by Lyric James
“Yes,” he said quietly.
“I mean, they were okay guys I guess but when I expressed a desire to change my career, to take some time off and try to pursue my dream of becoming a writer, well, they didn’t actually encourage me. Told me to stick to what I was good at, stick to the career path I’d chosen.” Give up on her dreams.
“Sounds like your parents.”
“That’s what I thought too so after the last one I decided relationships aren’t for me.” She twisted around and grinned. “But I guess you know all about that.”
Jordan quirked a brow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You don’t spend a long time in relationships either.”
“Women begin to expect things like commitment if you’re with them for very long.”
“Yeah, like marriage proposals.” Once upon a time she’d believed in love and relationships that eventually ended in marriage. But after so many failed attempts, as long as she found a guy to hit the right spot every once in a while, she didn’t need the rest. “And you don’t believe in love and marriage proposals?”
“I believe in both. To the right person.”
“But I have a feeling you’re not looking for the right person. Is there some type of special mating ritual for a phoenix?”
He gave her a curious glance, a mix between irritation and she didn’t know quite what but she was sure he didn’t want to answer the question.
“There’s not so much a ritual but an act that seals a bond between a phoenix and his or her chosen mate.”
Layla knew what it was, instinctively, as soon as he said it. She’d wondered all night why he hadn’t and now she knew. “A kiss.”
His gaze flew up to meet hers. After a beat, he nodded. “When a phoenix chooses a mate, he seals it with a kiss.”
“You mean you’ve never kissed anyone? Ever?”
Jordan laughed briefly. “It comes into effect during adulthood. I sneaked a kiss or two during my teenage years but other than that, no.”
It hurt to hear it. Why did she expect meeting her would change him? Why did she think she was the one woman who fit him? She knew better. Why did she think spending one night with the most incredible man she’d ever met would change anything for him?
It certainly had for her. “I guess you haven’t found anyone who’s fit you either?”
He didn’t answer her.
Chapter Eight
“Okay, what are all these for?”
At his dresser, Jordan pulled out clothes and tossed them to her. A T-shirt landed right over her head and he couldn’t help but laugh.
“Put them on.” Jordan was trying to keep them both busy, himself busy, really. He didn’t want time to think and he certainly didn’t want to hear her thoughts. After they’d made love…no, had sex…by the pool and spent a little more time together, his mind had become jumbled.
She lifted the items up one a time. “Another shirt, two pair of shorts, a pair of pajama pants, two pairs of socks. Are we going to spend the rest of the night in a freezer or something?”
Jordan pulled the same number of items out and put them on too. “Come on. Humor me. Get dressed and you’ll see.”
She grudgingly got up. “Okay. But this is a little weird.”
He smiled and sat on the bed to pull on his socks. When he looked back up again, he chuckled. “You look like a hobo.”
She grabbed a pillow off his bed and tossed it at him. “Um…you don’t look like Mr. GQ yourself.”
He glanced down. “Okay. Point taken.”
He grabbed her and something sizzled. His fingers trailed upward until they moved over her lips. He framed her face and tilted it up slightly. Why was he standing there staring into her beautiful face? Why did a longing, so intense, begin to build in the part of his chest he’d allowed no one to ever touch?
His heart rate increased as he studied her. He was certain she could see the hunger in his eyes for something he’d only wanted to sample a few hours ago. Now, now he wanted to own it, possess it.
When she came up on her toes, he lowered his head, warning signals blazing in the back of his brain. Her tongue slid out and coated her top lip and more than anything he wanted to take it into his mouth and taste it.
Heat suffused his body. He wanted inside her mouth in the worst way possible. Before he allowed the flames to take hold, he kissed her cheek.
“Let’s go,” he said and whisked her out the door and down the stairs, through the kitchen to another door and down some more steps.
“Where are you taking me? Did you decide to lock me in the dungeon instead?”
“Ha ha. Very funny.”
After they moved down a long hallway, he walked through another door and flicked on the lights.
“You have a bowling alley in your house. A bowling alley?”
Moving away from her, he turned on the two lanes and opened the cabinets with the balls and shoes. “And you’ve been challenged to a game, madam. A game of strip bowling.”
Layla rolled over laughing. “Are you serious? That’s why you had me put on all these clothes?”
The melody of her laughter tugged at something inside him. The genuine smile and delight on her face opened a part of his heart that wasn’t open mere seconds ago. He shook it off, stored it away, trying to remember the plan, what he wanted to accomplish. Make her fall in love, not vice versa.
“That’s right.” He motioned to the cabinet. “Go pick out a ball and a pair of shoes.”
She shook her head. “This is too much,” she said, a hint of laughter still in her voice. As she made her choices, she told him, “I hate to tell you, Mr. Gaines, but you don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into. You have challenged a master.”
Jordan sat at a console and began to set up the lanes. “Oh, is that right?”
“Yep. When I was in college, we bowled all the time.”
He peeked at her over his shoulder. “That was like, twenty years ago, right?”
She took a quick look at him, a sardonic expression on her face. “Oh, you got jokes now,” she said and resumed tying her shoe. “You’ll see. You might have met your match, mister.”
In more ways than one, he thought as he moved to the second station. She was turning him upside down and inside out. He’d worked hard to avoid this. Every woman he’d dated his adult life, he’d made sure they knew the rules, understood that what happened between them was temporary. And that had worked fine with all of them.
But Layla…Layla had stormed into his life and changed everything, changed him…changed his heart. But he had to stomp it down. He couldn’t let it happen.
When he was done, the right lane had his name and scoreboard on it, the left had hers.
“What are we playing for besides the joy of watching the other lose and seeing the other naked?”
For the last few hours, Jordan had tried to come up with something to keep her from writing this story—from all-out seducing her, which he’d done, to bribing her not to tell his story, his secret, which he hadn’t done, hoping to use money as a last resort.
But when he’d been in the shower, he’d thought about how much he enjoyed himself with Layla. The sex was outstanding but having her in his bed, cooking and sharing a meal with her, joking around, playing like kids, it was something he never did with a woman.
It was usually dining out at some fancy restaurant and then sex. That was it. With Layla, he was forced to do something completely different. He’d come up with playing strip bowling as he’d stepped out of the shower, because he wanted to continue having fun with her and to enjoy himself for a change.
He’d never let someone in his home before for the sole purpose of having fun. It had always been his sanctuary. The one place he could be alone and be himself. Besides the guy from the cleaning company who came twice a month, there hadn’t been a soul in his home in years until Layla broke in and disrupted it all.
And little did she know the wager she’d offered hi
m was the perfect solution to make this story go away. Although he wasn’t so sure anymore that he wanted her to go away with it.
“If you win, I’ll answer any questions you want me to answer.” He watched as her eyes lit up at this prospect.
He frowned as he digested the look on her face. It quickly reminded him this was the reason she was here. She didn’t care about him. She was a reporter. The thing she wanted most was her story.
His voice, once warm with amusement, now cooled. “If I win, you forget your story and forget you were ever here. Forget that you ever met me.” The look that crossed over her face was almost stricken. But with a shake of his head, he shut the part of himself down that cared one fucking iota about it. “Deal?”
After a few seconds, she answered. “Deal,” she said quietly.
They lost themselves in the game, each somewhere in his or her private thoughts. They took turns tossing their balls down the lane, and when she did, he couldn’t help but watch her. She aroused him with her wide, expressive eyes and the delicate, luscious lips he so achingly wanted to kiss but knew he couldn’t. And as she peeled each layer of clothing off her body, he wanted to be inside her.
Every once in a while she’d look at him as if he were some type of tantalizing treat she couldn’t wait to sink her claws into. But that was sex. He wouldn’t confuse himself by thinking it was anything more. His decision to make it strip bowling was a way to keep her mind on sex and not the exposé she planned to write.
He’d planned to play the game, reduce the amount of clothes she wore and have sex with her again. They were so lost in their own thoughts now, it hadn’t turned out the way he’d wanted.
When they got down to the last few frames, Layla still had on a pair of socks, a T-shirt and a pair of shorts. They’d decided that after each frame, whoever had the fewest points had to take off an item of clothing. Jordan had on a pair of shorts and a pair of socks.
She swung her ball down the lane and asked him, “Is it true that when you die, you’ll be reborn?”
He looked at the score and saw that she still held a slight lead. “You’re supposed to win before I answer any more questions or did you forget the wager of this game?”
“No. I didn’t forget.” She paused before tossing her ball down the lane again. When she turned back, there was something earnest in her face that made him answer her. “I really want to know, wondered if the legends I read about are really true.”
“I don’t live a lifetime to die and be reborn all over again. It’s not that simple and that would be too horrible for anyone, living your life over and over again.”
“I imagine it would. I never really thought about it like that.”
“We’re not immortal. We do live abnormally long lives, if nothing unforeseen happens like a car accident, an illness or something like that. But when we do die, another phoenix, another life is born in our place.”
“So you never had parents?”
“Something similar. We have guardians, people we live with as a family unit, who teach us our heritage and take on the role of parents. Each family of guardians passes the knowledge of our people down from generation to generation.”
“So you have no sisters or brothers either?”
He smiled thoughtfully. “No, not biologically like a regular human. But there were other phoenixes raised with me. For all intents and purposes, Soren and Khyler are my sister and brother. Soren lives in Texas and Khyler lives in Florida.”
“I’ve never heard anything about them.”
“Which is exactly what I wanted.”
“So before your guardians died, where did you grow up?”
“I was an Air Force brat. We spent time in Alaska, Greece, different parts of the United States. I liked California best. That’s why I came back here before they could put me in a foster home.”
“There wasn’t another guardian family who could take you in?”
“No. I would have had to wait in foster care before someone came to claim me. Besides, I’d learned everything I needed to know about my heritage by then.”
“You struck out on your own, became this well-adjusted, rich, powerful man who has a secret no one else can know.”
That wasn’t exactly true, his mate could know. But she didn’t need to know that.
“This is why you value your privacy so much.”
“Exactly.”
“You do make headlines when you begin dating another superstar or one of your companies makes some major multimillion-dollar deal.”
“Yes. So why does the public need to know any more than that? Why is it so important to know what I eat for breakfast or what kind of soap I use or what size shoe I wear for that matter? Who cares?” He tossed his ball down the lane with so much strength, the pins made a crackling sound as loud as a crash of lightning.
When he turned back to her, her fingers were splayed over her chest and she was breathing heavily. “Everyone does. Don’t you understand? Everyday normal people live vicariously through you, or people like you. Some look up to you. Some love you. Some hate you. But they still want to know. They want to know why you and not them? What do I need to do to be like him?”
He advanced on her as his ball rolled back into the return. “But that’s not what the Tattler wants to know. That’s not what you wanted to know. You broke in here expecting to find me with two, three women in my bed, tied up and dressed in women’s clothing or black leather and chains, with a dildo up my ass. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“I…I…”
Everything that had happened came crashing down on him like a three-hundred-pound weight. He’d begun the night with a plan to seduce her, make her fall for him and convince her not to write her story, or to bribe her if he really had to. But instead he’d fallen for the damn woman. A woman like the one who’d ruined his guardian’s life, his life.
“Don’t lie. You know I’m right. That’s what you write about. People’s secrets, the things they want to keep private. Intimate secrets that embarrass and make them go into hiding for years until someone else’s misery is exposed. You swoop in with your flashes and your cameras and your zoom lenses. One byline and a life is over. No coming back. No redemption. Even if they were innocent of everything, it takes months or even years for the truth to come out. By then it’s too late. They’ve gotten into a car, suffering from a hole of depression so deep they plunge everything that is good and decent inside them over a cliff to their deaths.”
He was panting when he was done, anger slithering through him like a snake. She reached out to touch him but he jerked back.
“Who did this happen to, Jordan?”
He retreated and slung his ball back down the lane again and got another strike. He was up by two points now. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes it does. It does to me.”
They were in the last frame and Jordan had one more roll. He’d been so upset he was surprised he’d knocked down all the pins. But as he calculated their points, even if he did get another strike, it didn’t matter. She still had three more throws and she was a damn good bowler, just as she’d said.
He was still going to lose. “Why, Layla? For your story? Finish the fucking game.”
“After everything we’ve done tonight, shared tonight, you really think that’s still true?”
Damn, she was good. She even managed to look aggrieved and offended by what he said. “The only reason you’re here is because of the story. That’s it,” he spat.”
“It’s true. I did come here for that, in the beginning.”
He walked right up to her and leaned in, his face inches from hers. “What? Now you feel different? You like me now? Is that it?”
She didn’t blink. “I do like you. Everything about you, everything I’ve learned. You’re a wonderful man.”
Jordan took a step back, told himself to calm down. “But you’re still going to write your story, right?”
Chapter Nine
Layla was torn.
If she didn’t write the story, she’d be out of a job. That would mean running back home to her parents. She shook her head. Ooooh no, she couldn’t do that. Yes, she had a little savings, enough to get by for a few months, but what would she do after that? The economy freaking sucked. It wouldn’t be easy finding another job.
Plus, Jordan hadn’t promised her anything. He hadn’t told her he loved her. He wouldn’t even kiss her, for goodness’ sake. The one thing she was truly sure of was that he hated reporters.
And she was a reporter.
“That’s what I thought. You enjoy exposing people’s secrets, making people miserable. That’s what you’re good at. Right? You’re proud of that. Instead of choosing a career that makes you happy, following your dreams, you decided to pick a job that destroys the lives of others.” Jordan walked past her to the door and flung it open. The knob slammed against the wall like thunder. His voice was flat and final. “You need two pins to win.” And then he was gone, his footsteps echoing up the hallway.
Layla didn’t need to finish the game.
God, is that what he really thought? That she enjoyed it…making people miserable? On some level, she had to admit that in the past, she did. She’d felt self-righteous. Obligated. In her mind, since they were stars and chose to be in the public eye, everyone needed to know everything about them.
What kind of human being was she? Didn’t everyone, no matter who they were, deserve some semblance of privacy? She gazed around at the room. Isn’t that why Jordan had chosen never to give interviews, because that’s all he wanted? A little privacy to be himself?
Once she’d given up on her dream to be a writer, she’d told herself she would become a reporter and chronicle the world’s stories. She’d work for some world-renowned paper, travel the country and eventually win a Pulitzer.
But once she’d begun working for the Tattler, she’d given up on that dream as well. Had she viciously taken this job to spite her parents and make other people as miserable as she’d been during that time? She hadn’t even tried to find a smaller newspaper to work for. She could have easily gone to some small town or community, found a well-respected newspaper and worked there, but she didn’t.