clothes were lucky for me.”
“I told you never to call me here.”
At the same time as Mary was stepping from the shower, Truman was making lame excuses.
“But, boss, I’m using a pay phone outside the Bozeman hospital E.R. No one will find out.”
The boss tried to keep sudden a
nger and frustration from spilling over through the phone. “I’m not paying you to get your nose broken. I wanted you to follow that new guy around for a while and report back on his behavior. What’s the idea of jumping him?”
Groaning, Truman raced to explain, “He looked like he was spying on somebody. I only wanted to scare him off. Make him regret he came to our part of the country.”
“Yeah? And that worked out so well, didn’t it?”
“It’s not my fault.” Truman’s whining voice set nerves to jangling. “He’s gotta be some kind of pro.”
The idea wasn’t a novel one. “I’m beginning to believe you’re right. I thought at first he was a private investigator and I wanted to know who hired him. I’m more convinced now that he’s probably a fed. DEA or FBI maybe. Makes me think I’d better bring in a pro myself.”
Truman issued a laugh, but the sound rang hollow and too loud across the line. “You get him, boss. What do you want me to do next?”
“Go on vacation.”
“But, boss…”
“Get out of the area. Go to Florida for a while. I don’t want to see your face around here until your nose heals. Is that clear?”
If it wasn’t clear, the boss figured the pro he hired could take care of Truman the same way as he would take care of the undercover agent in their midst. Permanently.
Chapter 4
“Ow!” Mary rammed her hip into the book cart for the third time this morning.
Darn it. Why couldn’t she watch where she was going? After all, she’d been employed as the assistant librarian here at the Honey Creek library for the past eight years. Certainly by now she should know where everything was located.
Absolutely nothing had been going right. Not since she and Jake had parted ways last Saturday morning in the parking lot of the Bozeman hotel. That morning had been so hopeful—so full of promise. They’d exchanged cell phone numbers and had stolen a few public kisses.
He’d said he would call. But her friend Susan told her that was what they all said.
Not in romance novels. In her favorite books the couples might have their troubles, but things always worked out in the end. If a hero said he would do something, he did it. The heroic characters she’d read about in romance novels were what had given her the idea that a man could be trusted.
Not that she’d had many examples of that in real life.
Nothing her father had ever said was the truth. He’d cheated on her mother. He’d probably cheated his business partners and friends. He’d even cheated about his own death.
Jake was not like her father. Yet Jake had said he would call, and here it was a rainy Tuesday morning and no word yet.
Why couldn’t she get over what had happened between them? Yes, he’d been her first lover and she knew a woman’s first was supposedly a big deal. But this yearning to make love to him all over again seemed to have put her under a spell. A strong and unyielding spell. Was that natural? Being reckless wasn’t like her. Or at least not like the person she used to be.
If she could just see him again… Maybe she would discover that he wasn’t everything she remembered. Maybe…
A squeal of delight coming from the children’s book section caught Mary’s attention. She started walking that way to find out which book had enthralled the little girl.
One of the biggest changes Mary wanted to make in her life was having kids. She wanted one, or maybe two—or three. Now that she’d lost the weight and it was possible to think about such things, it seemed children were on her mind a lot.
As she passed by the computer stations, empty at this hour, she fought the urge to stop and look up Jake Pierson. To check up on his background. But she would never do that without telling him first. It seemed dishonest.
“Mary, may I speak to you a moment?” Mrs. Banks, the head librarian, motioned from her office.
Mary changed course and headed her way. She’d been meaning to have a serious conversation with her boss for the past couple of days. Ever since she’d decided to change her whole life. But, well, the time had never seemed quite right.
Mrs. Banks ushered her into the tiny office and shut the door behind them. “Have a seat, Mary. I’d like to tell you something. My husband has decided to retire from his job and he wants us to move to Arizona. He likes the weather there.”
“No kidding?” Mary couldn’t imagine living anywhere else but Honey Creek. This was home. All her family and friends were here, along with everything else she knew and loved.
Mrs. Banks put her hand up as if she was about to say something profound. “I gave three weeks’ notice to the Library Board last night. They asked me to suggest my replacement.”
Mary began shaking her head before her boss even finished her thought.
Mrs. Banks must’ve noticed the denial in Mary’s expression because she gave her the cordial smile of a long-time business comrade. “I know you don’t have the credentials, Mary. But if you really want the job, I’ll go to bat for you.”
Mary’s boss had been her mentor from the beginning, and Mrs. Banks must’ve assumed Mary wanted what she wanted. She did not.
“You could always get your master’s degree in Library Science while you worked,” Mrs. Banks added. “It’ll be difficult to accomplish both at the same time in this small town, but it’s possible.”
“Thanks.” Mary’s mouth rushed to say something else, but her mind was lagging as she fought to find the right words. “But…I… I’ve been meaning to tell you…I’ve been thinking about quitting myself.”
Mrs. Banks raised eyebrows expressed what she thought of that idea. “You don’t want to work at the library anymore? What will you do?”
Good question. One Mary had been mulling over for weeks. “I have a few ideas. But I was hoping for a little time to check things out.”
“Does this have anything to do with the authorities finding your father’s body last week?”
“No.” And that was the truth. Her father had nothing whatever to do with her wanting to make some changes. After all, she’d lost over a hundred pounds on her own—before his body had been found for the second time.
“I see. Then I can tell the board to look for someone else?”
Mary nodded, but bowed her head rather than face the disappointment in Mrs. Banks’s eyes.
“Okay then. A young woman who used to live in Honey Creek recently contacted me about a job.” Mrs. Banks’s expression was thoughtful. “I’ll check on her qualifications. In the meantime, Mary, if you need a few days off, the best time would be during the next couple of weeks. While I’m still here and can watch over a temp.”
Mary agreed to take time off, starting tomorrow, and then she left her boss’s office as quickly as possible. Now she’d done it. Big changes would be coming at her fast. Whether she was ready for them or not.
Outside the Honey Creek library at 5:00 p.m. on a drizzly Tuesday evening, Jake leaned against his rental SUV and waited for Mary to get off work.
Torn between duty and his awakening feelings for Mary, Jake had spent the better part of four days secretly meeting with the Honey Creek sheriff and assuring himself that Mary had absolutely nothing to do with Wes’s current murder investigation. Somewhere along the line, Jake had found himself hoping he’d been totally wrong about Mary and that she was the murderer. That notion would be infinitely better than the idea of her as an innocent bystander that he was using for his investigation.
But no. Mary was exactly what she seemed.
Sweet. Naive. Trusting. And no longer a virgin, due to his asinine lack of self-control.
A trickle of cold summer rain eased down the back of Jake’s neck, but he shook it off. He deserved to stand in a frozen hell for what he’d done to Mary—for what he intended to do.
His head came up when he spotted her at the library’s front door. She was opening an umbrella and making her way down the stairs past the building’s wide white columns.
Damn, but she was pretty. Even w
et and dressed in a plain gray dress that seemed suitable only for a librarian. The sight of her made things twist inside him, and that hadn’t happened in a very long time.
Folding his arms over his chest, he waited for her to come closer. It was starting to register in his idiot’s mind that Mary might be in real danger. Honey Creek had at least one murderer lurking about. And Jake’s gut was telling him that whether or not Mark Walsh’s death and his own money-laundering investigation were linked, one murder could easily become two.
He’d been trying to narrow down the possible suspects, but found it difficult without knowing the people involved. He’d come to the conclusion that the best plan was to meet the various townsfolk. Maybe he could gain access to a couple of their personal computers and files.
And what better way to accomplish those goals than in the company of a beautiful, sexy woman—who might be in need of a protector?
But he swore there would be no more intimate nights. No more erotic touches and starry-eyed kisses. His conscience couldn’t take it.
“Jake?” Mary stood a few feet away in the rain, staring up at him. “What are you doing here?” Her eyes were the color of a pale ale today and clouded with questions.
He wished he could give them to her. “Waiting for you. And hoping you’ll come to dinner with me.”
“That would be nice. But where have you—”
Gathering her in his arms, he rushed her around the car and seated her in the passenger seat before she could change her mind—or ask any difficult questions. He didn’t want to give her a chance to think too much. Not about dinner. And especially not about him.
By the time he’d slipped behind the driver’s wheel, she was buckling up and placing her wet umbrella on the floor mats under her feet.
He turned the ignition key and brought the car to life. “I thought we’d go to Kelley’s Cookhouse for barbecue. That okay with you?”
Out of the corner of his eye, he caught her rolling her eyes before she asked, “You sure that’s where you want to go? My best friend’s family owns the place and we’re likely to run into everyone in town I know.”